Background

Junko was born to a mother on her own out in the sticks of Hokkaido, Japan. Her mother, a few years after, had returned to her duties at the local shrine alongside her job to better support her child. And as she grew into her early teens, Junko would also begin taking after her mother’s steps in training to become a maiden. During this time, the two would eventually move to Portland in the United States. Her mother having been hired to help tend to the Japanese botanical garden there, seeking a better life for her daughter. While there, the staff helped alongside Junko’s mother to teach her Shintoist traditions and ceremonies. Eventually prompting her to not pursue higher education, but a want to return to Japan to serve at a shrine proper. She’d never return to her home country, but she would be confirmed by the religious figures at the garden and would then be allowed to participate in their functions. Alongside her duties at the garden, she’d participate in interfaith and community outreach programs in Portland. Ever the nervous and anxious youth, her personality only seemed to shine in its excitement when learning about other faiths and assisting those in need at food banks and soup kitchens. Charity work had always been a particular passion of hers, especially since she didn’t have to worry about things like having a well-paying job or monthly expenses to take care of. One of her particular joys was in volunteering at masjid As-Saber there in the city. Even though most of that was tending and cleaning the mosque, it wasn’t too different to her duties at the shrine back in Hokkaido. And with it, the older ladies would often dote on her, treating Junko and her mother as one of their own. They’d help her learn to read the Quran, not in English, but in its original language, and were particularly patient with her difficulties on it. Alongside her interfaith volunteering, she’d also volunteer at her local food bank in wanting to assist the less fortunate. Though she struggled with reading the language of her newfound country, as she also did with Arabic, it wasn’t something that would stop her on picking up more on the spoken words she’d hear often. Things like gracias, buenos dias, Dios te bendiga, astagfirullah, mashallah, shukran, salam alaikum, and even some gestures with her hands in order to better understand the needs of the people she was helping. And then, one day, the world came falling down. Having grown well above six feet, Junko always got in the way of things more often than not. She couldn’t fit in most sedans, so she walked everywhere. She couldn’t circulate blood properly, so she learned to live with pangs of pain in her extremities. She couldn’t evacuate with her mother due to taking up too much room, so the lady opted to stay and let her daughter go as the convoy took off for the east, and the two would never reconnect as living people. In the next three years, Junko would fall in with a cult dedicated to nature after the quarantine zone she lived in was destroyed by the disease. They taught her more about surviving in the American wilderness, further reinforced by lessons passed down by her mother from living in the countryside of Japan’s northern frontier. Until she finally decided to make an attempt to go west once more over the course of those two years. At one crucial point in her life, she even came across a family with the last name of Reyes, fleeing from a destroyed QZ much like hers before her journey. Leading them through the woods, she could understand their potential discomfort in following a woodland stranger into nature. But perhaps it was fate that she was previously so focused on assisting people, as she hoped they came to trust her because she could share in their language, even if she clearly understood it better than she spoke it. As over the years, she tried to retain what she did know in the languages by seeking fellow cultists that spoke them; one of which gifted her a Quran to study the day Junko left. Having led the family to a Coalition QZ, Junko would not come to see the Reyes family for another few years. Maybe it wasn’t destiny, but the guiding hand of a mother that once loved her that wound up with her being ‘lost’ in the wilderness in trying to go back west. As if to avoid a worse end for the girl who was found wounded by one of the Reyes family in the woods during an expedition of theirs. Even if a little touched by now in her time out in the sticks during her journey, they brought her back to the QZ to be tended to. And there she would come to fall in love with the boy that rescued her from the cave collapse. She would live on to hide her face whenever and as much as possible, having earnestly believed herself to have died on that day. Now in her own thoughts merely a spirit possessing the vessel of a kami. How else could she have ‘survived’ such as an event, she believed, and that vessel was a tengu in the woods – a moniker she would come to accept for herself. Wherever the Reyes family went, the tengu was sure to follow after the ones who came to accept her in their fold; even with all of her little insanities and imperfections. Until one day back in January, Junko would volunteer with a small sect of fellow religious figures across different faiths. Their goal having been to set up an outpost to treat all injured parties, involved in the war or otherwise, in an attempt at neutral ground. Though she wasn't the bravest, she was certainly of determined mind in her own beliefs, much to the dismay of her loved ones. As this new, yet old, world still took advantage of those willing to give freely. In February, they received word of their outpost having been overrun with no survivors found, but they found solace and a grim hope that at the very least she wasn't among the identifiable dead. The only evidence of her found having been a Quran with post-it notes in Kanji on almost every page, tracking her progress.