Full name: Korra
Also known as: Avatar Korra, Shuibùluò Kēlā (Dìqiú/Chinese alias), Mizuzoku Kōra (Zipang/Japanese alias), Korra Tonraqsdottir, etc.
Species: Human
Date of birth: Siyue 14, 153 ASC (April 14, 2272 GSC)
Place of birth: Senna Village, Southern Water Tribe, Dìqiú
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 142 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Dark brown
Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index: 125

Affiliation: Dìqiú; Order of the White Lotus; Order of the Rose
Base of operations: Republic City, United Republic of Nations, Dìqiú
First International Police contact: June 25, 2391
IPO initial contact officer: Benjamin D. Hutchins
IPO trust level: A
Test of Light administered: June 27, 2391
Test of Light administered (yes, again): August 18, 2391
Grade: Grey Lensman
Other special qualifications/certifications:
- Master Waterbender (T'ai chi ch'uan mastery equivalent)
- Master Earthbender (Hung Gar kung fu mastery equivalent)
- Master Firebender (Northern Shaolin kung fu mastery equivalent)
- Master Airbender (Baguazhang mastery equivalent)
- Master Waterbending Healer
- Metalbender
- Lightningbender
- Energybender
- Veilbender
- Master, Harmonious Fist School (traditional Dìqiú swordsmanship method, comparable to wudan)
- Master, tessenjutsu (equivalent)
- Journeywoman, kenjutsu / iaijutsu (equivalent)
- BS Civil Engineering, Ba Sing Se University, 2299
- BA World History (with minor in Sociology), Ba Sing Se University, 2300
- MS Government and Public Administration, Republic City University, 2304
- Professional Bending Hall of Fame
- Taikonaut, United Republic Space Administration
- United Republic Red Cross Certified Search and Rescue Canursine Handler
- Special Investigator, Republic City Police Department, Republic City, United Republic, Dìqiú
- Deputy police officer, Ovsyanikovgrad, Wrangelia, Ice Planet Halloran V

Other grades/titles:
- Avatar
- Honorary Kyoshi Warrior
- Honorary life member, United Earthbender-Constructors
- URSA Lunar Exploration Medal

Description: Korra is an attractive human woman who appears to be in her late teens or early twenties, with medium-brown skin, eyes of an unusually intense blue, and dark brown hair which she customarily wears in a high ponytail and sidelocks. She is of slightly less than average height for a human female and ruggedly athletic, with a swimmer's powerful legs and shoulders. She favors sturdy, functional clothing, usually in shades of blue, and prefers to leave her arms bare whenever possible.

Notes: Korra comes from the Enigma sector world of Dìqiú, which is an astral/temporal "shadow" overlapping the more commonly known Japanese colony, Zipang. About one in a hundred people in Dìqiú has the metapsionic ability to manipulate (or, in the local parlance, "bend") one of the four classical elements (earth, water, air, or fire). Over the thousands of years since this ability first emerged in the world's native human species, traditional methods of employing them have evolved, much like conventional and metapsionic martial arts in many other places, and elaborate cultural and religious structures have developed around bending and benders.

At any given time, one person in Dìqiú will possess what is known as the "Avatar Spirit", an innate spiritual connection to the very active local astral plane. This person, unsurprisingly known as the Avatar, has the unique ability to bend all four elements, and other paranormal abilities besides. The Avatar Spirit is reincarnative, which is to say, there is only ever one living Avatar at a time. When one dies, the next is born; each is traditionally looked to as an agent to balance and harmonize the world. Expectations, as you might imagine, are very high.

Avatars are not commonly identified until adolescence, but there have been exceptions, and Korra is one of them; she discovered her ability to bend more than one element at a very early age. Unfortunately, the organization charged by her predecessor with locating, protecting, and aiding his successor after his death weren't quite prepared for that, and her upbringing and training were markedly improvisational as a result. Where prior Avatars had traveled the world to research and master the traditional ways of handling the elements as young adults, Korra was kept in one place and masters of the various bending arts were brought to her. This kept her safe from harm and provided a broad grounding in the mechanics of many forms, but it also meant that she was largely unprepared for anything other than a fight when the time came to confront the wider world.

Complicating the situation somewhat was the fact that, in the late 23rd century, Dìqiú was entering a period of rapid and accelerating social and technological change, roughly akin to that experienced by Earth's cultures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries SC. After millennia of only-very-slow scientific progress and a largely static agrarian society, the world was entering its industrial/technical revolutionary period, and during Korra's early career as a public figure, it charged straight on into its aviation, electronic, and even early space ages. Any exohistorian can tell you that this period is an exciting one in any society's evolution, but also one fraught with instability and troubles.

Couple that with the scientific discovery of Dìqiú's unique place in the cosmos, contact with Zipang, and the rest of the (previously believed to be uninhabited) universe, and you have a bewildering time to be anyone in Dìqiú, let alone the person charged with maintaining "balance" in a world where the very definition of that term is constantly at least up for debate, if not actually changing at all times. Hampered by her sheltered upbringing and the fact that she'd emerged from her seclusion into a world just on the cusp of significant sociopolitical upheavals, Korra had her work cut out for her just surviving her early career, much less succeeding.

Fortunately, surviving and ultimately succeeding are things she's innately very good at, and her long career to date, though signposted with both failure and triumph, has logged rather more of the latter than the former. Facing a bigger, more complicated task than any Avatar before her, she's employed her natural talents and her gift for hard work and risen ably to the challenge. Among many other things, she was one of her world's pioneering spacefarers, participating in the first voyage by people from Dìqiú to the planet's moon, Yue; played a major role in the opening of official contact with Zipang and, through it, the "big universe"; spearheaded the rescue and recovery efforts in the wake of a massive earthquake that nearly leveled a major city; and co-invented electronic mail.

[Seriously? -V-]

[Seriously. Don't knock it, that's a big moment for any civilization. --G.]

In 2391, while investigating the disruptions in Dìqiú's Spirit World caused by the Ragnarök, Korra visited New Avalon for the first time. Within a few hours of arriving in the city, she'd made contact with a rookie New Avalon Police Department officer, Patrolman Ragnar Ragnarsson, and gotten entangled in a clash with one of the young city's emerging underworld organizations. Shortly thereafter she sought out Benjamin "Gryphon" Hutchins, then only a few months into the process of organizing and preparing the International Police Organization for action, to ask him about his role in the events that caused the Spirit World issues.

Within another hour or two, she and the Chief were buddies for life, whereupon she found herself on Tomodachi, helping to deliver his son Corwin. [That is how this Avatar rolls. -V- ] This was not too daunting a task for a person fully qualified in both medical chi manipulation and her native culture's long and honorable tradition of midwifery. When she could stand up again, Skuld administered the Test of Light without hesitation. And then administered it again a few weeks later, [for reasons which remain classified above your level, buddy. -V-]

As previously described, Avatar Korra possesses the metapsionic ability to control the four classical elements of her homeworld's magisphere: earth (for which read primarily silicates), air, fire, and water. These elements are traditionally controlled (or "bent", to use the term most common in Dìqiú) using somatic chi-focus techniques which bear striking similarities to various Earth-Asian martial arts. Korra has studied these techniques intensively for most of her long life, and as such is, in effect, a master of many forms of personal combat. She's also mastered a number of advanced bending techniques, such as the extension of firebending to the generation and manipulation of electrically charged plasma (more commonly known as lightning), and (as noted above) the use of waterbending and chi manipulation to treat injury and disease.

Moreover, after several early experiences with adversaries who could interfere with bending abilities, she took it upon herself to train extensively in ways of fighting without them if need be. The combination makes her a very dangerous opponent in hand-to-hand combat, particularly added to her innate determination and her natural capacity for punishment, both of which are impressive. She is easily the equivalent of an Experts of Justice-level operative in this regard, and that's before you get into her abilities beyond her (closely intertwined) bending abilities and fighting skills.

To wit, Korra possesses certain paranormal powers unique to the current holder of the Avatar Spirit. Through her innate connection to the Spirit World, she can call upon the power and experience of any or all of her predecessors as Avatar (all of whom now dwell there). As there were quite a number of those, this places at her disposal a vast reserve capability, with which she can, if necessary, pull off feats of elemental manipulation once thought the sole preserve of high-ranking divine and infernal beings. As accessing this reservoir (by entering an altered state of consciousness known as the Avatar State) is both taxing and potentially dangerous, she prefers to limit the demands she places on it as much as practicable.

This ability also enables her to utilize the Spirit World as an intermediate medium for metacosmic planeshifting, enabling her to, for example, travel from Dìqiú to points in the "big universe" without going the long way around, or even accessing the higher planes - a trick known by its few practitioners as "veilbending".

Korra possesses one other superhuman ability which she herself is at a loss to explain. Though she is now nearly 140 years old, she does not appear to have aged since her late teens. Although this was the time at which she achieved her first full realization of the Avatar State, there is no precedent in Dìqiú's recorded history for such a thing having happened to any other Avatar. Both metaphysical and medical investigations into the matter have proved unilluminating. For good or ill, it appears that she simply does not age, though for how long this condition will persist is impossible to predict.

Both physically and psychologically, Korra can take quite a beating, but her real strength lies not in resisting hardship, but in coming back from it. Her full-speed approach to life and her considerable depth of feeling make her vulnerable to being knocked down - sometimes knocked down hard - by reversals of fortune both physical and emotional, but only a fool equates "down" with "out" in her case.

[I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down. -V-]

[Aaurgh! Earworm! Earworm! -LD]

Coupled to this resiliency is an enormous capacity for hard work. If a subject or undertaking interests Korra (or if she believes it's necessary, regardless of interest), she will apply herself to it with ferocious devotion and intensity, even if - as with her early studies of airbending - that is exactly the least efficient way to go about it. Eventually, she'll manage to bull through (or, on occasion, randomly have the "right" method suddenly fall into place for her after a period of beating her head against the wall). In this way she mastered the elements, their subsidiary and extended forms, various non-bending ways of fighting, stateswomanship and/or talking to unpleasant people without punching them, civil engineering, and the mysterious and intricate art of making that rock candy that somehow has words in the middle of it. [Really? I've always wondered how that works. -LD]

With this tendency, an enduring love of novelty, and a studied responsiveness to the ever-shifting demands of serving the public trust, Korra has accumulated a wide-ranging and eclectic education beyond her fighting skills. As mentioned above, she's a qualified civil engineer (because a surprising amount of the Avatar's job involves building things), and though too innately plain-spoken to make a real diplomat, she's surprisingly good at working a room, particularly within the systems of governance long established in Dìqiú, where she knows all the ins and outs. She's also widely read, well-spoken when she needs to be, and conversant with the customs, folklore, and philosophies of her world's various nations, the better to maintain smooth relations between them.

Despite the vast power at her disposal, her deep connection to otherworldly affairs, and her inexplicably extended lifespan, Korra remains fiercely, joyously, willfully human, in the messiest, most diligently imperfect sense of the word. Big-hearted, bull-headed, and empathetic even toward people who have wronged her, she's always ready to hug a friend, right a wrong, help someone in need, punch someone who needs punching, and stick up for the underdog. She has faults and she's the first to acknowledge them, but a willingness to settle for half-measures is not among them.

This, then, is no carven ivory idol or inscrutable, unapproachable ancient sage, but a cheerful, two-fisted girl-at-heart of action who wears her capacity both to exult and to fall as a badge of honor. She is reputed to have once remarked, "If I ever get to the stage where I can't screw up, I'm done. Then it'll be time for a new Avatar."

Present disposition: The importance of Korra's function as Avatar of Dìqiú is such that she rarely leaves the world, and never for very long if she can avoid it. It is mainly for this reason that she is not a full member of the IPO, though given her long-standing ties of friendship with the Chief and his family, many consider her an honorary member of Special Assignment 11 anyway. As quasi-official delegate from the United Republic (the polity onto which Dìqiú's other nations devolve responsibility for interplanetary relations) to the Babylon Foundation, she serves as the key liaison point between the IPO and Dìqiú's principal law enforcement agencies, and customarily participates in the rare joint operations between them.

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