Ryan Choi met Jia at a dance club after he gotten his schoolyard bully expelled from college for plagiarizing. Alvin Edward Qianfan was a young member of the Triads who had big ambitions but he had no patience for his studies so he would force Choi into doing his homework. Choi outsmarted Alvin but Alvin eventually got his revenge by beating Choi nearly to death. Jia put an end to Choi’s torment by telling Alvin that she would be his girl if he left Choi alone. Alvin agreed to Jia’s terms and Choi was left with a broken heart.
Choi finished school and went to Ivy Town to begin his career as a professor in physics while Jia married Alvin. Alvin remained a low level Triad member and he would often take his drunken rage out on Jia. Eventually Jia gathered her courage in order to put Alvin down like a rabid dog. One night, Alvin slept off his latest drinking binge and Jia took a shovel to Alvin’s head repeatedly. Alvin’s skull was completely caved in and Jia buried his mutilated body in an unmarked grave.
Unfortunately, Alvin didn’t stay dead for too long because of Blackest Night. Choi gets a distressing call from Jia because she is being terrorized by Alvin but Jia fails to mention its Alvin’s corpse who is stalking her. Choi heads to Kowloon, Hong Kong and he gets a text from Jia stating that she will meet him at his university. When Choi arrives, he finds Jia and his father being held captive by a Black Lantern version of Alvin. Alvin tells Choi that if he kills Jia the same way she killed him then Alvin will let Choi’s father go.
For a moment, Choi feels hurt because Jia’s only reason for calling him was just so he could defend her from Alvin. Choi had hoped he would be a knight in shining armor but Jia didn’t need Choi’s company until she was in a situation that she couldn’t handle. However, Choi put his hurt feelings aside and vanquished Alvin by using a series of size altering body blows. Alvin continues to taunt Choi while divulging some troubling news about Jia.
When Alvin started abusing Jia, she went looking for men who would defend her against Alvin but each man was too much of a coward to stand up to Alvin because of his involvement with the Triads so she took it upon herself to kill Alvin. Choi didn’t want to hear anymore of Alvin’s bile so he grabbed a lit lantern and threw at Alvin. After Alvin’s corpse burned up, the black ring around his finger flew away and Jia displays her gratitude by kissing Choi but Choi pushes her away.
Choi tells Jia that he will not be her fall guy and Jia understands Choi’s anger. Jia admits she used Choi simply because she knew about his recent fame as a superhero but she also confesses that deep down inside, she once loved him as more than just a friend. When Choi left Hong Kong, Jia began dating a mysterious librarian at Choi’s college. She soon finds out that this librarian is the time altering thief Chronos. Jia automatically joins forces with Chronos and she decides to help him in his latest conquest against the Atom. for her own reasons.
Atom: Small Wonder
Choi begins to realize that prolonged usage of the Atom belt can cause one to shrink. Choi fears he will lose equilibrium unless he finds the source of this anomaly in his blood. Choi calls in Panda Potter to help with this endeavor. Choi has developed a diminution mapping engine that will enable him to observe the nucleus of his blood cells. Choi primarily wants to investigate the white corpuscles for any signs of radiation poisoning or tachyons since the belt has endured temporal exposure from dimensional rifts.
Unfortunately, the mapping engine was miscalibrated and Choi’s blood sample became a matter displacing rift. Potter tells Choi to run before got sucked into the rift. Choi didn’t want to but he knew that Potter trusted him in finding an answer to stop the rift. Choi exits his house but the rift continued to expand in size. As Choi takes a moment to breath, he is approached by city council member Matt Wilson who has brought a news crew with him. Wilson confronts Choi about his involvement with Ivy Town’s recent chaos for the past couple of months. Before Choi could answer, the rift swallowed his home and made its way to his next door neighbor Amanda.
Choi makes his way through Amanda’s home and finds her holding for dear life as the vacuum of the rift increases. Wilson and the news crew are sucked into the portal and Choi tries to maintain a firm grasp of Amanda but it wasn’t enough. Amanda falls into the portal and Choi follows in after her. For a moment Choi was unconscious then he wakes up and finds himself floating on a hunk of wood in a crimson colored ocean. Choi is convinced at this point that his blood contains tachyons, particles which move backwards. It would seem tachyons are not only connected to the theory of time travel or dimensional rifts but they also apply to Choi’s physiology which would explain his loss of inches.
As Choi gathers himself, he comes under attack by a pod of monstrous tapeworms. Choi rides the tapeworms to avoid getting eaten then he realizes these tapeworms can fly. Choi is soaring through the air on this tapeworm until he finds a island in the sky. Choi jumps off the tapeworm and uses his bangstick to repel the creature back into the depths of the crimson ocean. Choi theorizes that his blood combined with the dimensional rift has created this unusual dimension and the tapeworms must have undergone some erratic evolution when they were plucked from Earth. On the island, Choi finds the people who were sucked into the rift. Panda explains to Choi that time moves rather fast as compared to Earth’s reality. A second on Earth seems like a couple of months in this dimension.
By this time, Wilson has made himself leader of the islanders and Panda has started a relationship with Amanda, Choi’s neighbor. Wilson tells the islanders to expel Choi from the island because he has injured the tapeworm and they will come back in numbers as a form of retaliation. Unfortunately, Wilson was right and the tapeworms began their assault. Choi uses his bangstick to keep the tapeworms at bay while Panda tries to convince Wilson into helping Choi. Wilson refuses to listen to reason and impales Panda with a shard of glass. Choi hears Amanda scream so he slows down the tapeworms’ pursuit by causing a mountainside to come crumbling down thanks to his bangstick.
Choi finds Amanda crying over Panda’s lifeless body and sees Wilson making a hasty exit. Choi catches up to Wilson and begins to beat him repeatedly. Unfortunately, a tapeworm comes crashing through but Choi dodges the tapeworm and watches as it devoured Wilson. Choi felt a deep sense of gratification that his friend had been avenged but then a temporal rift opens. The rift teleports the tapeworm first then it transports Choi to the same future that he went to when he tried to help Teddy Hyatt. Choi finds himself at the mercy of Lady Chronos. Choi also notices the tapeworm has evolved even further. It now possesses appendages which enable it to walk but Wilson’s mind has become the force that drives the creature.
Lady Chronos reveals that she is Jia and she invites Choi to join her in this new future. Jia asks Choi to forgive her since she used him in Hong Kong but Choi refuses to forgive or join her. Choi finally sees how deviant Jia can be. First, she seduces men into helping her kill her abusive husband Alvin and when that doesn’t work, she kills Alvin herself. Afterwards, Jia used Choi to kill Alvin during Blackest Night and now she is willing to betray Chronos, her latest husband for Choi. Jia of course, is angered by Choi’s spite so she tells Wilson to kill him.
Wilson and Choi fight for awhile until Booster Gold comes crashing through this alternate timeline. Booster saves Choi by giving him a few capsules of sulfuric acid. Choi throws the capsules into Wilson’s mouth and Wilson begins to dissolve from the inside. Booster takes Choi back through the timestream that he traveled. Booster and Choi rescue the wayward people from unusual dimension then they head back to the present time on New Earth.
When the portal opens, Choi finds a dozen news crews surrounding the crater that used to be his home. He also discovers Dwarfstar posing as the Atom and claiming he did all he could to save the missing citizens. Choi walks up behind Dwarfstar and pummels him to the ground. Dwarfstar is once again ridiculed by Choi but now on live television. Unfortunately, Chronos and Lady Chronos come through a temporal rift to rescue Dwarfstar. Lady Chronos asks Choi to spare Dwarfstar because Rudine is her son.
Choi reluctantly agrees and lets Dwarfstar stumble away in shame with the Chronos couple. When all was said and done, Choi asks Booster how he knew about his current predicament. It turns out Ray Palmer has been observing Choi’s recent exploits and called in Booster when things were going awry. Choi tells the news crews that he is responsible for this latest mishap and he will accept the consequences. Booster of course, takes the initiative by grabbing Choi from prison and teleporting him to the future because Lady Chronos is wreaking havoc in Booster’s present time.
Booster Gold: Stars in Your Eyes
Her romantic entanglements with Ryan Choi, Chronos and now Booster Gold, have caused her to remain undecided on where her allegiances lie. She was last seen helping Booster Gold defeat Starro’s temporal conquest of the past and the future. After a brief kiss of passion between her and Booster, Jia returns to Chronos’ side as they travel down the timestream once again. Starro iodine