![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
OOC - About Cho Jeonguk
Sep. 9th, 2013 02:05 amCho Jeonguk is an original character from a high fantasy universe I'm creating for a series of games. She hails from the Kingdom of Gohreyo, a place in that universe much like the Korea of the early Joeson period right as things go Analogue-shaped. It seemed a good way to provide her ample motive to blow that soju stand and take up an adventuring lifestyle.
(In fact, had I not played Analogue, I probably wouldn't become fascinated with Korean history and come up with this character. So thanks, Christine Love!)
Jeonguk (Cho is her surname) was a Gisaeng, or courtesan - a slave of high rank and education trained from childhood in the arts of poetry, dance, music, embroidery and medicine (yes, medicine; if you can embroider a robe, you can stitch a wound shut). In this universe, it also came with training in bardic magic - illusion spinning and emotional manipulation, in which she proved a quick study.
Jeonguk served in the court of (her universe's) great king Goreyoh, singing her poems out loud and saving money for a rainy day. It came. Did it EVER come. Not five years after Goreyoh died peacefully in his bed, the Filialist crackdowns started.
Jeonguk was able to read the signs earlier than everyone - so to speak; one of the things that made her realize that things were going horribly wrong was the adaptation of Lunar River characters over the native Solar script King Goreyoh designed - and so took her money and fled for the great city of Omphalos, also called the Crossroads of The World. There, she sought her fortunes. Occasionally this meant work as a doxy, which she admits she never found unpleasant work; these days, it means hurling foxfire, mending wounds and literally leaving her enemies breathless as the backup healer of an adventuring party.
She had a more immediate reason for fleeing the Kingdom of Goreyoh: she is Gumiho. Being outed as a Gumiho, given the Filialist propaganda against them as seducers of men and literal eaters of hearts, would have meant her life.
Let us get this out of the way first: yes, gumiho - the foxfolk, also called kitsune in islands further east - must eat fresh heart and liver at least once a month or they will sicken and die, and they do hide among human settlements with the aid of cunning illusions. The Filialist movement of Goreyoh would have it that this must be a human heart, stolen from a man seduced in the throes of passion. This is not so, and even the original Filialists of the Lunar River would laugh at the thought; a trip to the butcher's shop for beef or pork offal would be enough. Indeed, the gumiho often hid among the lower classes because it was easier to obtain meat this way without suspicion. As for that crime of hiding among humans, Jeonguk herself says: "Of course we do. Look at what happens to those of us that do not."
As an illusionist, Jeonguk can - with effort - control light and shadow, and make them as material things. Of late, she has learned words of power to sear her foes with gouts of foxfire and to throttle them or pin them with their own shadows, for as long as her Breath holds out. She is often more subtle, and uses glamours to hide her foxlike features - feet, tails, ears, and teeth. She cannot control minds, but she is capable of altering and heightening the emotions of others - and of taking the Breath of people in a state of high emotion.
Jeonguk is polite, expressive, but possessed of an implacable will and deep passions. She is more than capable of holding and of concealing her grudges until the time is right for her to act on them. Jeonguk learned to kill while fleeing for her life, and considers it distasteful and messy but often necessary. She will often speak of her old age (she is the advanced age of thirty) and reminisce of her glory days in the court, before she took lovers for coin and when she wasn't laughed at or thought a fool for writing her exquisite poetry in Sunscript rather than characters. She is bitter, yes, very bitter for what the "poxied ghost-worshippers" have done to her fellow gisaeng - and her fellow gumiho - and, by the Twelve from the Four from the Two, to her beloved Kingdom of Gohreyo.
(In fact, had I not played Analogue, I probably wouldn't become fascinated with Korean history and come up with this character. So thanks, Christine Love!)
Jeonguk (Cho is her surname) was a Gisaeng, or courtesan - a slave of high rank and education trained from childhood in the arts of poetry, dance, music, embroidery and medicine (yes, medicine; if you can embroider a robe, you can stitch a wound shut). In this universe, it also came with training in bardic magic - illusion spinning and emotional manipulation, in which she proved a quick study.
Jeonguk served in the court of (her universe's) great king Goreyoh, singing her poems out loud and saving money for a rainy day. It came. Did it EVER come. Not five years after Goreyoh died peacefully in his bed, the Filialist crackdowns started.
Jeonguk was able to read the signs earlier than everyone - so to speak; one of the things that made her realize that things were going horribly wrong was the adaptation of Lunar River characters over the native Solar script King Goreyoh designed - and so took her money and fled for the great city of Omphalos, also called the Crossroads of The World. There, she sought her fortunes. Occasionally this meant work as a doxy, which she admits she never found unpleasant work; these days, it means hurling foxfire, mending wounds and literally leaving her enemies breathless as the backup healer of an adventuring party.
She had a more immediate reason for fleeing the Kingdom of Goreyoh: she is Gumiho. Being outed as a Gumiho, given the Filialist propaganda against them as seducers of men and literal eaters of hearts, would have meant her life.
Let us get this out of the way first: yes, gumiho - the foxfolk, also called kitsune in islands further east - must eat fresh heart and liver at least once a month or they will sicken and die, and they do hide among human settlements with the aid of cunning illusions. The Filialist movement of Goreyoh would have it that this must be a human heart, stolen from a man seduced in the throes of passion. This is not so, and even the original Filialists of the Lunar River would laugh at the thought; a trip to the butcher's shop for beef or pork offal would be enough. Indeed, the gumiho often hid among the lower classes because it was easier to obtain meat this way without suspicion. As for that crime of hiding among humans, Jeonguk herself says: "Of course we do. Look at what happens to those of us that do not."
As an illusionist, Jeonguk can - with effort - control light and shadow, and make them as material things. Of late, she has learned words of power to sear her foes with gouts of foxfire and to throttle them or pin them with their own shadows, for as long as her Breath holds out. She is often more subtle, and uses glamours to hide her foxlike features - feet, tails, ears, and teeth. She cannot control minds, but she is capable of altering and heightening the emotions of others - and of taking the Breath of people in a state of high emotion.
Jeonguk is polite, expressive, but possessed of an implacable will and deep passions. She is more than capable of holding and of concealing her grudges until the time is right for her to act on them. Jeonguk learned to kill while fleeing for her life, and considers it distasteful and messy but often necessary. She will often speak of her old age (she is the advanced age of thirty) and reminisce of her glory days in the court, before she took lovers for coin and when she wasn't laughed at or thought a fool for writing her exquisite poetry in Sunscript rather than characters. She is bitter, yes, very bitter for what the "poxied ghost-worshippers" have done to her fellow gisaeng - and her fellow gumiho - and, by the Twelve from the Four from the Two, to her beloved Kingdom of Gohreyo.
