Bai Lin

It isn't impossible to make Bai Lin react to something with bitterness or anger, but it is damn tricky. She is a bottomless fount of optimisim and idealism that has stood against everything the world can throw against her so far. She looks at a world ravaged by nuclear war and picked over by bandits, raiders, and other bottom feeders, and she still honestly believes that if she just gives people a good talking to and reminds them that they can work together instead of fighting then everything will be alright. The fact that most of the time people ignore her or call her a fool has yet to deter her.

She knows that not everyone is going to listen to her, and that living like this might kill her, but believes that if she DOESN'T live like this she won't really be herself anymore. The Bai Lin she wants to be would be dead, with someone worse taking her place. Better, in a way, to die trying to fix this burned and broken world than to be broken by it and become part of the problem she wants to fix. Better to believe in people then to slide into a deep depression at the hopelessness of it all. The funny thing is, she actually DOES get people to listen to her. Not always, but more often than the average cynical bastard might expect. Sometimes they're only listening because ignoring her would feel like kicking a puppy. Sometimes, because they just watched her take on ten men twice her size and come out on top without breaking a sweat. Either way, it works.

Lin is rather inexperienced about the world beyond Yuxi Valley, but now that she's gotten a taste of it she has found herself growing more and more curious about it. Almost all of her life has been in the narrow confines of the Temple of the Soaring Fist. It was a life she enjoyed well enough, but it was also a life of strict asceticism. Cold showers, simple food, lots of hard work, and not a lot of fun. But stories filter in even to the most austere settings. Lin has heard tales of strange and luxurious things from beyond the temple, and has always been curious about them. Now that she is, technically, not a monk, she feels she might as well try them all out. Gourmet food, fancy parties, fast cars, movies, alcohol, romance...She wants to at least say she's experienced them. Then, even if she does decide go back to her old life, she can do so knowing that she's turning her back on something she isn't interested in rather than always wondering. She actually carries a list of things she's heard about and wants to try.

Since her temple was in charge of defending Yuxi Valley, the monks would do battle with invaders on a fairly regular basis, so she has come to terms with the fact that in the heat of the moment, sometimes there are fatalities. It's very sad, but an unavoidable truth that people die when they are killed. She'll still do everything she can to not just avoid actually killing people, but to stop others from killing people if she can. She's gone so far as to step between a defeated foe and a man with a gun and an itchy trigger finger. She falls short of perfection just like everyone else does, though. If it REALLY came down to it, and she REALLY felt that someone had to die, she'd go through with it. She'd hate it and be miserable, but sometimes you do what you must, not what you should.

Underneath the optimism, the inexperience, and the curiosity is a bone deep stubbornness that underlies everything she does. Once Lin has set herself on a course of action, it is very difficult to get her to stop. She lets her conscience guide her actions more than rationality, and will willingly go up against seemingly impossible odds rather than compromise herself and take the easy way out.

At some point in the mid 21st century, nuclear war wiped out 90% of humanity and catapulted the world into a nuclear winter. It wasn't until almost 100 years later that the climate started stabilizing, and by then millions more had died of starvation. But a few hardy communities survived, and civilization, though thoroughly destroyed, has a way of rising again.

The world is still a harsh place. The atmosphere of this tabletop game was "pastiche of Mad Max and Fist of the North Star", so there were a lot of tricked out cars, bandit fortresses, and wandering kung fu experts and wizards and shit. Though the world was a dying ruin of what it once was, a prophecy stated that a battle would take place between the Dragon King and the Phoenix King, and the winner would gain the power of the Yellow Emperor, and shape the new world to his pleasure.

But things like that had nothing to do with Bai Lin, a bastard child within one of the survivor communities that was luckier than most. Yuxi Valley, somewhere in central China, was blessed with highly defensible terrain and also a temple of Buddhist monks who were devoted to martial arts. It let them survive the first few years after the fall and build the temple into a veritable fortress, defending the lands within, which were quickly converted into farmland.

Lin was the result of an adulterous relationship. Her mother bore her, but then rather than keep her around to remind everyone involved of their past mistakes, her parents sent her to the temple. The temple always needed more warm bodies, as they were the ones in charge of the valley's defense. Lin was slated to be a servant, and sent to school along with a number of other orphaned children. She was more interested, however, in sneaking in to the martial arts classes, which was where her real passion lay.

By the time she was 12, she was getting in fights with the proper initiates and, even worse, winning. She was brought before Wu Qiang, the abbot, who decided to make her an initiate properly, instantly earning Lin's undying loyalty. Wu Qiang became something of a surrogate father figure for Lin, as her biological parents wanted nothing to do with her. She did well in the life of a warrior monk, mastering all the techniques and teachings that were given to her.

Lin got her fist taste of true battle when she was 16. Yuxi Valley was attacked by the deadly warlord, Yang Wei, who had conquered several settlements with little difficulty, before coming to Yuxi. She spent most of the battle hiding behind the walls with the rest of the reserves while more experienced fighters did most of the heavy lifting, but found that while she liked the competitiveness of learning martial arts, actual war was just scary and tragic with people dying without rhyme or reason. Fortunately, the battle ended in Yuxi's victory before she had to do too much fighting. Yang Wei himself was never found, but his conquests came to an end.

When she was 18, Lin officially graduated from Initiate to Warrior Monk. She spent her time training, seeing to the spiritual welfare of the villagers, and battling would-be invaders from outside. Occasionally she heard stories of far off cities like Neo Hong Kong, out in the wastelands. Though she could never go there and was supposed to shun such worldly attachments in favor of meditation and asceticism, she always found herself trying to imagine what it was like.

When she was 22, Wu Qiang died, and Zhou Chen, a senior monk at the temple, became the new abbot. Lin was distraught, but did her best to move on. At least, until she stumbled upon a vial of poison in Zhou Chen's chambers. She tried to accuse him before the temple, but he moved faster. He set her up to look like an vindictive liar, and reminded people of her close relationship with Wu Qiang, so that when her accusation came, it sounded not like a righteously angry warrior who had discovered a terrible secret, but like a mad conspiracy from a girl who missed being the favored child. Lin was stripped of her rank and banished from the temple and the valley, never to be allowed to return.

She spent the next year or so living in the wasteland, though "living" might be a bit glamorous. She didn't do much of anything. She just sort of existed. She wandered from town to town and lived off of scraps. The only thing that kept her from just giving in was the burning anger of the sheer INDIGNITY of it. She was RIGHT and she knew it.

Lin the pathetic wanderer found herself in a middle of nowhere town that was suffering from raids from Warlord Zho and his mobile fortress. The last year had taught her how people lived in the wastelands. This wasn't her problem. She could just walk away and keep her head down and live another day. Just...continue existing. These people were barely better than the warlord, anyways. She'd watched them turn away the hungry out of self interest.

At that moment, Lin remembered something Wu Qiang had told her many years ago. The words of the dead man echoed through her head: "Everyone has a breaking point, but that does not define them. You are not who you are at your lowest moment."

She was not the kind of person who let injustice stand. She was not the kind of person who condemned those who didn't help her. Lin wiped tears from her eyes, then stood up and...intervened.

There was a fight. She won with little difficulty, her warrior monk training leaving her MORE than a match for a bunch of goons collecting tribute. More importantly, there were other fighters in the crowd, other wanderers without a clear purpose in life. Fate had brought them together, and though they didn't know each other, for one moment they acted in unison. A banished monk, a wanderer with no name, an assassin hiding from her past as a barkeep, a mob enforcer with a conscience, and a gambler with debts to pay.

The next day, Zho's moving fortress, a huge battle cruiser on wheels, was in flames, and Zho was dead. A dozen villages he had spent his time terrorizing rejoiced. Lin and her new friends were heroes. They were celebrated! Lin, who had grown up following an ascetic life, discovered new things. Wild food, alcohol, fancy clothes...all things that had been strange exotic distant ideas were now right in her face. It was...enlightening.

It wasn't the main thing, though. The main thing was reclaiming her life. If she could get her new friends to help her, she could go home again. She could bring Zhou Chen to justice! Her wanderings had brought her a long way from Yuxi Valley, but for the first time since her banishment, Lin had a destination.

The five of them accomplished many feats, leaving the wasteland a little bit less grim and hopeless than they found it. They destroyed Zho's mobile fortress, they shattered the slave empire of the Valley of Fire, they even halted the conquests of the Scorpion Queen. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of reward. People even started looking to Lin for orders, who redirected them whenever she could. She actually hated the feeling of people looking to her for what to do.

Eventually, Lin found herself back at Yuxi valley, with her new friends at her back. Though she tried to sneak into the valley, Zhou Chen recognized her immediately, and pulled her aside to confront her. He wasn't interested in a fight, though. The valley believed HIM, after all, and nothing she could do would change that. She was still in disgrace after all. He mockingly invited her to do as she pleased.

While trying to figure out how to deal with this situation, Lin encountered to other visitors to Yuxi, emissaries from the Dragon King. They were interested in what she had to say about Zhou Chen, so she ended up spilling her whole story to them. They thanked her for the tale, and that was the end of it, as far as she was concerned. But that night, Lin awoke to find the temple in flames. The two "Emissaries" were spies, who sought to judge how much worth Yuxi Valley had as allies. They had judged that Zhou Chen was a coward and worthless, and so had stealthily dispatched the guards by the gate to allow the Dragon King's army in to conquer the valley. This was a breaking point for Lin. She was enraged that even here, in the ONE PLACE that was supposed to be safe and peaceful in a world gone mad, violence had found a way in. she went on an unholy rampage, obliterating everyone who stood against her. She easily defeated both emissaries, and came within a split second of crushing one of their skulls into goo when a single gunshot rang out, essentially stealing the kill from her.

Lin had killed people before. It wasn't something she was proud of, but when you're fighting against overwhelming odds, sometimes you had to choose between your life and someone else's. But that wasn't the case in this fight. Lin had blood in her eyes, and wasn't interested in fighting to surrender. If her fist had landed, it wouldn't have been the desperate calculus of survival, it would have been murder.

The wanderer, who held the smoking gun that had stopped Lin from sullying herself so, revealed that he was Yang Wei, the very warlord who had come so close to conquering Yuxi all those years ago. He was a changed man now, who had spent the subsequent years trying to find a new purpose to his life after his defeat at Yuxi, and had found it in Lin's righteous crusade to bring light to the wastelands.

Lin was rocked to her core by all this, but the surprises weren't done coming. Zhou Chen had watched everything that had happened. He had watching an army judge him as an annoying weakling to be swept aside. He had watched an exile that he himself had banished risk her life to defend his home while he had cowered in fear. And...sometimes, a man just wakes up one day, and decides he wants to be better. The next morning, Zhou Chen confessed his crimes. He was banished and Lin was welcomed back with open arms. They even offered to make her the new abbot.

Except. Lin realized she was a different woman from the one who had been banished. She had seen much more of the world. She had killed, to her shame. She had loved, and had enjoyed it. She had seen untold suffering in the wider world, and she couldn't rest while it continued. So she turned it down. She chose a successor to be abbot in her place, and returned to the wider world to continue her battle.

The end of this part of her journey was almost here. Lin tracked down the Dragon King to the bustling city of Neo Hong Kong (hundreds of miles from the original Hong Kong, which had been a radioactive crater for a century.). She and her friends finally caught up to him DURING his final battle with the Phoenix King (remember that prophecy from the beginning?). The Dragon King wanted to use the power of the Yellow Emperor to build a new world order, where he would PERSONALLY put an end to the suffering by conquering everything and instating ORDER once and for all. The Phoenix King, on the other hand, wanted to share the power, giving everyone in the world a sliver of divine power and creating a world where the weak were no longer preyed upon by the strong by making EVERYONE strong. Recognizing both plans as insane, they tried to stop the fight, so the Yellow Emperor would never be born, but failed. The Dragon King took his own life rather than let their duel be inconclusive. And so, Lin and her friends had their final battle as a group against a fledgling god.

It was a difficult battle, but in the end, their fury was enough to defeat the Yellow Emperor before he could fully acclimate to his new powers. Yang Wei, the former warlord, died of his wounds from the final battle, and Lin recruited the somewhat bewildered Phoenix King (once again a mere mortal) to take up his slack in her quest to heal the world. Not with divine power, but with hard work and understanding.

Lin's group broke up after that, each setting out to change the world in their own way. With any luck, they were the spark that rekindle a more warm and kind age, to take the place of this cold and barren one.