» Jion is from a vaguely ruined alternate-Earth, where World War III has already come and gone. Most of the world is still picking itself up after the damage wrought by WWIII, and has transitioned into the final stages of recovery. The United States is still caught up in some minor skirmishes in Eastern Europe, specifically in the South Caucasus states, but is otherwise focused on rebuilding the economy and transitioning from a more militant war-time government to something with more peaceful priorities. Technology has advanced, but with focuses mostly on wartime technology and bio-engineering.
» Sixteen years ago. Jion is brought into existence. He's the product of a military-funded experiment that was started before the outbreak of WWIII and picked up its pace near the end of the war.
» Created from genetic material derived from anonymous military-associated donors, Jion is conceived in a test tube in some laboratory out in the barren wasteland of the American mid-West. Not just him, though. Jion and several hundred other genetically-engineered humans are created at the same time as part of the military's ambitious Project Planaria -- an attempt to push regenerative medicine to its limits. The human embryos are modified to share key genetic sequences with planaria in order to facilitate super-rapid cell regeneration in case of injury. Extensive testing using rats and guinea pigs have been successful in creating specimens capable of recovering from massive amounts of damage, and this stage of the project aims to create humans with that same capability. Hopefully, Project Planaria will yield several hundred super-soldiers capable of recovering from virtually any injury. These soldiers would be huge assets in cleaning up the last few conflicts persisting in Eastern Europe.
» Unfortunately, the promising compatibility between flatworms and rodents doesn't equate to compatibility between flatworms and humans. The first batch of embryos fails almost in its entirety, yielding only twenty-something successful specimens. The second batch of embryos created in an attempt to salvage the project doesn't fare any better. Furthermore, the thirty-something children who transition safely from test-tube baby to infancy don't display any signs of rapid regeneration. Any additional funding to the project is immediately put on hold, especially given the strains on the national economy due to post-war recovery. The resulting children from the experiment are tentatively raised in a laboratory environment -- the plan goes that they will be closely observed until they hit the age of 18, then will be enlisted into the military as normal persons.
» For nine, ten years, the children of Project Planaria seem to be perfectly average humans. However, when the children enter their early teens, they suddenly start showing symptoms of rapid regeneration. The boys first, and then the girls.
» Jion -- one of the children from the second batch of specimens, average among his peers in every way -- is one of the first children to show signs of regeneration. At age eleven, he wakes up one day plagued with absolutely crippling pains in his abdomen and chest. Though the lab technicians first dismiss his symptoms as the beginnings of your garden variety stomach flu, a physical examination reveals that his chest and abdominal cavities are packed to bursting with extraneous scraps of flash, teratomas, two extra kidneys and an extra lung. He's rushed into surgery and "fixed," after which the scientists begin questioning and prodding at him to figure out exactly what is going on.
» It turns out that the children show similarities to planaria only after they hit puberty. Furthermore, their regeneration turns out to be terrible flawed. Their bodies produce far too many stem cells that uncontrollably differentiate into varying other types of cells, causing their bodies to produce mass amounts of extra internal organs, bones, muscle tissue and teratomas. In fact, their bodies produce extra components rapidly enough that, if they go too long without surgical intervention, the resulting pressure in their bodies can cause tremendous harm to themselves, or even death. Not to mention, the constant rapid regeneration also causes the children to age extremely quickly, roughly four times that of a normal person.
» There's a mad scramble as the scientists leading the project try to decide what to do. Obviously, these specimens are not fit for military duty given their flawed regeneration and need for constant surgery. But even worse, with the long gestation period and high cost of production, any specimen that dies as a combatant would equate to huge financial losses. So, after much debate, Project Planaria personnel decide to relegate these specimens as combat medics, instead.
» So Jion, at twelve years of age and rapidly coming to realize that he's not exactly a normal human being, is placed in a crash course in military medicine.
» Taken out of the military-lab compound where he's spent most of his childhood, Jion spends the next year and a half being put through an intense training regimen, learning the ins and outs of working as a combat medic. Though not an especially bright individual, Jion's accelerated physical and mental growth allow him to absorb information like a sponge, and he passes all tests with flying colors.
» Immediately afterwards, he's shipped out to action overseas. Jion is technically thirteen years old. Physically, he's about eighteen. Mentally ... it's hard to tell.
» Products of Project Planaria are often given drastically unconventional tasks due to their capabilities: providing emergency care under fire in highest-risk situations given their ability to work even while taking heavy damage; helping evacuate individuals from hazardous locations; serving as blood donors on the spot due to their ability to rapidly produce large quantities of blood every day; and -- in the most drastic cases -- serving as emergency organ farms for gravely injured soldiers. It's a tough job.
» Though Jion quickly earns a reputation for being efficient and easy to work with, agreeable and always willing to lend a hand when needed, he's never really integrated into any battalion, either. Though technically ranked a specialist, he only knows to follows orders and save people's lives, no matter what it takes; ranks are irrelevant to him. His squadmates often don't know how to treat him due to his status as "one of those weird blood-tanks," and he's too often shipped to other locations before he can really come to know anyone.
» His lifestyle isn't particularly cruel or demeaning. He gets a healthy paycheck to his name that he can spend however he likes. Nobody dares disrespect him due to his special status. He's treated nicely between skirmishes, and a lot of people appreciate what he does. He's saved lots of lives. But -- it's undeniably a somewhat lonely way of living.
» Jion spends two and a half years being shuttled from battlefield to battlefield in Eastern Europe, given only brief breaks in between deployments, when he's made to return to his old laboratory-compound home for medical checkups and observation.
» And it's during one of those breaks that he ends up meeting with one of the other children he grew up with back at the military-lab compound -- a specimen from a different project, a girl named Melody. Unlike him, Melody is a soldier proper, created with abnormally good reflexes and dense muscle mass, usually deployed for infiltration purposes due to her small size. Though Jion's always known that he and his fellow experiment specimen were created as tools of war in the first place, it somehow disturbs him greatly to see Melody actually serving as a soldier.
» Though he's never really questioned his life before, seeing his friend's situation makes him start to hesitate. Life serving as a glorified lab rat's all he's ever known, and he's thought that he'd be okay with it. But ... then again, maybe not. He wants his friend, at least, to have a nicer life. And if she does, he wants to as well.
» He's soon deployed once more (Armenia, this time), and he performs his duties well, of course. He's still a combat medic, and he'll do his best to help as many people as he possibly can. But at the same time, he starts thinking, considering, planning. Maybe, the next time he's returned to the lab compound, he can find an escape route. Maybe, if he can meet up with Melody there, they can run away together. Technically, they're both military property, and life as civilians would be impossible while the war is still going on; something that's incredibly unlikely to happen in their projected (very short) lifespans. But maybe ... they can run away and try living a normal life. He'd like to try that. It sounds kinda nice, escaping to a quiet city somewhere and living like a normal person. The thought of 'a normal life' becomes something that he looks forward to and hopes for. Something that keeps him going whenever circumstances are tough.
» Jion Haru, age 16 (physical age roughly 28), falls asleep in his tent one night like he always does after a long day of hard work -- and wakes up in a strange place called Haven.
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» Jion is from a vaguely ruined alternate-Earth, where World War III has already come and gone. Most of the world is still picking itself up after the damage wrought by WWIII, and has transitioned into the final stages of recovery. The United States is still caught up in some minor skirmishes in Eastern Europe, specifically in the South Caucasus states, but is otherwise focused on rebuilding the economy and transitioning from a more militant war-time government to something with more peaceful priorities. Technology has advanced, but with focuses mostly on wartime technology and bio-engineering.
» Sixteen years ago. Jion is brought into existence. He's the product of a military-funded experiment that was started before the outbreak of WWIII and picked up its pace near the end of the war.
» Created from genetic material derived from anonymous military-associated donors, Jion is conceived in a test tube in some laboratory out in the barren wasteland of the American mid-West. Not just him, though. Jion and several hundred other genetically-engineered humans are created at the same time as part of the military's ambitious Project Planaria -- an attempt to push regenerative medicine to its limits. The human embryos are modified to share key genetic sequences with planaria in order to facilitate super-rapid cell regeneration in case of injury. Extensive testing using rats and guinea pigs have been successful in creating specimens capable of recovering from massive amounts of damage, and this stage of the project aims to create humans with that same capability. Hopefully, Project Planaria will yield several hundred super-soldiers capable of recovering from virtually any injury. These soldiers would be huge assets in cleaning up the last few conflicts persisting in Eastern Europe.
» Unfortunately, the promising compatibility between flatworms and rodents doesn't equate to compatibility between flatworms and humans. The first batch of embryos fails almost in its entirety, yielding only twenty-something successful specimens. The second batch of embryos created in an attempt to salvage the project doesn't fare any better. Furthermore, the thirty-something children who transition safely from test-tube baby to infancy don't display any signs of rapid regeneration. Any additional funding to the project is immediately put on hold, especially given the strains on the national economy due to post-war recovery. The resulting children from the experiment are tentatively raised in a laboratory environment -- the plan goes that they will be closely observed until they hit the age of 18, then will be enlisted into the military as normal persons.
» For nine, ten years, the children of Project Planaria seem to be perfectly average humans. However, when the children enter their early teens, they suddenly start showing symptoms of rapid regeneration. The boys first, and then the girls.
» Jion -- one of the children from the second batch of specimens, average among his peers in every way -- is one of the first children to show signs of regeneration. At age eleven, he wakes up one day plagued with absolutely crippling pains in his abdomen and chest. Though the lab technicians first dismiss his symptoms as the beginnings of your garden variety stomach flu, a physical examination reveals that his chest and abdominal cavities are packed to bursting with extraneous scraps of flash, teratomas, two extra kidneys and an extra lung. He's rushed into surgery and "fixed," after which the scientists begin questioning and prodding at him to figure out exactly what is going on.
» It turns out that the children show similarities to planaria only after they hit puberty. Furthermore, their regeneration turns out to be terrible flawed. Their bodies produce far too many stem cells that uncontrollably differentiate into varying other types of cells, causing their bodies to produce mass amounts of extra internal organs, bones, muscle tissue and teratomas. In fact, their bodies produce extra components rapidly enough that, if they go too long without surgical intervention, the resulting pressure in their bodies can cause tremendous harm to themselves, or even death. Not to mention, the constant rapid regeneration also causes the children to age extremely quickly, roughly four times that of a normal person.
» There's a mad scramble as the scientists leading the project try to decide what to do. Obviously, these specimens are not fit for military duty given their flawed regeneration and need for constant surgery. But even worse, with the long gestation period and high cost of production, any specimen that dies as a combatant would equate to huge financial losses. So, after much debate, Project Planaria personnel decide to relegate these specimens as combat medics, instead.
» So Jion, at twelve years of age and rapidly coming to realize that he's not exactly a normal human being, is placed in a crash course in military medicine.
» Taken out of the military-lab compound where he's spent most of his childhood, Jion spends the next year and a half being put through an intense training regimen, learning the ins and outs of working as a combat medic. Though not an especially bright individual, Jion's accelerated physical and mental growth allow him to absorb information like a sponge, and he passes all tests with flying colors.
» Immediately afterwards, he's shipped out to action overseas. Jion is technically thirteen years old. Physically, he's about eighteen. Mentally ... it's hard to tell.
» Products of Project Planaria are often given drastically unconventional tasks due to their capabilities: providing emergency care under fire in highest-risk situations given their ability to work even while taking heavy damage; helping evacuate individuals from hazardous locations; serving as blood donors on the spot due to their ability to rapidly produce large quantities of blood every day; and -- in the most drastic cases -- serving as emergency organ farms for gravely injured soldiers. It's a tough job.
» Though Jion quickly earns a reputation for being efficient and easy to work with, agreeable and always willing to lend a hand when needed, he's never really integrated into any battalion, either. Though technically ranked a specialist, he only knows to follows orders and save people's lives, no matter what it takes; ranks are irrelevant to him. His squadmates often don't know how to treat him due to his status as "one of those weird blood-tanks," and he's too often shipped to other locations before he can really come to know anyone.
» His lifestyle isn't particularly cruel or demeaning. He gets a healthy paycheck to his name that he can spend however he likes. Nobody dares disrespect him due to his special status. He's treated nicely between skirmishes, and a lot of people appreciate what he does. He's saved lots of lives. But -- it's undeniably a somewhat lonely way of living.
» Jion spends two and a half years being shuttled from battlefield to battlefield in Eastern Europe, given only brief breaks in between deployments, when he's made to return to his old laboratory-compound home for medical checkups and observation.
» And it's during one of those breaks that he ends up meeting with one of the other children he grew up with back at the military-lab compound -- a specimen from a different project, a girl named Melody. Unlike him, Melody is a soldier proper, created with abnormally good reflexes and dense muscle mass, usually deployed for infiltration purposes due to her small size. Though Jion's always known that he and his fellow experiment specimen were created as tools of war in the first place, it somehow disturbs him greatly to see Melody actually serving as a soldier.
» Though he's never really questioned his life before, seeing his friend's situation makes him start to hesitate. Life serving as a glorified lab rat's all he's ever known, and he's thought that he'd be okay with it. But ... then again, maybe not. He wants his friend, at least, to have a nicer life. And if she does, he wants to as well.
» He's soon deployed once more (Armenia, this time), and he performs his duties well, of course. He's still a combat medic, and he'll do his best to help as many people as he possibly can. But at the same time, he starts thinking, considering, planning. Maybe, the next time he's returned to the lab compound, he can find an escape route. Maybe, if he can meet up with Melody there, they can run away together. Technically, they're both military property, and life as civilians would be impossible while the war is still going on; something that's incredibly unlikely to happen in their projected (very short) lifespans. But maybe ... they can run away and try living a normal life. He'd like to try that. It sounds kinda nice, escaping to a quiet city somewhere and living like a normal person. The thought of 'a normal life' becomes something that he looks forward to and hopes for. Something that keeps him going whenever circumstances are tough.
» Jion Haru, age 16 (physical age roughly 28), falls asleep in his tent one night like he always does after a long day of hard work -- and wakes up in a strange place called Haven.