Niu Li

Code-Name: Chǐrǔ (耻辱), meaning DisgraceEthnicity: ChineseSex: FemaleAge: 23Appearance: Hair: Chiru has a short coat of red-brown fur covering her body. Around her face, she has two curved horns that frame her ears, but her fur does not grow any particularly longer around her face

Eyes: Chiru has dark brown eyes

Skin: Chiru's red-brown fur is velvety soft to the touch. Only her palms and the soles of her feet are completely without fur.

Weight: 125 pounds

Height: 5'9"

Other: Chiru has the overall appearance of a goat-person, though she is mostly more person than goat. She has human hands and feet, a human facial structure--outside of the curved horns that frame her round ears. She also has a tufted goat's tail. She tends to prefer to wear little to no clothing, though she dons a simple loincloth and wrap around her chest when necessary. She has a nasal septum piercing.

Date Of Birth: June 6th, 1996

Place Of Birth: Hong Kong

Education: Whatever she scrounged up along the way

Powers: Physically, Chiru has uncanny balance. She can find a way to climb almost any surface, a perch on any ledge. She traverses tight ropes like their wide streets. On hands or feet, she can always find her center of balance.

Chiru possesses postcognition in the form of psychometry--the ability to touch an object and know its history. Her psychometry works on any non-living object, including the recently-deceased. She can touch an object and know its most recent owner's face, touch a key and know what door it goes to, touch a security panel and know the most recent code entered. It is not automatic, taking concentration and sustained direct contact.

Power Limitations: Chiru's psychometry works best when the object has been exposed to an emotionally-charged event, whether positive or negative, but more often negative. When an object is emotionally-charged, she is able to go straight to the event that caused that charged. If not, she can technically rewind from the current day back further and further into the object's past--which is time consuming.

When using her ability, Chiru becomes so absorbed in the object's past that she loses awareness of what's going on around her. The only way to jar her from her visions is to remove the object from her touch. For this reason, she usually doesn't activate her psychometry unless she is in a safe place or someone she trusts is watching her back

Her ability does not work on living creatures, such as humans and mutants, but she could feasibly use her ability on a person's clothes or accessories to glean their past. Wedding bands and sentimental trinkets are a godsend.

Hobbies and Interests: Chiru hungers after knowledge because she has been denied formal education. She's very interested in jewelry appraisal, able to recognize most stones, gems, and precious metals from extensive practice.

Background: Chiru's mother could walk through walls--an ability that lent itself to burglary in a society where being found out as a mutant would practically be death sentence. She never hesitated to tell her Chiru, her disgrace, that if the newborn hadn't been a mutant, she would have abandoned her at the nearest orphanage. But she couldn't just let her own blood be killed on principle.

Her mother's work was lucrative enough that she could afford for Chiru's tuition to a private elementary school. At school, she was Niu, and it was like being in a different world entirely, though she was still bullied for having a single working mother, even if no one knew what her mother's line of work was exactly.

Things changed suddenly for her when she hit puberty. Two lumps formed on her head, and in the matter of a week, they'd grown into horns. Her dark hair fell out, and her body grew her coat of velvet-soft red-brown fur. Her tailbone grew into a true tale. As the pain of her transformation wracked her body, she held tightly to her favorite stuffed animal and felt herself plunged into her own past--happy memories allowing her to escape the pain.

There would be no returning to school. No more normal life. If she wanted to go out in public, she had to be shrouded in layers of clothing. Her mother couldn't allow her offspring to live a useless life dependent on the whims of others, and so began to teach Chiru the art of burglary. Chiru could scale to heights that her mother couldn't reach, and her developing awareness of her ability to touch objects and know their history gave her a certain edge.

When the mother/daughter duo attempted to steal from the wrong home and were caught, Chiru could only watch as her mother was killed. She didn't have the strength to fight back as her mother's killer placed a collar around her neck and declared his decision to keep her as a novel little pet.

A pet needed to know tricks. A pet needn't speak or wear clothes when a pet had such a fine coat given to it by nature. A pet mustn't complain. A pet eats what it is given, when it is given food to eat.

But a woman--even a young woman--must listen, learn, and wait for her moment.

Her moment came when her master's wife was murdered. Grief, anguish, a thirst for vengeance--these things would surely temper her master's attitude in her favor. She explained that if she was given the knife that had been found in her body, and if her collar was removed, she would be able to see the killer. He didn't strike her for speaking, but promised her that if she was lying she would regret the deception.

She didn't lie, and the murderer was found. And her master began to turn to her, from time to time, to investigate unseen histories and name truths. Though she had no love for her master, her fear of him and her limitations upon courses of escape considering her appearance maintained her loyalty to him.

She proved her usefulness in terms of the skills her mother had taught her, and the applications of her powers in identifying moles and threats to the organizations. Her master's organization was strengthened as a result of her keen ability to discern the truth of the past. She tested the extent of her master's trust in her subtly, bringing his wrath down upon several who mistreated her, and shielding key individuals who she suspected would be capable of helping her escape.

Then her master tasked with a particularly difficult task: Find the face of Xiu, the infamous assassin. She couldn't get her hands on enough objects, trying to find anything that would show her the shrouded face. Xiu killed using her mutant ability and left no trace. Any time she used a fresh corpse to see into the past, she saw the woman draped wholly in shadow. She began to try using portraits hanging on walls, trinkets on shelves, anything in rooms and hallways to try to backtrack the place where Xiu had come from.

But her appearance limited her search. If she headed outside, it had to be in full concealment, in back alleys, at hours when no one would notice her horrible disfigurement and call the authorities on her for being such a hideous mutant freak. In public, she relied on the more common investigative skills--asking questions, listening to stories, checking them out for authenticity by using her power when she was safe.

The breakthrough came as a total coincidence. One of her master's generals was found dead at a party--with none of the markers of a Xiu assassination. Her master was certain that the one who had killed him had to be one of the guests. Since he'd been stabbed in the back, Chiru doubted that she would be able to see who had attacked him. Backstabbings were tricky business.

And she said she saw nothing because what she did see seemed inconclusive. The victim had turned and caught sight of his killer retreating, just the barest glimpse of her face and her weapon--a shadow blade. Chiru had been so certain that Xiu was like her that she never expected a young woman with a lovely face to be the one wielding the shadows. It could have been a coincidence--two shadow-manipulating killers--but the simplest solution was usually the correct one. She'd found Xiu.

Rather than reveal this and have it turn out to be false, she set forth to verify her findings. It was easier to find the young woman--with her western appearance and coppery hair--than a shadowy figure in the night. Chiru confronted her. They conversed. They fought. Chiru narrowly escaped with her life.

But she left the encounter with something more valuable than Xiu. She had clues as to who held Xiu's leash. In a way, the words that Xiu chose seemed purposeful--nothing so crystal clear that it would be a betrayal, but littered with enough implications that Chiru knew which direction to take her investigation.

After all, Xiu was the weapon of assassination, but she was no more free to choose than Chiru. What mattered was who held Xiu's leash. He was a careful man, but those clues were enough. Chiru came to her master with his name, knowing full well that this would spark a ground war that she didn't want to be part of.

While her master planned his plans, she leaned on those who owed her favors for not turning them in when she could have, and she got transport out of China.

She didn't care what she did or where she went, as long as from here forward she was in her own power. She chose to embrace her appearance rather than hide it, take a certain pride in her horns and her soft fur. She soon realized, though, that there was strength in numbers--especially as things grew worse across the United States. She began watching for allies, and she found them in the Sisterhood.

Personality: Chiru's hatred for humans--especially for humans who use mutants--is ferocious and deep. In general, she prefers to use cunning over direct violence. She is generally intense and untrusting toward strangers. To say that she could ever trust anyone would be an exaggeration, but she understands the logic of strength in numbers, and the necessity of reaching an accord. She works with people on her own terms.

Special Notes: Play-By: Liu Yifei