Legends of Ninjago Book 1: Brotherhood (Ninjago AU, Cole, Jay, Zane, Kai)

Chapter 2: Lightning

Jay Walker fidgeted with the steering controls on his latest contraption. For the last few weeks he'd been working on a jet pack/hang glider hybrid, with very little success. He hoped that once he perfected his invention, travel would be much easier for everyone—and more fun—but so far his tests hadn't gone quite as well as he'd hoped. He had barely been able to get off the ground last time, and he kept having problems with a fuel source, but this time would be different. This time he was going to fly.
He pulled on a more aerodynamic jacket and pulled his goggles firmly over his face. Next he strapped his glider on and with a shaky breath he looked out over Ninjago City. He had reasoned that if he could only start his flight from up high enough that he would achieve more lift, so when his mom had asked him to run into town to grab a few things, he took the opportunity to test his theory, but now he was having second thoughts. He was up so high.... so very high... what if the glider failed? Jay shook his head firmly. This wasn't going to fail. This time would be different.
"Test number 24," he said to himself. "Here we go."
He gripped the handles on the glider wings tighter as he braced himself to jump off the edge of a twenty-story building. He breathed deeply, then.... jumped! The wind was filling his ears as he pushed a button on a small hand-held device in his left hand and the engines ignited on his pack. With all his strength he pulled his wings up to steer him away from the ground which was hurtling toward him at an alarming rate. Just a few feet away from certain doom, he pulled up and began to fly through the air, up, up, up.
"I DID IT!!!" He shouted over the wind and his engines. "I'M FLYING! I DID—" suddenly the jetpack sputtered out and he was falling again. He tried desperately to re-ignite the engines, but they were out of fuel. A second later he came crashing down onto the roof of another skyscraper and very nearly broke a bone, but aside from a few bruises he was fine. He sighed with frustration as he threw off his goggles and collapsed on the ground in a disgruntled heap.
"Oh, well, that's just great! I got lift all right—a whole five seconds of it! What a great accomplishment!" he cried sarcastically and he kicked the pile of metal that was his pack. "I'll never get this stupid thing to fly." There wasn't much left to do now except sulk, maybe.
Jay looked up at the sun, then checked his watch. It was already three-thirty. If he wanted to get the groceries and be home in time for dinner he'd better hurry, so he scooped up his glider, folded it, and wore it as a back pack while he went to the grocery store.
He opened the shop door and was greeted by a soft, tingling bell. He waved kindly to the lady behind the cash register, Mrs. Flynn, a very kind woman with dark brown hair and slanted eyes.
"Testing another invention, I see," she said with a smile.
"Yeah, just tinkering," Jay flushed. He didn't exactly like to talk about his inventions unless they actually worked.
"I saw the flight from here. Very impressive, young Walker." Mrs. Flynn was trying to be encouraging, but Jay's checks turned tomato red with embarrassment. He laughed an uncomfortable 'thank you' and went into the produce section of the store. He wished there was somewhere he could store his very obvious backpack contraption, or maybe he could create a way for it to fold into a much more convenient, super compact—
"Hey!" he cried as two kids which he went to school with bumped passed him, banging their fists against his jet pack. They jeered at him as they passed and mumbled 'nerd' and 'geek freak' under their breaths. Jay sighed again. It was bad enough he had to deal with this sort of thing at school, but sometimes it was just unbearable to run into kids like them in everyday places.
He looked up and saw the other kids—two brothers—rejoin their mother who was standing by her shopping cart and seemed to hardly notice them approach as she scanned the shelves. Jay silently envied them. It was rare that he would go somewhere with his mom because both she and Jay were always working. Either she was at the store and he was busy with chores or homework, or he was at the store and she was at home working along with his dad.
Jay was born in a scrapyard called 'Ed & Edna; Scrap N' Junk'. His father primarily ran it, selling scrap metal to the army since he was too old to enlist and they barely made ends meet as it was. His mom helped where she could; she organised donation events where people would come together to supply more scrap metal for the army, and would keep their household running seamlessly. Meanwhile neither of them had any time to homeschool Jay, which had been his original curriculum up until middle school when the war started, so he was sent to a public school in Ninjago City; their junkyard was only a few minutes outside of city limits. He had a very hard time making friends there, mostly because he was seen as a very strange kid who came from a strange place and liked to tinker a lot by himself. He, like many other boys his age, had thought about joining the army, but he was only sixteen, so he'd be in for a long wait before he could do anything like that.
Jay quickly roused himself from his thoughts and hurried to finish his errands. He paid for the groceries and then scampered out into the busy streets where he struggled not to hit anyone passing by with his giant back pack-glider. The bus station wasn't particularly busy, and he got there just in time to catch the last bus heading toward his home, then he sat among the crowd of people and was silent as the vehicle steadily bounced him around in his seat.
When the bus stopped at his destination, there were very few people left riding it. Jay got out and looked around at the barren, dry landscape and the lush forests that laid beyond.
Of all places to build a business, why such an ugly place? Jay thought.
This was a large clearing outside the city where not very much grew aside from small tufts of yellow-green grass and a few scraggly bushes. The bus had dropped him off a few yards away from the junkyard proper and he still had to walk down a long strip of road before he reached his home; groceries and battered glider in hand.
The junkyard was fairly old and, in some regards, tacky. It was a massive assortment of all kinds of odds and ends, mostly cars and motorbikes, surrounded by a wall of sandy stone with only one entrance: a big metal gate. Around the gate were twinkle lights in all the colours of the rainbow and an illuminated sign which read: