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[center][color=Yellow][h1]Yangchen [/h1] [/color] 
[IMG]http://safebooru.org//images/1721/09b17336d5329c872479310449cb5578ec802ac1.jpg?1801991[/IMG]
[color=Yellow][h2]Airbending Instructor[/h2][/color]
[color=Yellow][b]”Air is the element of freedom, a concept only possible through equality of force. That’s what I dream of: a world without Tyrants of any stripe.”[/b]
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[color=Yellow][u][b]Full Name[/b][/u][/color]
Yangchen


[color=Yellow][u][b]Nicknames[/b][/u][/color]
Yang 

[color=Yellow][u][b]Age[/b][/u][/color]
26

[color=Yellow][b][u]Gender[/u][/b][/color]
Female

[color=Yellow][u][b]Sexuality[/b][/u][/color]
Heterosexual

[color=Yellow][u][b]Abilities[/b][/u][/color]
The world is not a place for generalists, and Yang has tailored herself to fit a specialized niche. She has trained her entire life to be an airbending combatant, to excel in self-defense and the intricacies of bending conflict. She spent years improving her reflexes, increasing her maximum force exertion with her bending, sharpened her control over her element, beat routine after routine into her mind until the parries and ripostes of bending combat were second nature to her. She earned her Master’s robe fully, and excels in the physical, practical side of airbending rather than its spiritual manifestations.

In her later years, her fascinations with the physical world transformed her into something of a scholar of chemistry. Her contributions to the field of explosives are difficult to understate, and though she has long since been surpassed by those who have migrated to her nascent field of study, her knowledge and skill with the subject and its products is not insignificant. She tries to keep up to date with developments in the field, and has the steady hand and extraordinary care that comes with those who experiment with the deadly.

She prides herself on being both a good cook and seamstress, her paranoia manifesting in her desire to be as self-sufficient as possible. She has academic knowledge on a great many subjects to a slight degree, has a good head for mathematics, and learned to juggle and entertain after losing her purse on a trek from Ba Sing Se to the coast. She is a dab hand with the flute, after it was used as an instrument for her to improve her control with air.

[color=Yellow][u][b]Fighting Style[/b][/u][/color]
Being stationary is inviting death. Airbending is the quickest, the most nimble, and Yang glides around the battlefield as quickly as possible, never maintaining a constant vector if it can be helped. She earned her mastery of the element before disapproving teachers with her ability to close quickly and dominate within the guard of opponents, but with her discoveries in chemistry her doctrine changed. She prefers, when able, to fight with tools: tossed instruments, projectile weapons. To flit around the field and savor the range where her defensive abilities are most effective, and where her instruments may be used without danger to herself.


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[color=Yellow][u][b]Physical Appearance[/b][/u][/color]
Yang is of medium height, a slender build, blessed with an athletic body but one lacking in feminine assets. Her hands are well worn, her body flecked with the result of a premature detonation, scars and burns in small, well-spread quantities. Her long hair is her one concession to vanity, a river of light brown which she attends to with care and practice. Her demeanor is mischievous, her smirk almost as common as her great laugh, sonorous like the ringing of a bell. Her gait is purposeful, her stance proud and defiant. She holds people’s gaze without fail, her face and brash alto both expressive in their own ways. She furrows her brow and bites her tongue when concentrating, rubs her hands and taps her feet when nervous or unprepared. She blushes and stammers when flustered, the latter a holdover from her youth, when her nerves where much thinner and her opposition to authority so much more petulant and mundane. She dresses well, when she can, enjoying the feeling of confidence and self-possession that comes from looking well. She enjoys silk and lace, bifurcating her wardrobe into that which she wears for pleasure and that which she wears for purpose. The latter half is most frequently trousers of hardy leather, shirts of dense wool, a coat of mail she had tailored to fit her.
 

[color=Yellow][u][b]Equipment and Personal Belongings[/b][/u][/color]
Two revolving double-action revolvers and ammunition. Depending on her job, she may also carry several tubes filled with Toluene-based explosives. She is rarely without a long length of silken rope and a sharp paring knife, or some amount of money and her white lotus pai sho tile.

[color=Yellow][u][b]Goal[/b][/u][/color]
Yang fundamentally finds herself drawn to Airbending’s promise of freedom. She despises authority without consent, imbalances of power and threats of violence. To her, the very existence of benders condemns those without the ability to some loss of freedom. She has no illusions that the world would be better without benders, their gifts to civilization are too numerous to count, but she hopes to give non-benders something with which to level the playing field, to let them stand on more equal ground with benders, with the Avatar, and decide to not comply with orders they don’t want to follow.

[color=Yellow][u][b]Secret[/b][/u][/color]
Yang fears her own hypocrisy, though she is not self-aware enough to fully understand the potential problems her worldview presents. She is a bender who sought violent power so that non-benders could free themselves if ever oppressed by benders, but by incorporating the solutions she has developed into her bending she may have hamstrung her own goals through ingenuity solely for her own pride.

[color=Yellow][b][u]Habits[/u][/b][/color]
She fidgets, hums, and taps her feet when on edge or worried. She always takes ten seconds  before making a crucial decision when possible, even if the decision seems like the most clear and simple choice possible. She has a habit of looking over her shoulder, of peering around a room, her paranoia manifesting in all sorts of small ways around this.

[color=Yellow][u][b]Other[/b][/u][/color]
She has an extreme fondness for lion-dogs, and has always wanted to have one for a pet. She never has, due to her circumstances. She craves the secrets to Zaheer’s flight, and has followed in the path of Laghima, but has so far not achieved what she desires, though her ability to direct herself through the use of airbending has been improved significantly.

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[color=Yellow][u][b]Likes[/b][/u][/color]

 Explosions
Dancing
Her husband
The color orange 

[color=Yellow][u][b]Dislikes[/b][/u][/color]

Beansprouts
Inactivity
Being forced to do anything
Rooms with only one exit

[color=Yellow][b][u]Strengths[/u][/b][/color][LIST]
 
Careful and precise
Airbending combat
Chemistry expertise and scholastic learning
Excellent reaction times
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[color=Yellow][b][u]Weaknesses[/u][/b][/color]
 
Stubbornness
Pride
Irascibility
Anti-authoritarian axioms leading her to irrationality


[color=Yellow][b][u]Personality[/u][/b][/color]
Yang is self-assured, set in her ways. She’s spent her life analyzing why she does what she does, why she thinks what she thinks, and has found herself, if not unique, then at least unusual in this regard. She has a high opinion of herself, and a firm setting in her beliefs, her methodology. In preparation for being sent to train the avatar, she spent time learning to accommodate difference, be flexible in tutelage, but old habits die hard indeed. She’s vocal, not seeking the center of attention but often finding herself taking, it elegantly or not, with her talkative nature and natural oratory.  She is quick to laugh, fast to come to anger but slow to act on it. Despite her firebrand, maverick personality, she is always slow to action, careful in everything she does. Self control is the fundamental quality of both scientist and airbender, and with Yang wanting to be both she has cultivated the skill over the course of her life. She prides herself on keeping control of her actions and her outward disposition, and only in the most extreme circumstances does she involuntarily let herself off the steel leash she has constructed.
She loves excitement and action, to be doing things and participating rather than watching or speculating. She has little time for the fantastical or the esoteric, no patience for mysticism which does not have discernible application. She loves to spar, to run and travel, to see sights and build things. She is dedicated to her work, but unlike the mania of her youth her desire for activity now is able to be directed towards entertainment: sports, cards, dice, a hundred activities have been picked up from the White Lotus and enjoyed, with the notable exception of Pai Sho, in which she is remarkably bad.
She is quick to joke, though her wit is not the sharpest. She enjoys reading, learning, but only as means to application. Her mind is often full of great piles of hypotheses, so many of which will only be discarded to reveal the scant few which bear fruit. She is collected, careful, discrete; an excellent keeper of secrets. She is still, and has always been, particularly paranoid. In the whorls of her mind danger always seems close, or the steps necessary to prevent disaster cheap enough to make them worth doing despite their apparently wastefulness to her peers. Try as she might, she has been unable to remove this facet of her personality, and it has saved her from embarrassment or even physical harm more than a few times.

[color=Yellow][b][u]Brief History[/u][/b][/color]

Yang learned from a young age that the world is not a place for generalists. Being a generalist is not the way the world was designed, with the elements compartmentalized and handed out individually, nor the way society was made to function. Her parents, both citizens of Republic City who had climbed from the slums into comfortable middle class society had instilled this into her, and even before she realized she had a talent for airbending she was living by the maxim. At age five, sitting across a table from her father and puzzling over sheets of sums placed before her, a sneeze tore the shutters from a nearby window, and within the week she was preparing to leave, to become an airbender. She protested, but frequent visits were promised, and pressure was applied.  A few weeks after her sixth birthday, she left to train with the slowly-growing cadre of airbenders. It was a difficult adjustment, but she was a resilient child and well taken care of by both her masters, and her parents who did everything they could to make her exodus easier. 

She proved prodigious, both through natural skill and steadfast determination. Airbending became a release for problems in her life, and something she could take pride in as she faced the trials of growing up. It took her some years to find the correct master, with Aang’s influence decreasing the emphasis on combative airbending despite his status as a war hero with scores of Fire Nation casualties to his name. After three years of less-than-productive training and antagonistic relationships due to the kindling of her anti-authoritarian compulsion, she found Master Wan, a young man recently raised to the status of master and a resident of Republic City as well. Together, they made incredible progress: Yang raced to catch up with him in terms of airbending ability, though it would take her more than seven years to truly close the gap. They developed their own form of airbending, an amalgam of several different styles and tested rigorously with help of the pro-bending phenomenon and tailored to suit the frenetic, quick-paced style that Master and Student shared.

Wan also instilled into Yang his love of chemistry. He was always more interested in farming practices, in helping people grow more food or helping the machinery which would gather in crops, but after seeing a fireworks display on her eleventh birthday she found her own way to take the enthusiasm of the master she so adored and apply it properly. She experimented with the rough powder first, and after several mishaps developed her caution. She learned all she could as she worked with her master, and when she was 16 she developed the first ever sulphur-free explosive powder, extruded in cords. She named it after her master, and sent it to the great industrialists of Republic City for testing and development. Wan had the insight to try and use her products in airbending, and in her 22nd year she received the fruits of her labor, and the benefits of her collaboration with the great industrialists of Republic City: her insight to propel small metal projectiles from first smooth, then grooved tubes produced the first firearms, quickly advancing alongside the other great marvels of modern technology, and a Toluene-based explosive with a much more bombastic yield than any of her powdered propellants. She earned her master’s laurels at the age of 23, and found a husband the same year: a water tribesman and musician named Tak. They share a home in the Southern Water Tribe, but the nature of Yang’s work as an itinerant, and later as an operative of the Lotus, means they spend very little time together. They are still, of course, very happily married, though childless.

Her inventions, clearly seen by the observant as a threat to the standard order of things, were noticed by the White Lotus, and she was approached. Their philosophy was a good fit for her, the possibilities for advancement tantalizing with her acceptance as an airbending master capping her other paths of status, and at the age of 23 she was inducted. She worked for the Lotus, opposing tyranny and injustice. She relished the opportunity to put the skills she had cultivated for a purely academic fascination a decade previous into practical, useful effect. She faced the normal problems of a soldier, the disgust at what was necessary and the difficulty of conflict in the real world, but she found her footing and worked towards the goals of the Lotus as best she could. She clawed her way to recognition, if not rank, and after being wounded and taken from active covert duty by a series of broken ribs, she was propositioned to be the educator of the Avatar’s airbending. She accepted, supposing the heads of the Lotus saw things the way she did: that in the growing strife of the age the Avatar would need more than meditation and inner peace: they’d need the ability to make their mark on the world.

Recovered, pensive and anxious to not ruin her greatest task yet, Yang is eager to set to work training the Avatar, to meet her charge and change the youth’s ways to better let them make their way in a world sliding down hill towards fires of war.

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