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Grayson Thovain grew up in a mostly normal home, with mostly normal parents, that is until his 12th birthday when his mother died in a tragic car accident that killed both her and her unborn child. After this, Grayson’s father became obsessed with all things paranormal. At first Grayson thought, his father was just nuts, but after a while, he got into it as well, and decided to devote his life to investigating the paranormal. After graduating, he would split his time between taking odd jobs to pay the bills, and investigating local occurrences of hauntings. He struggled for a few years, until his father died leaving him a substantial estate. He, with a couple of his friends also interested in the paranormal, decided to start a business with it. On the front, they took people willing to pay to go with them and sleep over at suspected haunted locations, while they could then take the money and use it to investigate other sites.
By the time, Grayson was 29 he was quite good at what he did, and had made considerable money taking people on tours and camping trips to haunted sites, so much so that he was able to completely separate his business. He let his friends stay in charge of the tourist side of the business, so he could go off and really start investigating more seriously. In 1993, near the end of October, Grayson was investigating the catacombs in Paris, France, and on the eve of the 31st Melinoe came across him. She was impressed that a mortal was so willing to be in such a place, and of all nights he could be there, all-hallows eve. Over the course of the next year, she started appearing to him, running into him while in mortal form, passing herself off as a paranormal junkie to get his attention, she even bought a copy of a book he had published for him to autograph. She never stayed with him for extended periods, but it was clear that Grayson was smitten with her. Upon finding out she was pregnant with twins, she realised she would have to leave for good, and on the day she arrived to give him his sons, she decided to explain everything to him, all about the Greek gods and who she really was. He was shocked, but took it all in, he had seen quite a bit in the paranormal world to not be too shocked by the revelation.
He promised to take care of his children, but the idea that ghosts were real, and even the gods, consumed him, and he threw himself even deeper into his work, hoping to find some kind of hard core proof that he could actually take to the public. Because just saying his ex-girlfriend told him so, obviously would not have been enough. So for the most part Ryker and Tobias were raised on the go, usually being home-schooled by their father, although ultimately they learned more about paranormal stuff than they did maths and social sciences. As they grew, one thing became very clear, especially when they were around places that had high amounts of paranormal activity, they could see and commune with ghosts. At first they were excited at how happy it made their father that they could do this, but after a while it became clear that he cared more for their abilities than he did for them.
As the kids grew, and their powers became more and more prevalent, monsters started sniffing around. The fact that they grew up with the knowledge that they were demigods, Melinoe having left weapons and directions to the camp in New York for them, made things easier to deal with; they also had the advantage of ghost look-outs giving them a heads up if monsters were nearby. They managed to get by ok this way, for quite a few years, always looking out for each other, then one day their father took his ghost hunting too far. He decided to visit Prypiat, Ukraine; normally this would not have been that bad of a thing, as if visitors stay a good deal away from the power plant itself, the radiation levels are not high enough to be harmful. Even then, with the proper gear, which their father had, he could go deeper as long as he kept an eye on the radiation levels. He did not want the boys that close to radiation at all, so he left them at the main camp set up just outside the danger zone where they could monitor their father’s progress. As their father made his way around the city, some particularly nasty ghosts decided to play a mean trick on him, and making their presence known tried to get him to follow them deeper into the city. As the father saw the paranormal activity spike, he could not help but follow, like the children to the pied piper. The sons could hear voices on the radios in the background of their father’s, but because they did not speak the language of the area, they had no idea those voices were luring their father to his death. Their father soon went too far into the city, ignoring the radiation alarm on his suit entirely, and his boys’ pleas for him to go back where it was safe.
Within days, it was clear that their father had been exposed to too much radiation, and after a few months in a Ukrainian hospital, he died of radiation poisoning. The boys made plans to get out of the Ukraine and get to the camp that was talked about in their mother’s note, they took the last of the money their father had on him at the time and quickly got plane tickets to New York. After being chased by a hellhound and taking it down just outside of camp, they finally made it, to start new lives without their father.
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