Dr. Wei Lin
The Centennial Botanist
- Health
- 30
- Stamina
- 8
- Age
- 117looks 75
"We cannot survive by feeding on scrap iron and spite. True endurance requires roots."
Passive
At the end of each round in which no attack against you was successful, heal 2 HP.
Loadout
Who they are
Wei Lin is one hundred and seventeen. Telomere therapy and a century of automated medicine held his years back almost entirely; twenty-four years of exile, even in the clean air of the Vault, have finally begun to show, and he now looks like a vigorous man of about seventy-five. He stands 173 cm and 64 kg with a serene, erect posture and calm, fluid grace. His warm-toned ivory skin is thin and finely creased at the eyes, brow, and mouth, yet clear of blemishes, and his wise, observant dark-brown eyes look out from behind round horn-rimmed tortoiseshell reading glasses. His silver-white hair is gathered into a neat, disciplined scholar's ponytail at the nape of his neck, and he is clean-shaven. He has no scars and no tattoos. He wears his sealed, earth-toned technician's hazard tunic of faded sage green, bone-white at the collar and cuffs, beneath the heavy near-black waxed-canvas botanical work apron with leather tool pockets, bound, strapped and stitched in green. He fights with his hands wrapped in barbed handwraps, strips of canvas stitched through with twists of rusted barbed wire that tear whoever grabs him or strikes into his guard; at his hip rides an inertia-drive wakizashi, a short blade whose hollow spine holds a sliding tungsten slug that adds weight to the cut the longer the fight settles; and in his apron pocket he keeps trauma-pens, spring-loaded auto-injectors of clotting agent and adrenaline he assembled himself in the arboretum's laboratory. By the radiator walk he keeps a carbon-fibre sasumata, the old two-tined man-catcher, to hold an attacker at the length of its pole without wounding him.
He lives in the Sunken Hydro-Arboretum, cultivating blight-resistant winter tubers, vitamin-rich citrus, and clean medicinal herbs, and descends into the Surface Shanty Slums with remedies for the grey-rot. He despises Elias's water mafia and Lyra's crusade alike, and mentors Kira in secret. He detests violence and fights only to defend the Vault, because he believes humanity cannot survive on scavenged rust alone.
The dead, Arthur, Silas, Orson, and Mara, fight in none of these places. They survive only in the Doctrine, the journals, the archives, and the grief of the living.
The years before
Year0
The Hundredth Year
"I was ninety-three, with the body of a man of sixty. A century of medicine had made me, and I had made the Coalition's crops. The purge did not read my file. I walked out with the others, in my indoor clothes, into cold I had never felt."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year3
The Green Vault
"Five hundred feet under the quarry I found the old conservatory, its radiators still warm with geothermal steam. I cleared the beds, mended the misting valves and planted. Behind the Potting Bench the sequencer ran. Nobody above knew."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year19
The Girl on the Chalk Floor
"She worked her father's forms alone by lantern light, every angle computed for a heavier man. When she turned her knee in for the third time I stepped into the light. She had a blade out before my lantern touched the floor."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year24
The Clean Glass
"Tomas Varek followed my glass for a month, up the quarry adit and down into the Green Vault. I read the stimulant in his heart before he spoke. He wanted a name. He offered to cut my terraces one by one until I gave it. I wrapped my hands."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year24
The Doorstep
"Kira Vance came back to the slums with her forearm cut open. I closed it on a doorstep with one of my pens and went away without asking for anything. Questions leave tracks. So, I have since learned, does clean glass."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year24
The Grey-Rot Shelters
"I go down into the slums with what the Green Vault grows, and I leave the cure for the grey-rot in clean glass. One of the men I treated that winter was a militia runner. I did not ask whose man he was. I never ask."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year24
The Hammers
"A militia runner carried my vial to Lyra Vance, and she sent Jesse Holt with twelve men and four sledgehammers for the sequencer. I met them at the end of the Radiator Walk, read his death in one look, and offered him a season of treatment."
Dr. Wei Lin
Year24
The Winter Route
"Nadia Chen brings the winter route to my door. Rations come up from the Caldera on her sledges, and my vials go back down with her to the grey-rot shelters. The Coalition calls her a traitor. Without her this garden feeds nobody."
Dr. Wei Lin
Pack 4 · Dr. Wei Lin vs Tomas Varek
All five packs