♪ Born, which is nice, then tragically grew up, and somewhere in the middle of that was a childhood. Hadley sadly doesn’t remember the day of his own birth, even though his sister claims she remembers seeing the lights on the ceiling the day she was born and his brother claims he remembers the ugly moulting feathers on their aunt’s stocky legs when she visited him when he was born. And the family (sarcastically) entertains this idea, and wonders if Hadley’s lack of a ridiculously detailed infant memory is why he had such a peculiar ability to read the future for a brief moment in time. Because, you know. That’s definitely a power people like Hadley can have. Totally. ♪ Before Hadley discovered this incredible ability, he was a pretty normal child in a pretty normal family of pretty normal sirens. You know, the normal neighbourhood siren flock! A whole entire family made up of sirens with enchanting voices and uncanny musical talents. Though the family weren’t seriously thought of as anything potentially magical until Hadley was of troublemaking age, and more as a quirky loud family with a handful of benign but talented weirdos who really liked music. In reality, many generations past, a human met and fell in love with a siren and managed to survive his aggressive affections, resulting many hundreds of years later in migration to all the corners of the globe, eventually resulting in at least one enduring bloodline. We’re just sorry it was the Hopper bloodline that was produced and remained intact. ♪ Potentially unusually for a youngest child, Hadley always had a major case of Middle Child Syndrome. His sister - being the oldest and a siren with a particularly melodic voice - was heavily encouraged in her opera singing career by their parents, while the two middle boys were keen on instruments and praised for the way they took to them. However, the boys came with different problems - the second youngest, while extremely in tune with his magic, found it catastrophically hard to control, while the second oldest took greater interest in flight, which was encouraged but great discipline was required to ensure it stayed hidden to the wide neighbourhood. So they began to attract a lot of attention within the family unit while the youngest boy was forgotten about. As a result he would act out harder than before, at first trying to grab his parents’ or grandparents’ attention by showing them something “new” he could do with his magic, but when that didn’t work he started just causing trouble. ♪ At first it was pranks on his sibs, which is pretty normal kid behaviour and sometimes got laughs and applause, and other times sharp dismissal and ignorance thereafter. After maybe the tenth or twentieth megaphone-level whoopee cushion prank he had all his joke shop toys confiscated and people were really very sick of his antics. Teachers would routinely bring his parents in for increasingly frustrated talks about his worsening behaviour. Of course, he didn’t just stick to using his innate magic to cause trouble. Eventually he figured that his parents didn’t care about that. After all, his sister used it to great effect in her successful singing career, and his brothers needed more training to keep theirs in check, and he could just sit in the corner and be mediocre for all they cared. Even when he started trying to learn ever more annoying instruments they were all taken away from him immediately. ♪ So he turned away from music, from sound, and as he entered his teens he started playing with fire. Literally; he was setting shit on fire. It dawned on him that he received the most attention from his parents whenever they had to go to his school to smooth things over, so he would become destructive at every possible opportunity. It eventually culminated in his being suspended for a while after a trash can fire got out of control, though thankfully no one got hurt but himself. Singed his eyebrows off and inhaled a lot of garbage smoke. He got better though. A shame about his behaviour, since he was fairly bright and studious. If he only applied himself in a scholarly way, maybe he would have got the validation and attention he craved without all the pyromania. Or, you know. Maybe not. ♪ For a while in his mid to older teens it seemed as though Hadley calmed down a bit, apparently humbled by the trash fire incident. Really he’d just given up looking for attention from his parents and had realised other kids existed. He became the kind of guy who was down for anything and who’d be the first to take on any bet or dare just to bask in the attention. One year he seemed to have a different girlfriend every other week, until it got around that he was cycling through them for his amusement. He wasn’t; he was just painfully ill-equipped to hold onto a relationship and fell in love hard and fast with anyone who so much as smiled at him. ♪ Right at the end of school, Hadley got into fake psychic shit to impress a girl he really wanted to notice him. As with most of his phases it started small and innocent enough, taking his horoscope “seriously”, getting into crystals, reading about angels and performing magic spells from magazines. As it began to get him the attention he wanted and he became friends with the girl, he began to concoct a story about his lineage, a secret she absolutely could not tell anyone, or else everyone would want their fortune told. Because his whole family were actually banshees. He said he could totally prove it, but he would need to make a terrible prediction and it might frighten her! She promised she wouldn’t be scared, and invited him to her home while her parents and little brother were out. Here, he gave his best shriek - with warning!! he didn’t want to hurt her!! - and then placed the back of a hand on his forehead dramatically. Oh, woe was to be upon someone’s dear… uhhhh… pet! Yes, a pet! Someone within the next row or ten of houses would have a pet perish soon; he could feel it in his very bones! ♪ He sort of didn’t count on the girl immediately running off with a gasp to check on her brother’s pet mice… one of which had died of stress following Hadley’s terrifying scream. Okay, that made him feel bad, but like… it also meant he was definitely a Seer of some kind, at least to keep up the ruse of being some mystical creature this girl could get close to, as long as she absolutely did not tell anyone that he had this ability, for it would expose his family and they would have to move again, and it would be the thirty third time in the hundred years of childhood he’d spent on the Earth! No, Hadley doesn’t know anything about banshees. How did you guess? ♪ Obviously the girl didn’t keep her gullible mouth shut. By the next week everyone knew Hadley had “predicted” the death of the mouse and very few people actually believed it, but some of her neighbours had heard the shriek and thought it was foxes. But one thing led to another and it all just snowballed. He wound up shrieking to prove that he definitely could shriek, not necessarily to predict anything, but when the star cheerleader broke her leg within a week of that shriek, people simply decided that Hadley had predicted disaster for the school by… shrieking in the school. People demanded he do it more often! Which meant attention, adoration! But shrieking like that was beginning to take its toll due to the nasty reality of bloodrush, so he began charging. And he made a decent amount of money for making easy predictions, scrutinising the person who asked for it and simply giving the most likely event ♪ Honestly, his parents were furious when word got back to them, as they were right to be. It was pretty obvious that he was cold reading people and fleecing them, but they were also furious that he was using his hereditary power to do it. With little warning, they kicked him out. Or rather, after a heated argument during which Hadley threw a tantrum at the age of nineteen, he stormed out and they locked the doors and refused to let him back in, forcing him to sleep in a neighbour’s shed during the freezing cold night. It was a moment that solidified in his mind that he could never count on his parents to love him unconditionally like they did his siblings, and when his mother let him back in at sunrise, he packed a bag, withdrew his savings and left home for good. For a short amount of time he was considered a missing person until he finally called his parents and let them know where he was, but also that he wasn’t coming home. They remain on rocky terms, but they do speak. He speaks to his siblings, too, even if he isn’t super close to them.

♪ With distance from the life that had forced him to turn to fake psychic shit came a heap of embarrassment. Reflecting on what drove him to it in the first place and how he’d almost believed in it himself all for this girl, all for fleeting glimpses of attention and adoration, he felt a deep sense of regret. But going back would definitely only make things worse, and he was still pretty well known among those in his little town as ‘the kid who practiced magic and predicted disasters’. Or more commonly, as a cold reader who took money from the gullible. Either way, he wasn’t really remembered all that favourably. And he’d have to go back and be mature and admit he was the bad guy in all that and apologise and all that noise and the thought of taking accountability for his actions made his skin fucking crawl. So he did what anyone else would do. Move even further away. ♪ They went as far as his money would take them, which meant “running in one direction until money ran out”. When that happened, they started taking on odd jobs and temp positions until one day they finally found themselves a permanent position as a server at a fancy little restaurant. The pay wasn’t great, but leaning into the charismatic voice of his ancestry ensured the tips were plentiful. Most of the time. Some people simply cannot be charmed for love nor money, you know? At this job they met Dallas Montana, their polar opposite and immediate friend, more or less. Life was pretty good; Dallas didn’t probe too much about Hadley’s past and therefore the siren didn’t have to really think about it much, looking towards a bright and vibrant future with good friends by their side. ♪ Or, at least, until the owners sold up and the new idiots decided it was not a restaurant anymore and literally no one currently working there was staying. One day they all turned up for work and the shutters being bolted down was how they first learned they were out of a job. ♪ This seemed like the sign to move on again. What was left here for them? In fact, after a terribly short conversation with the longest lasting worker other than themselves, Hadley had Dallas convinced that it was a brilliant idea to grab all their savings and high-tail it out of here. And they didn’t even have to use their ability! (Not that they would, not these days, honest!) Didn’t Dallas have his eye on this junky old food truck? They could go to it, couldn’t they? Buy it up, refurbish the damn thing, start that business they kept talking about - because now Dallas’s plan was Hadley’s too, somehow. ♪ Which is how both Hadley and Dallas have wound up in not exactly the nicest part of town, living in a cardboard box little apartment together and… just doing their best! How long will it take for Dallas to notice after all this time that something isn’t quite right with Hadley? ..Dude’s pretty oblivious; Hadley ain’t worried.