Five Ghosts - Character Profile

[stormglass]

Idraiv Xiulan (Originally Xiulan Storm) (Player: Amphithere)



Gender: Female

Signifier: (TBD)

Occupation: Mercenary, currently with the crew of the Amber Blossom Songbird. Prior to finding herself slung across the multiverse, she was a Captain in Federation Navy’s Bureau of Intelligence. A highly trained operative, she and her partner were placed on assignments directly at the behest of Admiral Beckhart, in charge of the Bureau’s department of ‘dirty tricks’ and most dangerous operations. A physical combat specialist and trained chameleon, her most recent jobs had her handling a partner programmed for the ‘soft’ side of the work.

Family: Xiulan has no family in the universe of the hexarchate, but the ghosts of those who have gone before elsewhere are an unspoken presence every day. If not for family history, there is little doubt she would not be where she is today, either physically or mentally.

Living, she has two half-brothers ‘back home’. They are twins and were old enough to be grandfathers by the time she was born. She was never close to them.  Other living family include a not entirely known collection of cousins, nieces, nephews and so forth, courtesy of a father with many children over a long span of time.

Dead, they are legion - a truth and grim pun all in one. She is the youngest daughter and child of Gneaus Julius Storm, leader of the famous Iron Legion, one of the last mercenary armies wielded in private wars before Federation outlawed them in the wake of a convenient disaster. That disaster and its precursors were fruit of both a twisted branch on the family tree and a much larger conflict. Its echoes would propel Xiulan through the following years, heartsick and hating, until she played her own part in a reckoning that left further scars.

Background: (The starting idea came from Glen Cook’s Starfisher Trilogy, because I thought a transplant from that universe would be fascinating in the he*archate, courtesy of the multiverse rifts. Basic family history and career background of ‘Mouse’ Storm, but female, essentially a different personality and different points of personal history. I’ve also mentally tweaked things about the setting so it’s not quite so early 80s sci fi in some regards.)

 

Xiulan Storm was born in a universe in which humanity had spread out from what became known as ‘Old Earth’, various founder-states eventually coming together to establish a Federation of worlds from amongst many of the settled planets. At the time of her birth, Federation was the undisputed powerhouse of the known universe, though independent planets still existed. The greatest irritants in Federation’s side were twofold: Sangaree raiders and an ongoing failure to pull the High Seiners, commonly known as the ‘Starfishers’, under its sway. The Sangaree were a species visually indistinguishable from humans and contemporary research had advanced the theory that they and humanity had in fact somehow branched from the same roots in a far distant past. But regardless, from a societal and cultural point of view, the differences were strong. The Sangaree viewed humans as animals and treated them largely as such on the worlds they controlled. In turn, Federation and private armies attacked whenever such holdings could be found. It was the liberation of one such world, Prefactlas, that set off a chain of events that, over two hundred years later, would see Academy-aged Xiulan losing, in the space of less than a year, two brothers, her father, her father’s wife (the woman she’d mainly known as a mother), a mentor/the Legion’s second in command, and huge numbers of her father’s Iron Legion. The immediate perpetrator did not make it out of the Shadowline war either, but nevertheless, a cycle of vengeance was perpetuated.

 

She returned for her last year of Academy and joined Intelligence. And the Bureau was enamored with the potential of agents with the ‘right’ obsessions. Admiral Beckhart, running its most secretive division, was especially so.

 

Years and assignments later, Xiulan was partnered with an old Academy almost-friend on a series of missions, the final of which owned an ostensible goal of their seeming to ‘cross over’ to the Starfishers: essentially a defection from Federation to join that strange, insular human society. They were the ones in complete control of the harvest of ‘ambergris’, a critical component in intersteller communications systems - intstel - and a waste product of the vast creatures known as starfish (cosmic dragon might have been a better term). The Seiners and starfish had a bond which Federation did not understand. More importantly, Federation was tired of bidding at auction for ambergris like everyone else. But in reality, unbeknownst to Xiulan’s partner (Thomas McClennon), the true goal was to ascertain the location of the zealously hidden Homeworld of the Sangaree. Thomas was programmed to sell the cover story, but long term stresses, too many psych briefings too close together and a rush job on the latest caused him to truly think he wanted to defect.

 

But such complications did not thwart the true mission. Xiulan recovered the information and got it to the Bureau. And with it, the Navy was able to act on an Order drawn up some time ago. As Admiral Beckhart would tell it, he doubted they would have actually followed through, if not for what had lead to that series of intense, rushed missions to begin with: a threat had been discovered years earlier and vetting had been underway. It was no run of the mill sort of threat, but one determined to be existential to every living world and creature. It was dubbed the ‘centerward threat’ and while it would take a long time to reach the worlds of Federation, no simple counteroffensive would be enough to survive. All focus must bend to preparation, even though it would take generations. And Federation determined that the threat of the Sangaree could no longer be tolerated in any fashion, at the risk of it jeopardizing the very survival of humanity and its allied species.

 

So the Order was executed: a nova bomb was dropped in the sun of Homeworld’s system and the system itself was obliterated.

 

Post-mission, Thomas faced a Board of Inquiry, and both he and Xiulan were placed on extended leave. When the latter was reactivated, she was dispatched to the mysterious Star’s End installation that featured (or so was the hope) heavily in the plans to deal with the centerward threat. It was there that things went wrong.

 

What exactly happened, she doesn’t know. But the starfish were trans-dimensional beings of immense age and complexity. They, Star’s End, a hyper drive out of synch…she wonders. Yet there is no one to ask.

That was three years ago.  Fortunate not to go careening into the hands of a hexarchate faction, Xiulan leveraged every bit of training and obsessive focus she could bring to bear to get her footing in an alien universe. Spinning up lies and half-truths in answer to her presence, and absorbing every scrap of information she could, she has been left with an impression of a universe half-mad with the dictates of calendrical preoccupation…and no way of knowing what is happening within her own.

Appearance: Between black hair, an ivory complexion, and the cast of her features, Xiulan largely resembles someone of one of the major phenotypes of the hexarchate worlds owing to her mother's ethnicity. But there are small notes here and there that suggest the influence of something more like a Hafn bloodline might have played a part too. She has hazel eyes and a sharp featured face.

 
She tends to wear her hair back in a ponytail or bound up with hairsticks, the latter a style in rotation only since coming to the hexarchate.  Trained to adapt and blend in, she doesn’t want to stand out in attire unless she’s made a deliberate decision to do so.  But here, what ‘stands out’ runs along different rails than back home and she’s adjusted.  (Plus, having an excuse to carry stabbing implements in one’s hair is a bonus.)