Welcome to Gaia! ::

Name: Yahui Xu

Pronoun: He/him

Age: 508; appears 18

Birthday: Earth Day? Yes.

Fav. Food: Eel

Hated Food: Dairy. Just... why??

Occupation: N/A to start with

Hobbies:

Carving -- A traditional skill of the Tai, Yahui can work wonders with a piece of wood. Or a bar of soap. Or a vegetable, even. He's one of those people who can turn a carrot into a flute on the fly, and always has tools on hand.

Foraging and Fishing -- How else is he going to eat? Yahui finds grocery stores unsettling, so he gathers a lot of his food from the great outdoors.

Dendrology -- Yahui is enamored with trees and shrubs, and treats them as friends as well as study specimens. There are already a handful in Destiny City he considers his favorites, which he tries to visit the most often.


Virtues:

Queen of Swords -- Courtesy is one of Yahui's strengths. He sets clear boundaries, observes the boundaries of others, and is generally polite to all living beings. When communicating with others, he is honest and firm when he needs to be.

Six of Cups -- Yahui does not hold back on his emotions and has great empathy for others. He will cry over your difficult experiences as easily as he cries about his own. He'll laugh at your joke even if he doesn't understand it. Overall, he's eager to get to know people, learn their history and bond with them.


Flaws:

Nine of Cups -- Earth is full of ways to relax and enjoy yourself, and Yahui's been starved of such things since childhood. His desire for comfort and pleasure often triumphs over urgency, and he easily gets lost in indulgences.

The Tower -- Yahui avoids responsibility, avoids stress, and avoids confrontation. He then avoids the consequences of these choices. It can make him a fair-weather friend in the best of times, and a serious liability in the worst of times.


PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

Eyes: Bronze and almond-shaped.

Hair: Pastel sage in dense micro-ringlets kept close to the head, as well as a small goatee on the chin.

Face: An oval face with a wide, flat nose.

Skin tone: Teak

Body Type: 4'8" and quite thin (for now).

Fashion: Yahui doesn't understand what's wrong with going out barefoot in a bathrobe in public. He does not like clothes much and puts minimal effort into his appearance.

Deep Space Senshi:

Physical Features:
The Tai had stone-colored skin with freckles or blotches resembling lichens or moss. They were hairless, instead growing small keratinous knots, plates and ridges on their bodies which resembled tree bark in color and texture. These could be carved, etched, sanded, polished and painted in fashionable ways. Their fingernails and toenails were wood-colored as well. Lastly, their eyes were metallic colors, with highly reflective retinas that left a sharp glint in their pupils in all but the brightest of lighting conditions. Most did not grow taller than 5 feet.

So, for Sailor Taiyi...
Skin: Chalk limestone (FFFFE8 ) with pastel sage (CFE9CC) mottlings around his scalp, shoulders, biceps and knees.
Eyes: Bronze (CD7F32)
Bark growths: Teak (997f66); found on his scalp, browline, chin, shoulders, forearms and the backs of his hands. These are carved and etched to depict eddies and whirlpools of water, or life forms found in or near freshwater.


Backstory:

Taiyi was once a vibrant and peaceful world where all waters flowed through rivers of living wood. That is the story Yahui learned when he was found and awakened as a Chibi Senshi by the resistance. The world he actually grew up in, however, couldn't be more different. Instead of life-giving water, the rivers were choked with oil. Instead of rolling fields and elegant plant life, the horizon was filled with decaying machines.

It was a miracle he had been found at all, they said. Previous incarnations of Sailor Taiyi were imprisoned or executed by the imperial family who once ruled their world, with the emperor using elaborate costumes and stage magic to pose as its senshi in his place. They had triumphed in a great struggle to overthrow the emperor and reclaim their true senshi, they said. They had waited hundreds of years to him be reborn again. And now his people needed him -- now more than ever -- to save Taiyi from its newest foe.

He had no idea how he, a humble healer, could do such a thing.

Taiyi was in decline. Its waters were diminishing. The people had organized to keep their planet alive, with none of their efforts yielding sustainable results. Eventually, they decided the best way forward was to rapidly industralize. They made use of metals from a meteor that had serendipitously fallen to their world, and gave birth to System Y.

The results were disastrous. Unbeknownst to the Tai, the Chaos in the meteor influenced all who worked on the project. Instead of the modernized resource distribution system they had originally planned, System Y transformed Taiyi into a cruel factory where the people were treated as cogs in the machine. Instead of giving to the people, and helping the people, it was programmed to take, and take, and take. Its builders became a new ruling class who enjoyed the comforts of the spoils while everyone else suffered.

The resistance had been working for centuries to put this to an end by the time Sailor Taiyi was found. In spite of the conditions they faced, many of them saw his return as a sign they would surely win. The reality of the situation, however, had closed in on him even before his graduation rites were complete: the world was failing, the population was declining, and there was so little water left.

Soon enough, the resistance collapsed. They were picked off one by one. Eventually, Sailor Taiyi was the final remaining target. As a healer with no offensive magic at his disposal, he relied on his Mauvian companion's technological prowess to defend him against the mechanical sentries and hazards that had been built to protect System Y against the resistance. However, she was aging and sick from the pollution that ravaged the rivers and the air. His magic helped little bit less every time he used it to heal her. Eventually, she collapsed one day after breaking him out of a trap. Her final words to him before the trap claimed her life were:

Please trust in Taiyi one last time.

He begged his world to give him a reason to do so.

A pull on his star seed led him on a wandering journey that lasted several days. At the end of the path his world set before him, he found a tiny slice of wilderness not yet touched by machines. An underground chamber that didn't reek of oil. To his amazement, he heard a dripping of water -- the very last bolus of clean, living water Taiyi had to offer. He sat under it, and drank from it, and let it drip onto his head and mix with his tears. After this final offering was complete, the chamber closed around the senshi, and he fell into a deep trance.

The pulse of Archideus's destruction awoke him and pulled him to Earth. Now he struggles to understand this mysterious opportunity he has been given, while being haunted by visions of an unknown darkness lurking the ruins of his homeworld.