ARS PACTUM: Wenyan Jiang

i love...............ink wash...... a lot for someone who can't do it

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Name: 

Wenyan Jiang (江文言)

Type:

Human

Contracted To: 

Rabbit

Wenyan politely asks that it spare his village from trampling. Rabbit asks for a name. As you can see, the name bequeathed to it is very creative!

Specialties:

Telekinesis here and there— mostly only for bits of paper. Gravity (?) He doesn’t test it, much, so he’s actually not entirely sure.

Tier:

2

Age:

17

Gender:

Male

Birthdate:

March 8, 1948

Height: 

182 cm, 5’11.5"

Is he... is he getting taller? 

Nationality:

Chinese, speaks Sichuanese

Personality:

Quiet – demure – perceptive – brusque – eloquent – conservative – artistic – responsible

Wenyan sits as close to the walls as he can get. His movements are slow and elegant, in the way that an uncomfortable harvestman spider trapped in a small container might be— because he’s tall and self-conscious of the attention it attracts, he tends to look rather pitiably stoic, with his long legs crammed under a desk, slouching at all times, shoulders up to his huge ears.

A little shy in social situations, he likes to keep quiet and observe before speaking, although he tries to not be left lacking in the social decorum department. When he does speak, sometimes the impression is left of a boy who learnt the bulk of his English though old-fashioned books. (This is because he did.) Often, he’ll try to make responses with strangers as brusque and to-the-point as possible to minimize the amount of words he’s forced to use— but once he knows someone a little better, his favourite way to communicate ideas is through florid simile and metaphor, not trusting his vast vocabulary to convey a concept without allegory.

Naturally intuitive, he’s good at perceiving others, almost to the point of sixth sense. He’s comfortable with others’ emotions as a bystander, but not so much his own, which tend to take a backseat to mental pursuits. With friends he can be a little standoffish and easily-embarrassed, but only because he prefers to associate on a mental level. It might also because he has an older brother’s psychology at heart, and so he’s quite fond of subtly degrading people… all in jest, naturally, but that’s about as far as his humour goes.

His upbringing has given him a rather maddening sense of relaxed conservatism and a strange set of anti-authoritorial values. Wenyan values fair play, but he also believes in a natural order of things greater than the individual; to him, the best-run administration is one that doesn’t require intervention from its leader at all, and the best society is that which acts without limit or government. He is hilariously comfortable with paradoxes that might drive a different man to madness. In short, he’s the weirdest libertarian on earth.

Although he tries to hide it, nurturing others is a little close to his heart. He takes his upperclassmen duties seriously. Ask this guy where the water fountain is, and he’ll Sherpa you through the mountains like a Tibetan Mastiff. Ask him how to perform a simple charm, and he’ll describe multiple authors’ philosophies on it. Wenyan is well-read and knowledgeable in part because he has a thirst for data and a fascination for folklore, but also because he knows he needs to be: as a human, he feels as though he is intruding on a world that is not his.

Likes: Painting, Classical literature, chess and other strategy games League of Legends jkjk, ghost stories, spicy food, rabbits

Dislikes: People who recklessly endanger their own health, no matter how petty (Wenyan you’re one to talk you SLOUCH AND RUIN YOUR BACK), government intervention, corruption, Rabbit

History:

His village was barely a village, and more a small community of religious refugees. Within the village walls, magicians were revered as wise teachers who had been granted a divine gift through lives of self-cultivation. Strong and benevolent entities were gods. It was their location high up in the mountains that saved them from firebombing during the war, his parents’ contemporaries claimed— that, and the night fog of the Daba Mountains, thick and heavy, that obscured the light of settlements under cover of darkness. The oldest magician in the village had a different story, however:

“The ground here is old and protected,” the head priest told him, once. “Before the irrigation system in the time of the Qin dynasty, the Min River was ruled by a dragon that grew fat with spring meltwater. He flooded the banks of the river, sweeping huts and livestock away, until a court magician from the capital diverted his course. But he still lives below the channels; like all powerful entities, his presence will lure weaker ones to these parts.”

While Wenyan could not verify the veracity of this firsthand, it was true that weak entities were abundant in early childhood to the point of being mundane. Living in the remote mountains, forty miles from the closest city, meant developing a strong stomach for sweeping tier-one entities out the door with the broom, and maintaining a cool head when they kicked up miniature dust storms directly below your infant sister’s cot.

He only had to fetch the magicians for assistance once. A woman cloaked all in white came down from the mountains one particularly long winter, mouth red as blood, but lips grey as stone. The train of her robes slithered within inches of his body before his feet caught up to his brain and he bolted for the temple, dropping his yoke in the snow. The next day he was bedridden, with a chill he was unable to shake.

When Rabbit appeared before him in his early teens, his first thought was of the white-clothed entity so many years ago: how she had taken someone’s newborn son and elderly mother that winter and vanished without a trace, leaving bloody footprints in her wake. Wenyan Jiang did not want for ambition, but had always aspired for something attainable: to assist a magician in Chengdu, perhaps, or to be a scribe for some of the magical books in the temple library that needed restoring. But he would have never willingly walked into a pactum with an entity unless something greater lay at stake.

Entities that were not gods were enemies: they were demons and disease, famine and pestilence— they were made to be drawn and quartered, exorcised and sealed. He regards the deal he struck with Rabbit to be a self-sacrificial one, in which he forfeits any life he might have led to keep a force of nature in order. There is resentment there-- but there is also a powerful responsibility, and something akin to family. In a foreign country, Rabbit is the only piece of home he has.

Miscellaneous:

• He was a calligraphy champion as a kid, and prides himself on having magnificently neat writing that looks like a font. When he sealed his contract with Rabbit, he took care to write his name in careful penmanship. The handwriting promptly turned into oracle bone script within the pactum mark, which left him rather bitter at the wasted effort. (“So ugly…”)

• His name translates as “Classical Chinese” in Chinese, (LOOK I DIDN’T KNOW OK--) but in a more poetic naming sense it’s meant to be… ‘literary speech’— something like that, anyway

• The bowl cut is because he’s a) lazy (easy to trim! No styling!! MAGNIFICENT) and b) heavy influence from the mod subculture, I’m assuming. Just wants to look like a Beatle. Follow your dreams wenyan

• He’s got a choppy Received Pronunciation and Mandarin hybrid accent and a voice that would be reverberatingly deep if it weren’t for how softly he tries to speak. He glosses his th’s into ds or zs, but still manages to sound strangely posh and bookish. I guess it almost falls close to how older Hong Kong English accents sound?... I’ll update this if I find a clip of what I mean

• This is how his voice sounds in Standard Mandarin. DISCLAIMER: I have no idea what the guy is saying but I’m 100% sure it’s some kind of voice work sample and I love him

• He dresses like an insecure 13-year-old who wants to blend into the wall

• Pisces… S-scorpio rising, Moon in Taurus, Mars in Capricorn, Venus in Libra... ANYWAY

• Blood type O+

• He’s a Classics geek, in both languages. His favourites are gods and demons fiction such as Water Margin and The Turn of the Screw, because he’s a weirdo. He’s born just in the right era to be a frothing redologist. Don’t ask him about Shakespeare or he’ll #GO #OFF!!! About how iambic pentameter is overrated or something. I feel like he’d like The Tempest though.

• He's a light sleeper, but goes so still that he looks like a dead body. have fun roommates