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Introducing Xie Lian
Jun. 17th, 2024 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrap_collectorXie Lian has just finished washing his single unchipped dish when the distance-shortening array appears on his wall. He’d eaten well today; the farmers from the village below Puqi Shrine had generously shared some of their less attractive vegetables with him in thanks for his and San Lang’s help in their fields the other week, and he’d made a sort of thick, salty stew with them. He’s a little disappointed that no one had dropped in to eat with him, but he chastises himself for the feeling immediately. How spoiled he is, these days. Had it really taken such a short time for him to get used to having company?
He sets the dish on the windowsill to dry in the late afternoon sun and crosses to the wall to examine the array. It’s quite a polite invitation, if it is one; skillfully made, and he senses no ghostly or malevolent energy tied to it. He reaches out to touch it, then hesitates and crosses back to his little table, where he writes a short note, just in case San Lang does drop in before he gets back. He pats the front of his robe and smiles a little, takes his straw hat from its place by the door, steps forward into the array…
…and ends up dropping through a few feet of empty air and splashing immediately into water. He kicks, breaking the surface, and flounders his way to its edge, thankfully not far off, and hauls himself up on a rock, where he tugs off his boots and ruefully empties the—he glances around—lakewater out of them. Odd; it appears to be morning, here, unless the afternoon is very pale and he’s entirely turned around. “Ah,” he says, to the fish that flops its way out of his hat and into the shallows, “I seem to have traveled very far indeed.” The architecture of the large house nearby is unfamiliar, even to him, though probably not to the fish.
Anyone drawn by the splash will find a young (?) Chinese man of similar dress to some of those already here, although his clothing is much simpler and slightly threadbare. His few layers of white robes are clean, other than some very newly acquired mud, but noticeably patched here and there with careful needlework. He has lengths of white cloth wrapped around both his wrists and his throat, and without the protection of his boots a black, stylized tattoo is visible, curling around his left ankle. His ears are pierced, but he wears no earrings. He’s wringing water out his long, dark hair, which he wears unadorned, and he appears to be unarmed.
He sets the dish on the windowsill to dry in the late afternoon sun and crosses to the wall to examine the array. It’s quite a polite invitation, if it is one; skillfully made, and he senses no ghostly or malevolent energy tied to it. He reaches out to touch it, then hesitates and crosses back to his little table, where he writes a short note, just in case San Lang does drop in before he gets back. He pats the front of his robe and smiles a little, takes his straw hat from its place by the door, steps forward into the array…
…and ends up dropping through a few feet of empty air and splashing immediately into water. He kicks, breaking the surface, and flounders his way to its edge, thankfully not far off, and hauls himself up on a rock, where he tugs off his boots and ruefully empties the—he glances around—lakewater out of them. Odd; it appears to be morning, here, unless the afternoon is very pale and he’s entirely turned around. “Ah,” he says, to the fish that flops its way out of his hat and into the shallows, “I seem to have traveled very far indeed.” The architecture of the large house nearby is unfamiliar, even to him, though probably not to the fish.
Anyone drawn by the splash will find a young (?) Chinese man of similar dress to some of those already here, although his clothing is much simpler and slightly threadbare. His few layers of white robes are clean, other than some very newly acquired mud, but noticeably patched here and there with careful needlework. He has lengths of white cloth wrapped around both his wrists and his throat, and without the protection of his boots a black, stylized tattoo is visible, curling around his left ankle. His ears are pierced, but he wears no earrings. He’s wringing water out his long, dark hair, which he wears unadorned, and he appears to be unarmed.
