You lasted throughout the Avatar Storm, gathering other members of the Brotherhood and forging yourselves into an expert force, surviving everything that the world could throw at you and coming out stronger, until you ended here, with your own Chantry and students. And at that moment of lucid clarity, you cast off the ties to your parents and joined the warriors and monks of the Vajrapani. You asked your mentor, and he told you of the eternal Tao and of the Akashayana Sangha, of the Vajrapani and of Do. The creatures were hard to beat, but your mentor unleashed techniques and moves that you would never have thought possible, but there in the heat of battle, they seemed like second nature to you, and as the battle ended, you noticed how your blows had simply rent through their steely exterior and interior like it had been paper.
So when the police showed up and cited some obscure laws to close down the dojo, you and your mentor rebuked them first gently, and then turned to violence when they reached for their weapons, and as you struck at them, you noticed that their skin was not skin at all, but instead metal concealed beneath synthetic skin.
You showed what you could do to your parents and was apalled when they told you that you should stop and continued simply to spite them. Step by step did you open your mind to the practice of Eight-Trigram Palm, mastering all the forms one by one, whether it was the original three forms or the eight animal forms or one of the deriviative styles.Īnd you soon found that your studies of the Tao and your practices of Baguazhang allowed you to do wondrous things, like scaling a wall in seconds or dodge bullets with your expert timing. You practiced day and night, making your parents afraid of your well-being as you exerted even your top-trained body to the limits of it's physique, while studying the philosophies of the esteemed master Dong Haichuan who was said to have been able to grab a teacup without even starting rings in the tea. This world of mysticism and philosophy was wholly new to you and quickly grabbed you with a fervor that was completely new to you, so when your teacher beat you in your first match without breaking a sweat, you decided that you had to be good at this. So when you finally as a young woman managed to persuade your parents that you should get to practice a martial art on a deeper level than simply thoughts of effectiveness and speed, you started the practice of Baguazhang kung fu under a local practitioner. You knew nothing of the many beauties and horrors of the world, only seeing the bubble of order and safety forged by your parents. Yet this exercise of excellence and perfection was an empty one, without any purpose but to excel and climb to the top. At an age of fifteen you were the elite, able to take down five armed men in seconds, and at the age of twentythree you could perform advanced math at the speed of a calculator while doing physical exercise. When the other children played and laughed, little Mei was practicing martial arts, and when the other children went home from school, you would learn of the triumphs of science and reason over mysticism. Life was always empty for you, growing up as the single child of a wealthy pair, both staunch Technocrats who ensured that you had only the very best in education and training.