Xing La Fangirl Questions

[DryaUnda]

• Does her difficulty hearing have anything to do with her Pressure Support advantage?
• What are the specifics of her genetic grafting?
• What do her teeth look like?
• What does her name mean?
• What does her voice sound like?
• What does the world look like for someone who can see into the infrared portion of the spectrum?
• What is her racial template?
• What skills would make use of the sense of smell?
• Why (backstory-wise) does she have Clueless and Low Empathy?
• Would any skills benefit from Infravision?

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

What does the world look like for someone who can see into the infrared portion of the spectrum?

http://www.flir.com/
Click any of the links under Imaging. In the upper left hand corner there will be a "black and white" image that is taken in the thermal infrared part of the spectrum. Click different links on the left hand menu to get different pictures. Alternately, you can go here
http://www.x20.org/thermal/FLIR.htm
and scroll down near the bottom. Note how warm things glow "white," although insulated areas (such as clothed parts of a warm person) will appear darker. Cracks and crevices of warm objects will be brighter. Note also that you can still make out a fair amount of detail, although not as much as with normal vision.

Luke

[thastygliax]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

• What is her racial template?

She hasn't been given one, and the passage about genetic grafts leads me to believe that any extrapolated template would have to be left pretty loosely defined. That bit of background is just in-game justification for her weirder traits, not a race.

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

• What does the world look like for someone who can see into the infrared portion of the spectrum?
• What skills would make use of the sense of smell?
• Would any skills benefit from Infravision?

Find a movie or TV show where someone uses IR goggles or an IR camera (Predator, last week's CSI, etc.). Varying temperatures are shown by "false color" imaging in either B&W or color: hotter objects are brighter or red/orange/yellow, cooler ones are darker or blue/purple/black.

Poisons and Observation are two skills with which Acute Smell/Taste can sometimes help. Infravision can also help with Observation, esp. when something is hidden from normal vision but is much hotter or colder than its surroundings: a cable or duct in a wall, a tank under a camouflage net, a soldier in arctic gear against snow, etc.

[DryaUnda]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Note how warm things glow "white," although insulated areas (such as clothed parts of a warm person) will appear darker. Cracks and crevices of warm objects will be brighter. Note also that you can still make out a fair amount of detail, although not as much as with normal vision.

Originally Posted by thastygliax

Varying temperatures are shown by "false color" imaging in either B&W or color: hotter objects are brighter or red/orange/yellow, cooler ones are darker or blue/purple/black.

Somehow I seriously doubt that Xing La's eyes will "translate subtile variations of heat into vivid and colorful images" (R. A. Salvatore, The Dark Elf Trilogy).

My personal guess is that warmer things will appear more red(ish) to her.

[lunar]

We don't know what Xing La means. I asked someone who knows Chinese and he says that ther are just way too many possibilities. We don't know the tone or the kanji so infinite worlds... infinite meanings.

[DryaUnda]

Originally Posted by lunar

We don't know what Xing La means. I asked someone who knows Chinese and he says that ther are just way too many possibilities.

Do you have any of the meanings? Perhaps I could figure it our based on that (in case her name is some sort of pun; c.v. Tsukino Usagi).

[Casey]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

Do you have any of the meanings? Perhaps I could figure it our based on that (in case her name is some sort of pun; c.v. Tsukino Usagi).

Note: I'm no expert or native speaker and picked this stuff up from playing in a Firefly type game online. Most of the info I can find is in Mandarin using the PinYin style of Romanization. To view the Chinese characters you'll need Chinese font support installed. No offence is meant to people who actually use and understand Chinese languages. The mandarintools and Rachel's pages below are good starting points for basics on Chinese names and writing/tones.

Some possibles:

Surname-

from http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/3919/x.html#X
Xing2 邢 No.195 Xing2 (place name)
Xing4 姓 xing4 surname/family name

195 indicates position within the traditional list of family surnames.http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/3919/hundred.html

Xing2 and xing4 could also be plugged into some of the dictionary sites listed further on in this post.

Personal Name

from http://www.monashwushu.com/dic/worddict.html

拉 [la1] /to pull/to play (string instruments)/to drag/to draw/
啦 [la1] /(onomat.)/(phonetic)/
喇 [la1] /(onomat.)/
剌 [la2] /to slash/
喇 [la3] /(phonetic)/
剌 [la4] /cruel/obstinate/
落 [la4] /leave behind/
辣 [la4] /hot (spicy)/pungent/
腊 [la4] /December/preserved (meat)/
蜡 [la4] /candle/wax/
腊 [la4] /preserved (meat)/
瘌 [la4] /scabies/scald-head/
蜡 [la4] /candle/wax/
啦 [la5] /(an auxiliary word performing the grammatical functions of mood)/fusion of le + a/

from http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html

la3 horn, bugle; lama; final particle
la4 peppery, pungent, hot; cruel
la4 wax; candle; waxy, glazed
la4 year end sacrifice; dried meat
la4 solder; tin

http://www.tigernt.com/cedict.shtml might also come in handy

General Chinese names sites:
http://www.jiawen.net/Chinesenames.html
http://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html

I'm having some difficulty finding la as a personal name but there are many Chinese personal names from what little I know. Li seems more common, as in

Li 麗 Beautiful
Li 力 Strong
(from the jiawen.net page above)

HTH.

[CharlesGriswold]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

• What does the world look like for someone who can see into the infrared portion of the spectrum?

They would be able to see a color that we can't. There's no way to explain how it would look to us, just as there's no way to explain the difference between red and green to someone who's colorblind.