janos jen renata

Abrasive. Cynical. Selfish. Of the words one could use to describe what Janos Renata is, he is the first to profess that few of them are positive—though he would also argue that whatever positive traits he does have don’t matter. Possessed of low self-esteem and a poor self-image, Janos deliberately pushes his perceived flaws to the forefront of how he presents himself to others and is prone to lashing out at others to push them away if they get too close. This, combined with the fact that his one source of joy seems to be pushing others’ buttons to get a rise out of them, makes Janos difficult for most people to get along with.Bits and pieces of his true nature do manage to peek through that façade, though—and those who manage to tear it down completely would find underneath a man who is surprisingly open-minded considering his history as a cog in the Garlean Empire’s war machine. Though he makes his bed with familiar demons, he more naturally gravitates to the unknown: unfamiliar technology, people, and places. This, combined with his extensive travels in his decade since leaving the Empire, has granted him a well-rounded wealth of experience to draw from—whether he recognizes that he does or not.

level one

level two

level three

content warning

indoctrination by a fascist state, child abuse, suicidal ideation and attempt, mass-casualty events, and violence.

military service

At first, Janos relished the opportunity to get away from his home life, throwing himself into the training programs that the military demanded of all of its fresh enlistees with gusto. He spent a not-insignificant amount of time grinding himself down to fit the mold that the Empire set in front of him so that he would not be ostracized by his peers as he had been in school, letting himself be fashioned into an obedient and ultimately inoffensive little cog in the Empire's war machine. He hoped despite himself that his service would help to redeem himself in the eyes of his mother, and his brothers supported his decision to try.Ultimately, he was assigned to the XIIIth Legion and sent to a castrum in central Ilsabard which served as a hub for incoming supply shipments from the capital to other facilities in the region and which was used as a maintenance hub by cohorts stationed nearby. The work was not particularly rewarding, but it was abundant; every Architectus assigned to the castrum tended to be overworked by their superiors and Janos was no exception.

As a Pureblood Garlean, Janos was given leave starting after his first full year of service to visit home for midwinter holidays. While his Garlean colleagues looked forward to this time of year (some because they had family in the capital, others for the opportunity to shove their workload off onto the conscripts), it was one that Janos, over time, came to dread. No matter what stories he came prepared to share, he was continually spoken over when he spoke, ignored when he didn't, and ultimately exiled to the kitchen to help prepare some portion of the holiday feast. While his colleagues tended to return in brighter spirits, Janos often came back in a worse state than he had left in.

Eventually, he admitted that he wanted to die.

The admission came at the dawn of his fifth year of service during a routine psychiatric evaluation to ensure that everyone stationed at the castrum remained fit for service. The admission was something that Janos knew, even at the time, that he would not be able to take back. Perhaps it had been intended as a cry for help from a man who was quickly realizing that he was running out of options; just before the holiday, he had been passed over for a promotion to kir, which his mother had been none too happy to hear.He was immediately placed on stand-by for monitoring and the matter of what to do with him became the subject of heated discussion among the medici for the next several days. Ultimately, the conclusion that the primus medicus attending to the units stationed at the castrum came to was to do nothing. The mere suggestion of being sent home drew a reaction of abject horror out of Janos, and the castrum needed hands in order to meet the deadline on a prototype development project that they had been assigned by the legion's praefectus architectorum.He was released from care and placed on watch, allowed to return to his duties as-assigned. Things were quiet after that, for a time—until, shortly after his birthday that year, he recieved a letter.

From his mother.

It was a notification that she was officially disowning him and cutting him off from the family. He was no longer welcome and she had already discarded all of the personal affects that he'd left at home. His brothers, scattered to the winds with their pre-dictated career paths, were unable to dissuade her from her chosen course, though after the fact Quirinius told Janos that their efforts probably would have been in vain anyway. She was looking into remarrying now that the dust had settled from her particularly messy divorce from the boys' father, and Janos would only hurt her chances of marrying upward.This final rebuff proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. He knew now that there was nothing that the medici could or would do to help him. Desire became intention. Intention became action. It wouldn't be painless, but he found a way out.It was supposed to go something like this...

midnight

As night fell on Janos's fifth year of service in the XIIIth Legion, he slowly assembled the pieces he needed to commit suicide. The more he planned, the less sufficient it was for him to simply die; he needed to die and take the person who had driven him to this point down with him. Certain that his brothers would thank him for it later, he spent weeks lining up the dominoes.Castrum ████████ had, during Janos's service, been assigned a special project by the XIIIth Legion's praefectus architectorum and overseen on the ground by multiple architectus magiteci during development. This was a project that required many hands and which had to proceed on a strict deadline; however, discretion was still important to the Empire, and they did not want word of the project to get out before it was complete lest they attract the attention of insurgents and the Empire's political enemies. Castrum ████████, in that regard, was the perfect place to proceed with developing a prototype; it was safely away from any active war fronts and, as a maintenance hub, it had a wealth of architecti to assist in development and assembly.

This project, naturally, was a weapon: a high-powered cannon meant to liquefy anything in its path, based on technology previously used in the development of the Prometheus siege engine.Janos would destroy it and then put a bullet in his head. When they came to check on the prototype after the dust from his distraction settled, they would find it in pieces and his body right beside it, clutching a note taking credit for the whole thing to his chest. He would set the warmachina in the castrum to wander and ignore orders using an exploit that he had discovered in the older model of magitek core that most of them still utilized in order to create a distraction, during which he would access the armory using one of his bunkmates' stolen credentials and arm himself for his task.

And then no one would ever want to associate with the Renata name again, least of all his mother.

His plan was successful up to entering the armory, however the exploit that he'd used had ended up being a little too effective; when combined with certain mechanical faults, it could trigger a fail state wherein the warmachina's innately-programmed sense of friend or foe was disabled. What had been meant as a distraction became a violent cascade of fire and steel, the stored warmachina going haywire and attacking not only each other but anyone in sight. Soldiers had been doing exercises on the grounds at the time, only to be rent apart by slashers; colossi and vanguards patrolled the grounds while the alarum sounded for all personnel to take shelter. The violent nature of the malfunction led soldiers to take up arms to defend the castrum, and when the first one arrived, they found Janos.They began to interrogate Janos as to why he was here rather than taking shelter, and, in a panic, Janos shot the soldier until his gun was empty and the soldier lay still on the floor.As Janos realized that his plan had gone awry, the first in a chain of explosions tore through the castrum as the warmachina began to break down and overheat. He knew that his plan was compromised, but he still had to see it through to the end.Ultimately, the destruction suffered by the castrum was devastating, with reports following Imperial investigations estimating that about "43%" of the castrum had suffered complete structural destruction, and the rest was damaged so thoroughly that it was questioned whether it would be worth the resources to rebuild. The prototype ended up destroyed not by Janos's own hands but as the result of the largest explosion to rock the castrum.Of the dead who were identified, Janos Renata was not one of them.

on the road

... But by all rights, Janos Renata should have died that day.His plan to commit suicide was far from flawless. The commotion—and large explosions—at the castrum drew the attention of local insurgents and mercenary warbands alike; once they arrived, they managed to suppress the remaining machina and raid what was left of the castrum. While they mainly sought weapons and supplies, many of them were not above picking over the personal effects of the deceased. When some mercenaries happened upon Janos, long-unconscious but hanging on by a thread near the ruins of the destroyed weapon prototype, they saw in him an invaluable opportunity: first, they could extract information on the Empire's machinations from him to feed to local rebels and other warbands, then they could use him as a hostage to extort that selfsame Empire when they were through with him.

So they picked him up and stitched him back together, first with magicks and then with more conventional means as his condition stabilized. He spent over a moon recovering from the ordeal, largely nonverbal and at times barely lucid. As he recovered, though, he started making simple requests and asking questions first in writing and then in sign, until one day he told them:

"I want to stay."

The memory of the incident had been all but wiped from his mind, replaced with an impenetrable black haze that he did not dare try to peek beyond. The confession he had intended for the Empire to find had burned away in the aftermath as he lay dying. So, he couldn’t begin to say what was missing—but the state that the mercenaries repeatedly referred to finding him in was unknown to him in its entirety. He recalled no plan, no warmachina, no fire, and certainly not bleeding out in the middle of the castrum.It was easier to keep a willing captive than an unwilling one, and so the leader of the warband agreed. Janos travelled with them for over a year, returning to himself in bits and pieces and keeping a journal along the way. Travelling with eyes wide open slowly but surely extinguished any love he had left for the Empire, and—though not precisely by choice—he spent more time listening, and watching, and learning than he had over the past twenty-three summers he’d been alive.Over time learned to make himself useful. He could repair the warband’s appropriated equipment and point them to Imperial outposts, so long as their locations had remained static since the time of the incident. But all good things would inevitably come to an end, and it was a clear summer day when the warband had arranged to turn Janos over to Imperial intelligence in exchange for having the bounties on all of their heads dropped.Janos fled—of course he fled. He ran until his legs would carry him no further, until he collapsed in a field so vast that while he could see traces of civilization in each cardinal direction, there was nowhere to run to.And even when he screamed, there was no one to hear him.

That was the start of his solo career.

it was after this incident that Janos realized that he would need to go his own way if he was going to survive. Burying his old name, he took up the moniker Jan Volfied, stealing the surname of one of the mercenaries he had travelled with before they turned their hand with their scheme, and then he set himself to work. As a common soldier of fortune, there were precious few jobs he would refuse to take; assassinations, arms smuggling, and bounty hunts were all on the table. For his disposition, he was nicknamed the Black Silence, a title that he readily accepted even if the mounting bounties on his head proved to make finding work difficult.Eventually, though, the money flowed toward Eorzea.

present day

And mercenaries always follow the money.These days, Janos spends most of his time in Eorzea, doing the same sort of work with the comfort of knowing that the people that want his head on a platter are a continent away. He travels around quite a bit, never staying in one place for too long, but in general he tends to find the people of Limsa Lominsa to be the most agreeable...

future

NOTE: Janos experiences amnesia with relation to many of the most major (and most traumatic) events in his backstory. While this information is still usable for hooks and I'm willing to RP around it, I would appreciate it if characters did not try to 'cure' his amnesia. He is deliberately written with the intention of not invoking common fiction/Hollywood amnesia tropes and approaching the affair through a more realistic lens.

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