Prologue - Falling Stars from a Foreign Sky - Credits to my Co-GM, @Lewascan2, for the contents of the post.

Unknown Location - Unknown Time

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You died.

“Please, accept my deepest apologies.” The boyish voice was accompanied by a deep bow. “But my time is short and my measures truly desperate.”

Perhaps that was a rather underwhelming way to describe your present situation, but there wasn’t really a way to beat around the bush here. Of course, by its nature, death was something most humans feared, for good reason even. Be it uncertainty about what was to come or the worry about their death being painful, most people did not anticipate the day it came. And for you, sadly, that death was most likely one of the latter.

“As the one who should be a keeper of the Balance, I have committed an unforgivable sin upon you, taking you away from your well-deserved rests, from the afterlives you were promised to.” Still bowing, the being that had evidently pulled you here was shockingly young in appearance, a boy dressed as a monk, bald… and with a rather distinctive set of blue, arrow-shaped tattoos standing out against the skin of his forehead and hands. “But… if you can find it in yourselves to let me explain… Please, I need your help.”

You died.

”You all probably recognize me, eheh…” A sheepish smile crossed the boy’s face, as he straightened up. “I’m Avatar Aang, and it’s exactly because you already know who I am that I really need your help.”

You probably had a lot more to live for, but in the end, reality was harsh. Your time on the mortal coil was now over, and as awareness of your body faded… a brand new one came to be. It was almost a strange proprioception-like phenomenon, an alien awareness of your own existence as a soul cast from their body. You were a shapeless light in the dark, a single shooting star in a sky filled with many like you.

”The Balance of my world is in danger. I’m…” He frowned. “I’m still trying to fully understand what happened, but what you need to know is that someone replaced me. You all know how the events of my world should have gone, how I should have fulfilled my destiny as the Avatar, but in my world -in my dimension- something went wrong.”

You were being pulled. Inevitably. Inexorably. To what destination? You couldn’t rightly say, but perhaps you could make an educated guess or two. Bereft of a body, however, you were left with little more than your thoughts, with time to reflect, perhaps regret, perhaps not. Yet, you could sense that your destination was arriving swiftly. And then…

”While I was frozen in the ice of the Southern Water Tribes, I was hidden, but as it turns out, I was also vulnerable. Unconscious and still yet to really come into my potential as the Avatar, I was subjected to a spiritual attack. I tried to fight back, but it was useless. My attacker managed to boot me out of my own body, reduce me to a drifting spirit that they then locked outside my world entirely in this strange prison.”

Then it wasn’t.

”Thankfully, Raava was able to awaken and help me, and we managed to eventually break free… mostly.” He rubbed the back of his neck, chuckling. “Well, more like we managed to poke some holes in the thing, big enough to reach through. But when I looked back at my world…” He shook his head, frowning. “...it was muddled to my sight. Yet, I was able to sense a great disturbance in the Balance, a warp so great that it threatens to disturb even neighboring worlds.”

Lost in a sea of souls, you could only bear witness as something broke through the flow like breaching the surface of a rushing current. A shining presence, a pair of warm comforting hands, glowing gold, white and blue, as they swept through the spiritual currents with shockingly sure and delicate motions, with a care befitting a parent handling their newborn.

Aang gestured outside the cage. “I don’t really fully understand it, but this prison was made for me with a sort of… hardened crystallization of concepts, of these things called ‘tropes’, ‘memes’ and ‘narrative energies’. They gave my attacker strength I could not oppose at the time, strength I can’t even really oppose now, considering how strong the shield around my world is, a shield also made of the same material that crafted my prison.”

As those hands pass through, you feel them scooping you up, along with a cluster of other souls, rising up now, breaking free of the spiritual waves. The world dissolves then, from an ocean to a near blinding kaleidoscope of chaos, a cacophony of sensation and incomprehensible sights that the hands soon move to shield you from.

”I need your help, because even though I’ve broken my prison enough to reach outside it, it’s still keeping me from leaving and going back to my world to stop this… Imposter.” He gestures to you all, a smile on his lips. “I chose you because you all understand my world, which means you might know what needs to be done to save it. With Raava’s help, I was able to dip into the cycle of reincarnation itself, to find souls with a will to live and make a better world. You. If you are willing, I can help you live again. With the ability to influence the flow of souls, I can act around the shield blocking me and send you all in through the reincarnation cycle.”

And then you arrive to what you can only really describe as a bubble of broken reality, a sphere of shattered shards that shine with a prismatic, kaleidoscopic light. It is as if you are being pulled into the core of a shattered planet, a small nebula of orbiting chunks.

Aang bows deeply again. “Please, save my world and help to restore Balance. As the Avatar, my duty is to uphold the peace of the world, between humans and spirits alike, but trapped here like this, I can do nothing alone.” He swallows thickly. “Because of that… my only choice is to ask you for help, to ask you to be reborn into a world that may not even be exactly what you expect, to face some malevolent force that was even able to completely remove the Avatar as a threat. I can’t even truly tell you who they are or what they want, only that it can’t be anything good.”

And as you pass through that shattered, prismatic orbit’s outer layer, you find yourself becoming more aware, more tangible, more stable. Your sense of your body becomes clearer, echoes of sensation and control returning, even as the hands drawing you inward gently retreat, allowing you and the rest of the souls to spread out, to grow and expand in full.

Aang sighs deeply, but as he straightens up, his expression firms. “But don’t think I won’t aid you in this task…” He reaches to the side, and one of the broken shards of his prison floats over to his hand. “These shards contain strange powers… powers the Imposter exploited to trap me… but maybe, I can turn them into your advantages, allowing you to turn a portion of the Imposter’s power back on him.”

And what you find awaiting you there is a single human figure, floating there in the center of this shattered sphere with a strangely familiar alien creature of white and blue looming behind him, before it dives back and is absorbed into his body.

Turning several shards over under his gaze, he frowns. “Three… Two or three. That’s as many of these ‘cheats’ as I can grant each of you, as many as your souls can handle safely.” Nodding, he smiled now, looking a bit more confident. “With this power, I can give you all a chance, and better still, I can at least exert a bit of control over where you will be born.” Glancing outside the cage, he sighed. “From what I understand, you all probably-”

"Eh, just put me in the Fire Nation, I guess."

In the present, the stunned silence of the group of gathered souls was broken by a feminine one amongst them, a bold soul that stepped forward radiating impatience and unease.

Startled, Aang chuckled. "Ah, hold on a moment, are you sure you don't want to-?"

"Yeah, it's fine." The woman dismissed whatever he was going to say.

Aang blinked. "...Well, if that's what you prefer." He cleared his throat. "Then I appreciate the enthusiasm. But before I send you off, there's also the matter of the shards I could grant yo-"

"Meh."

"Uh-"

"Just whatever is probably fine."

"Are you su-"

"Yeah yeah, just give me whatever feels 'helpful' and toss me down already. I'm getting the willies being a disembodied soul."

"Are you-"

"On with it already!"

Giving a bit of a startled noise, Aang -looking a bit hesitant- still complied, the white and blue glow of Raava’s power beginning to rise from his skin again, as his brow pinched in concentration.

At a wave of his hand, a trio of shards shot out from the orbit around them, flicking into the bold soul’s chest with a flash, and as they did, a golden glow enveloped her. A crackle of kaleidoscopic energies sizzed whatever passed for air in the crystal-filled void, before the woman’s soul compacted into an orb of light and rocketed out of the prison in a flash.

There was a long silence for a moment, as Aang lowered his hands and sighed, the glow of Raava’s powers disappearing... And then, the Avatar’s brow twitched. He blinked, a look of something like comprehension and a wince passing over his visage, before he awkwardly cleared his throat and sheepishly grinned back at the rest of the group.*

"Oops."

“Okay, like… You know I’m really hyped to meet you and all, Avatar Aang, but… Oops? Oops?” came the voice of another woman amongst the disembodied souls. “I sure don’t like the sound of oops anywhere near my immortal soul!”

Wincing again, Aang gave a nervous chuckle. “Sorry sorry! I just realized I may have handed out something to that girl that I…” His cheek twitched. “...probably shouldn’t have. And um…” Clearing his throat, one finger pulled at the collar of his robes anxiously. “W-well, that was my first time trying this whole ‘reincarnating someone else’ thing out, so it’s understandable that there were some issues…?” Grimacing, he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, that’s no excuse.” He bowed deeply again. “Now that I understand fully how this works, I swear that nothing like that will happen with the rest of you.”

“Eh…?” The other girl uttered. “And what exactly happened?”

“Well…” Aang straightened up. “Before she interrupted, I was going to tell you that you could choose what sorts of ‘cheats’ I grant you to help you out… within reason, of course.” Leaning against his glider staff that had... somehow taken a spiritual form with him, he added, “Of course, there are many of these shards that your souls simply wouldn’t be able to handle carrying even if I only gave you one of them, and there are others that contain powers…” He grimaced, before a hint of steel glinted in his eyes. “-that I would never willingly inflict on my world, no matter how much they might serve a greater good.” He shook his head. “Some prices simply shouldn’t be paid, like for example… ‘tropes’ that disturb free will.”

“Well shoot,” another soul snapped their fingers with a chuckle, “and here I was looking forward to getting myself that infamous harem that every other isekai fanfic features.” At Aang’s long, unamused stare, they raised their hands in surrender. “Joking. Joking.”

“As I was saying,” Aang continued, “If you can tell me what ‘cheats’ you want, I can probably find one of these ‘tropes’ that can give it to you. Just about any power really, be it local or even ones that might originate from other worlds. That will be your gift and asset, to let you survive whatever might lay ahead of you and defeat the Imposter.”

“Hoh?” the second girl from before said, her soul radiating glee and anticipation. “Yeah… I might be able to come up with a few ideas.”

Aang nodded. “On top of that, the other piece of good news I can give you is that I can provide you some time to prepare before the Imposter becomes an immediate problem.” He smiled, panning his gaze over the group of souls. “Since I can tap into the flow of reincarnation a bit, I can roughly control not just where your souls will end up but when. Not too far back, but… up to about sixteen to eighteen years before my stolen body breaks out of the ice. That’s as much time as I can give you. Beyond that, if you have reason to be born later, I would recommend trying not to give yourself a shorter grace period than twelve years to grow up. Please keep in mind, you’re going to be truly reborn as a native of this world in a brand new body, not transported with your old body. You’ll need time to train, to ready yourselves for what could be coming.”

Aang paused then, allowing that statement to sink in, as he shuffled through a few more of the drifting shards around them, a small collection of them gathering beside him in apparent preparation, before he spoke again. “Having heard all that then… will you help me? Please, know that I will respect whatever decision you make, and if you wish to simply move on, I can return you back to where I found you and let you pass on as you should have. But if not… If you are willing to help me…” He bows one final time. “Then you will have my deepest gratitude.”

Of course, recalling all this, you know precisely what choice you made.

One by one, you all made the only real choice, didn’t you?

You chose to be reborn. You chose to be empowered.

You chose to enter a world threatened by a looming darkness, returned to consciousness as a squalling newborn, and yet… As you did, as you breathed the air of this new world and perhaps almost imagined you felt the distant buzz of alien potential hovering over it… In the quiet of your own mind, perhaps you truly understand this for the second chance it is… unfettered by even the observation of your patron.

Yes, this is a world in need of saving, a world you were literally born to save, but now that you have been… Well, the Avatar -bleeding heart that he was- never laid down any way to truly enforce that mission, did he? Indeed, he would not truly infringe on your free will, lest he be a hypocrite, even for the greater good.

Instead, out of both desperation and his own optimism, he chose to trust you.

The only question remaining now is… was he right to?

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GM Notes

It’s the first round, everyone, and the story begins now. To help keep things as smooth as possible, as we advance through what can perhaps be described as a collective background posting setup, we’ve got a few guidelines that should help keep things relatively contained until the timeline has advanced to the year AG 99, otherwise know as “canon start”, the point in time at which shit will really start hitting the fan.

• As you can see, the opening post involved meeting Aang and the reincarnation process. However, don't expect Aang to make any further appearances beyond round one, even to respond to questions. You're assumed to have asked any questions you need to about the process/situation offscreen, before being quickly sent on your way.
• After being reborn, the main goal of the first round is to establish your "starting line" and should involve describing your PC's family/living situation, along with actions (if any) that they can muster enough agency to take that might cause butterflies. GMs may be open to collaborating on or otherwise being consulted for some NPC actions if you’d like immediate (very short-term) results. Your post should not explore events roaming further than a handful of months (a year at most) past your PC's birth.
• Reactions from the world to your PC's births and potential actions will largely occur in the second round, as the GMs shape the general direction of the timeline your PCs are living in.
• After considering the matter, it was decided that players will rather broadly be allowed control over almost all NPCs except where some have been specifically excluded. Major/most Villains, National Leaders and otherwise notable NPCs that GMs have taken to personally controlling in totality (like Ozai or the Dai Li) will be excluded from player control. However, unnamed NPCs are generally freely available for players to manipulate and flesh out within reason. GMs should always be consulted and give permission for cases of influencing the actions of a large organization or nation unless the player has received specific free control over them. As for named NPCs and established characters of canon, as long as they have not been specifically excluded, players are free to control them as they wish.
  
  This was decided upon as a manifestation of the ever-infamous “Fanon/Improper/Flanderized Characterization” trope, as this trope-warped world can thus cause known characters to exhibit wildly different personalities or motives depending on who is writing them. In other words, any canon character you meet? Their actions and personality may very well swing according to whoever is in the driver’s seat at any given time. GMs may set “boundaries” for certain characters to operate in, but within those bounds, they are free to be flexible. And if GMs grant a player exclusive control over a given canon character, they are thus considered to be the sole person allowed to control them aside from the GMs or other people they in turn grant the go-ahead to. So, if you have NPCs you want to have exclusive control of, don’t hesitate to ask about it.
  
  It should be noted, of course, that if a player drops or is otherwise too busy to assume control of a notable NPC they control, the GMs will either assume control themselves or give the NPC to another player that wants to claim them.

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Unknown Location - Unknown Time

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Earth Kingdom - AG 82 (Spring)

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In the grand scheme of things, the reborn soul of the young woman would not have said she truly regretted asking her benefactor for the protection of her memories. After all, memories were what made someone who they were. Take those away, and -regardless of some silly technicality like having the same soul- you were basically dead. In other words, it was ego-death, no different than truly dying really. It was one of the things she had truly feared in some dark corner of her mind, the distant worry about growing old and having her own mind, the very bedrock of her selfhood, failing her, leaving her body as little more than a walking corpse puppeted by some blank slate wearing her face and name like a skinwalker. She would honestly rather die than be reduced to such a disgraceful, humiliating state.

And that was why she wouldn't regret choosing to prioritize preserving who she was above all else. No matter the benefits she reaped from this arrangement, no matter the opportunities this new life offered her, it was all utterly pointless if the "her" enjoying them wasn't the "her" that actually mattered. The benefits far outweighed any downsides, those yet realized or otherwise, and she would endure a thousand screaming births in crystal-clear detail before she ever even considered not being herself.

Even so...

Ah yes, so this is what it means to wish you could repress things.

...maybe having a bit of conscious control over what she remembered most clearly would have been nice.

Being an infant again was a special sort of hell, the newly named Xiao Yu decided. It was a roller coaster of humiliation, helplessness, hunger and just general utter mind-numbing boredom.

You couldn’t walk... or talk... or even have any real agency worth a damn. And all the worse, assuming you were actually conscious and lucid in this period of your life, you were also basically illiterate and incapable of understanding anything others said.

Or, at least, that is what she could have been concerned about. Instead, for some reason, despite most of the Elemental Nations being blatantly Asian in cultural inspiration, they all spoke in English dub...

Well, she supposed she couldn't really complain there. It was a small salve against her indignity at needing to relearn bladder control, a relief against the boredom of staring up at a ceiling from her crib, and she'd take those silver linings where she could get them.

Then again...

Well, she certainly had other ways to solve boredom.

Churning in her core, the energy she could now feel at all times these days ebbed and flowed like a crackling tide, an ever-present warmth that tickled her guts with the comforting promise of its existence.

Gooey baby lips twisting into a whatever passed for a sly smile on her dumpling of a face, Xiao Yu stoked and prodded that energy with intent, feeding it her indignity, her anger and determination, and in a flash of orange light-

Trans-Magia

-her helpless saggy baby body was filled with surging power, a wordless coo of glee leaving her lips, as she was draped in tiny segments of black armor and adorned with a crimson cape flowing down her back.

As usual, she found herself grimacing, however, her once weak baby arms now possessing just enough strength and dexterity to rub at the space just below her collar, where a trio of black stars stood out against her skin like tattoos around a larger golden star that was outright imbedded in her flesh.

Already, she could feel the strain on her body.

Magic -MahoAko magic, rather- was peculiar in the sense that part of your stamina in using it came from the actual strength and age of your physical body. Therefore, being that she was literally a months-old infant, she couldn't practice her magic for nearly as long or hard as she wished.

At least, not the more magic heavy powers.

A moment's concentration was all it took for her body to leave her crib, taking flight, as she slipped over to her window and easily lifted it open.

Smiling wide, with glee bubbling in her chest, the emotion feeding further into her magic and bolstering her depressingly small reserves, a single infant soared high into the night sky of the Earth Kingdom, her now magically sharpened gaze casting across long expanses of rich forests and rocky fields.

Feeling the wind in her tufts of hair, feeling the true freedom of soaring closer to the clouds... as Xiao Yu rocketed across the dark skyline of Ba Sing Se at a pace that would have probably put some helicopters to shame, she decided that this had been worth it. No matter how little of this power's true potential she could manifest right now, improvement was just a matter of time and training, and this sense of freedom she had acquired... this sense of truly being able to take her future into her own hands...?

Well, as long as Aang doesn't interfere further or demand more of me than the present task, I suppose it's a price worth paying for this... I may be grateful and all for this chance, but I'm hardly going to commit myself to supporting his every future whim. As much as he should have had the right to choose his own destiny, I've got the right to choose mine.

Of course, tonight, she was on a particular sort of hunt, one she'd been working towards slowly ever since she'd started getting strong enough to secretly leave her home unnoticed by her parents.

Raising her hands towards the air, the infant's face scrunched up in concentration, the golden star on her chest channeling her intent into guided patterns and carving a cloudy dark gate in space into the air.

Abruptly, she gasped -wheezed really- as the drain on her magical reserves from what was supposed to be one of the cheapest magical feats in her entire cheat powerset still nearly knocked the breath out of her.

Guh... if I were just a little older, damn it..

Taking a couple seconds to catch her breath, the infant wasted no time diving through the small dark gate-

-and came out the other side about what she estimated to be halfway across the continent.

The main way she could mostly say that for certain was that she was currently floating high above a point where two massive rivers flowed into a yawning titanic lake behind her. That same lake, somewhere further east at her last expedition's starting landmark, was crossed by a narrow strip of land called the "Serpent's Pass". And directly forward to the west, large forests clustered across the land.

Smiling widely, Xiao Yu let her dark portal close and set off flying again, straight due west as much as she was able... which, admittedly, wasn't too hard. The titanic lake behind her and the connected rivers (or were they more like long, massive water channels really?) were distinctive enough landmarks that as long as she had a map with her, she was not likely to get lost any time soon.

And she did, of course. Have a map, that was.

Stolen, yes, but really, who was going to miss it, right? That map shop had plenty more, after all. And hey, her cheat powerset came from a villainess anyway! So, of course, she was going to use a few questionable methods for the sake of saving the world!

And besides, she was a literal infant right now!

How in the world was she supposed to acquire what she needed in any sort of legitimate manner, eh?! She didn't have time to waste!

So, naturally, she had spent her first nights out with her powers experimenting, then preparing for her future voyages, then stealing a decent quality map of the Four Nations, and then beginning to take periodic nighttime flights out into the world around Ba Sing Se to expand her options.

See, the thing about her portal magic was that visualization was important. She couldn't just imagine a scene from a cartoon and pop right out in the Fire Lord's palace. No, she needed to actually see that place in person somehow and be able to clearly visualize and recall it as a way to teleport back.

Sure, she could have tried to use scrying magic to remotely view the world from the comfort of her home, and -to a degree- she had managed that, even used it to help plan her map heist... But scrying was weirdly a lot more mana intensive compared to just portaling out and exploring personally.

And honestly? She didn't really mind that too much.

Being able to get out and stretch her metaphorical wings... to be free of the stifling existence of an infant even for an hour that she could finally move her body correctly and forget about her currently degrading existence... that was a priceless thing to her right now, this freedom. And she wouldn't give it up even if she had an alternative.

Thus, the plan was relatively simple.

Right now, she was too weak to do much other than fly around and make maybe two portals a day before being tuckered out. But even while that was the case, she had enough resources to be productive.

Therefore, for this first year of her childhood, her primary goal was to visit all the major locations of the world of Avatar she could find and burn them into her memory, radically expanding her options for her portal targeting down the line.

Everything else could wait, aside from trying to mess around with her chi while she was otherwise stuck playing the part of a normal infant. But right now, the important thing was to ensure her dark portals could reach every corner of the Four Nations, the sooner the better.

This was, after all, turning out to be a fairly big world, much bigger than the show had made it seem at least, and once she linked up with her fellow "saviors", she was sure they would rather appreciate not having to make the same sort of treks the GAang did to get everywhere.

Smiling in satisfaction, Xiao Yu soared through the sky with confidence and a sense of progress burning in her chest, the pleasant hum of improvement raising her spirits, as she took yet another step towards her goals.

And that night, when she returned to her crib and released her transformation with a weary sigh that soon transformed into the groan of sleep from her feeble infant body, the reincarnated soul still slept with a satisfied -and perhaps concerningly smug- smile planted upon her lips, satisfied with another flawless operation, no-one the wiser of her absence.

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Ba Sing Se, Earth Kingdom - AG 82 (Winter)

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Honestly, the weather in the world of Avatar was fucking weird. The concept of seasons barely seemed to exist across national borders, as each nation seemed to largely perpetually maintain a single season year-round. Really, about the only thing that seemed to mark the passage of time in the actual series was the movements of the celestial bodies and the night and day cycle.

Which was why living in the Earth Kingdom meant a baby could be wandering about outside barefoot in the dead of what should have been -and technically was- winter and be completely fine.

"Aamamamahhttbbbtt..." Yu babbled mostly aimlessly, as she toddled forth on stocky baby legs. Honestly, she would have done so mostly in silence normally, but working her lips was the first step to coherent speech. And besides...

"You're doing so good, Yuyu~!" cooed her mother, apparently quite enamored with the nonsense flowing out of her child in baby-speak.

Yu resisted the urge to scowl at the baby-talk, because she just knew that her frustration would only make her look even cuter somehow. Honestly, nothing entertained adults like a small, harmless creature looking petulant and trying to appear angry. She would know; she'd been one, after all. At this point, the only thing she could really do was endure the humiliation and fight harder to regain the control of her body that she'd lost.

Case in point, she was currently spending her daylight hours establishing her independent streak from the word go. Already about a year into her rebirth, and she had the basics of walking down, even if it was still more comfortable to use something as a handhold to keep her up.

Like the wooden fence she was currently peering through, staring across a wide expansive field with bright blue eyes at the herd of strange creatures that still made her want to cringe as much as watch in fascination.

The creatures in question were large, flightless bird-like entities... if birds had the tail and head of a horse with a broad and curved beak mounted on the front of the latter. They were mostly covered in feathers, aside from a bit of short course hair around the horse-like parts of the head and the long stream of the tail, and the fully grown members of the creatures towered at what Yu could only eyeball at an easy eight feet tall.

"Hehee~, do you like the ostrich horses, Yu?" her mother giggled.

Again, the baby restrained the urge to cringe at the creatures' name. It wasn't the first time she'd heard it by any means, but she still wasn't even close to getting used to it.

Seriously, what is it with this world and fusing random fauna together? Is it so much to ask for to see more normal animals around here?

"Ablabbrrble," she instead replied sagely in response, wobbling a bit, as she tightened her grip on the fence she was standing against.

Her eyes were drawn to the only human currently out in the field, her father, who was currently mounted atop one of the horse-bird things and running the rest of the herd through what seemed to be tolerance exercises. Namely, that her father would steer his steed over to a group he had yet to accost in turn, dismount... and start earthbending.

It was with utter fascination that Xiao Yu watched, feeling the distant rumble of displaced earth vibrate through her feet, as her father sometimes ripped jutting walls out of the ground and soon replaced them, while other times chucking boulders about and seeing which steeds didn't clear away squawking in offense. Those that didn't sometimes got additional attention, as her father earthbent obstacle courses and other structures, before guiding ostrich horses through them to gradually acclimate them to earthbending in their vicinity.

From what she could already gather about her parents' jobs, it seemed they were some of the latest in a multi-generational series of earthbending ranch owners (her father born into it and mother married into it), who seemed to be raising military steeds. Honestly, that was about the only reason Yu could think of to put so much focus on training the otherwise docile horse-bird-things to not be freaked out by any amount of earthbending. If you were out in the middle of a battlefield, the last thing you'd want is for your steed to panic and buck you off over your own damn attacks... or just generally run for the hills every time you dismounted to get serious.

"Do you like daddy's earthbending?" her mother interrupted her thoughts again, smiling in that way that was casually patronizing and indulgent, even if adults maybe didn't mean it to be.

What do you think, lady?!

"Blyuh." Instead of frowning, Yu just nodded seriously, earning a gleeful little giggle from her mother. Yu rather doubted her mother actually thought her baby understood what she was saying, but maybe if she...

As the thought occurred to her, Yu was struck with indecision. On the one hand, it would be immensely satisfying and make her feel quite smug... On the other hand, was she ready to start distancing herself from the cover of safety in obscurity? Hmmm... perhaps not. Still, as long as she wasn't unlucky enough to attract the Dai Li's attention somehow... it should be fine, and even if it wasn't? Well, she had options they couldn't account for even now.

Fine then. It was decided.

Furrowing her brows, Yu shifted her feet, gripping the fence like a lifeline, as she dared to bend her wobbly baby knees and nearly toppled over. Immediately, the burn of weak baby muscles began to protest, but instead of letting herself fall, she mustered as much will as she could manage to remain in an increasingly crouched stance.

Her knees shook precariously, burning with exertion... but Yu simply looked down, then back up at her father, focusing on mirroring her stance to her father's, as he tore up another line of the field. Sucking in a slow, steadying breath, she closed her eyes and simply let herself... feel and listen.

The key to earthbending is confidence. More than anything else, it is the will to face anything head-on, to endure and power through with brute force and will. To be a true earthbender is to understand the concept of neutral jing, to balance offense and defense to withstand any assault until the perfect moment to act decisively arrives.

Her mother was still chatting at her every now and then, but Yu wasn't really paying her much attention. Instead, she was focused on the soil underneath her feet, on the rumble of every shift of the earth and every heavy footfall of the creatures that lived in it. She focused on perceiving those vibrations, on feeling the way they rippled up her shaking legs. She focused on the way her feet dug minutely into the soil yet further, as she ground her heels and toes into it, deepening her stance as best she was able.

But more than that, earth is a stubborn element, and you must be stubborn in order to bend it. For an earthbender, the only paths are to endure or advance. You must be unyielding and utterly sure of yourself. Fear is the mind-killer. Doubt is weakness. If you do not believe with absolute certainty that the earth will obey you... if you do not impose your will upon it, the earth will not answer.

She listened instead to the sound of the earth around her, to the way it crumbled and cracked, trying to imagine what her father was doing with it based on sound alone. She listened to the squawks and whinnies of the ostrich horses, listened to their footfalls and tried to guess where the closest ones to her were.

In this way, the first step should theoretically be the hardest. After all, somewhere in the back of a normal person's head, they aren't really going believe they can move the earth. They are going to doubt. They are going to question. They are going to hesitate. And they are going to get caught in a spiral of self-reinforcing failure until they get lucky and break through.

She inhaled deep, letting the scent of the earth fill her.

But me?

Xiao Yu let go of the fence, letting her body fully settle into the stance of her wobbling legs. Scrunching up her brow, she tensed, forcing her legs to stop shaking, as they burned harder.

Bitch, I'm a motherfucking isekai insert, and we're simply Built Different.

"HWAH!" shouted the baby just a few months short of a year old, thrusting her arms out through the gaps in the fence, and the soil before her lurched in response. Even as her gut did summersaults with a brand new sensation, a tingling running up her legs and spine, Yu didn't have all that much time to revel in the feeling of triumph, before the shift of nearby earth ripped her own footing right out from under her and sent her toppling back into the grass with a yelp.

There was abrupt shouting, the squawk of a few ostrich horses that she had barely noticed getting closer, and Yu soon found herself scooped up her mother's arms, the wide-eyed woman fretting over her incessantly. Grumbling internally, Yu fumbled to swipe away at the fingers brushing dirt off her clothes and questing over her head in search of fresh bruises.

Wan-dammit, woman, I'm a baby earthbender! I'm not a regular-ass glass cannon of a child. If there's any bloodline that would be born with hardier stuff, it's us! Oi! Are you married to an earthbender, or not?! Where was all this concern when I was toddling around barefoot around the fence in search of splinters, eh?!

Despite Yu's frustration, however, it was still immensely funny to see her mother suddenly round on her father with no few berating words on her lips, chiding the poor, confused man over earthbending so recklessly so close to her "precious baby" and apparently not quite recognizing that it was Yu, herself, who had actually managed the feat, despite doing it right in front of her.

It was, therefore, even more amusing to squirm around in her mother's arms until she finally let her down, before planting herself by her mother's leg and throwing an even more confident punch forward... accompanied by a shifting spray of the dirt in front of her.

And as her parents both stared at her utterly gobsmacked, Xiao Yu finally couldn't stop the peals of genuine victorious laughter from screaming uncontrollably from her mouth, as she tumbled over, finally -perhaps ironically- looking much more like a normal baby for once in the face of her joyous accomplishment.

Grinning widely with her mouth of tiny baby teeth, Xiao Yu's eyes gleamed with triumph.

In the end, with earthbending, it's like a little green troll once said...

Do or do not; there is no try.

---

[Trope Acquisition: Prodigy (Earthbending).]

---

After that little "incident", the rest of her first year of life started to go in a rather more tolerable direction. The knowledge that their child was capable of earthbending at her age drastically ripped the rub out from under her parents' feet as far as underestimating and babying her... mostly anyway.

Yu was still a baby, after all, and suspension of disbelief only went so far. Her parents started to treat her as more capable and weren't as surprised when she started showcasing even more atypical baby behavior, but that didn't mean they started placing unusual expectations on her.

If anything... it was almost the opposite?

Indeed, her prodigal showing, if anything, seemed to make them more worried than proud, and Yu felt she could hazard a guess as to why.

Long Feng and his ROOT knockoffs.

The citizens of Ba Sing Se did not like the Dai Li, the secret police of the Earth Kingdom. Though no-one would perhaps dare whisper of it aloud, plenty of rumors likely told of what happened to those that crossed the tyrannical organization that held the entire city in the quiet iron grip of fear.

Of course, if she thought about them like ROOT, then it didn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess why her parents would be concerned. After all, one had to wonder: where did the Dai Li recruit their absolutely loyal earthbenders from? Of course, the most diabolically efficient way would be to just abduct young earthbenders to brainwash as soon as possible, whilst also brainwashing anyone that objected to forget they even existed.

Maybe she was reaching, but honestly, given the shit they had pulled in canon, Yu was pretty confident that she wasn't even half wrong.

And that was why she could understand why her parents were reluctant to indulge her push to learn further earthbending young. Of course, they couldn't really stop her from trying on her own, but every time she tried to get her father to show her more, he would try and steer her towards something else, as if it were so easy to redirect her supposed infant attention span. Her mother, meanwhile, had taken to trying to keep her inside more, filling her time with books and learning.

On the upside, this was actually useful. Being educated faster meant being able to sooner justify communicating through writing the words her mouth couldn't yet pronounce properly. And as for her father's attempts at distractions, it had led to her being introduced more closely to the ostrich horses, and Yu was actually quite interested in getting involved in the family business.

Unfortunately for her parents though, they weren't dealing with a normal infant, and Yu honestly didn't see any reason to delay her earthbending education for a moment. From what she could gather of her family's business, she wasn't the sort of earthbender the Dai Li would probably abduct, because she was part of sustaining an important enterprise. Training war mounts for the Earth Kingdom properly required earthbenders, and thus, thanks to her family's position, even as low-class as they were, that should mean she would be considered more valuable right where she was.

In short, she was pretty sure she was untouchable unless she went out of her way to attract trouble. Making her disappear and covering the tracks would be more trouble than it was worth, given how large a family she'd seen at one of their holiday gatherings and their probable incidental connections due to who they must be actually selling war steeds near exclusively to.

Besides, she was an earthbender, dammit!

Backing down and giving up simply wasn't in the nature of her chi. An earthbender endured hardship and challenges stubbornly, and she wasn't about to let herself falter ideologically from the word "go".

Less than a year old or not, Xiao Yu would be learning earthbending now.

And if her parents assumed otherwise? Well, they were free to be as incorrect as they liked.

---

GM Notes

In order to hopefully help smooth out the writing of the first round, I made sure to have this post prepared in advance. Xiao Yu's Year One post hopefully gives a more concrete idea of the general structure of what we are expecting for the "infant post".

You're technically allowed to keep a bit of a flashback to the reincarnation/crystal void, but it may be simpler not to have it unless you'd like to slightly collab over it, given that Aang will not be making any appearances beyond the first round for the time being. You're free to largely assume your OC had a decent amount of time to have some questions answered about the process before being shuffled off on their way. Post-birth, we'd like to get at least a basic idea of the OC's new family situation in their fresh life, and you can stretch this out to occur over the course of up to a 1-year period IC. You can do so in about as much detail as me, if you like, or you can instead treat this as somewhat of an extension or "part 2" of the backstory on your character sheet and summarize relevant events in more moderate detail.

As a side note? On the matters of birth, while not always the case, benders are often born in the season their bending also happens to be strongest: Water (Winter, Earth (Spring), Fire (Summer), Air (Fall). As to the specific year they'd need to be born in to have a maximum age of 18 before "canon start/AG 99" arrives, you can have them born as early as late Winter (January) of AG 81; simply count up towards AG 87 for those potentially planning to be 12-year-olds.

The latter segment of this post can be viewed as a bit of an example template of how we'd like to see Trope acquisition/invocation carried out. By no means, of course, are players ultimately required to use a similar level of detail in their own Trope invocations (if only in these opening rounds) though, as "long and detailed" is simply my natural writing style. So, don't feel obligated to replicate it.

As discussed fairly openly in the OOC, the OCs are only allowed to acquire a maximum of 1 new Trope in the opening round, and this will count towards an overall maximum total of 6 new Tropes between birth and the start of "canon". OOCly, this limit is for balance reasons and limiting chaos a bit. ICly speaking, you can see this as an extension of the reason Aang didn't load the OCs up with more than 3 starting Tropes. Their souls are still new to this, and they need time to grow into their capacity to safely absorb and actively manipulate further Tropes. As such, within the first year of their life, they will perhaps find themselves able to invoke and absorb a single new Trope before finding all others to slide between their metaphorical fingers for a while thereafter. You are, of course, also free to have your OC not acquire any new tropes at all in this period if you wish and save all of them for the next round and the timeskip.

Ethan Reed had always known he wasn’t going to get a happy ending. Not in his first life.

He never said it out loud, of course. Not to his family. Not to his doctors. Not even to himself when he lay in a sterile hospital bed with tubes in his arms and a paper thin gown over his way too thin body.

But he knew.

He knew when the treatments stopped working. He knew when his mom started crying outside his door instead of in front of him. He knew when his dad, who always tried to be upbeat, sat down one day and just… held his hand without saying anything.

So, when the end came, he wasn’t surprised.

He was seventeen.

He wasn’t angry about it, either. That part shocked him. You’d think he’d rage against it—against the injustice of it all. But mostly, he just felt… tired. And sad. Sad about the little things. That he never kissed anyone. That he never got to graduate. That he never got to try the food from that Sushi place across town. That he never got to be someone.

And when the dark came, when everything slipped away, he thought, “At least I tried.”

And then…

He was cold. Not hospital cold. Real cold. And wet. Soaking, heavy, and bundled in furs.

⸻

He cried the first time he opened his eyes.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to have eyes anymore. He was supposed to be buried or cremated or whatever his parents chose. He was supposed to be a memory in a slideshow with sad music.

Instead, he was a newborn.

His name was Siku now, and he was a twin.

He couldn’t believe it at first. But when Katara, rolled against him in their crib, he knew. He had watched the show a thousand times.

And Sokka… Sokka was older, sure, but the voice, the shape of the hair, the way he kept talking about how he was the man now?

It had actually happened. He had been reborn into the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The story had gone wrong. The canon was infected. Something about tropes. About broken narrative threads and corrupted archetypes. The world was in danger. But all of that seemed so far away when he wasn’t even strong enough to lift his own head.

—-

Being a self-aware baby was awful. The lack of agency, being humiliated all the time. While he was happy to still have his memories, why was it necessary to be conscious during this? Couldn’t Aang have let him wake up in his older self? Ugh.

But there were silver linings. He and his sister were already close. Sokka was already trying to teach them both how to throw imaginary boomerangs. And Gran Gran told the most beautiful stories in her soft, voice that made him feel like maybe this world wasn’t all broken.

And of course, he had the ability to waterbend. He wasn’t strong enough to actually do anything with it voluntarily. But whenever he stared out at the ocean, he saw the ocean move. Just a ripple, but it was something.

As much as it sucked right now, He had been given a second chance. He had a new family, and above all else, a purpose. He wouldn’t waste it.

Japan - Current Year

Life just sucks.

At first you’re young, full of energy and believe you have so much time to do all the things you want to.

Then life settles in, just like a commercial scam, you find out you don’t have the time to do nearly as much, instead you have to do a cycle of doing the same boring, repetitive things to keep up with taxes, car insurance, healthcare, all with the rising inflation.
Then you also find out your energy is also gone, it is more of a trial period that drops dramatically down past your 30 and then keeps getting worse, it’s like one of those crappy mobile apps that try to hook you in.

Finally you are past 50 and you’re alone, have accomplished nothing and all you can do is keep going until you burn out.

At least it wouldn’t take much longer in this hellhole, before heart disease did its thing. Should have done exercise, should have stopped smoking, it didn’t matter now…

---

Unknown Location (Some kind of Void?) - Unknown Time

Is this the afterlife? What all those religious folk were talking about? Because it’s so… underwhelming.

If it’s heaven, it sucks.

If it’s some form of hell, it’s just boring, not even trying to actively inflict pain or suffering.

If it’s a voidless dimension or limbo, it’s quite terrible at that too, there’s other ’orbs’ ‘souls’ or ’things in here, however you want to call them.

Oh look, they are yapping…

Aang’s words cut right through the silence, detailing his world and the dire situation it was in, body-snatching, tropes, memes and reincarnation. The boy’s wisdom just recently lacking a hundred more, a powerless Avatar in a prison of fanfiction.

This all sounds like the story of a short-lived game.

Moreover this new existance feels like some dream, purposeless and shapeless, what would constitute as ‘moving’ could barely be associated with the feeling of moving an actual physical body. These souls, simply left with their minds and each other’s voice.

One could maybe get used to this, anyone who dies will be forced to as it seems.

As Aang’s continued his explanations and demonstrations, the souls would experience a disorienting sequence of lights, chaos, and eventually the feeling of a real body. Not fully and maybe not for long, but definitely enough to grant a sense longing and distate for this new form, feeling this new immaterial existance is just a fraction of your previous fully real life.

The rest is history. It is pointless to have specific requests for those lacking knowledge fine details on the world and ‘memes’.

Better to move on asap and leave this husk of a form.

---

Fire Nation - AG84 Spring

Being a newborn sucks too, apparently.

Firstly, she didn’t cry, which in retrospect is very weird for a newborn to NOT cry.

Secondly, what the hell was going on with that ’test’ soon after she was born? Some kind of cumbustible oily ball and then it caught in fire, but nobody saw the fire? Or they saw something else?

It was a very weird experience right out of the womb, but it’s better to get used to this weird world fast, just a glance at thise animals and people making fire while breakdancing was enough.

Tengfei
That was her new name, which she picked it up amidst the chaos. Better get used to it.

---

Retaining your adult’s mind and awareness while being an actual baby, THAT is terrible.

Even worse was to think some reincarnates might have it worse than you, powerlessness and humiliation would just be common for the others too.

Best not to think about it and just move on, I’ll do things when I can, which is not now.

Instead it’s better to use this time to learn in what special kind of hell she’s in, like what these chimera animals are and their stupid names, come on, ‘ostrichhorse’ ‘crococat’ , seriously?

Travelling around by ferry doesn’t mean you’ll see as many places as you’d like, the boat does the same few routes all the time and rarely it will go to a new island, if it does it’s because it’s a short-lived trend. The only consistently lucrative destination seems to be Ember Island, which lives off its tourism and has places for rich snobs no less.

Another really important place Tengfei saw, although not for long, was the Fire Nation’s Capital, which is called… Capital City… _{seriously what is wrong with people here and naming stuff?}
The city itself was impressive and quite large, not as if it’s anything like Taipei or Tokyo, this city is old, old-old, and lacks many of the modern amenities she’s used to, ’at least there’s sewers but still I’d rather not get sick and need meds.’

For the other things, life as a ‘non-firebender’ wasn’t that special, although it’s bullshit, I remember that string-ball thing caught fire.

Well, ar least she might avoid the draft by being a ‘second-class citizen’ , hopefully.