Entry tags:
Bleed us dry leave us here with nothing {APP}
Player Info
Name: Dha
Age: 24
Contact: rarimmadinosaur (plurk), lookraccoons (aim)
Characters Already in Teleios: N/A
Reserve: Here!
Character Basics:
Character Name: Feng Li Wei
Journal:yaosai
Age: 36
Universe: Original
Canon Point: After her life is attempted by her father Cao Wei.
Debt:Class A: Murder (52 counts at her hands directly, 8765 in the battles she planned)
Class B: Assault (105 counts), Breaking and Entering (2 counts)
Class C: Attempted Assassination (1 count), Breaking out of Prison (1 count), Carrying Concealed Weapon (216 counts), Disorderly Conduct (3 counts), Ignoring a direct order by a superior (3 counts), Property Damage (10 directly, 5062 counts in battles she planned), Trespassing (3 counts), Using underhanded means in a fight (5 counts)Disturbing the peace (10 counts) Exposing top secret government agencies (1 count)
CLASS A: 8817 YEARS
CLASS B: 53 YEARS, 6 MONTHS
CLASS C: 442 YEARS, 11 MONTHS
GRAND TOTAL:
TOTAL: 9313 YEARS, 5 MONTHS
Original Character Section:
Setting:
In 2259, there was the Great Exodus. The civilized galaxy as we knew it succumbed to mass anarchy, as rebellion after rebellion tore any standing laws to pieces. Entire planets were razed, polluted, destroyed. In an attempt to save himself, Commander Yu Canghai loaded up several barges of people, including his family, to escape to the far reaches of the universe. It turns out, there's not a whole ton of habitable planets, especially in any kind of clustering outside of the current solar system, so the wanderers fled farther than they planned. With no choice but to keep going, they pushed their resources to the limit and found a handful of planets in an unknown sector. Selecting the most stable and habitable planet of the bunch, Canghai founded the colony of Shileyuan (失樂園) ["Paradise Lost"] (As a note, people who identify as being born and raised on the planet are later known as Shilean. Racially, they are more or less those with connections to the royal family.) As the population grew and re-produced, they spread out to a handful of neighboring planets. However, to prevent the same lawlessness that had provoked the Exodus, an empire rose, strict and lawful and, more importantly, fit to survive the millennia to come. The Jiuen Dynasty (救恩) became the predominant power in what became known as the Liulang (流浪者) Sector ["salvation," "wanderer"].
After the Great Exodus, however, greater-than-light-speed technologies more or less fell into disuse. While great armadas full of bulky cruisers had previously been the expected, the Jiuen Dynasty streamlined their military power, with a heavy focus on leaner, fast vehicles that could be use practically in skirmishes with the ability to silence revolutions before without attracting the attention that sending in the fleet would do. The few rare overt executions were done with careful and purposeful intent at key points when uprisings believed their oppressors to be weak and spread too thin over the handful of habitable planets in their sector. Since the Jiuen Dynasty’s capitol was the most viable, it also centralized most of their power to a single planet. Other planets in the system include:
- Diqiu (地球) ["earthen"] – Largest source of agricultural imports come from, besides Shileyuan. Known for having harsh poles, but a band of habitable territory near its equator.
- Huo Zui (火嘴) ["mouth of fire"] - Extremely technologically advanced, due to existing on a planet that is a bit unstable and still terreforming. Peoples from this planet are known for being Rough with a capital R.
- Yidianyuan (伊甸園) ["garden of eden"] - new capitol, home of the Union forces. Feng Li and Corporal Downs are currently stationed on this planet. It's a dusty sonofabitch. The economy is more or less stable, especially compared to what the Jiuen Dynasty had been imposing on the rest of the sector.
The Jiuen Dynasty was rife with corruption, favoring the rich and the royal to the poor, resulting in a crippling class war. The wealthiest lived in the capitol, Shileyuan, while those unable to afford it were often shipped off-world to the less stable colonies. For example, Huo Zui is a planet still in the process of being terraformed and was known to be one of the poorest planets in the sector. Crime rates are high, people who could get off the planet did so as quickly as possible. A regular hive of scum and villainy. However, it is on Huo Zui that the first whispers of a true rebellion were first heard. For centuries, strict laws held the non-Shilean populations in place, but tension grew with the mounting support from a rapidly-militarizing group known as the Union. They wanted nothing more than to throw off the tradition and oppression laid down by the Jiuen Dynasty for millenia.
Rebellion became full-scale war during the Great War as the Union amassed enough military strength to effectively fight back against the Jiuen Dynasty. Key skirmishes include The Battle of the New Dawn, The Bloody Friday, The Second Attack, and The Battle for the Union. The Battle of the New Dawn was the first victory of the Union and is the true turning point of the Great War. Jian Yu, the third of Cao Wei’s sons, was killed during this battle and truly signified that not only was the Jiuen Dynasty vulnerable but also stoppable. Previously, Jian Yu had been known as The Thunder (Léi shēng, 雷聲) and an otherwise unconquerable force in terms of his handling of artillery and the Jiuen Dynasty suffered heavy losses during the skirmish.
The Bloody Friday, three months later, however, was a critical counterstrike against the rising power of the Union. Thousands of Union soldiers were more or less herded into a vicious pincer attack where Feng Li herself led Jiuen forces into what was eventually termed a massacre. The Union forces there were not in any way prepared for the strength of the strongest of Cao Wei’s armies: The Southern Army. The rebellion was nearly crushed then and there if not for The Second Attack a couple weeks later. The Union stopped the Jiuen Dynasty’s momentum and turned it against them, resulting in a swift and sudden string of victories against the Dynasty. At the cost of many Union souls, they overtook the final Shilean outpost on what was to become the new Union capitol: Yidianyuan. The war effectively ended with Union victory at the Battle of the Union, where Feng Li herself was nearly mortally wounded.
In the months after the war, the Union spread its influence over the sector and became the dominant power, easily stepping into the vacuum provided by the fall of the Jiuen Dynasty. The change in power was so fast, many of those in remote areas of planets did not know it had happened until new flags were erected at outposts. However, in the shadow of the Great War were the issue of the number of Shilean prisoners of war, including Feng Li herself. Many were summarily executed or otherwise exiled from the sector. One of those were believed to be exiled was Cao Wei himself (“believed” being a key word there). For important, potentially valuable POWs, however, the Union created the Deacon Project, a top-secret military program designed to protect the newly-acquired assets of the Union. In exchange for their lives, important POWs would vow complete loyalty to the Union and a hand-selected “Deacon,” who basically served as a warden for the Shilean inmate. Every year the POW would stand at a hearing in which the contract would either be renewed or terminated. Throughout the meantime, however, if the Deacon felt that his or her inmate was potentially conspiring against the Union, that inmate would be executed instantly. No hearing, no judgment, instant death. While it held many of the POWs in check, over the five and a half years between the end of the war and Feng Li’s current canonpoint, more than half of the Shileans enrolled in the Deacon Project were killed, leaving around 20 still serving, including Feng Li. Six months into her sixth year with the Union, the Deacon Project was revealed to the public, to the fury of Union veterans.
In an attempt to completely throw off the Jiuen Dynasty’s mantle, the Union attempted to completely wash away the previous culture entirely. Traditional symbols and temples were torn down and instead replaced with the Union’s choices and culture. Shileans were largely considered outcasts, even in cities where the two groups had co-existed peacefully before. However the names of planets and cities were not changed to prevent confusion of residents. Still, this lead to a great deal of resentment that came to a head during Feng Li’s sixth year serving the Union. Growing rumors of a resurgence of the Jiuen Dynasty’s power emerged at the same time that talk of a second revolution to a third unknown power. In an attempt to keep the sector stable, the Union entered into talks with the remnants of the Jiuen Dynasty and Cao Wei himself emerged from the woodwork from where he had been in “exile” years before. In a show of good will and forgiveness toward the Jiuen Dynasty, the Union held talks in an attempt to bridge the gaps in its power. Suspiciously, Cao Wei agrees.
However, all is not good in these talks, there is a great deal of tension and the announcement of a formal disbanding of the Deacon Project is believed to ease some of this. The evening before this a formal dinner with the Shilean POWs serving in the Deacon Project was planned by Cao Wei, but results in the poisoning and deaths of nearly all of them.
TL;DR: An alternate version of the American Civil War and Reconstruction in space, with a bonus cameo from the Wei Empire from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
TL;DR Timeline of the Setting:
2259 – Great Exodus and establishment of the colony of Shileyuan/Jiuen Dynasty
Thousands of years of relatively peaceful reign. Some rumors of revolution. Nothing bad.
2565 about – the Great War begins (important skirmishes: Battle of the New Dawn, The Bloody Friday, the Second Attack)
2569 about – The Battle for the Union ends the Great War and the Union becomes the primary power in the Liulang sector
2570 – the Deacon Project is established
2575
February - The Deacon Project is accidentally revealed to the public. People are pissed off.
March - Rumors of a third power come to light.
June- The Union begins talks with Cao Wei to try and bridge the gaps between the Union powers
July – Feng Li is going through personal things mentioned in her history and her own life is attempted by someone mysterioussssss. She arrives in teleios right after this.
History:
In 2259, there was the Great Exodus. Thousands and thousands of years later, Emperor Cao Wei, known as The Justice (正義, Zhèngyì), became the leader of the Jiuen Dynasty. He raised a long lineage of warlord sons and his only daughter Feng Li Wei. With four older brothers, she had a lot to prove. Her father attempted to push her off onto her nannies, like was traditionally done for centuries with the women of the royal family, but she refused to participate. Instead, she frequently followed her brothers to training. Each year on the day of Shileyuan's founding, there is a week-long celebration, known as the Festival of Wandering. Throughout the week, there are many plays and re-enactments, telling the story of their history after the Great Exodus and culminating in a tournament to commemorate the end of the Great Wandering. It was there that Feng Li was finally able to prove that she was fit for battle, beating each of her brothers and her father's best lieutenants. Her father refused to watch any of her fights, but when she was crowned the victor, he re-considered his stance. She was selected to serve as her father's righthand lieutenant and military strategist for the strongest of his four armies, the Southern Army. (Nevermind that there's no North/South/East/West in space.) Over the skirmishes leading up to the Great War, she became known as The Fortress (要塞, Yàosài), for never losing a position to rebels, whether she was on the battlefield personally or not.
Still, the Great War raged for years. Feng Li organized and planned some of the crucial conflicts during the war, such as The Bloody Friday. Said massacre was noted in her file as being one of the more brilliant strategies she had put together. During the final strife of the War, the Battle for the Union, Feng Li was nearly mortally wounded and left to die on the battlefield by her father as he retreated. Within a few months, most of Cao Wei's lieutenants were executed, except for the key assets believed to be important to the future of the Union. Feng Li was one of about a hundred POWs who were initially approached about joining the Deacon Project. Of those that were approached, she was one of about 50 who accepted the contract. She was paired with a soldier from the war, Corporal Ulysses “Lee” Downs. For the first couple years, they butted heads more often than not, but they still managed serve successfully as a team. Their initially antagonistic relationship became more of a friendship over time with tense moments when either stepped over the line. This was primarily due to an intense mission during their third year that was interrupted by Shilean extremists who nearly killed her when they recognized her. Corporal Downs stepped in and effectively saved her life again, despite having every opportunity to leave her to die like her father had. Within the past year or so of Feng Li’s service, their superiors began going directly to Feng Li to give assignments and leaving Corporal Downs in the dark, such as one within the last year. Her commander gave her the order to kill her oldest brother Zi Hao in order to bring down an emerging sect of Shilean resistance known as the Heian (formally the 黑暗的心臟, Hēi'àn de xīnzàng or “Heart of Darkness”).
While Corporal Downs was not to know of the true target, however, he found out when he discovered Feng Li in media res killing her brother. Before the Corporal could identify the body, Feng Li disposed of it, much to the Corporal’s anger. Matters only got worse as they continued to investigate the Heian and Corporal Downs was kidnapped and tortured by them. Feng Li was ordered to not rescue him and to focus on stopping the Heian’s plot to reveal the then-secret Deacon Project to the public in an attempt to instigate a public outcry against the Union. Using the loophole that only her Deacon could execute her, Feng Li chose to rescue Corporal Downs and the Deacon Project was eventually revealed to the public. However, the outcry was not what the Heian anticipated and instead the Jiuen Dynasty’s remnants came to light with the reveal and Cao Wei became a power again in the sector.
Amid the tension between the two powers of the Union and Jiuen Dynasty, rumors of a third power began to emerge. While Corporal Downs recovered, he and Feng Li were placed under a strict lockdown and suspended from missions for several months. Cao Wei and his ambassadors arrived on Yidianyuan at the request of the Union and talks about forming an alliance against this mysterious third power began. Enraged by seeing her father again, Feng Li decided to take matters into her own hands. During one of the summits, she snuck out of her quarters and planned to assassinate her father. At the last moment, she decided against killing him and that stooping to his level wasn’t something she wanted to do. However, agents from this third power, beat her to the punch and nearly killed her father. During the investigation surrounding this attempted assassination, it became revealed that Feng Li’s attempt to fool the surveillance cameras in her room had been tampered with and that she had run looped footage through the system while she had left the room.
Any positive public sentiment regarding the Deacon Project disappeared quickly and Cao Wei, then, called for a formal dismissal of the now-hated project as a gesture of good will from the Union. Any remaining Shilean POWs were to be returned to Cao Wei and to serve underneath him in this new alliance. With the intense political and public pressure, it began to look like disbandment was the only option left for the Deacon Project. On the eve of said disbandment, Cao Wei called for a ceremonial dinner with the POWs still on contract with the Deacon Project. During the dinner, Corporal Downs and his fellow Deacons went out to “celebrate” the end of the Deacon Project. However, it turned out that someone poisoned the food of the dinner of the POWs, including Feng Li’s. When she attempted to contact Corporal Downs, he was too drunk to answer his phone and was not aware of the situation until several over Deacons received calls from their POWs.
At the point that Feng Li is brought to teleios, she has been ushered to the hospital and been treated with what the doctors hope is an antidote.
Personality:
Above all else, Feng Li is a very private person. She’s not the type to go on about her problems to anyone, much less strangers. Despite trusting Corporal Lee Downs, both as a friend and someone guarding her life, she doesn’t open up to him without direct prompting on his part. Even then, unless she feels it’s necessary to tell him, she will likely keep any explanation short, sweet, and to the point. It’s not that she’s aloof, it’s that she’s very protective of herself, especially after the deacon Project begins to demonstrate some of its inherent corruption. Additionally, when she has true “time off,” which is rare in and of itself, she doesn’t really enjoy going out and doing anything crazy. She doesn’t have many friends inside or outside of the Deacon Project. Many of her people blame her in some way for the defeat at the Battle for the Union and the very rapid change of social power. So, instead, with her time off, she likes to explore Yidianyuan, whether it be climbing mountains just outside the capitol city or reading about its history.
Part of this private nature stems from her professional attitudes regarding her life and work. Despite Lee Downs’s relatively lax approach, Feng Li is still aware that she’s being watched roughly 24/7 for any slip-ups. Her life is what’s at stake and while her contract is renewed yearly, the primary prosecutor (Deacon Avias Shields) starts building a case day one after the hearing. This paranoia usually results in Feng Li being as productive as she can and taking on as much work as feasible, which has led to her and the Corporal to being considered one of the best strike teams in the Project (if not the best). However, this attitude isn’t exactly new to her. Throughout her childhood, she was constantly trying to prove herself to her father, so she could be treated like her brothers and not be pushed off into obscurity. At the end of the day, she’s very deeply afraid that she isn’t good enough or doesn’t deserve her new life, despite it being one filled with watching her back. On occasion, she will tell a joke, but only to Corporal Downs or someone else she trusts (which are few and far between) and never on a mission or a job.
She is also, then, very independent. She does what she can to stand alone and not depend on others as much as she feasibly can. This allows her to be a creature of habit and constance. She doesn’t like changes in routine or the status quo. At the end of the war, she had a hard time adapting to the new push of culture and a new lifestyle entirely dictated by the Deacon Project. However, the structure that eventually emerged is something that she has again buried herself in. The growing tension due to the reveal of the Deacon Project and the slow change in how the Project itself began to fall to its own corruption has put her on edge.
Once upon a time, Feng Li had been very ideal-driven and focused on causes and working toward a “big picture.” After all, she fought in a war that killed thousands upon thousands of people. During the second half of the war, though, this began to change. The death of her brother Jian Yu in the Battle of the New Dawn absolutely shook her foundation. She, like many of the royal family, had more or less believed themselves to be invulnerable because they were fighting for justice and stability. However, Jian Yu’s death very much became a catalyst in turning her drive more inward. At the end of the war, this was only more and more cemented when her father left her on the battlefield to die. So, when the Union approached her with a potential new life, she accepted it with very little hesitation. During her first couple years with Corporal Downs, she and him butted heads for this reason primarily. She looked out for herself and no one else at first, while Lee was still very much drinking the life and liberty Kool-Aid that the Union was serving to anyone and everyone. She slowly began to swing back toward ideal-driven, until she was forced to murder her oldest brother Zi Hao on a mission a few months before her current timepoint. Like the death of Jian Yu before, Zi Hao’s murder at her own hands pushed her to open her eyes. She couldn’t keep following the Union’s orders to blindly, even if it put her life in jeopardy. So, when Corporal Downs was kidnapped and her superiors told her to leave him, she decided she had had enough. She rescued him at the cost of the Deacon Project’s secrecy and to this day she does not regret what she did.
Due to a combination of this and the betrayals she’s internalized, Feng Li definitely has issues with loyalty and those who swear some kind of undying allegiance to institutions or those in authority. She does trust Corporal Downs with her life but did so only after two or three years into their service, after a very intense mission in which he saved her life at great risk to his own. Still, she has problems with people saying they would die for a cause. As someone who has lost not one but now two brothers to separate causes, she won’t let that happen again. After Zi Hao’s murder and Corporal Downs’s kidnapping and torture (and the Deacon Project’s consequent reveal at his rescue), she decided to open up to Corporal Downs about the fact that the Project had been going to her directly more often and that they saw him as disposable. While the timing of this revelation wasn’t exactly ideal, considering she told him within a week of his rescue. She felt that he needed to know what had been going on and why she was the only one who came to save him.
This then also emphasizes that she’s not one to sugarcoat her words or situations. If she’s telling someone something, there’s a reason and a purpose to doing so. Diluting the message, she feels, would not only be insulting to the person she’s telling as well as herself. Lying is an extension of this and she’s extremely sensitive to others lying to her, for any reason, which has happened more and more as social and political tension following the reveal of the Deacon Project to the public. As talks of an alliance between the former Jiuen Dynasty and the Union and her father emerged again, she had to handle the dilemma of being two-faced (i.e. being polite and nice to her father versus the anger she still feels toward him) and being outright and straight-forward. The latter would risk her life, but she can’t stand being the former. So, she puts off talking to her father directly as long as she can. An important enough decision as facing her father is something that she can and has refused to act on until she was one-hundred percent sure of her decision. Usually, she is otherwise quick and efficient in her behavior.
On the issue of her father, she still holds a lot of anger toward him, as previously mentioned. She had put so much of herself into proving her worth to him, to the point of being nearly blind to his faults, that his betrayal at the Battle for the Union completely crushed her. After years of letting this anger fester and build, seeing him again as the Shilean “ambassador” nearly pushed her over the edge again. As mentioned, she planned his assassination and up to the very last second was sure that she would kill him herself. At that last second, however, she found herself able to spare him. Not out of any love for him, but because her new life is more important than ending his. When she wakes up after being poisoned, however, she will be very sure that her father was responsible, to the point that she will deny any evidence to the contrary, no matter who is presenting it.
So, at this point in her life, Feng Li doesn’t exactly view the world in a very pleasant context. She has just been poisoned after a formal dinner with her father and been unable to reach the only person in her life who she trusts when she needed him most. Her ability to trust others is going to be at an all-time low. Things have changed even more than she wants to accept and she’s had a lot of structure and balance removed from her life. She may be initially very confrontational and distant until she becomes more used to arriving in teleios.
On the issue of crimes, though, she will be very used to. Since the end of the Great War, she has had yearly hearings about what she did during the war. Even outside of the hearings, there is a lot of animosity still between the Deacons she works with and herself and the other Shilean POWs, with a handful of exceptions including Corporal Downs. She’s very used to being viewed as a criminal and someone who is serving a sentence, more or less. Eventually, she might actually see teleios’s debt system as a much lighter sentence than what she had been serving before under the Deacon Project. Said Project has recently been turning her against her principles, so a break from that will be very welcome. However, as mentioned, the biggest problem she’ll have is the sudden loss of structure.
Powers/Abilities:
Feng Li is not supernaturally gifted in any way. She does not have any precognitive abilities or superstrength or any of that. Zero super powers.
From early in her childhood, she trained with her brothers, learning a number of fighting styles. Her favorite is an improvisational style that incorporates some degree of acrobatics and many different skills that she picked up from her brothers. She has a degree of skill with close combat and close range weapons, but over the years, her specialty has become long-range weapons, sniping especially.
Coupled with her affinity to battle strategy makes her a formidable opponent at distance, but less so within say fifty feet. She can hold her own in a fight, but she won’t be overpowering someone with super powers or anything like that anytime soon. She cannot fight off crowds, but can handle groups around 5 or 6 before she gets overwhelmed. That said, in those cases, she tries to use her environment more than simply punching down everyone around her.
She has intermediate electronics skills (routing video feeds and breaking encryptions she’s familiar with) but nothing on the ELITE HAXXOR level by any stretch of the imagination. She also has some basic piloting skills of small stealth vessels but would not be able to fly any kind of barges if her life depended on it.
She also speaks Shilean (essentially traditional Mandarin) fluently, but mostly to people she knows speaks it (i.e. she won't start conversations in Shilean if she can help it).
Appearance: In her universe, she would be easily identified as Shilean, due to her ancestral features. She is olive-skinned with dark, narrow features. There was a heavy emphasis on being light and fast in the Jiuen Dynasty, especially among their upper-level military. As such, Feng Li is built like a runner. She's got a great deal of tone and has an extremely athletic build that is designed to make her very efficient. So, she doesn't have a whole ton of curves and is not likely to dress to accent those few that she does have unless it's an explicit part of a mission. That said, she does have long black hair that she usually likes to keep tucked back in a ponytail, but has recently been letting it hang loose due to the down time that she's had during Corporal Lee Downs's recovery. Additionally, she's not the type to wear makeup of any sort.
Feng Li also has a number of scars that she doesn't necessarily bother to hide, but the most prominent are on her torso it's not like she walks around topless. She has three gunshot scars from her near death at the end of the War: one in her upper right abdomen that exits out a few inches from her spinal column on that side, one on the left side of her chest that exits out just below her shoulder blades on that same sice, and one on her left bicep. These don't cause her much pain anymore, but are still sensitive areas. Other than that, the most noticeable scar is a long-since healed gash from the physical fight that ended in Zi Hao's murder.
Her PB for the game is Grace Park.
Samples:Actionspam Sample:
And how many people have excused their own actions. I have heard 'we are at War' as a reason for killing. [Feng Li sits back in her seat a little, watching him with through narrowed eyes. They were beginning to bridge on territory that she didn't share with anyone else but the Corporal and this man was certainly not him.] My father said it more often than the word "peace." I was at War, too.
[She pauses a moment or two, considering her next words carefully,] I accept my sentence because the War is who I am in the eyes of the Deacons. The Jiuen Dynasty defines the Union; without it the Union would not be anything. The War is not all I am, but it is a piece of me and I must account for all of me. You couldn't know me without knowing the War.
[A breath, a shift in her weight.] But I do also enjoy long walks on the beach. That is something that the War did not give me.
Prose Sample:
“You’re up early.” Corporal Lee Downs had never been a small man, but he had grown thinner from disuse. The Union Army only needed so many experts at a time and they saw his responsibility as a Deacon to one of the few remaining lieutenants of the Jiuen Dynasty too great a task. And Feng Li had not given him a reason to run in years. That meant he had time to prepare his small talk, especially for the annual day of humiliation for her people. Today was the day when her contract for her life would either be renewed and her care placed back into Corporal Downs’ delicate fingers, or when she would be summarily executed. Every year, it became harder to distinguish which fate was worse.
“It is an important day,” she replied from the kitchen where she stood with a single bowl of breakfast: eggs, rice, chicken, and a mild sauce for the weak-stomached Union Boy.
He took the simple dish from her with a raised eyebrow. Every year, he asked the same question, “Not eating?”
If nothing else, the corporal was a constant, an element so predictable that he came as a comfort on days like this. She had given him no reason to assume she planned anything, he gave her no reason to literally lose her head.
“I would rather not eat before the hearing.” She moved past him as he seated himself at the glass table. At her usual seat were the trappings of her former position. Badges, medals, decoration enough for what seemed half her quarters.
“You never do,” he observed quietly, in what she assumed he believed was a thoughtful tone, except that Feng Li had heard him use the same tone occasionally when speaking to dessert.
Their conversation never seemed to ease the pulses of fear that vibrated up her spine with every tick of the clock, an analog thing that chimed on the hour and one of the few possessions she had kept after the War she was reminded of every year on this day. The soldier ate quietly and the clink of his fork on the ceramic bowl echoed alongside the ticking of the clock.
“You’ll be glad to hear that if you keep your head, we have an away mission lined up.” He finally spoke again as he set the bowl in the sink in the cubby-sized kitchenette. His lips were still stained brown from the sauce, a small victory for the great former Jiuen Dynasty.
“You have such a way with words, Corporal.” Feng Li folded her uniform with precision, edges sharp and clean. “That makes me want to fall on my own sword.”
Lee padded back across the living room to her, his dark brow furrowed in a distant cousin to amusement. “Figured you’d appreciate the honesty.”
His eyes followed the movements of her hands, studying every pull of fabric and she noticed within moments.
“I did not say otherwise, Corporal.” Her words were as formal and crisp as the uniform in her hands. With a soft sigh, she smoothed her fingers over the gold and silver donning the navy blue, never glancing up to meet Lee’s gaze.
UPDATED DEBT