Aspects:
Urchin
Pirate
Redemption
Priest
Vasco
Skills:
Divine magic xxxx
Awareness xxx
Listen xxx
Danger sense xx
Search xx
Survival (sea) xx
Brawler x
Language: Isles x
Theology x
Pilgrimage Calculation x (prophesies a speciality)
Description:
Jessen is of medium build with dark hair, beginning to fade. He’s not old but some of his features have aged before their time, with his hair starting to recede and a few wrinkles spreading slowly across his face. He is almost always seen in his priestly robes, consciously projecting the image and demeanour of a man of peace. This is offset by the long scar below his chin, visible only if one looks carefully (and one tends not to inspect a man of the cloth for such details.) He carefully presents a patient, cautious demeanour, while behind it lies an intensity that is now measured out in small, even spoonfuls.
Background:
Jessen was the middle child who ran away from home. While the youngest got spoiled, and the eldest got to make his own way in the world, Jessen felt both overprotected and overlooked. When he was 16, he lost his temper with his family for the last time, stowed away on a ship, and went wherever it took him.
He had no idea what he was in for, but he was just about streetwise enough to survive the first few months. A determination not to go back with his tail between his legs was enough motivation to get him to work, hard, at whatever rubbish jobs he could find for a few coppers. Of necessity, he got good, he got hard, and he got along with the kind of crowd your parents warn you about.
So he got a reputation for being a fast learner and being willing to do dirty jobs. Eventually he was “asked” if he’d like to “help” on board a pirate ship. This is the kind of job offer you do not refuse. He said yes.
We’re not talking Johnny Depp piracy here - we’re talking vicious, nasty, sell your own grandmother stuff. Jess was in way over his head, and still young enough that he didn’t have the critical faculties to see just how unpleasant a life this was to lead. He looked up to his crewmates, although you wouldn’t say that out loud if you didn’t want a beating.
And in that environment, he started to fit in, and he got good. A twisted sort of morality set in over the coming years. Where possible, don’t kill your victims. Rape and pillage, sure, after all in international waters it’s finders keepers, and set them adrift on a plank of wood miles from any coast, without food or fresh water, but it’s their own fault if they die for not being able to swim strongly and navigate by the stars.
That led, ultimately, to his biggest mistake and his salvation. One of them actually made it home, the daughter of a rich merchant. She was able to describe the ship and her attackers, and her father, enraged, could afford to buy enough magic to track them down. That he did. He hired a bunch of mercenaries just as vicious as Jess’s crowd. They boarded Jess’s ship, held the crew at swordpoint, destroyed their rudder, their compass and their spyglass, ditched the food and water supplies and - just before disembarking - holed the ship very neatly below the waterline.
In the ensuing panic there was just enough cooperation between those on board to plug the hole before the ship sank. This didn’t last very long. Recriminations, deserved and undeserved, came within an hour or two, and little alliances and petty arguments suddenly magnified. Jess, who thought he’d been keeping neutral, had managed to honk off pretty much everyone in the crew at one time or another and, in the heat of the moment, found himself friendless. He found himself overboard, drifting on a piece of cargo that had leaked from the punctured hold.
Jess himself was the second of his victims to be discovered. The waters of the archipelago are warm enough in summer that you might survive a night, but you’ll eventually succumb to thirst. An itinerant priest, of Home and Safety, who was travelling on a merchant ship discovered him and took him on board. The ship was on a long haul route and Jess, recalcitrant at first, found himself listening to the priest who’d saved him. The physical and mental trauma of the events, particularly the memory of being abandoned now burnt into his mind, coupled with the knowledge that he had done the same to many before him, were too much, and he broke down.
He couldn’t bring himself to throw himself overboard a second time, so one path remained. Jess confessed, the priest gave him the benefit of the doubt, and Jess began to study there and then.
Jessen now travels in search of lost souls, but has never returned home.
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