Chou has a lot of sass and no chill.

Born the seventh daughter to a father who wanted nothing more than sons, he finally relented and decided "why the hell not." His final daughter, Chou, learned how to master a sword from a young age and spent most of her adolescence picking fights with these newly acquired skills. Those, of course, weren't the intended purposes, and after several years of getting herself into some serious scrapes he decided that enough was enough. Chou was shipped off to a professional boarding school to raise proper young ladies, where (to her surprise) she discovered her love for patterned, traditional clothing, painting her face in the traditional style of her country, and doing her hair up pretty. Of course, hitting people with swords remained a favorite pasttime of hers, and after a few years she was kicked from the boarding school for misbehavior. 

Not letting this stop her, she decided that she didn't feel up to returning home and facing her father's anger, so she set out to travel the world and maybe beat up some jerks with her sword along the way. She continues to send letters back to her father every month, telling him about all of the wonderful things she is learning at school, and she drops in at home around the holidays to visit. Her farce has been going on for a solid year and little old Chou has no plans to give it up any time soon - she's having too much fun travelling, exploring, and beating up bad guys.

Eventually in her travels she meets this asshole called Vigil (what kind of a stupid name is that?) and he, for whatever reason, decides that Chou might need some extra protection from friends of the thugs she's beaten up. Chou is highly offended by this notion - she can take care of herself, after all - but eats her words when, a week after Vigil starts following her around, he stops a man from slitting her throat in the night. Grumpily humbled and forced to accept that she's making a few enemies here and there, Chou agrees to let Vigil follow her around and maybe share her food and supplies and stuff. He's something of an enigma to her, a stranger from a land very unlike hers, but she eventually grows fond of his weird, quiet ways, and the two even manage to have some fun getting into fights and making names for themselves.

About

Vigil is selectively mute. It isn't that he physically cannot speak - it is just that he chooses not to. Some of the trauma of his war-torn childhood and the violent upheaval of his life caused him to be silent for many years, and even after he had recovered from the early horrors in his life, he found that he preferred to remain quiet and let others do the talking. It's easier to know what others really mean when you concentrate and listen. He prefers instead to communicate mostly through facial expressions and gestures, but will use his voice when absolutely necessary. It's grown a little strange from disuse, having taken on a scratchy and almost rough quality, but he isn't afraid or ashamed to speak up when the situation requires it.

Despite his outwardly typically laid-back personality, Vigil is a deeply trouble individual. He is still haunted by the events of his childhood and the horror of war that he experienced - soldiers slaughtering people he knew, watching villages burn as his family fled, and other unspeakable events. He wakes in the night, sometime, shaking and sweating and cold, and cannot drift off to sleep after that. Sometimes it occurs to him that speaking to someone about the things that haunt him may help, but he doesn't want to burden others with his troubles. His purpose in life is to help others, not to have them be concerned with him or his silly nightmares.

At his core is a very strong sense of justice. Vigil wants, above all else, to never see what happened in his homeland happen to others. He wants to see families remain together, to see people never injured or hurt, and to have those who would commit these terrible acts taken care of before they can carry out their deeds. He isn't afraid to get physical to uphold this belief, however. Despite how much he wants peace, he knows that he must sometimes bloody his own hands in order to keep others clean - and that's okay with him. Vigil reasons that so long as he is upholding peace by removing those who would seek to destroy it, things even out.

Vigil Despite the fact that Chou still hasn't managed to puzzle out Vigil after travelling with him for several months, nevertheless she likes him quite a bit. Sure, he's weird and a bit strange, and he doesn't like talking, but Chou talks enough for the both of them anyway. It isn't a bother. He communicates just fine with her with his face and his gestures, and Chou has been surprisingly intuitive to interpreting his messages since they first met. She gets the feeling that Vigil likes her because she doesn't pressure him to speak or do things he doesn't want to, and she has the niggling idea that he might have had to deal with that a lot in his past. Regardless, she considers him a good friend and is honestly very grateful that he saved her life, even if she's a bit embarrassed to admit she needed his help. He's a cool guy.