It was not a good day to travel through the Ibinian badlands. Strong winds whipped the sand dunes into howling miniature cyclones. But a lone figure in a thin brown cloak was braving the storm. She was small, but strided with confidence. The soles of her well-fitting leather boots sank into the sand with each step.

Suddenly the sandstorm began to clear up. She had been travelling alone for days now without seeing a soul, but now two men on horseback were drawing close. They had tan skin and odd hats that wrapped around their heads. They were clad in leather armor, had swords strapped to their backs and pistols strapped to their legs. One had a mustache and one had a clean face.

Their horses stopped with a whinny in front of the woman.

“Now look at what we have here.”

The man with the mustache leered at the figure from atop his tall steed. Her head was tilted downwards so he couldn't see past the hood of her cloak initially. But then she looked up at him and he could then see that she was wearing a porcelain mask. It was strapped to her face by a leather band and had odd facial features painted on it. Blushing pink cheeks, plump red lips, flat black bangs that curled across the forehead, long eyelashes painted around the eye slits, and finally arched eyebrows that gave it a permanent expression of surprise.

“What in the… what’s with that?”

The woman spoke from underneath the mask. It muffled her voice but her words were still clear to the two men. “What is with what?”

“Do you hear that voice? I’m shocked. This is a woman.” The second man spoke, the smooth-faced one who hadn’t addressed her before. “From a distance it looked like a man with bug bites on his chest.”

The two men shared a laugh.

“I do not have bug bites. I haven’t become acquainted with many bugs through my trip. I saw some loud buzzing flies, but they did not bite. I didn’t see any teeth on them, they were rather small.”

The two men’s expressions of humor became expressions of bafflement.

“Where are you from, girl?”

She scratched herself under the arm looking almost like a monkey. “From the north.”

“What?”

“I have been walking from the north.”

The mustached man rolled his eyes.

“I mean, where do you- How do I say this? Where do you originate from? And don’t say the north! I am asking for the country.”

“Ah. Okay. My misunderstandings, greatest apologies. I am from Jingzhu.”

The men exchanged looks, then the smooth-faced one spoke up. “Jingzhu is a faraway place. How did you get this far on your own?”

“I am well-traveled. I am used to traveling to many places on my own. Good sense of direction. Don’t need a compass, my head is like one. Anyways, I must get on with my traveling.”

Pulling her cloak around herself, as it was being whipped by the returning winds, she started to walk off. She passed the men on their horses, who were taken aback by the woman's strange behavior.

“Hold on a minute now, you never answered my question, girl.” The first man to speak brought his horse around and had it walk alongside the girl, matching her pace. “What is with your mask?”

“Hmmm.” The girl neglected to look at the man as she kept walking. “You are curious about my mask?”

“If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be asking about it.” The second man was now catching up with them. “Are you not too bright or something?”

“I am not bright at all… I am not a fire or a lamp. Or the sun. Or a firefly. Fireflies can be bright. Sometimes. But then they flicker their fire out and are just dark. Until they become bright again.”

“Okay, you aren’t bright. Glad we’re in agreement.” The smooth-faced man laughed at his own joke.

“To answer your inquiries, the mask is part of my culture.” She answered plainly, stopping in place to scratch herself again, then yawned into that hand. “I cannot take it off until I am chosen by a man to be his wife. I can then only take it off when I am alone with him and he is asking me to.”

“I see. I didn’t realize Jingzhu had such a custom.”

“It is only the custom of my sect.”

“So that means that you aren’t married.” The smooth faced man said. He looked her up and down, trying to peer at her body past her cloak. “Do Jingzhus not like skinny women like yourself? They are quite popular in these parts… I am personally a big fan.”

“Skinny? I am not skinny. I am lean-bodied. There is a great differential.”

“I am not sure that is how that word is used.” The mustached man said. He glared at his partner for trying to hit on the strange woman. That however was when he noticed something odd. Beneath the woman’s cloak strapped to her back was a large black weapon. A curved blade made from what looked like old iron. He decided not to comment on it for now. “Where exactly are you headed girl?”

She gave them the name of the town. It was an old mining town that was left abandoned when the ores were all gone.

“This is suspicious. Of all places to go, why there? And you can't have walked all this way on your lonesome.” The smooth-faced man moved his hand to his gun. “You are too strange! I think we have some kind of criminal on our hands.”

The girl stopped in her tracks and finally turned to face the men following her.

“You suspect correctly. I am an assassin. People pay me to kill. I am meeting a client and friend to discuss a deal. But I have no plans to kill you two. Nobody has paid and you seem quite congenial. It would be in both of your best interests not to test my power. You cannot match it.” Despite her boasts, she spoke completely calmly and measured, as if she was reciting a passage from a holy book.

“Do you know who I am?” The mustached man pulled his gun from its strap. “I am Jahani, the lord of these areas you travel through. Even the dragons respect me. You are a mere scrawny girl and your only weapon appears to be an oversized farming tool! How you have gotten so full of yourself I do not know!”

He leveled the pistol at her.

“Remove that strange mask and drop that sickle on your back. You are coming with me.”

“I bet she’s working with those Nova Ordo crazies!” The smooth-faced assistant shouted. He took out his own gun. “She’s definitely dumb enough to be one. Filthy rats have been nothing but trouble. I say we kill her here and leave her body for the vultures. Threatening officers is enough of a crime.”

“Do not be hasty! There is information to get from her.”

Steady as a rock the masked woman pulled her sickle from her back. “I am already running late. Let me go and I won't kill you.”

“Second strike: pulling a weapon on officers. Third strike: threatening them again! You’re out lady!”

“No, don’t fire!” Jahani shouted.

It was too late. By the time he opened his mouth, his assistant was already pulling the trigger. The woman brought up her black sickle and with a lightning-quick movement slashed at the air in front of her. For a split second the air filled with the noise of metal striking metal. With deadly precision she had swatted the bullet in midair, sending it hurtling back at the man. It blew a hole in his chest and he dropped off his horse, which ran away neighing in terror.

He got up to his knees using his hand to staunch the bleeding hole in his torso. He brought up his gun again but then something even more unexpected happened. The woman’s black hair glowed white and a tendril of frost twisted from the sickle and froze the weapon to his hand. He screamed in shock from the sudden cold, and while he was stunned the woman flipped forward and finished him off with a skull-splitting sickle slice.

“By the dragons!” Jahani brought his horse into a run, fleeing the scene. He fired back at the girl with his gun but she froze the bullets in chunks of ice that dropped to the sand.

Her hair glowed brighter and she slammed the sickle against the ground. A wall of ice popped up in front of Jahani’s horse. Spooked, it threw Jahani off and continued to run without its rider. Jahani wasn’t able to get to his feet before the woman closed the distance and killed him too.

With a final use of her power she froze the blood on the sickle and shook it clean. Her hair darkened once more into its usual coal shade.

“Quite pitiful. If they had just left me be I wouldn’t have to do this. But ah well, I better move.”

“I am sorry for being so late, brother Qu-Lai.” The woman said between mouthfuls of food. Her porcelain mask remained on her face as she ate voraciously, pulled up just above her pale pink lips. “The distance was longer than you’d said it would be!”

As soon as she arrived at the abandoned warehouse she was meeting her contacts in, she had realized how completely famished she had gotten from using her powers against the two horsemen. The only food they had around were these too-sweet cactus fruit tarts and some chicken feet soup.

“Why didn’t you take the train, sister Xi-Wen?”

“That big metal snake thing? I don’t trust machines. They can break down.”

“You thought it was a big snake? What, are there no trains in Jingzhu?” Xi-Wen was too busy grabbing handfuls of fruit tart and shoveling them in her mouth to look back at who was talking. 

The voice was Meena’s, a woman she hadn’t met until today. She was a representative from the Ibinian Nova Ordo. Qu-Lai, an old friend of hers who had left her sect to join with the Nova Ordo group in Jingzhu had met Meena while spying on Sage Coalition operations. Together they had sent a message to her requesting her presence in this weird town. The letter went on and on but the main point was that they wanted her to fight for Nova Ordo.

“No, at least not in the parts where we come from.” Qu-Lai explained to the girl. “They’re very rural.”

Meena placed a bowl of chicken feet soup down in front of Xi-Wen, who attacked it like she had attacked the fruit tart. She pulled one chicken foot from the broth, shook off the liquid like she was drying a wet hand towel, and then shoved it whole into her mouth. She quickly chewed the meat off of it, sucking the fat from the knuckles, and then spat the little bones out all over the table.

“That’s disgusting!” Meena cried. “What are you, some kind of wild animal?”

“No. I’m a human. Actually humans are animals. Did you know that? I am not wild though. Hmmmm. Are humans domesticated or wild?”

“You are anything but domesticated!”

“I should’ve told you earlier, Meena. Sister Xi-Wen is a little different, I should say.”

“What do you mean ‘a little different?’ Is she half pig or something? Actually, I think pigs might have more manners than she does.”

Xi-Wen took a sip of the broth, then desperately spat it out like she had just accidentally drank deadly poison. “This soup is too hot! It’s way too hot!”

“It’s been sitting out.” Meena balked at the girl’s behavior. “It’s a little above room temperature, that’s all! What’s your problem?”

Xi-Wen pulled her sickle from her back and dipped the tip in the broth. Her hair glowed again as she made a minor use of her power. Sheathing her sickle, she took a sip of the broth again. “Ah. Nice and cold. But it’s too salty.”

She grabbed the rest of the fruit tart and shoved it in the broth, mixing it with her bare hands like she was kneading bread dough. Meena gagged. 

Xi-Wen pulled her hand from the bowl. The mixture was the consistency of mud. She stuck her hand in her mouth, sucking each finger clean.

“Mmmm… sweet and salty combined. This is innovative cuisine!”

As Xi-Wen continued her assault against table manners and common decency, Qu-Lai pulled Meena aside and lowered his voice to a hush.

“Xi-Wen is a member of the White Mask Sect, just like I was. Their training is like nothing you can imagine. Basically torture. They’d have us live naked and alone in the woods for the entire winter with nothing but our bodies and our masks. We’d have to fight off bears and wolves without a weapon. And then they’d have us walk barefoot over burning coals. Or crawl on beds of spikes. They tied boulders to our waists and had us climb to the peak of a mountain. Then back down again. Then back up again. We were only children.”

“By the dragons!” Qu-Lai was right, Meena couldn’t imagine what she was hearing. “How did you not just die?”

“A lot of us didn’t make it. The people who did make it out… Well, some could be normal. But others just had something in them break. I think the training didn’t just break Xi-Wen; it shattered her. It's more than just her speech issues and sloppy eating habits. She sleeps with her eyes open like she’s still in those forsaken woods. But despite all of her quirks, she was always the strongest in the sect.”

“Meena!” Xi-Wen called out, having polished off all the food on the table. She relaxed back in her seat. “You have a very womanly figure, I have noticed. Large breasts. The men who I ran in with earlier thought mine were bug bites. Ha! Can you believe that?”

“Would you be offended if I said yes?” Meena jabbed back.

Qu-Lai spoke before his former comrade could open her mouth and give one of her trademark clueless answers. “Sister Xi-Wen, remember how I would tell you sometimes that the things you say make others feel uncomfortable? You’re doing that again.”

“Ah. Greatest apologies. But your breasts are large, Meena. That is just fact. I think that is why Qu-Lai keeps staring at them when you are not looking.”

Meena dragged Qu-Lai away to another corner of the large room.

“Are you sure about this choice? She seems unreliable. She acts like a kid!”

“Trust me. She’s not good with social situations, or eating like a human being, but when you stick that sickle in her hand and tell her to go beat something into the dirt, she gets the job done like that.” He snapped his fingers. “We really can’t hope for much better. And most of these desert dwellers probably can’t handle the cold very well.”

“I get she’s your ‘sister,’ I get you both went through the training from hell, but face it. She’s crazy.”

Qu-Lai smiled. “Crazy can be a very good thing in a fight!”

He headed back to the table to talk with his old friend again. Meena just stood there baffled.

“Maybe they’re right, calling us Nova Ordo a bunch of nutjobs…”

Character Overview

Name: Xu Xi-Wen (last name first)

Author: gorkus

Allegiance: Nova Ordo

Age: ??? (somewhere in her mid-twenties, nobody’s quite sure, not even she is)

Race: Human

Bio: A quirky assassin from a place called Jingzhu, a mountain country similar to China or Mongolia. She is a member of a sect of assassins called the White Masks of Death or White Mask Sect. From birth she was taught in the clan’s ways and made to wear a white porcelain mask at all times. The trials she endured included surviving naked in the icy winter woods, fighting wild animals to train in martial arts, and walking across beds of flame to learn to resist pain. It was grueling, but it molded her into a killer and she was rewarded with one of the sect's most prized totems at the end. However, the years of brutal training may also have broken her mind.

Of all the White Mask Sect’s members she is considered the most deadly and has been hired to take out many targets in many smaller countries, like wealthy traders, government officials, and warlords. Her sect alligned with Nova Ordo after meeting with the members of their Jingzhu branch. She believes strongly in the Nova Ordo ideals of freedom from the Sage Coalition (who have wronged her sect in the past but they refuse to explain what exactly they did). It is also something like a business relationship, however.

Key Personality Traits:

• Social Skills Level 0: Xi-Wen’s non-stop training from youth made her strong, but it didn’t adapt her well to social situations. She eats like an animal and has many bad habits like scratching herself openly, yawning loudly when other people talk, or over-sharing personal details. When speaking with people her speech is odd and stunted; she uses long words without knowing what they mean, makes odd comments, and has a hard time following what people say. She lives in her own little world inside her head. She is never rude intentionally and is always cordial with people (even her targets), but can be unintentionally mean due to missing social cues.

• Arrogance: Xi-Wen is highly arrogant and believes she cannot fail. This is not “haughty princess” arrogance or “rude jackass who’s full-of-themself” arrogance. She does not belittle her opponent or dramatically boast of her power but calmly state it as if it’s a fact. Legitimately, she does not think she is capable of failiure, and cannot even comprehend the idea. The idea of her losing a fight or failing a mission is completely alien since her entire worldview revolves around herself and her identity as an assassin.

• The Mask Stays On: All the women in her sect are required to wear porcelain masks at all times (even while eating, they just pull it up a bit) until they get married, and even then they can only reveal their face to their husband when they are in private. The males wear masks as well, but usually only on missions and on sect meeting days or ceremonies. Xi-Wen is unmarried (and will likely never get married due to her temperament) so she keeps her mask on. If it is removed, she will consider herself “nude” until she can get it back on or find another face covering and will compulsively hide her countenance.

• General Weirdness: Beyond her self-centered form of arrogance and poor social skills, Xi-Wen is just a naturally odd person. She sleeps with her eyes wide open while sitting upright, despises and avoids all kinds of mechanical devices like guns, has absolutely bizarre taste in foods (she eats nothing that’s warm, as an example), and doesn't trust closed doors, only entering buildings through windows or doors that are already open. On top of these, she has dozens of other minor quirks. While working however, she is deadly efficient and often cold silent.

Abilities:

• Glacial Sickle: One of the White Masks of Death’s most powerful ancestral totems and her primary weapon. It is an oversized, semi-circle shaped blade with a small handle made of white wood. The weapon was forged long ago from black iron that is always cold to the touch. It contains the spirit of a massively powerful ice demon that menaced Jingzhu before being conquered and slain by the ancestors of the modern White Mask Sect. It is considered unshatterable and Xi-Wen is very skilled with using it. She straps it to her back when she is not wielding it.

• Ice Manipulation: With the Glacial Sickle, Xi-Wen can channel the wintry power of the demon’s soul trapped within. She can launch waves of supernatural frost that freeze people if they’re exposed to it for too long. She can launch crescents of sharp ice from the sickle that slice through trees like paper, and even release icy mist from it for a smoke screen too. Or, she can raise ice walls for defense, or create ice slides to maneuver around the battlefield. The ice it generates melts fast, however. Using the power too much makes Xi-Wen incredibly incredibly hungry, though she has trained to limit this. Whenever she is channeling the ice demon’s power her hair unfurls, glows white, and in great uses of power it begins to float in the air.

• Overwhelming Speed: Xi-Wen is more durable and strong than any plain ol' human due to her years of grueling training, but speed is where she really shines. it is said she can parry revolver bullets with her Glacial Sickle or move so fast she briefly becomes invisible to the naked eye in short bursts. However her speed is not completely insurmountable and she can be caught off guard by sneak attacks.

• Unarmed Skills: Glacial Sickle aside, Xi-Wen has no inherent magical abilities. Separated from her beloved totem, she is a talented fighter and very fast, but can no longer use her ice manipulation. She knows many survival skills and is trained in six Jingzhu martial arts. 

Appearance: As said before, Xi-Wen constantly wears a porcelain mask that has been reinforced to not shatter easily. It has a doll-like face painted on it with red lips, curled black bangs, arched eyebrows, rosy cheeks and slits for her light blue eyes (look up Chinese opera masks for a better mental image). Her hair is coal-black and most often tied in a long traditional braid. She has a very lean figure that is mostly muscle; in her baggy clothing she can be mistaken for a short young man, as she has very small breasts, toned shoulders and only slightly wide hips. She normally wears loose blue clothing, a red sash around her waist, and leather boots similar to Chinese martial arts uniforms, but has taken up wearing a light brown cloak over her uniform to protect herself from the intense sun of Ibinia. Her skin is pale to the point of being supernaturally white and always a little cold.

How they got recruited: One of the Nova Ordo factions in Ibinia was very close with the primary Jingzhu Nova Ordo faction, the same that had good relations with the White Mask Sect. Upon the suggestion of a friend of hers, a former White Mask named Zhen Qu-Lai who joined the Ibinian Nova Ordo, she came to the desert country and agreed to fight on their behalf. (She did ask for a bit of money in exchange though.)

ArantChronicles

Hey guys! We're just two slots away from hitting our goal for the project. If you're interested to write for the collab, sign up soon before the slots are all gone! We have one Sage slot left and one Nova Ordo slot left.