Difference between revisions of "Naomi Suzuno/History"

Like most stories that involve legacies and fortunes, Naomi's beginnings were rife with conflict. Her father, British-born Miles Spencer, was the CEO of Spencer & Strassen -- a business that specialized in luxury entertainment, goods (like art and antiques), and travel; a company that catered almost exclusively to the international elite. Based in London, by the 20th century, S&S expanded its operations worldwide. Asia, with its economic boom during the early 90's, was a prime target for it and it didn't take much to convince the distinguished executive to open a base of operations in Japan. It was there when he met Midori Hisakawa, a middle-class local woman and the personal assistant of one of his more important Japanese investors. Against his family's wishes (and this event would remain, to the rest of the family's eyes, a black spot in its history), he married her and settled in Lunarvale, where his only child, Naomi, was born.

Now the wife of a wealthy businessman, Midori concentrated her efforts in being an attentive wife and mother and took an active interest in her daughter's upbringing. Concerned about her gaijin last name and how her future classmates would react to it, she convinced her husband to register Naomi under her maiden name so she would better fit in with the rest of the children in her class -- since then, school records knew her daughter as Naomi Suzuno while important legal documents bore her full name (Naomi Suzuno Spencer).

She was thrown into an egregiously messy turning point in her young life at the age of 13. Returning from yet another vacation with her parents, an inexplicable engine failure in the family's jet sent the aircraft crashing into the private landing strip reserved for their arrival at the local airport. Given her position on the plane, situated close to her mother and belted into her seat, Naomi would have died if it wasn't for the intervention of a strange manifestation that protected her moments before the impact occurred. While injured, she miraculously survived the accident and the emergency surgery afterward that compelled attending, medical personnel to remove most (but not all) of her ruptured spleen. Her parents weren't so lucky -- her mother was killed instantly and her father's spinal cord was severed. Miles Spencer left the hospital paralyzed from the neck down, able only to move his head and right hand.

Chaos reigned over family matters during Naomi's recovery. Other members of the Spencer family wasted no time trying to assert their rights to the company and control over the family coffers, either through direct legal action or through more indirect ways (like wresting Naomi's guardianship away from her invalid father, being heiress). An investigation was launched upon examination of the plane's remains in which it was discovered that the engines were sabotaged before it left its last stopover, which put the entire household as suspects. Through the canny maneuverings of the family lawyer, Christopher Kent (working through his colleague, Akira Tanaka, who was based in Sumaru City), attempts to seize the family fortunes stopped, and guardianship of Naomi was passed onto her uncle, Henry Spencer, Miles's youngest and favorite brother. However, given Henry's uneagerness to move to Asia, and Naomi's unwillingness to move to London, Henry executed a series of legal documents denoting the family butler, Anthony Robinson, who had served and assisted Miles for a good fifteen years, his official agent to oversee his niece's welfare in the East. The seriousness and complexity of the entire affair had a profoundly sobering effect on Naomi, who realized in spite of her youth that she was going to have to maintain an active hand on responsibilities she knew little to nothing about. She pulled out of school and was tutored at home while she and Robinson saw to her father's condition. She started depending heavily on Messrs. Kent, Tanaka, and Conroy Wright, S&S's deputy CEO and a trusted friend of the family, in handling the Spencers' business and legal affairs.

Naomi decided to return to school in her first year, enrolling at St. Hermelin when she was 15 years of age. Now that the family's seclusion after the disastrous crash seemed over, the media, on top of everything else, came calling -- Miles's accident had reached his prominent business partners in Europe. After a year of struggling against repeated attempts by the paparazzi to get the story, Robinson suggested that the family move from Lunarvale to Sumaru and while reluctant to do so, Naomi agreed. Not only was Sumaru bigger, but the family had holdings there, medical facilities were more accessible, and it would put her in the same geographic location as Tanaka. After finishing her first year at St. Hermelin and beginning her second, she had her father moved to one of their high-class hotels in the area (the current Spencer home is, in actuality, a series of renovated penthouse suites in the Peninsula Sumaru) and transferred to the Seven Sisters High School to continue her schooling there.