Seventh Ocean Media

Background Data

During the waning days that preceded the Ides of March in 1553, there was one man in Belfast Ireland who was a master chemist, and one of his most faithful proteges was Stavros Disraelli, a young man who would change his name to Stavros Ozraelocles; the common-law husband of the fair and beautiful Sonya Elechad. As a way of pennance for the crimes that Oz’s father, Dionte, committed while under the influence of the devil’s booze, Oz vowed that he would never allow liquor to touch the lips of either himself or the people he loved. That was when Stavros had a chance encounter with explorers, who bartered with him for some special seeds and roots that were claimed to have been found in the Asian nations. It took Stavros quite some time, but he and Sonya worked in tandem with Sonya’s sister, Elena, and her husband, Sylvio Hardt, to grow and harvest the resources to manufacture his beverage. But, it was not until after the Belfast Slaughter that Oz was able to perfect the recipe.

Dark Origins in the Overlord’s Neverzone

From the time that he and Sonya were taken from Belfast by the Overlord of the Dark Neverzone until the present, Stavros was able to put his tonic and serum development to use for the Overlord, as a means of giving His Lordship another reason to keep Stavros and Sonya alive. When Oz helped Sonya escape the Odin’s Eye and spirit her away to the Nevertribe’s Lands, Oz used a muted Belladonna serum on himself to change his appearance, as he was now a wanted man. But, knowing that his wife and her two children were safely out of Huek’s eyes, Oz contributed to the Resistance, with the help of a trusted friend Sean Schmidt. Finding ways to help refugees escape the Dark Neverzone into the Great Myriad, scouts who went through the portals were able to find raw materials and resources for the Resistance, including Sassafras, which Oz began to cultivate at a rapid pace, and learned how to create his Sarsatonic all over again.

Long before the formation of other rebel cells of freedom fighters, Oz had been secretly providing his special sarsatonic to the Lost Boys’ allies, who were the former pirates of Huek — now calling themselves the Defectors, and the Nevertribe, as a way of keeping their spirits, and those of the enslaved populace, alive. Covertly, using forbidden magics that Defector Leader, Oswald Smee, had provided, the tonic was given special magical properties that ate away at those who were carriers of Neskomf-level evil, all thanks to a Black Ruby ring that Smee’s comrades, William M. Jukes and Chester Jeccho, had looted from their former captain’s treasure caches. The cursed gem was a benign counterpart of the Hope Diamond, that made the tonic poisonous to evil by dipping his ringed hand into the casks; completely harmless to those devoid of malice. For their involvment in theiving Huek’s treasures, Smee and the other Defectors were slain by renegade bounty hunters. Smee’s dying wish to Oz was that he made sure that when Huek dies, he dies crying.

Mina Elechad and Keeping the Truth hidden

When Sonya was held captive on Huek’s war ship, she was used for the most inhuman and insidious things, among which was the forcible birth of twins. Not caring about who sired them, Oz loved Sonya with all his heart, and swore to the children with his very soul that he would love them as their true father, in every real sense of the word. This meant, of course, that when Mina had reached her late teens and formed a rebel cell of her own, Oz confessed that he was the monster who fathered her and Felipe. With no proof to the contrary, Mina had good mind to slay Oz, right then and there, but he because wanted to be there for Sonya, he appealed to both Mina’s taste for retribution and her palate by promising to keep her and her band of rebels in his special sarsatonic, which had been the symbol of the resistance’s morale for years, now. It was that one promise that had allowed him to keep his life, at the cost of his other promise; willingly being enslaved and chained up in Mina’s ship’s brig. During the Neveryears that the resistance routed Huek’s resources and slayed his most reachable high echelon agents, there had been mysterious deaths amongst her crew at the very beginning, and it was because of Oz’s ring. To keep the heat off of him, Felipe kept the ring safe, as he knew of it from his time with the Romani Clan. This proved, however, that Mina and Felipe could not put their trust into their crewmates, as the deaths were far deadlier than others, showing there was a deep darkness in these scoundrels’ blackened hearts.

Liberation of the Dark Neverzone and Beyond (20XX)

Flash forward to modern-day Earth, Nicole Jones, a youngster with unlimited magical power and intelligence, was abducted from the secret tunnels beneath Remington Springs and brought to the Dark Neverzone by Mina Elechad herself. To keep her captive safe from the brigand crew she governed, Nicole was chained up in a seldom-used hold that reeked of dead fish and other refuse. To quench her thirst, Oz was ordered to give Nicole a tall, frosty glass of Sarsatonic, knowing that it was similar to Earthean Root Beer. While Nicole was parched, she did not trust the rebel captain, and Oz volunteered to taste it with a separate straw. When it was determined to be safe, Nicole greedily slurped the sweet concoction from the very first drop that hit her tongue. Being a girl of refined taste, Nicole was blown away, metaphorically, by the quality and flavor of this micro-brewed beverage, praising Oz and disclosing that his was the only soul that her empathy powers could sense, stating that Mina’s was cloaked by darkness, as shown by how she abused a chained-up and hunchbacked old man with a whip. Before Huek’s final gambit, Nicole had downed at least 8 glasses of Oz’s tonic (and due to her Magical Gears, her body disintegrated waste before it could be created).

The final battle with Huek and the Trinity of Pan had uncovered decades’ worth of hidden truths: Mina and Felipe were fathered by Huek himself; their crew from start to finish was their half-siblings via Huek, planted as spies and saboteurs; Sonya was afflicted with a lab-manufactured pathogen that negated the rejuvenating, youth-restoring properties of Neverland, condemning Sonya to a slow and agonizing death come night’s end. Thanks to the alliance between Mina, Rafe, Gwendy, Twi, Nicole, Ariella, Bella, and Esther Jones, Huek’s ship was destroyed, his crew killed, and the mastermind and ravisher was arrested by the Brotherhood of Pan. That just left the task of healing the aged Sonya.

At a sacred tabernacle site within the Nevertribe’s village on the Eastern Coast of the island, Nicole was tasked with using her special powers to create the miracle that Mina knew she would be capable of. Nicole needed a conduit that could carry pixie dust into Sonya’s inner pathways, that could not easily be absorbed by her dehydrated tissues; so she assigned Oz to make his best possible batch of sarsatonic (with the aid of time being frozen by the Trinity’s Pan Powers). Lacing the tonic with magical dust, Sonya drank it down, and Nicole chanted a spell that infused her Pan energies into the affected cells of Sonya’s body, eradicating the virus at its source, and immediately reversing Sonya’s aging, making her look as physically young as Mina and Felipe. The batch that Oz had created had another side-effect, thanks to Felipe dipping the ring into the tonic at the behest of a mysterious voice. The spell that Nicole chanted had sent out positive radiation outward, replicating the same effect on Oz, negating the damage that his Belladonna mutegenic potion had done to him, returning him back to his youthful former self (with a touch of grey)

Age of the Knights of Pan

After Mina was fully ascended as a Knight of Pan, code-named Petra Pan; the Neverpier that was a smarmy safe-haven for pirates and drunkards was forever condemned by the Lords of the Neverscape, giving ownership of the pier to Sonya and Stavros, and the property that was once O’Flannigan’s tavern was rechristened as an alcohol-free family establishment called Oz’s. Thanks to their new allies of the Neverscape, Oz and Sonya were gifted with a house on the hill above Neverpier that was identical to the house that they lived in, in Belfast. With a new life and a new purpose, Oz was now able to realize his dream of manufacturing and selling his sarsatonic to the masses; finding new fanship with the group known as Team Panfan (which started out with Rafe, Gwendy, Twi, and their friends). The palace cook of Queen Aurora’s castle brokered a deal for the use of his recipe, in exchange for interns from Princess Maddie’s school of magic to help out in his sarsatavern’s kitchen.

The tonic became such a big hit, so much so that knowledge of the brew had made its way to other Neverzones, some of which were brought into the past by time-traveling fae and Neverbeings (no earlier than the 1980s in some Neverzones). One of these particular zones was the Combination Neverzone, where Petalia was birthed and raised in. When Petalia was adopted, along with her friend-sister Gloria, by Stavros and Sonya after Mina and Spencer’s Combination Ritual, she learned that the beverage that was so highly vaunted in her Neverzone by her friends from ToxAnon, that it all stemmed from Oz, she was so excited. Realizing that they had never tasted it themselves, Petalia and Gloria were so curious, so Sonya gave the loving flowers each a serving of it via the soil underneath them and an eye-dropper.

At the present time, Oz not only has in-laws from the Jones Family visit his (as he calls it) hole in the wall on dates and special occasions, but he has found a secret cult following of it on Earth, it being the favored beverage of the Joneses, Schucarts, and Team Panfan. Even though it was earning Oz and Sonya more money than they ever dared to dream, most of the revenue from his tonic goes to the aid of others, thanks to the Foundation that was created by Mina, known as the Solin-Sly Foundation. One of the other places that his tonic has found a home at in the Petaliaverse was in the Bee Kingdom, thanks to Winona Wasp’s acquiring a taste for it with her ToxAnon friends. Queen Beeatrix, who was already a staunch friend and ally of Petalia and Gloria, had arranged a meeting at his brewery, willing to barter for shipments of his tonic to her hive. Oz knew that Beeatrix would be willing to pay a high cost, but Oz was more than willing to give her hive an unlimited line to his sarsatonic. Her empathic powers told her that there was more to his demeanor than the happy mustachioed face she saw. Through the magic of her sage mages, she was able to see the hardships that Sonya and Stavros went through, and even knowing that, he still loved Mina and Felipe as his own, which was felt in the beam of light that Gloria and Petalia had created as Mina and Spencer’s magtis flowers.

Moved to tears by the Elechads and Stavros, and how wonderful of parents they were to Petalia and her friends, this gave Beeatrix the impetus for giving Petalia her long-overdue title as a Beehive Dame, she and Gloria both. As a small token of the Beehive royals’ love and esteem, the Bee Queen gave a jar of her best reserve-label honey to the household, with the promise of more anytime they wanted it. This in turn gave Sonya the desire to plant special flowers and botanical specimens that were invaluable to the creation of honey, so that there would never be another famine of it in Beeatrix’s kingdom again. A simple thing like a tall glass of root beer may seem small to some, but in the right circumstances, it can make all the difference.