Pang Long Yen

Full Name: Pang Long Yen (Surname: Pang // Given Name: Long Yen)
Nickname: Everyone just calls him Old Man Pang or Pang
Gender: Male
Age: 67
Element: Earth // Metal Specialist
Birthplace: Omashu
Position: Master Armorer of the Kyoshi Legion // Master Earthbender & Metalbender

Sym, the Rabbit-mouse:

Personality: Known for being a kind, wise, and rather eccentric old man, Pang tends to be the sort of person who always knows what to say. Even the infamously short-tempered General Yu makes requests of his wisdom from time to time. That said, he doesn't always make sense. He's rather famous for his cryptic behavior. He enjoys playing Pai Sho in a particular lower ring tea house well known for it's stock of White Lotus members and he can often be found wandering about Ba Sing Se for no apparent reason.

Abilities:
Earthbender // Metalbender: Master
Though he finds little cause in his daily life to use his powers save perhaps to test his creations, Pang is an ingenious and talented master bender. In his earlier years, he used to craft his weapons using bending. However, as his skills turned more toward forging unbendable weapons and armor, he began to use the fire, anvil, and hammer of the forge. Nowadays, the most use his bending ever gets is repairing minor damage to the Breach and helping whenever expansions are made to the mammoth structure.

Smith // Metalworker // Silversmith: Master
Famed for his masterpieces of armor and weaponry, Pang literally wrote the book on creating unbendable metal works. Such is his reputation for creating items of legendary quality that he has become the chief armorer of the Kyoshi Legion and their most trusted craftsman. Even the general of the Legion, Katsumi Yu carries his weapons and wears armor he created.

Chemist // Woodworker // Leather Crafter: Expert
Using a thorough knowledge of woodworking and chemistry, he formulates many sturdy and reliable faux materials for his works that stand in very effectively for other materials. For instance, he will often use certain types of bone and specially formulated stains, lacquers, and enamels to make the bone have the texture and much of the visual quality of jade. Though it is impossible to make perfect reproductions using such materials, it would take a trained eye to spot the difference in the case of his finished products. He has also devoted a great deal of time to learning how to treat and work with leather, as many of his creations have quite a few leather elements. He's become quite good on all counts.

Appearance:
Height: 5'7" (1.524 m // 152.4 cm)
Weight: 132 lbs. (59.9 kg)
Eyes: Dark Brown
Hair: Gray // Originally Black

Pang is a rather diminutive old man who is quite a bit stronger than his appearance would suggest, owing mostly to fifty years of striking anvil with hammer. He has a fair few scars on his arms, mostly the vestiges of burns. He wears simple clothing made from fabrics that do not easily catch a spark and often his hands are blackened from the soot of the forge. He keeps his hair fairly short and maintains a beard and mustache. In truth, he cares very little for his appearance. So long as he is not uncomfortable in what he is wearing and how his hair is arranged, he gives little thought to the issue.

History: Born in Omashu to a pair of lowly government officials with little money or glory to their names, Pang was the third of six children and a constant pain in his parents' rear end. He made a habit of playing his bending powers early on. As their house sat near a junction in the city's mail network, he'd practice his bending out his window by diverting the stone sleds carrying the goods down another path. While this was entertaining for him, it left his parents in quite deep water with Lo Fan, the city's comptroller at the time, whose office was responsible for accounting for the goods.

When he was fifteen, Pang's father took him to meet with an old family friends, a man named Chan Tao Xue, a master smith who had been the pride of Omashu's Smithy District for decades. Little did he know that his father had made arrangements with Tao Xue to train him in the art of metalworking. Pang was resistant to say the least. However, Tao Xue demonstrated a skill that did interest him -- metalbending. Eager to learn this, if nothing else, Pang stayed around and slowly became Tao Xue's apprentice.

Over the next five years, he learned from his master the art of metalbending. Tao Xue, clever as he was skilled, tricked Pang into learning how to work metal as he would in a forge while he taught him metalbending. Eventually, he was able to coax Pang into using hammer and anvil to craft his creations and Pang almost instantly fell in love with the practice. He began to learn his master's techniques, mastering one after the next. He came to understand why his master, Tao Xue was so prized as a craftsman -- he made weapons to compliment benders. However, Pang saw a different path. He saw benders as having all the weapons they needed. So instead, he turned his attention to perfecting methods of creating weapons and armor that were impervious to both bending and chi-blocking. Within twenty years, he would become the world's foremost expert on the creation of equipment of just such a sort.

However, all through this time he harbored a dark secret. It was something he had hidden from his parents and his master alike for fear of what would become of him. For years, since before he was Tao Xue's student, he had been mildly involved with a gang which, in very cliched fashion, called themselves the Badger Moles. They had been using his bending to give them an edge over other gangs. When he began to learn metalbending, they became that much more powerful. But the gang's leaders were not satisfied with their small cut of power. They wanted more. They used him to create an underground arena, much like the one which existed in Gaoling. Through this, they set up a racket, cheating people out of vast sums of money by rigging matches. They used Pang as their trump card, forcing him not only to participate in and throw matches at their convenience, but also to collect on the debts incurred because of it.

One day, Tao Xue revealed his knowledge of this to Pang. It drove a wedge into their hard-earned friendship. Despite his anger at Pang's actions, Tao Xue only wished for his apprentice to free himself of this poisonous influence, though he did not say it to Pang. He desired for Pang to find his own path in this, which he did. Enraged by his master's anger with him, he turned on the Badger Moles and razed the arena into rubble. Furious, the Badger Moles retaliated against him using Fire Nation gadgets stolen from traveling merchants and inventors. However, the inferior metal was no match for his metalbending and he quickly put an end to them, but not before realizing that the Badger Moles had become just a small cog in a very large and expansive criminal organization spanning from one end of the Earth Kingdom to the other.

Pang felt he was left with no choice. He left Omashu, his family, and his master behind and traveled far south to Gaoling and beyond. All the while, he financed his travels by taking odd jobs, even bounties along his path. By the time he reached Kyoshi Island, he was a mess of a human being with little or no hope left. It was fitting, then, that he had finally found his way to the beginning of his new life...

Pang found that Kyoshi was no haven of gangsters nor a place they were like to come looking for him. It was peaceful, yet it was home to skilled and dangerous warriors who would be crossed only foolishly. He settled down on the island and crafted himself a simple forge on the outskirts of the village, makind kitchen knives and the occasional set of horseshoes for Bim, an old man who had an old horse as his only family.

Yet, it was the attention of a certain young Kyoshi Warrior named Ina that truly changed his life. His skill in crafting unbendable weapons had been hidden until she came along, having discovered his secret past. She challenged him to create for her a pair of tessen war fans that could not be bent. He agreed. He took care when crafting them, making them as beautiful as they were deadly. When he presented them to her, she promptly threw one into the air and attempted to crush it using her bending. When it landed on the ground with a thud, uneffected, she smiled and said only two words: "Well done."

Over the next few decades, Pang became more and more a part of the Kyoshi Warriors. He was their craftsman, forging their weapons and armor. But he became so much more. He became a trusted confidant and a wise ear for any who needed one. He found he was good at giving advice. When Meili began expanding the Warriors into a Legion, his task became that much more expansive. He moved with the Legion and it's general, Yu to Ba Sing Se where he helped raise the Breach and established a new forge for himself in it's uppermost reaches. Now, he is a legend -- the man who makes invincible blades. And he takes pride in his skill...

Approved. You are one third of the way to getting approved. I think that he should be our first grandmaster. What do you all think?

Seems like every power has good reasoning behind it. Great story by the way. Approved.

The Avatar Approves of this Profile.

have fun.