Name: Ajax Diagorides
Age: 40
Gender: Male
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual/fightsexual
Role in Society: Foreigner/commoner
Occupation: Mercenary/wanderer/troublemaker
Legend:
The legends surrounding Ajax have spread across the kingdoms as a result of his ceaseless traveling and the ease with which he stands out no matter where he goes, hard to miss the obvious foreigner built like a brick house. The actual stories vary from place to place and feel more like baseless rumors than legitimate recountings, but they all share a similar theme.
He strangled a cave full of ogres to death in this kingdom, he killed a minotaur with a single strike to the head and took one of its horns as a trophy in another, he entered a renowned school of martial arts or a tournament and bested all their fighters, he cleared out a bandit garrison because it was on his way, it's a simple thematic. Also famous are his disregard for the study of magic and his lack of belief in the existence and influence of gods and his mentality that humans can achieve whatever they set out to do if they try hard enough.
Appearence:
Ajax is an olive skinned and tanned man who stands at 6 feet 2 inches and weighs around 260 pounds. A thick, muscle bound figure with powerful, sinewy arms and robust legs which end in burly hands and feet and a log-like neck that holds up a head as large as the rest of his body, with a prominent jaw and chin as well as dark brown eyes, short, curly black hair and a thick but not overly long beard, overall bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Boxer of Quirinal.
Ajax is a mess to look at. He is scarred from head to toe, his eyes are sunken, his nose squashed, he has cauliflower ears and his hands, forearms, elbows, knees, shins and feet are covered in extremely thick and rough calluses, giving them a leathery, bumpy look. Ajax's clothing, a loose, white doric chiton that's strapped to his left shoulder with a pin and goes past the waist, ending just above the knees, does not help hide his rather deformed body. Ajax also wears brown leather, hobnailed, sandal-like boots called caligae.
Personality:
Ajax is a reasonably merry man, fond of living a life full of excitement and action and fairly easy to get along with as he is giving, loyal, honest and straightforward, seeing greed, deceit and treachery as marks of weakness. Conversely, he's also kind of nuts. He enjoys battle to a mind-boggling degree and smashing things to bits seems to be his main solution to any problem, often turning him into the aggressor as he prefers to escalate things when others are more than ready to back down or run away.
Ajax has a great distaste for magic and religion and will act rather condescending to anyone who relies overmuch on these. It’s not enough to bring him to violence but he sees over-reliance on magic or the intervention of higher forces as a queer path in life. Why credit the gods with your achievements, why rely on some mystic force you can barely comprehend when you could achieve this on the strength of your back? He feels much the same towards those who take their status as nobles as somehow making them intrinsically superior to others.
Ajax has a fairly complex world view based on strength, self-reliance and personal growth. He feels the strong come to rule the weak, but that strength isn't limited to physical strength or martial power and that the weak should, in turn, grow strong and strive for greater things in life. He relishes the freedom necessary for such a growth and will readily help others to attain it, just as long as they actually put the effort to grow themselves. He is rather harsh towards those who could stand for themselves but don't and expect others to do it for them, believing that over-reliance on others is another path to subjugation.
Skills:
-Pankration master: Ajax is a frighteningly skilled unarmed fighter, having trained to fight most of his life and having survived a number of ordeals through fighting skill alone. His fighting style is known in his homeland as Pankration, loosely translated as "all of might", and was originally a blend of boxing and wrestling with no rules beyond no biting or eye-gouging before more and more skills were added to its repertoire. Ajax is particularly skilled at the boxing aspect of it, having trained in it first before starting in Pankration, but he is still quite good at grappling and other forms of striking.
This is Ajax’s everything, his reason to be, his focus, the thing he has practiced for nearly all his life, and he has lived a fairly long one, much longer than most would’ve bet on considering his lifestyle. Given his extreme level of overspecialization and his age, it stands to reason that he is better at this than others who have pursued other skills in their life, especially those who are younger and have not fought anywhere near as much as he has.
-Animalistic: Ajax’s instincts have been honed through his time surviving in the wild with no tools or any real survival skills to speak of, just plain overpowering physicality. This gives him a sixth sense for detecting and reacting to ambushes and traps as well as hunting down specific prey and projecting a certain "aura" of intimidation that goes beyond his obvious physical attributes and enters the terrain of monsters, producing an instinctive feeling of dread that marks him as extremely dangerous to any self-aware creature.
Combat flaws:
-Complete lack of versatility: Ajax is limited to smashing. Ajax smashes. Well, okay, that’s kind of a gross oversimplification of his abilities, he’s a superlatively skilled unarmed fighter, but that is all he has and all he wants to have. No magic, no weapons training of any kind, no desire to even consider learning these things, nothing but his own body.
Personality flaws: Ajax is impulsive, agressive and extremely set on his ways. He considers all forms of battle that aren't a straightforward clash as varying degrees of cowardly and his peculiar set of morals can leave him seemingly uncaring towards someone's plight because he feels this person can face it on their own and should do so rather than beg for assistance from a foreigner like himself.
Abilities:
-Superhuman physicality: Magic, Ajax feels, is for the weak. This is a sentiment shared by many of the premier heroes of his homeland. Magic is for the weak who need to rely on something other than their own body and waste the endless potential of a living, breathing creature for growth and progress. Through lifelong dedication, Ajax has made himself as physically overpowering as any monster. Though his agility and manual dexterity aren’t much to speak of, he is freakishly strong and damn near tireless. His entire body is tremendously difficult to damage and eradicates poisons, toxins and disease with absurd ease.
-Pride: Pride's a powerful emotion and Ajax is quite proud of himself. Proud of his superhuman body and the primitive power it represents over that acquired through money, knowledge, social influence and other roundabout ways. So much so that he is able to use his body against things that should be unaffected by mere brute force, pitting his might directly against magic and the like. This kind of pride also allows him to ignore any sort of mind-altering effects, and attempts to invade his psyche will meet with as heavy a resistance as if Ajax was fighting the person directly.
Backstory:
Ajax descends from a long line of athletes, from a land far away. His father, Diagoras, was an accomplished boxer trained by his father as was tradition within the family and celebrated in his homeland for his many victories in legitimate sporting events. Ajax was trained by his father, a widower, from an early age as well and rapidly became a boxer of considerable skill himself. However before Ajax could make his debut in an official event, Diagoras was murdered, the killer managing to evade the law.
Ajax eventually discovered that his father's death was orchestrated by Diagoras' supposed benefactor, Magistrate Cleon, because Diagoras had won a fight he was asked to throw, thus ruining many a bet. Enraged, Ajax sought Cleon out to murder him with his own two hands but was subsequently defeated, bested by foul sorceries and the attack of a demonically powerful fighter in Cleon's employ, known only as Hyperanthes. He was captured and his family subjected to great shame.
Publicly tried for attempting to murder a magistrate, Ajax was sentenced to death by poisoning but before it could be carried out he was smuggled out of prison by Cleon and his associates, who then sold him to The Crypt, a brutal underground arena where people are forced to fight in rule-less deathmatches for the enjoyment of select crowds. It was here, fighting for survival armed only with a pair of old and worn gauntlets and greaves, that Ajax developed his fighting style across several years of captivity, with only one thought keeping him from despair: revenge.
As time passed Ajax befriended a few of the other fighters and together they planned an escape, which was mostly just being superior fighters taking on a bunch of crappy hired guards by surprise. Knowing he'd be hunted down by The Crypt and Cleon, Ajax decided to flee the country without involving anyone else, sneaking into a random merchant ship leaving the island which was first dragged around, then smashed to bits by a typhoon. The lone survivor, Ajax drifted aimlessly in a damaged boat until he arrived to Iliviace.
He has spent many years in the land, growing accustomed to its language and its ways, always wandering, always fighting, never settling for long. Some day, he will return to his homeland and wreak upon Cleon a vengeance so thorough even the gods, should they exist, will have to stop and take notice. But for now he is quite lost on how achieve this, considering he has absolutely no clue on how to get home and couldn’t possibly give any directions to a ship.
