Jake's a pretty ordinary guy.
His family runs a diner in midtown, but he could never stand restaurant work. The kitchen prep work was just too much standing around, and he never quite got the knack of charming the customers on the service side. Bucking stereotypes a bit, just a bit, his brother ended up the waiter while his sister runs the kitchen.
For himself, he got an apprenticeship doing metalwork, and found a solid union job on the doing sheet metal (and other stuff), mostly on the waterfront, sometimes elsewhere in town. The town's a busy place; there's always a lot of work.
His folks didn't raise no selfish jerk, they made a point of service. Their service was through their restaurant and through donations to City Harvest. Jake volunteered at the food bank, helping rearrange inventory, fixing things that broke, manning the food lines, and hoofing it out on the town to drop off meals. For a fancy place like Freedom City, it was shocking to see just how quickly people would get in trouble when they hit a bit of bad luck. The people with any kind of mental issues didn't even need the bad luck.
Things were fine, not great. One night, though, things changed. He'd got a temp job through a friend of a friend, helping unload a shipping container in the middle of the night. That was a red flag, but he needed the cash, and it was just moving stuff, right? Well, he was in the middle of moving a shiny barrel with a hand truck when he heard gunfire, and one thing led to another and when the barrel exploded he found himself flying through the air with weird lightning and glowing chemicals everywhere.
Bad night, right? He woke up, couldn't be more than a few minutes later, in the middle of a huge dent in the guardrail. His hand was metal, but as he watched it faded back to normal. The whole pier was a pile of twisted flaming wreckage. He was no fool, and high-tailed it out of there.
He was different, after. Stronger, but nothing to brag about. There was something different about metal, too, now, but he couldn't really put a finger on it. In any case, he was helping his brother clean up at the restaurant one night, since that guy with the hair whose name he could never remember cancelled at the last minute, when what sounded like World War 3 started up outside. The window shattered, and he could quite clearly see a grenade, an actual, real-life grenade, come flying in.
He tackled his brother to the ground, and his skin went metal again, and then there was this sheet of steel covering them, and the grenade blew up, but they were fine. Whatever was happening moved on, he made the steel go away somehow, and eventually he calmed down and turned back to normal.
After that, the metal thing came easier, and he was way stronger. Mike knew, but he was family, and he was a good guy. No need to tell Mom and Dad or Lauren. Most of all, Jake was pissed. He'd been blown up twice. Someone had blown up Astrolight Diner. This city had gotten out of hand, and he was going to fix it.
Jake's a pretty ordinary guy. Except he can turn to metal, lift a truck, and is going to make things better however he can.