Post by saghani on May 25, 2008 18:42:46 GMT -5
Name: Fa Rong
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Group: Earth Kingdom Soldiers
Nation: Earth Kingdom
Bender?: Earthbender
Physical Appearance: Standing at 5’5”, Rong is not much taller than your average woman. However, she is clearly more athletic, with lightly muscled arms and legs, clearly visible and showing her physical strength. She possesses noticeable curves, but in her hips and glutes, they are firm with muscle. She is actually somewhat annoyed with her breasts, which though well proportioned and nothing larger than average, are still at the point where she has to tightly wrap them to keep them from annoying her during athletic activity. In general, her body is quite smooth and streamlined, fit for athletic activity, but not bulky in any way. Her skin is fairly tan, possessing a light touch of cinnamon color from all the sun she’s received. Her feet and hands, similarly are calloused and somewhat dirty from all her training and fighting, with short nails and the occasional fading wound from fire or blade.
She has an oval shaped face with smooth, softer features. Her eyebrows are thin and smoothly arched, and would be considered nice for a lady save that the right one has a scar towards the end of it that creates a thin slit where hair doesn’t grow. The scar comes from her active physical activity as a youth, where her smaller size in comparison to the boys sometimes worked against her. A second scar can be found running down the back of her left calf muscle. Her jade colored eyes are a bit large, giving them a warm, friendly appearance.
Rong’s hair is a somewhat uncommon color, carrying a hint of red that makes it a rusty brown, and naturally straight with a smooth texture. However, as the Earth Kingdom military doesn’t provide much in the way of hair care, it has started to become a little coarse and loose some of its sheen. While she used to keep it short, it hasn’t been cut in a while, and if let hang, it would reach down to the bottom of her shoulder-blades. Instead, she keeps it in a long braid (Chinese style) which she wraps in a bun on the back of her head, secured with long hairpins. In the front, she parts her bangs off to the right side, which, if unattended, would let most of her bangs hang down in front of the left side of her face. However, she instead pins the end of the bangs behind her left ear, creating a kind of curve of hair that hangs down in front of her forehead, with the lowest point just above her left eyebrow.
Clothing/Armor: Most of the time, Rong is in her Earth Kingdom foot soldier uniform The only difference is in the signature conical helmet made of hardened leather. Like all the others, it is sea green on the top, with a short golden spike on the top, a band of hunter green trimming the bottom, and a pear colored diamond emblem in the front, trimmed again by hunter green. However, instead of the normal neck guards, she simply had a hunter green cloth strap that runs under her chin and secures the helmet in place. From there on, her uniform is standard issue. On her torso, the primary garment is a cloth, pear colored tunic with yellow-green hemming. The tunic splits at the waist, and hangs down until just above the knee over each leg. Over each shoulder is a thick, sea green pad hemmed with hunter green, made from a thick hide to add a little extra protection for the shoulders. Length wise, they only extend to just above her elbows, but they are quite wide, and hang down a fair distance in front of and behind each shoulder. As they are separate from the tunic, they are held together via two hunter green leather straps that hang just below the neck in the back and the front.
On her forearms are two hardened leather arm guards, camouflage green in color, save for an extra strip of metal added to the front that is simply grey. On her waist is a forest green cloth belt, with a metal clasp in the shape of the Earth Kingdom emblem. The belt holds in place two leather pads that protect her sides, vertically going up to the bottom of her ribcage and down to cover her hips. They are olive drab in color, with olive hemming. On her legs, she wears camouflage green cloth pants that tuck into a pair of shin guards. The guards consist of sea green cloth all the way around the leg with army green hardened leather covering the shin. As an earthbender, she wears no footwear. She also has simple white cloth wraps for her more feminine parts.
She keeps a silk, spring green qipao dress with her for more formal occasions. It is sleeveless, with thin golden hemming around the edges and the mandarin color. A single garment, it fits tightly around her torso and extends down to her ankles. It is slit up the side of her left leg, from the bottom to almost all the way up her thigh. A pattern of small panda lilies can be seen on the qipao, carefully embedded with silk of just a lighter shade of green than the rest of the dress. She also has a matching pair of traditional (Chinese) spring green silk shoes, which are essentially like silk slippers.
Weapons: Though some earthbenders like to incorporate weapons, Rong does not care for that sort of thing. Though her earthbending shows a lot of potential in terms of her raw power, determination and athleticism, it is decidedly unrefined, and even bordering on being totally wild. Nicknamed “Berserker Fa” during earthbending lessons as a youth, the name holds true to day. Her style is to hit hard and fast in a ferocious, sometimes unpredictable manner and never let up. However, though this has certainly improved her stamina, she can burn herself out, particularly in long battles. If she burns out at the wrong time, she can find herself in serious predicaments.
Personality: Rong is a young woman of great willpower, possessing a deal of inner strength. Though it can lead her to be rash, stubborn, and headstrong, it has given her the confidence and determination she’s needed to succeed in her chosen way of life. Very much a tomboy, she has a blunt, somewhat colloquial manner of speaking (though, in contrast, her voice is still quite feminine, if a tad deeper). She is very passionate in her opinions, too, possessing a strong sense of justice and a great deal of empathy. Indeed, it is not her anger that drives her in battle, but these passions. This can lead her to do reckless things in the heat of battle for the sake of these ideals, as she hates leaving comrades behind or making tactical sacrifices.
The result is that Rong is quite outgoing and friendly. She doesn’t like seeing people upset or down, and will go out of her way to cheer them up. She seems to have the ability to get people to open up, and is good at listening about other people’s problems. Some of her superiors have expressed the opinion that this shows her natural charisma, and combined with her inherent strength and willpower, she may show the early signs of a good leader. However, she has no grasp of strategy…at all. In fact, while she certainly isn’t stupid, she’s probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And though friendly, she’s not terribly funny, so she doesn’t crack many jokes. She is, however, fond of giving people nicknames.
However, though she does a lot of listening on other people’s troubles, she doesn’t do a lot of talking about her own problems. She gives the outward appearance of a very strong, confident individual, but she has her doubts. Namely, she is still unsure of her identity and her place in the world. Her whole life, she’s found herself more at home with boys than girls, to the point of being uncomfortable around the latter. Some of the ridicule this has earned her truly wounds her. Not only that, but she feels quite a bit of pressure in being one of the few women in the Earth Kingdom army, and sometimes it can get to her. Additionally, she has a dislike of physical contact derived from an incident when she first joined the army. She is slowly getting over it, but she still doesn’t like to be touched.
Background: The Fa family was a large, well to do family living in a small town in the southern Earth Kingdom when Rong was born, the fourth and last child in her family, coming after three brothers: Ren, Suo and Dai. Her father, Huo, was the liason between Omashu and her home village, and thus was frequently away. This left her mother, Ji, to see to the economic affairs of the household, something she was incredibly proficient in. In fact, it was her was largely responsible for the family’s wealth in the first place. However, this essentially meant that she was raised by her brothers. Not knowing how to raise a “proper lady”, the boys simply treated her like another brother.
Though her tutors taught her manners and tried to mold her into a proper lady, Rong never took to it. She preferred romping around with her brothers, particularly Dai, who was merely a year her senior. The four became a very tightly knit group, and tended to do everything together. Often, the boys whom they played with expressed dissatisfaction with allowing a girl to join in their games, but her three brothers were good at paving the way for her, not to mention that she tended to have the habit of never listening when she was told to leave. It also helped that Rong proved to be athletic, often stunning the boys in town by proving superior to them. So, her early years were spent almost entirely around boys, and when she was forced to be around girls, she felt antsy and uncomfortable. They seemed foreign and odd to her. She couldn’t understand them or the activities they seemed to enjoy. Occasionally, she was ridiculed for this, and while outwardly she seemed to take it well, inside, it hurt.
To top things off, she turned out to be an earthbender, and a damned talented one, too. Her eldest brother Ren, also an earthbender, started to teach her the basics at a young age, but found that she got the hang of them much quicker than he anticipated. Unfortunately, Rong’s parents caught wind of her behavior, and decided to try and crack down on her to try and get her to focus on her studies, which she was slacking off on. It was not out of cruelty or a need for gender conformity that they did this, but simple misunderstanding. They thought that Rong was simply being dragged along by her brothers, when in reality, she loved spending time with them, and loved earthbending, martial arts, and athletic feats far more than studying, tea cerimonies, or other such boring behavior.
Her brothers, having essentially raised her, knew more about Rong than her parents did. So, Rong’s brothers devised a plan: Ren told his parents that Dai had developed a talent for earthbending to acquire the money necessary to get Rong training from a proper master, while Suo, the group braniac would “help” Rong with her studies so she could have the time to properly practice. For several years, the scheme went off without a hitch. Under the training of the local master, Master Ma Chang, Rong’s earthbending blossomed, and she showed remarkable progress. However, because the others under Ma Chang had been training much longer, sometimes her technique suffered. In making up for this with raw athleticism and tenacity, it was here where Rong earned the nickname “Berserker Fa”.
It was at this time that she found out about the war with the Fire Nation, mostly from other students, many of whom had fathers or friends in the army. Being the rash, empathetic young woman that she was, Rong quickly came to the conclusion that not only should the war end as soon as possible, but she needed to do something to help stop it herself. Ren became slightly wary of this attitude, but he decided it could be dealt with when the time came.
Eventually, however, the scheme was found out when Dai was put on the spot to show a guest his earthbending, which he naturally failed to do. Now fifteen, Rong was forced to practice only on her own or with Ren, which significantly slowed down her progress. Her parents simply couldn’t understand why she would want to earthbend, deciding it was merely a product of her acting out as a rebellious teen.
For a year, this continued. Rong was miserable, but for some reason she complied. Her brothers were stunned that their normally strong willed, stubborn sister was going along with it so easily. Or rather, they were until her sixteenth birthday, where she announced that she would be leaving to join the Earth Kingdom military. It seemed that she had simply been waiting until she was old enough to sign up for the army, having never actually given up on her ideals at all. Her parents naturally refused, but Rong did not run away. Instead, for every day for nearly two weeks, she asked her parents if she could leave, stubbornly refusing to accept defeat. Her parents still refused to give in, even with the support of her brothers, so Rong decided to take things even further. She declared that she would not eat a bite of food until her parents allowed her to join the army. So, she sat in the garden, refusing any food given to her. By the third day her parents gave in. They finally came to understand that Rong was not the “proper lady” they had thought her, and accepted her identity and ideals.
Having attained her parents’ blessing, Rong left to join the army and start training. At first, she was given grief for being a woman. There were so few women in the army and they were so spread apart that those that joined had to simply be mixed in with the men, from simple unit assignments to sharing barracks’. The latter was more than a little awkward at first, though mostly for the other men, but Rong found a solution by simply setting up in the far corner and using a spare sheet to create a screen for when she needed to change. They couldn’t afford to make special exceptions just for one soldier, and she knew it. If she showed signs of slowing the unit down, it might be curtains for her career. Fortunately, her talent and attitude soon led her to be accepted among most of her fellow trainees, which carried over to most of her commanders. The Earth Kingdom was, after all, in a state of desperation, and while some officers held concerns about her distracting the other men, her talent and the ability to fit in with her assigned unit became apparent in training camp, so most decided that the upside of adding a talented Earthbender to the Earth Kingdom ranks was greater than the potential downside
Unfortunately, talent alone could not remove all obstacles. One night, after leaving the barracks to go to the bathroom, Rong was ambushed by two men, who intended to violate her. After a great deal of struggle, she not only fought them off, bet left one crippled for life at the other needing over two months in the hospital. While the incident made her more determined t succeed, she couldn’t help but be a little shaken by the event. Back in her town, she’d been “one of the boys”, and not really an object of sexual attention, so the incident was all the more disturbing. The result was that she developed a small phobia of physical contact, not letting anyone touch her at all for several months. Through sheer willpower, she’s managed to make a slight recovery from it, but still seems to avoid it whenever possible.
The rest of her training progressed without much incident, and as a bender with clear potential, Rong was assigned to a unit in the North, meant to halt the advance of the Fire Nation towards Ba Sing Se. She has been in almost two score battles since, and been fairly successful, shaking off any rookie nerves quickly. She’s on friendly terms with most of her unit, but she has found it difficult to find someone truly close. Both her and her comrades are aware of the implications if it looks like they are becoming too personal, and so there tends to be a limit with how far these friendships can go. It doesn’t help that she’s only been on active duty for a little more than a year, and so has not had the time to form truly tight knit bonds with anyone. With the news of Omashu’s fall, however, she has begun to worry about her family, and hopes that the Fire Nation advance ca be routed soon so that the army can turn its attention to liberating the south and finding her family.
Sample RP:
For what felt like an eternity, Rong had been marching. Well, her and several thousand other Earth Kingdom soldiers, all of whom had the same destination: Ba Sing Se. A few days ago, her army had a different destination entirely, heading north towards the town of Zhy. It was to be part of a campaign to liberate the northwest peninsula of the Earth Kingdom, but all of that would have to wait now. Before they reached Zhy, they’d been intercepted by a messenger with orders to turn east and head back to Ba Sing Se. The Fire Nation had cut a path across the continent after taking Omashu, and was gathering for a siege on the capital itself. Unfortunately, the liberation of the peninsula would have to wait, it seemed, something Rong was quite perplexed and annoyed by…and everyone in her unit knew it.
“I thought Ba Sing Se was supposed to be this big invincible thing,” she complained as she walked. “So why do they need us? Why can’t we help the people on the peninsula at the same time?”
“Because, Fa, it’s us soldiers that make Ba Sing Se invincible,” retorted her commanding officer, Sergeant Liu. “Walls without soldiers aren’t too useful.”
Rong scoffed, “Yeah, well, they’ve got a city full of soldiers. They don’t need all of us, too.”
“You’ve got to learn just to follow orders, Fa,” the Sergeant replied, shaking his head. “You can’t be so bullheaded. It’ll get you killed. Like the last battle, when you dove in after Corporal Li.”
“Well, I could have saved him,” Rong answered with a frown.
“But you didn’t.”
A moment of silence, “But I could’ve.”
With a sigh, the Sergeant rubbed his temple and looked at the ground. It was always this way with Fa Rong. She wasn’t one to get down about her mistakes, in part because she didn’t really admit to them all that often. He wasn’t too mad at her for not following every order to-the-t, as the best soldiers were ones who could adapt to circumstances and know when orders shouldn’t be followed. However, he was worried that eventually, her stubbornly “berserker” behavior in battle would end the life of another talented young bender too soon.
“Look, Fa, this next one is going to be big. Bigger than either of us have ever seen,” he said slowly. “And if we’re going to win, we can’t have soldiers wasting their lives, all right.”
Rong turned to the Sergeant and looked at him, lips pursed a little and her brow knotted in a serious look. After a moment, she looked straight ahead. He was a veteran. He’d seen a lot of men die, and seen as many losses as wins. He’d told her once that he truly didn’t know who would win the war, but normally he managed to keep that from showing. With this big battle, he was getting nervous. The other men couldn’t see him like that. Frankly, Rong didn’t like to see him, or anyone, like that.
“We’ll win,” she said, turned back to him and giving him a small smile. “We’ll win because we have to.”
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Group: Earth Kingdom Soldiers
Nation: Earth Kingdom
Bender?: Earthbender
Physical Appearance: Standing at 5’5”, Rong is not much taller than your average woman. However, she is clearly more athletic, with lightly muscled arms and legs, clearly visible and showing her physical strength. She possesses noticeable curves, but in her hips and glutes, they are firm with muscle. She is actually somewhat annoyed with her breasts, which though well proportioned and nothing larger than average, are still at the point where she has to tightly wrap them to keep them from annoying her during athletic activity. In general, her body is quite smooth and streamlined, fit for athletic activity, but not bulky in any way. Her skin is fairly tan, possessing a light touch of cinnamon color from all the sun she’s received. Her feet and hands, similarly are calloused and somewhat dirty from all her training and fighting, with short nails and the occasional fading wound from fire or blade.
She has an oval shaped face with smooth, softer features. Her eyebrows are thin and smoothly arched, and would be considered nice for a lady save that the right one has a scar towards the end of it that creates a thin slit where hair doesn’t grow. The scar comes from her active physical activity as a youth, where her smaller size in comparison to the boys sometimes worked against her. A second scar can be found running down the back of her left calf muscle. Her jade colored eyes are a bit large, giving them a warm, friendly appearance.
Rong’s hair is a somewhat uncommon color, carrying a hint of red that makes it a rusty brown, and naturally straight with a smooth texture. However, as the Earth Kingdom military doesn’t provide much in the way of hair care, it has started to become a little coarse and loose some of its sheen. While she used to keep it short, it hasn’t been cut in a while, and if let hang, it would reach down to the bottom of her shoulder-blades. Instead, she keeps it in a long braid (Chinese style) which she wraps in a bun on the back of her head, secured with long hairpins. In the front, she parts her bangs off to the right side, which, if unattended, would let most of her bangs hang down in front of the left side of her face. However, she instead pins the end of the bangs behind her left ear, creating a kind of curve of hair that hangs down in front of her forehead, with the lowest point just above her left eyebrow.
Clothing/Armor: Most of the time, Rong is in her Earth Kingdom foot soldier uniform The only difference is in the signature conical helmet made of hardened leather. Like all the others, it is sea green on the top, with a short golden spike on the top, a band of hunter green trimming the bottom, and a pear colored diamond emblem in the front, trimmed again by hunter green. However, instead of the normal neck guards, she simply had a hunter green cloth strap that runs under her chin and secures the helmet in place. From there on, her uniform is standard issue. On her torso, the primary garment is a cloth, pear colored tunic with yellow-green hemming. The tunic splits at the waist, and hangs down until just above the knee over each leg. Over each shoulder is a thick, sea green pad hemmed with hunter green, made from a thick hide to add a little extra protection for the shoulders. Length wise, they only extend to just above her elbows, but they are quite wide, and hang down a fair distance in front of and behind each shoulder. As they are separate from the tunic, they are held together via two hunter green leather straps that hang just below the neck in the back and the front.
On her forearms are two hardened leather arm guards, camouflage green in color, save for an extra strip of metal added to the front that is simply grey. On her waist is a forest green cloth belt, with a metal clasp in the shape of the Earth Kingdom emblem. The belt holds in place two leather pads that protect her sides, vertically going up to the bottom of her ribcage and down to cover her hips. They are olive drab in color, with olive hemming. On her legs, she wears camouflage green cloth pants that tuck into a pair of shin guards. The guards consist of sea green cloth all the way around the leg with army green hardened leather covering the shin. As an earthbender, she wears no footwear. She also has simple white cloth wraps for her more feminine parts.
She keeps a silk, spring green qipao dress with her for more formal occasions. It is sleeveless, with thin golden hemming around the edges and the mandarin color. A single garment, it fits tightly around her torso and extends down to her ankles. It is slit up the side of her left leg, from the bottom to almost all the way up her thigh. A pattern of small panda lilies can be seen on the qipao, carefully embedded with silk of just a lighter shade of green than the rest of the dress. She also has a matching pair of traditional (Chinese) spring green silk shoes, which are essentially like silk slippers.
Weapons: Though some earthbenders like to incorporate weapons, Rong does not care for that sort of thing. Though her earthbending shows a lot of potential in terms of her raw power, determination and athleticism, it is decidedly unrefined, and even bordering on being totally wild. Nicknamed “Berserker Fa” during earthbending lessons as a youth, the name holds true to day. Her style is to hit hard and fast in a ferocious, sometimes unpredictable manner and never let up. However, though this has certainly improved her stamina, she can burn herself out, particularly in long battles. If she burns out at the wrong time, she can find herself in serious predicaments.
Personality: Rong is a young woman of great willpower, possessing a deal of inner strength. Though it can lead her to be rash, stubborn, and headstrong, it has given her the confidence and determination she’s needed to succeed in her chosen way of life. Very much a tomboy, she has a blunt, somewhat colloquial manner of speaking (though, in contrast, her voice is still quite feminine, if a tad deeper). She is very passionate in her opinions, too, possessing a strong sense of justice and a great deal of empathy. Indeed, it is not her anger that drives her in battle, but these passions. This can lead her to do reckless things in the heat of battle for the sake of these ideals, as she hates leaving comrades behind or making tactical sacrifices.
The result is that Rong is quite outgoing and friendly. She doesn’t like seeing people upset or down, and will go out of her way to cheer them up. She seems to have the ability to get people to open up, and is good at listening about other people’s problems. Some of her superiors have expressed the opinion that this shows her natural charisma, and combined with her inherent strength and willpower, she may show the early signs of a good leader. However, she has no grasp of strategy…at all. In fact, while she certainly isn’t stupid, she’s probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And though friendly, she’s not terribly funny, so she doesn’t crack many jokes. She is, however, fond of giving people nicknames.
However, though she does a lot of listening on other people’s troubles, she doesn’t do a lot of talking about her own problems. She gives the outward appearance of a very strong, confident individual, but she has her doubts. Namely, she is still unsure of her identity and her place in the world. Her whole life, she’s found herself more at home with boys than girls, to the point of being uncomfortable around the latter. Some of the ridicule this has earned her truly wounds her. Not only that, but she feels quite a bit of pressure in being one of the few women in the Earth Kingdom army, and sometimes it can get to her. Additionally, she has a dislike of physical contact derived from an incident when she first joined the army. She is slowly getting over it, but she still doesn’t like to be touched.
Background: The Fa family was a large, well to do family living in a small town in the southern Earth Kingdom when Rong was born, the fourth and last child in her family, coming after three brothers: Ren, Suo and Dai. Her father, Huo, was the liason between Omashu and her home village, and thus was frequently away. This left her mother, Ji, to see to the economic affairs of the household, something she was incredibly proficient in. In fact, it was her was largely responsible for the family’s wealth in the first place. However, this essentially meant that she was raised by her brothers. Not knowing how to raise a “proper lady”, the boys simply treated her like another brother.
Though her tutors taught her manners and tried to mold her into a proper lady, Rong never took to it. She preferred romping around with her brothers, particularly Dai, who was merely a year her senior. The four became a very tightly knit group, and tended to do everything together. Often, the boys whom they played with expressed dissatisfaction with allowing a girl to join in their games, but her three brothers were good at paving the way for her, not to mention that she tended to have the habit of never listening when she was told to leave. It also helped that Rong proved to be athletic, often stunning the boys in town by proving superior to them. So, her early years were spent almost entirely around boys, and when she was forced to be around girls, she felt antsy and uncomfortable. They seemed foreign and odd to her. She couldn’t understand them or the activities they seemed to enjoy. Occasionally, she was ridiculed for this, and while outwardly she seemed to take it well, inside, it hurt.
To top things off, she turned out to be an earthbender, and a damned talented one, too. Her eldest brother Ren, also an earthbender, started to teach her the basics at a young age, but found that she got the hang of them much quicker than he anticipated. Unfortunately, Rong’s parents caught wind of her behavior, and decided to try and crack down on her to try and get her to focus on her studies, which she was slacking off on. It was not out of cruelty or a need for gender conformity that they did this, but simple misunderstanding. They thought that Rong was simply being dragged along by her brothers, when in reality, she loved spending time with them, and loved earthbending, martial arts, and athletic feats far more than studying, tea cerimonies, or other such boring behavior.
Her brothers, having essentially raised her, knew more about Rong than her parents did. So, Rong’s brothers devised a plan: Ren told his parents that Dai had developed a talent for earthbending to acquire the money necessary to get Rong training from a proper master, while Suo, the group braniac would “help” Rong with her studies so she could have the time to properly practice. For several years, the scheme went off without a hitch. Under the training of the local master, Master Ma Chang, Rong’s earthbending blossomed, and she showed remarkable progress. However, because the others under Ma Chang had been training much longer, sometimes her technique suffered. In making up for this with raw athleticism and tenacity, it was here where Rong earned the nickname “Berserker Fa”.
It was at this time that she found out about the war with the Fire Nation, mostly from other students, many of whom had fathers or friends in the army. Being the rash, empathetic young woman that she was, Rong quickly came to the conclusion that not only should the war end as soon as possible, but she needed to do something to help stop it herself. Ren became slightly wary of this attitude, but he decided it could be dealt with when the time came.
Eventually, however, the scheme was found out when Dai was put on the spot to show a guest his earthbending, which he naturally failed to do. Now fifteen, Rong was forced to practice only on her own or with Ren, which significantly slowed down her progress. Her parents simply couldn’t understand why she would want to earthbend, deciding it was merely a product of her acting out as a rebellious teen.
For a year, this continued. Rong was miserable, but for some reason she complied. Her brothers were stunned that their normally strong willed, stubborn sister was going along with it so easily. Or rather, they were until her sixteenth birthday, where she announced that she would be leaving to join the Earth Kingdom military. It seemed that she had simply been waiting until she was old enough to sign up for the army, having never actually given up on her ideals at all. Her parents naturally refused, but Rong did not run away. Instead, for every day for nearly two weeks, she asked her parents if she could leave, stubbornly refusing to accept defeat. Her parents still refused to give in, even with the support of her brothers, so Rong decided to take things even further. She declared that she would not eat a bite of food until her parents allowed her to join the army. So, she sat in the garden, refusing any food given to her. By the third day her parents gave in. They finally came to understand that Rong was not the “proper lady” they had thought her, and accepted her identity and ideals.
Having attained her parents’ blessing, Rong left to join the army and start training. At first, she was given grief for being a woman. There were so few women in the army and they were so spread apart that those that joined had to simply be mixed in with the men, from simple unit assignments to sharing barracks’. The latter was more than a little awkward at first, though mostly for the other men, but Rong found a solution by simply setting up in the far corner and using a spare sheet to create a screen for when she needed to change. They couldn’t afford to make special exceptions just for one soldier, and she knew it. If she showed signs of slowing the unit down, it might be curtains for her career. Fortunately, her talent and attitude soon led her to be accepted among most of her fellow trainees, which carried over to most of her commanders. The Earth Kingdom was, after all, in a state of desperation, and while some officers held concerns about her distracting the other men, her talent and the ability to fit in with her assigned unit became apparent in training camp, so most decided that the upside of adding a talented Earthbender to the Earth Kingdom ranks was greater than the potential downside
Unfortunately, talent alone could not remove all obstacles. One night, after leaving the barracks to go to the bathroom, Rong was ambushed by two men, who intended to violate her. After a great deal of struggle, she not only fought them off, bet left one crippled for life at the other needing over two months in the hospital. While the incident made her more determined t succeed, she couldn’t help but be a little shaken by the event. Back in her town, she’d been “one of the boys”, and not really an object of sexual attention, so the incident was all the more disturbing. The result was that she developed a small phobia of physical contact, not letting anyone touch her at all for several months. Through sheer willpower, she’s managed to make a slight recovery from it, but still seems to avoid it whenever possible.
The rest of her training progressed without much incident, and as a bender with clear potential, Rong was assigned to a unit in the North, meant to halt the advance of the Fire Nation towards Ba Sing Se. She has been in almost two score battles since, and been fairly successful, shaking off any rookie nerves quickly. She’s on friendly terms with most of her unit, but she has found it difficult to find someone truly close. Both her and her comrades are aware of the implications if it looks like they are becoming too personal, and so there tends to be a limit with how far these friendships can go. It doesn’t help that she’s only been on active duty for a little more than a year, and so has not had the time to form truly tight knit bonds with anyone. With the news of Omashu’s fall, however, she has begun to worry about her family, and hopes that the Fire Nation advance ca be routed soon so that the army can turn its attention to liberating the south and finding her family.
Sample RP:
For what felt like an eternity, Rong had been marching. Well, her and several thousand other Earth Kingdom soldiers, all of whom had the same destination: Ba Sing Se. A few days ago, her army had a different destination entirely, heading north towards the town of Zhy. It was to be part of a campaign to liberate the northwest peninsula of the Earth Kingdom, but all of that would have to wait now. Before they reached Zhy, they’d been intercepted by a messenger with orders to turn east and head back to Ba Sing Se. The Fire Nation had cut a path across the continent after taking Omashu, and was gathering for a siege on the capital itself. Unfortunately, the liberation of the peninsula would have to wait, it seemed, something Rong was quite perplexed and annoyed by…and everyone in her unit knew it.
“I thought Ba Sing Se was supposed to be this big invincible thing,” she complained as she walked. “So why do they need us? Why can’t we help the people on the peninsula at the same time?”
“Because, Fa, it’s us soldiers that make Ba Sing Se invincible,” retorted her commanding officer, Sergeant Liu. “Walls without soldiers aren’t too useful.”
Rong scoffed, “Yeah, well, they’ve got a city full of soldiers. They don’t need all of us, too.”
“You’ve got to learn just to follow orders, Fa,” the Sergeant replied, shaking his head. “You can’t be so bullheaded. It’ll get you killed. Like the last battle, when you dove in after Corporal Li.”
“Well, I could have saved him,” Rong answered with a frown.
“But you didn’t.”
A moment of silence, “But I could’ve.”
With a sigh, the Sergeant rubbed his temple and looked at the ground. It was always this way with Fa Rong. She wasn’t one to get down about her mistakes, in part because she didn’t really admit to them all that often. He wasn’t too mad at her for not following every order to-the-t, as the best soldiers were ones who could adapt to circumstances and know when orders shouldn’t be followed. However, he was worried that eventually, her stubbornly “berserker” behavior in battle would end the life of another talented young bender too soon.
“Look, Fa, this next one is going to be big. Bigger than either of us have ever seen,” he said slowly. “And if we’re going to win, we can’t have soldiers wasting their lives, all right.”
Rong turned to the Sergeant and looked at him, lips pursed a little and her brow knotted in a serious look. After a moment, she looked straight ahead. He was a veteran. He’d seen a lot of men die, and seen as many losses as wins. He’d told her once that he truly didn’t know who would win the war, but normally he managed to keep that from showing. With this big battle, he was getting nervous. The other men couldn’t see him like that. Frankly, Rong didn’t like to see him, or anyone, like that.
“We’ll win,” she said, turned back to him and giving him a small smile. “We’ll win because we have to.”