Name: Sir Jun Adalsteinn
Age: 50
Gender: Male
Appearance: Jun Adalsteinn
Adalsteinn stands at an even 7 feet tall (2 meters) with brown fur, slightly grayed from age. Wide and bulky with muscle that is usually hidden underneath his armor, its much more apparent when he wears a more casual tunic and hood.
His sword can always be found on his left hip, a simple and embellished design with a straight guard and leather grip of a dusty light brown. On the other side of his hip is a large pouch that holds his daily necessities.
Adalsteinn's mug usually has a grim and uninviting expression thanks to his heavy brow, with a heavily faded scar underneath his left cheek that you would be unable to notice unless you inspected his face closely. His eyes are dark beads with only the slightest tint of blue in good lighting,
The most prominent feature that the Elk has are naturally his antlers. Winding arcs of keratin that have been hardened over many years of use, and intentionally sharpened to increase their potential lethality, they are porcelain white and very striking and beautiful especially to other horned creatures like deer and moose.
The position of Guard Captain is one just as much of fashion as function, and Adalteinn's specially crafted armor is as fitting as his position warrants. Made of blued steel with a golden trim around the breastplate, a pair of besagew plates sit in front of the gaps between the breastplate and the pauldron.
His gauntlets have been specially designed to jut out from the knuckle in a way that does not disrupt his ability to manipulate weapons or other objects, before being sharpened to a wide edge that can deliver shallow but potentially lethal cuts and stabs.
Outside of combat he also wears a heavy red cloak emblazoned with the royal seal.
Race: Elk
Role within the Expedition: Mentor figure, Heavy Infantry
Racial Skills:
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Antler Gore: At close range Jun is always armed with an extra weapon that he has been training with since adolescence. A sharp headbutt can rip out eyes and tear throats even through open faced helmets.
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Sprint: Whether to escape, or in Adalsteinn’s case charge an enemy for a devastating antler gore, Adalsteinn is capable of rapid bursts of high movement speed even in heavy armor. Though not being as young as he used to be, such all-out sprints are taxing and can only be done a few times before needing a break
Normal Skills:
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Versatile Weaponry: Though favoring a sword, Adalsteinn has learned over many years and many battles that the most dangerous warrior uses whatever is best for the situation. Trained in the use of spears, swords, and bows. Though not excelling especially with any of them, his competency has at least allowed him to fend off his younger fitter and more specialized students and defend his honor, though only just barely.
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Heavy Armor Training: The hallmark of a Dawn Blade is their proficiency at maneuvering in heavy armor, and Adalsteinn is no different. He dons full plate and other common heavy armor with ease, relatively.
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Field Medicine: A warrior may survive the battle, only to die from infection a week later. Adalsteinn is trained in battlefield medicine and even minor surgery thanks to the Clerics of the Dawn Blades. That is the limit of his expertise however, he has no advanced medical or medicinal knowledge besides keeping the blood inside the body.
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Hand to Hand training: No student of Cochise the Coyote has gone without training in open hand and wrestling. Though some consider such tactics dishonorable, if the difference between victory and defeat can be determined by a sharp jab to the throat only a fool would not take it. His expertise extends to the clinch and grappling, though more advanced and esoteric moves from the far east are not a part of his training, or his students.
Weapons:
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Longsword: A ceremonial and ubiquitous weapon, there are few if any warriors who have not held a sword at some point in their life. This sword is especially weighted towards the handle, making it more convenient for switching between one and two handed use.
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Boar Spear: A perhaps even more common and ubiquitous weapon than even the sword, a spear makes up for its lack of style with its reach. This spear has a sharpened blade along its head, as well as a crossguard to prevent it from being buried inside enemies,risking valuable time and potential breakage to get it out. Typically carried in the left hand, behind the shield.
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Gauntlets: Many young students, proud of their years of drilling with swords have been put in their place with a sharp check to the face. These gauntlets have been modified to have a sharpened spike of metal sticking out from the knuckle allowing for shallow, but potentially lethal strikes.
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Dagger: More commonly used for eating and utility work, its value in a clinch is undeniable.
Armor:
-Ceremonial Full Plate: Although engravings provide no tactical advantage, the Captain of the Guard has to look the part just as much as play it. Blued and engraved with gold trim, such a set is as beautiful as it is functional, and is more than capable of turning a bladed weapon, though just as vulnerable to half swording and blunt weapons as any other.
Equipment:
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Field Bag: Filled with all of the small pieces of equipment essential for staying in the field for long periods of time. Rope, Pitons, flint and tinder, waterskins and rations and other lesser miscellaneous equipment.
Personality:
Adalsteinn is a salty old bastard of many years, with a lifetime of wins and losses behind him. He comes across as direct and straightforward, and to his students outright mean, though that is partially a front.
As a lifelong warrior teaching other warriors, some of the best of their respective generations in fact, he cannot afford to spare the feeling of anyone he is responsible for for their own sake. When someone makes a mistake, he twists the knife just enough to make sure that they’ve learned from it and won’t make it again.
He’s not especially vindictive, quite the opposite, but has no problem appearing that way if one of his students is just not getting it.
At home, or around people he has the luxury of turning his drill face off, hes polite and relaxed, and his wife swears he is hilarious, although Adalsteinn’s children don’t know how she could possibly ever think that, as he is a fairly strict father.
Likes: Chestnuts, tobacco, honey mead with apples. Although he’d probably never say it out loud, he loves objects of quality. This usually focuses on swords and armors of particular makes given his job, but he has also collected a fair few paintings and even has a statue from a prominent sculptor on display in front of his home, the depiction of a Stag Deity.
Dislikes: Being challenged on decisions, particularly by his students or being interrogated about his past. He cannot stand tardiness, and dislikes indecision or doubt especially amongst his students. This does not mean he favors the brave and stupid, he especially loathes those who refuse to think before they act.
Background:
Sir Adalsteinn was born upon Exer’s Wall, or so the young bucks say when the old Elk passes out of earshot.
As old and wind-beaten as its worn down stone and mortar, as tall and unyielding and vicious as its battlements.
A tall tale, but few of his peers yet live to correct them.
Sir Adalsteinn was not born upon the wall, with a sword in one hand and a fist clenched banner in the other. Born the fourth son of Sigmundyr and Ingijorg Adalsteinn--a bakers son, his early life was utterly unremarkable.
Until his antlers began to sprout. For Elk and Deer, antlers were not merely a symbol of virality, they were a source of pride--and for better or worse, Jun’s wide swept tangled antlers were some of the most beautiful that the Isle of Stone had ever seen.
To his peers, Jun had become a target. Every deer elk and moose made a point to lock horns with the boy to cement their own superiority within the local pecking order. He met challengers big--challengers fast and challengers far more experienced than he in these mock battles without respite, for those who turned down such challengers were viewed far worse than mere losers.
From the age of twelve, every summer was spent defending his honor until his antlers snapped, only to grow back through winter and spring and be broken again the following summer.
Until the age of sixteen, when an outsider who had heard stories of the White Antlers of the Arching Valley came to challenge him.
A coyote with a scarred face, he challenged Jun to a traditional battle of antlers, to the scoffing of onlookers who had turned Jun’s matches into quite the spectator sport.
Though Coyote had once preyed upon Elk, few creatures could withstand the ferocity of a charging elks antlers.
Each took their positions, but the moment that Jun charged the nameless coyote had gripped his antlers, pulling him into a sharp jab and a takedown that the boy had never seen before.
They sparred again. Again.
Soon the sun had fallen over the horizon and the Elk laid back upon the cold ground, antlers as broken as his body.
Though the coyote had not intended to test the boy so severely, he could not help but admire his tenaciousness. Not once had he turned away from his challenger, nor even asked why he was doing this in the first place.
An ideal mindset for the offer he was soon to make.
The Coyote, Cochise was an officer of the Dawn Blades Warband. Heavily armed warriors who were trained for the thickest and most grueling combat in Wardian, they stood on standby as the vanguard in the event of an invasion from a foreign power.
Cochise had heard the rumors of the battered Elk, who since growing his horns had not had a moment's reprieve from challengers, but had not expected the tenacity of the lad.
Jun’s martial skills were certainly not exceptional, and perhaps for this reason he had not been sought out by other Warbands.
It was easier to let experienced warriors apply for themselves through a grueling gauntlet, rather than spend years training a novice to reach the level of physical fitness and technical skill required.
Cochise had not made this offer idly, nor had Jun misunderstood the seriousness of what the coyote was offering.
To be a Dawn Blade was to be the brave amongst the brave, and though they were perhaps the most famous of the Warbands of Wardian such titles did not come without a cost in blood.
But such an opportunity would not be handed to him a second time.
He asked for a day to say goodbye to his mother and father and his childhood home of the Arching Valley for he would not see any of them again for some time.
Cochise had offered him more than a single day to pack up his entire life, but the young Elk refused.
Any longer than a day would give him time to back out of his word.
It was unrefined, but that tenacity was the heart of the Dawn Blades.
Over the next few years of training Jun often lamented being blessed with such foresight.
By twenty he had passed through the Night Gauntlet, an evening of non-stop fighting and brutal testing of a warriors metal that climaxed at dawn of the next day.
By twenty two, Jun had survived his first battle, and by twenty five he had become a full member of the Warband--a veteran warrior amongst others.
At twenty seven, Adalsteinn--now an officer within the Dawn Blades faced his first true test of mettle. Sea raiders, secretly equipped and reinforced by a rival nation from across the ocean were spotted and due to make landfall within mere days.
For fear that this was the start of a greater military invasion, the Dawn Blades were sent ahead to hold the beach as a vanguard while the Corsairs engaged them in a naval battle.
Cochise, the Elks mentor and overall commander of the defense was killed early in the battle, struck down by a bombardment of ship mounted ballista that even the heavy armor of the Dawn Blades could do nothing against.
Taking command, Adalsteinn gave orders that even today military strategists scrutinize. Rather than retreating to a safe distance from further bombardment and ensure the integrity of his unit, Adalsteinn ordered his men to the tip of the shoreline, forming an inverted combat box wherever enemy vessels dropped their ramps.
As he’d calculated, no further salvos were launched against his men for fear of striking friendly vessels and any enemy marine who disembarked early had not only a fully armed Dawn Blade to contend with, the strong tides threatened to pull them back into the sea.
Although the day had been largely won by the expertise of the Corsairs and their devastating flank of the enemy fleet, Adalsteinn had won the double edged sword of fame and notoriety amongst his men and his superior officers--and the attention of people of even higher rank than them.
With the death of Cochise, and the unit he’d left behind in need of new leadership the decision was made to promote Adalsteinn to a permanent position of command.
He gained a reputation as a shrewd and aggressive field commander, and although some of his more defensive minded peers resented how casually he gave the order to charge, they could not deny the efficiency of his maneuvers. Defensive battles expected to last for days would be over in an afternoon after a daring flanking maneuver.
Eventually that resentment would have consequences. Adalsteinn was too young, too bold, and with three platoons of the heaviest and most well equipped infantry on the island, too powerful for his own good.
The day after his twenty ninth birthday he’d received a challenge that he hadn’t had since he was a teenager, an Elk and rival officer named Elias and his entourage wanted to lock horns with Adalsteinn. He’d expected a light ribbing as on his birthday the day before, but when they drew blades upon Adalsteinn he wasted no time in seizing the initiative, goring Elias and one of his sergeants to death with his antlers.
Although he’d acted in self defense, the judges of his court martial could not ignore the testimony of four sergeants and a lieutenant of the Dawn Blades.
His reputation had given him a stay of execution, but for the next year Adalsteinn was imprisoned in a cold jail cell, his life's work and all of his achievements stripped away from him.
But, as had happened almost fourteen years ago now, a stranger entered his vision.
His life would again take a turn, another offer he could not refuse.
The King himself had heard word of Adalsteinn’s fate, ever since his coastal defense he’d been a person of interest. One of dozens, but even to be counted amongst two or threescore was an honor in the extreme when it was a King doing the counting.
He had sent one of his Royal Guards on a mission to retrieve Adalsteinn for a very important mission. Although even the King himself could not say for sure whether Adalsteinn had deserved his sentencing, his prowess in battle and in leading aggressive maneuvers was not something he could let go to waste.
His worthiness however, would be determined by the success of his mission.
The nation that had attacked the coast and led to Adalsteinns comeuppance had not been resting on their laurels over the last three years. They had been rallying men, constructing ships, and were waiting merely on a good opportunity to launch another fleet that dwarfed the first, one that the shrewd tactics of a mere two Warbands would not be enough to dent.
His mission was simple, if perhaps out of the scope of a typical military operation. He, along with a small detachment of Marshers and Corsairs would ensure that the fleet would never make it out of port.
It was daring in the extreme, as fine of a tightrope act as Adalsteinn had ever walked. It had to be smart, fast and deadly aggressive and though there were other capable commanders on the Isle of Stone, none of those few had been written off by their respective Warband. His actions could be denied away as a desperate act by a deranged comrade killer turned pirate.
It was something only he could do, because he was the only one who could fail without repercussions.
Though he despised being chosen for this reason, he agreed. If only to get out of his cell and smell fresh air once again.
The attack came in the evening, insane enough that rumors reached the King and Queens ears, and only with Adalsteinn’s retelling of the events would they believe them to be true.
A month, and no small amount of gold had been spent buying up nearly every last drop of oil in the harbor city and every town within a week's travel, enough to create an artificial shortage.
Adalsteinn however had had no inclination to become an oil baron, as the evening of the attack nearly every drop of it had been spilled into the closed off harbor.
Though the battalion of marines guarding the harbor were confused, they were unable to put two and two together until the large chain that blocked off the harbor was dropped by an infiltrating group of marshers that had taken over the gatehouse.
As if on cue, a ship that had up until now been masked by the cover of night now lit up in a fiery conflagration, headed straight into the now open mouth of the harbor filled with enough military ships to launch a sizable invasion.
When the ship touched the oil blackened water, the whole of the harbor was consumed in a thick fog of smoke and flame, consuming every ship that had been moored there and spreading further to dock houses and warehouses along the waterfront.
Adalsteinn had not had time to estimate the damage, but by the time he had returned to the Isle of Stone a month later he let go of his worries.
He’d returned in time for the second half of a celebration, apparently a freak accident had destroyed an enemy fleet and Adalsteinn was more than happy to give mother nature the credit.
When he returned to the throne room to give his report, the bleak mood and temperamental Queen had Adalsteinn unsure of whether he was to be commended or executed.
After delivering his report, his plan to destroy the harbor without risking his secretive unit being caught or killed, the King and Queen finally seemed to relax, before nearly breaking out into song and dance.
They demanded food and drink, ordering Adalsteinn to stuff himself until he was more a slug than an Elk.
Though there would be a ceremony later, the King very unceremoniously ordered the Captain of the Guard to induct Adalsteinn as a Royal Guard himself. He would not allow such a conniving and effective commander to be under the employ of anyone else.
On his thirty first birthday, Adalsteinn’s Knighting ceremony was complete. He was now a member of the Royal Guard, the most skilled, most well equipped and most dangerous troop of warriors on the island.
He trained hard, for even the Royal Guard could put the most seasoned of Dawn Blades to shame, lead military formations and in particular trained those who manned Exer’s Wall.
He married a doe--Vilde, fathered nearly a dozen young Elk’s of his own, and grew old.
Friends, colleagues, and even a few of his children died from sickness. Soldiers he’d trained became officers, some left after fulfilling their duties, more than a few had braved the blizzards north of the wall never to return.
At the age of fifty and Captain of the Royal Guard, with hard trained and finely groomed Royal Guards to pass the torch to, Adalsteinn was content with his best days being behind him.
Until the blizzards began to subside, and the fog cleared.
One final mission, one last burst of youthful curiosity.
One last chance to satisfy the spirits of the dead, friends who had died to know what was beyond the veil of the storm.
Other:
The training yard.
Adalsteinn had spent the majority of his day as he had spent nearly every day of the last ten years of his life here, but today was a special special day.
Today was Friday, and unlike some other training officers he gave all of his students Saturday and Sunday off to decompress.
His training was stressful, mentally exhausting and back breaking at times. It had to be.
He was turning fawns into the best and brightest on the Isle of Stone, and he’d be damned if he failed.
Because his home and his children might be damned too, if he failed.
There were no small number of threats within and without from this island, a fact that he was acutely--excruciatingly aware of.
The King, and Queen--and they weren’t kidding anyone with their age, their heirs needed strong men and women. Strong and brave and smart--and full of grit up to their eyeballs.
So yes, they would get their day off. This time.
But it was Friday, and noone in the drill yard had any illusions about what that meant.
It was fight day. His favorite day.
In order for the fawns to go home and sleep off the last five days, and do whatever they had to to unwind, they had to go three rounds with the Guard Captain himself.
He’d learned over the years that sometimes the smart ones game the system. Slip through the cracks, miss the things they need to learn the most.
These fights made sure everyone on an individual level was learning and excelling, and he’d know how to personalize his training for those who weren't.
It was not something most of the fawns--his students, particularly looked forward to.
Volunteers first, the same ones every time.
They had the right idea. Get in, get out and enjoy their days off as fast as possible.
Huckabee, a a Brown Bear and Philippa, a Red Fox both played rock paper scissors for the first round.
The winner always went second.
Huckabee lost, taking his place in the sand arena before Adalsteinn, approximately ten feet apart.
His stance was good, wide. The Bear was taller and stronger than the Elk, but he hadn’t always used that to his advantage.
But something so basic wasn’t worth applauding. How he handled what was to come would determine next week's training regiment.
They both raised their wasters, wooden swords in a salute.
Adalsteinn wasted no time in pressing the attack after he’d dropped the salute.
A light harassing strike, meant to probe Huckabee’s guard and test his reactions without much risk.
He was here to test him after all, there was no value to this exercise if he started with a finisher.
Huckabee pressed into the attack with one of his own, a pair of wide steps forward pushing the Elk back into his half of the circle accompanied with light diagonal cuts.
But his goal was not to land a cut, Adalsteinn knew that very well, as this was a move he’d taught the bear.
Each cut was meant to pull the Elk’s guard away from his center line, a perfect opening for a decisive finishing stab.
Solid.
But he hadn’t been monitoring his footwork well enough.
A sharp step and Adalsteinn was inside of Huckabee’s guard, sword cast aside as one hand pressed against the Bears chest, the other grabbing him behind the knee.
He was heavy, that was for sure. But for a low tackle weight wasn’t important, it was body mechanics.
Adalsteinn followed the bear down into the guard, making sure that a flailing sword strike didn’t connect with him.
But the fight didn’t end here, as it would in another trainers arena. He pushed down in between the Bears legs as he tried to kick him off. His large paws connected to Adalsteinn’s hips, but he tilted them at an angle as each kick came in.
Were it a real opponent, Adalsteinn would have lowered his antlers and gored their eyes out, but Huckabee would learn nothing from it, even if he could do it safely.
The bear swung with a large paw, and although the Elk’s guard was up and tight, no amount of experience made a hit any softer.
He’d miscalculated--as another one came from the other side. Getting Huckabee on the ground was good, but there was nothing he could do to overpower him and get him to tap.
A choke would leave his head open, there was no guarantee he could overpower him long enough to put him in a joint-lock either.
He pushed off of the bear in time to avoid a third punch to the side of his head, taking a sharp step towards where Huckabee had dropped his waster.
The sharp pull around his legs meant that Huckabee had also discovered his plan, and was not eager to die on his own sword.
Adalsteinn had thrown his a distance when he went for the tackle, much as he wondered where it was this was not the time--
His fingers coiled around the waster just as Huckabee prepared to throw his weight into the Elk and take him to the ground.
But the Elk, at least today, was faster. A sharp clubbing across Huckabees head and the match was over.
Neither was gasping for air, extreme levels of fitness had been drilled into every soul in the yard. But it was only the first round.
They both stood up, dusted themselves off and retook their positions.
(M) The Reclamation of the North OOC
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