Xue_Lung_Fan

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BACKGROUND
Xue Lung Fan has lived for a long time. A very, very long time. Born before the fall of the Han Dynasty of ancient China, Xue has seen nations and empires rise and crumble. She has watched cults become religions and spread to all corners of the globe. She has seen mankind map out the Silk Road, discover the New World, and even land upon the moon itself. Ages have come and passed, and all the while, Xue Lung Fan has watched with an unnaturally long life. For Xue Lung Fan sustains herself with a combination of dark magics and the life essence of the young maidens that she consumes.

Xue fears, above all else, karmic punishment after her death. When she was naturally young, she was not a wholesome person, and honestly believed that she would be punished severely under the Buddhist belief system of reincarnation. Thus, she has sought to prolong her life inevitably, and turned to mysticism as a result. Unable to live the immaculate life of a Hermit (otherwise she wouldn't have had this problem in the first place), Xue took a different route. She consumes the soul of young maidens in order to prolong her life-span, and consumes their bodies to maintain her youth and beauty. In this fashion, the longer she lives, the larger her karmic debt becomes as she preys upon others for her own gain.

As the years roll on, however, she has gained less and less time from each soul consumed, leading her to become more and more obsessed with her own mortality, resulting in more time spent on the hunt and less actually living the life that she has taken great pains to prolong. She has taken to blaming the 'corruption and decadence' of modern society for these diminishing returns, believing that it is the victims' fault that they are less pure then they once were, and thus provide her with lesser benefits upon their sacrifice. There is, perhaps, something to this line of reasoning, but it doesn't change the fact that Xue Lung Fan's time upon this Earth is growing shorter... and thus she is getting more desperate to prolong it.

PERSONALITY
Xue is, by her basic nature, obsessive and deceitful. She only has enough room in her heart for one thing, and that one thing is Xue Lung Fan. Her personal survival is her top, and often only, priority, and the happiness, well-being, or the very lives of others rarely factor into her plans as things other then an obstacle.

A lover of both arts and sciences, Xue spends her downtime immersing herself in culture and learning. When you have lived for over three thousand years, you have to keep up upon the latest art and science because they are the only new things you've seen in the past several hundred years. She often frequents art galleries, night clubs, and universities (which are, incidentally, her favored hunting grounds as well), and has been known to occasionally spare a promising artist, writer, or thinker on the merits of their ability to ply their craft. In the modern world a beautiful body can be bought, but true talent is a rare and precious thing.

At her heart, Xue is a coward. She has been running from death for almost four thousand years now and takes the phrase 'the better part of valor' well to heart. She is a planner and a schemer, favoring tried and true tactics over experimentation. When subterfuge and subtlety fail, her knee-jerk reaction is either brute force if she's at the advantage, and retreating to regroup and plan anew if she fails. For all of her experience, she does not improvise well in the rare event that one can throw something at her she's never seen before.

The most dangerous part of Xue is her knowledge. She knows humans, she knows how they think, how they react, how to read their body language. Humanity has changed remarkably little in the past few thousand years, though the rapid technological upswing of the past two hundred has delighted her greatly by providing new amusements and entertainments.

TACTICS
Xue Lung Fan is a shameful opportunist and an ambush predator. She has no interest in the supernatural beings of the world (because they can generally fight back) and generally limits her depredations to normal humans of a young age. Ideally, Xue will have a week to stalk a target from afar to learn it's habits, patterns, and other such exploitable quirks, but she has a number of ready-made strategies for when opportunity presents itself.

Xue prefers to avoid fighting entirely. She would much rather use seduction, drugs, or a simple rag with chloroform to get the job done rather then relying upon blade or bullets. A target that can fight back, after all, is a potentially dangerous one.

The first order of business while hunting is to isolate her target. How or where matters little; so long as she can get her potential prey alone she will weigh the risk of consumption. It is very rare that she'll attack more then one target unless she knows she can even the odds rapidly, or she's prepared some special trick or trap beforehand.

If fighting does occur, however, Xue is very proficient because she's had thousands of years to study dozens of styles, from bare-hand, to sword-play, to marksmanship. More importantly, she fights dirty, employing paralytic poisons, sleeping powders, and underhanded tactics as often as she can get away with. A fair fight is one that you lose half the time; she avoids 'fair' fights at all costs.

Xue's preferred hunting grounds are schools, universities, night clubs, art galleries, and the like. Anywhere there is likely to be artistic expression, learning, or entertainment is likely to draw the Evil Hermit's attentions. Particularly if it has a high female population.

RP HOOKS
The Patron: Perhaps you are a struggling artist, looking for someone to financially support you. Xue has money, though you'll likely be struggling in a different way soon!

Gone Clubbing: What it says on the tin. Xue goes to the latest hot new nightclub and hits the dance floor, looking for fun.

Stalking: For that personal touch, Xue has marked you as a target and has decided to 'take her time with this one', tracking you over a longer then usual time period.