Tan Li

Psychological description

Li has a personal fear of becoming angry – he has no desire to be like his father before him. In his effort to banish anger from his life Li learned the traditions and beliefs of Tao – The way of balance in all things. He is calm and collected and rarely shows any outward appearance of emotions except the joy and happiness that his love of martial arts brings him.

Physical description

Sun-kissed skin underneath a mop of dark hair. His dark eyes sparkle with mischievousness that he never wields. His clothes benefit his station though he does not have excess. He is 180cm (~5’11”) with an athletic and well defined musculature but he is by no means bulky.

Biography

Born to Sun Ning and his wife Li had 1 older sibling. Ning was quick to anger and while Li was too young to completely understand the situation he saw the cuts and bruises on his mother and brother. He fled the violent rages his father was prone to and would hide in the closet until his mother or brother would come find him.
Li remembered the few times that his father found him in the closet. The moments were seared into his memories. He remembered the pulsing vein in his father’s temple. Li remembered the exact shade of his father’s skin. The smell of the sickly cologne mixing with the bit of stale alcohol and smoke from the local bar. The pain of a broken arm, the beatings that followed would be etched into his memory as well.
Li remembered the last time he saw his mother and incidentally his brother and father as well. He was four. The memories are tainted with the washed out colors of tears as Li found his mother lying in a pool of crimson blood. Her head with a large gash across the forehead. Li remembered tasting salt and copper that day. Tears and blood.
He was taken away that day. He and his brother were separated. Li barely remembers the look of on his brother’s face as they tore the two apart forever. It was such a long time ago – the memory faded and blurred with tears and blood. But he remembered the love he had for his mother and brother. But life goes on and Li adjusted to his new family.
Tan Zhen and Tan Qi were loving parents. They taught Li “the way”. Everything was a matter of balance – everything. There was no need to worry, or get angry – the world had a way of working things out given enough time. They were not pacifists by any means. They did not sit idly by – they worked hard and their results were returned ten fold.
As Li learned about the Taoist way – he learned how to feed his body, mind and soul so that he was in perfect harmony. The day he came to the Tans he started learning Tai Chi. It was a family tradition and Li was now part of their family.
As he progressed with in his own meditation he was also needing a stronger outlet for his energy the Tan’s sent Li to a Tao Temple where he was set to a strict regiment. Discipline, work, rest and nourishment all scheduled to reflect the balance of his new life.
Li picked up various Martial Arts while staying with the monks in the temple.
As he grew older Li continued with Aikido, Kung Fu and Tai Chi. It was these practices that landed Li in an opportunity of a lifetime. Li was 10. He was competing in a Kung Fu competition in China. He was one of the top ranked students and took first place overall in his age group. In the crowd was a man looking for the perfect Aang. His studio was searching for boys with martial art skills to be the next iteration of Avatar: The Last Air Bender.
His hard work had paid off and Li went to the studio to film the movie. While the movie may have bombed in the theaters, Li’s career took off. He played as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the television show for two consecutive seasons before he out grew the part – literally out growing the needed costumes.
By 18 Li was consulting on martial arts films, even choreographing some of the famous fight scenes of the late 2020’s. He never really left the screen for long.
Li was not an extravagant person, he donated portions of his well earned money to charities supporting abused women and children.
But the lime light and tournaments were not enough excitement or enough challenge for Li. He sought greater challenges and he found them in the underworld of every city. Deep in the shadows in nearly every city Li visited there were underground fighting clubs – some pitted you man against man. But it was the thrill of fighting the unknown that held Li’s attention. Strange and exotic men with golden eyes, or long fingernails that were as sharp as knives, there were even women with teeth as pointed as a sharks in some cases the worse were the men with decayed skin, they nearly made Li wretch from the sight.
Li was in Moscow in 2033 seeking such a fight and he met a man after one fight. He spoke like a Russian in a deep voice thwarted with the cold. He spoke of monsters and secret organizations. But it was not the cause that called to him – it was the danger it presented. Li jumped at the occasion. It would be a pure pleasure to find himself among these so called monsters stripping them of their lives to save humanities.
Li went on hiatus from his acting career for three years while he spent time in Vatican City learning all about monsters and killing them. Li made friends there, but he was not one of the few chosen by his recruiter to take personally under his wing – mostly due to his proficiency in martial areas. He didn’t like weapons though he did pick up the bo-staff to compensate for those particular monsters you didn’t want to grapple with. He also learned the crossbow and firearms as every man and women did in the confines of his new side career path. Some monsters were just too dangerous to go one on one. Li hoped never to encounter one of these reborn gods.
Every man and woman in the order had a tattoo on their left forearm that indicated to others like them they were brethren – a serpent biting its own tail. It was one final step after Li’s initiation that he finished before returning to the screen and his travels around the world. He chose his tattoo – a blue Chinese style dragon biting it’s own tail encircling the yin and yang symbol. Outside the dragon Li continued the Taoist motif of balance and harmony with trees and water up the entire left side of his arm from wrist to shoulder.
For 8 years Li toured the world working in the movie industry as either actor or choreographer. In each city he stayed he continued to seek out the underground fighting pits and taking out their little toys after he’d fought them in the ring of course. The ring leaders never knew it was him, but many suspected that whenever he rolled into town and he showed up – something bad would happen to their monsters.
It was a rare occasion where Li would actually find a monster out in the wild, but it did happen. It was on one such hunt when Li was 29 that the most unexpected thing happened. There had been rumors among the denizens who frequented the fighting pits that Li first heard about a creature who was hunting women and children above ground. Li had abandoned his fight that night to seek out this predator. He had tracked the dreyken to an alleyway. But what he found was not the monster he hunted. It was just a man dressed like the monster. He was about to use his make-shift finger blades on the boy in front of him.
Li was too far away. He reached out as he yelled. “Stop!” The man in the well-devised costume froze in place. He was clearly unable to move of his own violation. It was then that man started to panic. Li didn’t pause a moment before he was ripping the boy from the monsters grasp and sending him away with a violent flair.
Li turned on the man and hit him square in the neck crushing his windpipe in Li’s anger. The man gasped for breath as Li watched the light fade from his eyes. Anger colored his vision. Li dropped to the ground still unaware that the man was dead and standing still. It wasn’t until Li had calmed his emotions and retrained his calm state of mind that he saw what had truly happened.
Li’s clarity fled him the moment he saw the man’s dead eyes and he fell to the ground in a heap. Li called the police as he sat in shock. Li was taken into custody, but was released once the man was connected to the previous murders of women and children. Li was donned a hero but he didn’t feel like one – his anger had killed a man.
Li sought the mountains of his childhood home to find his own inner balance. In the mountains Li conquered his rage under the tutelage of the monks of his youth.
It was in the Tiantai meditation techniques that Li found the light. While Li was learning to control his anger through the teachings of the Four Doctrines and the Fourfold methods Li encountered a shimmering darkness of light. The concept seemed foreign to him at first how could darkness be light or light darkness but it was always there just out of sight like a shadow stalking him.
It was in the emptiness of the Shared teaching of the Four Doctrines that Li grasped the light. At first it struggled and it fought. Li let it go, let it drop from his grasp feeling lost and unfocused. It wasn’t until a few days later when Li tried again that he took control of the light with no ill-ease that he understood the nature of the light. Once he felt the power he knew this was what had caused the man to freeze. But Li had no idea how he could actually preform such feats. And this new found power would need a balance – Li knew he had to find it.
The Light was broken up into five distinct elements much like his Tao teachings – earth, metal, fire, wood and water; but the elements didn’t precisely match it. They had their own distinct flavors and colors but metal and wood were missing from the branches of light in flavor, but Li didn’t know what else to call them so he used his teachings to bend the light to his will.
It was all about balance. Li never wanted to use his power as a destructive force. It was how he found the balance to using it. The light threads could be formed into patterns, woven like a tapestry.
While in meditation Li wove patterns to see the outcomes. He avoided fire feeling it most destructive element of nature – he didn’t want to blow the monetary or himself up. After months and months of trial and error Li finally found the specific pattern of threads to replicate the immobilization of the man who was attacking the boy. It was a simple feat of air and spirit – the missing metal and wood of his Taoist teachings. It had taken him all those months to finally put a name to the light branches of the light.
More months passed and pattern after pattern Li found combinations that would work. The meditation allowed him to grasp the power, but it was neither immediate or at whim. But he’d master immobilization and the art of illusion. Li could hide small inanimate objects with weaves of light changing its appearance from one thing to another.
Li could create small whirlpools of water, and air, make earth and air walls. He had touched fire once to light a candle, but his fear of anger and the heat and the destruction it was capable of he avoided such things. Such was the nature of his study for a complete year.
Li returned to the world to continue his work as both an actor and with the Atharim finding himself once again in Moscow. He was between professional jobs at the moment and he knew Moscow was teaming with creatures to kill – and The Almaz was the club in which he found himself once again.
It had been a good 15 years since he’d shown his face in these rings again. Tonight he was scoping out the scene. The club was littered with people of wealth and those of much darker natures. Sometimes they were one and the same. It was not a club Li liked to frequent but the fights were always good and sometimes even exotic. Tonight’s entertainment was a mixed bag.
The бак fought a relative unknown in most circles, but Li recognized him from his research into who’s who of the Atharim contacts. This was the man you contacted if you needed a safe haven, or special equipment or both. Li had no such needs, it was not strange to see an acquaintance of the Atharim in the ring – they were mostly all adrenaline junkies anyway.
In the end Li was not surprised the man won despite his smaller size – no one ever said that you had to fight fair. The бак would likely never show his face in the Almaz again.
The matches finally shifted to the cage and Li watched as the crowd took in the wolfkin and rougarou. They of course knew nothing of these creatures. The golden eyes appraised things and the rougarou was near glazed over in hunger. Li wondered if they’d feed the beasts anything.
Li watched the beasts fight. Strange things abound the whole night, small chills ran the course of his spine, threatening postures seemed to come out of no where and yet when he looked he saw nothing. The world spun in chaos as the creatures broke free of their cage.
One man didn’t run when the creatures took them in with their gaze. A strange power leapt into view as the man smote the beast with lightning. It didn’t come down from the heavens as in the movies but came from the man himself. The power – the fear. The anger…
Li would seek out the people at the table looking for answers.
:PPC
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