Chapter Text
Welcome to the introduction to this fanfic. This is a prequel series to my fanfic The Alternian Candidate, set in the 1950s. Pa Harley is an African-American Republican senator, the first African-American senator since Reconstruction in this alt timeline, and he is a widowed father who raises Jade alone. I made him The Most Interesting Man Alive so I must tell his story. I know this story might have the broad appeal of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, where all the spec fiction stuff is replaced with nerd shit, but maybe it will have fans.
Here is Jake Harley's broad life story:
Jake was born Jake (not Jacob) with an unimportant surname in a small town in Missouri to a black teenage housemaid at the Crocker Plantation and her black husband right before or after the wedding on February 9, 1902. This is the same day as his white half-brother and future rival, Sam "Colonel Sassacre" Crocker. When he was 6, his mother died of measles and his legal father abandoned Jake with his maternal grandmother since he didn't want to raise another man's child. In 1910, Jake started to use the surname Harley after the comet. In 1917, as a 15 year old, he lied about his age and joined the US Army and was assigned to be a barber. He went on various adventures. In the late 1920s, he met his wife Alice Plein, a spinster from an elite Philadelphia African-American family. He married her and in 1930 they had Jade Alice Harley. Meanwhile, he started the business Harley Hair. In 1933, while pretending to be the white Jake English, he infiltrated a Communist meeting and had sex with Condesce, who was on Earth disguised as the Canadian-American "Betty". In 1934, Alice dies (strangely unrelated to "Betty") after toddler Jade accidentally shoots her and a doctor botches the operation to fix her. He is fed up with doctors at this point and converts to Christian Science. He takes Jade on adventures and ignores that she is intersex and on three occasions suffered a strange neurological event. By 1950, he is a congressman for Illinois's 1st District. He sued Betty for libel and won some point previously, neither of them really knowing for sure yet that they were the ones they had sex with at that communist shindig. In the summer of 1950 while on vacation with Jade at Deep Creek Lake, he meets John/June Egbert, Condesce's adopted son. Egbert and Jade have a romance that is broken up by Condesce, though Jake also didn't want them to marry. In 1952 he runs for senator as Betty's husband Colonel Sassacre is also running and they both win. They both win re-election in 1958. However, Jade had been disabled by her neurological condition and she resents that Jake treated her as a surrogate wife all these years but never visited her in the hospital. In 1955, Jake meets Bro Strider and they have a brief but intense affair. Bro dies in 1956 and Jake thinks that Bro killed himself over Jake but that's not what happened. In 1960, Jake finds out he is dying of anal cancer. He has reconciled with Jade and his ultimate fate is in a quantum state.
And I need to clean my keyboard because it barely work.