Spoiler: Background
Show
James and his parents were a perfectly normal family in middle-class suburbia, living a bit outside Cheyenne. James' father was a factory worker, his mother a freelance editor (or a 'living spellcheck' as she called herself). It was all a nice, boring life, and had been ever since the couple had moved into their house some half-dozen years before James' birth. James was prone to flights of fancy, perhaps, talking to inanimate objects or things that weren't there at all, but it wasn't as though most children that age didn't have imaginary friends.
Then came one night in October, a week or so before James' eighth birthday. He remembers it very distinctly, because he was idly wondering what he was going to get for his birthday when the Visitor arrived.
The Visitor was a perfectly pleasant, unassuming man, who wondered if perhaps James' parents wouldn't mind him stopping by for dinner, and they didn't, of course, because he was a perfectly pleasant, unassuming man, and why wouldn't they offer him dinner? And if their son complained that his imaginary friends screamed when they saw the Visitor, well, he was prone to flights of fancy, after all, and he should go upstairs and stay in his room for being so rude.
It was after the Visitor left that James' parents started to talk. He was a strange man, an unfamiliar man, some sort of violent criminal, no doubt. James's father called the police, and the police officer came and took their statements and agreed that the Visitor was definitely some sort of vile individual who needed to be tracked down and captured as soon as possible. James' mother went next door and spoke to Mr Aimes, a grizzled, burly man who had three equally-burly sons and five shotguns between the four of them, and they all agreed that the Visitor needed to be stopped before he committed any more crimes.
James' parents left him alone that night, for the first time ever, storming out armed with nothing more than a kitchen knife and a handgun between them, joining the police officer and the Aimes' and various other people from the neighbourhood who agreed the Visitor had to be hunted down.
It wasn't until late the next morning when a different police officer arrived at James' house. It had been a bear, he said, though the police officer after him said it had been a gang of armed criminals. And the one after that muttered quietly and touched the cross around his neck and didn't say who it was at all. But whatever the case, the twenty-three people who'd gone after the Visitor that night died. And the Visitor himself was nowhere to be found. James was the only one who'd even seen him.
This...affected James, as one might expect. He was passed into the care of his grandmother, Gertrude, who had next to no idea how to look after a child in these modern times and settled for letting him use her computer (which she had no idea how to use anyway) when he wanted and telling him not to tell anyone all his claims about his parents being killed by an alien.
James took her advice to heart. All through school, his classmates thought of him as kind of intense, protective at times, and almost scarily dedicated to working out during gym class and outside of school. Most people new to the school pegged him as the school bully, all tough and strong and angry all the time, and were more than a little surprised at how gentle he could be sometimes.
No-one ever knew him as someone who spent his free time searching through conspiracy theories and avidly reading the correspondences of groups that argued about alien abductions and shared 'proof' of ghosts being real.
James' near-obssession with being 'strong' led him, unsurprisingly, into the world of sports and weight-lifting, and while he had no real interest in taking part as anything more than a hobby, his teachers nudged him towards coaching, basic first aid, and so on - something he found he quite enjoyed doing, appealing to his gentler, more protective side as it did - and eventually he found himself with a scholarship to study physical therapy. His grandmother complained mightily at the fact that the college was almost on the other side of the US, but as far as James was concerned, that was a plus. It got him further away from the memories of the Visitor and his parents.
But the summer after graduation, before he was due to move away, his life took an unexpected turn.
Like many of his classmates from high school, James had wheedled his grandmother into letting him sign up for a summer camp - two weeks away from homes, family, cellphones and so on. And the first couple of days were...well, basically everything you would expect from letting a bunch of eighteen-year-olds do their own thing with only a very minimal amount of adult supervision. It was - as far as he was concerned - great.
Then the dreams started. He could never remember exactly what they were about, but he could remember the whispers that came after, telling him to abandon his friends, family, and everything else that made him...him.
He was fortunate. The pack whose territory the camp was on had a Cahalith of their own, skilled enough at interpreting her dreams that they were able to predict James' First Change - it helped that one of their packmates was actually part of the staff for the summer camp - and make sure he didn't hurt anyone, and give him a very brief primer on what being a werewolf meant. They managed to instil enough fear of his own nature in him, and the potential for carnage it could cause, that he agreed to work with them to let him get a more extended period of tuition. He told his grandmother and friends that he'd been offered a part-time job working at the cafe on the same site as the summer camp, which was actually not entirely false - learning to control himself in the face of obnoxious customers (under the careful gaze of a couple of the pack) was as good a learning experience as any, albeit something of a trial by fire. By the time he was set to head off to college, he (and his mentors) were fairly confident that he wouldn't do anything monumentally stupid.
It was at college that he joined the Storm Lords. He'd been taught about the tribes, of course, but simply hadn't had the opportunity to join one in the crash course of Uratha life he'd been given back home. But now he had plenty of time to dedicate to his new life.
It was this freedom to move around that led him to being asked (genuinely asked, albeit kinda pointedly) to move to New Bedford, a couple years into his degree. The simple fact was that the protectorate he was in...didn't really need him. Other places did. And New Bedford happened to have a college that offered a reasonable - and more importantly, part-time - education in sports therapy, which was something of a plus given that his grades had sort of slipped while he'd been focusing on the whole 'werewolf' thing. So New Bedford it was.
He hadn't known until he got there that June, his old girlfriend from high school (and the summer camp) was also there, majoring in media studies. In happier times, they'd have probably ended up back together within a couple weeks. But James has done his best to keep her at arm's length, worried about what his...well, his life...would do to her. June being an aspiring journalist - and more importantly someone who a) knew him enough to know that something weird had been going on with him ever since that summer camp and b) cared - she immediately started prodding him with questions about his sudden change in colleges. So far she hasn't prodded too intently (probably mostly because, well, New Bedford kinda has bigger issues at the moment), but he's definitely worried that she might start connecting dots that would be better left untouched - to say nothing of his concern that she might actually get hurt.
Re: (OOC) New Bedford by Night II
Reply With Quote