Life is never perfect and often terrible things happen which are beyond our control, but they are still part of our lives. They shape who we are and make us resilient to the harshness and unpleasantness of reality.
However, as mere mortals, we hardly get to know the true darkness that lurks inside our world.
That doesn't make our lives any easier to live but it does make it simpler.
My name is Ji Shiba, adopted son of the Shiba Clan. Like most of you, I was born without magical blood and lived a normal life. Normal but not easy. I was orphaned, bullied and beaten up in the streets of Stone Canyon till one day, a stranger showed me kindness and took me in. I never realised that it would change my life forever.
That stranger was Lady Kagami Shiba, head of the Shiba Clan. She was my mother. She didn't treat me any different from her biological son, Alaric. I was loved and cherished for the first time in my life. I not only got a mother but a brother too!
They tried to shield me from the dark secrets of their family. Secrets that ultimately caught up to them … and me.
The Shiba Clan was the leader of the Samurai families. Along with six other clans, they spent their lives defending the world from supernatural threats - monsters, ghouls and demons.
That was not the life my mother envisioned for either of her sons. Yet she was left with little choice.
When I was eighteen and Alaric was 22 years old, strange creatures attacked our home and my family defended themselves with magic runes, which they referred to as symbol power. I know it's hard to hear and believe me, it's harder to believe even after witnessing it with my own eyes.
They revealed themselves as Samurai and shortly after, Alaric called the other five heirs of the samurai bloodlines. Our home was reinforced with powerful rune magic and made impenetrable to those with demon blood.
The heirs used their collective resources to gather intel on these dark beings and found out that they were extra dimensional demons known as Nighloks… thought to have been vanquished by the first generation of Samurai Warriors centuries ago in feudal Japan.
That's when everything became more bizarre! Swords and magic…. These were hard to wrap my mind around but I did. But superheroes and alien technology passed down generation after generation was downright mind boggling.
Alaric and his companions became the Samurai Power Rangers, warriors trained in elemental magic clad in colourful spandex. They operated in secret. I never understood how they managed to do that considering their flamboyant suits and huge mecha!
I didn't understand all of it but that didn't keep me from helping Alaric and the other rangers from the sidelines.
I found a way to replicate the morphing technology and create more morphers. But there was a catch. Only those of samurai bloodlines could morph, thus making me useless in a fight but my mother was never one to do nothing while my brother risked his life to save the world. She becamethe second red ranger.
The fight continued for years. Alaric fell in love with a girl who was caught in one of the nighlok attacks and managed to remember everything despite the memory spells. Her name was Katya Tsurugi. We later found out that she, like us, had secret links to ancient Japan. She was an air ninja from the Wind Ninja Academy.
For a time, everything was right. I found friends in the other samurai- Elena Corbett, Mark Enrile, June Hansel, Mako Watanabe and Oindrila Ozawa. Alaric married Katya and soon they were blessed with two beautiful children- Jayden and Lauren. We were one big happy family.
Skip forward ten years. We were still fighting the nighloks when their leader finally showed himself- Master Xandred. His attacks were brutal and threatened to reveal the supernatural to the rest of humanity, which would no doubt open a whole other can of worms and create more chaos and misery, which is exactly what Xandred wanted to raise the levels of the Sanzu River and flood the mortal world with tainted water, converting every human to a demon.
It was time for the final battle. A battle which killed off Alaric and Mia, orphaning Jayden and
Lauren. The Council, for some godforsaken reason, decided to separate us, so that in case the nighloks found either one of them, the Shiba bloodline would continue.
It was bogus but the logic behind the plan was sound.
I was forced to say goodbye to my mother, who went with Lauren to the ancestral Shiba house in Japan while I raised my nephew Jayden as my own in Stone Canyon. We communicated via emails and skype but otherwise met each other only once a year for the Council meetings.
After completing their mission, the other samurai also left the Shiba House to continue their lives.
We kept in touch but couldn't meet physically to protect Jayden. It's absurd but the Council demanded absolute secrecy about the location of Shiba House. All the samurai rangers had to give up their morphers, and were sworn to secrecy. The nighlok were gone and Master Xandred was banished by my brother.
The Council was nothing but paranoid and they fractured my family.
Still I follow them as my brother would have done.
I hope the nighlok wouldn't arise again during Jayden's lifetime. He deserved to live a full life. I enrolled him in the Fire Ninja Academy in Summer Cove. He wasn't allowed to go to school and meet normal kids his age but at least in the Academy, he could have some semblance of a normal childhood and make some friends, who could understand him.
I love him like my own son. I look at him and see my brother. I wish we had been a normal family but we weren't. And that's okay.
I got a family and no matter how fractured it is, I'll never give up on them. I may not be a Shiba by blood but I was raised as one and I will uphold their legacy as the protectors of this world against all supernatural threats till the very end.
End Notes
Hope you guys liked this chapter. Ji never had a backstory in canon so I decided to give him one. Tell me what you guys think in the reviews.