A long time ago (~30-25 years before my lore’s present), Jinyoung was apprenticed to Ronin, a spirit summoner who worked for @flightofbabylon‘s Caer. The details of his time there are still a little sketchy, mostly because I haven’t had time to chitchat to Babs about it exactly.
Jinyoung, however, was stronger than Ronin. He had less precise control over the beings he summoned, but they were more powerful than Ronin’s. The powers they granted him were more accurate. One day, while conferring with a spirit that allowed him to see into the future, he Saw something he shouldn’t have. Being the mostly-innocent creature that he is, he told his liege lord, who then promptly ordered Ronin to dispose of him.
Lost and maimed, with no memory of who he was or how he arrived there, Jinyoung should have died in the Boneyard. Instead, he was found by Shinwoo, taken back to Tindog’s clan, and slowly nursed back to health.
For months, he only spoke to the Imperial who rescued him, loopy and disoriented from the medicines he needed to dull the pain from his shattered legs and ruined wings. He spent those months wrapped in a red wolf cape, convinced he was a harmless, sneaky fox, prone to curling up in larger dragons' luggage and generally being...odd.
However, Shinwoo’s tender care and nurturing drew Jinyoung out of his shell and the Pearlcatcher slowly regained a foothold in reality. He realized he was not, in fact, a fox , but realized that he probably thought he was because of Chance and Destiny, the twin fox spirits that have been with him since…before.
Since before the huge hole in his memory that tastes like blood when he tries to think past it. If they were the first thing he saw when he awoke - or the last thing he saw before he...fell? - maybe that would explain those strange months.
He slowly started to speak to others in the clan - at first, Shinwoo’s fanclub. Following that, Tindog (who made him feel safe), and Nova (who gave him a strange feeling in the back of his brain, like he was trying to remember something), and then Jinwoo (....who reminds him a lot of someone, he’s just never sure who) and finally Shrike…
That didn’t last long. Shrike always looked hungry, and he refuses to be someone’s dinner. Not while he doesn’t know who (...or what) he is.
Six months into his stay with the clan, Shinwoo - in an attempt to help him remember things - began to take him out into the world on his trips. One such trip led to the discovery of Legend, a Light spirit that Jinyoung woke from a canopic jar. Alarmed, Shinwoo kept it a secret, and Jinyoung swore never to tell.
Until it happened again, this time in Albatross, a water ghost that followed him home. This time, Shinwoo went to Tindog. The matriarch was skeptical, but both ghosts seemed bound safely, neither seemed an overt threat, and thus they were tolerated.
What no one realized was that it happened a third time. Jinyoung’s concentration - worn thin over time by the constant presence of Legend and Albatross - faltered, and during the Trickmurk Circus he accidentally invited something else through: Babylon. A strange mixture of shade, humanoid ghost and outright cruelty, Babylon was more powerful than the previous spirits. He possessed a Spiral magician there for Trickmurk, and he lay in wait, gathering his powers until he felt it safe to strike.
It took a month, but the spirit preyed on Jinyoung’s vulnerability to pull...friends from the Void, and to trap the entire clan in their much weaker human forms.
Shinwoo’s light powers and complete desperation gained the attention of the Lightweaver; he used much of his strength to banish the monsters, holding them at bay until the last clan member was able to flee aboard Musa’s airship.
Incomplete, the ship stayed aloft long enough for them to escape before it crashed deep in the Hewn City. Still humanoid, still licking their wounds and with only two clan members who knew the Light territory, Tindog ordered the clan to go into hiding.
Jinyoung, still oblivious to Babylon’s presence but full of a sick feeling that he was somehow responsible, could only agree. However, their time in the Hewn City so far has been incredibly draining to him - each monthly celebration of each flight’s power has brought with it a new ghost. Shinwoo and his friends guard him with alarm, prepared to defend him from anyone - even Tindog - if the need arises.
And as much as he’s tried to stay hidden and out of the way, the others of the clan have begun to realize that - beyond, even, his time spent as a ‘fox,’ and his missing memories - he’s just plain weird: the rumors of the ghosts and statues that tend to waken when he nears, haunting him and needing bound. Eggs hatched in his presence grow at an insanely accelerated rate: Olio, the one egg he was given charge of, grew to early adolescence within a year. And, most alarmingly dreams he’s had of the future tend to come true....
But despite the mad magic and fate wound around him like nooses or chains, Jinyoung wants to live, and the determination to live has become a self fulfilling prophecy all its own.
