In 1976, the first rounds of clinical trials for a serum designed to impart synthetically generated superhuman abilities to ordinary children was underway. In these trials, children of Company employees were utilized for the experimentation, marked and monitored, and left to develop their abilities naturally following the injection process. Six out of every ten injected successfully manifested their abilities - some not until very late in their lives.
Hokuto was born on Valentine's Day, 1976 at Saint Luke's Hospital in New York City. Her birth was an unremarkable one, but the pride of a loving father and mother. Love, however, does not make up for a life constructed solely on a foundation of lies.
Half Chinese and half Japanese, Hokuto was the daughter of agent Akado Ichihara and Li Zhang-Shou. Her father, a loyal agent of the Company brought on by Kaito Nakamura in the early years of the Company's founding kept the secret of his occupation from his beloved wife, operating under the pretenses of an employee of Primatech Paper Company.
Akado Ichihara would ultimately subject his daughter shortly after her birth to injection by this Formula, unbeknownst to her mother.
Hokuto Ichihara, like a small handful of others, was among the youngest of the injected to manifest her ability. However, the outward manifestation of her ability was not an obvious one, and for a girl who on the surface seemed so ordinary and so commonplace, the world within her mind was slowly becoming anything but.
While marked and watched by the Company, they were initially unaware of a developing ability inside of Hokuto that began as fitful nightmares that began around the age of twelve. By sixteen, Hokuto had been keeping a journal of her dreams for four years. Uncannily, Akado's browsing of this journal matched dreams he himself had, and ultimately he brought the journal to the attention of a founding member of the Company who would be able to best empathize with the troubles the young Ichihara girl was going through.
It was on May the 16th, 1992, that Hokuto Ichihara first met Angela Petrelli.
Initially confused and not able to understand the gravity of her own self, Hokuto was quietly mentored in the use of her ability by Angela, a woman who commanded similar powers of her own. By drawing Hokuto into her own dreams, Angela was able to instruct the young girl on the basics of her own mental well-being, showing and teaching subtly, through exploration of her own life and the dreams of those around her. Angela would soon discover, that Hokuto's ability to manipulate and control dreams went beyond mere out-of-body travel.
By 1994 upon her graduation from high-school and consideration of college, Hokuto had come to know Angela only as a woman who spoke to her in her sleep, but was fully aware now of her capabilities in eavesdropping and manipulating through dream-state contact. However it would be through her father, that Hokuto would begin to realize the truth about her family, her father's business, and find an offer extended to her, to become something other than a simple, ordinary girl.
Akado's explanation was delivered to his daughter one week after her graduation, in late June 1994 on a Ferris wheel at Coney Island. The revelation that she was not alone, that the woman in her dreams was more than a figment and an imaginary compartmentalization of her own mind was stunning. That her father would keep a secret from her mother for so long as well came as a traumatic paradigm-shift from the world she had known.
The offer to join Akado at the Company, however, was even more unexpected. The request was made to keep this from Li, in order to protect her from the dangers that she could not face or handle, to allow his wife to life a happy, secure life — even if it was a lie.
The most surprising outcome of the conversation, to Hokuto, was that she agreed to lie as well.
From 1994 to 1996 Hokuto Ichihara would train to become a Company field agent specializing in reconnaisence and intelligence. Not a physical spy, but a spy of the mind. A woman who worked in the Company archives, and during the night would travel far beyond the confines of her body to the slumbering minds of others, performing whatever tasks were asked of her in order to gain three important things: Praise, acceptance, and love.
The three things her father had never once given her — from her perspective.
Upon graduation from Columbia University with a bachelors degree in business management, Hokuto would devote herself full time to the service of the Company, working under the same cover of her father as an employee of Primatech Paper in New York City. For the Company, Hokuto was the chief archivist fo the Company's paper files for ten years, working in her sleeping hours to gather intelligence and information, while maintaining a strong friendship with Angela Petrelli, both in and out of the realm of dreams.
However, over these ten years, a division of Hokuto's mind would begin to take form. Not in the form of a split personality, but more a duo-persona, a "false self" projected to the world. However, it isn't clear — even to Hokuto — which persona is truly her self. In dreams, she is a free, liberated and unfearing woman, capable of open conversation, assertiveness and confidence. Outside of her dreams, she is a humble, soft-spoken and passive woman.
Her true strength, and her true self, she struggled to understand. The woman she had become in her dreams, was her idealized self.
On March 7th, 2006, Hokuto's mother passed away at the age of 55 from heart failure. Both Hokuto and Akado were struck hard by Li's death. It was following her mother's demise, and the realization that she had devoted ten years of her life to serving the Company and her father, that Hokuto finally discovered just how truly distant she had become to her mother, just how little she understood her, and just how much her mother truly cared for her and was proud of her daughter.
After a long discussion with her father and Director Bishop, Hokuto Ichihara retired from the Company after ten years of dutiful service. Parting ways with the organization she had come to see as a second family, Hokuto turned to the family she had neglected, and her mother's remaining legacy in the world — a book store that she had been running since coming to America in the early sixties, on Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Queens.
Just eight months later, Hokuto Ichihara would lose her father in the destruction of Midtown Manhattan.
Reactions to the bomb were all over the news, the sheer destruction that claimed midtown Manhattan also dealt considerable collateral damage to Roosevelt Island. The small, pencil-narrow island caught much of the debris from Midtown, which resulted in considerable fire damage across the island, which has only one bridge out onto the mainland, opening out into Queens. The chaos there in Hokuto's neighborhood was just the beginning of the traumatic year she would have.
Dream after dream Hokuto viewed in her new life as a woman outside of the Company was filled with tragedy. People were terrified, frightened, and sinking into depression over the events happening. Eventually, in an effort to pull herself out of her own emotional quagmire from the deaths of her father and mother in the same year, and in an attempt to disassociate herself with that pain, Hokuto Ichihara took on the pain of others as her own.
In dreams, Hokuto began one by one attempting to remodel and revitalize the lives of those touched by the bomb. Though motivational suggestions, emotional support, and the manipulation of nightmares into comforting scenes, Hokuto attempted to sway the hearts and minds of a city on the brink of self-destruction. Their pain became her pain, because an outsider's emotional turmoil is always easier to handle and fix than your own.
Two years out from the bomb, Hokuto Ichihara continues to run the Ichihara Bookstore on Roosevelt Island. During the day, Hokuto volunteers for her community by donating old books from her store to the schools of New York, and on days when the shop is not open, volunteers at local soup kitchens and community shelters. She is never idle, never stops, never ceases moving — because the moment she does, she has to deal with the memories of her parents and their loss, and that is something she simply refuses to come to terms with.
In her sleeping hours, Hokuto travels across New York City, seeking out troubled minds and hearts, looking for ways she can offer advice in dreams, for ways she can quell unrest and turmoil of the spirit. It is her singular goal and desire to lighten the hearts of the city, to take away the pain, the fear and the sorrow into herself and make the lives around her brighter.
Even if she refuses to admit to her own darkness.
