Those posting bounties for Seshat often describe a mysterious figure, around 6’7”, clad from head to toe in fancy-looking white powered armor outfitted with various strange weapons, looking down an assault rifle through a glowing blue visor, with a glowing ankh present on the left shoulder. She is often mistakenly described as a robot, though that would only be half-true.

Under that layer of armor lies… another layer of armor. Black and grey platemail layer together to create an imposing stature, complete with a glowing magic tower shield and spear. She has no helmet for this layer of armor, revealing a brown face with stern yet strangely beautiful features, her eyes and eyebrows marked by kohl, her right eye in particular being marked with the Wadjet symbol. Strange glowing green lines can be seen at the base of her neck that trail down underneath the collar of her armor.

And under that lies her true self. A featureless, purplish, vaguely humanoid and almost ethereal-looking body that would look quite strong… if it weren’t weathered and covered in cracks. Green magical energies leak out across her body from these imperfections, though the six-pointed emblem on her chest seems to be deliberately made. A protrusion on her right arm can be used to project a glowing green blade of magic, while winglike structures on her back project an ethereal green, fiery light.

Stern
Melancholy
Adaptable
Observant
Empathetic
Determined
Self-righteous

In ancient times, there was a legendary warrior who wandered the Mediterranean world, who triumphed over any who dared to challenge him. No one was sure whether this was due to his own skill or the enchanted sword he wielded, and this remained a mystery when he finally met his fate and the sword was shattered into forty-two pieces. They were eventually recovered by the court sorcerers of an Egyptian pharaoh, and each piece was used to create a warrior to serve him.

Seshat was one of these warriors; a creature formed from earth and magic. Though the specifics of her creation were lost with the Library of Alexandria, it was clear that Seshat and her brothers and sisters were an even greater force than the weapon they were made from. They fought to defend and expand the pharaoh’s reign, and did so excellently until his death. It was only a matter of time her brother Horus suggested that they take the pharaoh's place, and expand their domain even further. After all, they were almost godlike; far stronger than any feeble human could ever hope to be. Who better to stand above them and maintain Ma’at? Though most of Seshat’s brothers and sisters agreed with this plan, Seshat was vocal in her opposition. She was joined only by her sisters Mafdet and Isis, who shared her more level-headed approach.

Debate raged on until it was clear that they would tolerate mere words no longer. Horus challenged Seshat and her allies to stand against their siblings through battle.

And so she did. Through some mix of strategy, skill, and miraculous luck, the three had managed to triumph over thirteen times their number. It had not been without cost: Mafdet had lost her life, and Seshat’s core had been knocked from her body amidst the maelstrom of melee and magic, and had been lost in the flow of the Nile. With her own life fading as well, Isis concocted a plan to save her sister, giving Seshat her core before she succumbed to her wounds. In but a single night, the forty-two had been reduced to one.

Out of some mix of shame and sorrow, Seshat felt that she could not continue to serve Egypt any further. Seshat gathered the cores of her comrades and melded them with her own, with the exception of the one piece she had lost. She began to travel the world, searching for artifacts of immense power, similar to the one that had created her, and began to either destroy them or seal them away if the former was not an option, as well as opposing those who would threaten the world’s balance, especially if it involved said artifacts.

While a century meant nothing to Seshat, millennia of travel and battle began to leave their effect on her, perhaps an effect of the loss of her original core, perhaps an imperfection in her own creation or perhaps something else entirely. It did not matter to her: As her body grew frail and aged, she supplemented it with armor and weapons to protect it, for she would keep fighting no matter what.

Her exploits had continued to the present day, most importantly when she fought to stop the attack on Cairo, and was labeled as one of the terrorists despite her efforts. While she had little interest in how she was perceived, she still knew one thing for sure. The balance of Ma’at was being threatened, and she would make sure that it shall remain undisturbed.

Seshat was never formally trained under any formal fighting style. Instead, she fights using a variety of weapons and armor sets with skills that she has accumulated and refined through fighting and studying worldwide over thousands of years, with the odd magic spell thrown in here and there.

To offset her fragility, Seshat uses two layers of armor that she has collected over the years. Instead the armor simply dampening blows, it has been supplemented by her own sealing magic that negates the damage to Seshat herself entirely, transferring that stress into the armor plating itself, until it eventually melts into a series of hieroglyphs on Seshat’s body for a few hours until that magical stress is properly vented. On all layers of armor, she will use her body’s boosters for an extra bit of speed, though she can only really be considered “fast” once the armor is gone.

The third, outer layer is comprised of the weapons and armor plating of various robots, most prominently a high-tech assault rifle, which she uses in conjunction with a few other scavenged pieces of equipment to keep foes at bay at longer ranges.

The second layer of armor could be considered cutting edge and ahead of its time… About a thousand years ago when it was forged, give or take a century or two. Wielding this set of platemail alongside a mighty tower shield and a long spear, Seshat becomes more aggressive, blocking and shunting aside blows with her shield and thrusting deftly with her spear, augmented by the odd shield bash and a couple of magical spells.

Seshat’s final layer is her true form, and with it she fights with strength, speed, and raw magical power echoing the era of the height of her power. Gaining the ability to fly and teleport, Seshat fights both with beauty and desperation reminiscent of a cornered animal, using her arm-mounted laser blade of ki and magical energies. With no armor to protect her aged body, she is beyond fragile in this form.

Seshat can sense ki as well as magical energies, and the visor of her power suit can allow her to see heat signatures as long as it’s active.

■ Second Layer

■ Final Layer

Seshat’s moves are specialized enough to do well in certain situations, but the layers of armor they are tied to are far less durable than a Nomad who made these their focus would be, even if that durability adds up. If her current moveset has an advantage, then she’ll need to fight well to maintain it.

On the third layer, while she can fight defensively at longer ranges, her damage output is lacking. Her melee skills are also lacking while she’s holding her rifle, and she is very susceptible to throws. Her mobility is also abysmal, leaving it easy for faster foes to get into her vulnerable range.

On the second layer, she fares better offensively, but she has no way of fighting opponents at long ranges. Her slower style lends her best to poking away at mid range along with the occasional charge. Her shield bashes are powerful at very close ranges, but they’re rather sluggish.

On the final layer, Seshat is at her fastest and most powerful, with skills suited to fighting opponents up close and personal, but she is also at her weakest; an almost literal glass cannon not much more durable than a regular human. Under all that armor lies the most fragile nomad of all.

Seshat can progress through her layers of armor at her own pace, but she has no way of getting them back in the middle of battle. If she misjudges her opponent, she may have screwed herself out of an advantage.

Khan has mastered the art of the composed smirk, the conspiratorial half-smile, and the noncommittal bedroom eyes. As a movie star and pop-culture personality, it comes with the job description. The wild and vicious emotions that slog back and forth through his head, privately, like jellified thunderstorms, are held in check by The Look that Khan wears by default. His eyes are black, almond-shaped, heavily lidded, and lined by a generous amount of eyeliner, and his lips are dark, defined, and full of color. His long face—usually wavy and soft, occasionally rigid and sharp—is a blend of Vietnamese and European features, which helped considerably when he first entered acting in the white-obsessed world of Southeast Asian celebrity.

Though he is not altogether far from forty, his smile and his eyes have retained a certain ageless boyishness, though whether this is natural or the work of Hollywood surgeons is anyone’s guess. Sometimes, Khan will fail to wash off his eyeliner before crashing after a bad bender, and the next morning head out into the world with smudged, day-old darkness around his gaze. His skin is tawnyish, while his hair is bleached blond, usually worn in some form of undercut. Two bright diamonds sparkle on either earlobe.

Build-wise, Khan is roughly average, standing at 5’8” with a somewhat toned, somewhat sleek, artfully everymannish body, bought for him by celebrity bodybuilding consultants, courtesy of his agent. Nowadays, however, there is a bit of softness to his build, a bit of underfed leanness, though in the past he had private nutritionists to advise him on his dietary needs, and exercise advisers to advise him on exercise. Of course, Khan was never the best at sticking to schedules, and exercise and healthy living pair badly with raucous partying, and after driving off three separate teams of nutritionists with his winning personality, Khan’s agent gave up, and decided to let him run wild.

Khan enjoys the best of clothes, colorful, fashionable things preferably in shades of greenish blue and bluish green, shiny dress shirts and sleek velvety blazers—for most things in his life, he simply throws his money in the direction of his agent and scoops up whatever she deigns to throw back, but in the case of his clothes, everything is personally selected and purchased with great care and deliberation.

■ Callous
■ Emotional
■ Short-sighted
■ Vain
■ Self-destructive
■ Fatalistic
■ Lonely
■ Childish
■ Spiritual
■ Absolutely furious
■ In control(?)

Khan grew up in an apartment on the suburbish edges of Hanoi. Across the hall lived Vang Dùc Jong. She and Khan had been neighbors since elementary school, but their lives seemed to run parallel to each other, passing each other like ghosts what must have been every day, but never really intersecting, not until the tenth grade when, out of the blue, the two suddenly found themselves best friends.

Jong was of Hmong descent, and her mother, greatly attached to their family’s history, raised her daughter on a rich diet of religion and language, supplemented by regular love, support, and encouragement. Khan, on the other hand, came from a wealthy, sanitized background, with a British chainsmoking mother and a father who wanted very little to do with their family’s or their country’s past. The marriage started falling apart roughly before the first grade, and it wasn’t a violent kind of collapse, but more like a ship slowly sinking, with one end hoisted up out of the water, its weight throwing up great fat whirlpools and sucking down any swimmers unlucky enough to find themselves nearby. Khan, as a child, was largely ignored, while his parents buffeted each other back and forth and, occasionally, used him as a prop in their arguments. He raised himself alone, which he preferred, because when he wasn’t alone he was being raised to hate himself and his home and everything around him. All things considered, Khan could’ve turned out a lot worse.

His isolated upbringing might have contributed to how much he depended on Jong. As a friend, he was funny, and supportive, and honest, but he was also needy the way black holes and dying plants are needy, and he was never the kind of person to think before he spoke. Good looks and good jokes can make it easy to keep people around you, even when they should know better.

Khan was interested in acting, while Jong wanted to follow through on her lifelong ambitions in photography. She would move to China, she said, or California, where there were larger Hmong communities and more in-depth resources at the national libraries. Learning as much as she could about her history and culture and being able to share it was her mother's dream, and now hers. Photography, she often explained to Khan, was her paintbrush, her medium, her power. He listened, sometimes, and was polite enough to not act interested when he wasn’t, and impolite enough to tell her he wasn’t interested, Christ, do you ever talk about anything else?

But while photography didn’t hold much interest for Khan, he had a kind of tentative fascination with religion, thoughts on which Jong had in no small supply. She sometimes talked to him about Hmong mythology, and Khan listened like a fearful Protestant fresh off the Mayflower, listening to foreign thunderstorms shake the foreign trees and foreign soil surrounding him on all sides. The story of mankind’s creation in particular captured Khan's imagination, though not always in a pleasant way.

According to some Hmong clans, Nplooj Lwg, a great frog deity, was responsible for creating humanity, and upon whom humanity eventually turned, and killed. With his dying breathe, the great frog cursed all of mankind, splitting them off from the world of the divine and the spiritual. They would know sickness, and death, and the leaves would turn brown on trees. And then he died.

The invisible world of gods and faith and heavenly powers fascinated Khan, then and now, and as a child he would glimpse them occasionally on TV, in fun action movies, and in recordings of Nomad heroes mid-fight. They were a sign of something, and Khan didn’t know what that something was, but it was something different and greater than whatever life he had lived, and seemed certain to continue living. Acting, then, was a convenient way of getting close to that otherworld without putting himself in any real danger. He was interested in several big-name universities, while Jong looked more into smaller, liberal arts schools. However, after copious begging, and after throwing away one of Jong’s other acceptance letters before she could get home and check the mail, Khan eventually convinced her to come to the same school as him.

At school, Khan fell in with new friends, though most weren’t so much friends as they were drinking acquaintances, at best. He and Jong got into arguments. But they stayed friends, still, no dumb argument would change that.

Then, halfway through their first year, Khan struck gold. He had sent out acting applications to a dozen studios, and, to his surprise, was offered a role in a new comedy being filmed in Korea. After some hesitation (he tells himself, often mentally emphasizing the moral quandary of that moment), Khan accepted the offer. Jong was left to complete her degree alone.

In the years later, Khan would think about how many missed years he and Jong could’ve had together, all those times they must’ve silently passed in the apartment halls as children, the different life that might’ve grown if they’d just met earlier, if they’d met differently. He believes strongly in savoring the moment, and not wasting one’s time, though at the same time has a bad habit of never savoring the moment, driving off friends, and generally wasting his time.

But the move to Korea treated him well. Khan became a much beloved character on Wheelflowers, a silly television show about a the slice-of-life antics of a struggling boy band, and after two years on the show, h made his first incursion into Hollywood. Once again, Khan struck pure gold, this time in an Oscar-bait drama where he played a heroin-pusher who facilitates the downfall of his closest friend, and ultimately takes his own life. More roles opened up. Two more hits. A fuckton of money. One day, in some shadowy attic of his mind, he thought, California, didn’t I know someone who wanted to move to California? Shortly after his second big hit (an action movie), Day tried to look up Jong. He didn’t try very hard. But it was enough to provide some fake relief for his conscience, and to suddenly give some new life to old memories and fantasies about his childhood, his teens, and the life he lived and could’ve lived growing up. It is possibly just coincidence that, afterwards, his career choices took an enormous dip in quality.

There were no more successes in Hollywood for Khan, not after his early twenties. At least, not critical ones.
He was in one or two flops, guest starred on a handful of television shows, but mostly he retreated to his Los Angeles home, and he fell into a whirlpool. Parties, mostly, and sometimes those parties even involved people other than him. He felt unhappy, and more than that, realized that he had been feeling unhappy for a very long time. In the blur of jumping into his pool every other weekend from the house roof, out of his mind on cocaine, and masturbating to the infamous shower scene from season two of Wheelflowers, and thinking, always thinking, about the time he spent in high school with Jong, Khan came to a realization. Acting wasn’t enough. He had to go out there, off-stage, off-script. He had to tear shit up.

What if you became a nomad?

Khan tried working out, hiring several famous martial artists to train him. This, of course, was an unmitigated disaster, and either by having sex with, disrespecting, ignoring, or generally badmouthing just about everyone who crossed his path, sometimes all at once, as well as a complete lack of discipline, his training never went very far. Good old fashioned hard work would not do, apparently.

Instead, Khan put his considerable wealth into drugs, rituals, and invasive medical procedures, imbibing whatever piece of science and magic he could get his hands on. He quietly receded from Hollywood, building up a purchased nomad's body born from fine taste, excess wealth, and lack of restraint. Mystics would trap him in magical vortexes, drugs would be injected one after the other into his spine, surgeons would plant mysterious organs into his chest—it was a hectic, badly thought out, and altogether painful affair, to say the least. Khan was very drunk for most of it. But he kept going. Some part of him must’ve savored the pain, the feeling of knowing exactly what he needed, and getting it, and for once having what he needed and got be neither drugs or alcohol.

It was around then, sometime after his fifth augmentation, that he began having dreams.

The corpse of Nploog Lwg loomed over him, and Khan was deafened by the frog’s dying curse, which rang in his head like a bell, splitting his body in two.

Odin hung from the Tree of Creation, pinned to the living wood by a spear, crying out into a starry sky, and Khan cried with him, screaming for help, screaming.

He held up his hands and shouted for mercy as Ma’at lowered her scepter upon him, flatting the infinite chaos of the universe and imposing order upon all of creation, binding Khan’s body to the belly of the earth.

He watched Yeshua pray on the hilltop, hours from his execution, steeling his doubts and fears as Judas led a crowd over the distant hills, his intent as clear as day, and Khan wept, and could not stop weeping, until every drop of water in his body had leaked out from his eyes.

He saw thunderstorms, and stormcrows.

Eventually, Khan decided these nightmares were a sign of divine providence, that his new path had been approved by the powers that be. This is intermittently a source of wild confidence and frightening unease. When he felt he had enough augmentations, that is to say, he was told any more would kill him, Khan took to the roads. This was his moment. This was when he would make change, real change.

However, after a few months of attempted nomading, as with most other things in his life, Khan quietly gave up. With very little fanfare, he returned to his life as a celebrity, and rumors went wild over his recent, mysterious absence. With a kind of blank, uncomfortable resignation, Khan was cast by a Korean film studio for a supporting role in a well-received, mild box-office success, and he has, once again, drowned his thoughts in reckless indulgences and the glitz of the advertising tour. His most recent stop—Japan.

Khan has only rudimentary fighter’s training, and can't rely on skill to win a fight. His powers come not from ki or marital arts prowess, but from a hasty cornucopia of mind and body-altering drugs, rituals, and surgeries. Most of these are geared towards elevating a normal, low-ki human to full nomad fighting status, and allow him to stomach nomad-level attacks and return them in kind like any other fighter. Compared to most nomads, he has slightly below average strength, nonexistent skill or training, solid defenses, and what amounts to an extraordinarily high health bar. His true danger, however, is his debuff abilities, which can whittle away at ki reserves during a fight and cause temporary stat drops in opponents.

Khan’s powers are most useful in battles of attrition, as his techniques are good at punishing attacks and lessening damage, and grant him a respectable tanking build. However, Khan’s stormy temperament, always close to the surface, breaks out easily in fights, and he tends to resort to straightforward brutal assault even if it isn’t the wisest strategy.

However, at the same time, Khan has an ultimately empathic and emotional nature, and just as easily as he might resort to violent pummeling attacks, he is quick to jump back and give an enemy space if he thinks he might’ve gone too far, a rather dangerous tendency for a nomad to have.

Khan’s ability to injure ki is quite dangerous, and his augmented body boasts strong defensive capabilities (though without true ki protection he does get quite bloody easily). However, he is at his best against melee fighters, and is very weak to strong ranged attacks, as he has low speed and low mobility. His abilities also work best when dragging out a fight, so fighters who can apply constant aggressive pressure from the start can usually overpower him.

He is also slightly below average for a nomad in terms of raw power, and not to mention his lack of skill and training can put him at a disadvantage against highly trained fighters.

Khan can, at times, be a legitimately good actor. However, since his first three films, which were met with critical acclaim, he has mostly been cast in rather schlocky roles with rather schlocky directors, and has yet to score another true hit. General consensus is that he is a somewhat talented actor who got lucky, but isn’t much more of a celebrity coasting on hot air. That said, his latest film, Blue Medicine, is seen by some fans as a return to form.

A combination of experience and his augmentations means Khan has to take in a significant amount of alcohol or drugs before the effects can take in.