Ar'Kendrithyst

Eight year old Jane watched the neighborhood kids play with sticks like they were swords, in the park next to her childhood home. She wanted to play, too. She didn’t really know why, but something in her gut pulled her toward the swords and the hitting and the running. The chase and the victory. She wanted to play, so badly.

So she ran out there, picked up a stick, and joined them.

Erick came rushing out to the park two minutes later, terrified that he had lost his daughter. But she was fine; the other kids’ parents knew Jane, and Erick. One of them was just about to go get him, but since he was here now, everyone went back to playing in the park.

Jane became the Black Knight who terrorized everyone else, who burnt down the crops and stole princesses from castles.

For an entire summer she had new friends; everyone attacked everyone else as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ roles passed around like game controllers. It was a wonderful summer. It was magical. It ended early when a ‘sword’ ended up in a friend’s guts, one weekend in July. The stick only went in two inches. Nothing bad happened except for a lot of crying and some antibiotics and a trip to the hospital, but then that friend moved away, and Jane was shunned by the rest.

She was still 8 years old.

When she was 10, she had a reputation:

Head in the clouds and a fist in someone’s face, watch out for Crazy Jane or she’ll leave you bleeding on the concrete and your parents will move you away to Hawaii.

Some kids actually wanted to move to Hawaii, though. This rumor proved to be very detrimental to the health of many local kids. Many, many broken bones were set into casts by the local doctors. Jane though? Jane was the one who did the breaking. Jane thrived.

Jane got into lots, and lots, and lots…

And lots…

And lots of fights that year.

And so, so many Parent Teacher conversations.

The first time she had ever seen Erick drink himself to sleep was after one of the rougher Parent Teacher meetings, when she was 12. She changed, after that.

Oh, she still beat the ever loving shit out of whoever came and gave her grief, that did not change. What did change, though, was that she always did it quiet, now, making every effort to keep the markers of violence off of the visible body parts of her challengers, never leaving any lasting damage, and stamping down any hints of further violence instead of inciting them to grow. She even started snuffing fights before they started. She paid attention to what Annie-down-the-street heard, then she got pro-active and either stayed away from certain people, or beat them down hard enough that they stayed away. On one memorable occasion, she took a baseball bat to certain bicycles, to make sure they couldn’t catch her after school, when they planned to go at her 5 versus 1.

In the course of becoming the biggest baddest girl in school, Jane’s actions had a ripple effect on many different aspects of school life. One of those came to a fateful conclusion when she beat up a bully who was trying to move up the ladder, toward Jane. That bully had been picking on some nerds, and they wanted to show her their appreciation. They weren’t trying to shove in on her; they were genuine.

Somehow, in some way Jane never actually knew, she made true, real friends with the nerds, and the nerds loved D&D.

Turned out, Jane loved D&D, too. She was as surprised as anyone, and her father was thrilled that she was spending time with some calmer kids. He cheered her on, and soon, Jane had all the D&D books and fantasy stuff she could have ever wanted.

She could also do all the violence she ever wanted, among a bunch of like minded folks. It was imaginary violence, but it still scratched that itch. She loved it. Her friends loved having her, too; no one touched them all the rest of grade school.

Jane still had to beat down some uppity bastard every now and then, but mostly she killed imaginary mindflayers and evil dragons. In one memorable campaign, they played the part of the evil king's enforcers. When they finally crushed the last of the resistances, that campaign ended, and the next campaign was them fighting for a new resistance against their old characters.

Jane took immense satisfaction from personally beheading her previous Blackguard with her new Paladin. She still remembered that moment, years later.

Flash forward to the end of highschool: Jane had been playing D&D and a dozen other table top RPG settings for the last 6 years. She knew how to work a system. She knew how to both powergame, and metagame. Though she didn’t know what she wanted with the rest of her life, constant roleplaying had helped her form the backbone of her philosophy.

Much like how her father chose to help people; Jane wanted to help people, too.

He was all about the peaceful solutions, working the local powers and working with the local powers to help the individual; keeping a community well tended through constant, vigilant work. When Jane was a girl, Jane’s philosophy of life was tied to her father's. As she got older, it changed, and while she still saw her father’s work as important, Jane was not her father. Where he saw fields that needed tending so peace and prosperity could blossom, Jane only saw how Erick put himself out there, vulnerable, one hidden knife or pulled gun away from death. Her fears were proven true when she stopped one of the kids in her school from using his knife on her father, but all anyone saw was Jane with a knife at another kid’s throat.

Erick believed her when she told him what had happened. He always believed her, so she tried to never lie. But still, some part of Jane knew that she had crossed a line. The way her father viewed her had changed, fundamentally.

Erick managed to talk Jane’s way out of juvenile detention, as well as solve the problem of a kid gunning for him with a knife, by talking to the kid’s mother and getting them both out of their house with their abusive grandfather. Jane never saw any of that. All she saw was the knife in the kid's hands.

Erick made everything so much more complicated than it had to be.

Arguably, he got better results than Jane.

But that didn’t matter. She couldn’t watch her father put himself in danger. That’s why she went to college four states away. She still wanted to help him and the world, in some massive way, but she couldn’t watch him make himself vulnerable.

In college, away from the trials and tribulations of small town midwestern life, Jane played D&D with new people, and learned about theaters of war in far off nations.

She knew then, what stage she wanted to live upon.

Flash forward 4 years, and college was over. Jane had been playing D&D with a steady group for 4 more years, and done, so, so much more than just get a BA in Communications and play D&D.

She knew three languages, a bit of computer programming, how to professionally throw a punch and take a hit, how to shoot and aim, how to use everything around her as a weapon, even some science and mathematics. She could tell you the exits of every room she glanced through, and the best way to escape any situation as quickly as possible. She had go-bags, she had wilderness training. She could run as fast as the fastest people at school, and she could parkour with the Street Running club. She could dance, and sing, and be a social butterfly, if life demanded it of her; though she tried to avoid those situations. She lifted weights. She ran on treadmills and through the woods. She watched the news, both local and international. She knew her armors and her weapons, though all that was just an immensely fun hobby; she never expected to need her RPG stuff in her daily life, going forward. Her credit score was even great: 770, which, on the surface, seems like a funny thing for a field agent to need, but thinking about it a bit more, good credit is vitally important. Can’t have agents tempted by foreign money, after all.

And then she fell to Veird, with her father, on the way to her internship in Langley, Virginia.

And Veird? Veird was great. Better than anything Jane could have ever asked for. Better than working for her old government, better than playing D&D. This was real. This was here. This was now.

Monsters! Magic!

Violence!

The most necessary violence Jane had ever seen!

Even working at the CIA wasn’t as necessary as the work she was doing now.

… the work she would be doing. Right now she was still leveling. Still gathering power.

Jane was SO READY for this kind of life. Danger that needed to be cut down, right outside the city walls. Threats to the world ten kilometers away. This was great! It was motherfucking terrifying, sometimes, but that was a small price to pay for living on a world with magic. A world with a surface area thirty times the size of Earth, if you counted the Underworld.

Jane counted that Underworld, oh yes, she very much did.

Sure, her dad had some emotional stuff to work through, but he was coming around.

What wasn’t coming around was this stupid fucking spell.

This FUCKING, SHITTING, stupid SPELL that would just not COMBINE CORRECTLY.

Aurify.

Mana Shaping X.

[Airshape X].

[Telekinesis X].