Jacob was born in a roomy townhouse in downtown Bristol, the first and only child of Henry and Lauren Brent. He was a healthy baby, though unusually calm and peculiarly absent of late-night crying fits, even as an infant. Worried visits to the pediatrician turned up nothing but normalcy. From the time he was enrolled in preschool onwards, all of Jacob's schools were private institutions. His parents would accept nothing but the very best for him, and the early indicators of high intelligence motivated them to place their son in the most educational environments they could manage to find. Throughout his school career, Jacob's parents pressured him immensely - every individual point underneath a perfect score that he earned was enough to spark hours of criticism and pressure, and eventually Jacob no longer got anything *but* perfect scores. He grew withdrawn at home and positively gregarious in school towards his teachers, earning their affection. He also eventually gathered a group of other sharp-minded youngsters who more or less terrorized everyone they considered to be beneath them, something that continued until his parents suddenly decided it would be prudent to leave their native England for the United States to seek greater educational opportunities for their son.
The Brents moved to New York City just in time for Jacob to begin high school. Lauren became the ER administrator at Lenox Hill Hospital after a few palm-greased interviews, and Henry became involved in local politics and eventually attempted to run for mayor, though he did not win the election. Jacob was put into yet another stuffy private school, further molding him into the man he would eventually grow to be. At the insistence of his parents he chose a sport to spice up his growing pre-college résumé; after half a year, he fell in love with fencing. By the end of that same year, he had been recruited for the school's fencing team, and was their star sabre fighter though he was able to fence all three standard swords. Further pushing from Henry and Lauren saw him landing parts in school productions, most notably as Macbeth and Hamlet in the plays of the same names, and twice as King Richard in Richard II. He acquitted himself admirably in each performance, and grew to realize that he enjoyed being on the stage. He graduated as the valedictorian of his class, and his graduating speech was surprisingly negative and cutting towards most of the school's faculty and student body.
He went on to take the pre-law track at the University of Pennsylvania at the unending urging of his parents. Still under their unwavering eye he continued to compete in the fencing circuit and became more involved in UPenn's drama program, once again landing himself several notable parts in various performances. He consistently ranked near the highest edges of his fencing team and was its captain for three years running (sophomore to senior), and managed to win the Ivy League fencing championship during his last year. He once again graduated with the highest honors, and actually refused to give a graduation speech - he handed the 'honor' off to the salutatorian, earning himself a completely incorrect reputation for being humble. Jacob then applied to Harvard to finish his law degree, and after being accepted and finishing there was snapped up by headhunters from New York, who secured him a place in the District Attorney's office. Jacob's life was relatively uneventful from then on as he simply worked his way up the ladder, eventually landing himself a position as a fully-fledged ADA shortly after he turned thirty-five.
Four years after that, odd things started to happen. Working very late one night at the office he began to fall asleep at his desk - only to be jolted back into awareness by his computer's internal workings exploding. Understandably, he was baffled. He ended up putting it down to poor construction of the computer, and paid to replace it out of his own pocket. Jacob started noticing that he experienced far more static shocks than his coworkers, and began trying to create them. To his amazement, he could control the movement of the shocks and even ended up having little strings of electricity crawling harmlessly over his hand with some effort. He decided to investigate further while not informing anyone of his newfound ability, making excuses to the DA's office involving a family emergency, and left the country to stay at his family's house in Suffolk for a grand total of a year, doing little else but relaxing and testing himself. Needless to say, many household appliances ended up being destroyed or quietly replaced.
Jacob returned to the states only after he was satisfied that he had a reasonable amount of control over his ability, which had gradually increased in power as his command over it grew. He resumed his position as an ADA, and the next year, in 1999, he was stricken by a stress-related heart attack that led to him being diagnosed as hypertensive at the age of forty two. He recovered from the heart attack with no complications, except for the fact that his parents were suddenly very interested in him again. Jacob's mother set him up on a date with one of the doctors she worked with, a woman named Ada Kross. They continued to date on and off and had some rough spots with each other, but eventually grew close and married in 2001. The next year Jacob ran for the position of District Attorney and won, putting him in the crosshairs of the New York Republican party as a possible mayoral candidate. Almost immediately after winning the position of DA, Ada became pregnant - something that both of them had assumed impossible because of their age. Their twins, Henry and Sharon, were born just a short time before Jacob resigned under the haze of a corruption-bribery scandal. A former secretary had accused him of taking money from various illegal sources to help skew verdicts and sentencing. No evidence was found, but shortly after his resignation Jacob purchased a small villa on the southern coast of Spain; and the scandal was enough to ruin his chances of running for civil office.
Though most of his former colleagues assumed that Jacob would simply fade into semi-respectable obscurity, he reappeared on the legal and political scene with a bang as a criminal defense attorney. It was astounding - a man who had helped to put away a very large number of lawbreakers was making a living off of getting them off the hook in ways that ranged from technicalities to bribery, although the latter hasn't made it into the public eye. Most of his new cases tend to be high-profile, and he's shown some strange affinity for representing members of the local mob. His secondary career has been very successful in terms of both finances and prestige, and he has found that he enjoys it almost as much as he enjoyed being the DA. In 2006, when the twins were four, Jacob and Ada left the country to vacation without their children in Spain to 'get a break' from normal life. Two days into their vacation, the bomb exploded in Kirby plaza. Both of their children died in the blast, which they heard about a day after the fact when watching the news. They were unable to confirm the status of the twins for weeks, and were effectively homeless since the bomb destroyed their former apartment building. They remained abroad until early 2007, moving back to New York only after power had been restored to several parts of the city.
Since that time, Jacob has made it his business to both resume his criminal defense practice and re-involve himself in local politics, attempting to actively shoot down the Linderman Act in the political arena. He has gone so far as to hold several press conferences on the subject - though not many people tend to listen to him, considering him to be eccentric, he has managed to stir some dissent.
