Thomas Jaworski

=Biography= The Jaworski’s have been a proud family for as long as any of them can remember. Sometime around the year 2000, one of the Jaworski’s traced their family lineage back to when their original Polish ancestors came over to the United States in the year 1894. It was a note of pride amongst those of the family when they confirmed a family legend, that they were purebred Polish. A further note of pride for the family was that they had had at least one family member serve in the armed forces for every major conflict since World War I. This included both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. And not to break tradition, a member of the family also served in what has been called the war on terror. This is not to say that all Jaworski’s served in wartime, a few served in peacetime, and many Jaworski’s never served at all. Regardless, it was always considered an honor within the family when one of them decided to enlist. The family continued their traditions, keeping at least one strand of pure bred Polish among them, with many still enlisting over the years.

One young and recently wed Jaworski had enlisted in the military, and was assigned as part of the security detail on a colony ship to Rukast. When faced with the decision to bring his family along, both he and his wife agreed, they would go together. And so it was that the Jaworski family came to Rukast. 160 years later, the current generation, Thomas, Michelle and Ryan, all still claim to be purebred Poles. How true that statement is is debatable, but at the least the family has done their best over the years, marrying those with at least some obvious Polish descent.

Thomas Jaworski is the oldest of the three current Jaworski children, with Michelle two years younger than him and Ryan three years younger than Michelle. The three of them grew up in a house run mostly by their mother, as their father had continued the Jaworski tradition and served in the armed forces to protect the American colony. He was rarely at home because of this, and when Thomas become old enough he started to shoulder the responsibility of raising his brother and sister. At first, as any normal teenager, he did so grudgingly at the urgings of his mother. But as middle school became high school, Tom gradually started to see this protection as a way of life and began to engrain it as a part of his life. This instilled in him a firm sense of both loyalty and protection of those he cared about. In high school, while he took to his newly realized way of life with vigor and hard work, it did prove to be too much for him. Mid-Junior year, he crashed.

For three months in his academic career he collapsed. He barely did any of the work assigned to him, but he held onto his now self-appointed task of looking after his brother and sister, not letting his family know of his collapse. He managed to pull through it by holding tightly onto his family and fortunately didn’t fail any of his classes. He was close to that point on a few of them though. His parents found out, which meant he and his mom had a few long talks over the winter break. He never told either Michelle or Ryan about it though, rationalizing that what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

With his talks with his mother, he gradually realized that the way of life he had chosen for himself was what he wanted to keep doing, and that his studies were less important to him. And as such, due to pressure from his father and from his own self-appointment, he chose to enlist. Due to his father’s already established position in the military, he managed to get into the academy for officers. There, where his studies pertained to his career and to protecting those that he loves, he found that he could push himself harder without the breakdown he’d suffered from previously. He’d given his life a sense of purpose, and pursued it with zeal.

He graduated from the academy, having done relatively well. He wasn’t incredibly outstanding, but he did well enough to land a good assignment. He served in the American military for about a year, participating in a few border skirmishes, but most importantly gaining the friendship and trust of most of his platoon. That trust became invaluable to him, especially when a pirate raid hit him hard. He wasn’t involved at all in the raid, but his family, including his recently retired father, were all travelling to take a vacation. They were hit by a pirate raid, and all of them were killed.

The news hit Tom hard, that in one blow his entire family could be wiped out. He took some leave off from his unit to get himself together, and through the grief one thought kept recurring in his mind. The military that swore to protect the people of this colony had failed. He resolved that something was terribly wrong with the military if they would allow that to happen, and the thought that he could do better repeatedly stuck itself into his head. He rejected it at first, but it kept coming back, even when he got himself back on duty and saw something sloppy, something that could get someone killed. Finally, he broke down and told some of the soldiers he trusted most, that something was dearly wrong with the military they served

After spreading his ideas around to those soldiers he trusted most, they agreed that after their terms were up, they would find each other and try and do something about what they had realized. And so, after three more years Jaworski’s term was up. All he had seen in his time serving only reinforced what he had come to believe, and as such, he and those of his platoon who met up with him left American borders and started up their own military.

He started with only about a squad and a half’s worth of soldiers, of varying ranks, but gradually worked himself up to the level of a platoon again, tending to keep his more trusted men as his NCOs. He was strict on certain aspects of their conduct, but lenient with others. He allowed customization of uniforms and equipment, but insisted that innocent civilians would not be harmed in any of their operations. Not to say that civilians could not be targets, but that innocent bystanders were not fair game, and that collateral damage be kept to a minimum. He let personal effects be, but insisted that his men act as a professional unit and not a band of pirates.

After about a year of fighting independently, Jaworski’s platoon got into a particularly brutal engagement, and Jaworski found his platoon lacking in supplies, morale, and in dire need of some new recruits. As such, he told his men that they were headed for Atlantis, to resupply, take some much needed leave, and try and get some new recruits to fill the places of those he’d lost.