Name: Wen-Li Dulcette the Wind-tossed Blossom
Physical Description:A woman around six foot tall. She is not so much slender as lithe - normally clad in a faded red poncho with silver gilding. Her long skirt is also red, and billows impressively with her movements. Her hands are covered with gloves - the left is black, the right one longer and white, but long years with instruments have made the fingers dexterous and nimble. Perhaps her most noticeable feature is her headwear - her dark hair is cropped short and hidden underneath an ornate hat, and her face hidden beneath one of a seemingly endless multiple of masks. Her actual face? Well, it's been so long she's almost forgotten herself. Her eyes are a vibrant, almost electric blue, and gleam through the eye holes of her mask. She carries a large parasol segmented into dark panels - which seems odd, at first glance. Even odder is the long, thin cable than connects to one of the traditional Orinost instruments - the guitar. This guitar, when played, roars much louder and differently to any normal guitar, for the energy of the sun flows through its strings.
Job: Wen-Li is a singer, rememberer, and gatherer of tales. She sings for the dead and for the coin of the living, and gathers their stories so they might be recorded. She can sing, dance, tell tales, perform
bian lian, and if need be, protect her virtue with a thrown knife. Her sleight-of-hand can be used for more than just masks, after all. She's also a dab hand at painting (from the masks again) but that doesn't occur very often.
Personality: Easy to smile (or put on a smiling mask, rather) and laugh. A dry sense of humour - even black - nonetheless fails to cover her kind nature. She resents Imperial authority, seeing them as blunderers at best and openly harmful to the people at worst. Obviously, words are her resort in a problem, and most people can be persuaded, tricked, or confused into seeing things her way.
Despite her easy laugh, the Wind-Tossed Blossom is none-the-less deep in mourning for her country, now little more than echoes. A funeral in Orinost involves telling long stories about the dead, the cremation and the scattering of ashes almost unimportant by comparison. What mattered of a person was their actions, not their mortal form - the memories they left behind. For her country, nothing but ruin in it's glorious, tragic defeat, spreading her tales is a form of weeping for the land she has lost.
Biography: There's nothing left for men in Orinost. In their final hour, as the Imperial forces battered down the gates with cannon and drenched the streets in red with gun and bayonet, the King's widow beseeched the furies of the machines to sing a death wail for their country. The dirge tore across the land, turning bricks to dust and men to ash, poisoning the soil and the very air, disappearing the thousand-year history of the Orinost in one cataclysmic instant. It's been a long time, and the plants have begun to grow again - the standing stones that are all that remain of the prowess of the Orinost are being swallowed by grass. The men who go too far into that land still sicken, with no cure or remedy.
Only the few Orinost outside the Kingdom in its final hours survived. They're scattered, now - some settle in the Far West in tiny enclaves, hidden and nursing a slow hatred for the Empire, too few to ever act on it. Others - like Wen-Li - have taken up the task of spreading the songs and stories of their people, so when they are gone, perhaps some remnant of their fallen Kingdom will remain. There's few places for them, so they blow hither and fro like tumbleweed on the wind.
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Topic: The Far West (Wuxia Steampunk Western RPG) All full up, waitlist available (Read 21696 times)