NAME: trace
CHARACTERS: xiao xingchen (the untamed)

TELL US ABOUT YOUR CHARACTERS:

some backstory cliffnotes in three handy bullet-points

personality-wise, he's one of those 'can't refrain from helping someone who seems to need help' sorts, a very warm and outgoing person by nature. he does have kind of a 'stereotypical kind do-gooder' outward presentation that he tends to keep people at arm's length with at first (it's pretty much all he had ever known before ryslig, but since arriving here he has made great leaps in allowing himself to be a person instead of a daozhang)

underneath all that, though, he's a fiercely loyal and stubborn friend with every ounce of terrible dad-humor you'd expect from a reformed mountain yokel.

here in ryslig, he's a werewolf (werefox, really), and he lives in a cottage in the woods above lake minska.

he has been here for a little over two years now, and though he kind of let himself get insular and cozy for a while in late 2021/early 2022 after some particularly fucky events early last year sharply narrowed the scope of his long-term aspirations, he's once again starting to get that proactive itch to Fix This Overarching Bad Situation Somehow, so he'll probably be out and around a lot more once he (and I) can nail down exactly what direction to go with it.

WHAT YOUR CHARACTER(S) WILL BE DOING:

frequent haunts — apart from his home and his husband's estate (lotus pier, at the south end of lake minska), he also spends a lot of time volunteering at bavan general hospital (generally doing whatever nursing-adjacent tasks he can with experience in field medicine but no degree), in exchange for a small but steady supply of expired/non-medically-viable blood for said husband to drink.

current status — so he lost one of his few close cr early last month, which has put him in a less-than-stellar mental place currently (not that he tends to let on), which in turn has lit that Do Something Proactive And Meaningful drive in him so he can stop feeling so impotent re: being able to make a legitimately meaningful positive impact in the lives of others.

he should have a network post coming up re: a few things, but mostly asking about the sea of stars. i meant to do it last month but things got away from me.

in a more long-term sense, i think he's going to be feeling out what sort of monster support systems actually exist and working toward maybe setting up (or helping with, if one already exists) a system that tries to maximize the number of monsters fed per civilian death - a larger-scale version of what he, runyu, and jiang cheng had worked out before runyu left (runyu was fae and would get the person's energy, then jc would get the blood, then xingchen would get the meat). i feel like he has a lot of questions re: the monster types he has less experience with before he can figure out how to approach any sort of system-building, though, which will probably be more network posts along the way. gotta love network posts.

SCENARIOS YOU'RE INTERESTED IN:

he had a small but diverse CR pool for a while, but basically everyone aside from jiang cheng and runyu is gone now, so my obligatory 'give me anything' type answer is just that i really want him to start making connections with others in general again, so that he can't keep numbing his thoughts with whatever work or training he can throw himself into.

(also, this will be more like a menu of thread possibilities than an actual wishlist, but w/e)

if anyone would want in on the above monster support system project once it starts to come together, he isn't proprietary about it and would love to make it a team effort with anyone who believes in the value of minimizing harm to the native residents of the peninsula.
— (i don't think that he'll actually put out a call for help even once he gets it started, because he's kind of just not a person who defaults to passing work off onto others when he can shoulder it himself, but he (and i, oocly) would definitely welcome others into the efforts.)

i really, really would love to see him make a friend. i laugh at how low that bar is set, but god like. he has been surface-level friendly and even joked a little with so, so many people, but it never quite seems to break through to a layer where they actually have serious talks about genuine things, or form any kind of trust deeper than the trust you give someone you ambiently know is a decent person. i've been letting it slide because at least he still had runyu, but now the friend count is zero (jc and lanzhu don't count) and i'm not gonna let this fool self-isolate.

he's one of the many many people here who could teach someone sword combat, or possibly effective meditation practices if that's somehow of interest.

does your character need help with something? literally even the stupidest little tasks? Let Xingchen Help You. he's too helpful for his own good and has almost definitely been told to fuck off and mind his own business at least a not-insignificant number of times in his life.

characters who frequent the woods between bavan and lake minska (or even happen to go out there one single time) might encounter him in his travel form (a waist-height jiuweihu fox), where he can help them get un-lost or just generally be a large fluffy acquaintance. i also wouldn't be opposed to them helping him in some way, like if he got his leg caught in a trap or something like that.

ANYTHING ELSE: as an ooc note, i'm trying to regain my footing after two years of grad school ate my life, so most of my plans are still firming up. also, i discovered while setting up a new thread-tracking system this evening that at least four of you tagged me in late july/early august and i didn't get the notifs - so if i tag our super old thread and you'd rather just drop it, that's totally fine.

re: trigger warnings — xingchen definitely comes with some of those in an overarching sense including eye gore(?) (his blindness is due to physically... not having eyes) and mentions of suicide. however, it's super unlikely that either of those will probably come up (and if they do, there would be ample warning or pre-plotting), since he has bandaging over his eyeholes and tends not to talk about the more concerning parts of his pre-ryslig past unless directly asked.

and now, a parting gif(t).