James Clark was born in South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1978. His mother died when he was young, young enough that he doesn’t remember her at all, and after she was gone his father threw himself into work. He was a good provider, but didn’t spend a whole lot of time with his son, so Jim was raised mostly by his grandfather, the wičháša wakȟáŋ (“medicine man”) of the tribe. Thus, Jim grew up caught between two worlds. The first was the one represented by the grandfather he adored, encompassing all the traditions of his tribe; the legends and healing practices, language and ceremonies. The second was that of his friends, many of whom were trying to leave those traditions behind.
He managed to walk the fine line for years, especially because he actually was interested in the traditions of his people. He wasn’t sure he wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, but he did have an aptitude for healing and was a quick study. He supplemented traditional knowledge with modern medicine, becoming an EMT after high school before enrolling in nursing school.
Once he became an RN, he returned to the reservation. He had a strong desire to continue to help his tribe, and also wanted to be close to his father and grandfather. Of course, nothing last forever, and in September of 2006 his grandfather died from cancer. Jim was devastated, and embarked on a vision quest to try to find some solace or meaning after the loss. Thus, on October 1, 2006, he was by himself in the high desert. He had been without food or water for two days. On the third night, just as he had begun to pray, he was struck by a vision in the flames of his campfire. It looked like a huge explosion — though nothing about was very clear, save for the obvious destruction and death surrounding it.
He went home shaken, and was reluctant even to think too hard about what it meant. However, when the blast went off in Manhattan on November 8th, it was too close to be a coincidence — and more than that, he felt in his bones that it wasn’t one. He’d seen it, and it had happened. He still tried to push it back for a little while, but with the public revelations of more and more “special” people, there rapidly came a time where he couldn’t ignore the implications of what had happened, especially when he started having other visions.
When it came time for the “evolved” to register, he dutifully went, and was classified as Tier 0. After that, things began descending into chaos. The visions kept coming as the world around him went to hell, first with the discovery of the Vanguard, and then the aftermath. Living as he did away from most major metropolitan areas, he didn’t see the worst of it firsthand, but what he did see was bad enough. SLC-E people being attacked, injured, and killed by angry mobs were a daily occurance in the hospital where he worked, and resources already stretched thin reached far past the breaking point. He was torn between staying and helping the hugely underserved population of his home, or going and assisting in the fight for his very survival, and the survival of all the SLC-Es. The breaking point was the Cambridge Massacre, and the following events leading up to Andrew Mitchell’s succession as president. Jim knew that he was needed elsewhere, and so he joined up with the freedom fighters to resist Mitchell’s orders and keep his fellow SLC-Es alive — and free. He wasn’t a fighter, but medical personnel were always useful, considering the number of casualties sustained.
The war…was what it was. He doesn’t dwell on those days. He lost more friends than he could count, and there were many days where he wasn’t sure if he could go on, or if he even wanted to. It didn’t help that the visions kept coming, no matter what he did to try and suppress them. There were a few — very few — that he was able to interpret soon enough to be useful, but more often than not they were vague and disjointed, a massive hindrance rather than a help. This was especially true considering that when he had one, not only would he go into what was more or less a trance for several minutes, but he would also need time to rest afterwards. He pushed himself beyond his limits during this time, taking only minimal time away and pushing through the rest, but it took a toll on him from which it would take years to fully recover.
The Reconstruction period found Jim moving to the safe zone in New York. Ostensibly it was to help rebuild, but the move and subsequent events were also integral in his own recovery process. It took him around a year before he was able to even begin to lead some semblance of a normal life, and he spent most of that year attempting to integrate all the visions he’d had fully into his consciousness. He suffered from extremely vivid nightmares, which then led to insomnia. He isolated himself from everyone as he sought clarity and solace from the suffering he had witnessed both psychically and in person. It was a very long road, made even longer and more difficult by the fact that he did not seek out help. The treachery he had witnessed against those like him during the war was always at the forefront of his mind, and he found it difficult to trust anyone else to help him with his journey back to health.
Slowly but surely, however, he began to return to himself. He started sleeping better, and was able to get in contact with his surviving friends. He went back to work, first in an administrative capacity and then with patients. He was never quite the same — who was, after all? — but he had managed to become whole again in a way that he hadn’t been since before the war. There would always be shadows lurking, but he no longer lived completely in darkness, either environmental or self-imposed. He now lives and works in the New York Safe Zone, and though there is plenty of reason to be wary of the future, there is also renewed hope.