Jana Kertha
"Jana, darling, remember what we taught you. Whenever you need a breath, a moment of clarity, remember the family ritual and it will clear your mind."
Jana is a Human mercenary that was in the expedition that found the old Kartkash temple. She is skilled with the sword and crossbow and was born into the Kit'de'thrak organization without realizing thanks to an old ritual her family does when a kid comes to age.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
Her skin is light olive, with vitiligo marks on her neck, face, and arms that are almost white. Her short hair is dark brown, with strips of light brown on the front. Her green eyes always show happiness, which helps distract a bit of the scar that covers her left side of her face. The scar happened after a creature attack and happened to fall in the vitiligo part of her face, which mades that part of the face more distracting.
Apparel & Accessories
She always has close by her rapier and crossbow, as they are a family relic, and tends to wear armour as she fears another incident (like the one that gave her the scar) might happen without her be prepared to properly react. She has a ring and a necklace that her family gave her before she left home but she doesn't wear them, she complains that jewelry is uncomfortable.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
She was born in a normal family, nothing too special about it other than a couple weird familiar traditions. She was mainly raised by her grandfather as her parents worked a lot. This close relation to her grandfather made her learn a few familiar traditions that her father (who wasn't the son of her grandfather) was trying to hide from her, claiming to be crazy old men stories. Her mother never really showed if she cared for her to learn the familiar traditions or not.
One of the familiar traditions was a couple of sentences in an unknown language. These sentences were supposed to help you calm down, open your mind, and let you see things cleared. She used them a lot whenever her father yelled at her for following the familiar traditions he didn't like. Another tradition she waited to happen for years with a lot of enthusiasm, as it only happened once she was to become an adult. Unfortunately, her grandfather passed away from old age before she could do the tradition. But, thanks to her mother support, she managed to learn more familiar traditions from an old journal her grandfather had and did the tradition with her mother in her father's back. This tradition involved her getting a tattoo, which she knew she wouldn't be able to hide from her father for too long, but decided to do it anyway.
When she came back home after getting the tattoo, her father wanted her out of her home. After a long and intense arguing, her father left, never to be seen again, but her mother started showing more support to her decisions and even look more lively than she had ever been. One thing Jana decided to do after being free from her father was to learn how to fight with her family relic, which she discovered thanks to her mother a few months after her father had left.
She found a mercenary group who was searching for new recruits and they accepted her. Joining the group made her mother worry about her and small arguing started to come back at home because sometimes she went back home with wounds or bruises, making her mother's worries show to be true. After a while, her mother accepted Jana's job as mercenary, but the joy she had shown after her father left wasn't seen anymore on her mother's face.
The mercenary group was nice to her, they understand she was new to the job and made sure to give her missions that fitted her abilities, it was like a second family to her. She even met her first partner, a Human woman that showed her nothing but love until she died in an expedition that ended up not being what the job said. After losing her love, Jana started taking more risky jobs, caring not about her health, to the point where the other mercenaries hid the harder missions from her.
Her last job with the mercenaries was doomed to failure. Someone sent a job about an expedition to a cave, it was supposed to be easy. When Jana reached the cave, half the expedition team was already inside, and the ones waiting for her (although she wasn't late, she has never been late to her job and that's something she's proud of) hurried her so they all could enter the cave.
The cave ended up opening to a maze-like cave system, and the other half of the expedition team was nowhere to be found. Her part of the team was trying to find the other team, but after what felt a day worth of search resulted into finding nothing. Her team decided to leave the cave for now, recover some energies so they could get back later. She was reluctant to let the other half stay disappeared and stayed a bit behind; since she seemed to be the only "stranger" on her team, they left her behind but left the string that showed the path to the exit.
After searching without results, her hunger forced her to start leaving the cave. It was then when she was attacked by a wild creature. She never saw the creature, but felt it jump to her, throwing her to the ground, and also felt how she hit something to get it off her. She ran to the exit, managing to somehow outrun the creature, but she was partially blinded, the creature wounded her on her face and the blood of it was falling into her eye, forcing her to keep one of her eyes closed.
When she got out, a healer of the expedition team treated her, but was also told that her abilities weren't needed anymore and thus was sent back to her town. She went back with her mercenary family, who wanted to talk with her as they were preoccupied with her recklessness. There was arguing, but in the end, Jana realized how reckless she was being and promised her family that she would be better.
After that, she spent some month just helping on the mercenaries' building, mostly caring of her mother, who had grown ill. She was happy, she ended up loving to take care of the building, helping her fellow mercenaries train, even take care of the wounded ones, she learn she liked to cook, and slowly her food started being delicious. It all changed when her mother succumbed to the illness and died.
For a couple months, she mostly stayed at the mercenaries' building without really doing anything. Her friends tried to make her happy, make her do the little things that she enjoyed, and they managed to do so after a month or so. A couple of weeks after, an old employer, Belanor Heleris, asked her personally (rather than the mercenary group) to accompany him in a job. After talking with the other mercenaries, she ended up accepting.
The expedition Belanor Heleris prepared was supposed to find an old temple filled to the bring with forgotten information. The whole travel to the supposed temple's location was tense. Belanor Heleris had made a team where no one knew each other and that was easily seen as no one seemed to trust anyone but their boss. Jana decided to make it her mission to make the group warm up to each other and stop having such a tense moment.
Once the team reached the place, they found the famous temple and, after checking stability of its walls and all, they entered it and made a camp. Jana saw inscriptions in some places that no one else saw and didn't say anything in the start, hoping for the team to be more trusting before saying anything. Didn't even take a day for another person in the team, a wyvern named Raku, to realize she was seeing the texts, as he saw her writing down what she was seeing. Both of them talked about it, Raku seemingly also saw them, and started trying to understand its meanings on their free time, without the others knowing. Raku seemed to know more than he said.
A few days later, the team managed to enter the temple's library. The scene was horrible, a hundred or more skeletons rested there, with texts that showed they died of inanition. It broke Raku. She talked with Raku, helped him feel a bit better, and Raku explained his story with her. He was here when the temple was attacked and left abandoned, he knew these skeletons, it's no wonder he broke down. The next day, Raku made the rest of the team leave the temple, but asked her to stay with him, help rebuild, since she was able to read the hidden texts as he could.
After accepting Raku's offer, they both first went back to the city where they originally sailed from. They had two things to do: make sure the other expedition team had no maps to go back to the island, Jana wanted to say goodbye for a while to her mercenary family and Raku wanted to meet his father (yet he was found dead).
The first months of work in the temple were fun. Raku, while kept himself quiet and shy with the old expedition team, was great company, he was funny and had a lot of stories from his old jobs, which were answered with stories from Jana's old jobs. Progress was good yet slow, and a lot of times Raku was about to break down again and abandon the place, but Jana helped him each time, helping him push forward.
After Samaira, leader of another temple that was in a similar situation, gave Raku more responsabilities and a team that would help them clean the temple, Raku quickly changed to be colder and started depending less on her. Jana felt hurt for that, but understands why he did so and is still trying to help her friend. She commands the team Samaira sent them in name of Raku to make him have less things to do, but he keeps insisting to check all works personally.
Motivation
Jana usually would have left Raku as soon as the expedition was canceled (by Raku expelling them all from the island), but she had grown attached to him and the place made her learn about her family.
A combination of these two things are what keep pushing her forwards, but she is hoping that one day Raku would accept her mercenary family to come live here even though she hasn't asked the mercenaries yet if they would.
Pets
Jana never had pets, her mother was allergic to animals' fur and her father said they were dirty. She never really minded, until in the mercenary group she saw one of her friends have a bird as a pet. She loved their relationship and was a bit jealous that she didn't had a pet, but never stopped to try get one. When Raku and her were cleaning the temple, she was sad that they were stealing the house of many animals that had claimed the temple as theirs after many centuries of disuse.
She managed to convince Raku to at least leave the animals a room for them, saying that they could leave on their own if all the movement from people started scaring them away. But as soon as Raku accepted, she started giving them food and spending time with them, even gave them names!
I love her and I do not like her father. >:( I am glad he left. I'd love to know more about her mercenary group.
Thanks! I'm also glad he left xD I might write about her mercenary group if I get a bit more of ideas, so far I barely got any for it.
Love to code, but this one is driving me crazy!
My world Shattered won as the "Most ground-breaking premise new world"!