Yanmei Lin

Type: Ghost

Appearance: Yanmei Lin is a shockingly beautiful Chinese woman with fathomless black eyes, ghostly pale skin, and long, flowing hair the color of blood. She typically manifests wearing elegant robes of embroidered white silk - the cuffs and hem of which appear slightly worn and tattered, as though they have seen better days. Faint burn scars occasionally ripple across her pallid cheeks and arms whenever she is enraged - echos of the fire that took her life.

Biography: Yanmei Lin was born and raised in a small Chinese village, just outside the capitol, in the 69th century AD - during the height of Gao Zhang's hold over the Imperial throne. As the daughter of a local shaman, she witnessed first-hand the injustice and abuse of the eunuchs' regime - the beatings, the "emergency taxation" raids, and other, fouler things. At the age of only nine, she saw her own father murdered in the street by a mob of Gao Zhang's hired thugs - beaten to a bloody pulp for daring to speak out against the corruption and excesses of the Imperial eunuchs.

Surrounded by so much misery and suffering, Yanmei Lin sought to alleviate it as best she could. To this end, she took up the study of medicine, mastering the arts of acupuncture and herbalism when she was still in her teens. By the time she was twenty, she was intimately familiar with the healing powers of chi, and used this knowledge to ease the pain of her people. It was difficult work - her clinic overflowed with the casualties of Gao Zhang's oppressive administration - yet she persevered. The work brought meaning to her life, and served to remind her that compassion could still flourish amidst the corruption and cruelty of the world around her.

One night, a stranger stumbled into Yanmei Lin's village, badly wounded and near death. Despite the misgivings of the other villagers - who feared the man was a criminal or political dissident on the run from the law - Lin insisted on treating his injuries, and had him brought to her clinic. To her astonishment, his body responded to her treatments far more quickly than she would have thought possible, and he was soon healing at an incredible rate.

As his flesh repaired itself, the man began to speak, rambling incoherently about a war that had never happened, and of strange phenomena known as "junctures". Before she could get him to explain his ravings, the man's pursuers arrived and began to tear the village apart in search of their quarry. Some of them were human, but most were not - their ranks comprised of grotesque and terrifying creatures, like nightmares made flesh. With sadistic delight, they rampaged through the village, torturing and killing any unfortunate enough to cross their path. Blood ran like water through the streets, and buildings burned - the screams of their trapped occupants drowned out by the roar of the flames.

All seemed lost, until Lin's patient - his wounds miraculously healed - suddenly rose from his cot and launched himself at the fiends, engaging them with nothing but his bare hands. Instead of being cut down like the other villagers however, the stranger - to Lin's amazement - began to push the monsters back, his blows tearing through their flesh and shattering their bones with alarming ease. Despite the stranger's best efforts however, one of the creatures managed to loose a jet of noxious flame from between its skeletal jaws, setting Lin's clinic ablaze. Penned in by the fighting and the flames, the smoke soon overwhelmed her, and she fell into darkness - the desperate shouts of the mysterious stranger echoing in her ears as he struggled to reach her.

Yanmei Lin died that night, and her soul was quickly pulled, screaming, into the Netherworld, where it wandered for what seemed like an eternity, disoriented and half-mad from the trauma of her death. Gradually, the ghost that had been Yanmei Lin became aware of other beings like herself, and of mortals who traversed the shadowy, mist-shrouded passages of the Netherworld - using them to move between centuries as one might use a bridge to move between islands. She began to hear whispers of the "junctures" the mysterious stranger had spoken of, and of a secret war that stretched across time itself. Realizing that the mysterious stranger might still be alive, the ghost of Yanmei Lin resolved to find him and, with his help, end Gao Zhang's tyranny once and for all.

Melodramatic Hook: To find the mysterious stranger from her past and destroy the Eaters of the Lotus forever.

Attributes

Body: 5

Chi: 2 (Magic =7)

Mind: 7 (Charisma =8)

Reflex: 7

Skills

Creature Power +7 (=14)

Info/Botany +4 (9)

Info/Poetry +2 (9)

Seduction +5 (13) [Max 15]

Sorcery +6 (=13)

Medicine +2 (9)

Schticks

Sorcery: Blast

Sorcery: Heal

Creature Power: Flight

Creature Power: Insubstantial

Creature Power: Inevitable Comeback

Wealth: Poor