application.

[metalbent]

OOC Information:
Name: Lucy.
Are you over 15? Yep!
Contact: ilovelucille89@gmail.com works best for contacting me if you need me ASAP, but I'm also around at lucylovespluto & fleeting.

IC Information:
Name: Toph Beifong --> Sophie Bai.
Canon: Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Age: 13; about the same in canon if you consider the comics the most recent (she's listed as 13/14 there). Otherwise, LoK shows flashbacks to adult!Toph.
Preincarnation Appearance: Like this! A petite teen/preteen who kicks ass and takes names. Dark hair, milky-green eyes, and a sincere dislike for shoes.
Any differences: Sort of! Mostly in terms of fashion. Sophie obviously dresses pretty differently from Toph (she wears shoes, for example); she favors boots, jeans, and loose shirts. There is a lot of black and earthtones in her wardrobe, although Sophie has no input on the colors/designs beyond "soft fabrics, nothing constricting or annoying". Sophie has also been known to do her hair differently, but otherwise she and Toph are physically the same - though Sophie's a bit less physically fit than her preincarnate. She also always has her cane on her.
Preincarnated History:

Wiki link!
First things first: Toph comes from a world where there are four types of "bending", or basically four disciplines wherein users can basically use one form of elemental kinesis. The types are waterbending, airbending, earthbending, and firebending. Each bending form gives mastery (or at least the ability to bend basically) over the element it is named for. In Toph's time the bending types tend to be found in the corresponding nations (though later it would be harder to tell where a bender was from as the nations intermixed): the Fire Nation, the Water Tribes, the Air Nomads (though in her time there is only one of those), and the Earth Kingdom. Not everyone is a bender; you're either born with it or you aren't. Toph was born with earthbending in the Earth Kingdom.

Toph Beifong was born to the Beifong family, richest family in Gaoling - and according to some side character met only once, possibly the world! If things had been different she might have grown up fully involved in high society because of her family. As things were, however, Toph was born blind. And in a genuine but rather misguided attempt to protect their little girl, her parents reacted to her blindness by keeping her a secret from the world, locking her away in the Beifong family grounds where they (or their guards) could always watch over her. Most of Gaoling never realized that the Beifong family had a daughter.

While most of Toph's past is only mentioned, it's clear that her parents coddled her and never really let her do anything at all - not even eat hot soup, just in case she burned herself. She was raised in high society but never allowed off the estate, only known to her parents and servants. At the age of six Toph ran away for the first time. This was before she really knew how to "see" with her feet, because at that time she ran into a cave and there met the giant badgermoles. These were known as the first earthbenders in her world's lore, who taught the first human earthbenders how to bend. They were also blind, like Toph. Toph would later say this was what allowed her and the badgermoles to understand one another. By imitating their movements and interacting with the badgermoles, Toph began to learn earthbending. And more importantly than that, they taught her how to "see" with her feet.

Later Toph would tell Aang that, though blind, she never had a problem seeing. This was due to this trained ability. With a heightened seismic sense, Toph was taught to feel the vibrations in the earth, and she learned to visualize where people were from this (shown here). While Toph couldn't get facial expressions from this, and couldn't read or see images or the like, she could move around without assistance and in fact tended to be better at getting around than other people. She tended to notice when she was being ambushed and the like, for example. The only requirement was that Toph be in contact with the ground. Shoes and sand made it hard to "see" properly (although she would later train herself to deal with sand). Through this ability Toph also learned to tell when people were lying or not, by sensing via vibrations their heartbeats - though if the person can lie without it effecting their physiology she's screwed (hi Azula). While this sounds awesome, it does have a few obvious flaws: when on anything other than solid earth, her vision is effected. Also, she can't sense things in the water or air unless she manages to catch someone throwing it on the ground. She's apparently really good at judging distances and the like.

Toph's parents did eventually enroll her in private lessons with Master Yu, who owned a private earthbending academy in the city. He would come to the Beifong grounds to instruct her - although he never allowed her to progress beyond the basic exercises ("stances and breathing exercises only"). Toph's parents never understood her ability to "see", and for them she ended up playing the part of the helpless, well-behaved little girl they thought she was, for lack of any better ideas. While Toph did run away at six, she returned, and didn't seem all that willing to leave her parents later on until she felt she had no choice, at the threat of even stronger confinement. Despite their overprotectiveness and unwillingness to see her as she was, Toph always very clearly cared about her parents. It just wasn't a truly happy relationship, but a more tense one. Because of this, Toph had to let off steam somehow. At some point Toph entered the underground earthbending tournament (seriously) known as the Earth Rumble. Her pseudonym was the Blind Bandit, and no one knew where she came from or where she went to after fights. They only knew that the little girl managed to take the championship and defend it.

While all of this was going on in Gaoling, other stuff that would become relevant to Toph was going on in the rest of the world. Story time! While usually people only have one form of bending, there is one very important exception: the Avatar. The Avatar is a spirit constantly reborn in a huge cycle. First the spirit is born into the Earth Kingdom, then the next life starts in the Fire Nation, then the next in the Air Nomads, then the next in the Water Tribes - and then it repeats. This spirit is taxed with keeping balance between the four nations, and also in mediating between the spirit world and the physical world. And the Avatar can also use all four styles of bending. While the Avatar can call up knowledge from past lives in a form known as the Avatar State (or can consult with the spirits of past Avatars) the Avatar has to train in and master all four elements, typically starting with the one he was born into and following the cycle after. This is very common knowledge in Toph's world.

Also common knowledge? About a hundred years before the story starts, the last Avatar (from the Air Nomads) disappeared, pretty much right before the Fire Nation attacked everyone and tried to take over the world. In Toph's time the Fire Nation has pretty much beat everyone into submission except the innermost Earth Kingdom cities and the Northern Water Tribe. When the story starts, Aang, the Avatar who disappeared (frozen in an ice berg yadda yadda yadda), comes back and has to master bending. He also had to do this while evading capture from the Fire Nation, who are not at all pleased that the Avatar is there to be a spanner in the works to their whole world domination schtick. Aang was already an airbending master, and then he learned waterbending, and while in the process of continuing on with that, he found he had to find an earthbending teacher. He'd wanted to learn from his old friend Bumi, who was king of Omashu, but unfortunately the wily old earthbender was captured and didn't see fit to free himself. He did give Aang one piece of advice, though: he had to find a teacher who waited and listened.

His search for a teacher took Aang and his companions, Katara (his waterbending teacher) and Sokka (Katara's brother and resident Idea Guy), to Gaoling. They eventually found their way to the Earth Rumble, where the best earthbenders in the world competed. While most of the men in the competition were only in it to beat people up and look tough (...which...admittedly was part of Toph's reason for being there) and only listened to their muscles, the second Toph came on it was different. Besides recognizing Toph from a vision, Toph very carefully waited and listened to the earth before moving. She also managed to protect her championship! ...Until Aang challenged her (he just wanted to talk) and knocked her out of the ring with earthbending. Needless to say, this display did not actually cause Toph to want to talk to Aang, and she stormed off in a huff.

Aang and the others would eventually track her down and try to get her to join. Toph would refuse a few times until she and Aang called a truce and she talked with him. Immediately after that the two twelve-year-olds were captured by the man who had run the earthbending tournament, who thought Toph had taken a fall on purpose (which went to show he knew absolutely nothing about her; Toph would rather die than lose on purpose). While her parents brought the ransom, the men who had kidnapped Toph and the Avatar refused to release Aang. While Toph begins to go off, Katara asks for her help - and after Toph's father says she can't help because she's small and tiny and fragile and weak, she takes her hand back from him and says: "Yes. I can."

She then proceeded to stop Katara and Sokka from helping her; the Earth Rumble master had every other contestant helping him to attack them, and Toph took all of them on by herself. And she won. After that, her parents came to realize that she wasn't the girl she'd always tried to be for them, the one they had always wanted her to be. She talked to them about it openly, admitting for the first time that she loved being an earthbender and loved fighting. And she pointed out she'd never had a single friend, at the age of twelve. Her parents seemed to listen, but then said this had all shown them one thing: that she had been given too much freedom. Not ones to kidnap little girls, the gang left the Beifong estate.

...Only Toph decided enough was enough, and ran away to follow them. Though she told the others her parents had changed their minds, they actually hadn't. And that was the story of how Toph Beifong became the earthbending teacher to the Avatar. The group would go on many adventures as they attempted to defeat the Fire Lord, and those can be summarized aptly as "the misadventures of the heroic gang trying to defeat the Big Bad". There are, however, a few adventures of note I should briefly describe for you because of their importance to Toph's story (I will not summarize all the episodes because that would be a little bit crazy).

The first was when the two men her parents had sent after her (Master Yu and the Earth Rumble guy) managed to capture her. They trapped her in a metal cell and began to haul her back home. The significance of the metal cell was this: no earthbender had ever been able to bend metal, and therefore Toph was truly trapped. At least, she should have been. Trapped in a cage being taken back to another cage, and knowing the Avatar and the others needed her...Toph stopped and thought, and she became the first earthbender in her world to become a metalbender. This understandably freaked her captors the hell out and she obviously ditched them and headed back. After this, Toph would continue using her metalbending throughout the series. Since no one else in the world knew how to metalbend, this sort of gave her the best kind of unfair advantage: THE ONE IN HER FAVOR.

One of the other important Toph events was when the gang was in a desert. THE desert, really. They managed to find a mystical library and Toph decided not to go inside but instead to hang with Appa up top because WOW A PLACE WITH A BUNCH OF BOOKS wasn't really that much of a draw for the blind girl. The thing about the desert was at that time Toph's vision on sand was not great. And while she was up top, some bandits tried to steal Appa. She probably could have dealt with that except as that happened the library thing started to collapse, and the other three members of the group were inside. She essentially had to pick between letting Appa get captured or letting the rest of the group get buried alive. Toph tried to take the third option of doing both, but when it came down to it she apologized to Appa and held the tower-library in place from collapsing long enough to allow the others to escape it alive.

This event would cause her to spend the rest of the series practicing her sandbending, and by the third season she's capable enough to make miniature city models in great detail out of sand, among other things.

Anyway, the group would eventually take on the Fire Lord and hey guess what they managed to stop the invasion/war and stuff was grand. Life did continue on after that for them, however. Toph decided to start up a Metalbending academy, and much, much later on would help to found Republic City (the main backdrop of the Legend of Korra) and she would become the chief of the metalbending police and at some point would have the most badass daughter of all daughters, Lin Beifong (no one knows who her father is). All in all, not a bad life.

Reincarnated History:

Like her preincarnation counterpart, Sophie Bai was born blind. Unlike her preincarnation, Sophie wasn't immediately locked up and kept secret from the world by her parents. Born into a perfectly ordinary middle-class family rather than the richest family in her city ("and maybe even the world"), Sophie's parents dealt with their daughter's blindness in a much more measured way. They did research. Books, movies, talks with doctors, you name it, they did it. Rather than looking at the issue from the stand point of "how can we keep her from ever getting hurt" (although as with most parents they did want to shield their child from harm to a normal degree) the Bai family approached the matter from the viewpoint of "how can we help her to function without her vision?"

This was a wildly different view from the Beifong family in another life. Her parents encouraged her and supported her, and while they helped her as a child, their support and encouragement led Sophie to be able to support herself fairly well on a day to day basis (in terms of doing things; she is thirteen and not actually eligible for work outside of like, lemonade stands). There were problems and roadblocks, but they faced those together, and Sophie's childhood actually doesn't have anything stunningly bad to report. Sure, she got injured a few times due to stupid accidents she kind of blames herself for (going too fast, normally, especially at home where she feels most confident - and then misjudging something or miscounting steps and running into something. Ow). But those times barely stand out against her entire life.

Her childhood was happy despite the blind thing (and really, Sophie rarely gave it too much thought in the "woe is me" sense. She wasn't raised to feel sorry for herself). Sophie's parents always had time for her and liked to listen to her. Her father was (and is) an ordinary salesman at an office downtown. Her mother works as a secretary at the same office, which is how the met. And beyond her parents, Sophie has a perfectly ordinary extended family, all of whom she's fond of to various degrees (generally; of note is her cousin Bruce Banner, who is over three times her age and about as many times as nerdy. Sophie magnanimously likes him despite both these things, because she is just That Nice - and of course that connection was discussed and cleared with the Bruce player). She's sort of one of the younger members of the extended clan, but this has never bothered Sophie much. While she gets treated like the baby of the family sometimes, it's usually just doting on her or something, which she's okay with as long as it's clear they're just doing it because she's the "cute little baby". ...Well, okay, she's okay with it as long as she's getting something out of it.

Sophie was always permitted to attend a regular school, as well. She did have some special attention from teachers (and students), but just getting to interact with other children and getting out of the house? Was far different from what she might have expected in another life. Sophie made friends and enemies and got involved in things she liked. While Sophie never joined any school clubs officially, she sometimes drops by on meetings that sound interesting and doable, and otherwise spends a lot of time hanging out with friends or her family (which is, admittedly, pretty damn dorky). There is always something to do if you look, and Sophie gets antsy if she's left with nothing to do for too long.

So: Sophie's life has really, truly been pretty unremarkable from ages zero to thirteen, and that is honestly pretty remarkable considering her past life. Her interests include listening to music (not getting involved in it herself, although she's good at keeping a beat) and movies (though she hates movie montages - what's the point of long music sequences where apparently there are a lot of meaningful images and clips that have no dialogue to like clue her in on that without an ongoing translation by her parents or someone else?) and going for walks. Sophie also likes to read a lot, or to have things read to her. Note that these books are not classics or tough in general - she likes children's fantasies, grade school levelish, with lots of daring rescues and escapes and fantastical things within. Also blood and death and battles. She loves that stuff, too. She likes witty wordplay and jokes, too, and that sort of thing will almost always earn her affability. Also? SPACE. Space is cool. Sophie likes hearing about things from space, and has gotten her parents to describe a stupid amount of space-related objects.

Overall? Sophie is a rather well-adjusted middle school girl (going into 8th grade this school year!) who tends to spend a lot of time with her parents. She's also pretty snarky, but details.

First Echo:

On a trip to the natural history museum last year, Sophie got to touch a meteorite. Most of the exhibits were honestly pretty boring if you couldn't see them (and especially if your really boring teacher took it upon himself to give you extra commentary because of it) but getting to touch something from space was, in her words, pretty rad. ...Not that she said that out loud to anyone but her parents, because wow.

This triggered a sort of hollow feeling she shrugged off, and the numbers. And, when she got home? A bracelet in her room. Her parents didn't seem to know where it came from, but Sophie liked the feel of it and wears it most of the time these days, although she has no idea what it means or meant to her at one point (a sign of friendship, and also of awesome space rocks). She fiddles with it habitually these days, but not in the way Toph used to do - Toph used to metalbend it to keep herself amused, and Sophie obviously doesn't have that capability.

Preincarnation Personality:

"My name is Toph because it sounds like tough!" ...Okay, so that's not actually a quote from Toph. It is an in-universe quote, though, from play!Toph in the play "The Boy in the Iceberg" - which the gang goes to see while in the Fire Nation. It is sort of a ridiculous play and Toph is played by a huge muscular guy who actually says that. This play, though? It's written based on secondhand information in-universe. So somehow over the course of stories about the gang, Toph came across as the sort of person who needed to be played by a really muscular dude (Aang, on the other hand, is played by a bald lady, so uh there you go). That this sort of idea got put across isn't surprising. More than almost any other character (even Aang at times, who has a pesky pacifist air nomad sort of nature and tries to talk things out) Toph tends to sort of demolish the enemy really happily. Despite being a twelve-year-old blind girl who is smaller than pretty much everyone else in the series with maybe one exception, Toph is also one of the characters people least want to meet in an alley while doing something she wouldn't like.

Toph is tough, no question about it. While it should be noted that the image she showed for her parents was that of a demure, mannerly girl who was helpless for at least twelve years (and she seems perfectly capable of calling up those manners and that persona at need), Toph tends to deliberately distance herself from that girl. It's both rebelliousness and a sincere dislike for that sort of thing. In general Toph tends to act like a tomboy (or at least the popular image of one) and likes dirt, fighting, and being the best. She's abrasive and loud and confident in herself, and god forbid you get on her bad side, because she's not exactly gracious when she doesn't get along with people. Hell, she's not even that careful with her friends in the general way of things.

A lot of this has to do with a desire for independence. Having known for most of her life that she can do things, and also having been told for all her life that she can't, Toph doesn't take well to any suggestions that she's less than capable, or that she needs help. She takes even less well to any hints of pity about her lack of sight, or any signs that people don't think she's capable of doing things. While independence isn't a bad thing in and of itself, Toph takes it to extremes. When she first starts travelling with the gang, she almost entirely refuses to help out with chores and makes a show of taking care of herself. It isn't that she doesn't (or didn't) like the others, but more that she saw it as a matter of pride and thought that everyone should do their own things because that was how you proved yourself. She'd also later get in a snit and storm off after the others tried to help her out with things, assuming that they were doing so because she was blind when they were actually doing so just because she was their friend.

This is a point that gives her trouble. Toph isn't really great at the whole friend thing. While she's easily the most versed in social cues of society thanks to her parents and street smarts thanks to her time as the Blind Bandit, Toph had never actually had a friend before meeting Aang, Katara, and Sokka. It's clear early on that she's not really sure how to treat them like a friend - she sort of just treats them as she likes, and her affection is sort of awkward even when it's clearly there. She tends to punch people when she likes them, and doesn't seem to see the point in sugarcoating things even for friends. White lies don't have much to do with Toph Beifong, and she doesn't seem interested in changing that state of affairs.

Toph is really incredibly brutally honest. She never, ever sugarcoats or avoids saying something if she thinks it (though she can occasionally hold her tongue for the sake of a scheme, sometimes) and is often the character in the group who makes snarky one-liners after something happens. Status, gender, age - none of these seem to convince Toph to not say exactly what she thinks. In addition to that her tone and words can be a little bit caustic and aimed to hurt, honestly. She spent a chunk of her childhood beating up grown men in what equated to pro wrestling (but with earthbending); Toph's normal mode of speech seems to involve mocking people, even when she likes them. She calls Aang things like Twinkletoes and the Fancy Dancer, and has nicknames of equally derisive natures for the rest of her friends.

These things could be good in certain lights, but while Toph is a good guy, she's never really painted as being a nice guy. Oh, she's definitely supportive of her friends in her own way, and wouldn't actually leave anyone alone if she could help, but she's her own abrasive, boastful self as she goes about things, and you have to get to know her to get past that. Toph clearly adores the rest of the gang and does her best to stick with them and even makes sort of awkward attempts to cheer certain members up at certain times. And sometimes her attempts can be surprisingly on-key - like when she tells Zuko his uncle is already proud of him, during the Play episode (and then proceeds to sock him in the arm because that's how she rolls). In the comics, Toph is shown to care about her students a lot, as well. She believes in them when no one else does, and is willing to do a lot for them - and when they do well, she does praise them. She just also sort of berates them a lot and calls theme names, because that is how Toph Beifong operates. Another point towards her caring center is how long she puts up with her parents' coddling and how she actually plays the part of the girl they want for them. Toph's relationship with her parents is pretty tense and confused, but she always clearly cares about them. It's just...hard.

She's also the one who goes to try to talk to Zuko after he attempts to join and everyone else says no (although that ends in burnt feet, so) because she's capable of swallowing her pride and trying to think of what's best for the group when it comes down to it. And Toph does have a lot of pride. She's confident in her abilities and hates it when other people aren't. That said, she's also actually fairly decent at keeping a cool head at times. While Toph trash-talks and has a temper, she's also the teacher who waits and listens before acting. Toph often displays a wisdom beyond her years in regards to earthbending, and can often be more mature than she usually acts when she's bending or in a situation where her skills are needed (though she also admittedly jokes around while doing all of this, sometimes). The thing about her confidence is that she can pretty much always back it up, which makes it hard to talk her down to, you know, not being all gung ho about it. Even when backed into a corner (ala the metal cell before she learned metalbending) Toph doesn't seem to give up. She's very determined and seems to be made of the rock she knows how to bend.

Basically: abrasive, sarcastic snarker in a tiny body who despite that is gruffly affectionate with people she likes. Also a hero although she likes the fighting part a little too much, probably. Really, really protective of her independence and takes it badly when anyone suggests she can't do something on her own or can't do something.

Any differences:

Born into another world and a different set of circumstances than Toph, Sophie is obviously pretty different. The first and most obvious point is how Sophie is actually a lot more willing to accept help without snarking about it or being offended. This is not because she is not independent. She is, but it's in a different way and to a different degree than in canon. Instead of being raised by parents who didn't believe in her capability to function normally and being locked away and having everything done for her, Sophie was raised by guardians who seemed to believe in her and who raised her to be able to function on her own. Yes, it was hard. Learning to use a cane and learning braille and learning how to do everything that sighted people could do without a second thought was a huge pain and sometimes things take her twice as long and it's frustrating. But Sophie has a support system that actually believes in her and enables her to stand on her own two feet, rather than a support system that treats her as younger and less capable than she is and doesn't allow her to do things on her own.

So for Sophie, accepting help from that support system is not admitting that her parents and the rest of the world was right and she's tiny and helpless and weak. Hell, Sophie is willing to ask for help if she needs it. She has learned in this lifetime that help is just that: help. Sophie still wouldn't ask someone to do something for her, but she is willing to ask people to help her to do things for herself. This does not mean that she won't get annoyed if people offer to do things for her, however, if she hasn't asked for help. Help given without being asked for still ticks her off (although to lesser degrees than it would Toph).

Her childhood and relationship with her parents are really different, and the relationship with her parents is actually a big driving thing here. Sophie has a much happier home life than Toph did. Sophie wouldn't consider running away because there is nothing to run away from. She actually keeps her parents in the loop on her life because she's never been given any indication that they would treat her differently because of x y or z. Sophie actually has a support system and grew up with it. Sophie is also actually surprisingly more polite because of this. She wasn't raised with high society manners, but she was raised with the usual set, and she never saw a reason to blow them off or ignore them just to prove a point. Sure, it may grate on her nerves to be polite when annoyed, and Sophie is still pretty damn sarcastic and can be rude, but she's also a hell of a lot better behaved because her parents raised her up right and she's always been pretty happy in her life.

In general Sophie is actually better at social interactions than Toph. Sophie has had friends since she was tiny, and has never been locked away from the world. She's a lot less awkward around people and more willing to show affection. This doesn't mean she doesn't show affection in occasionally rough ways, and that she doesn't take the mickey out of people, but Sophie is actually more in tune with social norms and following them. She's willing to hug people and hold hands and will occasionally even open up about her problems without a big to-do. It's a miracle! Sophie is still really honest and blunt and sort of snarky, though. It's just more good-natured than it isn't (although it was honestly pretty good-natured with her friends in a past life) and she can't help herself about it sometimes. She is more willing and likely to apologize to people if she really makes a mistake, although it might be a teensy bit reluctant in certain cases.

This filters in to how her independence is different. Sophie? Is not actually rebellious. She just believes in doing things for herself and doing what she can for herself, but doesn't do things just for the sake of rebelling or blowing off steam. She has no reason to do so. She was raised believing "you can do everything except see" and that sometimes it would just take her longer to accomplish things. This means her confidence is still there, but it's more a confidence she has been raised with. She has been raised to have self-worth and to believe herself a capable person. While Toph Beifong was confident, she was not raised this way and at times her confidence was because of that, because she was proving herself, and her drive to prove herself was really, really important. Sophie has less of a drive to prove herself. Oh, she's competitive, and she likes to give her all, but she doesn't see the need to prove that she's not a weak little helpless blind girl because the people most important to her in the world have always tried to never treat her like that.

Another thing? Sophie may actually be a bit more confident and independent than Toph in another direction. Without the magic-feet way of bypassing her lack of sight, Sophie has actually had to deal with blindness on a daily basis. She has always had trouble seeing, unlike Toph ("I've always been blind, but I've never had trouble seeing"). Sophie has learned skills to work around that, which admittedly Toph did as well - but Sophie's skills are a lot less earth magic and a lot more hard effort that she still works on to this day. She's also grown up with less general resources in terms of money/power whatever, which comes across in how she deals with problems.

Abilities:

Pretty much all of Toph's abilities center around one single capability: earthbending. In the world of Avatar, "bending" is the term used to describe the capabilities of some of the people of their world who can control ("bend") earth, fire, water, or air. Toph Beifong was one of the - if not the - greatest earthbenders of all time, both by her opinion and those of others. She was the master chosen to teach Aang earthbending in the series for a very good reason: she's good at it. Toph has even mastered sandbending, which is notoriously hard for earthbenders - and she invented metalbending, which would later be more widely used thanks to the Beifong Metalbending Academy.

The most important use of Toph's earthbending is the one that has caused the most differences between Sophie and Toph. Toph never had a problem seeing - with earthbending, she could feel the vibrations in the ground and used them to "see". This was part of the reason she hated shoes. Sophie, without that ability, has turned out differently than she otherwise might have.

Toph was also much more fight-capable and sturdy than Sophie is, partly because vision was never an issue for her, even though she was blind. Toph was a really good combatant, although again, she relied on her bending more than anything else.

Roleplay Sample – Third Person: Test drive thread.
Roleplay Sample - Network:

[ When the video comes on, there's a girl. She doesn't seem to react to it at all, instead still absently fiddling with her phone. While there's a video function, Sophie barely every uses it unless her parents request it. After all, it does jack all for her. ]

Did I get it...? Geeze. Can't tell. [ It would help if there were some sort of speech confirmation that she'd done it right, but beggers couldn't be choosers, she guessed. ]

Yo. Say something, someone. Anything. All the people I heard talking - can you hear me?

[ Sophie's about to say something else, but then she shrugs, annoyed. ]

Guess I need to stop talking to see, huh?

Sample 2:

[ A while after her first access, probably; Sophie uses the voice function as a matter of course, unless she hits video. Sometimes accessing it through her computer is just easiest, since she has a screen reader there and can figure things out if people have written (which people do a lot - though she's screwed sometimes with handwriting, which annoys her). The only thing she never uses is written, for...well, obvious reasons. ]

Hey, so. ...Ugh, I really don't want to, but...can I get one of you losers to like, walk me to school?

[ She sounds just as reluctant as you'd think, although resigned. Asking for help isn't the worst thing, but asking for help for something she's been doing fine for years? It's sort of aggravating and it makes her feel small. But still, not asking would be irresponsible at this point and she knows it. So she...sort of has to do this. Right. ]

It's not like I forgot the way or anything. I mean, I learned that way back, have it down pat as long as no one screws me up but, uh...

[ A pause. These people are not her parents nor her family members (save one) and that makes her a little less happy about it, but... ]

People are getting attacked by stuff randomly, right? And I'm not...I mean, I don't know if I'll really be able to...do anything about that. Or tell what's happening before it happens. And I don't actually want to worry the parental units by suddenly wanting them to drive me everywhere - which, yeah, I don't think they'd actually go for, because I have to be independent at my age yadda yadda yadda and is there something I'm not telling them blah blah blah, but I also kinda guess it'd be sort of horrible to like, just get jumped by something and then have them figure out there was something I wasn't telling them that way? I guess it'd also be really great if you could walk me home from school, too.

Basically, I just need someone who can...you know, see danger coming. [ She gestures to her own eyes, which wouldn't be so hot for that. ] And maybe do something about it. I will count "helping me run away" as doing something about it for the purposes of this request.

I can't pay you or anything unless you want like three bucks because my allowance isn't that big and I'm thirteen.

But you should totally say yes because I'm thirteen and if you don't and I get jumped this will be on your heads forever and ever.

[ ...Sophie, please. ]

...Also, I'd appreciate it. So, uh. Thanks.

If you say yes, do so in voice or video form, or use text, because otherwise you're just writing into the ether and that'll do neither of us any good.

English text. Thanks. [ That done, she'll go do SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY. ]

Any Questions? Nope!