A talented dancer, Jean isn't shy when it comes to much. She freely draws on her experiences living in a travelling caravan, on her numerous adventures just one step ahead of Althena's Guard and their crackdowns on simple joys. She finds beauty in life in all sorts of places, from out of the way locations to the right sort of company, and can drink a staggering amount of alcohol and put away a serious amount of good food. Overall, she'd prefer people to think of her as a performer at heart, and to focus on bringing joy to peoples' lives, one way or another. Even being on the run from Althena's Guard, branded a Vile Fiend for her association with Lucia the Destroyer, doesn't seem to bring her down. This front is even true--but it's not the /whole/ truth. Jean hides a great many worries under her carefree facade, and despite her efforts to hide it her past has been revealed: Jean is a former member of the Shadow Dragon Cult, stolen as a child and trained extensively in the arts of death. She was a ruthless assassin, a terrfiying force before she turned her back on that life, nearly dying in the process. She wanted to live without ever fighting again, but found she had to take up violence in order to protect those she cared for, and now she does what she can to use her skills in service to a higher purpose. Is that just an excuse, though? Can she ever really escape what she had to become?
Jean is a talented dancer, highly athletic and skilled in a variety of styles. Her skill is such that she's learned to channel magic into her steps when she chooses, drawing on Althena's Blessing of the Shadow element to create illusions and other effects to hinder foes--magic she learned from others in the caravan. She's not much of a mage, though. In truth most of her combat abilities stem from pure physicality; she can leverage her grace in combat and even use dancing props like her fans as weapons. ...But it goes beyond creative use of dancing.
The truth is that Jean's combat abilities stem from long years of training in the martial arts--in the arts of the Shadow Dragon. It's a powerful style, one that draws on the whole body as a weapon; it favors powerful strikes and unrelenting advances, drawing on the darkness within its practitioner to ignore pain and sow terror and pain in her foes. With it, she is capable not only of precise and devastating blows, but of directing her ki into distance strikes--or even in techniques that turn a foe's life energy against him, like the dreaded Shadow Dragon Palm. It is a brutal art of death, and its true practice revels in its awful methods.
Jean once swore to herself that she'd never use its techniques again, but in the face of an awful danger that threatens far more than just herself, she has drawn on some of this power. Sometimes, she's drawn on more of it than she would like to admit that she still can. Maybe most frightening of all about the Shadow Dragon is that the level at which Jean practices now is nothing close to the power she brought to bear in the days before she left the Cult, and she may have been the best, but she was not the only talented student.
