Rojirei
Appearance
Sharply sinewy musculature, a face like a blade-axe beneath strictly trimmed hair. Offset by dull, slate eyes of sea-green. Nicked with straw-blade thin scar tissue whitened from cell damage and callousing.
Dressed ordinarily in itinerant rags looking and performing the role of a roving pilgrim and fan craftsman. Often humped with the weight of a grass-woven basket affixed with leather shoulder loops. Otherwise in possession of trade-craft ‘uniform’ and gear, hidden amidst modest crafting tools.
Skills and Abilities
Between Sun & Moon: A nominal member of the Yamato military class, Rojirei has been vigorously schooled in both fighting and clandestine arts. A consummate warrior on and off the battlefield, honed to enact the will of his superiors.
Inner Factors: The Yamato way emphasizes a duality of both body and centre. For Rojirei, this is the Path of the Wind, a set of simple magics aimed to enhance agility, provide defense, and apply suggestion and misdirection.
Beyond Intuition: A highly developed sense of perception, allowing Rojirei to perceive obvious and hidden threats in people, environments, and social situations. Such sensitivity allows brief glances into the world beyond the Veil of Tears, briefly interacting with spiritual phenomenon both informing and horrifying.
Beauty of Given Words: Stranger in stranger lands, communication, the ability to grasp spoken and written language, is paramount if not the knife’s edge of survival. Despite their given vulgarity, Rojirei is a keen decipherer of foreign dialects.
Personality
Strange dynamism of given Yamato rigidity and the sense of personal initiative and agency necessary to carry out his work in wider Arethil. Stern, inquisitive, distant, irascible, single-minded, asymmetrical, yin and yang, bold, subtle.
Biography & Lore
“Having been born into the house of a warrior, one’s intentions should be to grasp the long and short sword and die.”
Yamato will always remember the Red Ships: the raiding fleet of would-be pirate admiral Hanse Morgan Briggs, a commander as motivated by glory as by coin and the economy enforcing their weight. In 364, utilizing the cover of seasonal tai-fun, Briggs’ Red Ships made landfall in the Islands of Yamato. In the froth of storming chaos, gold stores, temples, shrines were pillaged, and slaves were taken. Before the warrior Bujin could mount a counter-assault, the barbarians had retreated back across the West Seas. A long tract of inhospitable ocean that no islander Yamato had ever dared sail.
Until Rojirei of the House of Dark Rain was granted the Will of Heaven. And tasked with forging a route over the waters, making landfall in foreign territory, and pursuing the enemies of the Chrysanthemum Throne to wherever they resided. An explicit order of martial vengeance to mark the long, penetrating reach of the Yamato Empire.
In the year 369, a lowly junk-rigged outrigger made landfall in the Gulf of Annuak. Depositing a soaked and ragged ‘peasant’ striking out into the continent’s interior.