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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samnell" data-source="post: 1687188" data-attributes="member: 130">Ok. Here's a go. I kept embellishing to be sufficiently hook-a-licious, but I could always add more on top too.      Jan Sverak is a student pursuing his PhD in Medieval history at Oxford. The son of Czech exiles who fled their home after the crackdown following Prague Spring, he spent the first half of his life living in London. When the Iron Curtain fell, the Sveraks returned to Czechoslovakia in 1993 and his father began a successful career in politics. Uncomfortable slightly in his ancestral home and greatly with his father’s increasingly hardline nationalist platform, Jan returned to Britain to finish his education. At the same time his mother took a position teaching Czech literature in Canada, uncomfortable around her husband’s new political contacts. He has no siblings.  Estranged from his family, Jan grew very close to his Latin instructor, the famously eccentric Dr. Sidney Silby-Bryce. The good doctor tried repeatedly and without success to interest Jan in Antiquity instead of the Middle Ages, which became a running joke between them.   Buried deep in royal charters from the Anglo-Saxon period one night, Jan’s studies were interrupted by a power outage. On investigation he found a group of physics students had set up a Tesla coil outside and were enjoying the spectacle, which Jan noted was announced on one of those student bulletins he never read. Seeing Dr. Silby-Bryce in the admiring crowd, Jan decided to be a good sport about it and went to get a closer look at the roaring, sparking electrical contraption. But as luck would have it the students weren’t careful enough with the Faraday cage containing their coil and as Jan approached some ten thousand watts blew straight into him. Jan took the whole charge of the coil and possibly saved dozens of bystanders in the process and woke unharmed, but with an instinctive ability to control and generate electricity. This rapidly drew the attention of the Physics department and left Jan more than a little bewildered and not sure what to do with himself. He isn’t entirely fond of the idea of being studied. His father is in contact with him again, full of talk of rebuilding bridges and renewing family ties. Jan doesn’t know if he should suspect the motives behind the repeated phone calls or not.</blockquote>

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