Difference between revisions of "Wandering Blade"

After losing everything in a house fire, Jim Theis decided that it was his chance to start a new life. Unsatisfied with the "average" life, he set off as a nomad, drifting from town to town looking for answers about himself, other people, and life itself. During his travels, Jim stumbled upon a hidden grove guarding a great secret: the mystical blade, Orshkibub, a relic of unknown power! Upon drawing the blade, Orshkibub bound itself to Jim making him its chosen wielder, a bond only broken by death. Though Jim was untrained with use of a sword, the knowledge of Orshkibub's previous wielders flows through it, guiding Jim... the Wandering Blade!

Jim Theis's birth was ordinary, under no particular sign, and to parents of little importance. His childhood was equally uninteresting; he grew up in a small Ohio town leading an average life. He was more smart than he was athletic, but neither aspect stood out against the other by any true significance. He continued his education, attending a smaller liberal arts college, graduating with a B.A. in English. From there he drifted from job to job, career path to career path. Life had been easy, but uneventful for Jim. His goals were like many others, acquire wealth, a spouse, children, and in this someone can find happiness.

For a long time, Jim believed this, in the American dream. That with hard work comes the reward of happiness and fulfillment. But as each day closed, as Jim's mind drifted in to the foggy aether of sleep, he heard a voice. A small voice that echoed for seconds which felt like years; “Nothing,” it would say. “There is nothing.” And the voice grew. It crawled out of the chasm of the mind that makes the subconscious and made a nest in his thoughts and actions. He grew detached from the few friends he had, his hobbies. His passions died. Each day was a personal struggle, a testament to human will -- to see how many times he could push the boulder up the mountain. By twenty-eight, Jim was alone. He was a shadow that knew only one truth, one absolute: hard word lead to happiness. He just wasn't working hard enough. If he would only work harder, then surely happiness would follow.

It was a small fire that burned through his house, but it was enough. Support beams were damaged enough to condemn the building, smoke thick enough to ruin his possessions. In one afternoon everything Jim's life had amounted to rose into the air and drifted away. “From nothing, to nothing,” he heard his own voice say in his head. “There is nothing,” he told the smoldering remains.

He stayed in a hotel, and in those days he thought. He thought about the American dream, and how his was dead. That insurance would try to find any way possible to not pay out, that what he called “his” was gone, that it was never truly his. He thought back to his college days: the last time he could remember being happy. He thought of the great minds he had read, of Nietzsche, of Marx, of Derrida and of Althusser. He realized the source of his own unhappiness was not from lack of effort, but from a removal of what it was to be human: the connection between people. He had placed so much emphasis on the artificially valued that he had neglected his own personhood. From then he decided he would no longer answer the call of what he once thought was the dream, the one path to life. He would search for his own dream, blazing his own path.

And that's when Jim Theis became a person of importance.