Pax



Pax is sixteen years old. The boy is short of stature and scrawny–he will not be intimidating anyone anytime soon. That does not mean that you should underestimate him. He may not be strong, but he is fast and he knows it. The other students of Laughing Palm joked that, whenever it was their turn to spar with him, it was like fighting the wind. The master did not joke.

He is fair-skinned and lovable–again, he will not intimidate anyone. Pax looks younger than he is: he has a happy baby-face completely at odds with his fearsome arrogance and rending personality. He will not suffer any perceived slight and he will start fights to prove that he is better. He is loud, obnoxious, and (more often than not) completely and totally ignorant of the wider world.

Being brought up in a monastery will do that to you, but Pax’s ignorance is borne more from apathy than the misguided instruction of old, tottering monks. His hair is dark and curly and his eyes are colored by hazel suspicion. He trusts very few people–getting thrown out of your monastery will do that to you–and he is very vocal about it. He does not care and he does not trust, making it very hard to learn.

Yet, not everything about the boy is bad. If you earn his trust, you will never find a firmer or more loyal friend. Pax’s word is ironclad, but he will hold you to your promises too. If he thinks that you’re reneging on a promise… He loves the tranquility of the natural world and is wont to wander aimlessly away from the noise and clamor of towns and cities. It seems that no one lies to him out there.

For some strange reason, he is fiercely protective of the elderly. He hates weakness–and goes out of his to ridicule and criticize those who are “weak”–but he exempts the old. Do not harass an elderly person within earshot or Pax will come after you. He hates crowds. He also hates those who act like they are superior because of their education. He likes to see how “erudite” they look with broken teeth.

Pax (perhaps wisely) stays away from girls. He does this for two semi-conscious reasons: he does not understand them and the cocktail of hormones rushing through his pubescent bloodstream flood him with these conflicting emotions. This infuriates him, so he is usually seen with men who do not inspire these emotions. He knows what to do with them, but not with women. As it stands now, Pax does not have many possessions. He has the clothes on his back and the sandals on his feet as he stumbles through a steadily darkening forest, muttering darkly about the monks in the Laughing Peace monastery. His robes–orange with black edging and stitching–are ripped, stained and otherwise dirty from his expulsion and journey through the woods. He is missing a sandal.

Biography
Pax is a “god” of peace–well, the brothers and sisters of “The Laughing Peace” are not quite sure what, exactly, Pax is. It defies (and deifies) classification. It is a paragon of virtue that values, or so the monks believe, the three cardinal virtues of “reason, loving-kindness, and peace.” The monks’ ultimate goal is to achieve the state of “peace” through understanding and kindness. Thus, they are a peaceful, contemplative order that wants to be left alone with their thoughts.

They found the feral boy gnawing on a cabbage in their vegetable garden. Brother Telemachus, a recent convert, tried to scare the boy away. The boy attacked him and the other monks subdued him with careful application of quarter-staves. Thus, a beautiful friendship was born. Telemachus spent days recovering, but they kept the boy confined for two months in the infirmary. The boy was starved, disease-ridden, and crawling with parasites. Somehow, he was still alive.

Fortunately, the boy recovered quickly, and the monks thought it would be all right to remove his bindings. He seemed harmless. The boy eluded them for three days, scurrying overhead and underfoot and causing all sorts of mayhem: he accidentally (or so they say) set the abbot’s robes on fire, threw rotten food at the monks, and, eventually, launched a second attack on brother Telemachus. The brother was ready for him this time: he set a trap and caught the boy in a fishing net.

The monks had had enough. They dragged the howling, snarling, biting thing in the net out of the monastery’s gates, and, as they were about to drive him away, the boy stopped struggling. Confused and wary, the monks backed away as the boy turned to face them. He looked quizzically into each of their faces. He scrunched up his face–thinking really, really hard and said, “Pax.” That one word brought the boy back into their graces. The monks are normally forbidden from speaking Pax’s name aloud, yet he knew it. The boy had fulfilled a prophecy of their order.

“The Outsider that speaks Its name shall become It.” The abbot, upon hearing the news, dabbed away her tears and decreed that the boy would be brought up as one of them. She also named him “Pax,” and created an exception to the “name rule.” Unfortunately, he did not take to their lessons. He learned to read, write and ‘rithmetic, but he preferred the refectory to his studies and the grounds to the cloister. The boy roamed and lived with little restriction, scandalizing the more traditional monks and irritating the upstart radicals. The abbot loved him, though, so he was proof against their enmity.

Pax spent all of his spare time learning the order’s martial art with Telemachus. At first brush, it may seem odd that a peaceful order would need martial artists, but they are a necessary evil in this violent world. There are few practitioners of “Laughing Palm” and only one master because the order does not consider violence important: it is for the backward and the unreasonable. Naturally, Pax took to it. It was something tactile that he could understand. He was tired of the theories and the concepts and the ideas that the monks continually chased–he wanted something that he could touch.

He enjoyed fighting: he was a natural. He did not see how “reason” would bring peace. Pax could not think away his problems–they sat on his desk, defiant–but he could fight and he did it well. Telemachus and Pax trained constantly together. The old master was impressed. The monks began to whisper that “the boy ‘failed’ reason,” but the abbot would have none of it. She quietly insisted that he was young and, if given time, he would find the right path: “It will guide him,” she promised with a mysterious smile. But, Pax did not see how “loving-kindness” would guide him to peace.

Loving his enemy did not mean reciprocation. The monastery barely repelled the frequent attacks of monsters and men: “peaceful” and “easy target” are often synonymous. No one realized that one master and six disciples could not protect three-hundred. But, Pax did. He knew that the outside world would slowly erode his order into dust. He heard the rumors: the other monasteries suffered horrible fates–now the rains weep o’er their silent halls, broken books and bodies litter the cobwebbed passageways as dark figures slouch into the shadows, squabbling over the remains.

So, he called a meeting. Telemachus and the abbot helped him to convince the reluctant. Pax mounted the podium and delivered a long, overwrought speech exhorting violence over “taking it like a dime whore.” He made good points (“we won’t be dead!”) and some bad ones (“we’ll look like a bunch of badasses!”), but he wanted to protect the people who had raised him. He was in tears at the end, begging the monks to at least learn to defend themselves. Unfortunately, very few of them were impressed with his speech. No one clapped. Some grumbled about “wasted time.”

An older monk got up to leave. That was when Pax lost his temper. “You want proof? You want me to support my assertions with evidence? Here’s some evidence!” He kicked aside the podium, leapt into the crowd, and struck the old monk in the throat. The old man went down like a sack of potatoes, but Pax had turned his attention to other targets. Things went downhill from there. He incapacitated forty monks before the six trained in “Laughing Palm” cornered him. Pax dealt with two of them before Telemachus stepped forward. He tried to reason with the boy, but Pax would have none of it.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">He was too angry. “You can’t reason your way to peace! You can’t love your enemy as they stab you in the heart! You want to find peace? You have to… have to… how can you have peace if you won’t fight for it–kill for it? I can kill them all and none of them will be able to stop me. You might, but I’d like to see you try.” It was a short and brutal fight, but they stopped him. The abbot ordered him removed. As Telemachus dragged Pax’s battered body out of the monastery, Pax realized horrible truth.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Telemachus laid him against the trunk of a Bodhi tree. “Peace,” he panted, “can only be found by being the strongest.” Telemachus shook his head. No, brother, you do not understand. ''That is not peace. That is fear''. The elder monk returned to his screaming, wailing brothers and sisters and closed the gates on the boy. Pax stumbled to his feet and, bracing himself against the tree, he screamed hatred at the monastery walls. Hatred, rage, remorse welled up in his voice, but it did not break him.

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">No, it made his resolve stronger. He was stronger than them. He would become greater than them. And, as he stumbled into the darkening forest, he realized that he would show them. He would return, and he would show them how misguided they were. <p style="margin-bottom:0in">

<p style="margin-bottom:0in">They would understand–oh, would they understand.

Vital Information

 * Class: Monk
 * Age: 16
 * Race: Human
 * Alignment:
 * Weapon of Choice: