Dusty Trails [Queue #1, Closed]

(WIP)

Full Name: Jeung Shen
Nickname/Alias: No nicknames he goes by, but people send plenty of slurs his way
Title: Mr.
Birthplace: Nanjing, China






Ethnicity/Complexion: East Asian, Chinese.
Preferred Hand: Left
Eye Color: Hazel
Hair Color: Black
Facial Hair: None
Grooming: Tries to keep his hair short, but otherwise none.
Build: Average for his height
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 145 lbs
Distinguishing Features: A few spots on his face.




Biological Sex: Male
Age: 26
Health: Reasonably healthy, minor nutritional issues
Senses: Sharp sight, hearing isn't great but it's not going.
Allergies: None he knows of.
Handicaps: Missing his right pinky finger.
Addictions: None.




Shen tends to keep to himself, though that isn't by his own personality but rather a learned tool to stay alive in the notoriously xenophobic land of America. At heart he's someone who believes strongly that people should work for what they have and values things like honesty, politeness, and general chivalry as far as common interactions go. He's got good self-control and tries very hard to avoid confrontations when possible, but internally he tends to be a bit quick to hold grudges, or at least judge people for their words. If someone particularly wrongs him and he sees a way to get back at them, he may go out of his way to do so, sometimes putting his own hide on the line. There are many strong opinions boiling away in his head that he keeps bottled up, and if given an ear he could probably talk someone's ear off. That said, he's not particularly well-educated and in fact can't read English besides a few specific words he's memorized through sheer trial and error, though he can speak it quite fluently. He isn't particularly interested in his home culture, though he still prefers to defend both his own and others' beliefs if they are called into question. He has become somewhat paranoid thanks to the west, not in the sense he thinks that people are out to get him, but he treats any confrontation as a potential threat to his life, as many people think they can shoot the foreigner and get away with it without issue (and are probably right). He's not really prejudiced in regards to race, though he tends to prefer spending time with other minorities as they are usually more hospitable, particularly Africans. In regards to women... he definitely has a conservative viewpoint, but he has slowly come to accept that the modern world doesn't allow for such liberties, and while he definitely isn't happy when a woman steps out of the traditional bounds, he has come to understand that it's sometimes needed.



Wardrobe: Brown pants, a simple cotton shirt, a dark brown leather vest. A few replacements for the first two. Wide-brimmed hat. Also has a leather duster for colder weather.
Mode of Dress: He tries to keep presentable, but considering he spends most of his time on the road and has little time to clean his clothes it tends to be fairly wrinkled.
Equipment: Colt 1851 Navy Revolver. Spencer 1860 Carbine (with shoulder strap). A belt with a pistol holster, room for several rounds of cartridge ammunition (intended for 50-50 Spencer), and a large pouch on it. Two replacement cylinders for the Colt. Ammunition for both weapons including wadding and a powder horn for the Colt. A hunting knife. Saddlebags (for his horse). Assorted food items (mostly dried things).
Funds: Fairly poor



Posture/Gait: While his body stands firmly erect and dignified with a strong gait, he tends to keep his head tilted down, mostly so that his hat covers his face and it isn't immediately obvious that he's Chinese.
Habits/mannerisms: Despite it not being his dominant hand, he prefers using his right hand whenever he can manage to do so and will usually keep his left hand by his side or on his lap (if he's sitting). As mentioned, he tends not to look up a lot and will intentionally avoid looking at whoever he's speaking unless he feels it absolutely necessary or when they actually identify him as "non-American." When sitting at a campfire he tends to write out Chinese characters and mutter the corresponding words in Mandarin; he's trying to make sure he remembers his mother tongue.



Lovers: None
Marital Status: Widowed/Single
Orientation: Heterosexual




Occupation: Hired gun (formerly a rail worker)
Work Ethic: Get the job done right the first time, and do it with excellence.
Rank: Self-employed
Income: Depends on the job.
Job Experience: Several years working at factories as a boy and young man, two years as a rail worker, a few brief stays at various stocking jobs, nine months as a hired gun.
Organizations/Affiliations/Factions/Gangs: None




Education: Has a basic home education which is far from good, but he can speak Mandarin fluently and read the Chinese written language. He has some memory of some of the core Chinese classics, such as the Analects and the Tao Te Ching. He can speak English fluently and with fairly little of his accent, but he can only read a few words which come up repeatedly, such as types of food--can also read numbers. He can do some math, but only in Chinese.
Special Education: How to work a textile mill. Rail work. Some very basic blast-mining techniques (though it's just how to set the charges without blowing himself up).
Intelligence: While poorly educated, Shen's got a good mind and is pretty fast-learning
Savvy: While not a criminal mastermind or a political genius, Shen has managed to avoid getting himself shot at or hung just for being a Chinaman in America, which should tell all you need to know.




Religion: Agnostic
Morality/Philosophy: Generally a hodgepodge of Chinese Buddhist and Confucian philosophy, though this is the roughest of approximations. He thinks that some of the old rules no longer apply and is willing to ignore them.
Crime Record: Theft: one Spencer 1860 carbine, about fifty dollars, and one horse.
Motivation: At this point, he's looking for a motivation beyond staying alive and sheer stubborn refusal to die out of spite towards the bigots of America.
Political outlook: "Why should I care about politics? I didn't have a hand in them back home and if I try to vote here I'll be signing a marriage certificate between my neck and a rope."




Current Residence: Vagrant
Friends: None
Enemies: San Francisco and San Jose Railroad Company
Followers/Companions: None
Idols: None
Mounts/Pets: Jiang
Skills/Talents/Training/Ability: Good shot with a rifle and has great reflexes. Pretty decent with a pistol. Can work certain factory equipment. Pretty good at moving about unseen. His riding ability is pretty run of the mill but getting better. Still needs practice at shooting on the move. Is quite good at spotting individuals in crowds.



Born on a farm on the outskirts of Nanjing in 1840, Jeung Shen had the grave misfortune of being born during the height of the Opium Wars. His family had been rice farmers for ages, but when the wars began his father was drafted into the navy where he served on a warship... unfortunately that meant going up against the modern steamships of the British Imperial Navy at the Battle of Chuenpee. Without a man of the house to provide, his mother struggled to keep the fields tended, wearing herself out day after day, barely managing to keep the field working. To make matters worse, not long after Chuenpee, Nanjing itself was assaulted and invaded by the British. In the end it was too much and the field ceased producing enough to even sustain the family, much less pay taxes. Moving into the recuperating city, Shen grew up in a slum, his mother a prostitute, a man whose honor had been thoroughly trampled on before he was even able to speak. Due to his mother's work, Shen was given a brother when he was just turning four, Yao, and while they may have been half-siblings, Shen tried to look after him as if he weren't a bastard. Before long he wound up trying to make things easier on his mother by working in the factories that had cropped up and, with this extra scrap of income, she was able to find a slightly lower-paying, but less insulting job.



Shen grew to be quite good in the factories, as did his brother once he was old enough, but their mother struggled with the situation. Her health failed the longer they went on, and while the brothers tried to make enough money to afford medicine (or at least a brief break), there was only so much they could do for her. They were only children after all. As the Taiping Rebellion approached Nanjing and a combination of stress and health problems piled up, it eventually came to be too much for her. As the victorious rebels of Tàipíng Tiānguó rose around the city and the people celebrated their new rulers, two boys laid their mother to rest. Shen had more or less become a man by this point, and so he decided to take them out into the countryside in an attempt to start a farm once again. Some land had been vacated and they wanted to reclaim their ancestral plot. Their wish was granted (more because nobody else was bothering with this plot of land than any benevolence), and soon they began attempting to figure out how to farm once more... it didn't go very well. Eventually they wound up leaving for a small fishing village upstream to attempt to be fishermen... this went a little better, but this was simply because they had a good mentor to guide them through everything rather than any skill on their part. Shen's life had barely begun here when he found himself dumbstruck by the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: Yeung Lan. Lan was another child displaced by the Opium Wars, though unlike Shen she had been fortunate in that her mother was able to find someone to remarry... and she was absolutely beautiful. Shen and Lan fell in love quickly and, after a whirlwind romance, were married. Unfortunately, their happiness was all too short-lived. Merely a year after getting together, Lan fell sick due to chemicals from the city drifting upstream, and then, thanks to her weariness, forgot to boil the water one evening and fell ill with dysentery. Shen could only watch and try in vain as the woman he loved crumbled before him. Yao, for his part, did what he could to try and help, as did some of the others in the village, but eventually Lan passed into the next world.



Before Shen's tears could even dry, word came to them in 1860 that the Tàipíng rebels had stalled at Shanghai and some of the wiser men in the village saw this as a sign that the Qing Empire would soon be coming to reclaim the land, and the unspoken sentiment which went with that read: "and they will kill everyone who does not fight with them." Between the changing tides, the loss of loved ones, and their mentor packing up to leave, the brothers saw this as the perfect time to leave. Initially they weren't certain where to go, but eventually Yao found an advertisement from America about railroad companies needing workers. America was said to be the land of opportunity, a place to get a new beginning... and the tickets there were rather cheap (though rising due to the demand). Deciding that would do, the Jeung brothers hopped on a boat and endured a seemingly endless journey to another continent, bidding their homeland farewell. On the trip a kindly old veteran of the Opium War whom had been in charge of interpreting for an British captain began teaching them English. While it took some practice and they never managed to read, the brothers were speaking at a reasonably decent level by the time they reached San Francisco. When they arrived, they rather quickly discovered that America wasn't exactly as the advertisements made it seem. The people may have been friendly to each other, but towards the Chinese immigrants they were downright bitter. It was everything they could do to find themselves a place to stay that wouldn't spit on them and call them 'chink' whatever that meant. They at least had a leg up on most of the immigrants: they were able to speak the language. Shen realized they needed to group together with as many as their countrymen as possible, and promptly discovered that many a Chinaman had also joined in with the rail companies. Deciding to go with one which was in the highest need of workers (being a new company), they joined on with the "San Francisco and San Jose Railroad Company." They were promptly put to work building a track from the company's name cities alongside many others of their kind, as well as a large group of blacks whom had escaped their plantations back east. The brothers had never met Africans before, but something they quickly found was that they were generally more friendly than the European Americans. That wasn't to say there still weren't some bigots amongst them, but they were definitely as a whole the nicer folks by comparison. Of course, the work was horrible. California was broiling hot and they were often worked ungodly hours in the blistering heat. America was also in the middle of a civil war, which made the locals rather irritable and inhospitable--though California wasn't exactly the frontlines of the situation.



Of course, life in America wasn't without dangers. The heat and lack of water were two of the more constant problems. During their work, it wasn't rare for the brothers to find someone had passed out or, in some cases, simply died of exhaustion on the track they had been working on. Sometimes they made friends with people only for them to die maybe a month later. There were occasional attacks by Native Americans, and while the 'savages' didn't actively target the Chinamen and Africans in the area (rather the Europeans were prime targets), they were often hit in the crossfire. Their foreman worked people viciously--a veteran of the Civil War who had been wounded and was working here because he "had the balls to be a slave driver." Shen wagered that something like 200 people were dead because of that bastard. And then there were the times when they were told to tunnel through a hillside: if you didn't find unexploded dynamite with your shovel and get smeared across the cave you were caught in a cave-in. In 1864, that was exactly what happened to Yao. He had been tasked with clearing out some of the rubble from a recent blast when one of his fellow workers struck a bit of TNT; the blast may or may not have killed him, but the ensuing cave-in did. Shen was heart-broken; he blamed himself for his brother's death, for bringing them to this forsaken land and putting them in this hopeless position... and he probably blamed himself a little for the loss of the women in his life too. And then, as Shen was in the midst of mourning, their bastard of a foreman came over and told him to get back to work, backhanding him when he opened his mouth to reply. Shen had had enough of it. This country had take his brother, his last hopes, his last dreams... and they were beating him down for it. That night, he slipped into the foreman's quarters, stole all the money he could, took the bastard's war rifle, his clothes, his food, and his horse, and rode for Arizona like the devil himself was nipping at his heels. Luckily for him, the foreman couldn't remember the names of his Chinese employees, and nobody was willing to tell him. Shen was a free man.



Of course, now he was also jobless. Fortunately, he now had some money to do some investing in his future. First thing he did was find a place where he could work as a stable hand so that he could stop running. It took a while to find someone willing to hire a 'chink,' but eventually he found a ranch in New Mexico which had just lost a few workers (though for what reason was unclear) and were desperate for hands. Of course, he was only kept on long enough for him to be replaced, but it was enough money for him to get a used Colt 1851--hardly the most glamorous firearm, but it was cheap and reliable. After that, he kept going from place to place, trying to find work wherever he could, always finding places which needed temporary hands. Of course, he knew this wouldn't work as a long-term solution, and he tried to figure out some way to set himself up before he ran into another fit of bad luck. Eventually he realized that hired guns (wagon guards and such) were reasonably wealthy occupations... at least wealthy enough to scrape by, and it was a job almost always in demand. After training enough to make sure he was good enough to do such a thing as a career, he began hiring his gun out. Of course, he didn't earn much compared to others like him, mostly due to the bigotry, but that was also part of what made him somewhat successful as far as keeping alive: he was cheap. He was reliable, he was capable enough, he didn't complain, and he kept his mouth shut. Those selling points have kept him in business for the last nine months. In that time he's had to kill on occasion, not as often as some would say but it happens. The first time shook him up a little, but he got over it just to keep himself going and has since settled his mind by remembering that it was the rules of this land, and he probably saved people whenever he killed one of those bandits. It hasn't been a glamorous life, but it's been enough to keep his belly full. His hope is to one day earn enough to settle down again, maybe even find a wife, as unlikely as that might be out here... but for now he's Jeung Shen, gun for hire.