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Sybal-Heim: Wen Ta Yeh

Koreviss

Published: Aug 14, 2015

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rp application doxa dragon insurgent sybal sybalheim

Description

Name:

文志字大業

Wen Chi zi Ta Yeh (19th century unstandardized Romanization)

Wén Zhì, courtesy name Dàyè (modern Pinyin Romanization)

Terms of Address:

Ta Yeh (courtesy name, formal and personal)

Mr. Wen (surname, formal)

Wen Ta Yeh (full public name, formal)

Chi (birth name, wife only)

Age: 34

Born February 10, 1859

Entered Sybal-Heim September 12, 1881 without a time skip

Physical Age: 22

Height: 5’8”

Hair: Black

Eyes: Brown

Faction: Insurgent

Sybal-Heim is paradise for Ta Yeh; he is famous, wealthy, respected, and accomplishing his dream of improving lives through technology. However, that wasn’t quite his dream. He was supposed to be like this in China, supposed to be ushering in a new era of prosperity and strength, bringing honor to his family for generations.

A rationalist at heart, Ta Yeh doesn’t believe claims that Basileus is a deity or that Sybal-Heim is magic. Enough people call him a wizard for having a modern grasp of physics and its uses; surely the city’s aetheric technology, as he calls it, could be explained by an even more thorough understanding, but the Organizer is a man of secrets. He keeps the city’s inner workings hidden from its citizens and the city’s very existence hidden from the outside world, letting most of humanity suffer and die even when the purported criteria for entrance are so universal.

When the possibility of overthrowing Basileus was whispered in his ear, he cautiously began backing the cause from the shadows. While for now he intends to have his cake and eat it too, he is willing to sacrifice more than he might think to fulfill his duty to bring these wonders to those who need them.

Occupation: Businessman

The phonograph, the telephone, the electric dynamo, and the incandescent lightbulb - “patenting” these and other inventions spurred Ta Yeh’s meteoric rise to financial success. Taking full advantage of both his Ivy League education and his parental instruction in mercantilism, the young newcomer burst onto the scene with a swath of business ventures which helped introduce modern technology into the economic landscape of Sybal-Heim. Resultantly, he spends much of his days and nights putting trade secrets into practice, negotiating arrangements with a highly regulatory government and entrenched guild system, and continuing to innovate to maintain the edge that has served him so well. His most recent project of renown was masterminding the 1892-1893 renovation of the Heilig Minister’s Estates, which saw them outfitted with electric lighting, an elevator, and an internal telephone network.

Never one to let a resource go to waste, he also sells his sybal’s fruit most nights, be it for educational, culinary, recreational, or even medical purposes. That the Insurgents resell his fruit, glamoured, as a profitable drug known as ambrosia in the city’s underbelly is hardly something he could be held responsible for, even if it were ever discovered.

Sybal Form: The Dragonroot Serpent

When night falls, Ta Yeh transforms into a massive arboreal dragon about 20 feet in length, 2 feet in diameter, and 2 tons in weight. His wooden snake skull, fruit-adorned antlers, thick and sinewy vines, mane of moss, and sharp wooden spikes combine into a fearsome visage of the forest that is undercut by the cheerful red plum blossoms. More sensitive interior vines can emerge to form his limbs and whiskers or retract again, switching his silhouette back and forth between dragon and serpent.

He has the constrictive power of a boa, the infrared vision and scent-tracking skills of a pit viper, and the speed and bite strength of a cobra - but the dexterity of none of them. Rather than moving through muscular action or something similar, the Serpent is moved about by winds that blow him in the desired direction. They are audible to others, making his presence while moving obvious, but have no physical effect on any sybal or object other than himself (except, recently, the glowing locks of his wife's sybal). While this does allow him to levitate up to three feet off of the ground in true draconic fashion, it makes movement unintuitive and difficult, leading Ta Yeh to often struggle with simple activities like opening doors even after extensive physical therapy. They are also responsive to his mood, making hiding his emotions harder and making coordination even more challenging when distressed.

His heightened senses come with the drawback that he can be disoriented by sudden changes in smell or temperature, which invariably happens for the first minute or so at the start of every night. He typically uses this time to have his servants dress him, because while The Dragonroot Serpent begins each night "nude", Ta Yeh adheres to Confucian-Sybalian concepts of modesty, so he wears clothing that covers all of his body except his head and arms. This also has the benefit of protecting him from fire, a considerable danger for his highly flammable form, and from the cold, which makes him highly lethargic. Because of this predilection for clothing, no one has noticed that the plum blossoms are starting to look more like roses...

Sybal Power: A Taste of Knowledge

Ta Yeh begins the night with eight unripe fruit. At will, he can ripen them with “copies” of portions of his mind, such as facts, memories, procedural expertise, etc., lighting the glassy pearl-seed in the center with a corresponding web of electricity. If a ripe fruit is then eaten, the consumer gains the invested knowledge while they are within 10 feet of the pearl-seed for the following hour, after which the pearl dims and the knowledge is forgotten.

Consuming a fruit typically entails taking a bite, but for sybals incapable of this the effect will trigger with an analogous action such as holding the fruit to the face. If the consumption process would damage or engulf the pearl-seed inside, the pearl-seed teleports to Ta Yeh’s hand if one is grown and free, his antlers if not, or the nearby ground if he is not present. Only the first sybal to consume the fruit acquires the knowledge, and if the skin is broken by something else, the fruit will be wasted if not consumed immediately. The knowledge gained from a consumed fruit feels “foreign”, and recipients have no difficulty distinguishing between their own thoughts and Ta Yeh’s. They will not necessarily consider the information contained correct or compelling, though they will have an absolute sense of how much Ta Yeh himself believes it.

A single fruit can hold no more information than could fit in a single thick book, and only on one topic. If Ta Yeh attempts to put knowledge too unconnected into the fruit, the electricity web will break down sooner or later and the knowledge will end early. If he attempts to put too much knowledge, some of it will be truncated, which also runs the risk of leaving the remaining knowledge too unrelated and ending it early.

Sybals themselves can only handle so much transferred knowledge; a single completely full fruit will overwhelm animalistic Ferals, two will overwhelm most sybals, and three will overwhelm even the smartest, though if Ta Yeh deliberately makes the knowledge confusing, just one will be too much for anyone. Nearly overwhelmed sybals become disoriented, while completely overwhelmed sybals fall unconscious, though either of these effects ends when the knowledge is forgotten, which may come from smashing the pearl-seed, moving it out of range, the web breaking down early due to poor construction, or the conclusion of the one hour.

Since the knowledge is Ta Yeh’s own, he cannot learn anything “new” from his fruit when he eats them himself, but he can enhance his recollection and processing of the duplicated knowledge and of associated information it pulls from the depths of his mind.

Sybal Temperament: Docile

The Dragonroot Serpent has little noticeable difference in personality from Ta Yeh's daylight self, with one exception: pyrophobia. He gives open flame a wide berth and loses all reason if set alight, but since those are not unreasonable reactions from a flammable sybal that has had bad experiences with fire, he is still classified as docile.

Personality:

+ Analytical, driven, respectful, compassionate

+/- Curious, idealistic, self-conscious, goal-oriented, serious, Confucian, verbose

- Stubborn, proud, stiff, impatient, hypocritical, controlling, anxious, overprotective

History:

Survivor of the Heavenly Kingdom

Ta Yeh was born into a wealthy merchant family, but little of that family survived long after his birth. His mother and most of his relatives were civilian casualties of the Heavenly Kingdom's attack on Hangzhou exactly one year later, slaughtered for not renouncing Confucianism and Manchu rule in favor of the Christian rebellion. His father escaped to Shanghai with him and managed to rebuild the family fortune through savvy business dealings and an advantageous remarriage, giving Ta Yeh a comfortable childhood, two sisters, and an example to live up to.

Young Mission Student in America

At thirteen, Ta Yeh was selected as a candidate for the Chinese Educational Mission, where 120 Chinese boys would be educated in America and return to China with the military and technical knowledge to strengthen the Qing Dynasty in the face of the rebellions and Western domination the empire was facing. Hosted by an American family along with another mission student, Ta Yeh diligently attended to his studies, graduating from a New England high school and then Yale University's Sheffield Engineering School before the mission was canceled early for a variety of reasons, not least of which was Christian and treasonous sentiment among some of the mission students. Held captive collectively for that crime upon their return, Ta Yeh entered the woods as a chance to prove his loyalty and usefulness to his people, having rejected the forest when it first appeared to him during a train robbery near the start of the mission.

Man of the Future in the Ancient City

That last spot of hope died quickly when the inescapability of the city’s boundary and inscrutability of its center were made clear to him, leaving his purpose gone and his sybal motionless. An influential businessman persuaded him to turn his education to profit, and Ta Yeh dove into the task with his characteristic earnestness, making him one of the most notable citizens of the century, but it was not until a mysterious benefactor whispered in his ear of Insurgency that his winds answered him and granted him movement. With the help of Chinala and Phan Thi Chau’s powers he developed his newfound motility, and with the help of Deyri’s power he made rapid advancements in his capabilities with his sybal power. Nothing but a bright future stood before him, which became all the brighter when he took Rosette Füeller as his bride, so all that was left was to bring that bright future to the world outside.

Additional Info:

Ta Yeh’s home, The Wen Estate, is a massive siheyuan with three spacious courtyards, two- and three-story buildings within them, a Chinese garden (now German forest) of size equal to the three courtyards combined, and walls high enough to keep the estate’s interior private from even the tallest of sybals. The estate is the southwest-most of a three-by-three array of similarly opulent siheyuans collectively known as the Everlasting Estates. Ta Yeh purchased his estate from its previous owner on the recommendation of his business associates as a show of his value to investors, making him the youngest citizen by far to ever afford one. Such a sizeable property demands upkeep, a demand that is answered by live-in staff:

Currently:

Lady Chen, domestic worker
Bopha, gardener
Timur, doorman
Tacitus, bodyguard

Formerly:

Kalaya, maid
Sun, domestic worker
Saul Cordell, bodyguard
Cairistona Connor, maid
Wong, domestic worker

Not live-in:

Tez, night security

A few items from and relating to his wife have made themselves permanent fixtures of his attire over the course of his marriage:

A golden and bejeweled pocket watch, an engagement present from her
A golden band, his wedding ring
A sword cane with a jade serpent, his 33rd birthday present from her
A jade and onyx hairpin fragment, cut during the Heilig estate renovation ribbon-cutting ceremony as a symbolic declaration of monogamy

He never blushes, even when embarrassed, unless he's also drunk, and you can count the number of times that's happened on one hand. Instead, he tends to become fascinated by that thing over there.
He enjoys language, having learned several of them in his life before Sybal-Heim (Cantonese, Beijing Mandarin, English, Latin, Greek) and even more after (such as Arabic, Vietnamese, and German). He tends to speak with an exacting vocabulary to stress his capability despite his youth, to avoid forgetting the Sybalian he learned upon entry, and because it's fun.
Keenly aware of the value that newcomers can possess, Ta Yeh keeps an eye out for potentially useful citizens. One example is Asma Hakim's charge Hasan, whom Ta Yeh connected with a job in Doxa to have a more available tracker sybal on stand-by after the mishaps with Santiago de Campos and Chaska Palla.
His sybal can experience hunger, drowsiness, and lust, but can't eat, can't sleep, and doesn't have a "little snake". If he's grumpy some nights, that might be why.
The default flavor of Ta Yeh's fruit is peach, but the more he puts into a fruit, the more the taste changes according to the contents. Ever want a fruit that tastes like bacon? Now you can!
His birthday takes place at the tail end of the year of the snake, and it was sheer coincidence in-story and out that it turned out to be exactly one year before the attack on Hangzhou. The history books never cease to be kind to my character crafting.