[center][color=palevioletred][h3]Xiaolan Dagon[/h3][i] “Zen as fuck.” [/i][/color][/center]

[color=palevioletred][b] “Tells you something about Buddha-nature. Vodka, bloodstains, burning headache. My gun is gone, and it took the stim-high with it… Life—as [i]he[/i] once said—is suffering, but we must fight on, or something like that.”[/b][/color]

Xiaolan blinked her eyes like she was trying to get rid of some filter pulled over them. It didn’t go away. Later, she’d realize she may have just gotten too used to seeing life through the filtered AR of her pair of [i]Hearts Up![/i] sunglasses. She was staring at her reflection, who was also prostrated on the dark floor of the hotel room, full-lotus with red-stained hands immersed in two glasses splashing vodka over their rims. [i]It’d get the bloodstains out[/i], she thought, [i]but at what cost?[/i] Xiaolan could have sworn she’d seen this image before, digitally alight on the wall of some great pagoda somewhere lost to time. Or maybe she simply foresaw her own fate—some great, graceful, Bodhisattva of death or something like that. 

Spilling half a glass of tainted vodka in the process, she pressed down the dictaphone's button once again with her elbow.[b][color=palevioletred] “Bodhisattva of death… I’ll use that somewhere. It’s like zen, but with more aesthetic. [i]Zen as fuck.[/i]”[/color][/b]

Who was to say, really, what happened? Could it have been an impulse surgery? They couldn’t be the stains of her own exsanguinations. Xiaolan knew this because she was too powerful, perhaps even immortal. The very thought conjured images of her squaring up hand-to-hand with Raijin. Maybe it was the thundering in her skull. She removed her hands from either pint glass, flicking them around until the sterile smell misted her accidentally. It was only then that she realized, through the mental haze and visual fog, it was going to be another day of suffering. [i]No moisturizer.[/i]

Xiaolan’s war purse was lighter upon leaving that morning. A rather off putting interrogation of the morning staff in the [i]fine establishment[/i] below her hotel offered few answers. ‘The Big Shooter’ was gone, which would mean she would be stylistically limited until her reunion with her custom boomstick. As she left the bar, she plucked a dying bougainvillea from a growbox out front, knowing she'd need it later. There, walking through the damp streets of New Malacca, Xiaolan was hardly present in reality, searching instead through a dark void wherein she hoped to find memories of a night gone wrong but found only blackness. It did cross her mind that today was a day of more than just derelict wandering, awaiting the return of someone with a vessel to go raiding, or wasting away confined in bars she couldn’t afford following cons she could never quite keep up with herself.

It was late enough that Xiaolan already couldn’t keep track of the sun. Perhaps she’d slept through the day on purpose, because of her imminent meeting. It was a sort of fate that always befell her. Rest never came easy, appearing as a haphazard burnout of the lights, only to leave the [i]Artist of War[/i] to awaken in another instance of reality altogether. Always, it seemed, moments before she had to be up and going somewhere else with great urgency. [i]Flowing like water over the steel plates patching streets that wouldn’t be paved for generations.[/i]

The Whip’s pink plated was more dented than it had been the night prior. When Xiaolan felt herself take its handlebars in her grip—feel the slight skew off their axes—she couldn’t help but manifest the half-mil asyuan. [i]Coin[/i], as she called it sometimes, was abject. It was a horrid necessity—one of the [i]Tools of War[/i]. She pondered life as a footpad, a footsoldier, or just one shield in a phalanx. The infantrymen rarely pondered their coin. The general, however, played abstract games to determine the fate of nations. Warfare, as it had modernized, had become less its romantic predecessor and more a game of shifting coin, economy variables, petty intrigue that nonetheless changed fate like no honorable battle ever could. It was through the half-mil that she could once again place herself among the generals, and with the coin there was so much to be done. Enemies could be ended, alliances reestablished, capital collected, and even—perhaps—dormant relations kindled.

The Whip fishtailed into a drifting stop at speeds cruel enough to leave slashes of blackened rubber burnt into the already dark pavement. Dancing figures, flashing through forms and kata ran through sequences of precision techniques across her mirrorshades. Xiaolan had the habit of leaving files packed with information splayed across her vision—like she was unconsciously sapping their secrets into her brain in the day-to-day. She grinned when she saw the two men standing as Yin and Yang before the door to Suraiboshen. Catching glimpses of their own optics, the [i]Hearts Up[/i] frames upon Xiaolan’s face flickered red, as if greeting them. She smirked.

The establishment, the Artist presumed, might have just the sort of chemically-addled compounds laced into their confections to erase the overwhelming sense of [i]DOOM[/i] that coursed in her veins. Every day, in fact, she hoped she’d find the right chef, or sensei, or guru, or enemy that might help her escape the forsaken state of constantly falling and falling towards something dark and unwelcoming. But then, where was the fun in running away from the battle?

[color=palevioletred] [b]“Your general’s come.”
“You’ll find nothing of interest.”
“I am the weapon.”[/b][/color]

She paused, letting the perfect structure of her rhetoric linger. Xiaolan was a strange one to frisk, especially with [i]the Big Shooter[/i] still absent without official leave, but it was her presence that manifested an edge. The colleagues within must have taken notice. Xiaolan was quick to make herself known.

[b][color=palevioletred] “Do my screens deceive me or do I stand witness to a fine section of warriors?”[/color][/b] She stepped down the hall, swiveling her head just enough to allow her glasses to devour the schematics of the establishment as well as the profiles of the group she’d been directed to join without making her gesture’s intent clear. Upon first observation, the rogue detected no immediate enemies or hazards.

[color=palevioletred][i]But so began the game, 
And the Artist of War, prepared to follow the Way,
Readied her reclamation of a throne on D8.[/i][/color]