Earth Kingdom: Enlai

Character Profile for one of my "Avatar The Last Airbender" OCs.
Karu | Enlai | Nunataq | Sinaaq


Top pose based on this [link] stock photo by ~ImagersStock.
Middle pose based on this [link] stock photo by *Katanaz-Stock.

"Avatar: The Last Airbender" is © Michael DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko, and Nickelodeon.
Enlai has been accepted at *Avatar-OC-club: [link]


Character Profile
Name: Enlai (Chinese meaning "favor coming")
Age: 26
Gender: Male
Height: 6'1"
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Green
Scars/Distinctions: None.
Appearance: Tall and muscled with a consistent layer of stubble on his chin, Enlai could be terribly intimidating guy. However, his near-constant face-splitting and lopsided grins make him approachable and friendly. While his sheer size causes him to naturally stand out among the other residents of Ba Sing Se, it also makes it near impossible for anyone to guess at his actual occupation. Logically, big guys like that don't make good thieves. And with the sheer number of residents and refugees in Ba Sing Se, his size isn't strange enough to draw THAT much attention.
Clothing: Enlai's clothing is pretty stereotypical of the Earth Kingdom, and doesn't stand out among the residents of the middle or lower rungs of Ba Sing Se. However, in the upper rung of the city, he is obviously out of place being both too big and not richly dressed. His favorite item of clothing his his hat, which is almost always with him, even if it's not on his head. Enlai uses the cloth of his outer-tunic arranged across his shoulders and face combined with his hat to make himself unidentifiable on the off chance he is seen while working. The way the cloth flows in this arrangement also makes it harder to judge his size from a distance.
Personality: Charismatic, intelligent and calculating, Enlai exudes a happy-go-lucky exterior. He flirts with nearly any girl that will give him the time of day, and truly does live life for the pleasures of it. He is likely to drop something as soon as he stops finding it entertaining or getting something he wants from it. Words like "responsibility" and "duty" might as well be curse words to Enlai.

Other character development deviations:
01. [link] <- Initial Sketches
02. [link] <- Rough Intro
03. [link] <- Meet in Ba Sing Se (Rough Outline)
04. [link] <- Of Cabbages (*uvnote kiriban)
05. [link] <- Meet in Ba Sing Se (Final pg. 1)
06. [link] <- Character set interaction sketches 01
07. [link] <- Character set interaction sketches 02
08. [link] <- Sketches from ~secondlina (LiveJournal.com)

Character Skills
Profession: Thief
Arts: Surprisingly, Enlai is actually a skilled artist. In fact, its a large part of how he earns his money. Painting, carving, and sculpting are skills he has intentionally developed. Primarily an art thief, Enlai is intelligent enough to know that turning around and immediately selling the actual art piece is a fast track to getting caught. So he creates extremely accurate reproductions of the stolen pieces and sells those in the regular markets through a few vendors he is on good terms with. The buyers never meet the artist, and the sellers have no clue how he can so accurately reproduce the works (they have no clue he actually has the original at his Ba Sing Se apartment). But everyone's happy since demand for the replicas increase right after the original goes missing, and Enlai's are nearly always the most accurate. He gets rid of the original by either slipping it in among the reproductions or selling it on the Black Market that usually takes the art piece outside of the city.
Fighting Skills: Enlai isn't much of a fighter. In fact, he tries to avoid it. He's strong and big, so he can handle himself decently in a street brawl, but he can't take a trained fighter in a genuine fight. He's all about using his head.
Weapons: None.
Bending Skills: Earthbender, but not particularly powerful. Just a few basics... like chucking rocks and using earthbending to scale stone/clay walls.
Other Skills: Enlai is actually an educated man. How else would he be smart enough to come up with his art racket? He often snuck into classrooms as a child, and thusly knows how to read and write, knows some reasonably advanced math, and has the sort of logic and reasoning skills gained from secretly sitting in on the occasional Ba Sing Se University class that interests him.

Character History
Hailed From: Ba Sing Se
Current Residence: An apartment in the middle rung of Ba Sing Se.
Family: Unknown

Other History: Enlai lives his entire life, from birth, in the lower and middle rungs of Ba Sing Se. He is still living in the city when it falls to the Fire Nation's Princess Azula aided by the Dai Li. He decides to leave Ba Sing Se after the city falls to the Fire Nation (before he has to do something responsible... like join a resistance group). His recently developed "friendship" (of sorts) with the socially inept and unfriendly Karu (He probably just likes bugging the hell out of her after their initial meeting) causes him to decide it would be entertaining to follow her travels for a little while (since he's leaving Ba Sing Se anyways).