saw some tatanka today (from a distance bc SAFETY for me and them)..... effervescent

this + @drdulosis spaghetti western wei wuxian pic has SURE got me thinking about wangxian in the wild wild west

consider: Wei Wuxian, outlaw-turned-blacksmith, guardian of his ragtag town

Lan Wangji. former sheriff. current bounty hunter. uncompromising in his morals. his profession allows him more freedom to follow them than the institution. they have a checkered past - and it all started when criminal kid Wei Ying careened into Lan Zhan’s border enclave.

Wei Wuxian wipes the sweat off his brow, straightens up. grins brighter than Lan Wangji’s white hat in the noon sun.

“Hey, Lan Zhan, A-Yuan. Did you ever hear the story of how Billy the Kid fought a vampire?”

They called him Ten Guns. Wen Ruohan was a quick draw and a quicker temper, and he flashed his star badge to blind anyone he came across. Legend had it that three blind men took him down, but legend wasn’t as true as the truth.

A machete-favoring man, Gusu’s horsemaster who was said to be able to find water anywhere, and a store clerk. They gathered forces from five states to get Ten Guns, whose injustices on behalf of the government could no longer be ignored. Their war came at a cost to Wei Wuxian.

hold on brb more bison

ok i’m back i didn’t get gored i just ventured out of data range for the day. time for more thots about a handwavy Western-genre

from someone who mentally exists in a Western film at all times

Teenage Wei Ying thinks the Gusu enclave is hilarious and fascinating. They wear all white! In lakeside oasis! Going a stones throw in any direction will have them feet in the dust!

He and JC and JYL are there after JFM pulled some strings with his old buddy LQR.

the Yunmeng gang is reckless and wild, everybody knows. That’s what the papers scream. There are three children in it. The papers are silent.

The storm clouds of war are gathering on the horizon, and Yunmeng’s gonna take advantage of that. do a few heists. Keep the kids away.

Gusu isn’t in the law, per se, nor is it outside of it. JGS, oil tycoon this side of the river with an army past (hence JFM connections), sent his only son there to 1. get him out of his hair, he was asking a lotta questions 2. grow relations. Hedge all your bets.

Well, you know the story. Under a great big moon, two kids meet and fight. Nothing so elegant as swords, and the liquor is what WWX had on him (Wei Ying back then), but the same result. Fate altered. Forever.

(no i don’t know anything about enclaves i was just like: hmmm one time i met a cult in RDR2 so i’m going to invent this now. so mote it be.)

When JFM visits Gusu, just passing through, and learns of the brawl WY got himself into with JGS’ kid, he pulls him out. Leaves his kin.

Hell, well, he needed a plant for a bank robbery, and WY is a good actor. Always has been. It’s dangerous for any plant - high stakes. WY is as good as any. Not like it’s his own kids.

After the heist goes sideways and the dynamite blows up and WY is yeah, pretty badly injured, he’s taken back to Gusu. He’s rowdy and terrible and good-fer-nothin’ but Lan Zhan clings to him. Who knows what they whisper together as they clamber over the big rock formations.

That was then. In between the then and now, Wei Ying: vanished for 3 mos. under the pretense of going rustling. changed his name to Wei Wuxian. robbed more than few trains, all by himself. spent some time in jail. was presumed dead for 13 years.

Lan Zhan: left Gusu. Grew his name as a sheriff - strict but true, no vices. Got sick and tired of being held on a leash by the gov. Became a bounty hunter. Found an abruptly empty camp + the child that had been left. His guitar, they say, can be heard for miles on a cold night.

Mingjue ran a gang of horse thieves called the Red Blades and Xichen belonged to Gusu but was a ranging man and A-Yao the store clerk/fence had kept the territory wild. Tensions began when Red Blade’s men started to go missing. A-Yao’s businesses were prospering. Encroaching.

if nobody stops me I will be thinking about cowboys for years please send help

As for Yunmeng? Wen Ruohan had come after them, hit ‘em hard during the war. Burned them good. Wanted posters in one town, broadsides about their crimes in another, until even the most free of towns didn’t want them for fear of retribution and trouble.

In the hardest years, there were three members of the gang. But Jiang Cheng stood firm, recruited wisely, and managed his funds and his reputation until he could crawl out of the cave and take anchor in the town he was born in. Lotus Pier. The Poisoned Hand, they had called him.

Something to be chopped off when it risked the rest of the body. Now he was Three Poisons: his tongue, his temper, and his traps.

It didn’t hurt he used actual poison, too. He did what he must to defend his town and his people.

jiang yanli lives in the city. her lithe fingers craft. they crafted food, explosions, carved spoons and knives and bowls for her people. now she decorates her house and guards her son and reads the paper and sends money in the mail to distant postmasters who wait for merry men.

jyl polishes guns but never is seen to shoot them. in the city she’s a world apart from her past and her people, but jin ling is safe. and she is removed from potentially being used as a bargaining tool. she can be wrapped in soft silks and dispatch information like an eagle.

jin ling doesn’t stay safe for long.

here’s the thing. when being wild is in your bones and your blood, gentry raising can’t keep you. your friend ouyang zizhen’s father brings him back bleached bones and big stories from his monthslong trips away. your uncle Jiang Wanyin always has dust in his hair and tanned skin.

When your mother reads the newspapers and only lets jin ling see her steel under the soft (never directed towards him) and zizhen tells you about riding off into the sunset and you meet two kids from Gusu who show you how to survive, well.

A gang of children appears that year.

here's the thing: jin ling starts off absolutely rubbish at surviving. oh sure, everyone who lives out West knows a thing or two about the sun and shelter, about the sand and sparks, but kiddo it's different when your mamma ain't around. luckily you got friends, tho they laugh.

his mother worries but he sends her letters (he's a good boy, and if he asks for advice and she responds with a mother's love big enough to swallow them all, that's fine). they get heatstroke and hunt and grin like horses. it's when they return to the city that the crimes start.

jingyi has sticky fingers. zizhen has innocent charm that can make anyone stop in their path and believe him. sizhui wheedles information like no one's business. jin ling causes distractions (and is, incidentally, a master of disguise).

they start off slow, with pickpocketing.

then they're practicing scaling walls and turning mirrors and windows to not get caught peering. so it's a little breaking and entering. so sometimes it's slipping a hood on someone and extorting them. sometimes they giggle to plan like they'll rob a bank, or a train.

it's not like they need the money. jin ling's rich. zizhen is well-off. sizhui and jingyi have the clan money that they don't really need to worry about, plus their 'gatherings' from, well, life that gives them a little extra. it's just fun. it's just nice to have a group.

they don't stick to just one town, of course, and through careful vetting and easy camaraderie the gang grows in number - slowly, but it grows.

things get a little rocky when they meet a blind girl, rugged and ragged and in the company of a Christian priest and a Daoist monk.

There's something a little funky about the three of them, but they're homesteading out in the places where the prairie's brown goes to green, tucked into the foothills. Homesteading in a ghost town.

But Zizhen says talent recognizes talent, and he's drawn to A-Qing somehow.

A-Qing says she can smell a liar.
Xue Yang says "Ave Maria, gratia plena," but never says the rest. (He says it like that's all there is to the sentence. Not that the kids know much about it.)
Xiao Xingchen laughs and pats them on the head, and doesn't use a cane like A-Qing.

The Children’s Crusade, as the papers call them, are eight in number when they arrive in the town of Yi.

They make camp in the former general store, because it’s spacious and there’s old treasures the original three passed over.

It’s the only building yet to be connected in a series of hallways between the rest of the places on main street, renovations for the blind two to make their way through buildings without stair caution. Or was it there before they came? Did it have something to do with emptiness?