Lim Ming Hua, Noah
With messy and overgrown hair that looks chestnut under a bright light but otherwise appears raven-black and can never be tamed with a comb, Ming Hua (or Noah, he has no preference) has a rather scruffy appearance. Thin and lanky, with lean muscles that aren’t prominent enough to intimidate anyone, really, Ming Hua is made up entirely of odd edges and curves, tapered fingers and chin and olive skin. He stands 1.77m (5’8”) and weighs 55kg (121lb), making for a slight and lightweight figure. He has black eyes that glitter when he smiles, and grow – somehow – darker when he glowers. He looks fine-boned, delicate even, but he can hold his own fair enough. He has a mouth that loves to curve into a smile – the smaller and more teasing, the better – and feet that are quick to side-step him out of any sticky situation.Age:
15
Gender:
Male
Birthday:
30 November
Age:
Mutant
Power: Speed
As is probably easy to guess, Ming Hua can accelerate incredibly fast. He has always liked to sprint, used to spend his days running away from a raised hand, but that has taken on new meaning now that he could probably run a hundred-meter dash under three seconds without losing breath. He used to perform magic tricks to entertain the younger kids in his primary school, and sleight of hand has reached new levels now that his agility has improved tremendously. Landing punches on him or focusing on him as a target in general is made more difficult when Ming Hua just can’t keep still.
Coates
Personality:
Ming Hua is deft when he moves, and his tongue is just as smart and quick. Often delivering raw truth in more palatable forms of raw humour, he prefers not to bar honesty from people. He tends to say lack of integrity is a form of disrespect – and he does believe that, to a degree – but he really just enjoys being frank. Mostly because he is his own harshest critic, and isn’t inclined to spare others from his barbed tongue. At the same time, this doesn’t define Ming Hua as a heartless boy who will crush souls and dreams and call it a game. He is a decent human being, with empathy and compassion, and he tries to treat others the way he would like to be treated.
He can be deceptive at times, and when the going gets tough he will not be afraid to do what it takes to survive. But on a good day, he’s largely a pacifist: meaning that, in a confrontation, he would rather negotiate a compromise rather than bulldoze his way over the opposite party, simply because he wouldn’t like to be steamrolled over himself. It makes the confrontation less fun, and short-lived. Ming Hua isn't innocent to the ills that plague the world; he's seen them, and experienced some. But when it comes to worldly matters, he could be considered relatively fresh-faced.
He has a persistence about him that has borne him far in his brief lifespan and, when coupled with a penchant for laughter and cheekiness, moulds the mischievous boy you see before you, with a heart stemmed in sobriety and a – very much hidden – capacity for seriousness.
Brief History:
Ming Hua was born in Southeast Asia, and spent the better part of his early childhood in Singapore. He spent five years with a gang of ragtag rapscallions older than him who – when not pickpocketing or slipping roti (bread) from bakeries – taught him how to have fun, even with a growling stomach or a parched throat. There was no end to play in their dingy little alley where they were kings and queens of rubbish and cockroaches, but the easy life soon came to an end when authorities rounded them up and displaced them into proper homes.
It took Ming Hua another three years to settle into comfortable nights under a roof and blankets, huddled behind brick walls from the mercy – or lack thereof – of the cold. It took a little more than that for him to properly warm up to his foster parents, though he has never called them by the endearments Mama and Papa. He remembers little from the subsequent years of home, education, and drudging normalcy, but when time is sluggish his mind often turns to memories of his first friends, and their daily escapades on the streets involving angry merchants they’d stolen from. His foster parents – and himself – agree he came in a feral child of sorts, only he thinks of the term wistfully whereas they seem glad to have scrubbed that persona away from him. But sometimes – when he drifts between sleep and wakefulness, when a hulk of a school-boy shoves him roughly out of the way – he can see the black wide eyes of a boy from another lifetime staring back at him with an unsaid question, hollowed from constant hunger but brimming with the twinkling joy of an unleashed stray.
There is a certain beauty in free savagery, and just as many creature comforts to be had in structure and order.
Ming Hua was then relocated to America to further his studies overseas – it had always been a dream of his foster parents – and he has been under the homestay programme with a Mrs Rochester and her sallow husband. He took up the second name Noah after his first day in school when the teachers who tried to introduce him to the class butchered his Chinese name horribly, and he figured Ming Hua in America could be more of a nickname to the people who could pronounce it.
When the disappearing occurred, and the Rochesters disappeared from their home, Noah relived the freedom for but a second, before the mass disorderly chaos of the kids who had remained turned him off it. He liked his share of destruction, to be sure, but the scale at which it was being taken to was downright ridiculous. Despite his distaste, Noah began to align with the Coates rather than the Townies. He would follow his own rules; they could go about breaking someone else’s. But he feels irked by the Townie-Coate system, seeing as he doesn’t feel cemented in either. Noah thinks of himself more as a straggler, a bird to perch on the fence who could be swayed to either side at a turn of the wind. He’s not big on swearing allegiance so early in the war, and could easily be persuaded to defect to another side without much compunction.
