Jeros Redd

Jeros Redd
Storm Captain
Gender	Male
Race	Hyur
Clan	Highlander
Citizenship	Limsa Lominsa
Age	40s (apparent)
Height	2ym (6'0")
Weight	210 ponze
Job/Class	Soldier (MRD), Metalsmith (BSM/ARM/GSM)
Guardian(s)	Rhalgr, Byregot

(( First, a brief note on the spoilers sections: If you read them before finding out about them ICly, please don't consider it IC knowledge without a really good reason and/or running by me how your character might have found out. I don't mind adding others' characters to my backstories where appropriate, but please, metagame responsibly. --Jeros-mun ))

Appearance and Presentation

Jeros is a heavily muscled, older Highlander, with a craggy, scarred face that only a mother could call 'ruggedly handsome'. He has brilliant blue eyes and long, graying red hair, which he usually wears in the braided style common among his people. His wardrobe tends to be plain, practical, and conservative: dull, solid colors, rugged materials, and very little exposed skin. Where his skin is exposed, further scarring is usually evident. His voice is a rather gravelly baritone; he speaks in a peculiar mix of an Ala Mhigan accent with a hefty dose of Lominsan slang. (( I understand rendering this in dialogue can make it pretty hard to understand, so I endeavor to write "normally" and let you hear it as you will. ))

Scars (spoilers) Show text

As a result of a pretty hard-knock life and a resistance to healing magicks, Jeros has a lot of scars to show for all the natural healing he's had to do from his many injuries. Basically any exposed skin is likely to bear at least a couple; the following is not necessarily an exhaustive list:

• General / all over body: Battle scars of every description, from cuts, punctures, burns, and who knows what else, most of them well-healed. Several discolored / distextured patches of skin, larger than those on his face.
• Face: Several battle or duel scars, including one vertically crossing his left eye and one over the bridge of his nose, mostly well-healed and pale. A few discolored / distextured patches of skin, as of burns that never fully healed.
• Torso: Dozens upon dozens of long, thin scars criss-crossing his back, and others like them across his chest and abdomen but not as numerous; these did not heal well, appear raised and red, and several have spidery outgrowths. Jagged, irregular radial scars on his abdomen, as from shrapnel from a close-up explosion?, well healed.
• Hands: On the back of each hand, a symbol branded into the flesh long ago. The symbols differ, but each has the appearance of a personal sigil, or perhaps a simplified version of a coat of arms.
• Wrists: Raised, red scars in a partial circle around the wrist.
• Forearms: Minor burns from flying sparks incurred by smithing in short sleeves. (Idiot.)
• Knees: Well-healed incisions, as from knee replacement surgery.

Variations

• In his one concession to vanity, he sometimes dyes his hair the vibrant, deep red of his youth. If called out on this, he'll claim it's not to fool anyone else about his age, but to fool himself.
• Occasionally he will leave his hair unbraided for a while following a dye job, but this rarely lasts long; if he feels it scratching against his back, he'll put it back up in braids again.
• If it's been a while since he could reasonably have shaved, he'll have some oddly patchy facial hair, fairly thick where it can grow, but bare where the severest of scars suggest that the follicles have been damaged or destroyed. He knows how bad this looks; that's why he shaves!

Personality and Mannerisms

Despite his conservative dress, age, and many injuries, Jeros is still a fairly vibrant man at heart. He feels things deeply and is usually unashamed of and unrestrained in expressing his emotions. Time and experience, though, have taught him the value of tact, and he has learned to suppress a display if he must. He is loyal to a fault, protective of his allies / friends / charges / innocent bystanders, and warm and affable with those who have not given him cause to treat them otherwise. When his ire is roused, though, there is little mistaking it; his eyes flash, his muscles tense, and his voice takes on a growling, almost bestial quality.

Jeros is also a fairly superstitious man. As are many Ala Mhigans, he is given to frequent prayer to and praise of Rhalgr, but he doesn't stop there. In his smithing endeavors he has come to venerate Byregot and to see the Builder and the Destroyer as two sides of the same coin. He also offers prayers and/or blame to other deities among the Twelve as befits their own spheres of influence; when on a Maelstrom ship Llymlaen's name is ever on his lips, and when confronted with an unfortunate twist of fate he will often resignedly sigh "the Spinner weaves as the Spinner wills". Though fearless in the face of temporal peril, he has a particular dread of powerful voidsent; minor nuisances like oozes and vermin don't faze him, but he is like to quail before demonic or ghostly entities. Of magick he knows only what his comrades have shown and explained to him; he is incapable of wielding it himself, and his personal aether has proven resistant to being affected by it, two facts which may share a common origin.

As an officer, he cultivates the loyalty of his men and women through a combination of an almost fatherly disposition and a refusal to let them go into harm's way alone, leading from the front (and covering them as below) when a melee is unavoidable. He takes pains to ensure their training, equipment, and provisions are sufficient, even repairing their arms and armor himself when necessary. He takes any losses within his unit particularly hard, and is often heard to say that an old man like him should meet his fate first, so that the younger soldiers might live to see the world they're fighting for.

Combat

Jeros fights with a ferocity and toughness perhaps unexpected in a man his age. He favors a great-axe, sturdy armor, and an aggressive, almost reckless posture intended to make him appear at once the most threatening figure on the battlefield (drawing attention from his allies) and vulnerable to a co-ordinated response (keeping the enemies focused on trying to bring him down and not seeking targets of opportunity). He is cannier than the thoughtless berserker he may seem, though, and ready to pounce on the errors of those who take him for a dumb brute or a death seeker. To further heighten his presence, he has adapted the arts of spectacle he learned on the Bloodsands to fit the tactical understanding of a well-trained officer, shouting a barbed insult or exhibiting his weapon with a flourish at that precise moment it is both safest and most effective (which often involves making it appear to be the least safe moment). No stranger to injury, he can fight through the pain of those blows that penetrate his armor with the best of them, though his resistance to magick consigns him to a longer and more uncertain recovery than most.

Jeros does, however, have a truly "wild" side to him in combat that rises to the fore when he is driven to the heights of anger or desperation. Then, his aggression does become reckless and uncalculated, and his actions reflexive rather than tactically considered. It is in the throes of this "rage", as he has come to call it, that his strength and endurance peak, while his sense of his own injuries is dulled (for good and ill). However, this is not the full "Inner Beast" of a Warrior in the Hellsguard tradition; while he may unwittingly use similar terms to talk about it, he has not been trained in its conscious refinement, invocation -- or suppression.

History

Jeros speaks little of the years between his flight as a young lad from fallen Ala Mhigo and his arrival on the shores of Vylbrand. The people of Aldenard spared little love or sympathy for him or his fellow refugees, and when he does talk about that time, it is with bitterness: of the grudge the Gridanians held against them for the sins of their forefathers; of the blistering heat and endless wastes of Thanalan; of the sneering Ul'dahns and their avaricious Syndicate who value gil over lives. He was glad indeed to leave them behind and, in Limsa Lominsa, find a people willing to let him prove himself with hard work and loyalty rather than expecting purity or wealth to which he could not pretend. Before long, he found himself joining the Maelstrom out of a desire to return the favor and protect his new home. He rose briskly through the ranks, owing to his determination and the martial prowess he first honed in Ul'dah's arenas.

Jeros has confided to precious few people the following details (spoilers): Show text

The years before the fall of Ala Mhigo Jeros can scarcely remember at all. He has a fleeting memory of parents who died opposing the mad king and the subsequent Garlean incursion, but he is unable to recall their names or faces. Nor can he name those with whom he fled, or how old he was at the time. His first clear memory is of being turned away by the people of Quarrymill despite the obvious privation of his band of refugees.

Things only went from bad to worse once he reached Thanalan. He was but one of many refugees who disappeared one night from the gutters of Ul'dah, taken by opportunistic "entrepreneurs" and sold into slavery. For years he had no way of counting, he toiled in a sunless mine for an unknown master and a brutal overseer. Eventually, he managed to escape, but with nowhere else to go found himself drifting back toward Ul'dah, where he turned to odd jobs (when he could find them) and petty theft (when he had to) to survive. When the law finally caught up to him for the latter, he was condemned to the Bloodsands, where an Ul'dahn lanista saw his strength and ferocity and redeemed him. Only after several years of success in the arena was he able to purchase his freedom and a berth on the next ship out of the Sultanate.

He first met Leiladyn Mindartia, an Adders arcanist, on joint assignment under the Eorzean Alliance. At first he expected the Elezen woman to be just as sanctimonious as her countrymen, but as they worked together, investigating and thwarting plots from the criminal to the primal, they both came to find the association quite agreeable, reminiscent of the old cooperation between Nymian scholars and marauders. They later joined the Free Company that would one day become Might and Magitek together on the same night. He was less than pleased when they opened headquarters in the Goblet, for he had hoped never to have to return to Ul'dah, but aside from an occasional complaint about the heat, he seems to have adjusted.

For a time, Jeros divided his time between Grand Company and Free Company, lending his axe and occasionally his other talents to many a mission. Recent events and his advancing age, however, have forced him to retire to a less active role, resigning his command in the Maelstrom and spending his time delivering relief to his erstwhile fellows in Thanalan, repurposing his military experience into tactical support for the Free Company, and developing a nascent but promising talent in metalworking.

(More to come here. Please Look Forward To It(tm))

Known Associates

(Please Look Forward To It(tm))

Rumors

(Note: the following may be wildly exaggerated and/or wholly inaccurate.)

• He's more scar tissue than skin; he's so tough because he literally can't feel pain anymore.
• He keeps a notebook with the name of every soldier who has ever been killed under his command, and can be found reading it on the eve of battles. Perhaps vengeance powers his ferocity...or perhaps he's simply reminding himself what's at stake.
• He once dreamed of becoming a paladin, but was rejected due to a complete inability to grasp even the rudiments of conjury.
• He's formerly the Red Lion, a famous Bloodsands gladiator who disappeared after buying out his contract. He may have braided his hair and traded in his sword and shield for a great-axe and a smithing hammer, but he bears the same prominent facial scars and shares his tendency to growl and/or roar savagely when enraged.