puntapodes: an-qi tsai

An-qi “An” Tsai
Position: Official firebender and unofficial dog-whisperer/raccoon-wrangler of the Punishing Pentapodes.
Teammates: Onji Cheung | Si Jia Hao
Age: 21
Element: Fire
Height: 5’5”
Weight: She’s not telling.
Occupation: Student at the Republic City University. She tells people she studies zoology, but most of the time she seems to be doing anything but. She also has a part-time job incinerating trash. She hates her job.
Hometown: You wouldn't believe her if she told you.

Appearance
An-qi is often mistaken for anything but a firebender; she’s built like an earthbender and likes to dress in waterbender colors. Cultural stereotypes aside, An-qi’s physique is stout from a combination of genetics and a love of good food, and strong from pro-bending training. She keeps her hair at chin-length and occasionally highlights it red after the newest Republic City fashion.

Her clothing is chosen to be comfortable rather than trendy, with very practical shoes. She has her own sense of what might be called “style” in the loosest sense of the word—it usually involves pants with a pattern of embroidered pink whales. She occasionally wears a coonskin cap.

Personality
A quick wit with an even quicker temper means that An-qi is more likely to make enemies than she is to make friends. She possesses a short fuse and a low tolerance for many types of people, and her blunt and sarcastic manner of speaking easily angers those same people. It’s not that she’s incapable of tact; it’s that unless she actually values someone’s good opinion (which she probably doesn’t), she doesn’t think it’s worth the effort to mince her words. Her anger easily clouds her judgment, which can make her particularly volatile when she doesn’t consider the consequences of her actions. She’s cynical, stubborn, holds grudges almost to the point of obsession, and likes to make puns that are every bit as bad as her teammates’.

An-qi has a strong competitive streak, but that doesn’t mean she’s the best at everything she does. It just means that she’ll get frustrated if she isn’t. Which means she’s frustrated a lot of the time. She’s lazy if she can get away with it but surprisingly diligent if she sets her mind to it, and most of what she is good at comes from years of practice.

Her group of close friends is relatively small, and she’s just as quick to jump to their defense as she is to her own. She has a scattered but wide array of knowledge, more often useless than practical, and there are very few topics in which she isn’t interested. She loves some animals and violently discriminates against others.

Skills/Weaknesses
Whatever frustrations An-qi gathers in her day-to-day life come out full force in the arena. If left to her own devices, she doesn’t hold back; she hits hard, taunts her opponents ruthlessly, and has a tendency to favor firepower over strategy. She prefers her matches to be quick and brutal, as her aggressive style rapidly wears down her endurance.

In the arena, her teammates’ influence keeps her in check. Except for the trash-talking. She wouldn’t be a Pentapode if she didn’t. She’s actually quite capable of thinking creatively outside the arena, and she’s learning to do so under the pressure of a match. At their best, the Pentapodes can combine their abilities into some truly weird attacks. However, if An-qi gets nervous, she can easily fall back into old habits.

History
When questioned about her history, An-qi will tell you the following story:

She was born in the volcanic mountains in the remote reaches of the Fire Nation. Her parents raised her there, where she grew up with puma goats for playmates and wrestled platypus bears for warm-up before her real exercise began.

One day, after she had pile-driven an armadillo bear into submission, she stumbled across the mouth of a volcano. It was there she met her mentors for the years to come: the legendary hellbender salamanders. They were the original benders of hell, and An-qi implored them to teach her their secrets. After passing a series of grueling trials, the hellbender salamanders deemed her worthy of learning their ways.

But alas, she could only bend regular fire. Try as they might, the salamanders could not teach her to bend hell. And even though the rage within her heart swelled into an unquenchable inferno, all that ever left her hands were disappointing jets of flame. She couldn’t just be angry, they said, she had to be a special kind of angry--hellishly so--before she could unleash her hell-bending powers.

And from that day forth, she vowed to travel the world in search of that special anger, so that one day she could redeem herself in the eyes of the hellbender salamanders by bending hell.

Her old acquaintances will tell you that she grew up a small town just outside the Fire Nation capital and came to Republic City to get a job and an education, and that she pays for her studies at the university by working part-time as a trash incinerator (though for someone who despises her job, she's surprisingly good at it) but why would you believe what they say?

Either way, things don't go quite as planned when another young woman sits down at her table at a local dim sum restaurant...



_{Textures from `hibbary and ~mariaromerobarbero. Font is RagingRedLotus.}