ROCKSLIDE: Page 4 of 4

Biography - Part 4

When a new X-Men team formed under the leadership of Kitty Pryde, Rockslide trained with Armor and Rachel Grey in the danger room where she revealed her new code name Prestige. Rockslide commented on the X-ladies’ tendency to change their code names so often but expressed his approval of Kitty in charge. Perhaps this proximity resulted in only Rockslide and Armor being chosen among all of the students volunteering to help with a mission to save the mayor. Once on the plane, though, Rockslide’s theory of Kitty’s choice resulting from their sheer aesthetic beauty and awesomeness was shot down. The true reason derived from their defensive-offensive powers, allowing Kitty not to worry about them in battle. Santo managed to hold off a brainwashed Old Man Logan long enough for Storm to incapacitate him and save the day. On a later date, an assassin named the X-Cutioner invaded the mansion and Rockslide and Dust found a cache of explosives in the basement that could destroy everything. Kitty found them and ordered them to evacuate the mansion, which they successfully did. However, Santo was not able to talk a depowered Colossus out of going back into the mansion to help Kitty fight the X-Cutioner. Ultimately, Rockslide followed him in and even saved the day by punching the assassin and getting the disarming device. [X-Men: Gold #1-8]

One day, in a less serious situation, Rockslide’s friend Eye-Boy was having trouble dealing with his expanding power-set. Eye-Boy saw and warned Santo that a raccoon had stolen his wallet but Santo attributed this crazy sounding statement to Trevor’s lack of sleep and suggested he stop watching so much porn. [Generation X (2nd series) #5] Old Man Logan came by to say his permanent good-byes, when Rockslide broke the earth-shattering news that Glob Herman had managed to get a date. While Rockslide, Anole and Shark-Girl relaxed in the park, hopeful that they would be able to find love in the future as well, Glob was coming to the realization that this date was a set up by the Purifiers to turn him into a living bomb. When the kids saw him coming back and asked him how it went, he rebuffed them and walked into the mansion’s entrance hall, blowing up but causing pathetically little damage. The Purifiers still used the distraction to attack but Logan and the kids were successful in taking them out. Glob lamented his part in this but Logan made him realize how valuable his friends were. [Old Man Logan (2nd series) #39-40] Glob used this newfound confidence to teach Mojo of all people how to woo a lady. However, this incident ended in the mansion being attack by Mojo’s Half-Sentinel, taking out Rockslide and X-23. Mojo luckily saved the young mutants before jetting off with his ladylove. [X-Men Black: Mojo]

After the resurrection of Jean Grey, a new status quo came to the X-Men and Kitty began taking some of the students on training field missions. On the blackbird ride to the first of these, Rockslide scoffed at the enemy they were set to face, Forearm, making fun of his name and powers. However, Kitty suddenly lost control of her powers and phased through the plane, short-circuiting it and causing it to crash with the young mutants inside. Rockslide and a few others were unharmed but not Santo’s best friend Anole. Forearm and his Mutant Liberation Front team members arrived and lamented only getting to take on the X-kids. Regardless, the outgunned students managed to survive long enough for reinforcements to arrive and extract them. Back at the med-bay, Santo worried over Anole, but he had his bravado about how he would have taken out the MLF rebuked by Glob, noting Santo’s trouble taking on Forearm. Upon reflection of the loss, an embarrassed Santo did not protest when the X-Men left to save the world without them. This left only the kids home when a mob of protesters gathered outside the mansion, telling them to leave. However, the mob was interrupted by the arrival of the omega level mutant and son of Xavier, Legion. While he appeared rational at first, Legion soon devolved into a raving madman and started attacking the children. They did their best to protect the mansion, but the resulting battle and the arrival of the four Horsemen of X-Man resulted in the mansion’s destruction. [Uncanny X-Men (5th series) #1-3]

After relocating, the X-Men left to confront the man behind all the recent disasters, the Age of Apocalypse reality transplant, Nate Grey “aka the X-Man.” They left the students behind on clean up and were ordered to guard the captured Legion, who kept claiming he had the information needed to save the world. Armor and Glob both wanted to trust the man but Rockslide and Pixie did not want to disobey their orders. The deciding vote went to the injured Anole and so the kids decided to act on Legion’s information. First, they located Jaime Madrox and then unburied the door to access Cerebro so that Legion could locate X-Man. Pixie then teleported all of them to his location, where he had incapacitated all of the adult X-Men. Despite Rockslide insisting that they kick X-Man’s ass, Armor just wanted to talk. However, Legion had other plans and trapped X-Man, Rockslide, Armor, Glob and Pixie in an Age of Apocalypse style alternate reality within Legion’s mindscape. [Uncanny X-Men (5th series) #4-6]

The kids split into two factions in this new dystopian hellscape of a reality where their bodies had mutated into more powerful and intimidating forms. Armor and Glob thought they could reason with X-Man and that he was their only chance of escaping this reality. However, Rockslide and Pixie were determined to make sure that the danger that X-Man posed stayed in this dimension forever, regardless if that meant no escape for them. Everything came to a head with Rockslide and Glob squaring off for a knockdown brawl in which Glob actually gained the upper hand by forcing his flaming paraffin down Rockslide’s throat. Luckily, Armor stopped Glob from killing Rockslide with this identified weakness. Ultimately, Legion and X-Man combined into one being and ejected the kids back into the core reality. This resulted in almost every remaining X-Man and ally in the world dogpiling the gestalt omega-level mutant until he forcibly sucked every mutant in the vicinity and himself into an alternate reality of his own making. [Uncanny X-Men (5th series) #7-10]

The Age of X-Man was a peaceful utopia as seen through the lens of X-Man but completely forbade romantic love. With hopes of someday making the main X-Men team, Rockslide and his classmates were confined to a school focused on the brainwashing ideas of X-Man. For some reason, only Glob Herman’s paraffin body seemed to allow him to remember the events before the reality change and he kept a diary of his former memories, including Rockslide’s embarrassing defeat by Forearm. One night, when the group rushed over to a fire to see if they could help, they witnessed the arrest of some of their fellow classmates for attending an outlawed meeting about how love should not be forbidden. Despite having their memories wiped of this incident, this caused the kids to start questioning the status quo. Rockslide attempted to research the Life Seed, the item that messiah Hope Summers used to create this utopia, in the library to try to find some answers. However, this information was nowhere to be found and caused the staff to put Santo on a watch list. His questioning the teachers led to them reinforcing propaganda on him and conveniently “finding” a book that said the seed was destroyed. He later confessed to Glob that all of this seemed suspicious and that it was almost as if this hole in the history had been patched up as soon as someone started looking into it. Glob admitted that it did not sound crazy. He explained that X-Man had warped reality and even coated Santo in his paraffin to try to get him to remember.

The group found out that Anole was missing and tracked him to another secret meeting to save him but discovered he was in the process of planting a bomb at the school. They managed to rescue Anole but then went on the run from the authorities. After evading capture for a while, the X-Men captured them; sending Rockslide and the others to the prison for mutants that refused to obey the core philosophies of this reality. [Age of X-Man: Nextgen #1-5] Rockslide was thus at the prison when a riot broke out and the prisoners found the confined Legion. Ultimately, X-Man restored all of the mutants to their original reality once confronted.

The situation drastically changed soon after for mutants. Professor X, Magneto and Moira MacTaggert had secretly been working behind the scenes for years to design a scenario in which the mutant race could coalesce around one nation on the island of Krakoa. Not only that but a mutant circuit was established that could resurrect mutants even from death, given the secret brain pattern back-ups stored in Cerebro and genetic samples of every mutant supplied by Mister Sinister. Rockslide kept a low profile during this era, choosing to hang out with the other young mutants from his generation in the Akademos Habitat. He enjoyed the multitude of parties and joined the occasional mission but he did not join any teams. One day, he, Anole and Loa sought out a weird mutant, the Summoner, who inhabited a remote section of the new Arrako section of the island. He invited Santo to play a game with him that he described as a test used to identify one’s weakness, which intrigued Rockslide, as he believed he had none. The Summoner identified Rockslide’s vulnerability as being his energy form housed within his rocky exterior. However, Apocalypse arrived and interrupted the game, dismissing the children. [X-Men (5th series) #11-12]

Apocalypse had recently opened a gateway to the mystical realm of Otherworld and Rockslide was nearby when the Summoner came out from the gate with a dying Banshee, claiming that an ambush attacked their exploratory group. Rockslide volunteered to go with Apocalypse and a group of other strong X-Men to assess the threat of this potential army on the other side and quickly joined the battle when the army found them. The Summoner proved to be a liar and literally stabbed Apocalypse in the back. An enraged Rockslide attacked the Summoner and rebuked his calls of friendship, with the villain claiming that they once played a game and now it must end. With that, he used his sword to slice Rockslide in half, killing him instantly to the surprise of all. [X of Swords: Creation #1]

While surprising that Rockslide could be killed, at this point death was only temporary for mutants. As a casualty of war, Rockslide was fast-tracked through the resurrection queue and that is when everything went wrong. When Xavier attempted to upload Rockslide’s mind back-up from Cerebro, the transfer resulted in a change to Rockslide’s core personality and a glitch in the system, later theorized to be the mystical energies of Otherworld somehow corrupting all back-ups in Cerebro if a mutant perished within the land. The totality of the former Rockslide had been erased and the resurrected one was a rewritten amalgamation of a multitude of possibilities to form a completely new person. Polaris, the head of X-Factor, felt especially guilty about the loss of Rockslide and erected a monument in his honor. Additionally, she offered him a place to stay in the X-Factor headquarters for as long as he needed. It was here that he was reintroduced to many his “old” friends, who commented how weird it was that Rockslide was essentially a newborn speaking in some kind of garbled language. [X-Factor (4th series) #4-5]

The change in Rockslide bothered many others and he soon earned the moniker Wrongslide. Children would find him staring out endlessly at the sea where they would paint on him, causing him to laugh and dance. [Legion of X #1] He also took to occasionally watching the resurrection process, which included one for Sunspot after an altercation on the planet of Arrako, formerly known as Mars. Sunspot followed Wrongslide out to the sea where he explained that he no longer wanted the names Santo or Rockslide as they belonged to a different person. Despite the Wrongslide name’s origin as a cruel joke, it felt like a name that belonged to only him. Sunspot understood that and explained that Rockslide’s death had really hit everyone hard because he had seemed so full of life, yet his end was so arbitrary. Wrongslide explained that it was unfair that he was essentially a walking tombstone to the friend they had all lost, and that he made everyone so sad when he felt so happy. He wished to live out his life, then die in Otherworld one day so that a new person could be reborn and experience all of the beauty that he was now seeing. With this profound statement, Sunspot asked him if he would like to visit Arakko. Joining Sunspot and Storm’s new Brotherhood of Arakko, Wrongslide was on the frontlines protecting its citizens during a massacre by Uranos of the Eternals. His massive arsenal of killing machines caused the young mutant to feel anger for the first time as he attempted to curtail the carnage. He ended his tenure on Arrako by helping Storm defeat the despot Vulcan in a coordinated attack in which Wrongslide formed an underground cavern to hold the powerful foe. [X-Men: Red (2nd series) #4-6, 10]

Wrongslide found himself back on Krakoa and recruited by Bishop to sharpen his class of students in combat training. Inside a cavern of Krakoa, Wrongslide sneak-attacked the kids, but the arrival of a couple of true villains in the Fenris twins interrupted the lesson. After a cave-in buried the kids, Wrongslide managed to find and save them, at which point they explained that Fenris was using a mutant debilitating drug called Blightswill to poison the island. Additionally, they explained that the villains must have been drilling towards the Pit, a mutant prison with some of the worst criminals on Krakoa. The group managed to catch up to the drill and Wrongslide was instrumental in bringing the power needed to stop Fenris from achieving their goals. With the threat abated, Bishop asked them all to come back to train the next set of students. Wrongslide had finally started to integrate himself amongst his classmates and proved himself as his own person. [Bishop: War College #1-5]