Jia grew up the daughter of a wealthy Chinese American family. With her older brother groomed to take over running her family's medical research company, Tri Optimum?, she was encouraged to dive into the science itself to help turn a profit. By the age of 24, she was accepted as a Ph D? candidate in Molecular Biology and was on her way to running her family's research lab.
Except one night, in her lab, she looked up from her microscope and found herself in a specimen container of her own, being examined by something much greater than her. It took her and turned her inside out, peeling away layers of her form until she was reduced to inky blackness. Then the Researcher slipped into Jia's skin like a suit. Satisfied, it placed Jia in a glass container and set her on a shelf next to scores of other shadows like her.
Most of her time was spent in silent slumber, quiescent until drawn back out by the Researcher. What little Jia can remember is the endless experiments, the dissections, the electricity, the scores of completely meaningless tests. As if the Researcher enjoyed the process of experimentation without any interest in the results. Other shadows occasionally shared in her suffering but Jia went years without sharing anything beyond a scream with the others.
Until the night of the earthquake.
A rumbling woke Jia in her glass specimen jar just in time as it tumbled from its shelf. Two other jars broke beside her, leaving three of them facing each other without the Researcher in sight. To their mutual horror, each of them introduced themselves as Jia Sun. Despite their confusion, the three worked together and fled beyond the laboratory. It took months of getting lost down strange paths, hiding in shadows when monsters roved, and discovering each of them had similar but divergent memories of their prior life.
When they finally broke through back to Earth, the three discovered another Jia Sun carrying on with her life. None of the three could decide which of them she'd actually replaced. Or who the other two were if they weren't actually Jia either.
In the end, one Jia remained to watch over the Fetch and her family. One left to find a way to fight back against the Researcher and the Gentry who'd victimized them all. And one fled it all, traveling overseas and winding up falling in with a circus.
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