Saza

Background

Saza (as she calls herself) is an itinerant street performer who puts on displays of acrobatics, gymnastics, juggling, and general physical flexibility and agility. These are skills she learned as a former performer in a traveling circus. She's also a martial artist and rumor has it she knows qi-blocking techniques to paralyze opponents and temporarily break bending abilities.

In conversation she has vaguely mentioned having water tribe ancestry, but without much in the way of specifics.

Current

From her perspective as someone labeled an ethnic foreigner, the Earth Kingdom administrative state doesn't feel much different to her from the invading Fire Nation in terms of being met with unjust treatment. The proverb of "When elephants fight, it's the ants who get trampled" was recently confirmed in her mind when she was swept up in a broad dragnet and imprisoned by invading Fire Nation military autocrats over nebulous concerns about "spies and saboteurs." Her cellmates turning out to actually be people antagonistic to the Fire Nation has only reinforced her distrust and bitterness for both sides; in her view, their actions are responsible for giving the Fire Nation officials the incitement that collaterally led to her own arbitrary imprisonment.

Having broken out of jail, her goal is to reach the Northern Continent where she thinks she'll be safest from recapture by Fire Nation forces. Pragmatically, the best option she sees is to travel with her fellow prison escapees for as long as their goals of reaching the Northern Continent coincide. As far as the rest of the party's goals regarding the Avatar, she's highly skeptical of both their motives and the value of the Avatar tradition itself.

Beyond the Avatar, Saza's views of spirits in general are complex. She tends to conceptualize them as having their origins in being products of interdependent causes and effects of human perception representing personifications of abstract ideations and concepts, or as externalizations of the internal beliefs and views of people on an individual or cultural level, more than as objectively real phenomena that have an existence of their own outside of the people observing them. Generally, she wants as little to do with the affairs of spirits as possible, since in her experience they only reflect the problems and ambitions of the people associated with them, and becoming entangled in either of those things is not something she sees as likely to be good for her. Her beliefs tend to be over-simplistically misinterpreted as an unnuanced denial of the existence of spirits, so she's largely given up trying to discuss spirit matters with her companions.

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