XIAN Name: Shampoo, formerly known as "Shampoo-R" RL: Blade and Jason Heavensrun E-mail: kumonryuu@hotmail.com / jeisanhr@aol.com AIM: Kiima / JeiSanHR ----- RANK & TRAITS Rank: 7 --- Attributes Strong Fast --- Skills Martial Arts Stealth Marksmanship ----- ATTITUDE Style: Wu Yi Binjian, The Way of The Single Strike Kill. More a state of mind and philosophy than a formal martial arts style, it exalts the efficiency of downing an opponent in one or two devastating blows. Practitioners have little patience for the give and take of "normal" super-martial-arts, but instead concentrate on finding the necessary opening to land the single focused strike that will either cripple their opponent or simply knock them senseless. --- Methods: Xian is trained in a wide variety of martial arts and fighting techniques. When on an important mission or otherwise forced to be serious, she will stick strictly to Wu Yi Binjian, attempting to dispose of all opponents as quickly as possible. When in a more relaxed situation, she's likely to have more fun, toying with weaker foes or testing the limits of more comparable adversaries. Very self-controlled, she will not generally inflict any more damage on her opponents than she feels is necessary. Xian is honourable, to a point. She will always honour the stakes or conditions of a battle she enters into, but she will not necessarily agree to any such stakes unless she a) feels she is getting good value for the risk, and b) expects to have a reasonable chance to win. If she feels she was cheated or forced into a bad bargain, she will still honour the letter of her agreement, but be much more interested in working around the spirit of it and/or taking revenge at the first opportunity. ----- SPECIALS Advantages: Standard Martial Arts Abilities. Xian has had cybernetic enhancements made to her natural body, chiefly in the form of reinforcement to the skeletal structure and an enhanced ability to heal. She is therefore tougher than she normally would be, and also regenerates from wounds at an extremely rapid rate (though she requires rest to do so; ie, it won't work in the middle of combat unless she can get away to recover). One notable other side effect of her cybernetics is that she is essentially immune to atemi (pressure point) attacks. --- Disadvantages: Xian is proud and competitive. Unless she feels there's a very good reason for her not to, she can very easily be cajoled or goaded into a fight with anyone she considers a worthy match. Xian is a loner and does not particularly work well with others in a fight, viewing them either as disposable pawns or annoying interferences. --- Techniques Chi Gun Xian's large black phallic gun, informally called "The Wrath Of Heaven", is no ordinary firearm. It is actually an experimental techno- chi device, built to use the wielder's inner power. Just about anybody can learn how to use it with instruction (though anyone below Rank 4 would probably have their arm broken by the kickback of firing it); trained ki sensitives could figure it out with enough experimentation. Essentially, the wielder feeds energy into the gun, and then pulls the trigger to fire the specially-designed ammo, unleashing something very much like a chi blast with a solid core. Normally, this procedure takes only a few seconds, unleashing a blast equivalent to a somewhat powerful one for that Rank. However, if they have time and opportunity, the user may "store" more energy in the gun, increasing the power of the eventual shot. The more energy the user wishes to store, the increasingly longer time and concentration needed to store it. Were Xian to take about two hours of concentrated effort and feed so much energy into the weapon as to almost kill herself, she could probably unleash a blast that would level a city or blow a mountain to cinders. Xi Fa Xiang Gao The technique used in Shampoo's first manga story, where the user washes the victim's hair with a specially formulated shampoo while touching certain pressure points. This causes certain memories to be suppressed in the victim, though they can be recovered with a counter technique (and a different formulated shampoo) or by considerable mental stress. Xian knows several varients on this technique; she can not only erase memories, but distort them, or plant suggestions of memories that never actually occured. However, since any of these techniques require her to be able to wash her opponent's hair uninterrupted for about a minute, they're not easily done to anyone who is conscious and resisting.