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(OOC: I followed the East Asian naming conventions in this application, meaning that surnames come first, and that Shen’s mother did not take the name of her husband upon marriage. I also discussed the use of Selene with her player, and the Selene's player did give me permission to use the Black Queen in this profile.)
Full Name: Xorn Shen
Nickname : N/A
Code Name: Xorn
Age: 30
Affiliation: The Hellfire Club
Status: Refugee, Calligrapher/Chinese Language Teacher
Member Title: The Darkness of the Dawn
Physical Description
The most defining thing about Shen is the heavy metal helmet that he wears at all times. It is always present. The helmet is roughly in the shape of a human skull; except the sockets are a bit more narrow and go further back onto the helmet. Shielding the eyes are two pieces of black glass which function as a two way mirror, the person looking at Shen sees only their reflection. Also, there is no cavity for the nose. Further separating the helmet from a skull is the lack of a defined jaw, rather there is only a harsh line where the jaw should two small, almost invisible hinges connecting the lower jaw to the helmet. Behind the eyes and just below the jaw line is another set of hinges binding the faceplate to the helmet. Finally, on top of the helmet are six switches, in two lines of three switches each. Connecting this whole apparatus to neck is a metallic collar, permanently fused to his flesh. For this reason, Shen often wears long turtlenecks and other shirts to conceal the merging of metal and flesh. On the collar are six latches, which if all released, would detach the helmet from the collar.
The rest of the man is not that far out of the ordinary. Shen stands at 6’1”, taller than some, shorter than others. He is on the thinner side for height, weighing in at 154 lbs (not including the weight of the helmet which brings his total weight up to 160lbs). His hands are on the longer side and are slightly narrower than one would expect. Despite being something of a beanpole, Shen’s body possess something of a harshness in its lean frame. It is hard to see at first, however this harsh quality becomes especially evident in his movements.
Shen’s style is rather simple. He wears simple, monochromatic shirts and pants, often times of darker shades. He seems to own nothing with short sleeves or short legs. He does seem to favor sandals over sneakers, however he also has a pair of deck shoes that he is very fond of. His over whelming concern is to make sure that very few people ever see the metal collar fused to his neck, so anything he can do to cover that collar, he will. Because of the collar, he does not look kindly upon chokers and tight necklaces on other people.
Avatar: None
Personality:
The most obvious thing about Shen is the intensity of his religious devotion. It is said of some people, that they live their religious practice, without religion, they would be a fundamentally different person. This statement definitely applies to Shen Xorn. He is a devout Mahayana Buddhist, more specifically of the Chan (Zen) sect of Buddhism, however his particular brand of faith is heavily influenced by both the practices of Pure Land and Tantric Buddhism. The Tantric Buddhism comes from his maternal grandfather, who was a monk of the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism, one of the few sects that will allow a monk to marry. His father was a practicing Pure Land Buddhist for most of his life, so Shen incorporates Pure Land practices in honor of his father. Shen’s religious devotion everything he does. If he does anything, he will do it slowly, and focused only on the event at hand. Because of the oaths he has taken, he is slow to engage in physical confrontation, avoids romantic interactions with others, is honest to a fault, will not touch anything unless given explicit permission to do so, or watch television. This is in holding with the five precepts of Buddhism: refraining from taking a life, refraining from sexual misconduct, refraining from false speech, refraining from stealing, and refraining from intoxicants.
Despite the severity of Shen’s religious practices, or perhaps because of it, he is incredibly calm. He accepts things with a quiet grace and dignity that many would find impossible to compose, much less even use. Even the harsh lines of his body show that he has found a form of tranquility as no movement is made without careful thought or consideration. Shen has a reverence for life that makes almost every moment seem to be sacred and spiritual. There are few things indeed that Shen cannot find some small spiritual connection to. Everything about him exudes the aura of deep calm, and some envy this in him. This calm composure makes him one of the easiest people to talk to as he does not judge and he seems very approachable. While he may not agree with someone’s choices, he will never rebuke a person for making them. In his experience, it is up to every person to determine their own actions, who is he to pass judgment?
Deep within him though, buried deeply beneath years of meditation and training to deny it, is his anger and his desire. Part of him will most likely always hate the Chinese government for what it did to him and what it turned him into. While he knows as a Buddhist he should not let these attach himself to those events, part of him will always be hurting because of what he saw while with the Chinese Government. A part of him strongly desires revenge, and this leads to a deeply seated anger. He has only given into this anger once, and it frightens him, this deep seated anger and resentment.
Power Description:
Ironically enough for someone with his deep spirituality and reverence for life, Shen’s power is focused around death and the absence of life. Shen is an ‘energy void.’ He is able to absorb almost any and all energy in his ambient environment, regardless of its source. Unlike Selene or Rogue, whose powers are primarily focused on life force and life energy, Shen’s power extends through all things, be the energy potential, thermal, kinetic, mechanical, chemical, or radiation based. Essentially, by focusing his power he can stop a fire, stop bullets in their tracks, and even cause buildings to fall into ruin. Also, unlike Rogue or Selene, Shen really receives no benefits from absorbing all of the energy that he can, rather he just continues to exist. He gains no memories, no powers, nor skills when he absorbs the life force of another being. True, the passive absorption of energy means he no longer has too eat, drink, or even sleep, but beyond this, he gets nothing from the energy he takes into himself. If he does keep his power focused on a living being for too long, he can kill them, however he so fears his powers that he will do anything to avoid this extreme.
In order for Shen to use his powers, he must have either a good mental image or visual contact with that he wishes to drain. He must also be within 300 feet of that which he wishes to drain. The closer he is to something, the easier it is for him to drain it of its energies. His draining starts off as weak, but the longer he ‘feeds’ (uses his power) the stronger his power becomes. He is constantly fighting off the urge to ‘feed’, and because once he starts to feed he has difficulty stopping until all things around him are void of energy, he does not use his powers often. He can do a field drain, drain all the energy from everything within 300 feet of his body, but he tries not to do that.
The helmet was designed to help him control his power. The six switches on the top of the helmet serve to dampen the amount of energy that he absorbs. If he were ever to remove the helmet, there would be no way that he would be able to control the amount of energy he absorbed. It would be as if a black hole was unleashed on the surface of the world. All around him would fall into darkness and death. For this reason, he spends hours a day meditating, so he can learn how to deny the urge of his power, and perhaps even some day, bestow all the energy he has taken, but that day is far distant.
In addition to his energy absorption power, Shen is now capable of a new form of sight. While he can still see things in terms of the visible spectrum of light, he is also capable of seeing everything as interconnected patterns of pure energy. Because of this, he is able to identify a mutant by simply looking at one, as a mutant will have a different energy signature than a human. He is learning how to distinguish between the types of mutation as each various mutation has its own unique energy signature, but he is far from comfortable with this particular aspect of his gift at the moment.
Family:
Xorn Dei-Fei (father, deceased)
Borjigin Sarantsatsral (mother, deceased)
Borjigin Kuan-Yin (paternal grandfather, presumed active)
Xorn Kuan-Yin(twin brother, status unknown)
History:
One of the first things that Shen will tell you is that while the infrastructure of China made him possible, he is far from being Chinese. Rather, He is a mix of three of the largest minority groups in China. His father was a member of the Uyghur ethnic group, while his mother was half-Mongolian and half-Tibetan. So while he was a resident of The People’s Republic of China for most of his life, he does not consider himself to be Chinese, despite his proficiency in Mandarin. Shen’s unique blood status made him almost instantly a target of the Chinese Government, his heritage alone was not cause for what happened to him, although it probably helped in his later treatment.
Shen was the younger of the set of twins born to his parents. He is 888 seconds younger than Kuan-Yin, an auspicious number in Chinese popular belief. The twins were born in Urumqi, Xinyang Uyghur Autonomous Province, the People’s Republic of China. The twins were spared the fires of the Cultural Revolution, something for which both of their parents were grateful. While the Xorn family was far from rich, they managed to get along well enough for a while. Both of their sons managed to do well in school, and took easily to both Uyghur and Mandarin. Sarantsatsral even began to teach the boys some of the Tibetan language. Of the two, Shen took more easily to it. This began the idea circulating in the family that they might flee. While Kuan-Yin was perfectly happy and doing very well in China, Shen’s religious tendencies manifested at a young age, so the family was willing to flee to where Shen could become a full member of the Sangha.
This dream ended when Kuan-Yin came home one day complaining of severe headaches. It was just after their tenth birthday, a year before the events of Tiananmen Square. Shortly after this, Kuan-Yin began to know what everyone around him was thinking, feeling, and could in some cases, change those thoughts or emotions. Even in Urumqi, there were those who were deeply loyal to the Communist Party. Word eventually got to the Chinese Party officials of the young boy who could change the thoughts of others without a word. They were immediately interested. Shen and Kuan-Yin were kidnapped, their parents murdered, and their home burned too the ground. The two were separated, Kuan-Yin being taken deep into Inner Mongolia to be experimented upon. Shen on the other hand, was taken to a top-secret detention facility deep within the Taklamakan Desert.
For seven years, deep within the desert, in a prison for the worst of China’s ‘criminals’, Shen managed to survive. While some were truly criminals (murderers, terrorists, arsonists, rapists, etc.) others were the Fu-Wan Detention Facility as they were intellectual dissidents. One of these dissidents was a man who had been a Chan Buddhist monk. Shen found him and learned from the monk everything he could. This was his first real exposure to Chan, but seven years worth of teachings helped to persuade Shen to accept the Chinese grown form of Buddhism. While in prison, Shen did learn how to protect himself from unwanted attentions, although he didn’t want to cause anyone harm.
Everything changed the day after his seventeenth birthday. Everyone has a breaking point. Shen’s was seeing the monk executed. The monk was executed for crimes Shen knew him to be innocent of, but more than that, for teaching Shen. Shen gave into his hatred, his anger, his despair, and violated a fundamental Buddhist law and let himself be consumed by his desire for revenge. This sparked his hitherto dormant powers. In the span of ten minutes, Shen had laid waste to most of Fu-Wan by draining it dry. He was so crazed with his newfound ‘thirst’ that he willingly took the lives of other intellectuals and political dissidents along with the lives of prison guards and criminals.
He was subdued when he came across a power line. His lust for energy kept him feeding on the electric current. This sustained him for days, giving the government time to design and to force onto him the helmet. After that, Shen was shipped to Heilongjiang province, and imprisoned in a cell in a detention facility all of 60 kilometers from the Russian border. There he remained, composing his thoughts and mind, coming to terms with what he had done. He remained ignorant for the events of Liberty Island during this time. Over these long years, he did nothing but practice meditation, improve his Mandarin, and begin to learn English.
The events of dark Cerebro forced the Chinese Government to free him as his powers flared again and almost killed everything and everyone within a three hundred foot radius of Shen. Within the Chinese government, there existed a member of the Hellfire Club. He got to Shen first, knowing that a mutant of Shen’s unique powers would be useful to club. He sent Shen over to America, where he was met by Selene Gallio, the Black Queen. If it had not been for Selene’s guidance, Shen would have taken the cure. Under Selene, Shen has begun to understand how to focus his powers and how to use them without killing anyone. While many say that the personalities of these two is far from a perfect match, Shen is very devoted to his teacher. He firmly believes that she can help him master his power and his thirst. Selene is perhaps the only person who might one day be allowed to Shen without his mask, but that is a long way away.
Can I post twice a week? yes
Do I play any other characters on this sight? Irene Adler
Passwords, if new
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Shen Xorn, Xorn
