John Logan never knew his father, and neither did his mother. Born to a stripper in London, Logan's childhood was mostly filled with sequins, bright lights and lots of hugs and cheek-pinches, his family situation being of some urban variety of village communal raising. You see, his mother was good friends with the ladies who occupied the same stage as she, and during her pregnancy and recovery afterwards, everyone was happy to share the load of motherhood. He was raised by at least six different women in the early days, spent a lot of time backstage in a place simply named Silk, and was generally the darling boy doted on by women both tortured and not.
He otherwise had a normal childhood - he went to not-quite-so posh schools, got into many a schoolyard brawl, got spit on for having a "slut" of a mother, and was excellent at football (soccer, obviously). In fact, that's what Johnny boy wanted to do with his life - he wanted to be a football player, world famous, stupidly rich, and worshiped. His mother, meanwhile, was handed co-management of Silk, and they had a good if strained existence.
This connection to the world of late night entertainment also afforded Logan about twenty years worth of insight into the female mind that he might have otherwise never experienced, and could have potentially lead to him being a kind and considerate young man with a respect for women that other men might not have. Not so. Every relationship he touched turned to ash as he proved to be an emotionally manipulative bastard who expected certain things from his girlfriends and would readily throw a fit if he didn't get them. He was liable to yell and hit, but more so, he was liable to guilt, verbally hurt, and shame. Women came out the other side feeling like their soul needed a good scrubbing.
Meanwhile, there was football. He was not a favourite on any team he joined - he was too pretty and too mean-spirited to be well liked. Where he saw women as property and tools, he saw men as competition, always. But he was good at what he did. Until a car screamed around the corner, collided into John Logan, and broke his leg in four different places. Snap, snap, snap, snap - end of a soccer career of good fortune and wealth. No one could say that they weren't a little relieved, but they had pity, a lot of pity. Logan never particularly appreciated this pity, and spent far too long in a wheelchair than is good for the soul.
His mother, heart broken about her poor baby boy, had him move back into her flat where she could help him, and, so that he could keep his bank account appropriately filled, she gave him accountant work for Silk. With no real education outside of his attempt at sports, Logan did his best, and even when he did learn to walk again, he never really walked away from the business. He would never be able to become any kind of footballer, short of teaching children or something, and let is be said that Logan hated and still does hate children. So he became Silk's manager, allowing his mother to take an early retirement.
That was when things started to get a little legally hazy. The police came knocking when apparently word spread that Silk was becoming less of a strip bar and more of a bordello, the private backrooms for lap dances catering to men who paid for a little more than a show. Logan's idea, naturally, raking in the profits of prostitution and coercing reluctant girls into selling their soul a little. Silk was shut down and Logan was facing charges, so what did he do?
He ran the hell away.
Logan spent some time traveling, mostly going by his last name. He'd always wanted to go to Mexico, and so he did, running into more trouble than he could handle on occasion, but also more fun than he'd had in a while, meeting women who sometimes balked at the sight of the scars on his right leg, sometimes ignored them, rarely cherished them. During a fight over a dead woman involving her brother and his friends, Logan discovered he had the miraculous ability not only to make women feel powerless - but anyone who thought they could be miraculous too. His opponent, a Latino with a talent for turning his skin into some sort of molten hot substance suddenly found himself unable to do so when Logan willed it to be so. Suddenly unresistant to what may as well be lava covering his body, the man was instantly killed, freeing Logan to make a get away and try to come to grips with What Just Happened. Mere months later, New York was sent to a fiery hell, and then it all started making sense.
The coercion. The ability to induce fear, calm, arousal. The ability, apparently, to steal away the powers of others. Chemicals are powerful things, and it almost made up for the soccer career that couldn't be. Almost.
Logan was among the few that crawled into New York City while thousands fled the other way, intent to set up shop and find answers. Scraping together his savings (and a little help from his mother across the pond), he bought up some real estate for peanuts on Staten Island, and was among the first in the emerging neighbourhood of the Rookery to do business of the semi-legal kind. Police wouldn't touch the place and people went there to disappear - and sometimes for a good time, too. Women desperate for a job found themselves at his door step, and slowly, The Happy Dagger became one of the first brothels on Staten Island, a bright spark in the desolate borough but keeping its head down all the same.
The next two years, Logan built his business, with only a small hiccup of a financial crisis when a girl working for him killed a client in self-defense. Logan left her in a ditch and tried to cover it up as best as possible, but it was a financial sore point - but nothing his new best friend, James Muldoon, couldn't help him with - provided Logan use his particular talents of power negation to help with Muldoon's Evolved fighting ring. Well hey, happy to scratch your back, fellow countryman.
As for answers, Logan found them, he certainly did. The world had changed since the Bomb - suddenly, God (or whatever) had granted a select handful of people the ability to be amazing, and He (or whatever) had granted Logan the ability to take it away again. He'd always known that sex is power, and in the end, sex, when you get down to it, is chemical. So is happiness, sadness, love. In fact, everything, in the end, is chemical.
Guess someone up there is looking out for Logan after all.
