TJ grew up in New York and spent most of his life wanting to be a professional athlete. He was good at just about everything but could never really decide what he wanted to focus on. When he was 13 he decided he wanted to be a professional wrestler and joined the high school wrestling team and a number of local martial arts classes. He went from class to class, changing arts every six months or so, unable to find an instructor who told him anything other than "be patient". He didn't want to be patient.
Eventually, he found an art that let him. An Israeli form of combat called Krav.
He trained hard, almost to the exclusion of everything else. His grades weren't great but he was smart enough to get by without much work. He stayed out of trouble at school, but only barely. He spent four years focused on an adolescent fantasy that was destined never to come true.
On September 11th 2001, his father died in a terrorist attack. Nothing could have prepared him. His grades plummeted. He stopped training. Eventually, he was expelled from school for fighting and ended up on the wrong side of the law. The judge said that the damage he had done to the two other students was inexcusable. They might have thrown the first punches, but TJ's martial arts background made him singularly responsible for his own actions and capable of deciding exactly how he defended himself.
He was sentenced to one year in prison.
The judge offered him a choice though. He would suspend the sentance indefinitely if TJ joined the military.
TJ jumped at the chance. He'd been thinking about it for nearly a year as a way to get back at the bastards who had killed his father. He shipped out a few months later. He turned eighteen in boot camp.
With his physical abilities and martial arts background, he was selected for special forces training. Less than a year later he was on the ground in Afghanistan, a newly trained Army Ranger.
His tour lasted a year to the day. After a year of successful missions, one stroke of bad luck with an IED left him bleeding on the ground, the first victim in an Al Qaeda ambush. Three of his squad died, and he was left with shrapnel scattered through his pelvis and two stray bullets in his shoulder and arm.
He lost 12 feet of intestine, one kidney and the ability to interlock his fingers behind his back. Recovery took nine months.
While in the veteran's hospital he was mailed a purple heart and his discharge papers, and made friends with a few other restless soldiers with a lot of time on their hands. That was where he learned how to play Dungeons and Dragons. A guy named Jordan came in to run games twice a week for a friend that was in recovery. Having nothing else to do, TJ accepted the invitation to join.
At first TJ was drawn to combat classes, but eventually he grew frustrated that the game didn't model fights the way they really felt. In one game he tried a wizard and was hooked.
Once he was released, TJ didn't really have anywhere to go. Jordan told him that his latest project was for a video game company that was trying to develop a game to compete with the Modern Warfare and Battlefield games. Suddenly, TJ found himself a military adviser for a digital animation studio.
A year later when Jordan told him about the project he was looking to test, TJ really thought it was business as usual.
Boy, was he wrong...
