Tane Akemi - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Tane Akemi

Nickname

Old Tane

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Fighter

Height

6'6"

Birthday

Frostmoon 9, 1279

Age

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Birthsign

The Janus Owlbear

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Tane Akemi, on a shore that has changed far less than everything else

Appearance

Tane is a towering, broad-shouldered man, six and a half feet tall, with the heavy, deep-chested build of someone who spent every day of his life training with a spear, hauling canoes up the sand, and swimming against the reef surf. His warm brown skin is covered from neck to waist and down both arms in dense black tattoos: sweeping bands, spearhead chevrons, and interlocking geometric blocks in the old Vaitafe style, the full ceremonial tattooing of the Pe'a that marked his coming of age. A single curving line of ink sweeps down from his brow across one cheek. His black hair is straight and very long, pulled back from his face and tied high so that it falls nearly to his waist. His dark eyes are level and steady, and at rest his face settles into a stern, unreadable calm that makes most people assume he is angry. He usually isn't. He still dresses as he did on the last evening he remembers: a dark, patterned wrap bound at the waist by a woven sash with a round greenstone clasp, carved greenstone earrings, and a cord of dark beads holding a large greenstone pendant against his chest.

Unique Characteristics

Everything Tane owns is twelve hundred years old, including Tane. His tattoos are the clearest proof of it. Rokoura's tattooists recognize the bones of his patterns but not the details; several of his motifs have not been inked by anyone in a thousand years, and at least one elder has asked, very politely, whether she might sit with him and copy them. The greenstone pendant was carved for his Pe'a by Sefo, the closest of his brothers in the Warrior Guardians, and it is the only thing he carries that anyone he loved ever touched. His Vaitafean is so old-fashioned that Rokoura's children giggle whenever he speaks it. His Common is worse.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Unshakably steady with a spear in his hands
Honest; never pretends to understand what he doesn't
Loyal to the bone, and quick to call someone brother
Takes every hard lesson without a word of complaint
Endlessly patient with children and new students

Challenging Traits

Grieves in silence and will not ask anyone for help
Deeply distrusts anything that moves without a hand
Old-fashioned manners that confuse or offend
Trains until he drops to keep from thinking
Still turns at dawn expecting to see old faces

I did not sleep. I did not dream. I blinked. The sun was setting, and then the sun was setting, and everyone I have ever known had been dead for twelve hundred years.

Your grip is too high, and you are leaning. [A pause.] Again. Everyone leans the first time. My brothers leaned. I leaned.

The boat is flying. [He watches it pass overhead.] No one else is troubled by this? [No one is.] Then I will not be troubled by it either. Tomorrow.

Likes

The sound of the surf, which has not changed at all
Drilling spear forms at dawn until his arms burn
Taro and fish cooked over coals, the old way
Children who ask him what the old world was like
Sparring partners who refuse to go easy on him

Dislikes

Machines that move with no hand to move them
Being told he was lucky to have had no family
Old chants sung with words he no longer knows
Being studied like a carving in a memorial hall
Quiet evenings, when there is time to count the dead

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Background & History

A Child of the Whole Village

Tane was born in Vaitafe in the year 79, twelve centuries before anyone now living. The village he knew stood on the same western coast it would occupy for the next twelve hundred years: thatched fale in circles around the malae, the great fale tele where the Council of Matai met, outrigger canoes drawn up on the sand, and the Sacred Grove at the edge of it all. When he was four, his parents were lost at sea in a storm that took three canoes, and in the Vaitafe way he was raised by the entire village. Every household fed him. Every elder corrected him. He grew up belonging to everyone and, as he would put it later, to no one in particular, until the Warrior Guardians took him in.

Warrior Guardian

Tane began training with the Warrior Guardians, Vaitafe's peacekeepers and defenders, at twelve, and within a few years it was obvious to everyone that the spear simply belonged to him. He had the reach, the patience, and a stillness in his guard that unsettled grown men. At sixteen he took the Pe'a, tattooed from neck to waist over many painful days while his brothers of the guardians sang him through it. By twenty he was unbeaten in the ritual combat the elders used to settle disputes, and by twenty-five he was training the younger guardians himself. The guardians were the only family he ever had, and he loved them without reservation. His closest brother, Sefo, carved the greenstone pendant he still wears.

The Blink

The last thing Tane remembers of his old life is completely ordinary. He was standing at the carved stone gateway of the Sacred Grove at sunset, finished with an evening watch and thinking about nothing more important than supper. He blinked. The sun was still setting, but over a different sea, and he was standing among carved memorial posts he had never seen before: Ngā Pou Mahara, the Pillars of Remembrance, in a place called Rokoura, in the year 1306. He had not slept, dreamed, aged, or felt time pass in any way. For him there was no gap at all; one moment ran straight into the next, with twelve hundred years somewhere in between. As best anyone in Rokoura can tell, he spent those centuries sealed in a mindless pocket of space, a dimensional bubble where nothing touched him and time did not move. Who made it, how it came to Rokoura, and why it opened now, no one knows. Least of all Tane.

Gone Twice Over

The people of Rokoura told him as gently as they could. The Vaitafe he knew is gone twice over. Its people lived out their lives and died more than a thousand years ago, and the village itself, which endured all that time, was destroyed in 1303, when eldritch horrors fell upon both Vaitafe and Ahorangi. Most of the Vaitafe left in the world now live here, in Rokoura. Tane had no wife and no children, and people keep telling him how fortunate that is. He knows they mean it kindly. It does not feel like fortune. Every friend he ever had, every elder who ever corrected him, and every one of his brothers of the guardians grew old and died without him. He does not know whether they searched for him. He does not know how any of them ended.

A Stranger Among His Own

Rokoura is Vaitafe, and it is not. Tane recognizes the taro, the canoes, the smell of the cooking fires, and the bones of the carvings. But its people speak his language strangely, full of words he has never heard, many of them Ahorangi. They are led by an Ariki rather than a Council of Matai. Their tattoos are beautiful and wrong. Their children laugh at the way he talks. Beyond Rokoura's shore lies a kingdom called Haven, with flying ships, doorways to distant cities, and machines that move without anyone moving them, and every Vaitafe instinct he has tells him that all of it is soulless and dangerous. He has decided, for now, to set that instinct aside. He has a great deal to learn, and he intends to learn it the way he learned the spear: one hard repetition at a time.

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Goals & Aspirations

Learning the World Again

Tane's first task is the least glamorous one: learning how the world works now. Coin, modern Common, who rules what, where Haven is, who the Chosen are, and why the boats fly. He asks questions constantly, bluntly, and without embarrassment, and he writes nothing down, because in his day nothing was written; he simply remembers. Anyone patient enough to teach him will find him an extremely good student.

A Spear and a Post

Tane woke with nothing but what he wore, and his spear was not among it. He wants a tao, a Vaitafe spear, made properly and in the old way, and then he wants what he had before: a post to stand and people to protect. He has already walked up to the Whare Toa Tapu once to watch the Stormforged Toa train, and he has not yet decided whether he is ready to ask. He suspects some of them lean.

What the Old Stories Remember

Vaitafe history was kept in chant, song, and story, and some of it survived the fall in Rokoura's elders. Tane wants to know what became of his brothers of the guardians: how they lived, how they died, and whether any of them had children whose lines still run through anyone alive. Most of all, he wants to know whether the old stories remember a young warrior who walked to the grove gate one evening and never came back, and if they do, what they say happened to him.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Warrior

ATTENTION!

Tane Akemi is an E-grade Vaitafe fighter and a true master of the spear, trained in a warrior tradition twelve hundred years old that no one alive has ever seen. He has been awake for barely a day. Do not mistake his confusion about the world for weakness: with a spear in his hands, he is one of the most dangerous people in Rokoura. He does not understand coin, machines, flying ships, or most of modern Common, and he will not pretend to. He is grieving everyone he has ever known, all at once, and he is handling it the way the warriors of his time were taught to: silently, and alone. Be patient with him.