Lia Xin
Female Human Planeswalker, Age 16 years (Ascended 1 Year Ago)
Lia Xin is a young woman. Her black hair is straight and shoulder-length. Her almond-shaped eyes are dark. Her skin is fair. She is still somewhat beneath her adult height (she is about 5’ tall), though she is unlikely to ever be taller than 5’2”-5’3”. She is slight.
Lia Xin, or “Quiet Lia”, is mute. She can make no vocal sounds whatsoever. She could hiss, sigh to an extent, exhale loudly, or make noise with other parts of her body (clapping, stomping, etc.) but she cannot voice any sound at all.
Lia was a prodigy calligrapher and artist before ascending to become a planeswalker after encountering one began the process of opening her already creative and inquisitive mind to the vastness of the multiverse. In most cases, she must write to communicate, which has been a problem as most planes do not share her native writing system. By the present (most of a year after “Louder Than Words”) she’s picked it up, but is still not entirely comfortable with common letters.
Lia essentially awakened to magic only after becoming a Planeswalker. Her spellcraft is worked through her brushwork. Using mana as ink, she can draw or write what she desires, conjuring spirits or weaving arcane magic. She had some inkling, before her ascension, that she could infuse characters with a sort of power, but performing dramatic magic by writing with mana only came after. She’s not exactly aware of it and is hampered by needing an implement to perform magic, but her enchanted calligraphy is actually quite potent and versatile. She seems capable of using all five colors of magic, but Blue and White are the most natural, followed by Red, Black and finally Green. However, while Lia understands that mana-calligraphy gets her magical effects, and the meaning of her characters, she’s not well versed in the rules of magic: there are some things she attempts that simply fizzle without her knowing what she’s missing. As she discovers more about her power and its nature, this becomes less frequent.
The following are some characters Lia has used. It is by no means comprehensive and doesn’t include any characters used for summoning spirits (which most, including some of these can be).
‘Ascension’: Lia scribes this character to focus herself for planeswalking, though she does feel that she could planeswalk without it, it is easier with.
‘Death’: Lethal without doing any actual harm. If successful, the victim simply keels over.. While Lia has used the character for Death successfully, her black mana bonds are weak and thus unreliable (In game terms, she wouldn’t be running enough swamps to get
on command)‘Fire’: Depending on how much mana Lia imbues into the character, she can use this in place of flint and tinder, or conjure a dangerous blast.
‘No’: If scribed quickly enough with blue mana, this is capable of negating other magic. Written with white mana, it creates a momentary barrier. Discovering the different uses of ‘No’ has furthered Lia’s attempts to understand magic significantly.
‘Thought’: Lia has discovered that writing ‘Thought’ with blue mana results in something of a brainstorm, though she generally feels quite uncomfortable after using it, as though the ideas are not her own and will soon fade.
‘Understanding’: with enough blue mana, this can provide supernatural insight, but Lia needs a decent idea of what she wants to know more about for it to function. She is more comfortable with ‘Understanding’ than ‘Thought’ despite its limitations.
‘Wood’: Though Lia has weak enough bonds to green that she essentially needs to be in a region with green mana available in order to utilize it, ‘Wood’ seems to encourage plant growth. It’s something she’s experimented with when able, but hasn’t found useful
Lia is very smart. She’s a nice girl at heart, but being a step removed from most people (that is, being unable to communicate directly) gets her treated as stupid and isolates her from human interaction, which has lead to her having a somewhat shocking lack of empathy at times. It’s quite possible that might be a sign of arrested development in a way, that she never learned beyond being nice for its own sake how to see the world through another’s eyes, because everyone else is quite unlike her. Furthermore, she seems to take the deaths of others in comparative stride, as though the idea is still a bit unreal for her.
Appears In
Morgan’s Notes: “Quiet Lia” (Aged 0-14)
Louder Than Words (Aged 15)