Re: Timedrop23’s Characters

More fun with fire and martial artists as I bring you my interpretation of the Cowardly Lion (the reason for his cowardice is more evident in his back story than the picture), in the person of Shin Lao:
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w597/SeanWilkinson84/Timedrop23-Lao_zps43a2be68.png
The Lao are a tribe of men skilled in the martial arts. The first of each generation to reach their eighteenth birthdays are sent through a series of trials to determine which is most fit to earn the title of Shin Lao and receive the enormous power bestowed on all protectors of the Eastern realm of Oz.
But passing the trials does not automatically mean one is worthy of wielding the power of the Shin Lao. Many who receive the Shin Lao powers are overcome by the beast within, becoming savage lion-men doomed to roam the volcanic lands of the far East until the end of their days.
But one such savage was different. Like all who fell before him, Shin Lao passed the trials but was deemed an unworthy master of his inner beast and banished to the volcanic fields. Where most gave in to despair and feral nature almost immediately, Shin Lao survived a brutal month in the wastelands to the East, fighting off hordes of rabid lion-men and making an uneasy truce with the lion spirit inside him. Those who survived fights with him would come to fear and respect Shin Lao as their leader, but none would venture outside the volcanic region that had been their home for so long.
Shin Lao returned home to find his village laid to waste, the population wiped out except for one, a girl named Yong-Xi with a tall tale of winged golden monkeys and mechanical giants called she called the Twim.
Lao and Yong-Xi set out together in search of the Twims, the tormented rage of a beast clawing to take control of him all the while. Other villages they passed in their quest had suffered the same fate, a lone villager remaining to spread the horror of the Twim and their flying monkey entourage. One even said he had seen a man being chased into the Western Wood by flying monkeys, and could hear the metallic groan of a Twim reverberating through the forest at night.
So off they went again, setting a course for the Western Wood, Shin Lao dreading a fight with such mythical and mysterious opponents the entire way.
Mind you, Shin Lao had fought his way through a legion of feral lion-men and come out fairly unscathed, so it was not the prospect of being killed in battle that frightened him. It was that with every slaughtered village they passed, the rage inside him grew harder and harder to suppress, and that when the day for revenge finally came, the anger he felt would boil over and the man who had endured so much to become the Shin Lao of the East (and now, it seemed, the entire realm of Oz) would cease to exist.
His ability to tame the beast within would be put to the ultimate test when he and Yong-Xi would enter the forest to find a red-haired girl in a blue skirt and a man in a strange green suit of armor, for the two strangers seemed to have a Twim traveling with them.