北方拓芙 I'M GONNA ROCK THIS LAND. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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lucetiooc2012-01-08 09:10 pm
metalbends) wrote in lucetiooc2012-01-08 09:10 pm
Future!Toph Part Two: Electric Boogaloo
We interrupt your regularly scheduled intro train to bring you more plotting! So you may recall, about a week ago I posted this about Toph's upcoming mallynap effect and who wanted to be involved. Well, I've gone ahead and drawn up a handy dandy CR List for the occasion so it's a bit easier to keep track of things!
So if you're not on there and you would like to be, just go ahead and comment here! It is not too late to work something out. Also, if you want something added to your character's relationship with Toph, just say so! This is open to everyone, so even if you're brand spanking new, don't hesitate to jump on!
Toph's return should be up in the next few days here, so I'd like to get the Planning of the Things wrapped up in this post here. I'd especially love to here from the Avatar cast (IS THERE GONNA BE BABIES OR NOT, MASA AND AKAI) as Toph would definitely have AU future memories of them.
Okay, that's all! Thanks to everyone who is participating. I'm uber excited for this to go down, and you all are making it simply wonderful and amazing.
So if you're not on there and you would like to be, just go ahead and comment here! It is not too late to work something out. Also, if you want something added to your character's relationship with Toph, just say so! This is open to everyone, so even if you're brand spanking new, don't hesitate to jump on!
Toph's return should be up in the next few days here, so I'd like to get the Planning of the Things wrapped up in this post here. I'd especially love to here from the Avatar cast (IS THERE GONNA BE BABIES OR NOT, MASA AND AKAI) as Toph would definitely have AU future memories of them.
Okay, that's all! Thanks to everyone who is participating. I'm uber excited for this to go down, and you all are making it simply wonderful and amazing.
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So, as a point of reference, Fenimore is 17 (technically going on 18 in February, but she tends to stubbornly stick to her summer birthday even if it is no longer accurate) and thus would be 23 going on 24 at the end of the six years. The other important age reference is that Fenimore is the main person responsible for Sophie, an NPC toddler born in Luceti left behind by a former housemate. Sophie is 3 years old now and will be 9 by the end of it. Whether or not Toph has actually met Sophie in this future, she might be aware since Fenimore kind of has to rearrange her schedule around Sophie and thus this would probably get mentioned someday.
When she is 18, Fenimore is drafted and barely ekes out a win against a Third Party soldier when she is cornered into having to fight. Despite having spent about a year training in the Kyoshi style, this is the first time she realizes that she actually can learn to beat a soldier. She starts taking her training more seriously, as a skill she can learn and less of exercise that satisfies the people who think she needs to learn self-defence. On the downside, this makes her enjoy it less.
Still, over the next couple of years, she becomes a competent fighter. Possibly she could spar with Toph for the blind martial arts, but I imagine Toph will progress too quickly for her to keep up when she can “see,” since Toph has a bit of a headstart with bending forms mimicking martial arts and she actually enjoys putting in the time for training. Versus earthbending is right out, since Fenimore would be just as squishy as the unnamed nonbender soldiers in Avatar – I like to think Fenimore would be a quick study, but nothing unusual.
A break in her learning comes when Fenimore is 20 when she has a nervous breakdown and locks herself in an empty apartment on as empty of a floor as she can find. Eventually, she would probably get coaxed out by various CR and taught what a therapist is, but it might take several days. She can sneak out at night to raid the grocery store for food and other stores for things she can distract herself with (possibly she will end up having made a few dozen bad hats) if she gets too hungry. Then it would probably take a number of weeks before she pulls herself together enough to be semi-reliably functional again when it comes to things like looking after Sophie and probably about a year before she stops having major backslides. But her attempts to big sister Toph, especially in meddling with her love life, will pick back up by the latter part of this period, though, even if it will be more inconsistent. She likes acting like a big sister.
I imagine Toph would likely be aware of this occurring, if only because I imagine that the initial nervous breakdown would probably be semi-public (either actually in public or due to an accidental video turning on when she throws her journal at the wall) and some of her backsliding would have noticeable signs, like the time when she cuts off both her twintails in a moment of anger. At the least, I’m guessing she would probably find out that something bad happened in Fenimore’s past that she didn’t handle properly. But how much she knows about the cause would probably depend on how involved she got during the nervous breakdown year, as her defences against talking about her problems would be down during this time. I’ll put more detail at the end of this for if you would be interested in Toph learning more, but for the sake of making this less tl;dr than it already it, that will be a footnote.
By 23, she is largely back to normal, even if there are still some leftover problems. She’s somewhat more open to new ideas and a little more open about herself, even if she is still a bit tsundere and remains \reluctant to talk about her own issues. Over the intervening time, she has made some effort to find a career path, hopping from job to job in the community every now and then. At this point in the timeline, she’s volunteering at the medical centre, washing blankets, bringing food for doctors and patients, and maybe pitching in now and then in some kind of light nursing-esque role. Her hair will have grown back to nearly its old length, though she won’t wear it in twintails anymore. She has also spent her whole time in Luceti single, outside of events. She’s mostly gotten over the frustration of having one week experiment romances most Februarys snatched away just as she starts to get into it, but she still gets a little touchy if people bring it up when she meddles in others’ love lives.
Anyway, as said, this is all very much tentative and can be changed entirely, especially since this would involve learning of things offscreen that could be learned ICly, like what was mentioned for Ion. (Though, granted, Fenimore will probably never say otherwise.) But when I look at how Fenimore represses her issues, does her level best to never talk about them, and has no idea what a therapist is, nervous breakdown seemed like the most obvious prediction for her future.
Footnoted issues leading up to said potential nervous breakdown: In her canon, Fenimore’s village of Ferines (an amphibious humanoid species that she belongs to) was attacked and the survivors taken to be experimented on by humans. She was the only one to survive out of her village, excluding some who were away from the village at the time of the attack who didn’t get captured, such as her sister. Out of the ones who were experimented on, which includes all of the friends she made to that point, she’s the only one who survived.
In the game, she generally only talks about this when she is angrily blaming one of the main characters for this, but after she comes to like that character, she never brings it up again and acts as though it never happened. I take this to mean that she represses and avoids dealing with her feelings about this, which is why she’s only talked about it to two people and only when she can’t hide it, and also why she’s only told Sokka that she’s learned that she is about to die back home. She sometimes tries to release some of this through getting angry or complaining about petty things, but she’s been doing less of that over her time in Luceti as she has matured without doing anything about dealing with the bigger issues mentioned.
Meanwhile: becoming a competent fighter has made her feel even worse about the attack on her village, as she had done nothing to try to defend it (not to mention the ones in her village who did try failed while about half the people of Luceti would have managed to make a much bigger indent, if not defeated the army on their own); spending time in Luceti have picked away at her attempts to ignore her time as an experimental subject back in her world, especially since she has now experienced the mallynapping conditions that are similar to her own world’s experience (except the experiments are much more complicated); and watching people come and go makes it harder to ignore that she is going to die within minutes of returning home. That’s combined with lesser stressors, such as being the person mainly responsible for raising a young child (Sophie), not having any idea what she wants to do with her life now that she is removed from the highly traditional, somewhat patriarchal society in which she was raised, and understanding that she doesn’t really have any outstanding skills by Luceti’s standards or even her own society’s standards. Avoiding dealing with or even talking about these issues eventually, in this version of the future, leads to nervous breakdown.
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And it occurs to me that if Toph at 16 wasn't so good at the trying to help, it might actually be easier to find out about it since it might provoke angry outbursts that might include detail she would otherwise censor. =P ...Honestly, even Toph was good at the help, there's a pretty good chance of angry outbursts. When Fenimore is emotional, they happen pretty easily. She will eventually come to appreciate it, though.
Anyway, Fenimore would be pretty vague on details in spots when she talked about it, especially about her time in the prisons where the experimenting occurred, but it would be enough to get the narrative where soldiers in red attacking her village (what is it with bad guy soldiers and red?), she was the only one to survive the experiments (conducted via torture implements, so they weren't nearly as complicated as those by the Malnosso), and she was rescued just in time to save her from dying in one (initially by another Ferines, but then by a group of humans). She'd also have told her about how she's not human, which would actually explain the underwater-breathing-with-hair-glowing powers she showed during Luceti Valley and how she got those river rocks, and she’d have told her how a big part of why she went through this was because a number of the humans in Fenimore's world are inclined to oppress the Ferines. Actually, from Fenimore's perspective, the humans of her world are about 50% dicks, since she had met more humans who actively would try to kill her than not back there. Since the first ones she met were dicks and Ferines in general believe that humans are dicks due to past conflict/oppression, Fenimore actually initially hated humans, but she got convinced by Shirley, the Ferines who rescued her, to give them a chance and now she only hates specific humans. Still, Toph will be getting a pretty biased account of the humans of Fenimore's world, with how much oppression is in that tale (not counting the ones who are/have been in Luceti, who were the ones involved in rescuing her). Especially since Fenimore and a number of other Ferines get killed in the midst of a power grab by the knights on the opposite side of the soldiers in red after she and a group of Ferines were involved in helping stop a major attack on the knights' country. That latter part might get initially left out when she is recounting the above, since it is in the future by her perspective, but would later come out.
Toph might also get the chance to find out other details over the years by making connections via comments slipping out. For example, Fenimore wears lots of clothing to cover a number of scars left over from the previous stuff and the twintails she eventually cuts off in this future were somewhat personally symbolic of her hope to reunite with her twin sister (who wore the same hair style the last time they saw each other).
I think that’s the level of detail Toph might get, along with the other stuff mentioned in the footnote. …I hope this is understandable, as I have lately been getting super-tired by midnight and my thought processes aren’t entirely clear atm.
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And I'll give you a chance to take it into account soon, I just didn't get to the end of my tags today and thus didn't get to tagging anything new. ;_;no subject
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I'm guessing the latter, but I will pretend it is the former. =P
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