Appearance

Physical Description

Kailan is a woman of moderate height with a trim, but athletic build. She mostly trains for speed and maneuverability, and struggles with weight training.

Body Features

Her blue skin is tough, like a well stretched waterskin, and appears slightly stretched over her frame. When she is emotional, it appears to bulge or move around her, showing some of the inhuman muscle structures beneath. She has a long blue, prehensile, tail capped with a tuft of blue-black hair

Facial Features

Kailan has a slender face and a narrow nose. Her teeth are slightly crooked from years are chewing on random items absentmindedly. Her eyes are bright blue, with rectangular pupils.

Identifying Characteristics

Kailan's body is completely covered in tattoos, often of bad puns or slightly irreverent jokes that she had done while drinking with other monks. Her goatlike horns are very visible. Her whole body, skin, eyes, and hair, are all different shades of blue.

Apparel & Accessories

Kailan wears simple robes and cloth binders intended to allow freedom of movement.

Mentality

Personal history

Born in Quain to Tian-Shu parents. Her father was killed shortly before Kailan’s birth by a Doru Div summoned by an Oni named Bojing that he had fallen into debt with. When Kailan was born, her mother believed that her tiefling heritage was a curse placed on her by the Oni or the Div, to punish them further for failing to pay the debts. In shame, she abandoned Kailan at an orphanage.

When Kailan was a very young child, it became apparent to everyone that she did not see the world the way the rest of them did. She struggled to see the world empathically and saw everything extremely transactionally. She was self-centered to the point of cruelty and violence, bullying other children, even attacking them viciously to get what she wanted. She struggled to understand good and bad and to see things from other people's perspectives. This culminated in her breaking the leg of another child in petty anger and being thrown out of the orphanage to fend for herself, in the expectation that she would starve.

Five years went by with her struggling on the streets, stealing and fighting for scraps before she was found and taken in by a local temple to Irori. This temple followed the teachings of the Cloud Crane School lead by Headmaster Yun E, but were not explicitly members of the academy, merely taught by an alumnus, a human monk named Chen Jincai. They did not mind her strange appearance, and informed her that so long as she followed the rules, she would be cared for, fed, and trained. Given how far down she had fallen, she was willing to try a new road.

The exercise and martial arts came naturally to Kailan. The philosophy, not so much. She struggled with ideas of being part of something grander than the self, and that behaving well is important for reasons beyond the immediately visible benefits. The monks were patient with her, showed her ways to control her outbursts, taught her to read, and helped her get control of some of her impulses. Over time, as her life and condition steadily improved in the temple, she became a true believer in the messages taught by the temple and Irori’s holy scriptures. 

Among fellow monks, she is a figure of contrast. Many younger students look up to her as a sort of rebellious elder-sister figure—cool, skilled, and impossible to intimidate. But the senior monks remain wary. They respect her discipline, yet worry that her understanding of Irori’s path still lacks the inward serenity needed for true balance. Kailan herself is aware of this tension and sometimes chafes under it. She wants to be a symbol of what the teachings can accomplish, a walking testament to how far someone can come. But part of her also fears that she’ll never fully belong—that there will always be some untamable part of her, coiled and waiting in the dark, watching for weakness and waiting for her to succumb.

She still drinks, and curses, and smokes whatever someone passes her on the street (some habits die hard), and she remains terrible with money and some of her more hedonistic impulses. Her pride in her physical skills makes her a bit of a showoff, but she does her best to stick to the rules as they were taught to her. Sometimes her interpretations of the mantras are a bit cold and uncaring because she still struggles with the emotional aspects of the intention of the messages, but she genuinely does believe that it will work out best for everyone. When she sees someone acting like the kind of bully or with the kind of cruelty that she showed growing up, it tears at her spirit, thinking of the person she used to be.

She has grown into a woman of moderate height with a trim, but athletic build. Her blue skin is thick and tough, like a well stretched waterskin, and appears similarly stretched over her frame. When she is emotional, it appears to bulge or move around her, showing some of the inhuman muscle structures beneath. Her horns are caprinic and curve backwards over her head. Her body is completely covered in tattoos, often of bad puns or slightly irreverent jokes that she had done while drinking with other monks.

These days, she carries herself with a swagger honed through years of practice; a bravado that borders on the theatrical. She grins wide, walks like she owns the very ground beneath her feet, and leans heavily into her appearance as the tattooed, blue-skinned curiosity. In truth, that confidence is more armor than fact. She still sometimes remembers the voices of those who rejected her—the orphanage caretakers who called her a monster, the street vendors who beat her with sticks, the sneering nobles who flinched at the sight of her horns. When crowds look her way now, when eyes follow her in markets or arenas, she can’t help but feel both proud and defensive. The message is clear: “Look at me now. See how far I’ve come. But don’t look too long. Don’t try to get too close.”

Despite everything, Kailan is trying. Everyday she wakes early and meditates before her training, even when it feels like it accomplishes nothing. She recites the mantras, even when they feel hollow, in the hopes that some day they won’t. She tries to help people struggling around her, not because she particularly likes them, or particularly cares about their pain, but because she remembers being that outsider, that mistake, that cursed child that nobody wanted. She uses her own past pains pain as a compass for her future–not always accurate, not always gentle, but deep, instinctive, and earnestly guiding her towards what she hopes will be a better way.

Kailan is currently headed towards Absalom, intending to compete in gladiatorial games as a way to draw attention to her school’s martial arts abilities in the hopes of attracting new and talented students to her masters. She also hopes that she will find people interested in teaching her new skills or leading her towards greater martial challenges that she can try and overcome. She would never admit it to her teachers, but she has also heard that there are amazing new alcohols and drugs to try and Absalom that she could not get back home, and she would love to sample them, should she be able to get access without going too far out of her way.

Education

Kailan was trained under Chen Jincai at an offshoot school of the Cloud Crane School of Martial Arts. This off shoot school was not formally approved by the Cloud Crane School, and thus may be subject to a martial arts rivalry and subsequent purging, but she found great grace and learning there.

Employment

She is looking to improve the name of her teacher and attract more students to their temple by demonstrating her martial skill in gladiatorial combat in Absalom. If she hears of any significant needs of people in the area, she will gladly seek to help them out.

Mental Trauma

Kailan is greatly ashamed of her youth as a bully and her history of losing her temper. She tries to protect and help people, and while she has been able to curb her more destructive impulsive, she remains somewhat hedonistic.

Intellectual Characteristics

Kailan has very little internal empathy and struggles to emotionally understand other people, but she is very invested in doing what's best for everyone. Sometimes this makes her follow the rules a little legalistically, but that tends to ease up over time as she's able to better understand the intents of those rules.

Morality & Philosophy

She believes quite deeply in the teachings of Irori. They helped turn her from a violent, petty child, into the (mostly) disciplined adult that she is now. She puts daily and concerted effort into improving herself physically, and to trying to better understand the mantras and mudras of Irori.

More than just the teachings of Irori, she remembers the deep struggles and pains of her youth and wants to minimize that pain for herself and for others.

person.sexuality

Kailan is mostly interested in people she sees as particularly skilled. What kind of skill isn't relevant to her

person.gender_identity

Kailan simply sees herself as herself. She's never really put enough thought into her gender identity to have a clear understanding of it.

Known Languages

Tien, Common, Abyssal

Personality

Motivation

Kailan embodies effort. She longs to be better than she was, than she is, and wants other people to see her as more than they have seen her.

Likes & Dislikes

She likes good drinks, good tobacco, a nice fight, lewd jokes, pretty clothes on pretty people, and being told she's done a good job.

She dislikes being scolded, bullies, spicy food (although she'll eat it anyway), and the texture of burlap and anything that feels sticky.

Virtues & Personality perks

Kailan values discipline above all else, and works very hard to maintain her focus on meditation practices and martial arts every day.

She wants what's best for everyone, and is willing to take advice on how to accomplish that, even if it doesn't make sense to her how that accomplishes the goal.

Vices & Personality flaws

Despite her deep reverence for discipline, Kailan is also deeply impulsive and struggles with it herself.

Hygiene

Kailan is exceptionally clean. She despises the sensation of being sticky or dirty and will often wash herself just to remove an unwanted texture.

Social

Birthplace

Quain

Contacts & Relations

Kailan has not been outside of the temple very much, and so she has few contacts beyond her teachers and friends there.

Wealth & Financial state

21 gp

Family Ties

She considers the other monks at the temple to be her adopted family. She has a lot of anger towards her mother, Liwen, and would likely have a lot of choice words for her if she ever actually saw her again.

Religious Views

Kailan is a zealous follower of the teachings of Irori, even if she does not always live up to those teachings.

Social Aptitude

Kailan means well, but she is awkward and blunt. She laughs at awkward silences, and talks slightly too much. However, she usually tries to talk other people up and encourage them a lot, and so people tend to find her charming more than off-putting.

Mannerisms

She is fidgety, impulsive, and full of energy. When she catches herself fidgeting, she will attempt to redirect it into practicing a mudra, body lock, or other ki cultivating activity, but she very much struggles to remain still. Even when she is laying down, her tail and feet will twitch and kick endlessly. She also is known to have a small stick or large stem in her mouth frequently, which she will chew on and worry with her teeth while she focuses.

Speech

She speaks with a light Tien accent, and when angry will occasionally curse in abyssal. She has no memory of ever learning Abyssal, but just naturally came up knowing it.