Application: Tai Feng Hau

[howl_typhoon]

Player info:
Name: Doom.
Pronoun: He
E-Mail: limitlessbuster@yahoo.com
Other Contact: AIM: Masterstarman

Character Basics
Name: Tai Feng Hau
City: Underwood
Age: 15
Gender: Female
Biological Sex: Female
Birthdate: January 28, 2035
Birthplace: Hong Kong, China.
PB: Makoto Kikuchi, The Idolm@ster (And Xenoglossia)

Appearance
Natural Hair/Eye Color:Black hair, grey eyes.
Height: 4'10 (~148 cm)
Body Type: Slender, but she has the wire of someone who does a lot of climbing and running.
Noticeable Scars/Tattoos/Piercings and Location: Tai Feng has a positively improbable number of normal-sized ear piercings, which she keeps adorned with studs and small rings. She thinks they make her look tough. If so, they may be the only thing.
Clothing Style: Tai Feng tends to favor light clothes that won't get in the way or make a big racket. She dressed in a lot of dark tank tops and cargo pants, and even after being dragged across worlds has managed to keep an old purple hoody from Earth, with a design across the shoulders, sleeves and back like tangling threads, in relatively decent condition. That preference transferred to Zen; she favors lighter clothes and minimalist armor, including as little as possible (often none; gets in the way) on her legs. She played around with coats and cloaks and other Cool Thief Looks for a while but quickly concluded the added awesome mystique was not worth the sheer practical concerns of having a big grabbable sheet wagging behind her.

Background
Summary:

Tai Feng Hau is a first-generation Chinese immigrant. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Tai Feng's parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was thirteen. Tai Feng ended up lodged in the cogs of social services; it became apparent that her closest living relative was an unmarried uncle living in Underwood, in the United States, and as he had little inclination to move back to the Homeland, Tai Feng found herself compelled to move across the Pacific, to a ...rather different culture.

Her uncle, Carl Shen, was completely unprepared for his sudden burden; working long hours at an underwhelming job, he simply lacked the means to adequately support a grief-stricken teenager simultaneously coping with a catastrophic loss, moving to an entirely different country, and the wracking emotional woes that come with simply being a young teenager. Carl did his best, in the manner of overwhelmed absentee parents since the invention of in-home entertainment: He got her a cheap pre-pay phone, a subscription to a couple video services, and hours of time totally unsupervised every day. Some weekends, he made some time to try and take her out to the local sights, or otherwise do something vaguely parental with her, but being a young girl with more issues than answers, it was largely not terribly well-received.

That he tried so hard despite all the problems speaks volumes about his character, a fact Tai Feng will probably not realize until she's got more emotional intelligence than a rock painted to look like a mean face. If she is /very/ lucky this moment will not coincide with his terrible death.

Tai Feng of course attended school, barely. She was alright in phys ed and needed to spend extra time in the ESL program to have a whisper of a prayer of understanding anything else. With some help from Carl and the teachers, she managed to get her English up far enough that being in the city wasn't an incomprehensible blur, but Tai Feng's spoken English even now is thick and somewhat broken. More than enough to be picked on. She got written up several times for clobbering a kid who mocked her accent. Carl yelled at her about it three times; she never listened.

In the manner of absentee-parented troubled /kids/ for the last hundred years or so, Tai Feng found herself gravitating to a handful of other neighborhood kids with circumstances nobody wanted to think about, from drunkard parents to just failing marriages. She thinks one guy's parents were in a cult but they never really got around to figuring that out before the whole family just shipped off to parts unknown one day. Nobody was particularly healthy, but they were friends and they had each others' backs, and that was, they thought, enough.

And, as rebellious, under-parented children with unmonitored access to household supplies are wont to do, they started (became? evolved into?) a gang. It was Underwood, this was not exactly the Crips, but the group was responsible for a few graffiti and vandalism incidents in the area during the last few years; Tai Feng proved to be an adroit climber and quickly learned to love the rush of finding increasingly ludicrous places to tag. She ended up a sort of junior hobbyist urban explorer, often turning up in strange places even totally on her own time.

They stole cigarettes because they thought that was what you did when you were tough; one guy raided his father's liquor cabinet a couple times. Banged up cars, broke a few street lights; a store window once, which was when Tai Feng found out she had a nice throwing arm. Ultimately, the petty crimes of petty teenagers.

And then things got.......weird. One of the guys had been playing the Legend of Zenderael, he said, one day hanging out on someone's porch. They were doing some kind of weird-ass ARG lately, he continued, which is about when Tai Feng stopped listening to the conversation.

When he vanished completely a week later, she started caring again. But that was too early, and Tai Feng too removed; she boiled but all she could do was keep her life going.

When /cities/ followed after him, what was she supposed to do? Never content to be the passive one, even in the end of the world, Tai Feng added a baseball bat (Carl's) to her usual gear, and then continued on her business. She had heights to climb and a head full of bad ideas to work out on perfectly innocent billboards. Tai Feng was only 15, after all; as swollen as her ego may be, this was a problem entirely beyond her ability to manage. So they did the /other/ thing tough gangs of cool people are supposed to do: She and her crew decided they'd patrol their little end of the world, and keep their territory safe.

It was Tai Feng's idea. Tai Feng wasn't really the strongest one in the gang, definitely not the oldest, and sure as hell not the tallest; but she was absolutely the craziest, which is something teenagers easily mistake for leadership.

It was on one such adventure, as the sheer bonkers state of the world(s) became clearer and clearer, that the teens actually discovered how big a bite they'd taken. Tai Feng didn't even get a good look at the thing; she was up about a story and a half, tagging a taco store's sign when she heard a roar from below, and one of the boys slammed into the pole holding the sign up. She looked down. It was dark, and the thing was big enough that street lamps couldn't illuminate it all. It couldn't have snuck up, it was just...there, suddenly.

And Tai Feng, /being/ the crazy one, yelled out, pulled her bat from the pack slung across her back, considered briefly how she intended to survive the landing, and leapt off, coming down on the thing's head. It didn't...do, much, but the impact put enough forces into the equation that when she came down in a roll, she stung rather than broke. It also made the thing mad at her. Maybe that's what she really wanted; she called out, run, it's too big, because they didn't have a plan for things resisting being bludgeoned to death. Isn't that supposed to work on everything!? She ran too, hopping and zig-zagging because she heard once that crocodiles can't catch you if you do that, and what is a crocodile if not a monster from another universe?

Providence landed on her side this time, sort of. Tai Feng hooked a sharp left around a blind alley, figuring she could taunt the thing from the safety of the narrow street. Except when she rounded the bend, she stumbled and fell flat on her face, because she was suddenly somewhere very different indeed.

Pakerion isn't particularly forgiving for the unwitting or the unwary. Tai Feng isn't a very smart person, but wits she has; by this point in the great merge, even someone as remote from the epicenter as Tai Feng had a grip on the fundamentals. Once she got over the gut-wrenching initial shock, she knew she couldn't just lie there. Too much of a survivor to be put down by a little something like a kidnapping alien dimension, she set down in a high place and took stock. That's when she found out her phone still had signal. A handful of frustrated searches later led her to the repurposed forums - and, through them, to the Rogues. (It may be more accurate to say she posted a grumpy 'oh my god jungles help' message and happened to get a non-murderous responder.)

She joined almost immediately, the memory of her whole body ringing when her bat hit the monster still stinging her pride. She needed to be stronger - to protect the people she cared about, and protect herself. She needed to be able to secure her own freedom, because it was clear enough the world would never give it to her.

Perhaps suitably, Tai Feng was canny enough to keep way clear of the war that engulfed the Rogues and their home region; for now, she busies herself with learning her class, and learning the new world she finds herself in.

Internet Presence: Tai Feng's internet footprint is rather small; her uncle was at best working-class, but he had a few ubiquitous amenities, a connection and a couple video accounts, plus time bummed from friends. Her streaming queues are all just wall-to-wall American and Hong Kong action and crime movies.

Her hobbies were more outdoorsy - she didn't feel terribly at home even in her house - and she didn't really bother much with the online scene, certainly not before the whole world went nuts. She mostly used the net for school purposes, email, and minor self-amusement.

That of course changed when she got to Zenderael. Initial confusion aside, some research on her phone ("why am i suddenly in a jungle" may or may not have been a top google result at the time) eventually led her to the repurposed forums, where she has slowly inserted herself as a presence out of more or less lack of any better ideas. She types a little stiltedly but is overall better at typing than speaking, principally because when she gets mad /online/ she just sort of vanishes for an hour while she makes someone's* life miserable in person.
(*may be herself)

Her forum name is howl_typhoon because howl is a cool word that sounds a little like her family name and typhoon is the literal meaning of her personal name. She thought this was very clever. Her email is cathau@gmail.com because her uncle set it up, and the mess involved with changing emails in the glorious networked future is WAY more effort than she cares to put in.

Information and Opinions About Zenderael

Tai Feng's initial impression of Zenderael was, quote, "Shut up face about stupid elf game!!" (she did not know or care if there were actually elves).

Needless to say this opinion had to become somewhat more nuanced as time passed, and the merges began, and people disappeared, and monsters arrived from nothing, and people got sick, and...

It'd seem like even for Tai Feng Zenderael represents nothing but a world-altering calamity - her parents' death mark two, the sudden horrible loss of everything she'd ever known, all the comfort she'd gained. But the fact that the change to Zenderael set her free from the demands of society - from the uncle she couldn't stand, the adults who couldn't decide whether to pity her or sneer at her, the classmates who knew exactly which of those they wanted to do - sets it apart from the first calamity. Tai Feng has the chance now to exercise that instinct for freedom stifled by her life so far. The merge with Zenderael took things from her - people dead, others scarred or traumatized, places that aren't there anymore. Taken by force to a new, strange world, bereft of even the confidence that the world here works the same way as she's used to. But Tai Feng chooses to survive, and Zenderael, unlike Underwood, is happy to give her the chance to do so...with the simple cost of adding the possibility, which to a foolish teenager seems so minor as to be irrelevant, that she might not.

Tai Feng, a survivor at heart and a thug in demeanor, joined the Rogues not too long after being dragged across the divide. Under them she has learned A) How to fight with more brains than a rock rolling downhill and B) amazing mystical powers!

Given her existing predisposition to show up in places nobody expects or particularly wants her to be, she's focused a lot of that energy on Rogue maneuverability talents - not bothering with the wall-walking, she instead focused on preternatural balance, and acute spacial awareness and reflexes. She has a heightened understanding of where everything in the area is relative to everything else and herself, giving her a fairly big leg up when it comes to being obnoxiously hard to find and/or hit; similarly, she has the reflexes to act on that information even mid-fall or mid-attack. With effort she can expand this into /situational/ awareness - sensing the tiny physical tells that give away peoples' intent, capabilities, and even minute details of the environment like weaknesses in walls and armor. Combining this with her reflexes gives her the ability to, for instance, hurl weapons at vulnerable points on everyone in a contained area at the same time. Or, as an alternate for instance, get a sense of where sentries will be going and when, so she can be somewhere else in a hurry.

Combat-wise Tai Feng favors disruption over murder and her picks show it; she carries a collapsible baton she lifted off a merged Vegas police officer, and for ranged options carries bags of sand and other small throwing weapons made to stun or daze rather than to kill. Similarly, she's focused her attack abilities on stunning and disruption, including a simple, efficient KO/stun punch. Very handy for when she slips up on a thiefin'. She relies fairly heavily on tool-based skills otherwise, including a thrown grapple line for urban maneuvering and various disarming techniques; with her baton and parrying dagger both in hand, she's able to play an obnoxiously defensive battle, stunning her enemies and breaking or at least debuffing their weapon. Her backup selection (ironically, for the more serious situation of life-or-death combat) is a pair of large daggers, more like smallswords, with long swept blades for more effective deflection of incoming blows.

In short, Tai Feng has cast herself as that most ill-starred of archetypes: The Evasion Tank. With just a touch of battlefield control.

Personality
General Overview:
Tai Feng is relatively simple on a surface level; she's a high-strung young woman with a chip on her shoulder the size of a basketball. With her life disrupted catastrophically twice so far in only a few years, Tai Feng acts out aggressively by being a loud, churlish, sometimes even cruel person, delighting in putting herself above others in even small, petty ways. She's a petty girl whose pride is easily stung, and she acts on her impulses much, much too quickly, particularly when she gets angry, which tends to blow up in her face and get her even madder, et cetera.

She can definitely be overly smug, not so much out of an inflated opinion of herself as a need, burned into her by the world's own cruelty, to prove that she's above it all. She tears others down because she needs them low enough to climb over. It's the only thing she's known, the last few years - bullied, on the school yard, by racist Americans, and as near as she can tell by whatever madman is running this miserable excuse for a universe. In this way Tai Feng's connection to the Rogues is nearly perfect; stealing from others, be it pickpocketing off the street or staging an elaborate heist, lets her use her own skills to prove her own talent and worth, while taking something from someone else to show just how much better she is.

This paints a pretty grim picture, so let's be clear: Tai Feng is "awful" only in the archest way possible. Although shrill and mean-spirited, she lacks the genuine malicious intent to manage much in the way of terrible deeds; she is, in all honesty, more of a pest than anything, if perhaps a pest who keeps a bunch of knives on her all the time and steals for sport.

In fact, Tai Feng has some potential to achieve some great things if she can ever get over herself. She ended up more or less the de facto head of her little gang, in large part because she simply had the gusto to blaze the path. Tai Feng isn't afraid to do what she thinks is called for, even if it looks completely ridiculous. She has a lot of guts and an unwavering willingness to put her own head on the line for the people she does respect.

Respect really is the currency by which Tai Feng operates. She can be childish and petty to strangers, but other than, well, taking their things, she mostly just assumes she's already going to be treated like crap and pre-emptively does the same. People with the patience and fortitude required to put up with the shenanigans of a fifteen year old can defuse her relatively quickly, in which case they'll find that Tai Feng is generally amiable enough, and more than willing to return respect with more of the same.

Tai Feng has the somewhat cynical cunning of a person who's had it pretty rough. She considers herself a survivor above all else; in her own mind she's more like the hero of a Hong Kong gangster flick than the smalltime juvenile offender she actually was. This is not a complete fantasy; Tai Feng has a fairly good survival instinct, and she can be counted on to keep herself alive when the chips are down. It is not as honed as she thinks it is, though, because she never saw much like real hardship.

Tai Feng can and does set that instinct aside - or perhaps put it to broader use? - when other people are involved, though. Tai Feng is, simply, an intensely loyal person. She values the people who do treat her right incredibly highly and will go way, WAY out of her way to help them out, fearlessly putting her own neck on the line for the sake of the people she thinks of as her friends.

To put a little bow on it all: Tai Feng is a troubled, wounded and traumatized teenager who takes her frustrations at cruel misfortune out on people around her. She has a spark of real greatness inside her, and if she should find a challenge capable of making her rise to it could achieve something marvelous. But she needs to grow up - and get over herself - before she'll be able to really shine.

Flaws:
Tai Feng is basically just a wandering ball of insecurities and frustration with an unsympathetic world. One of the several consequences of this is that she has a bewilderingly short temper, and can and will get really upset for seemingly minor reasons. USUALLY this just translates to her making a big scene in increasingly broken English. Usually.

When it does not translate into that, though, it translates into her leaping at threats like a complete idiot. Her growing class abilities and related fighting training have led this to not be completely suicidal in the harsher world she now finds herself in. Still; she sometimes needs to be protected from herself.

Actually I should probably just make that its own flaw: Tai Feng routinely lets her pride and anger frequently overrule her otherwise quite respectable survival instinct. It is probably her most dangerous trait to her own wellfare.

Tai Feng's English is baaaaaddddd. This is partly because she is frankly a little dumb, but it is also a bit of stubborn fighting back against the bullying and racism she's lived with for years. She is able to put together a serviceable sentence if she has time to think about it and can hold conversations well enough, but when her composure slips she starts slipping pretty badly. When she's particulary flustered she sometimes even uses third person self-reference, because English pronouns are just too damn much work.

Quirks:
Tai Feng does not know any martial arts, and both asking her if she does or laughing about the fact that she doesn't are two of several ways to make her immediately decide your face isn't flat enough. (As this might imply, her 'fighting style' is more or less just street brutality.) (she's alright at that, though.)

Tai Feng insistently introduces herself as Hau Tai Feng, in the Chinese order.

Like a lot of immigrants, Tai Feng has an Americanized name she's supposed to use for people who can't handle her Chinese name. It's Catherine. She despises it because it combined with her overall demeanor seems to inevitably make people call her Kitty, and SHE REALLY HATES THAT. She often doesn't bother with it because she doesn't speak English anywhere near well enough to bother hiding where she's from in the first place. It was, however, her name on the roll sheet at school.

Conversely, Tai Feng is hypocritical and kind of jerkish enough that she'll make up nicknames for people she's just met based on whatever handful of character traits catch her attention. This remains enshrined forever until she gets bored of it, more or less. It takes actually getting her to think of someone as a friend before she'll use their actual name very much.