Name: Gan HaiDescription: Clearly foreign in both appearance and mannerism,
Gan Hai is a rather small, fit woman in her mid-thirties. Her long, straight black hair, usually done up in a tight bun, contrasts starkly with her porcelain skin and spectral blue eyes. She has smooth, rounded facial features-- flat ears, a discrete nose, and a broad jawline with a slight chin.
Though quiet and soft-spoken,
Gan Hai has an incongruent tendency to make wide, almost theatrical gestures while speaking. Her stride is swift, purposeful, and somewhat long for someone of her unremarkable height. She wears light, airy clothing no matter the climate, seeming unaffected by any weather.
Background: Once, there was an Udanese water mage named
Fei Xue, of the
Lan Niu clan. She joined her clan's militia as part of the mandatory service required for her education and quickly became recognized as one of the most talented warmages of her generation. Though she declined any promotions that placed her in a leadership position, she still collected numerous awards and honors, including the coveted ceremonial name of
Xun Shui-- a name carried only by her most revered ancestors. Her enemies whispered with fear of her ability to call down the wrath of the skies and the vengeance of the seas, her allies regarded her with the respect and esteem born of many successful campaigns, and her clan, elevated to a much higher station by the sheer force of her talents alone, lavished her with praise and the ancestors' favor.
All of that changed when
Xun Shui was sent out with orders to destroy an enemy camp and interrogate any survivors. When she arrived, instead of an enemy camp, she found a small, peaceful-seeming peasant village. Confused and certain there had been some mistake,
Xun Shui questioned her commander, but was admonished and told to obey the orders she'd been given. That day, the village was frozen by a freak winter storm. The army spent two days searching before they found a man in the outskirts of the village, buried two feet in snow and half-dead from the cold.
Xun Shui was ordered to 'coax' information out of him. She would later be told that the man was the leader of the People's Militia, a rebellion which had recently been crushed unceremoniously. No one knew whether the village had been harboring him knowingly-- more importantly, no one cared.
Having already completed her mandatory service years ago,
Xun Shui made the difficult decision to retire two weeks after the incident, to the alarm of her clan and confusion of everyone who knew her. Though she was not stripped of her honors or titles, neither friend nor family fully understood her motivations for leaving such a successful and prestigious career. They were even more taken aback when
Xun Shui took the new ceremonial name of
Ning Quan and began a peaceful, unremarkable life as a scholar, rather than the life of courtly intrigue that most retired warmages pursued. Though they tried and tried and tried again, first to convince
Ning Quan to go back to using her great talents for the good of the empire, then to understand what drove her down such a path, they were politely but soundly rebuffed. Eventually, one by one, they all drifted away from her, toward more ambitious and exciting individuals.
It was then, alone and surrounded by little more than books and other intellectual nothings, that a weathered man who called himself
Jia Guo approached her-- and asked to borrow a book. Though she found him mysterious and arrogant in equal measure,
Jia Guo turned out to be a former general and warmage himself, and soon he and
Ning Quan formed a strange friendship of borrowed books, old war stories, and evening tea.
One day, over a cup of fine tea,
Jia Guo nonchalantly revealed to
Ning Quan that his current name was a mere disguise, and that his real name was
Zhang Jun. Through veiled allusions and implications,
Zhang Jun told her that he was a member of the very revolution that
Ning Quan had once helped to put down. However, the revolution had survived and continued deep underground, and now he was here to present her a choice-- continue living a dull, studious life that she was never meant for, turn him into the state which had ruthlessly commanded her to slaughter a village to capture one man... or help him and other discontented warmages like herself overthrow these greedy, arrogant rulers consumed by their petty power plays and create a new government with the consent of the people, where every woman and man worked happily and lived peacefully under their own governorship.
Two years later, riots and uprisings began to erupt all across Udan, as the People's Militia signaled their attack. Led by the revolutionaries
Zhang Jun and
Zhuan Chao, they captured several towns in an attack that took the Udanese government by surprise. However, their early fortunes swiftly reversed-- the threat to their supremacy caused the many feuding noble clans to unite under one banner for the first time in centuries. The two sides fought to a stalemate for some years. Then, in a surprising turn of events, the People's Militia was routed and slaughtered in the span of one hour.
Zhang Jun and
Zhuan Chao were captured during battle, but, while former was executed in a lengthy show trial a month later, the latter was kept imprisoned for reasons entirely unknown to her. Several years later,
Zhuan Chao was branded with the characters
"Gan Hai" across her shoulder blades, a ceremonial name for criminals, traitors, and spies of her clan, before finally being banished from Udan.
Gan Hai wandered several countries in the years after her exile, brooding over the failed rebellion and wondering where
Zhang Jun and she went wrong. At last, she reached an epiphany: the People's Militia had been led by seasoned and inexperienced warmages alike, but their army had consisted mostly of peasants, artisans, and common soldiers. Their only mistake had been treating them like noble warriors instead of the unwashed masses they were. From there, she devised a new philosophy from the corpse of the old: the vulgar class is not suited to govern themselves, and, like children, must be guided (even commanded) by wiser hands than could normally be found amongst the common crowd.
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