Meefan Sholank
In children, one may find a natural order. Some lead, some follow... and some march to the sound of the drums that no one is playing. Of these few, Meefan found himself counted. Meefan was a strange boy born into a normal-enough household: his mother a homemaker, his father a loyal member of the Legio.
Growing up, he was not as strong, nor as fast, not as ësmartí - at least, as most people define smart, for his thoughts were not as most men think - as some of the other boys. Further, he was less ambitious than most boys - he was content to think his own thoughts, to ponder, until something happened that he felt warranted a response. He did talk - almost overmuch - when queried - it was simply that his words were... odd, somehow, as though the thoughts he expressed were produced by a mind founded on different principles.
Unsurprisingly, he learned to be fairly withdrawn, for even his brothers and sisters were not quite sure of him. With age, however, he learned to have confidence in his own, undoubtedly unique, viewpoint, and in his eccentricities, although how that happened - with all his odd traits being berated at every turn - is anyoneís guess.
As a teenager, he refused to obtain any ënormal occupationí, much to the consternation of his parents. Working at the library as a bookkeeper used up a large amount of his time, and he got a chance to talk with some of the members of Iridineís intellectual elite. However, many of them dislike him - he was stubborn, and had a view of the universe that was - to say the least - odd. His pontifications contained bizarre leaps of logic that were quite clear to him, but anathema to most others. Still, he learned much, even if his odd perspective was never resolved.
When the library was closed, he decided that he needed to see the world. He used the remains of his savings to travel with a merchant to the Aestivan League, where he took up odd jobs - bookkeeping, manual labor, gardening, among other things - and saw as much as he could, motivated by wanderlust. He wandered far and wide for quite a few years - he visited Parcines, Gadaene, and even went further north than Remath, exploring the bizarre native tribes.
If most people in the civilized world considered him strange before his pilgrimage across the world, his exploration did not help him. Indeed, few men believed the stories of strange men he told. However, the few men and women that knew him noticed a change in him after he had visited the strange, unknown northern lands - he had an aggression that was lacking in him before, an ambitious thirst that lies in most men but had lain dormant in Meefan. Exactly the extent of these changes was unknown, as were the sources, but it did serve to make him more understandable to most people.
For the first time in his life, he had begun to pursue the martial path. He returned from the wild lands with an axe, and both the ability and the will to use it. Furthermore, Meefan eschewed the low-paying jobs he had before - he was able to keep the attention of nobles and patricians alike with his exotic stories of far-away lands. They gave him rewards far greater than those of a simple laborer, even if they thought his mostly-true stories to be simply entertaining fabrication.
He eventually returned to Iridine, driven by some unknown motivation to revisit his homeland. His parents had moved to Monlon, and were fairly surprised to see him - they had assumed he had died quite a few years earlier. He continued his bardly life, and also continued his practice with his axe. He still marches to the drum that no one is playing, but now, people know for a certainly he is quite different, rather than simply suspect. If this is an improvement... shall be seen.