Post by baoli on Apr 10, 2008 16:56:47 GMT -5
Name: Xiaofan the Grease Monkey
Age: 32
Gender: Female
Group: Fire Nation Army
Nation: Fire Nation
Bender?: Yes. Woohoo!
Physical Appearance: Almost entirely lacking in feminine curves, it's not hard to mistake the 5'3" mechanic and engineer that is Xiaofan for any of the numerous males who do the same job as her in the Fire Nation army. She is flat-chested and of slender hips as well, and if it weren't for the muscle, would probably resemble an early teenage male in build. Due to years of heavy lifting and lots of physical labor involving hammering and tightning bolts, Xiaofan's arms, legs and trunk are fairly thick with muscle - though her frame is middle-sized, she appears to be a bit of a bodybuilder. Her skin is a light khaki colour under washed circumstances, but most days is coated in smudges of grease, coal dust and road dirt from the tanks she works on.
She has a 2" tall and wide goldenrod and pumpkin tattoo of the Fire Nation emblem on her left bicep, just below the shoulder.
Her hair is something of a mess of dark sienna, having been cut short for utility's sake, and singed repeatedly during her job. The result is a somewhat unruly and untameable, constantly a little too long and growing out former buzz-cut look, with much of the hair wandering off in whatever direction it sees fit at any given time. Sweat and machine grease often conspire to leave it in interesting styles. Her bangs (or what hair pretends to be bangs when it's washed and not standing at strange angles because of grease) rest almost at the top of a somewhat high forehead on a square face, above expressive but fairly large eyebrows and almond-shaped golden poppy eyes. Her nose is neither too large nor small for her features, but is hawklike - it resembles a hooked beak more than most peoples', with a convex end around her nostrils. Her face has fairly deep laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, and deep brow furrows. The furrows give her a look of constant upset, even when she's happy and smiling.
She has an average sized mouth with almost no lips to it - it looks a bit more like a straight line than a mouth, her lips are that thin. Her jawline is strong and somewhat masculine.
Xiaofan carries herself with a reassured confidence and a bit of a swagger, which only adds to the casual observer's belief that she's a guy.
Clothing/Armor: The closest layer to Xiaofan's skin is little more than a simple set of binding cloths - a greying chest-wrapping keeps her less than ample bosom tied close to her body. Well, closer than usual, which just adds to her rather boyish appearance. Her rear end is covered by a simple breechcloth of faded white cotton. Over that, she wears a deep saffron sleeveless mandarin collar shirt with no decorations and a pair of somewhat baggy maroon pants that are sinched around her waist tightly with a thick, but well-oiled auburn leather belt with a square silver iron buckle.
The bottoms of her pants are tucked in to big black leather boots with scratched metal toe caps that reach half way up her calves. Both boots are laced as tightly as possible with frayed leather thongs of the same color, in both cases with the laces wrapped double around her boot tops. Strictly for security purposes, of course, and not at all because they're a bit big and threaten to fall off.
Over everything, she wears a heavy leather smith's apron of seal brown, secured to her body with heavy leather straps that are tied at her waist in the back. A tool belt of similar heavy leather (and with a Fire Nation emblem emblazoned into it, laced with a touch of flaking gold paint) hangs just at her hips, the main pouch full of random tools and fasteners and slung in the front. On the left hip of the tool belt are two loops with snaps that hold her larger tools, a mallet and an adjustable spanner.
A pair of goggles with a single merged lense made of darkened smoky-coloured glass and a frame of hardened black leather on a strap of stretchy elastic-like ochre fabric is usually either over her eyes or pushed up onto her forehead. Officially, they're for welding and cutting down on glare from the sun. Unofficially, she just likes the look of them and tends to wear them as a fashion accessory.
Most of her clothing, much like her skin, is either grease spot stained or smudged with coal dust.
Weapons: Xiaofan isn't much for fighting, being a mechanic and an engineer. If involved in a serious fight, she will bend with an exacting precision that rivals her engineering - her movements are somewhat mechanical, but textbook Firebending. The only real difference between the two is that she actually modifies convention in her engineering and thinks outside the box, and seems somewhat incapable of that in her bending.
She also does tend to carry an adult forearm-sized adjustable spanner wrench made of matte black cast iron and a well-worn wooden mallet, both of which she wears hanging from her belt in well-oiled leather tool holders at her left hip. If pressed into combat that won't allow for bending, which is generally a rarity for her, the spanner tends to get weilded as a two-handed mace, albiet somewhat clumsily and with great gusto. If the wrench fails to work, she will try the hammer.
She has even been known to swat people with rolled-up blueprints if need be. She, of course, sees need for it all the time. Also, she has a mind like a diamond. It counts!
Personality: Self-assured and full of confidence, Xiaofan is a hardass who knows what she's doing and will be damned if she takes any crap from anyone regarding her job. She is intelligent and she knows it - she'll argue at the drop of a hat over just about anything, mainly for the sake of arguing and proving she's better than you. She's aggressive and pushy, bossy, and demands to be in charge of most situations regarding machines. She has a habit of calling people by girl's names - especially males - as both a term of affection and a method of winding them up. She tends to pick on and drill at her few underlings and co-workers relentlessly, demanding perfection from them as she sees fit.
She is exceedingly proud and stubborn, and she does not like to ask for help - a major shortcoming that can (and has in the past) get her in serious trouble with her superiors, especially when she does things like stay in the tank bay for two days on end, trying to fix some strange ticking noise by pulling the whole machine apart (and reassembling it shoddily due to the lack of sleep and the fact she was working alone) that turns out to be a squirrel-rat that had holed up in the bay itself. She does not apologise easliy - almost never, in fact - and when she does, it is often half hearted.
When push comes to shove, however, she'll gladly stand up to any authority in the Fire Nation army for any member of her mechanic crew - she believes, deep down, they're the best of the best, and would take all kinds of pain to keep them together and learning from her. Her confrontational spirit, however, has kept her from rising in the ranks of the military - with her considerable skill and years of service, Xiaofan could likely be a head engineer and mechanical designer for the army. Instead, she's just a crew chief in a small detatchment of tanks.
Background: Born the youngest girl (and final child of 4) to two well-off parents in the Fire Nation royal capital of Lun Yang, Xiaofan was supposed to be the model of civility and courtly manner like her three older sisters. Sent to some of the best refining schools and academies, she was taught the arts and histories of her people, as well as basic bending as soon as she showed any talent for it whatsoever. Had things gone according to plan, she would have made her debut at court the day of her sixteenth birthday and secured her father's place as a governor in some cushy Fire Nation colony with her grace and charm.
Unfortunately for her father, her brash personality and seemingly complete inability to kowtow to anyone without being physically beaten into it rearranged said plan when the young hothead mouthed off to the wrong general at the wrong time, earning the family a considerable loss of status rather than a gain in it - her father still recieved a governorship, but it was of a penal colony in the middle of nowhere.
Frustrated with this turn of events and sick of his insolent daughter's ways, he made good with the Fire Lord and his court by giving up his youngest to the Royal Fire Academy for Girls. When this first assignment failed to produce any results aside from refining her pure insolence towards her teachers and disdain for her fellow students ( she even went so far as burning one of the other girls badly in a fight after class), her instructors came up with a strange and harsh punishment - one with very little precedent, but one that seemed completely necessary given her personality. Rather than simply send the girl home, they reassigned her to the main Royal Fire Academy, hoping it would scare the hell out of her and force her into a more pliable and subservient person as she came back begging to be let into the girls school again. Her long, plaited hair was hacked off in clumps by a military barber not a week later, and she was off. She never wrote home.
Once she got there, there was an immediate flap - the heads of the all-male school attempted to send her back, the heads of the girl's academy wouldn't take her. Both sides fought for a considerable length of time until a decree came down from the general at the head of both schools - the girl had to be taught, and the girl's academy wasn't equipped to deal with her. She would be quartered in a small storeroom on the main academy's base, given nothing but a cot and a few blankets. She made the best of a bad situation, immediately throwing her trunk into the small space.
Aside from the occasional outbursts against her instructors there, and fights with other students, Xiaofan took to the main academy like an elephant koi to water - she reveled in the physical nature of the job, enjoying her training, much to the chagrin of all involved. She wasn't supposed to be happy; she was supposed to be running home. Clearly, the plans weren't going well for anyone other than Xiaofan.
Her bending never really reached any level of greatness, her instructors often referred to her as 'skilled, but unwilling to improve beyond technically perfect book bending ' - in bending, she seemed to completely lack any sort of improvisational ability, her movements remained those of an intermediate learner. But she really liked the classroom portions of her new school the best. She liked tactics, military history and took to mathematics and engineering - more so than most recruits. She wrote essay after essay on the design of the Fire Nation's machinery. She was not allowed into the advanced classes due to the fact that it wasn't considered a womanly pursuit, just the basic courses, but this didn't quell her need for knowledge.
Having become facinated with the Fire Nation's tanks and other seige equipment on her first day in the academy, Xiaofan spent every waking hour that she wasn't in a classroom or practicing military drills reading plans, blueprints and books about the tanks from the academy library. She actively spent her small weekly stipend on tools and manuals, tinkering with small engines and working on models of tanks, trying to improve their meager efficiency and make the mechanisms. She was self-taught, but good - Xiaofan knew the inside and outside of the tanks almost as well as the men who were actually allowed to work on them.
Finally, there came a day when she felt ready to challenge the 'real' engineers - she walked into the tank hangar completely unbidden, and after the initial flap caused by her presence and some berrating by the head engineer, she simply walked over to a tank and popped the hatch. Tool after tool was removed from her belt, the head of the garage laughing at the sight of a woman fumbling inside this tanks. He held back anyone from stopping her, sure she'd screw it up on her own and allow him to discipline her severely.
Unfortunately for him, she didn't screw it up. Up to her elbows in grease and machinery, Xiaofan came into her own. The gears danced to her whim, the machines bent to her whim - and everything she touched worked. No one was sure how she was doing it, but Xiaofan coaxed life out of previously dead machines as they watched her work. The lead engineer grumbled, but even he had to admit that the girl was good. She tweaked and prodded his personal designs, tightning belts and nuts until noisy machinery gave way to a smooth, rumbling purr.
At first, the head engineer of the garage resented her meddling. But when he noticed the changes she was making were major efficiency boosts to the machines, he relented and congratulated her, putting her in charge of a small crew of students and telling her to impliment whatever magic she had just worked on all his tanks. It was then that she knew what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.
Xiaofan was a born leader of a mechanic crew. She, with her brash personna and domineering loudmouth ways, strangely managed to whip a low level machine crew into a formidable
crew of wrench weilders - the garage was shaped from a rag-tag collection of people who really didn't fit in anywhere else in the chain of command to a well-oiled (pun intended!) collection of gears that ran like the tanks they were fixing - smooth and fast.
Upon her graduation at age 21, Xiaofan was offered a shot at the head engineering brigade - a chance she blew spectacularly by verbally tearing into the cheif designer in front of a handful of generals and an admiral. She was immediately reassigned to a backwater outpost in the Earth Kingdom as chief of a crew of outcasts like herself. She has been there ever since, occasionally ending up in frontline missions as a head mechanic but mostly spending her time fixing the broken tanks in a hangarstill hanging out in a small tent of her own with none of the amenities the males get aside from her lone cot.
She doesn't care as long as they let her work on the tanks.
Sample RP: "Hey! Mailan! Quit daydreaming like the little girl you are and hand me that 3-4 lug wrench, would you? Seriously, do I have to do all the work around here alone?" Xiaofan's gruff voice rang through the tank bay, startling her male assistant into action. He dove at the tool chest and drew out a long wrench, smacking it into his boss' open hand. She closed her fist around it and drew it under the tank's belly with a smooth motion. "It's about time, I think I aged two years in that wait. What if this had been an emergency situation, Xialin? What then? Would you have bothered even trying, or would I have died under the tank because you like your little mental images of mooselion cubs better than your job?" She asked as she tightened one lug after the other, grunting with the effort as she did so. The tank she was working on had been failing to run for three days, despite her best efforts. It was beginning to grate on her nerves, as was her assistant's inability to pay attention to her today. She was likely to throw something at him if it continued. Finished with the tightning, she nodded in satisfaction and thrust a foot against the underbelly of the tank, propelling the rolling wooden platform she was laying on out from under it. She sat up and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, giving the wrench back to her assistant.
"Oh, come on, Grease. Give me a break. It's a beautiful day in the Earth Kingdom and everyone else is out enjoying it. Why do we have to stay here?" Her assistant looked out the window whistfully at the clear blue sky outside. Xiaofan sighed and threw a small bolt at the back of his head. It bounced off with a small thump. "Ow! What was that for?" He asked, rubbing at the spot it had hit him.
"I told you, Nuying, I need your head in the game! Now get with it. Climb up in there and start this beast up, would you?"
"My name is Yaozu, woman," her assistant muttered under his breath as he climbed into the tank. Xiaofan immediately redened with anger. She clambored up the side of the vehicle after him, yanking him down to her level by his worn collar. He paled as soon as he saw the anger in her eyes.
"If you EVER take that tack with me again, I will have your ass bounced from this regiment so fast you won't even have time to pack that frilly pink gown you love so much. I am your SUPERIOR OFFICER, and you will show me respect! Now get back up there and start this tank, or I swear I will personally dock your pay and spend it all on cheap sake down in Ba Sing Se!" She released his collar, pushing him back against the tank's body. Unable to reply to that, her assistant merely nodded and made his way into the tank proper. He sat in the BAD!pit and pulled levers according to startup procedure, expecting nothing to come of it as it had every other time he'd been told to start it.
This time was different. Something happened.
The tank roared to life, sounding something akin to a large and angry animal. Xiaofan grinned from ear to ear and thrust both hands in the air. "YES! I am the master!"
Age: 32
Gender: Female
Group: Fire Nation Army
Nation: Fire Nation
Bender?: Yes. Woohoo!
Physical Appearance: Almost entirely lacking in feminine curves, it's not hard to mistake the 5'3" mechanic and engineer that is Xiaofan for any of the numerous males who do the same job as her in the Fire Nation army. She is flat-chested and of slender hips as well, and if it weren't for the muscle, would probably resemble an early teenage male in build. Due to years of heavy lifting and lots of physical labor involving hammering and tightning bolts, Xiaofan's arms, legs and trunk are fairly thick with muscle - though her frame is middle-sized, she appears to be a bit of a bodybuilder. Her skin is a light khaki colour under washed circumstances, but most days is coated in smudges of grease, coal dust and road dirt from the tanks she works on.
She has a 2" tall and wide goldenrod and pumpkin tattoo of the Fire Nation emblem on her left bicep, just below the shoulder.
Her hair is something of a mess of dark sienna, having been cut short for utility's sake, and singed repeatedly during her job. The result is a somewhat unruly and untameable, constantly a little too long and growing out former buzz-cut look, with much of the hair wandering off in whatever direction it sees fit at any given time. Sweat and machine grease often conspire to leave it in interesting styles. Her bangs (or what hair pretends to be bangs when it's washed and not standing at strange angles because of grease) rest almost at the top of a somewhat high forehead on a square face, above expressive but fairly large eyebrows and almond-shaped golden poppy eyes. Her nose is neither too large nor small for her features, but is hawklike - it resembles a hooked beak more than most peoples', with a convex end around her nostrils. Her face has fairly deep laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, and deep brow furrows. The furrows give her a look of constant upset, even when she's happy and smiling.
She has an average sized mouth with almost no lips to it - it looks a bit more like a straight line than a mouth, her lips are that thin. Her jawline is strong and somewhat masculine.
Xiaofan carries herself with a reassured confidence and a bit of a swagger, which only adds to the casual observer's belief that she's a guy.
Clothing/Armor: The closest layer to Xiaofan's skin is little more than a simple set of binding cloths - a greying chest-wrapping keeps her less than ample bosom tied close to her body. Well, closer than usual, which just adds to her rather boyish appearance. Her rear end is covered by a simple breechcloth of faded white cotton. Over that, she wears a deep saffron sleeveless mandarin collar shirt with no decorations and a pair of somewhat baggy maroon pants that are sinched around her waist tightly with a thick, but well-oiled auburn leather belt with a square silver iron buckle.
The bottoms of her pants are tucked in to big black leather boots with scratched metal toe caps that reach half way up her calves. Both boots are laced as tightly as possible with frayed leather thongs of the same color, in both cases with the laces wrapped double around her boot tops. Strictly for security purposes, of course, and not at all because they're a bit big and threaten to fall off.
Over everything, she wears a heavy leather smith's apron of seal brown, secured to her body with heavy leather straps that are tied at her waist in the back. A tool belt of similar heavy leather (and with a Fire Nation emblem emblazoned into it, laced with a touch of flaking gold paint) hangs just at her hips, the main pouch full of random tools and fasteners and slung in the front. On the left hip of the tool belt are two loops with snaps that hold her larger tools, a mallet and an adjustable spanner.
A pair of goggles with a single merged lense made of darkened smoky-coloured glass and a frame of hardened black leather on a strap of stretchy elastic-like ochre fabric is usually either over her eyes or pushed up onto her forehead. Officially, they're for welding and cutting down on glare from the sun. Unofficially, she just likes the look of them and tends to wear them as a fashion accessory.
Most of her clothing, much like her skin, is either grease spot stained or smudged with coal dust.
Weapons: Xiaofan isn't much for fighting, being a mechanic and an engineer. If involved in a serious fight, she will bend with an exacting precision that rivals her engineering - her movements are somewhat mechanical, but textbook Firebending. The only real difference between the two is that she actually modifies convention in her engineering and thinks outside the box, and seems somewhat incapable of that in her bending.
She also does tend to carry an adult forearm-sized adjustable spanner wrench made of matte black cast iron and a well-worn wooden mallet, both of which she wears hanging from her belt in well-oiled leather tool holders at her left hip. If pressed into combat that won't allow for bending, which is generally a rarity for her, the spanner tends to get weilded as a two-handed mace, albiet somewhat clumsily and with great gusto. If the wrench fails to work, she will try the hammer.
She has even been known to swat people with rolled-up blueprints if need be. She, of course, sees need for it all the time. Also, she has a mind like a diamond. It counts!
Personality: Self-assured and full of confidence, Xiaofan is a hardass who knows what she's doing and will be damned if she takes any crap from anyone regarding her job. She is intelligent and she knows it - she'll argue at the drop of a hat over just about anything, mainly for the sake of arguing and proving she's better than you. She's aggressive and pushy, bossy, and demands to be in charge of most situations regarding machines. She has a habit of calling people by girl's names - especially males - as both a term of affection and a method of winding them up. She tends to pick on and drill at her few underlings and co-workers relentlessly, demanding perfection from them as she sees fit.
She is exceedingly proud and stubborn, and she does not like to ask for help - a major shortcoming that can (and has in the past) get her in serious trouble with her superiors, especially when she does things like stay in the tank bay for two days on end, trying to fix some strange ticking noise by pulling the whole machine apart (and reassembling it shoddily due to the lack of sleep and the fact she was working alone) that turns out to be a squirrel-rat that had holed up in the bay itself. She does not apologise easliy - almost never, in fact - and when she does, it is often half hearted.
When push comes to shove, however, she'll gladly stand up to any authority in the Fire Nation army for any member of her mechanic crew - she believes, deep down, they're the best of the best, and would take all kinds of pain to keep them together and learning from her. Her confrontational spirit, however, has kept her from rising in the ranks of the military - with her considerable skill and years of service, Xiaofan could likely be a head engineer and mechanical designer for the army. Instead, she's just a crew chief in a small detatchment of tanks.
Background: Born the youngest girl (and final child of 4) to two well-off parents in the Fire Nation royal capital of Lun Yang, Xiaofan was supposed to be the model of civility and courtly manner like her three older sisters. Sent to some of the best refining schools and academies, she was taught the arts and histories of her people, as well as basic bending as soon as she showed any talent for it whatsoever. Had things gone according to plan, she would have made her debut at court the day of her sixteenth birthday and secured her father's place as a governor in some cushy Fire Nation colony with her grace and charm.
Unfortunately for her father, her brash personality and seemingly complete inability to kowtow to anyone without being physically beaten into it rearranged said plan when the young hothead mouthed off to the wrong general at the wrong time, earning the family a considerable loss of status rather than a gain in it - her father still recieved a governorship, but it was of a penal colony in the middle of nowhere.
Frustrated with this turn of events and sick of his insolent daughter's ways, he made good with the Fire Lord and his court by giving up his youngest to the Royal Fire Academy for Girls. When this first assignment failed to produce any results aside from refining her pure insolence towards her teachers and disdain for her fellow students ( she even went so far as burning one of the other girls badly in a fight after class), her instructors came up with a strange and harsh punishment - one with very little precedent, but one that seemed completely necessary given her personality. Rather than simply send the girl home, they reassigned her to the main Royal Fire Academy, hoping it would scare the hell out of her and force her into a more pliable and subservient person as she came back begging to be let into the girls school again. Her long, plaited hair was hacked off in clumps by a military barber not a week later, and she was off. She never wrote home.
Once she got there, there was an immediate flap - the heads of the all-male school attempted to send her back, the heads of the girl's academy wouldn't take her. Both sides fought for a considerable length of time until a decree came down from the general at the head of both schools - the girl had to be taught, and the girl's academy wasn't equipped to deal with her. She would be quartered in a small storeroom on the main academy's base, given nothing but a cot and a few blankets. She made the best of a bad situation, immediately throwing her trunk into the small space.
Aside from the occasional outbursts against her instructors there, and fights with other students, Xiaofan took to the main academy like an elephant koi to water - she reveled in the physical nature of the job, enjoying her training, much to the chagrin of all involved. She wasn't supposed to be happy; she was supposed to be running home. Clearly, the plans weren't going well for anyone other than Xiaofan.
Her bending never really reached any level of greatness, her instructors often referred to her as 'skilled, but unwilling to improve beyond technically perfect book bending ' - in bending, she seemed to completely lack any sort of improvisational ability, her movements remained those of an intermediate learner. But she really liked the classroom portions of her new school the best. She liked tactics, military history and took to mathematics and engineering - more so than most recruits. She wrote essay after essay on the design of the Fire Nation's machinery. She was not allowed into the advanced classes due to the fact that it wasn't considered a womanly pursuit, just the basic courses, but this didn't quell her need for knowledge.
Having become facinated with the Fire Nation's tanks and other seige equipment on her first day in the academy, Xiaofan spent every waking hour that she wasn't in a classroom or practicing military drills reading plans, blueprints and books about the tanks from the academy library. She actively spent her small weekly stipend on tools and manuals, tinkering with small engines and working on models of tanks, trying to improve their meager efficiency and make the mechanisms. She was self-taught, but good - Xiaofan knew the inside and outside of the tanks almost as well as the men who were actually allowed to work on them.
Finally, there came a day when she felt ready to challenge the 'real' engineers - she walked into the tank hangar completely unbidden, and after the initial flap caused by her presence and some berrating by the head engineer, she simply walked over to a tank and popped the hatch. Tool after tool was removed from her belt, the head of the garage laughing at the sight of a woman fumbling inside this tanks. He held back anyone from stopping her, sure she'd screw it up on her own and allow him to discipline her severely.
Unfortunately for him, she didn't screw it up. Up to her elbows in grease and machinery, Xiaofan came into her own. The gears danced to her whim, the machines bent to her whim - and everything she touched worked. No one was sure how she was doing it, but Xiaofan coaxed life out of previously dead machines as they watched her work. The lead engineer grumbled, but even he had to admit that the girl was good. She tweaked and prodded his personal designs, tightning belts and nuts until noisy machinery gave way to a smooth, rumbling purr.
At first, the head engineer of the garage resented her meddling. But when he noticed the changes she was making were major efficiency boosts to the machines, he relented and congratulated her, putting her in charge of a small crew of students and telling her to impliment whatever magic she had just worked on all his tanks. It was then that she knew what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.
Xiaofan was a born leader of a mechanic crew. She, with her brash personna and domineering loudmouth ways, strangely managed to whip a low level machine crew into a formidable
crew of wrench weilders - the garage was shaped from a rag-tag collection of people who really didn't fit in anywhere else in the chain of command to a well-oiled (pun intended!) collection of gears that ran like the tanks they were fixing - smooth and fast.
Upon her graduation at age 21, Xiaofan was offered a shot at the head engineering brigade - a chance she blew spectacularly by verbally tearing into the cheif designer in front of a handful of generals and an admiral. She was immediately reassigned to a backwater outpost in the Earth Kingdom as chief of a crew of outcasts like herself. She has been there ever since, occasionally ending up in frontline missions as a head mechanic but mostly spending her time fixing the broken tanks in a hangarstill hanging out in a small tent of her own with none of the amenities the males get aside from her lone cot.
She doesn't care as long as they let her work on the tanks.
Sample RP: "Hey! Mailan! Quit daydreaming like the little girl you are and hand me that 3-4 lug wrench, would you? Seriously, do I have to do all the work around here alone?" Xiaofan's gruff voice rang through the tank bay, startling her male assistant into action. He dove at the tool chest and drew out a long wrench, smacking it into his boss' open hand. She closed her fist around it and drew it under the tank's belly with a smooth motion. "It's about time, I think I aged two years in that wait. What if this had been an emergency situation, Xialin? What then? Would you have bothered even trying, or would I have died under the tank because you like your little mental images of mooselion cubs better than your job?" She asked as she tightened one lug after the other, grunting with the effort as she did so. The tank she was working on had been failing to run for three days, despite her best efforts. It was beginning to grate on her nerves, as was her assistant's inability to pay attention to her today. She was likely to throw something at him if it continued. Finished with the tightning, she nodded in satisfaction and thrust a foot against the underbelly of the tank, propelling the rolling wooden platform she was laying on out from under it. She sat up and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, giving the wrench back to her assistant.
"Oh, come on, Grease. Give me a break. It's a beautiful day in the Earth Kingdom and everyone else is out enjoying it. Why do we have to stay here?" Her assistant looked out the window whistfully at the clear blue sky outside. Xiaofan sighed and threw a small bolt at the back of his head. It bounced off with a small thump. "Ow! What was that for?" He asked, rubbing at the spot it had hit him.
"I told you, Nuying, I need your head in the game! Now get with it. Climb up in there and start this beast up, would you?"
"My name is Yaozu, woman," her assistant muttered under his breath as he climbed into the tank. Xiaofan immediately redened with anger. She clambored up the side of the vehicle after him, yanking him down to her level by his worn collar. He paled as soon as he saw the anger in her eyes.
"If you EVER take that tack with me again, I will have your ass bounced from this regiment so fast you won't even have time to pack that frilly pink gown you love so much. I am your SUPERIOR OFFICER, and you will show me respect! Now get back up there and start this tank, or I swear I will personally dock your pay and spend it all on cheap sake down in Ba Sing Se!" She released his collar, pushing him back against the tank's body. Unable to reply to that, her assistant merely nodded and made his way into the tank proper. He sat in the BAD!pit and pulled levers according to startup procedure, expecting nothing to come of it as it had every other time he'd been told to start it.
This time was different. Something happened.
The tank roared to life, sounding something akin to a large and angry animal. Xiaofan grinned from ear to ear and thrust both hands in the air. "YES! I am the master!"
