There isn't much difference between humans and laguz -- or any other living thing. Similar needs drive them all: for food, for shelter, and for meaning. As a child, a little boy born to a bird tribe on a serene mountaintop aerie never wanted for these things. Prey was provided every night; he had a safe place to sleep; and he found all the meaning in the world in the infinite expanse of the sky at his wingtips. The peaceful summit was a haven, the only world he knew.
He grew up an only nestling, raised by who he knew to be his grandmother: an old, matronly woman who was no less severe-looking for her age. There was another who lived, at times, with them: his aunt, he was told. He doesn't remember much of her -- only that her feathers always looked dirty, she seemed to dislike him, and made grandmother more easily angry when she was around. He didn't much like her being there, but luckily she was often nowhere to be seen for days at a time. In their aerie, there were things he wasn't allowed to do: fly too far to the other side of the summit, talk to anyone he didn't recognize, or eat anything that his grandmother didn't feed him. His grandmother was a strict bird, and his testy aunt also seemed to harbor some kind of respectful fear of her, so he assumed that these were demands that everyone reasonably grew up with.
An independent child by nature, he didn't question his grandmother's overprotectiveness until he was about ten or eleven years old. He had no friends, no one to talk to besides his grandmother and, occasionally, his fickle aunt, but he didn't mind. His time was occupied with the stories his grandmother told -- of their heritage, of their kind -- and with flying. They weren't the only aerie on the summit; he sometimes spotted others like him, a mother walking with a sullen child, or a couple adult men lounging on a high perch. Once or twice to memory, they approached him, but he ignored them as per his grandmother's orders, and was never bothered.
At twelve years old, he began learning to hunt. Surprisingly, his aunt taught him, though her teaching methods were impatient and unspecific, and she often berated and struck him for not understanding. One lesson, a shrew got away due to his aunt prompting him to strike too early, and she rounded on him with rage. When he protested that she had misdirected him, she lashed out with a wicked talon. His grandmother found out later that afternoon, and he genuinely feared someone might be killed in the ferocity of their argument. It was far from the first time they had fought, but something about this time seemed different. By morning, his aunt was nowhere to be found, and his grandmother gruffly announced that she would be taking over his hunting practice.
His grandmother was severe, her language often caustic, but she only ever got truly angry with him for one thing: talking to strangers. He didn't realize how much until he told her once about being approached by unfamiliar birds on occasion, and how he wouldn't pay them any mind. Immediately, his grandmother began demanding who they were, what they looked like, and what they wanted from him. When he couldn't answer, she reiterated with piercing vitriol that he was never to associate with those he didn't know. Growing into his preteen years now, Jupi couldn't help but ask: why? That 'why' blossomed simply from meeting strangers to questions he had never even considered: why had he never socialized with anyone his age before? Why did his aunt come and go so often and seem to dislike him so much? Why wasn't he permitted to fly beyond this mountain summit?
He did not ask necessarily to rebel; though free-spirited and mischievous, he was not a disobedient child -- it was hard to be with his grandmother. And he did not necessarily covet these privileges either; he simply wanted to question. But his grandmother misinterpreted his curiosity for desire and called him ungrateful for what he had, expressly forbidding him from asking her such questions again. He was only twelve, and she did not think that he could understand the answers he was looking for.
Of course, that only made him more curious. He couldn't help it, and now that he was growing older and emerging from beneath his grandmother's overbearing presence, he was beginning to realize that things around him were different from what he had always considered normal. When he saw the occasional children again, led by a single, glassy-eyed parent, he realized that the looks they gave him were filled with longing. He realized that the men who lounged around the fringes of the summit talked crudely, and often smelled bad. But he didn't know what these meant.
A couple months after grandmother and his aunt's fight, his aunt came back. It was uncommon, though not unheard of, for her to be gone for so long. This time, though, when she came back, she was stumbling and could barely fly. Nothing she said made sense, and she smelled bad in the same way that the other birds around the summit did. As soon as Jupi helped her into the house, his grandmother whisked in to squirrel his aunt away, and suddenly he realized that she was trying to hide her from him. Why? Without warning, his aunt exploded at his grandmother, lashing out with vitriol he had never seen from her aside from that one hunting lesson, calling her things he didn't understand. Without thinking, he pushed himself between them, covering his face, expecting his aunt to strike him... but there was nothing. She looked at him with an expression he'd never forget, and then stalked away. He and his grandmother went silently to bed.
There was no more running, and even his grandmother saw that. It came out the next day: how the peaceful mountain summit he thought a paradise was, for so many, a prison. How the simplicity and quiet he had always enjoyed was in fact desolation. He learned of how the tribe -- if it could even be called that, for the inhabitants had few attachments to each other and lived in broken family pockets that barely interacted -- had been pushed, slowly but surely, to the fringes of Yeon by competition, and now claimed only this mountain summit where the prey was so scarce that one could hunt for an entire day and glimpse nothing. The "plenty" he had known as a child was thanks only his grandmother's cunning and ferocity; unbeknownst to him, she was feared and hated as a tyrant of the summit who was no longer energetic enough to hunt and so fed her only grandchild by stealing prey from others. She had forbidden him from talking to anyone for fear that anyone would take retribution on her by harming him.
Finally, he learned that who he had thought was his aunt was in fact his mother, a deadbeat bird who had failed her first child by another father and survived by scavenging a few quick bites of someone else's catch before they drove her away, rinse and repeat. She spent her hours not pitifully begging for food in the company of a revolving door of men, each lasting no longer than a year. Jupi's grandmother could not stomach the thought of her daughter leaving another child to waste away, and so had taken Jupi in as her own, allowing her daughter to stay in the aerie only because, for all her disappointment, she didn't have the heart to abandon her own offspring.
The shock almost overwhelmed him. All he had thought he knew was in fact the complete opposite. For the next over a year, he watched as the mountain summit around him lost its luster. He began to see what his grandmother had described, what he hadn't been able to understand. He saw the hungry children and the lack of healthy families. He had never thought about why he'd never seen a child with both mother and father, but only one, and sometimes none. But most of all, he saw what he in later years would realize was pervasive hopelessness. Despite their misery, the birds of the mountain summit never attempted to leave for a better life elsewhere. Instead of hunting or looking for opportunities, they would spend their days sitting around, watching the world deteriorate around them. Convinced that their choices didn't matter, they continued to waste away, passing their apathy into their children and their grandchildren.
In hindsight, Jupi wonders if he might have ended up the same way by now -- deadbeat, self-sabotaging, fathering his second or third child that he had no intention of caring for -- if not for his grandmother. Bully and terror that she might have been to others, it was she who saw his listlessness grow in those two years and decided that this was no place for him to live the rest of his life. She was old, and her own daughter was beyond change. But he had the rest of his life ahead of him and, as difficult as it was for her to let him go, she knew it would do him more harm than good to stay in the mire where he'd grown up.
Fifteen years of age saw him joining a mercenary troupe that his mom's fling-of-the-moment had connections with ( the only good thing that came of any of her men, his grandmother said ). It wasn't much, but it was a serious life in comparison to the bleak, aimless life of the mountain summit. He left without much fanfare; he didn't have many belongings to take with him, and his grandmother wasn't one for emotional scenes.
As it turned out, things weren't amazing; the mercenary troupe turned out to be more akin to a group of hired thieves, their expertise not so much in hard-won combat as it was in guerilla tactics to disorient so they could strike hard and get out. As their youngest and smallest member, Jupi was assigned the role of scout. He would soon pick up on the fact that this was an extraneous position given to expendable members due to its solitary -- and therefore dangerous -- nature. His job was to scan the site of the next job ( or 'heist' ) for obstacles and eliminate any initial barriers to the group's success. But his options were to either do it or return to the summit, and he knew his grandmother would probably kill him for giving up. Besides that, even if it the troupe was uncaring and crude, and the work perilous, he was finally living a life beyond the limits of what he'd known. That alone was thrilling enough to keep him going.
For better or worse, he ended up being good at it. Or he had to be. Though the scouting was first pointless and frankly just extremely dangerous hazing missions, they gradually became more important to the troupe's planning. He discovered information that would make or break jobs, or eliminated vital threats. It wasn't much as one bird, but slowly he became a convenient, then necessary, asset.
So necessary, in fact, that the leader of his troupe found him to be a threat. He was aging, and Jupi was coming into his prime. Jupi will never know exactly how his old boss had these connections, but part of the reason that their troupe had lasted so long without either being caught or out-maneuvered by other similar gangs was due to what the rest of them had always called 'the boss' network'. Not a single person, even the right hands, knew all of the boss' secrets, and all of the contacts that he knew. Frankly, Jupi thought it was almost laughable that someone like him -- a single miscreant hawk from the middle of nowhere -- was perceived as a threat to someone like the boss. Either way, he'd likely never know the details of the decision; he'd never had an interest in politics.
All he knew was that one day, he was approached by one of the senior members and told he'd be leaving. He was no longer part of the troupe. In fact, he was going onto bigger and better places ( Jupi knew better than to take those words at face value by now, but he wasn't going to complain ); the boss had recommended him to none other than the King of Sampia himself for a highly specialized force. Once more, he had little choice but to pack up and take wing, but Jupi was never one to turn away from the promise of something new.