Jainan the Fool

Jainan the Fool

Portrait of Jainan by Yorsy Hernandez.

Physical Description

Body Features

A lean, lightly-built man with a crooked smile and eyes the color of dirty ice, Jainan is not the person he was at the moment of his first death – not exactly. In the rite of resurrection, even a profane one, the soul might return to the body it remembers, not the one it necessarily left. Both the necromantic magic that raised him and Jainan’s own self-image were kind. The lines in his face have smoothed and the shoulder-length hair that had been threaded with premature gray at the temple is black once more, turning him from a man of thirty-five or so to one in his late twenties. He still wears his old scars and the weaponry and symbols of loyalty and luck inked into his skin, among them a crown pierced by a dagger on his right bicep and a trio of a crossed blades on his ribs. Other marks are less-easily accounted for than his ill-gotten youth: crooked scars ring his neck and cross over his collarbones, well-healed despite the grievous wounds they suggest.

In his brief but eventful second life, he’s picked up new scars and stories enough: an arc of knotted scars across his chest and back, left by the teeth of a monstrous dragon; a deep scar from the bite of a vengeful paladin’s blade. In Harthwater, he and one of his fellow adventurers picked up the matching tattoo of two hands reaching for each other while pierced by the same dagger. Jainan wears his on his left shoulder.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

To hear Jainan tell it, he was born and raised in Huvora, a cutpurse from the time he could walk and a cutthroat not long after. In truth, he arrived in the city at the age of twelve, a half-starved and friendless runaway. The city might have swallowed him whole. But he was lucky. He tried to steal from the right people: a scruffy band of pickpockets led by a half-elf boy named Prosper. They accepted him at once and taught him the ropes: confidence tricks, petty theft, begging. He was a quick study, earning the nickname ‘Key’ for his talent of slipping past any locked door.
In time, they expanded their repertoire: protection rackets, more ambitious burglaries, feuding with other youth gangs over territory. Key, as Prosper’s constant shadow, could always be relied upon to bring a knife to a fistfight. Though he never shared Prosper’s burgeoning interest in the arcane, an inborn ability for magic manifested the summer he turned fifteen. Psionic bursts accompanied recurring nightmares; his thoughts forcefully intruded on the minds of his friends; when startled, his fear became a blade of broken glass in his hand. Frightened by this would-be sorcerous inheritance, Jainan was grateful when the strongest manifestations ebbed, as were those closest to him. Only later would Jainan realize that he’d missed some critical stage of acquisition. Complex spellwork would always be beyond him. The latent magic hadn’t disappeared but reverted to a simpler state: one that he could more readily put to use. Any thief with a little imagination can find myriad uses for a spot of invisibility or a blade that leaves no mark.
For most of his friends, their life on the knife-edge of the city’s underworld was something to escape. Once they had the means, they left to make an ‘honest living,’ always promising to remember their friends. Jainan had no such interest in abandoning the lawless freedom he’d claimed for himself to toil as a shopkeep or tanner’s apprentice. Some of his fellow thieves agreed: Prosper, for one, and an ambitious young woman named Maryam. They’d outgrown their earlier cons and petty thefts, but Huvora was a city of unlimited opportunity for those bold enough to seize it. There was room enough for a new thieves’ guild to thrive. The Commonwealth recognized no royalty, but together they’d become the Crooked Kings of Huvora.
Under their decisive leadership, the Kings grew from a ragtag group of strays to a genuine power in the city’s underworld. They made a name for themselves in the right circles with audacious heists, vanishing – sometimes literally – whenever the city guard or a rival outfit caught their trail. Prosper’s penchant for divination and illusion magics made them impossible to pin down, always a step or three ahead of their enemies. He traded in information as readily as he did coin. Maryam, a former apothecarist’s apprentice fluent in poisons and potions, could be relied upon as level-headed in even the direst of circumstances, always with an eye on their future. In time she built a smuggling network that stretched far beyond Huvora’s borders. Jainan, of course, was an able thief, and when they discovered how lucrative assassination contracts could be, he found he had no qualms with killing. Anyone for the right price. But he devoted much of his time to training the Kings’s recruits, molding orphans and runaways into thieves and bootleggers and cutthroats, and instilling loyalty in each. You could leave the Kings, if you weren’t cut out for it – no shame in that. Jainan would find you an apprenticeship or a job or a safe place for you to land. But you didn’t forget your family. When the day came for Jainan to call in a favor, these former Kings would rush to help – or lose everything.
It rarely came to that.
The Kings and its leadership weathered the Three Crown War and the dissolution of the nation: profiting from wartime shortages through a robust black market, smuggling high payers out of the city to safe havens in Varkart and beyond, greasing the right palms with bribes when necessary. As the city entire scrambled to adjust to the new order – the Assembly felled, a President rising – there was opportunity to be seized from the instability. Jainan, never one for caution or patience, was hungry for the chance to establish the Kings’ dominance after years of lean wartime living. The perfect opportunity presented itself: a contract on the life of Cromwell Cresthart.
With the war, the former assemblymember – and one of the most hated men in Teriserae - had lost all the power and protection that his wealth had once provided. A pack of would-be assassins were on his trail – some with personal scores to settle, others eager to claim the riches that would flow to whoever felled him. But Prosper’s informants sniffed out Cresthart’s latest safehouse first. The Kings needed the coin, and Jainan needed to cement his reputation. Against the wishes of both Prosper and Maryam, he took the job: someone was going to kill the poor bastard. Why not him?
He gambled and lost. The assassination attempt was foiled by misfortune at every turn, and the luck that he had always relied on abandoned him. By night’s end he was in the custody of Villanova’s guards. After days of interrogation and a botched escape attempt, he was publicly executed. Huvora’s bards gave him a second life in song and show as an object of ridicule: Jainan the Fool.
The story should have ended there, and would have, if not for Jainan’s lingering notoriety. A lich in need of servants resurrected both Jainan and a mass murderer known as Ephraim the Vile, weaving potent magic into their new bodies to enhance their abilities and ensure their obedience. He sent them to hunt down an assassin terrorizing the Sister States, known only as the Kalishnikye. The pair soon learned that the assassin was in fact an adventurer named Kadrian Narrows, slain by the lich and resurrected through the same magic that had restored them. Jainan and Ephraim chose to side with Kadrian to escape the lich’s fetters. The gamble paid off. Allying with gods, monsters, and even the lich’s own brother, Jester Voss, the three managed to slay the Foul Phantom and many of his abominations, reclaiming their lives and freedom.
They traveled to Harthwater, where Jainan spent months tracking down a familiar face: Prosper, who had abandoned Huvora and the guild after Maryam’s death decades prior. Their reunion was short-lived. The party had sworn to help Kadrian save the soul of a friend unjustly condemned to the deepest pits of the Nine Hells. Against the odds, the party survived and succeeded in their mission, betting their lives and souls countless times to free the paladin Kyye Burrell. But in their efforts to reach Nessus, they had been the willing pawns of a more powerful entity: their final conflict with Asmodeus himself resulted not only in the devil’s death but the destruction of the Hells. The final impact of this devastation remains to be seen. After their harrowing of the Hells, Jainan seemed keen on an early retirement. A stranger had other ideas.

Accomplishments & Achievements

Jainan was considered one of the best assassins in Huvora, if you knew who to ask fifty years ago - -particularly if a death needed to be discreet. (If you didn’t know who to ask, his name and face meant nothing. As for any thief or killer, anonymity had its benefits.) No sanctuary was barred to him, no target safe once the fee paid. His psychic blades left no marks, physical or magical. Even his victims, under a medium’s touch, couldn’t profess more than a sudden sense of dread and a searing pain in their chest or head: nothing to suggest an unnatural death. After his execution, there was a marked drop in fatal heart attacks amongst Huvora’s well-to-do.

Despite his formidable skills as a thief and assassin, Jainan considered the founding of the Kings his proudest accomplishment, the shaping of its members his life’s work. He had a knack for gaining one’s trust and fostering one’s talents. The Kings were his family, and he’d defend any of them to within an inch of his life. He expected the same unfaltering loyalty from each.
Jainan wasn’t born in Huvora, but he loved the city fiercely. He spent countless hours roaming its streets, roofs, and towers, as if he sought to learn every alley, corner, and secret of the city by heart. He unearthed networks of smuggling tunnels unused for centuries; forgotten catacombs, dry sewers, abandoned chapels; the secret rooms and hidden passageways of some of Huvora’s finest manors. If you wanted to know where a fugitive might be likely to hide or what vintage of wine that Lathander’s high priest kept in his quarters under lock and key, Jainan was one to ask. He was loathe to take the time to set his ill-gotten knowledge down on parchment, but the few maps that he and Maryam created were still in use within the Kings decades after his death.

Failures & Embarrassments

Jainan’s greatest folly, of course, defined his life – and ended it. Stubborn to a fault, Jainan’s confidence too often veered into arrogance and led to enough close calls - even before it killed him. But he had shortcomings and embarrassments enough in his first life. His disdain of magic, for one. More than once he suggested that mages were on the whole cracked, never mind that he married one. In truth his distrust stemmed from his own inability. Despite an inborn psionic talent that he put to lethal use, an understanding of even the simplest spellwork eluded him. It took him years to master so much as a light cantrip.

For all the pride that he took in the Kings, his life’s work, there were plenty among them who saw him not as an able leader or older brother but a strutting bully who demanded total loyalty and punished missteps. It’s true enough that he was happy to play the martinet when he needed to eliminate any perceived dissent in the ranks. If Jainan hadn’t died, perhaps he might one day have faced an open challenge or a knife in the back. “Thick as thieves,” the saying goes. But leadership in organizations like the Kings isn’t known for passing bloodlessly.

Character Location

Harthwater

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Age

35

Date of Birth

16 Eleasis 1061; died in 1096, resurrected in 1141.

Birthplace

Anbhor

Current Residence

Harthwater

Gender

Male

Eyes

Pale Gray

Hair

Black

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Pale

Height

5'6"

Weight

135 lbs