Much to his chagrin, Jannick's minor sigil was placed over his heart.

Jannick’s straight face is second to none, but after more than a few minutes in his company, it starts to become apparent that he does not want to be here. He behaves as a Templar should (not to mention a member of the Veradis Royal Guard, of which he has become de jure leader), but every day that passes is a day that it gets a little bit harder to pretend that his Blessing is the greatest gift on earth. He is a man of many words once you get him talking, but these days, very few of them are likely to be good.

Still, a decade on the beat makes habits that are hard to break. Catch him on a good day, and he can get along with just about anybody, and has plenty of practice breaking up arguments. He finds it easy to strike up and carry a conversation (even - perhaps especially - when his conversation partner isn’t making any sense), and insults and provocations roll like water off his back. He really cares about the wellbeing of those around him, and takes genuine interest in people from all walks of life. With five siblings and a throng of nieces and nephews, he also has a soft spot for children.

But the trait ground deepest into him from his time as a cop is vigilance. True to his training and a decade of practice, Jannick’s head is always on a swivel, looking out for any signs of brewing conflict or dangerous situations about to arise. Of course, old habits die hard, so he has a tendency to intervene in brewing conflicts wherever he finds them - even if his Scion isn’t involved.

Faith is a staple of everyday life in Veradis, and nowhere more than in the Holy City of Juniperus itself. As such, Jannick, the middle child of six, got all the fixings of the pious upbringing: he went to a religious school, he served as an altar boy, and his parents made sure the whole family was in the pews every Sunday. To him, it was as routine as it was rigorous, with one teaching drilled deepest of them all: the Goddess loves you.

That wasn’t to say he didn’t love the Church, but what captured his young mind was not the priest at the altar, but the guards at the door: the Church Knights in their gleaming armour, shining like angels in the sun. Juniperus was crawling with them; with no civilian authority in the Holy City, all matters of public order were handled by the Church. Church Knights patrolled the streets, directed traffic, put out fires, and of course, fought crime. To Jannick, it seemed like they were the very force that made the world go round. And he wanted to be one of them.

The year of his seventh birthday, he begged and pleaded with his parents for months to let him become a page. While they were apprehensive at first, his pitiable whining must have worn them down eventually, because when the day finally came, he was introduced to Sir Ulrich Gerhardt, a man not too long out of knighthood himself. The new year would see Jannick join Sir Ulrich at the Civitas Equitum, where he got the chance not only to learn the basics of knighthood, but to rub elbows with the scores of other Knights, pages and squires who called the city barracks home. It was a dream come true.

The instruction of an aspiring Church Knight is rigorous and demanding, but Jannick sucked up every drop of it, from the mounted swordplay lessons to the late-night toilet cleaning. But his very favourite part was the field work, when he got to accompany Sir Ulrich on his duties. Sir Ulrich wasn’t the Knight Jannick had always pictured when he played Knights and Monsters with his siblings: instead of a traveling monster slayer or the Templar to a Scion, he was an officer of the Juniperus Police Department. His duties were many and varied, and during his time as a squire Jannick accompanied Sir Ulrich on mounted patrols, investigations of crime scenes, arrests of petty criminals, and more small-time court appearances than Jannick cared to remember.

It was a strange job for a Knight, Jannick initially thought. It had its share of action, no doubt, and the JPD took immense pride in keeping the streets of the Holy City safe from all manner of crime. But on top of stopping criminals, the job possessed a level of intimacy with the people of Juniperus that had never before come to Jannick’s mind, but soon became to him the very essence of a Knight. In the stories of his youth, the Knights were always slaying monsters on behalf of faceless villagers or questing at the behest of nameless clergymen for the good of the all-encompassing Church. But in Sir Ulrich’s line of work, the villagers had faces, names, and children who got lost and needed finding; the clergy consoled people whose apartments were broken into and whose assailants needed to be held accountable for their crimes. After a while, police work became, to Jannick, the truest expression of knighthood.

When he was 21, the time for his own knighting finally came. It surprised no one, least of all Sir Ulrich, when Jannick traded his golden breastplate for a kevlar vest and joined the JPD.

No one would argue the fact that it was the right choice for Jannick, but life came at him fast, and he learned soon after his knighting that the calls Sir Ulrich saw fit to bring his squire along on were not the only calls the JPD had to deal with. Juniperus had no more crime than any other city of comparable size - with its heavy Knight presence, it probably had less - but the police department was kept busy all the same. Crushing boredom on patrol could turn into a deadly encounter in an instant; every time the radio screeched, Jannick never knew what he would face next. At first, it was exhilarating. In time, it came to test his faith.

He grew up learning - knowing - one thing above all others: the Goddess loved her children. That was why she created them; that was why, when they called out to her in anguish, she gifted them her essence, creating the Scions. But he was no theologian; despite his training as a Knight, he didn’t know or understand the deep mysteries of the faith Incepta had instilled into her Church. He didn’t understand why, if She loved Her children so much, they so frequently forgot Her teachings and turned on each other. He didn’t know why the Mother was so content to let it happen.

As a police officer, Jannick saw firsthand the depths of human suffering and depravity. He unearthed the OD victims from their squalid apartments, nameless and known only to landlords complaining of the smell. He wrestled battered women as they begged him hysterically to let their boyfriends go free, only to respond to their house again the next weekend. He pulled the mangled bodies of children from twisted cars while the drunks who hit them walked away spotless. When he looked up, Jannick saw the gleaming spires of the Cathedra Incepta, the points of the Sigil star embracing the city like the open, loving arms of the Goddess herself. But when he looked around, he wondered if he and his heavenly Mother were seeing the same thing.

The years passed, and he didn’t pray much anymore.

Jannick’s transition from cop to Templar wasn't so much a choice as a mandatory transfer. Apparently out of the blue, Sir Ulrich, who by then had become Captain of the JPD, referred Jannick to Fyodor, who (for reasons mysterious to Jannick) accepted him. Jannick tried to protest, but Sir Ulrich wouldn't hear it: He insisted that Jannick was headed for disaster if he stayed on the beat, but that he could still serve the Goddess as a Templar instead. All Jannick could hear was that for some unstated reason, his mentor didn't think he was good enough to be a cop anymore. Try as he might to resist it, Sir Ulrich made it clear that if Jannick refused this assignment, he would no longer have a position in the JPD, and perhaps not even in the Knighthood.

It was a dirty trick, but there was nothing Jannick could do about it. A year of Templar training helped him cool off a bit, but to this day he and Sir Ulrich are still not on speaking terms. His assignment as Templar of Light to the future Prince of Veradis was a shock to all involved, and came with plenty of congratulatory letters from his old police buddies and a very proud phone call from his parents, but Jannick struggled a little to share their enthusiasm.

If someone had told his seven-year-old self he'd someday be Templar to the Prince of Veradis, he would have thought it was a dream come true. But as it turned out, the Prince of Veradis cared more about his title than the subjects it represented, and life as a Templar meant squinting at Royal Guard schedules and smiling for cameras as he counted down the minutes to his next smoke break.

They took back his standard-issue handgun when he left the police department, so Jannick spent his stipend on a (nicer) pair of his own, which he carries in his shoulder holster at all times. In addition to that, he'll suit up with a military-style carbine when he has time to prepare, and he's always been an advocate of the good old-fashioned baton.