Ha ha... Luckily, the Manual of Planes notes that some Ki-rin do live in the Upper Planes, anyway (such as the Seven Heavens)...
Drawing these guys took much more effort than I expected...
And now for some ki-rin (qilin)/t'uen-rin trivia:
Qilin is a compound word where qi = the males and lin = the females. Females are said to have no horns (so the t'uen-rin should probably be hornless, actually, but I followed the Monstrous Compendium entry
).
Some people have hypothesized that the qilin was a later word for the ancient xie (another single-horned animal, but this one could distinguish between good and evil (with its horn, I think)), which may have been an actual animal similar to Vietnam's saola (when its habitat included China as well). In either case, the Chinese characters for qilin include the radical for "deer" so it does appear to be some kind of deer or antelope (thus I have decided to make my ki-rin/t'uen-rin more deerlike than some depictions that are much more dragonlike).
Ki-rin (Qilin) in Chinese: 麒麟
T'uen-rin appears to be fake Chinese
There is no "t'uen" phoneme in Mandarin Chinese (although they tried, sticking the apostrophe there and all
) Perhaps we can change it to "T'ian-lin" (天麟) to say "heavenly rin" or something like that to legitimize it?
Finally, in old times some people once gave giraffes to the Chinese emperor, telling him that they were qilin; Japan has adopted this lie and calls giraffes qilin to this day