Editing The Sanguine Squad: The Reformed (section)

==History:==

* A couple of years ago Ash was at a lab where her mom was working late when robots broke in to steal a container of alien smart metal.
* Superhero team called Brute Force foiled the robbery. Enhanced Bronze-Gen vigilante types with names like Collateral and Overkill and Hardcase.
* One of them destroyed the container rather than let it be stolen for nefarious purposes. Ash got a shard of the metal lodged in her spine.
* Hospital found the shard couldn't be removed because it had partly bonded with her nervous system and the damage would continue to spread.
* One night the Blacksmith turned up in hospital. He'd been the one behind the robbery, but he'd expected the lab to be empty and was mortified that anyone got hurt. He promised to make things right somehow.
* He ended up visiting Ash several times as her condition worsened, sharing his plans and stories of his adventures. She never got so much as an apology from the superheroes involved.
* Months later he found a way to fix the damage, not by removing the metal but instead by fully fusing it with her. It was risky, but by this point she was in a wheelchair and desperate enough to try.
* It not only worked, it gave her control over metal. Under the guise of an apprenticeship, she learned how to control her new powers under the Blacksmith and became his sidekick.
* After about a year of this, the Blacksmith was jailed by his nemesis the Silver Sentinel following an attempt to take over AEGIS defence tech. He told Shrapnel not to try to spring him, as he had plans in motion from the inside and didn’t want to risk her being locked up  as well.
* Shrapnel then spent several months operating on her own, taking increasingly bigger risks and with less of a plan beyond vengeance against the world of superheroes. Her last public outing was against the Sentinel, where she was hopelessly outclassed but managed to escape after hitting the Sentinel with a school bus.
* It was Ambassador Bell who put Ash in contact with the team, approaching her in her civilian identity when she was wracked with doubts and putting her on a new path. Quite how Bell knows so much about her, and what exactly her intentions are, Shrapnel doesn’t know.