Fēng Yīnhǎitāo (Ready)

[Blueblood]

Roleplay Type: World of Equestria
 

Name:  Fēng Yīnhǎitāo (Translates to: Maple Mountain)

Sex: Male
 

Age: Young Adult
 

Species: Longma
 

Eye color:  His irises are a dark red, almost brown, the color of maple leaves in the late autumn
 

Coat/Scales:  His underbelly fur is a deep brown, while the scales over most of his body are lighter, amber-colored.  His coloration becomes even brighter in his wings, which gleam gold in the full sunlight.  Lately, though, he has taken to darkening them with charcoal.
 

Mane/Tail:  His mane and tail-tuft are both leaf green.
 

Physique:  Compact.  He's short, and yet always gives the impression of being a tall longma who is stooping, even when he is in fact stretching to full height.  The sense of energy in Feng's muscles just waiting to be released has often reminded those who meet him of a coiled spring.
 

Residence: Huangjing
 

Occupation:  A proud member of the Imperial Watch
 

Cutie Mark:  A maple leaf superimposed on an upside-down mountain.

 

Fēng acquired his cutie mark after leading his small mountain town on a search for the lost puppy of one of his playmates.  He essentially threw the whole of himself into the effort, convincing, cajoling, and outright conscripting anyone who would listen to him by sheer force of effort, will, and personality.  

 

While the search parties thus composed did not literally turn the nearest mountain upside down, they overturned nearly every stone upon it, revealing a great many things that generations of travelers had lost on their way over the pass.  Old coins, pieces of jade, and the like.  They even managed to dislodge a hidden Imperial Watch agent patrolling the area, who, bemused by the young longma, agreed to join the search, proving instrumental to actually finding the lost pet at last.

 

While most of the townsfolk were quicker to credit the Watcher with the success rather than Feng, the agent did stop to congratulate him, saying, "It takes a great deal of force and intelligence to so turn a mountain upside-down.  But you must be sure to temper your talent with an aim worthy of it.  If you have not found one for yourself when you have grown, there may yet be a place for you in the Imperial Watch."  It was then that Feng's mark appeared upon his flank, marking him for no ordinary destiny.

 

Unique Traits:  Being a longma rather than a qilin, his breath magic is fairly weak.  In fact, the extent of it is that his breath always smells of strong tea, wintergreen, and ginger.  The scent is fairly invigorating if you breathe in a lot of it, but that's about it.  However, he has learned to be able to talk and use it at the same time.  So, if you listen to him at length, you generally find yourself picked up, and having more energy than you first supposed.

 

History:  Feng was born in a small but reasonable prosperous town, nestled at the base of a mountain pass, famed for the forest of maples that reached up the slopes to the sky.  Such is the nature of small towns in Long Guo, that not only does every qilin and longma know every other one, but they all know each other's ancestors as well.  And Fēng Yīnhǎitāo's ancestors had a... history, to put it mildy.

 

All of his forefathers and mothers were remembered as proverbs and warnings, shared at the bedsides of young foals to teach them the dangers of not maintaining balance in all things.  Sometimes it was his great-great-aunt, who became rich as a successful merchant, but ended up wasting her entire fortune on luxuries, dying fat and peniless.  Others would bring up his great-uncle, who pursued the monastic and ascetic life, but took it so far that he nearly starved himself by fasting too much.  All the way up and down his family tree there were tales of great talent ruined by narrow focus or lack of self-control.

 

This tended to heap a great deal of negative expectation upon young Fēng, and at first it seemed like these expectations would end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.  While full of obvious talent and energy, most of it in his early life was spent getting into enormous amounts of trouble, usually of his own creation.  Even today, there are aged Qilin in his hometown that tremble when they mention the Spring of the Feline Landslide, or the Autumn of the Play-wars.  

 

But, upon the portentous first meeting with an Imperial Watch agent wherein Fēng got his cutie mark, he also received the first positive guidance for the expenditure of his energies.  Immediately, his efforts were more focused; he began reading up on all the small local library had on the Imperial Watch, and what it took to be admitted into it.  It was not the most honorable of ambitions, but frankly his fellow townsfolk were so relieved that he was trying to do something useful (and, what counted about as much, intending to move all the way to the capital to do it), that they supported his efforts whole-heartedly.  They even paid for all his travel expenses when he finally set off to report to the Academy as a cadet.

 

Of course, when he finally arrived at Huangjing, he found that his sources were just slightly out of date, in that the Watch no longer held their training in the Academy proper, having their own institution.  Nevertheless, the entrance examination was just as grueling as all those old texts had said it was.  His admission was actually hotly debated by his entrance examiners, as while his performance was quite exceptional, he had exerted himself to the point of straining his ankle, which troubled some of them.  A healthy disregard for one's own safety in the course of one's duties was commendable, but go too far, and you were an outright liability.

 

Nevertheless, Fēng was eventually admitted, though he could sense the hesitation about it.  This was probably the wrong impression for them to give, if they wanted him to curb his tendency for over-achievement.  Such was the nature of training in the Imperial Watch, though, that cadets soon found their limitations, if only at the edge of mortal capabilities.  Fēng's particular weakness was his lack of natural dragonbreath capabilities, which he strove to make up for in the other physical aspects, honing his natural energy to a knife's edge.  

 

There was one hiccup in his training, however.  The old Emperor died in the middle of it, leaving him half-conditioned when the new Empress Yue took the throne.  Not wanting to delay his graduation for all that, Fēng reinforced the conditioning of loyalty in all patterns of thought, to an almost obsessive degree.  The extent of his effort would have been creepy in any other context, and even as it was, his official loyalty ended up not unmixed with sentiments of a more personal nature.  He knew enough to keep those thoughts from examiners, and graduated as a full Watcher, right on schedule.  

 

And with that, he was assigned his first 'tour of duty' within the palace, for there were whispers of disloyalty among the higher ranks...

 

Character Personality:  "If anything is worth doing, it is worth over-doing."  Such a sentiment is antithetical to a culture steeped in the traditions of Balance and The Harmonious Path, but that has been Fēng's guiding principle throughout life.  To prevent himself from going the way of his ancestors, he is currently trying to balance his extreme passions against each other, so that he might achieve at least some kind of dynamic balance.

 

The end result is very much like those cyclical windstorms that almost do overthrow mountains, and any longma or qilin nearby is at risk of being caught up in it.  He takes pains not to be seen as mean; he seeks to be liked and often succeeds, provided you get an opportunity to know him personally.  But, since he is in the Imperial Watch, you will most likely never get that chance.  Be thankful such energies are bent to the Empress' will, for they would wreak much destruction were they ever loosed.

[Bellosh]

How's this application coming along?

[Blueblood]

Gala's kept me busy, but I'll finish it up after!

[RainbowFoxxy]