Billy Rocks

## **Appearance**

Black hair usually worn in a braid down his back. Dark brown eyes. Stands 5'10" tall, approx 158 pounds. Presents the closed-off, wary demeanor of a man who doesn't trust easily.

## **Talents**

Excellent with hand-to-hand fighting and knifework. Very good memory. Reads body language well. Speaks a few languages (English, Korean and Mandarin fluently, conversational Cantonese, some Japanese phrases). Decent hand at calligraphy.

## **Interests**

At the moment, survival. As he's able to relax more, his willingness to engage with the world will resurface.

## **History**

Billy was the eldest son of the head of a yangban family - the literati landed gentry of Korea up through the end of the 1800's. Billy was his father's first born, but the result of a liaison with a servant woman. He could never be counted as yangban himself, but as his father said, though he could never be the mouth of the family, he could be its eyes, ears, and strong, unseen hand. While his half-brothers all received an intense scholarly education with the aim that they would pass the exams allowing them to become yangban themselves, Billy (then Seok-ju, with no clan name due to his never being formally acknowledged as part of the family, leaving him essentially on the level of baekjeong, an untouchable) learned how to fight with knives, spears, and his whole body. He was given some education, particularly in the area of linguistics, to make him a more effective assassin and spy - he was instructed in Japanese, English, and Mandarin.

Most of the family's land was tended by farmers who did not own the land they worked, but paid the Yi family for the right to work it. As was common, quality of life for the lower classes was extremely poor: they were taxed heavily and were required to give up a large portion of their crops to a corrupt administration. Revolt and unrest among the peasants was commonplace. The leaders of these revolts were typically "pure" scholars who rejected the nepotism and corruption of the yangban and often lived in isolation and poverty themselves, or else simply common folk with nothing left to lose. One of Seok-ju's frequent tasks was to find such men among his father's tenant farmers and silence them before their words could cause disharmony and unrest. If these murders caused any conflict within the young man, he kept such ungrateful thoughts to himself.

Despite being practically an untouchable, his attachment to the family gave Billy a good life, and he gave them loyalty due to family. Then the Gabo reforms came and the yangban were abolished. Billy's father had too much pride to grovel before the new government; Billy's brothers were less prideful. They poisoned their father to curry favor and keep their lands and power. Billy was too much of a complication, and they planned to have him killed as well. The youngest daughter of the house warned him of what he'd already suspected; angry, conflicted, and alone in a rapidly changing world, he fled.

Wanting to get as far beyond his family's reach as possible, Billy managed to make his way to China, and from there, boarded a ship bound from Hong Kong for California. The North Pacific Railroad was importing immigrant Chinese workers to America by the thousands to construct their railroad. And, fortunately for him, the American hiring agents couldn't tell Koreans from Chinese; all they cared about was a strong back and the will to work.

During the long, cramped journey overseas, he fell in with the Lin brothers: Li-Tao, Yang-Shu, and Jing-Li. The oldest of the boys, Li-Tao, was barely eighteen, more than a decade younger than Billy. Jing-Li, the youngest, was only fourteen and had lied about his age in order to come along. Like most making the journey, they were peasant farmers hoping to support their families by sending money back. Of the boys, only Li-Tao was married, but they had two sisters at home and if they left, it also meant fewer mouths to feed.

Billy did not consider himself to be a superstitious man, but he'd also had three younger brothers and two sisters, and the meeting seemed more than mere chance. More pragmatically, while he was perfectly capable of defending himself, he had little practical experience in world; he could tell when a man was lying to him by the way his eyes moved and knew how to kill a man with a finger-length knife from across a room, but he had no idea how to haggle a fair price for of rice. It seemed right that he should be the protector of this family, and the boys, for their part, were happy enough to offer what worldly advice they had.

The worker camps were a grueling ordeal from the start, but Billy's education came in unexpectedly useful. Unlike most of the peasant workers, he had a very good grasp of English that only improved with practical use. He was able to translate easily between the foremen that oversaw the work crews and the workers themselves, making for a smoother and organized flow of labor. His linguistic skills weren't in demand enough to keep him off the work line, but it meant he could curry enough favor to keep the Lin brothers out of the most dangerous work details, even getting young Jing-Li assigned to assist the cooks, which was a very safe position and relatively well-paying.

Even with what perks they were able to scrape up, it was a hard life: the work conditions ranged from difficult to deadly, the workers were largely paid in scrip, and the tent cities little protection from the extremes of weather and no comforts. Still, the brothers made plans and insisted that Billy be part of them. They didn't mean to go back to China, but to eventually bring their mother and sisters over, open a store, and become respectable merchants. The running joke among them that Billy could be the one to guard the store, but only at night - he was too fearsome for the daylight and would frighten the customers, but when Li-Tao said that Billy should marry one of their sisters and become part of the family in full, he was quite serious. It was an unexpected and touching offer; Billy of course, agreed, the unconditional acceptance that came with the offer being more welcome than the idea of marriage itself.

Any plans Billy had for the future came to a halt when he began noticing changes in Jing-Li's behavior. The boy became withdrawn, snappish, and wouldn't change for bed or work unless he was alone. He refused to speak of it, and Billy finally had to corner him behind the supply wagons to get to the root of the problem: some of the foremen had been taking sexual advantage of him, threatening that they would send his brothers down to blast tunnels, work that always claimed lives, if he told. Billy comforted the tearful and humiliated boy as best he could, and assured him he would put a stop to it.

He met the three men as they were returning after spending their wages at the canvas saloon following the rail construction. The sight of their frequent translator flagging them down on the road was enough to convince them something was very wrong back at camp; it took little convincing to get them to dismount to speak with him. The knives that had been idle since Billy fled the peninsula saw work again as soon as the men all had boots on the road. He left all three with slit throats and severed privates, took what little they had in the way of supplies and money, and set out on the best of their horses. He'd done what he'd been trained to do since before he could walk: protect his family. And the only way to continue to do so was to get as far away as possible, before the bodies were discovered and questions were asked.

It was after going on the run that he shed his birth name, going instead by "Bill Yi". To most ears, it was simply "Billy", and that worked just as well. But an Oriental in coolie garb far from the railways stood out as a runaway at the least, and one close call with bounty hunters convinced him to steer clear of towns. He took odd jobs at more isolated farms, but even those became more risky as the season turned and trips into towns to stock up for the winter brought back tales of wanted posters.

At the point Billy stumbles into Wall, it's 1867, he's been on the run for two months, and hasn't had a full meal in more than a week.