When Xiomara had been summoned to the World of War he had been expecting a crusade of endless blood and violence. He had been expecting to cross blades with champions from all across the stars from the moment he took his first step. What he had not been expecting was a land that had settled neatly into the rut that was bureaucracy.

And he had never expected to find a panda running a tavern.

But Liu was an honest man with good taste in liquor, most likely because he was not a man, and that alone put him in the budding ascendants favor. It was not an unfamiliar scene to see the grumpy avatar lumbering through the Alexandria, shoulders squared and long limbs sweeping out from side to side, shoving those lesser warriors who had been cajoled into civility by those in power like some ungainly wraith. A thick white fur cloak hung around his shoulders, hood thrown down with the face of the bear who had died to gift him eyeballing those he left behind, its skin was leathery and cracked but frozen in the same snarl it had worn the day it died. He wrote half armor as he often did, from the right pectoral all the way to the right hand he was clad in black armor while the rest of his body was adorned with simple trinkets, from a necklace fashioned out of jagged teeth to a bracelet around the left wrist bearing a stolen amulet. Some of them were worthless, most were trophies that bore some significance or another to the man in question, and just a handful were powerful magical artifacts that thrummed with unstable auras of power. If stripped of them all he wore was simple white from the loose shirt to the pants that eventually tucked themselves into a pair of rider’s boots.

[color=ed1c24]‘You are my favored, you are my champion, you are my herald. Wait for your chance to strike and it shall come.’[/color]

The repeating mantra in his head was a constant companion and one he chose to ignore, stepping through the open doors of Shen’s Tavern, out of the dry sunlight and into the pleasantly multi-hued glow of the tavern. It was relatively empty given the time of day and so allowed Xio to maneuver his way towards the bar with practiced ease, dancing past the tables and patrons therein, and eventually sliding a stool out of the way. He chose not to sit for the town being and instead leaned forward, mounting his elbows on the counter top while he loosed a shout.

“Liu, show yourself, I have need of your council.” Xio’s normally beautiful face was dirtied by the dour look on his face, “Bring your liquor with you, do not ask how much, as much as you can manage and then some.” Xiomara was not a thing meant to be caged, the complacent city of Alexandria was working on his very last nerve, and now there were dark thoughts bubbling to the surface of his mind. He needed to know whether to act on them or to ignore the but first he needed to dispel the nagging voice of Vorsours. “I will need more before this night is done.”