“When I die, I don’t want to rest in peace I want to dance in joy I want to dance in the graveyards, the graveyards.…” —Delta Rae, “Dance in the Graveyards.”
莲, “lián”: “lotus, water lily” 黎, “lí”: “black” (also: “many, numerous”; “until, at the time of”; “almost, nearly”) 凰, “huáng”: “phoenix” (more accurately, used to refer to a female of the mythical fenghuang species)
Nickname: He’d really rather you didn’t. It’s one of the precious few things he won’t be easy-going about. Liánlí picked his whole name for a reason, thanks, and he’s not fond of being nicknamed. (He accepts “Li-ge” from close family/friends like Ming-er/Selenga, and “A-Li” but only from his zhiyin, Huanxi/Helene)
Gender/Pronoun: DMAB genderfluid, he/she/they/any. Most often he/him for the sake of convenience, but really, doesn’t mind any of the pronouns he’s ever heard (even ones that were explicitly made as jokes, like “shklee/shkler” from Futurama’s The Beast With A Billion Backs). Just don’t be weird if he decides he’s not feeling a certain pronoun today and corrects you on it.
Age:27, going on28. 29. 30.
Birthday: November 1st, 1994.
Sign: Scorpio. Wood Dog.
Gemstone: Citrine, but you’ll never catch him wearing it. It’s ugly, he doesn’t like it; he’d prefer rubies, jet, onyx, or black diamonds, if he even remotely had the money for those.
Blood Type: B-
Fav. Food: Drown him in either sugary sweetness or burn off the roof of his mouth with spice, and he’ll be your best friend. Or both. “Both” is good. Please drown him in sweet chili sauce, yes, thank you.
Hated Food: Bland foods, oatmeal, and whatever unspeakable, unholy things British people do to their poor beef before they feed it to people like <********>, leave Cockney diction and drawling, country village accents alone, that’s all ******** fine: why can’t the English teach their children how to COOK.
Occupation: Independent composer and musician—which, in practice, means that most people would really call him a Youtuber/TikToker, because he has to post his music there to get people interested in buying it off Bandcamp, Amazon, or the iTunes store, or streaming it.
Civilian Passive: Remember, remember.
Liánlí’s passive enhancement reflects the Kaifeng Knight’s role as a caretaker of the dead whom society would have preferred to forget. As the Knight of Kaifeng served these souls by making remembrances for them and reminding the living of their duties to the dead, so does Liánlí’s passive enhancement affect the memory.
Within a ten-foot radius of Liánlí, people will find it easier to remember things, whether about deceased loved ones (e.g., someone’s favorite song, significant memories, etc.) or more general topics (e.g., due dates, important details, whether or not someone left the oven on). This enhancement also makes it harder for people to forget things while around him, even those things that someone powerfully wishes to forget. This magic CANNOT recover memories lost by sideswaps or youmafication, nor can it recover memories of someone’s past life. The magic ends as soon as someone leaves the ten-foot radius around Liánlí, but any feelings roused by the magic last at player discretion. Since Liánlí cannot leave his own ten-foot radius, the magic always affects him (unless he is powered up as Kaifeng or wills it to stop).
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION Eyes:Bright violet (#9255E2). Pretty big, relative to most of his family; pretty average-sized, relative to the rest of humanity. Crescent-shaped monolids. Gets puffy under the eyes very easily; no matter what he does to cover it up, it inevitably shows through when he smiles. Has glasses, but alternates between them and contacts.
Hair: Black and long as s**t. Seriously, he’s 6’2” and his hair falls well past his waist, pin-straight. Sometimes, when it gets in the way, he’ll tie it up in a high ponytail or tame it into a braid or a messy bun (more often, two messy buns, just because there’s so much of it). If he’s feeling fancy, a partial updo (probably with crown braids, again mostly because he has too much hair and just putting it in a partial updo with nothing else will still look sloppy). Normally, though, a simple ponytail that gets it sufficiently out of the way.
Face: “Elfin” is a word he’s heard a lot. Overall shape is sort of between oval and diamond: longish and thin, with high, pronounced cheekbones and a jawline like a blade that’s dulled from too much use and not enough care to keep it sharpened. Full lips with a cupid’s bow that, when put together with his eyes, make for a puppy-eyed pout that is either devastatingly effective or hilariously pathetic, depending on your point of view.
Skin Tone:#F1D5C0, approximately. Warm-toned but fair and a bit pale.
Body Type: As mentioned, 6’2”. About 175 pounds. Long-limbed and slender, but since he awakened as Kaifeng of Saturn in April 2023, he’s been taking better care of himself, physically. Working out, yes, but also eating better (his non-magical bestie, Hayden, has worked out a reminder system to make sure Liánlí eats enough and regularly, and his zhiyin, Huanxi, helps enforce said reminders). As a result, Liánlí has put on a good bit of muscle since his awakening.
Clothes: Most common colors are black, red, and purple, but he’s not opposed to a splash of other colors (like, blues, grays, pinks). About the only color he doesn’t like wearing when it’s not required of him is white (it looks like you’re in mourning and thanks, he’d rather not). In terms of style: Layers. So many layers. Even in summer, Liánlí is likely to have on at least a couple layers, and one will probably be some kind of cardigan or thin sweatshirt because unfortunately, he runs very cold. He also likes combining elements that make people go “??? but what about your gender?” (he doesn’t know, what about it): flouncy sun-dresses with combat boots and men’s flannel shirts; black skinny jeans with pleated plaid skirts (give or take black lace lining around the hem) and beat-up concert tees; black skinny jeans with bondage straps straight out of the Tripp NYC back-catalogue and flowy, shoulder-baring peasant blouses. Generally, he looks like chaos and confusion, and thanks for noticing, he likes it that way.
Voice: In a word? Loud. Not that it’s unpleasant—quite the contrary—but Liánlí struggles greatly with the concept of an “inside voice.” He will try his best if you tell him he’s being too loud and ask him to turn the volume down……but his family regularly raised their voices at each other, and it was a struggle as the middle child to get any attention or be heard, even when he needed help (especially since the siblings next-youngest after him were twins). So, his sense of “too loud” wound up incredibly skewed. He tends to have exactly two volume settings: <******** Loud” and “Silent As The Grave.”
Also, he’s gotten very good at masking his natural accent after several years away from where he was raised—but when Liánlí is tired, drunk, especially distracted, etc., a distinctly, unmistakably Boston drawl rises from the depths like dread Cthulhu, coming to embarrass him and make people go “Oh my gosh, you never said you were from Boston!”
“And while I’m alive, I don’t wanna be alone Mourning the ones who came before I want to dance with them some more Let’s dance in the graveyards!” —Delta Rae, “Dance in the Graveyards.”
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2022 4:25 am
Hobbies: i heard the old songs radiating from you / shroud ourselves in the cosmos, let the music play (Music): Some people say they live and breathe music hyperbolically……and Liánlí Huáng is not one of them. As far as he’s concerned, his life didn’t start properly until he heard a plug-in novelty doll shaped like Frankenstein’s Monster sing “The Monster Mash,” made it play the song over and over, and tried to join in after a few rounds. As far as listening goes, he’s omnivorous, finding something to either enjoy or learn from in everything, be it Britney Spears, mash-ups of BTS and Nine Inch Nails, Tchaikovsky arranged for the theremin, or sea shanty covers of Nickelback.
His true passion, though, lies in composing and performing. Please don’t ask him to pick one over the other because he can’t, it’s why he studied both aspects at college. Liánlí’s parents only meant to make sure their kids were well-rounded when they forced all of them into piano lessons, but for him, it was an awakening. He has since studied five other instruments, some that his parents tolerated (violin and yuéqín [Chinese moon lute] are distinctive and complex, thus worth bragging about) and one they attempted to forbid (he learned guitar at college without their permission). He’s particularly fond of guitar and the two kinds of flute he’s studied, but he’s used all the instruments he knows in both his original music and his “cover songs for the socmed algorithms.”
Ask him his feelings on the Western concert flute vs. the traditional Chinese dizi only if you have time to spare. In so many words, they are A Lot.
my dreams are haunted by armies, armies of ghosts / i dreamt that i was perched atop a throne of human skulls (Dream Analysis): Once upon a time, before he left his family, Liánlí’s older brother Qiáng tried telling him that reading into his dreams was stupid, that it was a waste of time, and that Science said dreams didn’t actually mean anything, they were just the result of your brain doing weird s**t while you slept. With all the respect Liánlí believes his older brother is due (which means “none”), Liánlí thinks this is garbage. He doesn’t believe in dream interpretation as a way of predicting the future or anything—this, in his opinion, would genuinely be stupid and attributing to dreams more power than they deserve—but Liánlí nevertheless believes dreams (everyone’s dreams, not simply his own) to be Significant and worthy of analysis. Dreams may not be prophetic, but they are signals you’re meant to be taking, whether from your unconscious mind or from the more spiritual, less mundane realms of reality.
All that in mind, he tries to stay on top of his dreams. He’s kept a dream journal since he was about seven, and still has his old ones, going back to his 13th birthday; more than that, he keeps them pretty well organized and refers back to them not-irregularly. Each dream, to him, is a unique experience that requires individual analysis, though he also thinks it helps to look at any themes that might emerge. Either way, even if you don’t end up missing something important by not analyzing your dreams, does analyzing them really hurt anybody? No, obviously it doesn’t. So, don’t talk to him about your “scientific” explanations; he doesn’t care.
there’s a club where you’d like to go, you could meet someone who’s lost like you / a stranger’s just a friend who hasn’t shared their secrets yet (Clubbing): The worst part about Liánlí’s career, if you ask him, is how utterly solitary it is. He is, at heart, a people person. He enjoys being around people. Meeting other Youtubers and musicians in town is always a delight, and he treasures opportunities to collab with people. But those chances aren’t always reliable, so one needs to find other ways of being around people. In this way, Liánlí sees nightclubs and bars as basically the adult version of a playground at the park: he shows up with no real expectations, he finds things to amuse yourself, he talks to some people maybe, and even if he doesn’t go home with a new friend (or at least a one-night stand), he still gets to be around people and get the wonderful buzz he gets from not being alone, knowing that he’s not alone, and being swept up in getting to feel connected to something bigger than just……one silly little person, working alone in either his silly little apartment or the silly little studio space he rents for recording his songs and shooting his videos.
got my paintbox out last night, stayed up late and wrecked this place / unfurl the black velvet altar cloth, draw a white chalk Baphomet (Drawing): Liánlí may nominally speak four languages (in order of fluency: English and Mandarin, French, and German), but he and words are not always on speaking terms, exactly. Even with his music, it’s easier to write lyrics than to just say how he feels about something—especially because he can, for the space of any given song, put on the persona of one character or another, and just write from the perspective of, for example, an ancient vampire with no ties left to their humanity, or a fairy tale princess whose Prince Charming never came, or whatever—but sometimes, words just don’t play nicely with him.
When they don’t want to behave with him, and he needs some kind of outlet, he picks up a pencil and a drawing book. He doesn’t consider himself an artist by any stretch of the imagination; he’d have to put in more time, effort, and dedication to earn that title, in his opinion. But he is a person who enjoys venting his feelings by putting various kinds of pencils, pens, or markers to paper, and doodling whatever images come to mind. Thanks to his dream journal, even if no images immediately come to mind when he sits down with a drawing book, he rarely runs out of material.
Virtues: no sweeter pleasure than to see the credits clear through to the end / you gotta be strong in the face of suffering, even if it ends up meaning nothing (Resilient): Liánlí would bill his resilience more as spite than anything else: if the odds haven’t been in his favor lately, then why should he give the universe what it wants by rolling over and dying? While this phrasing isn’t wrong, it downplays the reality considerably and acts like Liánlí hasn’t put in work to pick himself up, dust himself off, and keep it pushing. By the very nature of his career, he’s had to learn to do this. Letting little setbacks or meritless criticism get to him would knock him down forever if he let it, between the contemporary haters and trolls who can show up in the comments sections, and the old scars from times in high school and undergrad when he went low-to-mid-key viral for being (at the time) a chubby, visibly queer Asian kid who was effusively emotional about everything from Heath Ledger’s untimely death to what you missed on Glee. Getting knocked down like that sounds like something he’s already wasted enough of his life on doing, so thanks for the offer, but he doesn’t wanna.
and i am coming home to you, if it’s the last thing that i do / it gets dark and then, i feel certain i am going to rise again (Determined): Approaching problems, Liánlí Huáng goes hard or not at all. When he’s decided on pursuing something or getting some kind of job done, he hates to give up on it. That, to him, would feel like losing. Yes, he tries to keep his head up in the face of temporary setbacks, but he also gets moody, sullen, and vindictive when he loses, because he hates to lose. Regardless of the context or the situation, losing feels like he is proving right all of the people in his life who’ve ever told him that he can’t do what he wants, that he’ll never make it with any of his dreams, and that he won’t succeed unless he follows their specific rules and plans for him to the letter. Whether the specific naysayers he has in mind are random youtube trolls or his parents, they are not allowed to win. If he gets himself into a game instead of walking away from it, he will find a way to win, no matter what it takes.
some moments last forever, but some flare out with love, love, love / hold them close, hold them near, tell them no one’s ever going to hurt them here (Devoted): Liánlí does not open up to people easily—but that does not mean he won’t get attached quicker than anyone’s business. He struggles to tell people how he’s feeling or how much they mean to him, but that isn’t the same as them not mattering to him at all. When he takes a shine to someone, Liánlí wants them to feel valued, and important, and safe. He’ll come over to comfort them at two in the morning, even though he has videos to shoot and a studio space booked for eight AM. He’ll keep track of their behaviors until he can read their emotions better than his own. He’ll give them his jacket, sweatshirt, and flannel in the middle of a blizzard. The extent to which he struggles to verbally express how much he cares about people only motivates him to go bigger and harder about showing people that he cares about them, even if it “must” be done at his own expense, because he doesn’t want the people he cares about to feel like they don’t matter.
when you see the risen beast in your nightmares, you treat him like a long-lost brother / companionship is where you find it, so i take what i can get (Open-Minded): The way Liánlí sees things, life is too short to close yourself off to new experiences. Even if the experience ends badly for you, even if you get hurt or make a fool of yourself or whatever, you’re going to miss out on so much that the universe has to offer by not expanding your horizons and trying new things. When it comes to people, his attitude is one of the few good things that he’ll credit his birth family with giving him. As far as most of the people who knew their family back in Boston were concerned, the Huángs were a picture-perfect family, aspirational even, all of them bright, hardworking, and devoted to each other. Outside appearances told everyone that everything with the Huángs was fine, but it wasn’t. Living for so long with that dichotomy has made Liánlí painfully aware of how little you can actually tell about anyone from outside appearances alone. It costs nothing to withhold judgment and give people a chance to prove for themselves if they’re assholes or not.
Flaws: it’s so hard to be yourself when you’ve already seen the inside / but i am just a broken machine, and i do things that i don’t really mean (Performative): Liánlí gets deeply invested in crafting every aspect of how (he wants) people (to) see him, in terms of both general personal qualities and how he feels at any moment—often neglecting the real person underneath his performance. He rarely outright lies (when he does, it’s usually to downplay things that genuinely hurt or bother him), but he stays aware of his audience and gives them what (he thinks) they want. Certain material realities may limit him in some ways (e.g., he may not have a certain skill so improvising with it will be less effective, and he can’t stop being of Han Chinese descent), but the best way around that is working the limitations into how exactly he plays himself for people. Even in moments of crisis, Liánlí struggles to genuinely express himself rather than playing up his reactions to an almost theatrical extent. Moments of genuine reality with him are rare, precious things and most of them come because either someone successfully caught him off-guard, or he got very, very drunk.
i try to tell you why i’ve come, it’s like i’ve got molasses on my tongue / when i try to open up to you, i get completely lost (Emotionally Tongue-Tied): Early on in life, Liánlí got the message that his problems didn’t really matter and talking about them at all was selfish, rude, and unfair of him to put on other people. Since there wasn’t a point in vocalizing his problems, he stopped doing it. Since bringing up his feelings only seemed to result in people using them against him, he started burying them in layers upon layers of misdirection. Even when writing lyrics, poetry, or the occasional piece of fiction that is blatantly inspired by his life and/or his actual feelings about something, Liánlí struggles to do it in a way that involves phrases like “I think” or “I feel.” Using the shield of “Well, I wrote from some fictional person’s first-person POV” is the only thing that helps, because it allows him some degree of nominal distance from his own feelings. At that, the strategy is hardly foolproof. Sometimes, there’s nothing for it, and the most you’re going to get is Liánlí shutting down and ******** off to mess around with one of the music pieces he’s working on, head out to a club and find a one-night stand, take a walk around town with no direction in mind and see where he ends up, or otherwise do. something. real. until he feels less bogged down in his own inability to tell you how he feels.
you smile at me in total defiance of all decency / i start laughing like a child, and i mark their faces one by one (Irreverent): Liánlí doesn’t like to let himself get bogged down in momentary setbacks or in emotions that are thorny, messy, and otherwise difficult. More than that, he doesn’t like letting other people see him sweat. While it’s true that he genuinely enjoys having a good time and spreading joy to others, it’s also true that he regularly ignores pretty much anything that could be construed as an unwritten social rule about when it is or isn’t appropriate to make a joke. Partly, this comes out of all the teenage rebellion he didn’t get to do while actually a teenager. These unwritten social rules ran his parents’ lives and were one of their primary tools in making Liánlí and his siblings miserable. Now that he doesn’t have to deal with those rules for fear of incurring parental wrath, he chooses not to bother. He knows the rules (most of them anyway) and he can abide by them, but please consider: the rules are stupid and he doesn’t want to deal with them.
On the other hand, Liánlí’s irreverence is often bound up in how much he is constantly performing some version of himself rather than being entirely honest with people. As far as he’s concerned, the correct time to make a joke is basically always and especially when he is going through some s**t. Is he injured? Make a joke about it (unless it’s something tiny like a paper-cut or a twisted ankle, in which case the answer is not “make a joke” so much as “make a big, dramatic scene in which he overhypes how much he is suffering and acts like his broken nail is the end of the world as we know it”). Is his entire life about to come crashing down around him? Time to make a joke about it and call himself a drama queen, besides!! Surely, this will prevent anyone from noticing that he is ever Not Okay.
no greater love than to lay my life down for a friend / hard limits fade into memory once broken through (Self-Sacrificing): Liánlí doesn’t have a problem with self-esteem, not really. On the whole, he thinks he’s a perfectly fine person, no better or worse than anyone else. Yes, he tries to be decent, and yes, he screws up not-irregularly, and yes, he has screwed up in ways that have hurt people and he probably will again, likely sooner rather than later, but he doesn’t feel like he’s done anything particularly heinous or damning on his character. He’s just a silly little guy who loves making his silly little music and wants to make people happy.…… But liking himself is not the same thing as truly valuing himself, which Liánlí has a great deal more trouble with. He is ready to give of himself for other people at the drop of a hat, whether any given sacrifice means his personal comfort (e.g., ignoring his own boundaries for someone else’s sake, giving up a seat on the train when he’s dead tired because it looks like someone else is even more tired), his time (e.g., coming over at 2am when he has recording studio time at 8, because someone he cares about is upset, cooking something special for you instead of working to edit his next video and get it ready for posting), his safety (e.g., giving up his jacket, sweatshirt, and flannel in the middle of a blizzard, throwing himself in the way of danger for you), or anything else.
In his mind, though, this isn’t a problem because it doesn’t come with a lack of self-esteem. It’s not a matter of thinking anyone else is a better person than he is, that he is a Bad Person who should suffer, or that they “deserve” his myriad sacrifices more than he does. On one hand, he hates feeling like he’s in anyone’s debt and will try to repay them for debts that may only exist in his mind without thinking about how that might feel to them. On the other, Liánlí just……wants so badly to help, to make people happy, and to feel connected to people, like he’s part of a group—a family, ideally—that’s bigger than himself and more than the sum of any individual parts. But outside of contexts involving his music, he’s not sure how to do that without falling back on behaviors that he knows come out of bad times and places in his life, but doesn’t feel he has a lot of viable alternatives for.
Weapon & Magic Page Weapon: A small folding fan, made out of bamboo and silk (lilac, with a painted landscape view of his wonder: a blasted-looking field with a river running through it, dirt-mounds dotting the landscape, gnarled and leafless pitch black trees, and at the center of it all, an ornate black tower). It looks very pretty and it’s very durable, but getting whapped with it would be more annoying than anything.
Squire Weapon: A club about the size of a wiffle-bat (~3 feet), made of hollow bamboo, with the folding fan from his prior stage attached to the top.
Squire Magic: Kāifēng swings his club like a baseball bat. When the swing is complete, ghostly shades claw their way out of the ground within a six-foot radius of Kāifēng. Anyone within the six-foot radius—including allies and Kāifēng himself—will feel a sense of recognition, like they should know who these dead people are, but the shades appear too mangled by death and decay to be recognizable as any particular person. The shades will attack anyone in the six-foot radius but Kāifēng, including allies, but being incorporeal, they do no physical damage. For the duration of his channeling, anyone hit by one of his shades will feel deathly chills and a heavy feeling of being watched. The chills stop as soon as he stops channeling; any lingering emotional effects (from the magic or seeing the shades) are up to individual players!
Kāifēng can channel his magic for up to 30 seconds at this stage.
Knight Weapon: Something similar to/styled after a yuèyáchǎn/monk’s spade: a bamboo staff about as tall as Kāifēng himself, with a spade on the top that’s shaped like his old folding fan and painted with the same landscape view of his wonder; the spade, while heavy and metal, is not bladed and cannot slice. Unlike an actual yuèyáchǎn, the staff does not have a crescent-shaped blade on the bottom, only a metal guard to give it more reinforcement when the staff is being banged into things.
Knight Magic: Kāifēng raises and twirls his staff, then slams it into the ground. After that impact, undead shades claw their way out of the ground within a ten-foot radius of Kāifēng. Anyone within the ten-foot radius—including allies and Kāifēng himself—will feel a sense of recognition, like they should know who these dead people are, but the shades appear too mangled by death and decay to be identified as any particular person. For the duration of his channeling, the shades will also cry out like “remember me,” “how could you forget me,” etc. The shades will attack anyone in the ten-foot radius but Kāifēng, including allies, but being incorporeal, they do no physical damage. Anyone hit by the shades will experience deathly chills and a heavy feeling of watched. The chills stop as soon as Kāifēng stops channeling; any lingering emotional effects (from the magic or seeing the shades) are up to individual players! Kāifēng can channel his magic for up to 45 seconds at this stage.
Forgotten Spell:
The Chill of Lost Souls
Kaifeng swings his weapon at a single target within a 20-foot radius. The target is knocked back by a burst of air, cold as death. When hit by the chill, the target is seized by a brief but powerful feeling that they have died and no one cared. This attack has three uses.
Powered Passive Enhancement:
Mementō mortūos
There is something of the grave about Kaifeng and his presence, something that makes one more likely to think about the dead. Being within a ten-foot radius of him makes people more inclined to think about those in their lives (of any species, including pets) who have passed on.
The effect gets stronger with more time spent around Kaifeng, but will fade entirely when he enters combat. Characters may, at player discretion: recall details about or experiences with deceased loved ones they haven’t thought about in years; feel a desire to visit or tend a loved one’s grave, or visit the place where someone died; feel as if they have neglected their deceased loved ones or forgotten things about them; etc. If no one significant to the character has died, they may instead find themselves worrying about potential deaths (of loved ones or themselves), or fixating on the idea of death more generally.
This magic CANNOT recover memories lost by side-swaps or youmafication, nor can it recover memories of someone’s past life. The magic ends as soon as someone leaves Kaifeng’s radius of effect. Any feelings roused by the magic may last at player discretion. Because Kaifeng cannot leave his own radius of effect, the magic always affects him (unless he is powered down as Liánlí or wills it to stop).
“And all of us, We’re meant for the fire, But we keep rising up And walking the wires So when we go below, Don’t lose us in mourning.…” —Delta Rae, “Dance in the Graveyards.”
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2022 4:29 am
HOUSEMATES: (in order of joining the house.)
Huanxi Xin / Helene, Eternal DSS of Inhibition: Zhiyin, soulmate, partner, beloved. They share the master bedroom. Huanxi and Dewey both wanting to tend a garden led to the process of cleaning up the backyard and converting some parts of it into a garden for herbs, spices, vegetables, flowers, etc.
Dewey Huang / Stribor, Super DSS of Gentleness: Liánlí’s brother, as far as you’re concerned. No, they don’t look terribly similar, but Liánlí doesn’t think that matters. Dewey’s family name is “Huang” because he is Liánlí’s brother, period, end of discussion.
Hayden Moran, best friend, platonic life-mate, and long-suffering voice of reason:31 32. Independent artist and illustrator. Please commission him to draw your fursona. Liánlí taught his dog, Lola, how to sing “Lola” by The Kinks because this is the sort of thing that Liánlí finds hilarious.
Hayden: English, “hay valley” Moran: Irish, “the great chieftain”
Qinxiǎo Qīyè, maternal cousin:2829 30. Homemaker and Etsy craftsperson, trying to get hir cooking show-style Youtube channel going.
Lián Míng / Selenga of Ida, maternal cousin-in-law:2829 30, almost exclusively addressed as “Ming-er” despite being older than Liánlí. Professional horse jockey and Liánlí’s favorite person to bully.
莲, lián: “lotus, water lily.” 明, míng: “bright, light, clear.”
Huáng Xiùyīng, Older Sister:3940 41, a doctor. Da-jie (eldest sister), Xiu-jie, jiejie. Unbeknownst to Liánlí, Xiuying has left Boston and been employed at Destiny City Memorial for about two years. She works predominantly in the emergency room. Married with two children. The family largely doesn’t discuss how the elder of her daughters was born suspiciously close to her wedding date; as far as her and Liánlí’s parents are concerned, it wasn’t a shotgun wedding, Huanjing was just born early.
Guō Chūnmiǎn, Brother-In-Law:42 43. Artist and stay-at-home dad to his and Xiuying’s girls. Liánlí has met his brother-in-law “for the first time” on four separate occasions and to this day, he does not remember what Xiuying’s husband looks like or what his name is; it’s kind of a miracle that he remembers how his sister’s affectionate nickname for her husband is “Mian-Mian.” Partially, Chūnmiǎn just has a very forgettable, “handsome enough but not particularly unique” face and a nice but not exceptionally impressive personality. Mostly, though, this is down to the fact that Liánlí was either stressed beyond belief or blackout drunk every time they met.
渦, guō: from the Guo River, but the character can also be read as wō, “whirlpool, vortex, eddy.” 春, chūn: “spring [season]”; “vitality, life, liveliness, energy”; “love, lust” 愐, miǎn:(literary) “diligent, hardworking”
Guō Huànjīng, Niece: 10. The only nibling of his who Liánlí has met, and she was barely a year old when he left the family.
Guō Xiàxuě, Niece: 6. Liánlí has no idea that she exists!
夏, xià: “summer” 雪, xuě: “snow”
Huáng Qiáng, Older Brother:3536 37, a lawyer (specializing in family law—and being dumped, if you ask his younger brother). Liánlí regularly struggles inside his own mind with the question of whether or not he is going to respect his older brother by thinking of him with one of the more proper forms of address (e.g., “Qiang-ge” or “Da-ge”)……or if he is going to silently belittle his gege by mentally referring to him as “Qiang-er” (a formation used to create affectionate nicknames, often for someone younger than oneself, so using it for an older brother would be considered cheeky and disrespectful).
Huáng Xīnyán, Second-Older Sister:3233 34, a lawyer (specializing in tax and corporate law). Xin-jie, Yan-jie, Xin-Xin (usually when Liánlí feels disrespectful), Er-jie (second [elder] sister) or Er-mei (to Xiuying and Qiang-ge). A renowned hell-cat, and if you ask Liánlí, possessed of the most painfully ill-suited name out of all their siblings, period.
Huáng Jiāyí, Younger Sister (twin with Jiāwěi): 23, Jia-mei, Yi-mei, San-mei (third [younger] sister), and very occasionally, Yi-Yi (read: if your name is anything but “Jiawei” and you try to call her this, she will rip your throat out with her teeth). The elder of the twins and fiercely protective of her brother. Got suspended from school quite a few times because she got into physical scraps to protect him from bullies.
Huáng Xiàyīng, Baby Non-binary Sibling:20 21, Xia-er, Ying-er, Ying-Ying. The only one who gets to call the twins “San-ge” and “San-jie,” respectively, because alas: they are the only one young enough for the twins to be gege and jiejie rather than didi and meimei.
Until he adopted Táotáo, he didn’t really consider himself A Dog Person or A Cat Person—or an Any Specific Animal Person of any flavor, if he’s honest. Since adopting her, though, he has become a Very Annoying Dog Dad, regularly featuring her in live-streams that he does for his Patreon supporters/channel members on Youtube, refusing to edit her interruptions out of more formal videos, making her an Instagram account of her own, etc.
One of his least favorite things about the Boston accent/speech patterns that he sometimes lapses into while Very Upset, intoxicated, etc. is the inflection it brings to his statements.
See, most places in the United States end sentences with a downward inflection that sounds more definitive to the ear, but the Southie Boston accent that Liánlí tries to repress in himself tends to lilt upwards instead. This should sound like a question or interrogative statement, to most people’s ears, but the Southie lilt doesn’t quite get all the way there. It sounds ever-so-subtly Different from how most people in the US talk, not always in a way that’s easily identifiable unless you know what to listen for, and it annoys the s**t out of Liánlí for two big reasons:
1. Jesus ********’ god, will you please <******** COMMIT to sounding like you are asking a question or not??? This half-assed, indecisive garbage of lilting upward without fully asking a question is so non-committal and annoying (in his opinion).
and 2. He feels like it makes him personally sound stupid, like some kind of East Coast Valley Girl (even though the unique lilt of the Valley Girl accent is not quite the same as the lilt from Southie Boston).
Notably, none of this really annoys him in Mandarin—though it’s also pretty different in Mandarin because specific inflections are super make-or-break in determining the differences between (among other things) two words that have very similar pinyin and pronunciations but do not mean the same thing—but in English, oh ********, Liánlí hates the way that his Southie lilt comes out and he would purge it from his mouth with fire and blood if he could.
In addition to his original, self-directed work, Liánlí is very happy to take gigs composing music for B-movies or short films getting made in Destiny City, local commercials, or whatever. Not his most favorite jobs in the world, but a paycheck is a paycheck, and even Big Names in contemporary composing, like Hans Zimmer, Ramin Djawadi, and Danny Elfman, started <******** somewhere.
While he has tried very hard to establish his current online presence as an Entirely Different Entity from what he posted in high school and undergrad, he misses the starry-eyed optimism that he had about social media, back then. Said optimism bit him in the a** whenever he went low-key viral—which meant a lot of malicious trolling, since he was a chubby, nerdy-looking, undeniably queer Asian-American kid, and he spent a lot of his videos being effusively emotional about Glee, or Heath Ledger’s untimely death, or why Nickelback is good actually—but Liánlí very much likes the idea that social media was meant to connect people. ******** algorithms and corporate tech-bro capitalism, ruining everything, as usual.
He very much does not like it when any of his old work comes back to haunt him. Most often, it’s in the form of gifs or reaction images that people have long since divorced from their original context (e.g., the screencap of Drew Monson’s “I was threatened” video being used to sarcastically mock people who are seen as playing the victim in situations that aren’t that serious), and he looks sufficiently different by now, most people do not immediately connect him to The Kid Who Went Viral For Losing His Entire Gay Mind Over The Troubletones’ “Rumour Has It/Someone Like You” Mashup On Glee.
He’s older, he’s grown his hair out, he’s lost a lot of weight, come out as genderfluid, and started wearing the clothes he wants to wear.… Basically, he’s put a lot of work into looking as different as possible from how he looked when he still thought that social media was about using the Internet to make real human connections. Please, just……treat him like he is different, like there is no connection at all between Huáng Liánlí and Huáng Zhìháo. Thank you.
Even telling him how different he looks is not his most favorite thing to ever hear, because it still carries a level of recognition and connecting him to his old life in a way that he Does Not Want To Deal With.
He was absolutely plastered at the birth of his elder niece as was his long-suffering bestie/perpetual voice of reason, Hayden. Unfortunately, Huanjing was born on April Fool’s Day, and Liánlí was an eighteen-year-old junior at Harvard.
He got a call from his brother-in-law in the middle of a party and ignored it because he did not recognize the number.
Then, he got a call from his da-jie’s phone, and it was his brother-in-law, telling him that Xiuying had gone into labor.
Neither he nor Hayden was sober enough to drive, so they had to get a cab. Once they got to the hospital, it was essentially a game of trying to see how long they could last before someone either figured out that they were drunk, or started a fight by accusing Liánlí of bringing a gay boyfriend to the birth of his niece, when Hayden was neither gay nor dating Liánlí.
Liánlí remembers exactly none of this for himself. The only part he does remember is that he and Hayden posted a Vine from the backseat of the cab (and Liánlí only remembers it because he has seen it in a lot of favorite Vine compilation videos). Not even the part where he was introduced to his brother-in-law for the fourth time and still didn’t remember his face or his name managed to stick with Liánlí. Whoops.
The last thing he remembers from that night is kissing a boy whose name he also does not remember.
He’s a rare specimen: a Harvard alum who doesn’t relentlessly talk up the fact that he went to Harvard, much less the fact that, because of how hard his parents pushed their children and used academics to pit them against each other, he started and finished early. At most, Liánlí might mention that he went to school in Massachusetts. There are over a hundred colleges and universities in Massachusetts, though, so he figures saying that much is probably fine.
Told his parents nothing when he left home. They left on a ten-day holiday while his grandparents took his younger siblings to visit their aunt, uncle, and cousins in Connecticut. Since leaving, has done nothing to contact them and hopes that this never changes.
By then, his Da-jie and Da-ge had already moved out of the family home (with Da-jie only having been back in Massachusetts recently), and his Er-jie was staying out late most nights to have fun with her friends. So, Liánlí went in with one of his Harvard friends on renting a Uhaul trailer, packed up his instruments and the things he couldn’t do without, and left for Destiny City while no one else was home. He left his old phone on the kitchen table, along with his copies of the house and car keys, and absolutely nothing about contact info, where he was going, where to look for him, or what he thought he was doing.
Hayden, his friend from Harvard, was moving so he could start to grad school at DCU; Liánlí just……had to get out of his parents’ house. He was sick of, among other things, enduring conversations about how embarrassing it was that he “needed a gap year to study and take the MCATs” because he’d wasted so much time on music, which assumed that he’d follow his Da-jie to med school at Johns Hopkins, even though this had never been part of his plan—all while biting his tongue about how deeply it hurt him when his parents skipped his graduation.
He was sick of having every choice he tried to make for himself—even something that was supposed to be objectively good for him like going to the gym or trying to change up his diet—systematically undermined, if not outright forbidden and denied him, because it challenged his parents’ ideas of where he belonged, what he was meant to do, and what role he was meant to play in the family.
He was sick of people expecting him to just be okay with his younger twin siblings outing his attraction to men to the entire family—after going into his room and snooping in his journals while he’d been at violin lessons—because keeping secrets meant that he was a liar who didn’t really care about the family, while Jiāwěi and Jiāyí were good, filial children who properly understood that it was their parents’ right to know everything about their children, at all times.
He was sick of letting his guard down during a session of swapping “weird s**t our families do” stories with friends, only to end up with said friends staring at him in a mix of horror and concern because apparently, no, they didn’t agree that it was totally commonplace or remotely funny to hear about how Huáng Yìchéng used to separate his children during any sibling fights by locking one in a closet and the other in the basement, and one time, he forgot to let Liánlí out for so long that Liánlí got in trouble for trying to deliberately skip dinner.
Does he ever regret leaving? Nope. Not even remotely.
Sometimes, he feels guilty about how few regrets he has, especially since he does have three younger siblings who all lost their er-ge when he left……but on the other hand, Xiàyīng, the baby, is the only one of said three who’s never made him feel like “What the ******** do you need an er-ge for, anyway? Since ******** when? You little nightmares can more than take care of yourselves.”
(Is it fair to feel that way toward the twins? Maybe, maybe not. But he never heard so much as a fake apology for outing him, and that was not only time the twins hurt him while he was expected to just lie down and take it. As far as he’s aware, Jiāwěi and Jiāyí only ever saw him as a perpetual scapegoat and their favorite emotional punching bag when he was around, so why, exactly, is he supposed to feel bad about leaving them behind? Yes, they have terrible parents who’ve taught them a bunch of ******** up behaviors—but Liánlí has the exact same terrible parents and he notably did not cope with that by denying his siblings any semblance of privacy, kicking them in all their emotional vulnerabilities, and making them the butt of every joke.)
He maybe also does have SOME regrets about leaving the twins behind, but he’d rather not admit this right now because it has proven significantly easier for him, emotionally, to just be angry with them about the fights and/or assorted disagreements that he and the twins had before he left, about the ways the twins didn’t do right by him, etc.
This does not, however, mean that he has no good memories with the twins. Mostly, it just means that Liánlí doesn’t know what to do with himself when the good memories resurface. Like, when he’s minding his own business and he abruptly remembers going over to Harvard Square (usually referred to as “The Square” because even in his own head, he doesn’t really talk up the fact that he went to Harvard), picking up Jiawei when his Red Line Bus got in, then taking him back to Liánlí and Hayden’s dorm to chill out for a while, help him with homework, play Pokémon with him, etc., because Jiawei just really needed to get out of their parents’/grandparents’ house, and knew that he’d be safe to be himself if he went to chill out with er-ge and Hayden.
Liánlí’s old Pokémon saves were where he first started experimenting with the name that eventually became his own. As soon as girl PCs were available to play with Kris in Pokémon Crystal, Liánlí started playing them because he thought they were cuter than the boy PCs and liked their character designs more. Starting with May in Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, Liánlí began naming all of his girl PCs “Liánlí” because he didn’t really like any of the default name options available in the games themselves.
It would be a while until he really started pondering why he felt the way he did about being addressed as “Liánlí” by the other characters in-game. Because of the atmosphere at home, and how his parents and grandparents fostered such an abusive and toxic environment, he didn’t really feel free to think about this question until he was at Harvard, with some significant emotional distance from them (even though the physical distance was only a 20-40-minute bus ride).
Either way: he used to work really hard to hunt and/or breed shiny Pokémon for Jiawei back then, especially using the Poké-Radar method in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum because Liánlí got really good at picking up the slight differences in the sound cues that let players know when a shiny Pokémon was waiting for them. He’d always trade them to Jiawei for whatever random mons Jiawei was looking to get out of his save boxes without needing to release them, so Jia-di has a ton of shinies from older gen games that all have “OT: Liánlí” in their profiles.
(These er-ge shinies are all in boxes in Jiawei’s Pokémon Home account, too. Liánlí doesn’t know about this, and would feel a mix of shocked and guilty if he were to learn about it—not least because Jiawei has put a LOT of time and work into transferring the RSE shinies to his DPPt saves, then transferring Pokémon from his saves of Sinnoh games to his saves in Pokémon Black/White, then transferring them to his Pokémon Bank on the 3DS, and then finally moving them from there to Pokémon Home………and Liání, meanwhile, has not thought about any of the shiny-hunting he used to do for Jiawei in quite some time.)
The only family member who got anything resembling an explanation was his Da-jie, Xiùyīng, who found an unstamped, hand-written and hand-delivered letter in her mailbox when she got back to her apartment. She was pulling long hours at Boston University, part of a medical research fellowship, and by the time she got home, Liánlí and Hayden were already in New Jersey. In the letter, he mostly tried to reassure her that he loved her, that her genuine support of his music had always meant more to him than he could properly say, and that it wasn’t her fault he was leaving.
Probably the worst part about his “how I ‘came out’ to my parents” story, in Liánlí’s eyes, is that he’d been thinking about how to tell his parents for himself, when the twins decided to out him. He wanted to tell them; he just wanted to do so on his own terms.
While he correctly anticipated his grandparents’ homophobic reactions—including their attempts to matchmake for him and set him up with every Nice Chinese Girl in the Greater Boston Area whose parents would go for it, because clearly, he only thought he was attracted to men because he couldn’t get a girlfriend on his own—he thought that maybe, his parents wouldn’t react like that. They never said much one way or the other about LGBTQ anything, so Liánlí thought that maybe, his parents wouldn’t be shitty about his sexuality.
……And then, his mother and father not only condoned his grandparents’ matchmaking attempts but answered his one attempt at protesting with an admission that they agreed, his grandparents’ idea about Why He Is Gay was nonsense and these dates probably wouldn’t change who he was attracted to, but that they expected him to go on all the dates regardless, to be unflappably polite to the young ladies, and to properly thank his grandparents for their efforts at helping him.
See, according to them, they could have handled Zhìháo being gay, and would have defended you from nonsense like this if he’d told them—but apparently, he had not absorbed their lessons about Why It Is Wrong To Withhold Information From Your Parents. As their son, Liánlí was theirs. Everything about him—about all of their children—was inherently a reflection on them, and ultimately, more about themselves (nominally, the entire family, but in practice, they only meant themselves) than about the kids. Therefore, Liánlí not coming to them as soon as he suspected that he had a crush on a boy at school was setting them up to lose face by potential public embarrassment.
Pointing out how many times they’d ever brushed him off when he’d tried to ask them for help with something was apparently not the correct answer here, or so Liánlí infers from how his father’s response was to suggest that his grandfather reach out to the family of a girl who’d been bullying Liánlí at school since second grade.
As an additional kicker: he isn’t even gay. True, he leans more towards men/masc-of-center people and he has more experience with them than with women/fem-of-center or entirely neutral partners. But as he will freely explain, the only real reason he prefers Grindr to Tinder is that people on Grindr tend to have a better functional understanding of what phrases like “no strings attached,” “casual hookup,” and “I’m not looking for romance or any kind of serious relationship” mean than people on Tinder.
Ultimately, the word that feels best to him for his orientation is “queer,” because so many other terms are so specific, and defined, and they require him to have such an intense and hyper-detailed awareness of not only his own gender (which does whatever it feels like honestly and he’s not sure why you expect him to have any control over this) but also those of any hypothetical partners.
Like, uggggh, honestly? That’s sooooo much effort and honestly, other people’s genders aren’t his business. He has a gender and he guesses that he just likes liking people, okay? He’s queer, that’s perfect, stop trying to pin down a more specific label when so much rigid specificity feels like a straitjacket and he doesn’t wanna.
He does identify with three terms from Chinese that are used exclusively for male homosexuality: 断袖 (duànxiù, “cutsleeve,” from an old story about an Emperor who cut the sleeve of his robes rather than risk waking up his lover while leaving the bed);
余桃 (yútáo, “the leftover peach,” from a Warring States period tale about Mizi Xia, beloved of the King of Wei, offering his half-eaten peach to his lover because the flavor was so amazing that he just had to share);
龍陽 (lóngyáng, “dragon yáng,” but it actually comes from the name of Lóngyáng-jun, a great beauty, a legendarily sexy man, and the lover of King Anxi [born Wei Yu, also from the Warring States period era Kingdom of Wei]. Once, Lóngyáng-jun despaired over the fate he thought would befall him one day. Should King Anxi find a better lover, surely he would throw Lóngyáng-jun back. As a show of his fidelity, King Anxi swore “Anyone who speaks of a greater beauty shall be executed along with his entire family”).
While all these terms tend to carry an implication of exclusive preference for men, Liánlí likes them for himself anyway because they have stories to them, which is more than he can say for most of the options he has in English.
Seriously, why are so many English words for LGBTQ things so <******** boring.
“Friend of Dorothy” is great, yes good, Liánlí likes that one (though it does have the same problem as “yútáo,” “lóngyáng,” and “cutsleeve,” wherein people who know what it means tend to assume that it conveys exclusive interest in men when Liánlí’s interest isn’t exclusive).
“Achillean” and “Sapphic” are interesting enough, though neither of them really feels Right to him, personally.
“Lesbian” has some kind of story since you do have to explain why the Isle of Lesbos is relevant to women who love women. (It also doesn’t apply to him; he just appreciates that it has an interesting history to it.)
But for real, outside of weird euphemisms like “light in the loafers,” so many of the English terms are so overly specific and based on a model that comes out of some Victorian sexological bullshit, and ugggggh.
Binaries are restrictive, boundaries are annoying, gender is a virus from outer space, and “queer” is the best English word for what Liánlí is and how he feels, but that doesn’t really mean much because his opinions of most English-language LGBTQ words is “ew, bored now, why is the English language such an obnoxious blunt instrument.”
Telling Liánlí to get therapy is sort of a pointless exercise, not least because, as he will gladly tell you, he already gets therapy. He has appointments every other week, and treats them as a necessary evil to continue getting his Adderall, because his psychiatrist’s office won’t write prescriptions for controlled substances like Adderall without regular therapy appointments. Not that he dislikes his therapist or anything? Liánlí just tries his best to do only the bare minimum because he doesn’t want to be there.
Unfortunately, getting Liánlí drunk is not a foolproof way of getting him to be honest. First of all, you have to commit to getting him to at least his fifth drink, and dealing with it when he turns into an emotional wreck (which he almost always will, when you get him this wasted).
Then, as if that’s not enough, you have to deal with him Performing The Role Of Himself But Drunk until he’s drunk enough to turn off that survival instinct. Until he hits that point, Liánlí will perform a caricature of intoxication that gets louder, messier, and more unpredictable as he feels his control of both himself and how you perceive him increasingly slipping through his fingers. Dramatic faux-meltdowns are common, complete with making himself cry on purpose. So is hanging off people and professing to love them sooooo much, or pretending to be more impaired than he actually is so they will help him. Pretty much any bullshit you might associate with The Drunk Girl At The Party, he will do it without hesitation.
You’ll know he’s ready to be honest with you because, all of a sudden, he’ll get quiet, stop overhyping his emotions and alleged inability to walk, and want to go as far away from other people as possible. Catch him while he’s withdrawing. If you help him get away, his sense of gratitude will compel him to play ball with you and let down the vast majority of those performative walls. He’ll turn into painfully honest putty in your hands. Have fun.
That being said? He doesn’t actually drink very much anymore. He sort of lost the taste for it after he turned 21 and it stopped being illegal for him to get wasted.
“And we will walk beyond Our daughters and sons, they will carry on Like when we were young, And we will stand beside And breathe in their new life.…” —Delta Rae, “Dance in the Graveyards.”
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2022 4:30 am
updated: June 24th, 2024.
🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶: “You can get it in this life, the next, and the next life after that, absolutely every day.” 🌶🌶🌶🌶⚫️: “You can get it like your name was Nina Simone or David Bowie. Or I guess Pedro Pascal.” 🌶🌶🌶⚫️⚫️: “You can get it pretty good, would host for you also.” 🌶🌶⚫️⚫️⚫️: “You can get it if I’m bored and you agree to host.” 🌶⚫️⚫️⚫️⚫️: “You can probably get it if you ask really nicely and I’m not doing anything more important.” ⚫️: “Maybe you can get it. Or maybe you can’t. I dunno, let’s play it by ear and see how I feel.” 🥔⚫️⚫️⚫️⚫️: “I would need a couple drinks before you can get it.” 🥔🥔⚫️⚫️⚫️: “I guess if the world is ending unless I let you get it, then sure, but otherwise……? Meh?” 🥔🥔🥔⚫️⚫️: “You probably won’t be able to get it. Sorry, Adam Driver. I’m sure you’re great, but……” 🥔🥔🥔🥔⚫️: “Eeeeeugh, I’d very strongly prefer not to let you get it, not even in the next life.” 🥔🥔🥔🥔🥔: “HARD PASS.”
CIVILIANS
Autumn Foster (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Dewey Huang (⚫️): “I refuse to rate Dewey according to the above scale because he’s my brother and it would be weird.…… Yes, I know he’s not my brother by blood and that he is a thousand-year-old space alien senshi. But please consider: he’s my brother anyway and rating him on the previously established scale would be weird, even if the only person I actually want to sleep with anymore is Huan-ge.”
Emily Moffat (🌶🌶): “10/10, would compose channel music for again. We stan a perky queen.”
Enfys Griffiths (🌶🌶): “Hayden’s friend from stick-fighting class. Already taken, which just makes sense, I mean? Take a look at him. (I am looking disrespectfully.)”
Gilbert Saunders (🌶): “Sweet guy. Wonder what he’s up to these days.……”
Huanxi Xin (🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶):“🎵 Wise men say only fools rush in. / I was just an only child of the universe, and then I found you. / Tell me how you know now the ways and means of gettin’ in underneath my skin. Oh, you were always my original sin. / Every single minute, I’ll be your hero and win it. When the lights go out, run away with me. / Dear, with your lips to mine, a rhapsody divine: ‘Zing!’ went the strings of my heart. / Baby, I'm obsessed, get me undressed. I wanna feel your lips on mine.… ‘Cause for your love, I’ll take my time. / Look at you go, I just adore you. Wish that I knew what makes you think I’m so special. / ******** this awful art party. Want you to make love to me and only to me in the dark. / Finally, you’ve come along. The way I feel about you, it just can’t be wrong. / Sweet like honeysuckle late at night.… I’ve been saving all my summers for you. / I know it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do. My gift is my song, and this one’s for you. / I’m here in search of your glory.… That ultra kind of love you never walk away from. You’re just the last of the real ones. / Take my hand. Take my whole life, too. ‘Cause I can’t help falling in love with you. 🎵………… About my zhiyin? I can keep going. 🥰💖”
Hayden Moran (NPC): “This best friend is mine. I will climb on him and protectively hiss like an upset cat.”
Kiyoshi Sakurazawa (🌶🌶🌶): “This is my friend. We are very good friends. It really doesn’t hurt that he likes Huan-ge. That’s a huge positive, actually.”
Ming Lián (⚫️): “I refuse to rate Ming-er according to my scale because he is married to my cousin and that would be Weird.”
Orah Gowan (🌶🌶🌶): “Oh, she was delightful. And she’s a nurse! Beautiful and brilliant, and a good person on top of it. A true triple-threat.”
Robin Archer (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Shuangxu Feng (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Yuki Tsukiyama (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
ORDER
Almere, Page of Lysithea (🌟🌟): “We’re gonna use stars for the underage folks, chili peppers would be weird (derogatory).”
Aokigahara, Knight of Saturn (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Belmont, Squire of Jupiter (🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Sailor Beta Leporis (🌶): [placeheld]
Princess Cybele (🌶🌶): “Don’t know her personally, but she really thrashed that Negaverse General-Sovereign guy. Seems to have a lot of nerve and grit, and she’s really very pretty.”
Eternal Daedalus (🌶🌶🌶): “Space senshi!! Really lovely guy. Powerful magic. Love his enthusiasm for toppling unjust hierarchies and his refusal to take anybody’s bullshit.”
Super Demeter (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Dunnottar, Page of Lysithea (): [placeheld]
Super Ellicott (🌶): [placeheld]
Eternal Elsa (🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Eternal Encke (🌶🌶): “Biceps, gege, ******** sakes, those A R M S. Please have mercy. Or don’t, if you want; I’m not your boss.”
Erytheia, Knight of Cosmos (🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Chibi Eupheme (🌟): [placeheld]
Eternal Fang (🌶🌶): “Friend! Was there when I powered up for the first time, helped me take down that spider-youma. Fang is a sweetheart and deserves all the good things.”
Princess Ganymede (🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Sailor Grieve (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Halle, Squire of Lysithea (🌟): [placeheld]
Super Hati (🌶): “He’s a little bit overly serious, but he’s cute and sweet. Whoever’s dating him is lucky.”
Super Helene (🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑🌶🍑): “Zhiyin. The one who knows the melody of my soul. Forever blessed to get to spend this life with him, there are not enough words. I could express it musically for the rest of eternity and it wouldn’t be enough time. 🎵 Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I. 🎵💖”
Super Hestia (🌶🌶): “Very helpful, very brave, haven’t spoken to her directly but I like her.”
Hy-Brasil, Knight of Earth (🌶): [placeheld]
Eternal Izanami (): [placeheld]
Eternal Kerberos (🌶🌶): “Cute. Kind. Healed me after the unfriendly Negaverse hottie bruised my poor rib.”
Lanting, Squire of Ida (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Lisse, Squire of Lysithea (🌟): [placeheld]
Super Madriu (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Mechelen, Squire of Lysithea (🌟): [placeheld]
Super Monoceros (🌶🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Super Murikabushi (🌶🌶): “He purified! Which is great because Xingyi-ge came from his world, and I have so many questions. Also, he seems to like Helene, which matters very much to me.”
Pendour, Knight of Neptune (🌶🌶🌶): “Jiejie is so kind and helpful, very sweet, just wants everyone to get along, which may not be realistic but her sense of idealism is heartwarming anyway.”
Super Róka (🌶): [placeheld]
Selenga, Page of Ida (⚫️): “I refuse to rate Selenga according to my scale because it’s Weird.”
Sonora, Squire of Ida (🌶🌶): [placeheld]
Sailor Stribor (⚫️): [placeheld]
Super Ymir of Sleet (🌶): [placeheld]
DARK MIRROR
DMS Super Bélénos (🌶): [placeheld]
DMS Super Lete (🥔🥔): “Meimei doesn’t know what words mean and is very rude to alien senshi. Not cool. Cute in the face but that personality, man.”
DMS Super Hybris (🌶): [placeheld]
NEGAVERSE
General King Faustite (🌶): “Okay, he’s, like? Evil or whatever? And I get that, I do? But he’s A+ in the face department and the talons are really hot. I’m not saying that I’d actually DO anything, but like……I can appreciate the beautiful monster-boy without condoning his actions, okay!!”
Corrupt Guinevere (🌶): “Really nice girl! Very cute! ……I have several many questions about, uh, the fact that I now recognize she is with the Negaverse, but she was still nice to me, so……?”
General Larimar (🌶): “Stabbed me, but ze had really good bone structure. Could still get it.”
Corrupt Super Niter (🥔): “Well, someone doesn’t have a very good attitude, do they.…… It’s this guy. This guy doesn’t have a very good attitude about anything.”
Corrupt Super Noctua (): [placeheld]
Captain Sakuraiite (🥔): “Was very mean to my Ming-er. That’s MY job!! How very dare!!”
Captain Siegenite (🌶): “Yeah, he bruised my ribs, but he was cute, I’d probably still let him get it. Or anyway, I would have been open to the idea before Helene came into my life.”
MAUVIANS
He hasn’t personally met any yet, but he thinks you’re all great!
星, xīng: “star”; “numerous and scattered, countless”
意, yì: “wish, desire, intention”
so, “to wish for the stars” or “numerous and scattered wishes, as many as the stars”
鉄, kurogane: “iron”
Nickname: None that you’re allowed to use, unless you are on a very short list of specific people.
Gender/Pronoun: Cis man, he/him.
Age at Death: 34.
Birthday: Well, he was born on Saturn, to a Saturnian mother and a Murikabushian father, so the Terran system of tracking days didn’t entirely apply to him, but the math would’ve mathed out to him being born on May 31st.
Sign: Gemini.
Gemstone: Emerald and agate.
Fav. Food: (Optional)
Hated Food: (Optional)
Hobbies: a malibu and coke for you, a g&t for me (Alcohol): Part of including this hobby is just to note that Xingyi had a drinking problem at a time in history when the very concept of a drinking problem didn’t really exist, as such. The fact that he was known for his drinking, it was known that alcohol was an easy way to distract him or manipulate him, and people talked about how he did not have a functional concept of “enough”? Not an inconsiderable fact. Distinctly a problem in a lot of potential ways, on top of all the reasons why drinking like that is Not Great for you.
thoughts that breathe and words that burn (Poetry):
starry starry night, paint your palette blue and gray (Painting):
a violin should be played with love, or not at all (Violin):
and i would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling saturn knights! (Mystery-Solving):
errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law (Annoying the Helenian Ruling Council):
Virtues: swim with real sharks, those who never speak when spoken to (Daring):
long life to the spiders, safe travels to the crow (Egalitarian):
it gets real nice around the graveyard, once you’ve acquired the taste (Creative):
seldom wonder why, just follow you (Devoted):
Flaws: but i have high unicorn tolerance, i have high unicorn tolerance (Stubborn):
love to the ghosts who taught me everything i know (Moody): Xingyi has a lot of feelings and he doesn’t always know what to do with them, much less how to express them appropriately. This leads to a lot of brooding and emotionally explosive outbursts, sometimes both at once. Worse yet, he’s moody AND he takes himself way too seriously about it. He will look you dead in the face while reciting classical Saturnian poetry featuring an overblown, melodramatic description of the death of someone young and beautiful, and if you even think about laughing, he will get Maximum Offended, storm off, and probably hold a grudge for the rest of the evening. On the plus, he forgets his grudges very easily once he calms down, but until that happens, he’ll be a ******** edgelord about it and kind of insufferable to deal with.
try hard to look hard behind my blackout sunglasses (Withholding): Huh, what are you talking about? What do you mean “How long has Xingyi been bleeding”? He doesn’t remember asking your opinion on how long he’s been bleeding or what he needs to do about it. It’s his stab wound, okay? Leave him alone. He didn’t want to bother you or make it, like, A Whole ******** Thing. It’s the same reason why he didn’t tell you that he’s spent the past six weeks wishing he didn’t have to get out of bed and kinda feeling like everyone would be better off if jumped from the top of the tower at his Wonder! Because he knew that you’d worry about it when you obviously have better things to do! Why are you mad at him for trying to respect your time instead of acting like your universe revolves around him? UGH.
the thing i’ve been trying to beat to death, the soft creature that i used to be (Self-Destructive):
******
[write up from Xingyi’s unofficial membership in a certain merc group, of which he was not ACTUALLY a member, but like, he went to rescue his cousins often enough, you know?]
Name: Xingyi Kurogane
Role in The Nameless: definitely not an official member (too many official duties and too much concern for how people were jerks to him for Space Classism reasons, also cared too much about NOT looking like a ******** in the eyes of his beautiful senshi Crush Boy)………but he WAS the semi-regular victim of “Don’t worry, I know a guy” from his cousins Kaede and Keishi Kurogane, because he could never bring himself to just tell them “no” when they called him to pretty please come bail the team out (or rescue them from something other than getting arrested)
Basics: sorry he’s late, he didn’t want to come.
Tried very hard to project the image that he thought Saturn Knights were supposed to project to people………so, basically: grim goth trash edgelord who will remind you of your own mortality whenever he feels like it and/or thinks you’re being really annoying, liberally quotes from ancient Saturnian poetry about death and dying and how everyone you love will die someday and the enviable tragedy of someone dying young and beautiful, takes his duties more seriously than he takes you, etc.
Was actually quite soft at heart—hence him constantly showing up: he “knew” that the Kurogane twins didn’t really want to spend family time with him, their boring Saturn Knight cousin, but he really hoped maybe, this time would be different—and as much as he genuinely enjoyed classical poetry about heady, serious things, he would’ve preferred to be laughing.
Despite his protests, was fine with being effectively paid in liquor that the team paid for or at least didn’t tell him which cargo ship it fell off before coming into their hands. his blasé and unbothered attitude about getting blackout drunk……sure was a thing. He liked to pretend that it didn’t mean anything serious, please stop acting like it does. :<
If the Crush Boy Senshi in question—Huanxi Xin / Sailor Helene of Inhibition—ever accompanied him to rescue the team, it probably wasn’t hard to see that they were obsessed with each other and should have just kissed already. They never managed to do that by the time Xingyi died. Still, he would have smiled and laughed more easily when said senshi came with him
May have also, at times, shown up in the company of Yuanxin Qiu, a Knight (not of Saturn) who was basically his adoptive brother except that Yuanxin’s blood family never formally adopted Xingyi. Yuanxin was sharp-tongued, hot-tempered, and he wanted to be here even less than Xingyi did. Frankly, he wanted Xingyi to just cut his father’s family out of his life entirely because, as far as he was concerned, all they ever did was make him miserable and take advantage of him. Yuanxin’s only here to make sure Xingyi’s okay at the end of it, high-key ******** the rest of you.
Several rumors about what happened went around when Xingyi died, including but not limited to: suicide over a broken heart; turned on by the people in the town around his Wonder; ripped apart by the ghostly shades of Kaifeng; suicide to protect his Wonder from Chaos; murdered by his non-Saturn Knight “siblings”’ father, who’d always hated him; drank himself to death; drank himself to death on purpose; suicide over being an alleged failure as a knight; and murdered by some jealous twink who wanted to get with Huanxi.
(There is an actual right answer about the truth of his death, but it wasn’t as widely known and probably didn’t filter down to the merc group unless someone actively went looking for it. But if anyone wants to plot about their characters/characters’ past lives having found out about it, hmu and we can work something out!)
“Achilles, Achilles, just put down the bottle Don’t listen to what you’ve consumed It’s chaos, confusion and wholly unworthy Of feeding and it’s wholly untrue You may feel no purpose nor a point for existing It’s all just conjecture and gloom And there may not be meaning, so find one and seize it Do not waste yourself on this roof.…” —Gang of Youths, “Achilles Come Down.”
“THOSE ILLUSIONS WILL DRAG YOU INTO IT”: PRE-AWAKENING
leaves of gold (gilbert & liánlí): Liánlí is playing his weird little flute in the park. Gilbert pops out of some leaves. in nasty weather (muri, volterra, liánlí): Liánlí ends up on a magical gameboard, being protected by two Dark Mirror senshi. a cure for loneliness (liánli, feat. hayden, lola, & táotáo): Liánlí is never, ever lonely or bereft of love in his life, unless it justifies him adopting this dog. maid4youtv — Behind the Music (emily & liánlí): Liánlí appears on Emily’s Youtube channel to talk about composing channel music for people. it doesn’t have to mean anything (orah & liánlí): Liánlí flirts with a cute nurse. No strings attached. PARKOUR! (guinevere & liánlí): Liánlí is leaving a grindr hookup’s place and sees a weirdly dressed girl doing cool parkour. unlike my father before me (liánlí solo): Some s**t is happening on Tiktok and Liánlí is grumpy about it. So, he goes out to clear his head.
“YOUR LUCK, IT’S GOT LIMITS”: PAGE TO SQUIRE.
drawing legs on a snake (fang & kaifeng vs. youma): In which Fang rescues Liánlí from a youma, and Liánlí awakens as Kaifeng of Saturn. say it once, say it twice (liánlí/kaifeng solo): Liánlí is live-streaming with his puppy, when he feels compelled to say some words and swear a Knightly pledge. dance in the graveyards (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng visits his Wonder for the first time. After falling into a death-trap, he has several questions about his past incarnation’s drinking habits and ostensible marriage to a hot alien senshi. operation loanshark: confrontation! (orp): Kaifeng wanders into a battle, gets stabbed, makes the General stabbing him have a meltdown, and generally has a cute time. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) far renowned in the underground (liánlí & ming-er): Liánlí is literally just trying to visit the library, but his cousin’s idiot boyfriendfiancé husband showed up instead. old frontiersman lost his horse (liánlí & ming-er): Catching up with Ming-er over tea at home, where nobody can eavesdrop or anything. teeth ground sharp (kaifeng, ming-er & youma): In which Kaifeng rescues Ming-er from a nasty youma. Also, something something, secret identity. just don’t think about it (kaifeng vs. niter): In which Niter is being very naughty, draining energy out here, and Kaifeng objects. secret life (kaifeng, ida & ming-er/selenga vs. sakuraiite): In which Kaifeng goes to protect Ming-er from a Negaverse Captain, Ida actually does the bulk of the protecting, and Ming-er awakens as Selenga of Ida. rain rain go away (ming-er & liánlí): In which Liánlí and Ming-er go into a little curiosities shop to escape some unexpected rain. & it is well with my soul (kaifeng & daedalus vs. lete): Lete is misbehaving, so Kaifeng asks her to stop. She throws around Marxist theory she doesn’t understand and Gets Told. “try new things,” they said (liánlí & enfys): Enfys welcomes Liánlí to stick-fighting class, which is very appreciated because Liánlí is a nervous bunny. wrestling a tiger bare-handed (kaifeng vs. siegenite): Siegenite may win the battle, but Kaifeng upset him by being annoyingly perky and positive, so who’s the real winner here. electric, so finally hectic (kaifeng & michel): Michel objects to the blatant unsafety of Kaifeng hanging out in the rain, humming Aurelio Voltaire. Also, Kaifeng gets struck by lightning. dizzying discoveries (beta leporis & kaifeng): Kaifeng tries to help a poor meimei who’s not doing so well. There is also a radioactive bear, because Starfest. light up the night (kaifeng vs. noctua): In which Kaifeng fights a Negaverse meimei at the Starfest lantern festival. fruits roll up (kaifeng & hybris): Hybris is behaving himself unlike certain Letes who shall remain nameless, so Kaifeng helps him gather weird fruit for Almadel. hear those bells ring deep in the soul (kaifeng solo): Up at his wonder, Kaifeng finds a room that is very locked. He also gets a past life memory and learns the name of his past incarnation’s sexy alien husband. when you wish upon a tree (monoceros/robin + kaifeng/liánlí): Kaifeng meets Monoceros at the wishing tree and takes him out for coffee. guide you home (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng finds Selenga after Leng-Leng has been drained and hit with Lete’s magic. Provides comfort and care for his cousin-in-law. loch ness monster adventure club (kaifeng & silistra): Kaifeng meets Silistra out at the reservoir while both of them are checking on the cryptid who lives there. bear-ly breathing (kaifeng & izanami): Kaifeng meets Izanami while attempting to check on the radioactive bear. cosmic lights (selenga & kaifeng): Kaifeng and Selenga have a fight under a rainbow meteor shower. Kaifeng gets very called out and finds a little wispy friend. soft beneath my heels (kaifeng, demeter & jupiter butterfly): So, three buckets of sunshine walk into a park in Destiny City with their magical wispy friends.…… friends in the dark (kaifeng & pendour): Chilling with Pendour-jiejie under a rainbow meteor shower. just having a good time (kaifeng & camelot): Meeting Camelot of Earth, who has been doing this significantly longer than Kaifeng has. remember how you found the key (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng takes Selenga to see his Wonder, and they unlock a room, in which Kaifeng finds Yúchén, Xingyi’s Saturnian violin. this is thirsty work (kaifeng & selenga): Up at Kaifeng’s Wonder, Selenga gets to sit and watch while Kaifeng carries water to his irrigation device. alcohol, your songs resolve (kaifeng & fang): Kaifeng gives Fang a gift from his Wonder: a bottle of Fangan fonio liquor from Xingyi’s collection.
“BUT SOMEHOW, I’LL FIND MY WAY”: SQUIRE TO KNIGHT.
so familiar a gleam (kaifeng & helene): Helene arrives on Earth and immediately finds his way to Kaifeng, who offers to take Helene home with him. honeysuckle late at night (liánlí & huanxi): Liánlí makes dinner with Huanxi, they discuss Xingyi some, and Liánlí very much wants Huanxi to stay. exit abyss, fall in well (kaifeng & helene): Kaifeng ends up in the mysterious gameboard from last year, but at least Helene is here, this time. easter in october (kaifeng & stribor): Kaifeng took Helene to see a cool graveyard, and finds a lost alien senshi. sleep is a commodity (treatment rooms) (orp): Kaifeng wanders into another Situation, decides to look out for a young Lysithea Page named Almere. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) sleep is a commodity (the waiting room) (orp): Still in Some ******** Situation, Kaifeng is determined to look out for Almere, Halle, and Lisse of Lysithea. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••) sleep is a commodity (the parking lot) (orp): Kaifeng and the Baby Unicorn Squad attempt to exit the ******** Situation (Kaifeng posts: •••) until the fog is lifted (orp): Hy-Brasil calls for aid! Helfeng join several others to help fight the beasts at Hy-Brasil’s Wonder. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••) within a budding grove (kaifeng & helene): Helene finally feels he can visit Kaifeng’s Wonder again. After Kaifeng shows Helene the depths of Xingyi’s devotion to him, a magical red string ties them to each other, and they unlock a Forgotten Spell for Kaifeng. cicadas know nothing of snow (helfeng vs. lete): Once again, Lete is misbehaving and needs to Get Told. Helene makes her feel SHAME over her actions. village green preservation society (huanxi & liánlí): A very sassy lost penguin wanders into the backyard of HuanLi’s place. They call for help to get him home. isle of misfit toys (muri & helfeng): Muri seeks Kaifeng’s help in sending Christmas presents to Team Faustite. He also makes Kaifeng explain what “zhiyin” means where Helene can hear. The one who knows the melody of my soul, you don’t say. a muffin is a bald cupcake (kaifeng & selenga): Selenga invites Kaifeng to his Wonder, and Selenga’s ancestor isn’t happy about it. Regardless, Kaifeng gives Qí Yáolán and his son a proper burial. through it all, the rise and fall (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng goes up to his Wonder, the day after December 25th. Has a memory about Huanxi’s gege. never smile at a crocodile (kaifeng & bélénos): Kaifeng rescues a young Mirror senshi from some very unpleasant snow-lizard. everyone’s gone on without you (dewey + huanli): Dewey ran into his reincarnated lover, Izanami. He talks to HuanLi about reincarnation romance. something to sing about (huanli): Huanxi caught some melancholy from a very strange blue fog, and comes to Liánlí for comfort and snuggles. to beat a nearby drum (kaifeng vs. sakuraiite): The Negaverse meimei who was very mean to Ming-er is back, but Kaifeng is better equipped to fight her, this time. wildwood games (arm wrestling tournament) (orp): Kaifeng participates in an arm-wrestling tournament hosted by Cybele-jiejie, on her planet. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) wildwood games (the hunt) (orp): Still at Cybele’s games, Kaifeng and Helene hunt for a jackalope together. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) wildwood games (training grounds) (orp): Kaifeng does not win Cybele’s obstacle course, but he has a good time regardless. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••) leaves of white mulberry (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng and Selenga look for a map of Kaifeng’s Wonder, and instead, find Xingyi’s old moth-hatchery. smile & pain will fade away (kaifeng & muri): Kaifeng attempts to show Muri to his Wonder, but something goes very, very wrong. menacing horizons (muri, kaifeng & helene): After Kaifeng gets rekt, trying to visit his Wonder, Muri carries him to Helene. the summoning (knightly orp): There is a gathering of Knights on the moon to talk about Weird Occurrences. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) you’ll never know, dear (kaifeng & helene): Visiting Kaifeng’s wonder so he can harmonize with his Code Piece. unruly sevens, vertical eights (kaifeng & madriu): In which a mishap lands Kaifeng upside down and Madriu helpfully assists him. aftershock (kaifeng & lanting): Helping out Lanting after he has been mercilessly bullied by Lete. friendly overtures (shuangxu & liánlí): Walking Lanting home leads to learning that he is actually Shuangxu-didi, for whom Liánlí has composed channel music before. chrysocyon chaos (order orp): Helping clear the Chaos infection off of Fang’s planet. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) poison in the air — introduction (order orp): Meeting up with other folks to go take on the Chaos plaguing Daedalus’s world. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••) poison in the air — the north bridge (order orp): In which Kaifeng helps battle a Gigantamax Garbodor-looking Chaos monster. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••) poison in the air — finale (order orp): Final battle against the Chaos poisoning Daedalus’s world. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) a night at the museum (massive orp): The mysterious space merchant, Almadel, requires aid in stomping out some space-bugs in his museum. Kaifeng and Helene show up to help. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••) a night at the museum, side room (helfeng + murielsa): Kaifeng and Helene follow Murikabushi and Elsa into a side-room in Almadel’s museum’s junk-room, which contains some very interesting objects. (Kaifeng posts: ) i wanna cast magic missile (liánlí, kiyoshi, yuki): Learning about Dungeons and Dragons in preparation for playing with friends! a little bit heiress (kaifeng/bélénos): Meeting Bélénos again, learning her name, and offering her a piece of her world’s history.
“DO OR DIE, GOLDEN TIME LOVER’S GONNA BLOW YOUR MIND”: KNIGHT & BEYOND.
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2022 4:32 am
“THE ONE WHO KNOWS THE MELODY OF MY SOUL”: HUANXI / HELENE.
dance in the graveyards (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng visits his Wonder for the first time. After falling into a death-trap, he has several questions about his past incarnation’s drinking habits and ostensible marriage to a hot alien senshi. hear those bells ring deep in the soul (kaifeng solo): Up at his wonder, Kaifeng finds a room that is very locked. He also gets a past life memory and learns the name of his past incarnation’s sexy alien husband. remember how you found the key (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng takes Selenga to see his Wonder, and they unlock a room, in which Kaifeng finds Yúchén, Xingyi’s Saturnian violin. so familiar a gleam (kaifeng & helene): Helene arrives on Earth and immediately finds his way to Kaifeng, who offers to take Helene home with him. honeysuckle late at night (liánlí & huanxi): Liánlí makes dinner with Huanxi, they discuss Xingyi some, and Liánlí very much wants Huanxi to stay. exit abyss, fall in well (kaifeng & helene): Kaifeng ends up in the mysterious gameboard from last year, but at least Helene is here, this time. until the fog is lifted (orp): Hy-Brasil calls for aid! Helfeng join several others to help fight the beasts at Hy-Brasil’s Wonder. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••) within a budding grove (kaifeng & helene): Helene finally feels he can visit Kaifeng’s Wonder again. After Kaifeng shows Helene the depths of Xingyi’s devotion to him, a magical red string ties them to each other, and they unlock a Forgotten Spell for Kaifeng. cicadas know nothing of snow (helfeng vs. lete): Once again, Lete is misbehaving and needs to Get Told. Helene makes her feel SHAME over her actions. village green preservation society (huanxi & liánlí): A very sassy lost penguin wanders into the backyard of HuanLi’s place. They call for help to get him home. isle of misfit toys (muri & helfeng): Muri seeks Kaifeng’s help in sending Christmas presents to Team Faustite. He also makes Kaifeng explain what “zhiyin” means where Helene can hear. The one who knows the melody of my soul, you don’t say. through it all, the rise and fall (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng goes up to his Wonder, the day after December 25th. Has a memory about Huanxi’s gege. everyone’s gone on without you (dewey + huanli): Dewey ran into his reincarnated lover, Izanami. He talks to HuanLi about reincarnation romance. something to sing about (huanli): Huanxi caught some melancholy from a very strange blue fog, and comes to Liánlí for comfort and snuggles. wildwood games (arm wrestling tournament) (orp): Kaifeng participates in an arm-wrestling tournament hosted by Cybele-jiejie, on her planet. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) wildwood games (the hunt) (orp): Still at Cybele’s games, Kaifeng and Helene hunt for a jackalope together. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) menacing horizons (muri, kaifeng & helene): After Kaifeng gets rekt, trying to visit his Wonder, Muri carries him to Helene. you’ll never know, dear (kaifeng & helene): Visiting Kaifeng’s wonder so he can harmonize with his Code Piece. aftershock (kaifeng & lanting): Helping out Lanting after he has been mercilessly bullied by Lete. friendly overtures (shuangxu & liánlí): Walking Lanting home leads to learning that he is actually Shuangxu-didi, for whom Liánlí has composed channel music before. chrysocyon chaos (order orp): Helping clear the Chaos infection off of Fang’s planet. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••)
“LET’S DANCE IN THE GRAVEYARDS”: THE WONDER OF KAIFENG.
dance in the graveyards (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng visits his Wonder for the first time. After falling into a death-trap, he has several questions about his past incarnation’s drinking habits and ostensible marriage to a hot alien senshi. hear those bells ring deep in the soul (kaifeng solo): Up at his wonder, Kaifeng finds a room that is very locked. He also gets a past life memory and learns the name of his past incarnation’s sexy alien husband. remember how you found the key (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng takes Selenga to see his Wonder, and they unlock a room, in which Kaifeng finds Yúchén, Xingyi’s Saturnian violin. this is thirsty work (kaifeng & selenga): Up at Kaifeng’s Wonder, Selenga gets to sit and watch while Kaifeng carries water to his irrigation device. within a budding grove (kaifeng & helene): Helene finally feels he can visit Kaifeng’s Wonder again. After Kaifeng shows Helene the depths of Xingyi’s devotion to him, a magical red string ties them to each other, and they unlock a Forgotten Spell for Kaifeng. through it all, the rise and fall (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng goes up to his Wonder, the day after December 25th. Has a memory about Huanxi’s gege. leaves of white mulberry (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng and Selenga look for a map of Kaifeng’s Wonder, and instead, find Xingyi’s old moth-hatchery. smile & pain will fade away (kaifeng & muri): Kaifeng attempts to show Muri to his Wonder, but something goes very, very wrong. you’ll never know, dear (kaifeng & helene): Visiting Kaifeng’s wonder so he can harmonize with his Code Piece.
“THE ME INSIDE OF ME”: ZHÌHÁO VS. LIÁNLÍ VS. XĪNGYÌ.
far renowned in the underground (liánlí & ming-er): Liánlí is literally just trying to visit the library, but his cousin’s idiot boyfriendfiancé husband showed up instead. old frontiersman lost his horse (liánlí & ming-er): Catching up with Ming-er over tea at home, where nobody can eavesdrop or anything. teeth ground sharp (kaifeng, ming-er & youma): In which Kaifeng rescues Ming-er from a nasty youma. Also, something something, secret identity. secret life (kaifeng, ida & ming-er/selenga vs. sakuraiite): In which Kaifeng goes to protect Ming-er from a Negaverse Captain, Ida actually does the bulk of the protecting, and Ming-er awakens as Selenga of Ida. rain rain go away (ming-er & liánlí): In which Liánlí and Ming-er go into a little curiosities shop to escape some unexpected rain. guide you home (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng finds Selenga after Leng-Leng has been drained and hit with Lete’s magic. Provides comfort and care for his cousin-in-law. cosmic lights (selenga & kaifeng): Kaifeng and Selenga have a fight under a rainbow meteor shower. Kaifeng gets very called out and finds a little wispy friend. remember how you found the key (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng takes Selenga to see his Wonder, and they unlock a room, in which Kaifeng finds Yúchén, Xingyi’s Saturnian violin. this is thirsty work (kaifeng & selenga): Up at Kaifeng’s Wonder, Selenga gets to sit and watch while Kaifeng carries water to his irrigation device. a muffin is a bald cupcake (kaifeng & selenga): Selenga invites Kaifeng to his Wonder, and Selenga’s ancestor isn’t happy about it. Regardless, Kaifeng gives Qí Yáolán and his son a proper burial. leaves of white mulberry (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng and Selenga look for a map of Kaifeng’s Wonder, and instead, find Xingyi’s old moth-hatchery.
“DON’T DRINK FROM THE STOLEN SPRING”: CLEANING THE RIVER.
dance in the graveyards (kaifeng solo): Kaifeng visits his Wonder for the first time. After falling into a death-trap, he has several questions about his past incarnation’s drinking habits and ostensible marriage to a hot alien senshi. hear those bells ring deep in the soul (kaifeng solo): Up at his wonder, Kaifeng finds a room that is very locked. He also gets a past life memory and learns the name of his past incarnation’s sexy alien husband. this is thirsty work (kaifeng & selenga): Up at Kaifeng’s Wonder, Selenga gets to sit and watch while Kaifeng carries water to his irrigation device. within a budding grove (kaifeng & helene): Helene finally feels he can visit Kaifeng’s Wonder again. After Kaifeng shows Helene the depths of Xingyi’s devotion to him, a magical red string ties them to each other, and they unlock a Forgotten Spell for Kaifeng. leaves of white mulberry (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng and Selenga look for a map of Kaifeng’s Wonder, and instead, find Xingyi’s old moth-hatchery.
“BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET”: DEWEY / STRIBOR.
easter in october (kaifeng & stribor): Kaifeng took Helene to see a cool graveyard, and finds a lost alien senshi. everyone’s gone on without you (dewey + huanli): Dewey ran into his reincarnated lover, Izanami. He talks to HuanLi about reincarnation romance.
“‘CAUSE WE’RE YOUNG & WE’RE RECKLESS”: MENTORING THE YOUTHS.
sleep is a commodity (treatment rooms) (orp): Kaifeng wanders into another Situation, decides to look out for a young Lysithea Page named Almere. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) sleep is a commodity (the waiting room) (orp): Still in Some ******** Situation, Kaifeng is determined to look out for Almere, Halle, and Lisse of Lysithea. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••) sleep is a commodity (the parking lot) (orp): Kaifeng and the Baby Unicorn Squad attempt to exit the ******** Situation (Kaifeng posts: •••) aftershock (kaifeng & lanting): Helping out Lanting after he has been mercilessly bullied by Lete. friendly overtures (shuangxu & liánlí): Walking Lanting home leads to learning that he is actually Shuangxu-didi, for whom Liánlí has composed channel music before.
“THE MONSTERS WE’RE OBLIGATED TO LOVE”: FAMILY STUFF.
a cure for loneliness (liánli, feat. hayden, lola, & táotáo): Liánlí is never, ever lonely or bereft of love in his life, unless it justifies him adopting this dog. unlike my father before me (liánlí solo): Some s**t is happening on Tiktok and Liánlí is grumpy about it. So, he goes out to clear his head. far renowned in the underground (liánlí & ming-er): Liánlí is literally just trying to visit the library, but his cousin’s idiot boyfriendfiancé husband showed up instead. old frontiersman lost his horse (liánlí & ming-er): Catching up with Ming-er over tea at home, where nobody can eavesdrop or anything. teeth ground sharp (kaifeng, ming-er & youma): In which Kaifeng rescues Ming-er from a nasty youma. Also, something something, secret identity. secret life (kaifeng, ida & ming-er/selenga vs. sakuraiite): In which Kaifeng goes to protect Ming-er from a Negaverse Captain, Ida actually does the bulk of the protecting, and Ming-er awakens as Selenga of Ida. rain rain go away (ming-er & liánlí): In which Liánlí and Ming-er go into a little curiosities shop to escape some unexpected rain. “try new things,” they said (liánlí & enfys): Enfys welcomes Liánlí to stick-fighting class, which is very appreciated because Liánlí is a nervous bunny. guide you home (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng finds Selenga after Leng-Leng has been drained and hit with Lete’s magic. Provides comfort and care for his cousin-in-law. cosmic lights (selenga & kaifeng): Kaifeng and Selenga have a fight under a rainbow meteor shower. Kaifeng gets very called out and finds a little wispy friend. remember how you found the key (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng takes Selenga to see his Wonder, and they unlock a room, in which Kaifeng finds Yúchén, Xingyi’s Saturnian violin. this is thirsty work (kaifeng & selenga): Up at Kaifeng’s Wonder, Selenga gets to sit and watch while Kaifeng carries water to his irrigation device. easter in october (kaifeng & stribor): Kaifeng took Helene to see a cool graveyard, and finds a lost alien senshi. a muffin is a bald cupcake (kaifeng & selenga): Selenga invites Kaifeng to his Wonder, and Selenga’s ancestor isn’t happy about it. Regardless, Kaifeng gives Qí Yáolán and his son a proper burial. everyone’s gone on without you (dewey + huanli): Dewey ran into his reincarnated lover, Izanami. He talks to HuanLi about reincarnation romance. something to sing about (huanli): Huanxi caught some melancholy from a very strange blue fog, and comes to Liánlí for comfort and snuggles. leaves of white mulberry (kaifeng & selenga): Kaifeng and Selenga look for a map of Kaifeng’s Wonder, and instead, find Xingyi’s old moth-hatchery.
“THE ONE PLACE THAT HASN’T BEEN CORRUPTED BY CAPITALISM”: SPACE!!!(excluding kaifeng’s wonder)
a muffin is a bald cupcake (kaifeng & selenga): Selenga invites Kaifeng to his Wonder, and Selenga’s ancestor isn’t happy about it. Regardless, Kaifeng gives Qí Yáolán and his son a proper burial. the summoning (knightly orp): There is a gathering of Knights on the moon to talk about Weird Occurrences. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) chrysocyon chaos (order orp): Helping clear the Chaos infection off of Fang’s planet. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••, •••) poison in the air — introduction (order orp): Meeting up with other folks to go take on the Chaos plaguing Daedalus’s world. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••) poison in the air — the north bridge (order orp): In which Kaifeng helps battle a Gigantamax Garbodor-looking Chaos monster. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••, •••) poison in the air — finale (order orp): Final battle against the Chaos poisoning Daedalus’s world. (Kaifeng posts: •••, •••, •••) a night at the museum (massive orp): The mysterious space merchant, Almadel, requires aid in stomping out some space-bugs in his museum. Kaifeng and Helene show up to help. (Kaifeng posts: •••) a night at the museum, side room (helfeng + murielsa): Kaifeng and Helene follow Murikabushi and Elsa into a side-room in Almadel’s museum’s junk-room, which contains some very interesting objects. (Kaifeng posts: •••)
1x Almadel’s Calling Card: A glossy, white card. In elegant script, Almadel is written in shimmering opalescent ink. On the other side, a holographic circle.
Almadel’s personalized, magical calling card. This item can be used to summon him anywhere, any time. You simply need to place your thumb over the holographic circle on the back of the card and he will almost immediately arrive.
He has a unique magic that allows him to travel to otherwise difficult or impossible to reach locations. This might be an unnamed/unclaimed/random location in space. He may be able to travel to locked or inaccessible locations on Wonders or Homeworlds and he can even reach homeworlds and Wonders of Chaos locations.
He cannot reach some specific meta locations but he may be able to get close enough to view or observe certain conditions. Players can inquire about these but are cautioned that others may be investigating the same meta location so information is not first come first serve. Staff will attempt to give something unique for all RPs, though.
Every visit has a time limit; Almadel’s magic does not work for long and he can only carry one person at a time per card. He can do group RPs but all participants must have a card. This card can also be used to summon Almadel for information or for bargain/trade. This item will be earnable again in the future.
Because this is a very powerful ability, plots will need thorough approval with staff before use. Please PM The Space Cauldron with your character and what they would like to gain from Almadel. We will work with you to plot things out!
Found (Starfest 2024, “A Night At The Museum” ORP), Used (forthcoming).
1x Black Candle: An ordinary, small candle but distinctly black in color, both in wax and wick. Once lit, the flame is quick to grow from orange to black - and with the color comes an array of spooky paranormal shadows displayed across the room for anyone who notices.
The longer the candle burns, the more sinister the shadows get, along with quiet, menacing whispers that reveal deep, dark secrets that you've never told anyone else. The candle burns for up to three hours or until the flame is blown out. The candle will not relight, no matter how hard you try, but you're left with the remains of the waxy trinket to keep for nostalgia... since, surely, you want to remember the sinister evening in question, right?
Claimed (Oct. 31st 2023; Halloween 2023), Found (forthcoming), Used (forthcoming).
1x Black Shard: A small, reflective black shard about the size of a finger. Snapping this shard in two pieces releases a black plume that, when inhaled, causes a hallucination that reflects someone’s innermost darkness. It will affect only one person, and the hallucination will last for up to half an hour before it fades.
The hallucination is only as powerful as the mind lets it be; it cannot hurt anyone or do any damage, but the user may be under the impression that it can during the hallucination. The hallucination shows them the darkest part of themselves, either as they see themselves or as others see themselves. It is meant to be a tool of reflection.
Once the magic wears out, it will appear like a translucent smoky quartz crystal, though it may appear as though the black smoke inside occasionally shifts about; it is a reflection of the darkness inside of everyone. It may be kept as a memento.
Claimed (Dec. 30th 2023; crown tokens purchase), Found (forthcoming), Used (forthcoming).
2x Gilded Invitation: An aged invitation in startlingly pristine condition. The text is unreadable but it looks like an invitation to an important event.
This invitation may have been for an event long past, but the residual magical energy in the card has the ability to amplify someone's ability to transport a guest with them at no cost to their energy. It will allow a free +1 for any method of teleportation that drains energy when brought with a guest.
This means that a new Negaverse Captain may be able to teleport with a guest for one trip, or a Senshi may be able to visit their homeworld and any stage with a guest at no cost of their own energy. Characters taking a group of people can bring one more than the usual max allowed.
Each Invitation has only one use. Afterwards, the text on the card melts away; it is still a beautiful card and can be kept as a memento.
Claimed & Claimed (Starfest 2024; individual participation rewards and bingo reward), Found (forthcoming), Used (forthcoming).
3x Golden Vial: A vial, roughly the size of a finger, filled with slow moving golden liquid. The vial will always be in an unmarked pouch of any color or fabric and can be found discarded or hidden on Homeworlds or Wonders, within the depths of Mirrorspace, or within the Dark Kingdom.
To use this item, you must uncork the top and drink the full dose at once. Splitting the dose will yield no effects. The golden liquid tastes sweet, but has no identifiable flavor. Once emptied, the vial will heat up and the glass will appear covered with a dozen cosmetic golden hairline fracture; the vial is not damaged in this process. Drinking this liquid guarantees that you will have some memory from your most recent past life, regardless of your affiliation or faction. Even civilian characters will have a short memory of their past life.
Only one memory may be recovered clearly, but that night you may also have vague dreams of up to three other partial memories. Mauvians can also use this but should not have memories on Mau; youma can use this item but the memories they receive should be them as a human in their most recent life. The vial can be kept as a memento.
Claimed (Jun. 22nd, 2023; Starfest 2023), Found (forthcoming), Used (forthcoming).
1x Satin Ribbon: A beautiful piece of satin with a deep red color and a bright sheen.
This ribbon is perfect as a bookmark, hair accessory or for jewelry. While it seems ordinary on its own, if you have the ribbon in your possession and come close to someone that you are destined to have a connection with, be it good or bad, a thin red string will automatically appear between the two of you, visible only to you and that person. The string will remain visible for up to three hours after it first forms and, no matter how close or far away you two are it will always adjust size to keep you connected. Once the magic ends, the red line fades from sight. The magic can only be used once, but the ribbon remains as as memento!
Claimed (October 23rd, 2022; Halloween 2022), [Found & Used (Jan 9th 2024, with Helene).
PERMANENT ACCESSORIES
Chrysocoin of Comfort: A small, exquisitely carved, wooden coin with a chrysocyon paw carved into it.
The coin itself is a light wood, almost birch in appearance, and the paw is stained to a rich mahogany dark shade. Rub the coin over the paw, and a feeling of comfort will embrace you, as if you've just had a long conversation with a good friend of yours. It can be used once per day, and the magic lasts for up to ten minutes in non battle environments. (Chrysocyon Chaos 2024)
Metallic Bracelet: An antique bracelet made of some sort of metal.
It has the ability to amplify magic usage; this must be plotted with your roleplay partner before use. You must ask for permission to use this item in events/ORPs.
When activated, this bracelet allows the wearer to get an extra use out of their strongest magic (up to third stage). They can only recover magic they have ICly earned; a Super Senshi may not get an extra use out of their Eternal magic since they have not unlocked it. Senshi can recover one use of their strongest magic, and Knights may recover up to 45 seconds of their energy pool.
Soothing Bell: A small, round bell with a tiny metal charm dangling from it.
The bell can be rung once per day and for one full hour the ringer will be overtaken by the sensation of a serene peace and will find that all of their worries seem to be gone and they are incredibly clear headed.
If a powered character uses this item while in their respective place of power they will receive additional benefits; A Senshi or Knight using this on their Homeworld or Wonder they will find that restoration significantly improves while using the bell (allowing restoration akin to two visits), Negaverse characters will find that the Rift is easier to navigate and youma are more agreeable (and may even lose significant interest in Corrupted Senshi), Mirrorspace is easier to navigate and Mirrorscape Realms may flourish a bit more. Mauvians may have more past life memories while on their Bonded Senshi’s worlds and may also improve restoration somewhat, and Vanguardians may find that their Source Stones seem to naturally replenish energy and can provide a greater output towards their projects.
Sparkling Earrings: A pair of matching earrings.
When shared between two people, one worn per person, it allows an immediate connection between their minds for up to two hours per day. These earrings allow the wearers to transfer thoughts and images, and is good for discreet communication as it cannot be tracked or monitored by anyone else. When the magic ends, the earring disappears from the shared partner and returns to the owner. The earrings must be together to recharge. The earrings can be used regardless of distance or location.
leaves of gold: Liánlí is playing his weird little flute in North-End Park when Gilbert comes popping out of a pile of leaves with no idea where he is. (Halloween 2022.)
Top -- high, “Mandarin” collared shirt, Saturn maroon, lilac piping around the collar; sleeves billow then come back to tapered cuffs. White ascot.
The idea sketch has a longish jacket, but after drawing it, it felt like A Bit Much for a page, maybe better for squire or knight? At first stage, just a purple waistcoat, wrap-style and embroidery modeled after the Victorian styles of Chinoiserie (basically, Victorians ripping off then-current Chinese fashion, or styling clothes and accessories after their ideas about what China was like and what people wore there).
Embroidery in the idea sketch has a lot of red spider lilies on the border, but for first stage, maybe a single one, up near the top so it looks like a corsage or a boutonniere?
Bottoms -- White leggings. Pleated lilac skirt with Saturn symbols on the hem. Gloves -- Nah Belt -- Wide sash around the waist, lilac. Shoes -- Knee-high boots, sensible heels. Saturn violet with maroon laces. Shoulders -- He has them. (Nothing decorating them for now.) Accessories -- None, his outfit's honestly enough as it is.
