Mitchell Jefferson Hort presents as a nondescript member of the counter-culture. He keeps quiet more often than not but get him drunk enough and he'll start expounding on the topic of cops, and how they are all bastards. He has a badly-foxed Waite Rider deck on his person at all times, which he occasionally shuffles with conspicuous nonchalance, but demurs when asked to tell fortunes, unless plied with money. He only rarely starts fires with his mind, and would prefer to be called MJ but for whatever reason it just doesn't stick.
Mitchell Jefferson Hort born to war widow Mary Alice (Moore) Hort in Huntsville, Alabama.
Mitch is included in a list of Cub Scouts advancing to Webelos, published in the Huntsville Times. Mitch is not included in any list of Webelos receiving the Arrow of Light between 1956 and 1958.
Mitch is included in a list of graduates of Grissom High School, Huntsville, Alabama.
Mitch is drafted into the US Army, undergoes basic training, and is stationed in Vietnam before the end of the year.
Mitch volunteers for medical testing in a hospital at Long Binh Junction.
Canyon Inn fire kills eight and burns more than 20,000 acres.
Mitch surfaces in Laurel Canyon, California, on the grounds of a former roadhouse best known as the temporary home of Frank Zappa. Contemporary reports assert Mitch claims to be able to see the future through Tarot readings, and that he predicts dire fates for Gram Parsons, Cass Elliot, and Janis Joplin among others.
First incident. Eleven die in a sudden fire in a grocery store at the corner of Sunset and Laurel Canyon Boulevard on October 8th, 1969. Mitch is still living at the roadhouse, giving Tarot readings in an ersatz den converted from a storeroom built into the canyon wall behind the house.
Second incident. Fire in Nichols Canyon kills seventeen and destroys six homes.
Third, fourth, and fifth incidents, all in the Little Armenia neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Mitch is renting a one-bedroom apartment. Total of six dead, fourteen structures destroyed.
Mitch makes a few new friends who are in fact most of the Los Angeles SANDMAN team. They gently sound him out and start preparing him for recruitment.
The LA SANDMAN team are all wiped out in the climax of the temblor event, eliminating the Red King’s incursion at terrible price. Mitch is not involved.
URIEL moves to pick up the pieces in LA, and finds out about Mitch. Shorthanded and rocked by troubles, they move forward with recruiting and training him. Mitch relocates from LA to San Francisco, starts going by "MJ Hearst," and takes a job as a “night watchman” at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
Mitch starts actively working as a field agent. His best use, it quickly becomes clear, is as a sort of bloodhound or maybe canary-in-the-coal-mine: let him loose into an area of suspected Red King activity and he’ll wander into the middle of it, surprisingly reliably. His pyrokinesis is about as much a hindrance as it is an aid, 'till yet he’d been (preternaturally) lucky and only caused the death of one civilian that he knows of.