SDL: Xin Lai

Name: Xin Lai (First name Lai, Family name Xin) 新涞
Occupation: Acupuncturist/ traveling Medicine Man
Age: 26
Record: 0-0-0
*ref sheets will be up soon*

About:

He’s actually quite easy to talk to, and laughs readily. Lai’s the type of person you can’t really decide if he’s being serious or not. He really doesn’t like duels to drag on forever, partially because his movements are limited due to ankle pains after extended periods of walking or fighting.

Lai has a saber, but uses it little (and only when necessary). He mostly attacks pressure points, sometimes using needles dipped in non-fatal poison. These poison needles are a completely different set from his acupuncture needles. And since his red-gripped specially made Acupuncture needles are precious reminders of home, Lai really doesn’t like it when people run off with them. Really. Doesn’t. Like it.

He also carries everything in that round basket he shoulders on his back (a gift from the late mentor), and often stops to collect different plants (and junk, and cloth, and food, etc). He hasn’t organized the basket’s contents in…a long time. Who knows what could be in there now...


History:

Born in an unknown rural village in the upper outskirts of Ming China, his hometown is plundered and overtaken by a group of bandits. The village survivors, including Lai, his father, mother, and older brother, were taken as slaves, forced into hard labor for the benefit of the bandits. The scars of the tightly bound rope to keep the village slaves in check are still visible on Lai’s ankles. When Lai was 8, his family successfully fled South.

Not much the sit-and-read-type of scholar like his brother Shou (新寿 ), Lai eventually befriended the son of an acupuncturist, a Confucian practitioner and martial arts fanatic, and they spent their childhood days playing together, and learning together.

But the year Lai turned 15, his brother Xin Shou, who had just managed to pass the Exam, disappeared. Lai’s parents, illiterate and powerless in status to ask for a wide-spread search, also could not afford an investigation into his disappearance. Lai, angered at the situation, left his home on impulse.

In his wanderings around the next few years, Lai met an elderly traveling Medicine Man, who specialized in herbal treatments, fungi concoctions, and other plant cures. Apprenticing himself to the old man, Lai accompanied his many journeys until the old man died a few years later; his medicinal knowledge passed to Lai. It was then that Lai stowed away on a ship to Japan, following a hunch.

He enters the Samurai Dueler’s League on one premise: his missing brother may have entered as well.


Miscellaneous Notes:

Lai has three pimples in an arched row above his right eyebrow. The hair in his ponytail never seems to stay down, and as a result is usually bent in a weird angle. He doesn’t like shoes very much; given the moment, Lai will happily take them off.