| Full Name |
Juda Lirandil |
| Race |
Half-orc |
| Classes/Levels |
Fighter, lvl 1 |
| Gender |
Male |
| Size |
Medium |
| Age |
26 |
| Alignment |
Chaotic Good |
| Location |
Absalom, Andoran |
| Languages |
Common, Elvish, Orcish |
| Occupation |
Adventurer, butcher |
About Juda
When Juda was a just a newborn, he was traveling with a caravan of orc slavers to their encampment with several slaves in tow, any of whom might have been his mother, when the orcs were attacked and slaughtered by an elvish hunting party. They liberated the slaves, several of whom were elves, but discovered Juda wrapped up in rags. When none of the traumatized slaves would own to him, one young ranger decided that a baby of any race was blameless, and took Juda back to the elves' city. The ranger's father, an aging alchemist, formally adopted Juda and raised him in his household, despite some small controversy.
Juda grew up athletic and strong with a love for the outdoors. His father taught him to love books and learning, and while never fully accepted by it, Juda was an avid appreciator of elvish art and culture. He played to his strength, enlisting in martial training when he was an adolescent, and improving with great proficiency until he learned that his greater strength and the rapidity with which he was learning the fighting arts was making people nervous. He started only practicing to his full ability in private, and holding back around other trainees. Fortunately he had a training captain who noticed this and pushed him harder than ever, forbidding him to limit himself for the sake of others. By the time Juda was twenty he had graduated from basic fighter training, well versed in elven martial warfare. However, prejudice started to catch up with him: his application to ranger training was denied on the basis that the elves in charge decided that their knowledge of the forest's ways needed to be sacred to elves only, and he was barred from becoming a paladin for the same reason, although the city heads told him that it was because they doubted the strength of his convictions. Juda grudgingly signed up for the city guard, and nearly went crazy standing before doors and at walls all day for ceremony's sake, his talents virtually wasted.
His father saw this, and used his influence with the city's nobility to get Juda a position bodyguarding for the grandson of a prominent elvish lord, an older elf with close to princely status. It wasn't much more use of his skills than being a city guard, but at least he got to move around, and it was a position with not insubstantial honor attached to it. The grandson, Arlen Holiscient, was half-human, and it was common knowledge that his grandfather mostly kept him around because he was beautiful, and his looks tended towards the elvish rather than the human side of his blood. He and Juda quickly developed a rapport based on their mutual love of the arts and scholarship, and their interstitial statuses in their society. Eventually, they started to fall in love with eachother. Nobody questioned long hours Juda spent in Arlen's private rooms, because it was his duty to go everywhere with him anyway, and it was common knowledge that the two were good friends. It never entered anyone's mind that they might possibly care for eachother on a more than platonic basis, and they didn't advertise it, because neither wished to be ostracized any more than they already were, although Juda did tell his father, who supported him as he'd always done.
Unfortunately, there was only a few months of crazy monkey love in hidden corners and the privacy of Arlen's rooms before his grandfather announced that he was to be engaged to the son of another titled elvish family. (Their culture didn't really care about unions between men, and this was primarily to connect the two houses anyway, neither having any unmarried female heirs: the people making the arrangements decided that if heirs were needed badly enough, they'd come from somewhere.) Arlen was mad as hell, and Juda couldn't stand to have one more thing he loved taken away by their society because of his blood. The two of them made arrangments, and a week before the wedding was to take place, fled the city.
They traveled as far and as quickly as they could, given that Arlen didn't have much experience roughing it cross-country. Juda tried to make the journey easier on him, killing what they needed to eat, taking the longest watches at night, and miraculously they managed to avoid any parties sent after them. (With Arlen's family's prominence, there were several.) Eventually they met up with an acting troupe heading for Absalom, who gave them disguises and let them hitch a ride in exchange for doing odd jobs. On reaching the city, the two were excited by the diversity they saw exhibited in citizens of every race, social class, and occupation, and with the last of their money they took a room over a bookstore in a busy neighborhood. They tried to find jobs, but Arlen had never had one in his life, and Juda learned quickly that despite the fair number of orcs and half-orcs in the city, people still weren't crazy about employing them. The owners of the downstairs bookshop ended up hiring Arlen, but the pay wasn't enough to support them. When Juda learned that the Pathfinder Society was advertising for fighters with training, he signed up with them.
