Jarek Prath's page

His parents careers grew as he did. His father a driven gunslinger and investigator, his mother a Chelaxian dignitary in Magnimar, acting as a diplomat. When Jarek was five his father received a promotion into deep cover government field work. In this his father succumbed to his old demons of alcoholism and violence to deal with his stress. A year later, when the violence turned on his family, Jarek’s mother returned to Cheliax, and left her son with his father (he would have been unsafe in Cheliax had agents of his mothers nation learned the leverage he could be against his father).

His father raised him alone from that point on. Employing abuse and his rage to hone his sons mind and awareness. Jarek still wears the scar on his face from a childhood incident in which his father left a living room window unlocked and sat drinking in his usual chair. When Jarek returned home from school, he entered and paused, scanning the living room. He didn’t notice the window unlocked and proceeded to his room. This failure drove his father into a rage throughout which he beat his son profusely. One terrible blow sending the 9 year old crashing into a table that nearly opened his skull.

Jarek’s turbulent childhood caused him to withdraw from the world outside his home. He did very well in school and loved his father despite the abuse. Blaming himself and his failures for his father’s ways. Shortly after Jarek completed regular school and was deciding a university he arrived home one day to find one of his fathers old pistols on the table. A pistol that had scarred Jarek many times. His father always made a perfect accounting of his weapons. Jarek waited up all night trying to discern the test and in the morning decided something was actually wrong. He knew his father was supposed to be working, and wouldn’t return for four more days so he went to the authorities.

He reported to his fathers' colleagues, but his fathers absence was always nodded off as “field chaos” that would work itself out. The case of his fathers disappearance was handed down lower and lower through the government hierarchy, to Jarek’s growing frustration. He felt that no one in the world cared for his father, so he decided to find him himself.

Jarek sought training in martial ways and pursued the path of the ninja to learn to gather information, stalk, and defend himself. Dojo after dojo refused him as a student for a variety of reasons. Frustrated, Jarek took to busing tables by day and drinking and bar brawling at night. One night, exhausted, drunk, beaten, and laying in an alley in the rain crying he was approached by an unknown man. The mysterious stranger, Jervas Stoot, said he'd seen Jarek trying to join the dojos and being turned away, and that he could help. Jarek cleaned up, quit his work and devoted the next two years of his life as the mans disciple.

While learning the ninja way, he tried to learn to use his fathers pistol which had always been forbidden him. One day handling the weapon he succeeded in fully dismantling the pistol. Beneath a handle plate he found writing that was scratched in a language he didn’t know. The only two words he recognized was the first being his name, and the last being his fathers. Believing he’d stumbled upon his fathers final message he hurried back to the authorities and attempted to show this to the Investigator Satinder. He was informed Satinder had been relocated to Sandpoint, and no other agent would handle the case. Frustrated and desperate Jarek packed his things, and set out to find his father with Satinder’s help…

He dresses in a black Shinobi Shozoku, with leather lamellar defending his vitals. His long heavy cloak, pack, and large belt pouches betray his vagabond path. And his many weapons reveal his warriors path. He holsters a pistol on his right thigh, and a katana from his left hip. Though with his cloak pulled tightly around him these are often unseen. On the roads he would seem any normal traveler. Albeit one who is always brooding and moves with a lithe precision economizing his movements and suggesting his path toward self mastery.