Sloan Rachel Davis was born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, eldest child of a fifth generation Astoria family that had grown rich off the bounty of the local timber and fishing industries, including whaling (it was the Davis Whale Rendering facility, which became the Davis Cannery in the 1880s, that was converted into the famed Whaler’s Wharf shopping area back in the 1970’s). But despite her family’s wealth and preeminent social standing, Sloan never turned into the sort of cliched “rich bitch” that many of her peers did.
More than a bit of a free spirit, she often drove her socially conservative parents to distraction with her many causes, rallies, protests and rock and roll concerts. It was perhaps the fact that she also shared their love of classical music, ballet and opera that kept them from killing each other during her turbulent teen years.
Things smoothed out when Sloan began college, majoring in Business and Economics (for her parents), with minors in Music and Theater (for herself) at Benson College. Between her sophomore and junior years Sloan took off to the British Isles for a summer of music and adventure. She first attended the Glastonbury Festival in England in June, travelled to various smaller music events around England and Ireland, and finished up in August at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland.
It was on the flight home to Oregon that she met Michael Sean McGregor and his two-year-old twin daughters Tiffany and Brittany. Mike was moving to Astoria to take up a position with Volksmacht Technology Solutions (VTS) as a project manager. His wife of seven years, Maggie, had died giving birth to the twins, and he was hoping to give them a better life (and maybe a new mother) in America.
Despite the 12 year age difference, Sloan and Mike hit it off, and she fell in love with the twins almost immediately. They in turn couldn’t get enough of her, and by the time the flight landed at McCall International, the foursome were thick as thieves. Sloan gave Mike her phone number, and he promised to call once they were settled. Which he did – he’d found her strawberry blond hair, electric blue eyes and trim, athletic figure quite the turn-on. True, she also seemed to have a brain, which really wasn’t his usual type (Maggie had been a bit dim, truth be told… but really super hot!). The girls seemed to adore her, however, and that counted for a lot in his eyes.
The two went out on numerous dates over the next six weeks, some with the girls, to places like the Astoria City Zoo and the Xiongwei Shan Chinese Garden; others just the two of them, to nightclubs, ball games and restaurants… including a memorable night at the rotating restaurant atop the Western Empire Tower Hotel, where Mike proposed. Youth, the romance of the moment, his undeniable charisma and charm, the glittering city spread out beneath them – all combined to lead Sloan into saying “yes.”
Her parents were… less than thrilled. They hadn’t been wild about her dating an immigrant, a Scotsman (Catholic at that), and an older man, more-or-less in that order – the Davis family had come to America, if not on the Mayflower, at least not far behind it; they were of good, solid English stock, staunchly Episcopalian; and Gerald had only been a respectable five years older than Nancy when they married (after a proper year-long engagement). About the only thing they could console themselves with was that at least he wasn’t an Irishman!
Still, they had learned over the years that to outright forbid Sloan to do a thing was guaranteed to only make her dig in her heels, and do it twice. Which is why they had been fairly circumspect in their reaction to the couple’s dating, exhibiting no more than a cool politeness appropriate to their station, in hopes the infatuation would soon fade. The news of the engagement hit them like a polo mallet to the head.
Sloan, however, had cannily made the announcement at her mother’s annual Autumn Cornucopia Dinner, with her step-daughters-to-be and a score of guests present, which made any kind of parental outburst impossible – not least because her parents were as enchanted by the twin girls as everyone else who met them. The prospect of having them as grandchildren weakened the elder Davis’ ire, their other daughter Philipa’s gleeful reaction to planning a wedding unbalanced them, and the unimaginable social stigma of having to un-announce a public engagement horrified them.
They capitulated, and Sloan and Mike were married at Faith Cathedral on Council Hill on 15 November 1994 (Sloan had convinced Mike to allow them the Episcopal ceremony, to help sweeten her parents, especially her mother). Sloan’s sisters, 13-year-old Philipa and 10-year-old Beatrix were joint Maids of Honor, while the twins were the flower girl and ring bearer. McGregor cousins, who had preceded Mike in moving to Oregon and Washington, mingled their decidedly middle-class Scottish rowdiness with the Davis‘ stolid, reserved upper crust family and friends – rather successfully, as it turned out.
There was no time for a honeymoon immediately after the wedding, with Sloan having exams coming up and Mike still putting in long hours getting up and running at his new job a VTS, but he promised her that when things slowed down, they’d take an exotic trip that would make the wait worthwhile. Sloan moved into the house she had helped him find in Navy Heights (not exactly Council Hill, her mother had sniffed… but not too unacceptable, for all that) and slipped easily into her new role as step-mother.
The fact was, Mike wasn’t thrilled about Sloan continuing with school, as he hated leaving his girls in day care. But it had been a non-negotiable demand of his new in-laws that their daughter finish her education before they would approve the wedding, and being an ambitious man who keeps his eye on the ring and knowing better than to alienate rich in-laws, he had agreed. Sloan rearranged her schedule as much as possible to minimize the need for day care, but it still rankled him.
By spring semester he had convinced Sloan that it would be best all around if she put her schooling on the back burner – just until the girls started school themselves – then she could go back and get her degree with no worries. The news infuriated her parents, and after the worst row since she was 15, they began an estrangement that would last six months. During that period Mike pursued the next step in his plan to ensure that his new wife became a proper mother and home-maker – he replaced her birth control pills with sugar pills.
Their already active sex life redoubled, Sloan noticed, after she took her hiatus from Benson . Not that she was complaining… whatever his flaws (and she’d begun to see a few) he was fantastic in bed. But within a few months she began to notice changes in him – while the sex was still mostly good, it became increasingly about him and not them, or her. And he became more demanding about how she managed the house and the girls. He often worked long hours, and when he did have free time he began spending it more and more with his cousins and new friends, while at the same time doing all he could to cut her off from her own social life, using the girls’ needs as an ever-dependable excuse.
By their first anniversary things had become very tense around the McGregor house. While she had reconciled, more or less, with her parents, Sloan found it difficult to talk to them about the troubles in her marriage, her mother being definitely of the “I told you so” mold, and her father fiercely opposed to divorce. All of her old friends had seemingly slipped away without her noticing, and what little social life she did have revolved mostly around Mike’s cousins and their wives… she could hardly complain about him to them.
But it wasn’t until she brought up the idea of their long-delayed honeymoon, seeking a way to maybe rekindle the romance and find the love again, that things got ugly. What she had viewed as a simple conversation quickly escalated into an argument, and from there into an all-out fight. While he hadn’t actually struck her, she was sure it had been a near thing… certainly she had been afraid for her safety. He eventually apologized, but it had killed something in Sloan and her feelings would never return to what they’d been. The tension in the house grew.
Her feelings for her husband might have changed, but Sloan still loved the girls and did her best to shield them from what was going on. Still, children know, and they began acting out in various was. Both honey blonds, with emerald green eyes, Tiffany had always been the louder and more outgoing extrovert of the two, while Brittany was quieter, more reserved, introverted almost to shyness. Now they both seemed to move even more towards those extremes, and Mike blamed Sloan for it.
Whatever her feelings, Sloan was no quitter and things might have gone on for quite some time in this fashion, had she not stumbled onto the substitution of her birth control pills. Then she understood why they called it a flash of insight – in one blinding instant of clarity she understood it all, whole and complete. The charisma and charm had worn off for her long before, of course, but it was only now that she understood the depths of Mike McGregor’s two-faced deception… it bordered on sociopathy, she very much feared.
He’d always and only ever really wanted a mother for his daughters and a house-keeper for his home, and maybe a sexual outlet as a bonus. He’d done all he could to mold her into the nice Mary Poppins/Stepford Wife he’d wanted, and getting her pregnant had apparently been a part of that… and thank God he’d at least failed at that much. Then she began wondering about that… assuming he’d begun switching out the pills around the time she’d quit school – and their rate of weekly sex had doubled, ha! – they’d been having unprotected sex for almost nine months, with no results. She wondered if his daughters were really his after all…
After her revelation it was difficult to present a normal face to her husband… and how she had come to loath that word. But with little hope of support from her divorce-adverse parents and no real circle of close friends anymore, she was afraid of Mike’s reaction if she simply left… and there were the girls to consider, damnit. Although the twins were not to blame for any of this, Sloan couldn’t help but have some change in how she felt about them. She did her best to be aware of it, and to not let it effect how she treated them, but she wasn’t entirely sure she was successful, and felt tremendously guilty for it.
She couldn’t let that get in the way of her getting out, though… but if it was too dangerous to leave herself, maybe she could get Mike to do the leaving… a plan began to form in her mind… she wondered if his first wife, Maggie, had had a similar idea…
While continuing to give in to Mike’s occasional, if decreasing, sexual advances (she wondered if he was cheating on her, and began getting regular STI checkups – but if he was cheating, he was playing it safe), she began to demand more things for herself. The primary one being, she was going to start going to night school, in preparation for returning full time when the girls began kindergarten. Mike resisted, but only half-heartedly… Sloan had become much more his vision of a good mother and wife, even if she seemed to be barren, and he was fine with his cousins’ wives watching the twins at night if he had plans. And so, several nights a week Sloan was free to pursue her own plans…
Things went on like this for almost six months, a new equilibrium seeming to have been struck in the McGregor household. Then Mike came home one night to find the girls packed off to the cousins’ and a candlelight dinner waiting for him. Sloan announced that she had happy news, and maybe now things would be better – she was pregnant! Mike was very pleased – it had taken a lot longer than he’d expected, but this should settle Sloan down to her proper place for good, maybe even put an end to this school nonsense, too. Not that he really wanted more kids – turns out they were a real pain in the ass. But as long as they had a mother to deal with all their shit he was cool with it.
Unfortunately, the downside was that the sex pretty much dried up at that point… “bad for the baby,” Sloan had insisted. But she did quit school again, and he was really going places at work – Dr. Halloran himself had taken notice last week of a project he was heading up – which didn’t leave much time for things like sex anyway. Besides, if he got desperate, his cousin Colt could always fix him up with a proper whore.
So things went until 7 December 1996, when Sloan went into labor and was rushed to Isobel Dixon Memorial. Mike was deep in a vital testing phase of his project at work that evening, and almost didn’t make it to the hospital in time for the birth. But make it he did, and with several of his cousins there to rag him and congratulate him on finally having a son (the ultrasound had shown that months ago), and the Davis family to peer down their noses at him, he entered the room just in time to witness the birth of…
…a boy most obviously not his son. The dark hair and obviously Asian cast to the features confused Mike at first – for a moment all he could think was that the nurse holding out the child at him had picked up the wrong baby somehow, somewhere – but then the squalling newborn had opened his electric blue eyes and Mike had his own flash of insight.
Then the screaming began, and the accusations, which brought the Davis’ and the cousins into the birthing room, and very quickly Security. Through it all Sloan remained calm and focused on the child in her arms, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. Between the cold words of the doctor, his cousins’ warnings, and the armed guards, Mike got himself under control just about the time the admin nurse arrived to record the baby’s name and vital statistics for the birth certificate.
Blissfully unaware of the contretemps that had just roiled the room, she asked for the parents names, and the baby’s. Sloan gave her name, and started to give the baby’s – Johnathon – when Mike interrupted with a bitter laugh.
“December 7th and another sneak attack by the Japs! The little bastard was probably conceived in the shitter at that damn sushi bar you like so much, Little Osaka – and now I know why you always wanted to go there! Might as well call him Johnny Osaka, ’cause he sure ain’t getting MY good name!”
For the first time since he’d entered the room Sloan looked him in the eyes and simply said “If that’s what you think best, certainly.” She actually had planned to give the boy her own maiden name, but at this point her father stepped in and made it clear he didn’t want his family name on the child when it went up for adoption… so perhaps John Doe would be more appropriate?
“I have no intention of giving my son up for adoption,” Sloan said quietly but very firmly. “I will raise him myself, thank you all very much.”
This started another round of shouting and recriminations in a three-side scrum of Davises, McGregor’s and hospital staff until Security evicted the first two groups of combatants. Once the room had again settled down Sloan confirmed that the child should be named Jonny Osaka – she certainly didn’t want the McGregor name on the poor kid, and if Father was going to be an asshole, well, she’d accommodate him in his assholery.
But she would at least spell Jonny her way!
When Sloan left the hospital her parents insisted she come back to their home, which she gladly did, having no wish to deal with Mike, even assuming he would allow her to return to the house in Navy Heights. Divorce papers arrived within the week, which she gladly signed (and thank God she’d given in on her parents’ insistence on an iron-clad prenuptial agreement), refusing to contest it or ask for alimony. But her stay with her parents was marked by a relentless campaign to convince her to give up the baby for adoption, and when it finally set in that she would never do that, her parents disowned her.
Fortunately Sloan had a small trust fund from her maternal grandmother Todd, which her parents couldn’t touch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to let her rent an apartment in Warrenton, where prices were still reasonable, and begin hunting for a job. There was no way she could return to Benson without her family money, though, and in any case being a single parent took up a shocking amount of her time and energy. School would have to wait.
But a friend from high school, a middle class girl Sloan had been friendly with while her more snooty friends had snubbed her, was able to get her a job waitressing at her parent’s restaurant/lounge. This kept her going through those first difficult years, and by the time Jonny was ready for school, they were doing fairly well. Sloan worked hard, but her son was always the focus of her attention and love, and he never knew they were poor.
Between her diligent saving and the residue of her trust fund, Sloan was able to send Jonny to a Japanese Immersion School in the Chinatown District starting when he was five. She wanted him to know and appreciate the Japanese half of his heritage, and although as it turned out he was the only Japanese (well, half-Japanese) kid in the program, he thrived there. He was a good looking boy, friendly, out-going and endlessly optimistic, and made friends easily. The only problem he faced was his mother’s complete refusal to tell him about his father, always putting him off “until you’re older.”
Despite that chronic thorn in his side, those were good years for young Jonny. Some of his fondest memories were of riding the light rail while reading manga comics, devouring books about the great samurai of the past, and from his eighth birthday on, attending the annual Astoria City Tournament of Martial Arts. When he was 10 his mother allowed him to start training at a small dojo in Chinatown after school, and he was in heaven.
Jonny was a passable student in most subjects, and a good one in subjects that interested him. By the eighth grade he was fluent in Japanese and well-versed in Japanese history as well as Japanese-American history. He was horrified by the terrible period of the internments during the Second World War, moved to tears by the heroism of his favorite role model, the Nesei member of the wartime super team Victory Flight named Supido Kyo (Speed Demon), and by the same token came to passionately hate the Imperial Japanese assassin Thunder Tessen , who’d murdered him. He dreamed of becoming a great samurai himself someday…
High school, sadly, was not as happy an experience for Jonny as grade school had been. There was no equivalent high school immersion program, and almost all of his friends had gone on to private schools or schools in different parts of the city. Warrenton High was not a bad school, and he wasn’t the only Asian kid there by a long shot… but he was pretty much the only half-breed. In those first few months, for the first time in his life, he found it hard to make friends, feeling on the outside with both the white kids and the Asian kids. About the only real friend he made in that period was a half-Korean boy named Sang Smith.
Sang’s father owned a comic book shop in the Korean area of Chinatown, called Other Worlds, and the two often hung out there after school, getting more and more into Asian comics, books and animation. Jonny got occasional work there as well, and the two boys even formed their own rap group KJap, which gained them a certain notoriety around the school. By the spring semester of his freshman year things weren’t looking too bad, and Jonny’s natural optimism began to reassert itself. Then came Tiffany…
In an attempt to meet girls Jonny had signed up to be equipment manager for the girls softball team, the Warrenton Lady Lions (and didn’t he get an earful from his mother about that name!). Unfortunately, one of the first games of the season was against the most elite of the public high schools in the city, Sunset High. This wouldn’t have been a problem (aside from getting trounced) but one of their star players was Tiffany McGregor, a second year senior and general queen-bee bitch. Jonny knew nothing of her or their old family connection, but Tiffany recognized him, and lost no time in telling everyone at both schools all about his “bastard” origins and his “whore of a mother,” in lurid detail.
After that, Jonny’s school life became hellish, as the few friends he’d started to make dropped him like a leper and various bullies made it their job to harass and intimidate him. Sang stuck by him, of course, but that was about the only bright spot at school. And his home life grew tense for awhile as well. After that first bombshell from Tiffany he had angrily confronted his mother and demanded explanations. She had sighed and given him a suitably edit version of events about her not-brief-enough marriage to Mike McGregor, and said that his birth was the result of a ten day whirlwind trip she took to Tokyo. When he pressed her for details about his father she just handed him a copy of Kirosawa’s Rashamon and told him the truth lay somewhere between the two stories.
That began Jonny’s love of, and obsession with, samurai movies… and a period of tension between mother and son. But as the high school years went on things slowly smoothed out and returned to normal. Except against the Thunder Tessen, Jonny found it hard to hold a grudge for long, not even against his nasty semi-coulda-been-step-sister Tiffany, and much less against his mother. His sophomore year Sloan bought the restaurant/lounge she’d been working at since his birth, and turned it into a popular Asian fusion bistro and nightclub called, appropriately, Fusion. Jonny worked there as a dishwasher after school, on weekends, and during summers, and by his senior year the place was booming.
Unfortunately Jonny’s grades never really recovered once the problems at school began, and his graduation was a narrow thing. But in June of 2014, with his proud mother there in the audience, as always his biggest booster, he walked across the stage and accepted his diploma. The summer after graduation Jonny had hoped to take a trip to Japan, having been saving all he could from his jobs at Fusion and at Other Worlds, but in fact he barely had enough for a trip to LA… and that only if he walked.
So that’s what he decided to do.
That summer after high school Jonny hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mt. Hood to Mt. San Antonio, and he really enjoyed the time alone to both get deep into his own head and get out of it at the same time. He felt more together than he had in four years when he finally arrived in LA for his planned visit before flying home. But he found a surprise waiting for him – his mother had sent him an open-ended ticket to Japan and $5,000 on a prepaid credit card. He was stunned and overjoyed, and Sloan laughed at his babbling when he called to thank her.
It was late September, and he decided to wait for spring to make the trip, his mother encouraging him to stay in LA and save up some more money. Securing his ticket and the credit card in a safe deposit box, Jonny soon found work as a waiter, and a cheap apartment shared with two aspiring actors, one of whom he was soon sleeping with. Beth kept encouraging him to get into modeling, but he was just too self-concious to make that leap. Sloan flew down for his 18th birthday in December, and they had a really great time. Among other things, they did their Christmas shopping together, exchanging gifts before she flew home.
Jonny timed his arrival in Japan for the time when the cherry trees would be in bloom, and he didn’t regret it – the sight was spectacular and everything he’d ever dreamed of. He suddenly realized how petty the problems of high school really were, and that he was truly happy for the first time in years.
That happiness lasted three days.
Returning to his hotel after visiting a samurai museum Jonny found a message from the manager of Fusion – Sloan had been killed the night before, hit by a drunk driver shortly after closing the bistro, while walking home. Jonny refused to belief it at first, and the next several days, as he made his way back to Astoria, remain a blur in his memory to this day.
But the reality finally set in at her funeral, where chefs and mixologists from across the city lauded her talents, and her friends gave moving eulogies. He met his maternal grandparents for the first time at the funeral, and his two aunts, but none of them had much to say to him, nor he to them. Jonny might have vented the anger he felt towards them, but he was just too numb.
He inherited a small sum of money and Fusion, but the bistro was heavily mortgaged and he knew nothing about running a business. He quickly sold his share to the manger, probably for less than it was worth, but he didn’t really care. For months he sat around his mother’s, now his, apartment doing nothing but thinking about the last time he’d seen his mother.
Eventually the money began to run low, and he finally got sick of himself; he began to pull himself together. He found a job as a cellarman at Bridgeport Brewery down by the Whaler’s Wharf, a job he really enjoyed. He also took a part-time evening job as a janitor at the University of Astoria, which he didn’t enjoy quite as much – but he was determined to save enough to go back to Japan one day, and live out the dream his mother had always believed in for him. It was slow going, but he had more than a little of his mother’s stubborn streak and he was determined.
On a Friday night in early May of 2016 Jonny was working at the Watson Science Center at UA, the center of the University’s physical and para-sciences programs, when he got a call from the High Energy Physics Lab. It seemed one of the grad students had spilled some sort of fluid behind the main plasma chamber… and he sure couldn’t clean it up as he had more pressing matters to attend to.
With a roll of his eyes as the grad student hurried out, Jonny wiggled in behind the massive plasma chamber and began cleaning up the spill… something thick and oily… maybe hydraulic fluid? It was a mess, and smelled funny, and in the end he had to pry off an access panel to get at the last of the fluid. Unfortunately, two other grad students, who had entered the lab almost immediately after the first one had left, took that moment to fire up the plasma chamber in preparation for an experiment.
Jonny heard a sudden growing hum of power, and before he could even move there was a blinding flash of blue light, a wave of heat, and then nothing…
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
He awoke, confused, and with every muscle in his body aching like he’d run a marathon. He was stretched out on the ratty old couch in one of the Watson Science Center’s break rooms, the one in the basement, nearest the HEPL… suddenly it all came back to him, and he sat up, blood rushing to his head and almost making him pass out again. The grad student who had called him to do the clean up was sitting at the table nearby, and jumped to his feet when Jonny sat up. He looked worried.
“Dude, are you OK?” he asked, coming up to peer anxiously at the young janitor.
“Um, yeah, I guess,” Jonny replied muzzily. ” I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck… but no broken bones… what the hell happened?”
“Oh, um, nothing, really,” the grad student assured him quickly. “Um, you must’ve touched an exposed wire or something – given yourself a shock. We found you unconscious, but your pulse seemed good, so we um, brought you here.” He gestured around at the empty break room.
“Oh. Well, um, thanks, I guess,” Jonny said , standing up a bit shakily. “I guess I should get back to work…”
“Oh, no, you’ve been out awhile,” the student said. “I figured you wouldn’t want to get in trouble, so I used your key card to sign you out when your shift ended. So you should just go home and rest up… take it easy, you know?”
Still a bit dazed, Jonny absently agreed and headed out into the early morning quiet of the ACU campus. While waiting at the light rail stop for the bus home, he wondered why it was so quiet… it wasn’t until he was home and flipped on the TV before falling into bed that he realized it wasn’t Saturday morning, but Sunday morning – he’d been out for over 24 hours!
Jonny had some crazy dreams that night, feverish and disturbing, and he woke up sweating, his sheets soaking. His temperature was 103, but by the time he threw on some clothes to head to the clinic, he was back to normal. This pattern repeated itself for the next week or so, the dreams often involving his trip to Japan and his mothers death… in the dreams there was a connection, it seemed so obvious, but on waking up it would slip through his fingers before he could remember it. But once his morning fever passed he always felt energized and ready for the day.
On Monday 16 May 2016, over a week after… well, whatever had happened in the High Energy Plasma Lab… Jonny was heading to his job at the brewery, enjoying a stunningly beautiful day by taking his time strolling down the Silver Mile and admiring the girls. As he neared the Whaler’s Wharf he heard a sudden explosion behind him, somewhere up the Mile, and whirled around in time to see a brilliant white flash – and find himself knocked on his ass.
As he watched in open mouthed amazement a swirling cloud of multi-hued energy spun up into a vortex, spreading out in a could that covered the whole area. Bolts of the chromatic energy lashed out in every direction, striking buildings, cars, people… as Jonny staggered to his feet and began to run towards the devastation, intent on helping however he could, one of the bolts lashed out struck him full in the chest!
He didn’t black out, but he did feel a tremendous surge of heat throughout his body – and in an instant he seemed to exploded in a blue flame. Looking down at his body, his hands… he seemed not to be flesh and blood anymore… instead he seemed to be made of some sort of blue-white energy… no, plasma, he recognized it from the lab! As he staggered back he stumbled over his own feet – and suddenly found himself flying upward! He could freakin’ FLY!
But his amazement and fear were both short lived, as he saw that many people were hurt, buildings were collapsing, and other people seemed to have gained powers as well – and not all of them were helping others. There was work to do…