Jango Flintlash
Jango Flintlash left home at the young age of 10 to find work. In an attempt to help his mother raise his younger sister, who had fallen very ill at the time, he left his home village in rural Amn to seek out work in the capital of Athkatla. He came across a company of couriers and agreed to run around the city as a foot messenger and a package boy. What was unknown to Jango was that the company was just a front for a smugglers' ring affiliated with the Shadow Thieves, and that this odd job would soon become a career he couldn't leave easily.
His love for his mother and sister showed in a devote sense of workmanship and loyalty to his superiors in the company. He performed every task without complaint, delivered every package regardless of weather, and was never late. Within a few years, he was trusted with ever increasingly valuable cargo.
The company, being run by the thieves guild, was keen to hide its nature from almost all of its employees, and truly only the dispatcher knew the reach of the company and its influence within the guild, and was even a ranking guild agent. Like all packages, it was against company policy for the couriers to ask questions about what they transported. Unknown to Jango, his cargo began to include smuggled goods, drugs, and arcane weaponry. The dispatcher eventually recommended Jango for "self-defense" training in order to better protect the cargo he would transport. So, at the age of 16, Jango began martial arts training.
This was the first failure of Jango's career. He simply did not have the physical fortitude to endure the first months of his training. The dispatcher sought his tutor's advice, determined not to lose the best employee he's had in his time at the office. While Jango was physically weak, the tutor was keen to realize Jango's mental prowess, and, also being an agent knowledgeable of the guild's dealings, had a contact who would make use of Jango's skills. While the two would present their plan to Jango as a career progression, they had greater schemes to exploit Jango's loyalty to make of him a powerful asset to the guild.
This contact appeared quite eclectic, to Jango, for lack of better first impressions. He looked like a temple monk, carried a cane, and sported a thin beard and shaved head. This would be Jango's mentor, a master in the Psionic arts.
Jango began with meditation, the skills of which he developed within the first year. When he questioned how sitting in quiet contemplation would make him a better combatant, his mentor taught him that meditation developed the mind, and when honed could be used as a powerful weapon. Eventually, he was shown some of the more explosive elements to this art, and Jango dedicated his full diligence to the craft.
Over the course of the next ten years, Jango's continued his effort to hone his skills. He specialized in Kineticism, a field of psionics involving the raw manipulation of energy. All the while he continued his courier duties, and, as part of the dispatcher's original plan, retrieval duties were added to Jango's list of responsibilities. Stolen goods, debts owed, contracts broken, repossession; all, like his packages and cargo, with no questions asked. His role as an enforcer was slowly, secretly, being built up, again while the Shadow Thieves were kept a secret from Jango; and with his ability to shock the minds of others with merely a thought, or manipulate objects at a distance, or, eventually, shoot bolts of elemental energy on a whim, enforcement was easy for Jango.
Until one day, for the first time, Jango came back empty handed. Jango was told that a man had stolen a large sum of coin by raiding another courier. Jango was to track down the man and retrieve the stolen funds. When the culprit was found, he was no man, but a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. When Jango confronted him, he was not met with lies or excuses like many of his prior subjects, but with confession and apology. The boy has stolen the goods to afford medicine, for his sick younger sister. After much begging and pleading for mercy, the boy added that while he did steal from the courier, it was a much smaller amount than what the dispatcher had told him. He let the boy go, even gifting him some coin out of his own pocket, and Jango returned to the company office.
The dispatcher was shocked and somewhat furious, and it led to an argument with Jango, who for the first time started asking questions. His mentor intervened and calmed Jango down, but not before the dispatcher decided that the stolen funds, or in any case the amount of funds he was sent to retrieve, would be deducted from Jango's pay, with interest; funds Jango had intended to send to his own sister.
This led to a series of events. Jango starting asking questions, questioning the dispatcher on who their targets were, who were the people they were dealing with, and who was funding all these operations. All these questions were, of course, shot down; but with what Jango perceived as an unusual amount of calmness compared to the dispatcher's reaction to his first round of questioning.
The moment that Jango realized something was wrong came when he went to visit his mother and sister, who he knew was still ill, for the first time in nearly a year after a busy season of work. When he arrived in his home village, his sister was gone.
Distraught and incredulous, he questioned his mother, who told him his sister had been healed, in large part due to the medicine they afforded on Jango's salary alone. She had grown better, physically healthier than most girls her age even, and left to follow her dream of joining the City Navy of Waterdeep; an adventurous life at sea to counter her bed ridden childhood.
What shocked Jango the most however, was when his mother told him that he knew all this, for he learned it just four months ago, not a year, when he visited last, and was joyous to see his sister healthy before her departure. Her condition had been improving for months, years even. Even more surprising was that his sister was 18, two whole years older than he remembered her to be. All of this, his mother insisted, Jango knew already. Jango did not question his mother, and was instead furious at his lapse of memory. His mother was concerned, and used some of Jango's funds she had saved and hired for him a cleric of Ilmater, who arrived next day.
Jango told the cleric of his life in Athkatla, and, at the healer's suggestion, they engaged in a round of ritual meditation. Jango fell into a deep state of autohypnosis, while the cleric manifested a spell of healing magic. Overnight, after many hours of ritual, and by morning, Jango had a sudden flood of realization. Memories, what felt like hundreds came rushing back to him. Memories of himself, attacking peasants in the streets, savagely attacking workmen with blasts of fire, and robbing them of their coin he believed they owed. Battles against cloaked men attacking him plagued his thoughts, and death, cold blooded killing of these assailants over the cargo Jango carried. All these memories had been erased from Jango's mind.
Jango knew of other realms of psionics that could accomplish such feats, and knew that the retrieval of these memories required no less than the divine, and he paid homage to Ilmater then and there. He knew only his old mentor would have access, or know someone who has access, to the sinister psionic capability of memory manipulation. He kept his revelations a secret when he returned to the company.
For his next mission, his customer was no other than his psionic mentor, who in fact was delivering cargo to a personal friend of his. Half way along the road in rural Amn, Jango, for the first time, opened his cargo. In it was a crossbow of well crafted, although not extraordinary make. However, it somehow resonated with him. He meditated with it for some time, and decided to pull the trigger, aiming at a tree. A burst of psionic energy accompanied the ammunition. The crossbow was what Jango recalled from his former studies as a psychokinetic weapon, capable of encasing the bolts it fired in a sheath of ectoplasm and dealing incredible damage.
With this firearm as a backup, and with his own mind as his primary weapon, Jango planned his escape. He turned from the planned delivery route, and snuck back into the city. Through no shortage of tactical wit and straightforward subterfuge, Jango invaded the company, and killed everyone. His co-workers, the dispatcher, even his former mentor, who suspected nothing until a crossbow bolt pierced his heart. He raided the dispatcher's office, and their were the contracts and documents that Jango used to discover the companies affiliation to the Shadow Thieves.
From there, Jango dedicated himself to fight against those who would so blatantly do others harm, or worse in forcing innocent or downtroughten souls to fight insidious battles of power for greater hierarchies. He intended to forever more fight to protect the common folk, and to free those who labored for others against their will or without freedom to choose otherwise. He took the last of his funds and dedicated more than enough for his mother to relocate herself far away in the Dalelands, and went on to seek a new life on the road in Cormyr, so that neither of the two would be found, or at least she would be far enough away to be safe in case he were found; despite the fact that the only two 'initiated' guild agents that had ever seen his face were dead.
He of course continued to pay homage to Ilmater, aiding the temples he passed through in any qualms they faced. In the temple in Suzail, that is where he was told by a cavalier about a disturbance, an invasion of orcs, on the swamp-ridden border with Sembia. Thus, Jango's new life began.
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