Ian Bradley was born to a couple of SINless parents. Mom tried to work, but soon it cost more for a babysitter than she'd make in a shift, and so became a stay-at-home mom pretty quick. Dad managed to get work through a fake SIN driving trucks at the dock, till the dock closed down to make room for a new hotel. After that, it was whatever he could hold down, which was never much. When he was about 3, he had a new sister and things got even harder. Before long, dad was taking out of town jobs and staying gone for weeks and even months at a time. They often moved to follow dad's job only to have it finished by the time they got there. Then, dad was off again. It was rough, but they got by.
Ian was always good in school and picked up on things a bit more quickly than the average kids, but never nearly as well as the smart kids. That's why even when he wasn't switching schools, he was switching classes, his teachers always thinking he was either way too smart or way too stupid for this particular class. He learned to make friends quickly, but never close enough to miss them. He learned to pick up new skills in a hurry, but never learned the value of mastering anything. By the time he was 18, he had learned a lot about a lot of things and still didn't know shit about shit. It was about then that he awakened. Of course it happened a week after he'd finally saved up enough money for that shiney new data-jack.
He couldnt weave magic into spells and whatnot, but he COULD talk to spirits and see the astral plane. That was enough for him. Even though he lacked a proper SIN, he managed to get himself a pseudo-secretive janitorial/apprentice position at one of the higher end magical colleges in the country. He was only there for two years before the unthinkable happened.
Walking home one night, a van drove up and stopped next to him and three men jumped out the back in a flash. They were dressed as policlub members, but Ian got the sense that they didnt quite talk the talk exactly right. They duck taped him and brought him to a secluded area under a busy train track, where they tortured and beat him within an inch of his life over the course of several hours. They thought they were leaving him for dead, but a passing taxicab just happened to notice him and make a call to a local street doc who does pro-bono work.
After several weeks of rehab, Ian was back on his feet again. Too afraid to go back home, for fear of running into those men again, he moved to the other side of town and tried to blend into the shadows, vowing that the next band of assholes to jump him are going to regret it. It's been almost 10 years since then, but still, every time he hears a train go by, it puts him right back to that night, shaking and stammering, remember what they kept calling him as they beat him and laughed; "Hopeless".
