Characters!

[Brian]

I'll start this party, cats.  Check it!  This is Liron.  Sometimes he's called Leroy.  Sometimes it's Leon.  He answers to all three of those.

Physically, Liron's an attractive man of slightly above-average height, though he has a very slight build.  His hair is (in proper Rastafarian style) always in dreadlocks, though a variety of hats tend to distract from the ropy strands that hang nearly all the way down his back.  Liron tends to wear bright shirts, usually greens or blues.  He also wears a yellow/red striped scarf on a large green overcoat, so he can carry the colors of Etheopia's flag with him (as a Rasta should).  Beneath this he wears cargo pants, usually kahki, and a sturdy if unspectacular pair of boots.

He is rarely seen without either drumsticks, his guitar, or both.

[Corwin]

My apology for the lateness in posting this.


Raven's life started with a cross-country trip with his father, shortly after hs mother's death. His father never spoke much of his late wife, or of how she passed away, and Raven learned not to ask as time went by, since his father would always get a sad look on his face and become distant.

They traveled in a beat-up old van, sleeping in it to save money, though they stayed at the occasional motel from time to time. This went on for several years, until one day, as they were camping at one of the national parks, Raven saw something that changed his entire worldview. His father, facing a huge bear twice his size, didn't flinch or run away. Instead, he slipped into what Raven would later learn was a defensive martial arts stance, and waited for the large animal to attack.

The fight was brutal and deceptively short. In all the movies Raven had seen, the combat always took several minutes at the least, both opponents passing each other dramatically before turning around for more of the same. Here, there were no loud yells, no flashy ki techniques, nothing of what he expected to see -- his father dominated the bear with a series of kicks at its joints, and then turned its angry lunge into a throw, which allowed him a hit at the bear's throat while it was dazed.

They had to leave right after the fight, before any rangers could stumble upon the scene. That's what Raven thought, anyway. His father was awfully worried that someone might come and see what he has done. But Raven didn't care about that. All he wanted to know was how his old man had done what he had, and wouldn't stop pestering him about it.

It took some effort, but eventually Raven began his training in the martial arts. His father explained to him that a healthy mind needed a healthy body, and Raven took his words on faith. The next several years were dedicated to training his body to its limits and then past them, as the father and son duo continued their trek across the country.

When Raven was almost fifteen, just a few days shy of his birthday, his father's demeanor changed entirely. He became, for lack of a better word, paranoid. Raven would often see him jump at shadows, his eyes constantly darting to and fro. One night he work up and saw a light come from the bathroom of the motel room they were sharing at the time. A quick glance revealed that his father's bed had been empty, the covers untouched. As he approached the closed door quietly, Raven could hear faint mutterings and what could only have been praying from behind it. He went back to bed, and never mentioned it to his father.

Two weeks later, his father died. They called it a simple traffic accident, but as Raven looked down onto the street from the roof of their motel, he noticed several shady people in black suits and sunglasses at the edges of the crowd, merging with it so seemlessly that others apparently failed to pay them any attention. A sharp realization cut through his shock -- something here wasn't right. His father, who killed a bear with his bare hands, simply couldn't be defeated by a measly car.

Those thoughts only grew in strength once those same men he had seen came to his and his father's motel room afterwards, to take him to a foster home. They introduced themselves as government agents, but it felt off to him. Would a government bureaucracy really work so fast? Why would it single him out of all the cases they must be swamped with? And how had they found him so quickly, anyway, since neither his father or he had a fixed address? He hadn't seen them talk to any of the officers or the witnesses and busibodies in the crowd, heading straight for his room instead.

But he was only fifteen, and his father taught him to never go against the system outright. There was some story about a willow enduring while an oak snapped under fierce winds involved, too, but it sounded stupid and he wasn't interested in trees, so he didn't really listen to that one.

The year passed quickly. Despite his lack of format schooling, Raven did okay in his classes, getting solid Ds in all areas except for gym, where he was the best his school had ever seen. That won him a few rivals from some of the guys at various sports clubs, but he ignored them. He was the best at anything remotely involving athletics, and that was a fact, as far as he was concerned. He had no time to waste on losers.

Where it came to girls, though, he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. His father never covered that subject during their travels. He studied occasionally with some of them, doing homework together, but found himself second-guessing his every move whenever he was in mixed company. That, more than anything else, annoyed him during his year in foster care.

Then, on his sixteenth birthday, as Raven was out, celebrating with a couple of classmates at a local club, a middle-aged gentleman approached him. He only stayed long enough to wish Raven a happy birthday, mentioning that he was looking more and more like his father in passing, and disappearing before Raven could gather his thoughts and ask him anything.

That was the first time Raven crossed paths with Heron.

Raven quickly got pulled back into the celebration by his classmates, but his mind was on the strange encounter. There was... something... about that older man. Something Raven had only ever felt in the presence of his father before. That vague feeling, more than anything, got him to take the other man's claim of having known his father at face value.

Another year passed. Raven graduated to solid Cs, while keeping himself in excellent physical shape. As he was able to stay in the same area for far longer than he could ever remember himself doing in the past, he had time to check out the local gyms and even a couple of martial arts dojos run by far eastern types who claimed to be the genuine thing. His skill rose by leaps and bounds, an undeniable fact that troubles Raven nonetheless, for his father had claimed that staying at the same place would stagnate his growth. Instead, Raven found himself learning and accomplishing far more during his stay with the foster family than any comparable period of time he had traveled with his father. Despite that, he never got close with his adoptive parents. Despite their best efforts, he always remained formal with them, unwilling as much as unable to see anyone else as his larger-than-life father's replacement.

As seventeen rolled by, the suspicions he had had for the past two years firmed into a belief that there was some other reason they did not stay at a single place for longer than several weeks. A belief that they _could not_ stay any place for longer. The inevitable conculsion was that they could not do that because they had been on the run. His mind immediately supplied the suspects -- those men in black suits. Raven had spotted, on more than one past occasion, a black van outside the track team's field at school, just over the chainlink fence. The shady men who claimed to be with the government were still keepng tracks on him, most likely.

That was fine by Raven. It just meant he wouldn't need to go far when it was time to avenge his old man. He said as much when he met Heron next. The meeting should have been unexpected, but Raven could feel, when he woke up that morning, that something was different. The world was different. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but everything around him was... off.

Heron explained what had happened to him, and when Raven demanded proof, it was provided to him. Fantasy had been all the rage at school, be it Lord of the Rings -- the TV series reruns on the SciFi channel, the new Harry Potter and the Second Coming of Voldemort book, or the live-action movies from abroad now playing in the cinema. To have a magical artifat which would belong right at home there, only work _for real_ demonstrated to him made Raven take the older man seriously.

School life was comfortable, sure, but what Heron offered had that spark of something Raven craved all his life. There wasn't much of a question of whether he would come with the other man, ditching school qnd leaving his few casual acquaintances and the foster family behind.

Among the things Heron taught him was not to waste his energy on vengeance. The Technocrati weren't evil in the traditional sense, being more on a level that brought on pity. Vengeance, therefore, would not change a thing, as it could not bring his father back. It would, however, make Raven a large target for the Technocracy. Though his perception and understanding of the world around him had changed drastically under Heron's tutelage, his goals remained the same as always -- to become the world's best martial artist, and to make his father proud. Openly going out against the Technocracy would, then, in turn, mean that he would not be able to achieve his main goal -- that of becoming the best in the world.

After leaving Heron, Raven went to explore the new options now open before him. While Heron taught him the basics of using his gift, Raven never felt quite at home with either precise rituals or wands and staves. He had seen the older man achieve breath-taking results with a few muttered words and a wave of a staff, but Heron's method seemed very inefficient. Raven was certain that he could achieve the same results with enough hard training, cutting down on the boring arcane preparations.

With that in mind, Raven set out to find a teacher closer to his own frame of mind. Having no particular direction or an idea of where to start, he just tried to repeat what he had done with his father during his childhood, and go on a road trip. He didn't have much money with him, so he would take the odd job here and there. Whenever he would get to a new town, he would always try his hand as a bouncer, and would always get rejected by the club owners. No matter how strong or capable he was, he just didn't look intimidating (or old) enough to work in that capacity. However, one disco he tried had an opening as a stage hand.

Raven met several of the performers that frequented the club during the following week. None among them left quite the same impression on him as Mei-Li, however, a bouncy Chinese girl who was the lead singer of her rock band. It took him a few times to see her perform before it him -- Mei-Li was using magic as well when she sang on stage! Intrigued, he bought her a drink after a performance and tried to talk to her about it with all the subtlety he could master. Apparently, that wasn't much as she saw right through him, but instead of getting angry or -- as he feared might happen if he were found out -- calling those black-clad men, she was excited at the prospect of finding another person her age who she could really talk to.

He later found out that while she had plenty of teenagers and young adults around her, none of them were her true friends. Some were jealous of her success, others frightened by a stalker she seemed to have acquired after her very first performance; he kept on sending her gifts and love letters, and it took quite a bit of her to not just quit over it. And then, there were those who held the fact that she had Min-Li's favor against her.

Min-Li was Mei-Li's grandmother, and her only remaining family. On top of that, she also lead a small, underground cult, and was grooming the girl to be her heir, teaching her at leisure. Mei-Li introduced her to Raven after a few dates, and the old woman took an interest in him, taking him on as a student. Min-Li was sympathetic to Raven's desire to be the best martial artist in the world, and offered him several paths towards his goal. After considering his options, he chose to train to attain mastery of time, as that seemed like the ultimate art to him -- one you could not defend against without mastering it first.