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groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
groundrules) wrote2021-01-08 03:30 pm
Entry tags:
applications
Eastbound is primarily an invite-only game — each existing player can currently invite up to one person per month, or get in touch about further invites. Existing players can hold two characters in game. A third character can be applied, if players can prove they have met activity requirements for two consecutive months with their existing two characters and have stayed engaged with the game. If you don't have an invite, somehow stumbled upon this neck of the woods, and you’d like to stay, drop the mod journal a line — we'll try to figure it out.
As of Oct. 1, cast/game caps are off. Please note, as of Dec. 1, Eastbound only has 3-4 months of gameplay left.
WHAT CHARACTERS CAN BE APPLIED?
YES: canon and original characters, if they have a solid and consistent personality and background. Characters brought in after they've died are a-okay. For characters taken from a time point just as they're in the process of dying, please read below on meeting medical requirements.
NO (at this time): real people, original characters set in a canon environment, characters from canons or canon instalments that have been released for less than one month, characters with imported development from other games (CRAU), alternate universe, or gender-swapped versions of canon characters.
Children or characters with very specific medical/magical/environment needs: appable, but please make a note of how your character will ICly meet their requirements and stay alive. Likewise, if you are applying for a character taken just as they're dying, provide a suggestion for how they can be kept alive on arrival (this might be easier in some app cycles than others). You can bend the world a little to make miracles happen (ex: a substitute for the medication your character needs to survive can be found for a high price at certain apothecaries, etc.)
Characters that were dropped or swept by activity checks: yes, but they’ll come back without their previous memories, if they are applied in by a different player.
APPLICATIONS CLOSED
→ NAVIGATION MENU
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CONTACT:
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE GAME?: followed friends' replurks, also given ye olde modly green light
CHARACTER: Wen Kexing
CANON: Word of Honor (drama adaptation of Faraway Wanderers by Priest)
CANON POINT: Crying In The Rain (episode 14)
BACKGROUND: Zhou Zishu is the head of Prince Jin’s secret police, and after years of a life doing terrible things in the shadows and watching his friends die, he has left the prince’s employ to wander the country and do good deeds, to accumulate merits in heaven. Of course, one cannot simply leave the secret police; in order to get away, Zhou Zishu has had to perform a form of slow suicide, and he’ll die in three years.
Thus wandering aimlessly, he stumbles into a 14-year-old boy, Zhang Chengling, whose whole family has been murdered. Zhou Zishu is convinced to bring the boy to safety, to a friend of the family. Along the way, he meets Wen Kexing, who is ostensibly also wandering the country aimlessly, accompanied by his disciple Gu Xiang, a pretty girl who is also a ruthless fighter. Despite Zhou Zishu’s best efforts, Wen Kexing insists on traveling with him.
On this journey, the four of them stumble into a plot involving the major martial arts sects to rediscover the world’s most powerful martial arts technique, strong enough to conquer the world; and the world’s most powerful medical technique, able to heal any ailment and raise the dead. These hidden techniques are as dangerous as they are powerful, and putting the pieces together involves murder, mayhem, and theft.
ABILITIES | POWERS:
Martial artist wuxia stuff including:
- He can manipulate spiritual energy (qi), which is a type of life energy that circulates through the body. It’s a buff for qualities such as speed, stamina, and endurance. Spiritual energy can be manipulated as a weapon or to heal.
- He’s a gifted swordsman, able to take famous sword styles and effortlessly improvise and improve upon them.
- In canon, however, he prefers to kill with a fan.
- He can can suck the life and blood out of a person with a palm strike, leaving their skin grey and withered, resembling a desiccated corpse.
- He can travel extremely quickly, with his feet hardly touching the ground, leaving no trace. He can also jump long distances, seemingly flying, leaping up to rooftops, or running along treetops.
- When fighting near water, can make fountains spring up like at the Las Vegas Bellagio.
- He can sneak up on even high-level martial artists without being noticed.
- He is able to speak softly yet direct his voice at a distance to a specific target.
- He has some medical skills, including being able to treat injuries and poisons.
- His fighting skills are sufficient that he can rule a valley full of the worst martial artist criminals in all of the central plains, holding his top spot for the last eight years; all of his predecessors could hold the top spot for three years at the most, before being assassinated.
PERSONALITY: A man in search of revenge, finds love instead.
After killing his way to the top of the Ghost Valley, an enclave of the jianghu’s worst criminals, Wen Kexing sets up an elaborate, intricate plan to exterminate his enemies. Who are his enemies? Everyone. He despises the “righteous” martial arts community for hurting his father and hounding his family from their home, and the Ghost Valley for brutally murdering his parents and everyone in their village, all for the sake of an armory full of hidden martial arts techniques. In their thirst for power, neither righteous cultivators nor Ghosts cared who they harmed, so Wen Kexing is out to kill them all. There are a couple of exceptions: the Tragicomic Ghost, who protected him as a child in the Ghost Valley, and Gu Xiang, whom he adopted and raised. Everyone else is guilty, in Wen Kexing’s eyes, and they all deserve to die.
Then he meets Zhou Zishu.
Initially, he’s intrigued by the man’s martial arts techniques, noting them to be unusual and familiar, and also thinks that he might prove to be an unpredictable variable in his plans. But when Zhou Zishu takes on the burden of protecting Zhang Chengling, even though he has no relationship to the boy and nothing to gain, Wen Kexing becomes fascinated by him. He attaches himself to the unwilling and uncooperative Zhou Zishu, never taking “no” for an answer. Zhou Zishu has disguised himself with a mask that hides his true appearance; Wen Kexing also wears a mask of sorts, with an attitude and demeanor that is by turns flirtatious, shameless, and childlike, as he follows Zhou Zishu around. He makes a show of being irritatingly cheerful, talking nonsense and invading people’s personal space in a show of excessive friendliness. He calls himself “Philanthropist Wen,” and insists he’s never harmed anyone, often while wiping (someone else’s) blood from his hands.
Despite this unpropitious start to a relationship, Wen Kexing and Zhou Zishu quickly become close. This is because they’re both achingly lonely. After his parents were killed and he was taken to the Ghost Valley, Wen Kexing feels that he has had to rely entirely on himself. Though he trusts and cares for Gu Xiang, he believes that she doesn’t understand him. After Alluring Ghost misunderstands his motives, he says to himself unhappily, “Those who know me understand my worries; those who don’t, think I have other intentions.” Wen Kexing feels that, despite the fact that he has been deceiving the man nonstop, Zhou Zishu is the only person he’s ever met who understands him; Zhou Zishu feels the same. Very soon, they begin to think of each other as soulmates.
And then Wen Kexing’s plan to watch the world burn runs into a solid wall of consequences. His plot to spread chaos in the jianghu results, repeatedly, in the death of innocents. Not only that, but his vision of himself as the sole architect of a grand plan is hopelessly flawed: there are other forces behind the scenes, manipulating him the same way he’s been manipulating others. Wen Kexing starts off the series arrogant to the point of hubris. He believes himself to understand every facet of human nature, in all its venality and greed. However, his life experiences are tragically limited, as someone who spent his formative years in the relentlessly brutal environment of the Ghost Valley. Until he meets Zhou Zishu, Wen Kexing has little idea of what it means to be human. Indeed, Gu Xiang tells him, “When [Zhou Zishu] is around, you look more like a person.”
Wen Kexing actually believes himself to be a monster. When he’s around other evil Ghosts, he gives into this nature completely. He acts to instill fear, by turns laughing or murdering without reason or warning. In Faraway Wanderers, he’s described by other Ghosts as a “downright madman born for killing.” He tempers his behavior around the few Ghosts that he doesn’t despise, although his attitude generally remains severe and often threatening. Around Zhou Zishu and Zhang Chengling, he affects a different persona: flirtatious, flamboyant, and silly. But when they respond to him with sincerity, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s flustered when Zhang Chengling spontaneously hugs him (and he does this often). When Zhou Zishu tells him, basically, that he loves him and wants to spend the rest of his life with him, Wen Kexing can’t respond. When Zhou Zishu correctly guesses Wen Kexing’s true identity and accepts him as his shidi, Wen Kexing responds by—literally—running away. The reason for this is that he believes himself to be unredeemable, and that if Zhou Zishu knew Wen Kexing’s true nature, he’d cast this shidi of his aside.
Even so, Wen Kexing mourns his lost innocence. Calling himself “Philanthropist Wen,” isn’t only an act, it’s what he wishes he could be. He longs for the life that was taken from him. In a different world, he might have grown up with his family in the Healer Valley, and become a renowned physician. He might have become a person, instead of a monster.
At his current pull point, Wen Kexing has acknowledged his feelings for Zhou Zishu, but also discovered that his soulmate has only a couple of years to live. The prospect of losing another person he cares about is unbearably painful for him, and he falls apart.
SAMPLE: here!
INVENTORY: A large, white fan and a jade xiao
NOTES: none!
IF ACCEPTED, WOULD YOU WANT A PLOT-LIGHT OR PLOT-HEAVY CUSTOM INTRO? plot heavy!
APPLICATION RECEIVED
ACCEPTED
NOTES
Never mind the blood rains, haunting song and inevitable ghost army cohorts — Wen Kexing will find himself otherwise occupied upon joining the caravan. The Sa-Hareth refugees who survived the
trainhorsecar collision will find themselves drawn to Wen Kexing’s affable manner. In particular, their children, alongside the young of the caravan, will take up trailing after him, begging him for sweets and treats and stories, with some calling him a princess or a bride because of his intricate clothes, relative to their journey garments. They will share with him their greatest treasure: verse, taught to them at night by the Lady, whom they join in her dirge:Stitch by stitch,
The love of a witch
Will unravel
Dusk to dawn
Each morning to mourn
With blood and gravel
They came, to a man
They came without plan
Walked their feet raw
Bore day and night
Sought witches to fight
Their fealty a flaw
For one witch alone
Arha turned every stone
His love a disorder
And at Taravast
Our hero, aghast
Led men to murder
Her sisters near dead,
"Save her," he’d said
"She’ll open the gates"
But foes of one day
Ally straight away
If a witch waits
Attaryl
Hearts empty still
The Bessis wed
Sick to the core
Of woe and war
With truce went ahead
Peace at a price
Army, sacrificed
By the Attaryl
The lady said,
“Turn or face dread.”
A sign of good will
Yet Arha’s care
Lovers, beware
Was halfway pride
He’d not be swayed
Not be delayed
Not be denied
So men tall and small
So learned at the wall
A witch’s love burns
Fire and tar
Shot from afar
Every wail earns
Love, her love
Hatisse’s sweet dove
Arha fell last
Vowed to return
His lady to scorn
And spit on their past
With strike of sword
The love of a lord
Will unravel
Dawn to dusk
His memory a husk
Each year he will travel.
...consider sharing this beautiful song, in its... dubious quality or summary with the group, because
it took a while to penthey’ve been waiting for the final clues to stitch together what happened to the Lord Arha and Lady Hatisse.The sorceress Karsa, an employee of the party’s Merchant benefactor who is currently journeying with the caravan, can update Kexing on the story so far. In Eastbound tradition, you are welcome to pick Wen Kexing’s network username, but I can provide a pun-based one, if you’re stuck.
Re: ACCEPTED
i’m planning to put up a network post about this tomorrow, will this work with your timeline?
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