Maimai / 鑫蕙芳 (Xin Huifang)

Profile

Personality

Cunning and mischievous, Maimai is very smart but very dishonest. You cannot believe everything (or anything) she says, because fooling others is her favourite past-time. She will always play dirty if she can, and does not see a problem in using illegal methods to achieve her goals. However, she dislikes suffering, so she will avoid causing any phyical harm (to herself or others). Since she grew up as a poor servant, she won't use trickery on the poor or downtrodden, choosing to apply her skills on the richer and more well-off members of society.

She is usually energetic and chipper, only losing her cool if witnessing cruelty towards the poor or the old. She enjoys challenges, especially of the mind. She can be a difficult person to travel with, due to her dishonesty, but if she truly comes to like you, she will protect you from other tricksters. But don't think you're ever safe from her...

Appearance

Maimai is a Verdan, which means she has pointy ears and green skin. She has thin, long brown hair, which she keeps in braids all of the time, except when sleeping. She's short and very skinny, due to a life lived in poverty.

After she left the farm, she adopted colourful clothing as her style, and wears buddhist bead bracelets: not because she is a believer, but because she thinks it will make her look more trustworthy.

She carries around a huge backpack where she keeps her wares, and is usually seen with a friendly smile on her face.

Story

Maimai, real name Xin Huifang (where Xin is the surname, Huifang her given name), was born to a poor couple of farmhands, who worked at a rich and cruel lord's estate. Her mother died very young, and so Maimai spent her whole childhood working at the farm, being looked after and raised by her father and other servants of the estate.

During this time, she learnt how to perform tasks such as sewing and mending clothes, but she also learnt sleight of hand from some less honest workers. Despite her father's disapproval, she was keen to learn trickery, as she thought it was amusing, and she enjoyed deceiving and outsmarting other people.

She had a happy childhood, and loved her kind father. However, she deeply resented her father's boss, the rich lord, because of how cruel he was to all the servants, including her father and herself.

One day, when she was 15 years old, the lord, now very old, became sick and the governess appointed Maimai to take care of him, since she didn't have any specific duties at the farm, and could spend her whole day by his bedside, heeding his every call. Even in his sickness, the lord was cruel and treated Maimai with utter disrespect.

Maimai pretended not to be affected by the old man's abuse, but secretly, she had started to plot her revenge.

Then, her opportunity came: she witnessed the lord dictating his will to his lawyer, and signing it. After the lawyer left, Maimai made an exact copy of the will, by hand, but changed the wording so that the entire estate would be left to her father.

A month went by, and finally the lord succumbed to his illness and died. The funeral had only his servants in attendance, and nobody cried.

Having left no descendants, the lord's estate was to be inherited by his lawyer... who was shocked to discover that this was not what was written on the will.

After much back and forth and verbal matches with the lawyer, Maimai's father finally inherited the estate and turned it into a commune together with the other farmers.

She lived happily with her father and the other farmers, but soon became bored of farm life and longed to leave and find bigger and better things. She adopted the name Maimai (to keep her real name hidden) and decided to become a travelling merchant, to fund her wanderlust, using some of the late lord's jewellery as her starting stock. However, she was not an honest saleswoman...

She honed her talent for trickery, even going so far as developing the legendary skill of the "Spectral Hand", which she often uses on unsuspecting clients. This way, she sells her wares to the clients, and then uses her ghost hand to steal them back, making a tidy profit.

Despite getting in trouble quite often, Maimai is not ready or willing to change her ways, and continues to roam the land, tricking every fool who dares to make business with her.

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