"LOOK! I found it! There it is!" she yelled, pointing to something in the vast desert.
Everyone else (except Appa of course) scrambled to the side of the Sky Bison saddle, only to see nothing but endless dunes. Toph Bei Fong laughed out loud and waved her hands in front of her blind eyes.
"That is what it'll sound like when one of you spots it! What are we looking for, Aang?"
The frustration in the Earth Bender's voice was understandable, as she was literally blind in the air, feeling only the hard leather and blurry outlines of her friends. Aang returned to his sitting position and sighed while the Water Tribe siblings looked out a bit longer, then joined him in annoyance.
"Before the Spirit Library sank I managed to see a map the Guardian showed me. There is, or was another library here. He didn't tell me anything about it, in fact he turned around and talked to the Professor," Aang recalled the Great Spirit Library and the large Owl that guarded it.
"In the middle of the desert?" Toph threw her hands up. "What's supposed to be in this library, more spiritual mumbo jumbo?"
Katara sighed again, Sokka turned away (he still remembered the Spirit Oasis up north) while Aang took his Glider out. Toph wasn't being anything but a typical Earth Kingdom citizen, the people who were famous for being incredibly hard-headed and straightforward, in stark contrast to the open mindedness of the Air Nomads or the introspective Water Tribes. Aang shrugged her comment off and glided out ahead of Appa, who grunted his approval, shaking his arrow tipped head. His shedding white fur trailed down into the seemingly endless desert, leaving a micro-trail of Sky Bison waste. Not that anyone would chase them this far into the Song Yi desert, but Aang was quite confident that the map was pointing to this location.
The Air Bender had been gone for about five minutes when he suddenly appeared out of the sun, nearly crashing into his friends and almost out of breath.
"I saw something!" he pointed to a rock sticking out in the middle of the sand.
"Let me see!" Sokka took out his looking-glass, noting that the rock was rather peculiar among the dunes that surrounded it, like a giant flat button on a sandy shirt. Katara took a look and nodded to Aang.
"I see some other people there! They look like Sand Benders!" Sokka refocused his lens on a small dust cloud.
"Great, more from those guys who ride boats in the desert!" Toph moaned. However, she too was perched on the edge of Appa's basket, as her ears picked up faint echoes of human voices. The language was alien to her but she had heard it before in her house, as the Sand Benders were by nature international traders and dealt with her father quite a lot.
"I'm going to go down there. Appa, you stay near the rock!" Aang commanded, patting the beast on its head before gliding down.
The caravan seemed to notice Aang but did not seem to react. One or two nomads even waved at the incoming Avatar, their boats 'moored' near the rock.
"Hello there!" Aang tried to sound as friendly as possible toward the notoriously haughty Sand Benders, who had kidnapped Appa once before.
"Greetings," a man who appeared to be the leader spoke in a thick Arabic accent. "Do you seek Great Rock as well?"
"Well, it is right there next to you, isn't it?"
"We have a comedian here, people," another Sand Bender poked at his companion. "That is the Great Rock. The Pasha asked you, do you seek Great Rock? You know… the place?"
"Err… yeah, I guess?" Aang shrugged.
"Aang, over here!" Sokka's voice called out from behind the caravan. A herd of Camel Buffaloes skimmed past him, led by a bored looking shepherd. A sand boat swung past the herd, the skipper cracking his whip for seemingly no reason. The boat hit a bump and swerved past the snoozing Appa, but the skipper tipped his hat and went by without as much as an incident. Aang noticed that the Sand Benders were now all laughing at him; the whole place was a bustling town, at the foot of the giant 300 foot rock.
"Aang, look!" Katara called out from on top of a Rhino Ostrich. "I'm running on the sand! Wheee!" She laughed as the animal galloped around her confused friend, a slightly less impressed Toph holding on for dear life behind her.
"Oookay…."Aang shrugged.
A half hour later, they were sitting in what the Sand Benders called a "Tea Tent" with brews straight from the Jade Dragon in Ba Sing Se of all places. From afar the Great Rock was well, just a Great Rock but, as the waiter explained to them it was a place of congregation for the Sand Bender tribes, where they swapped goods and stories of the Four Nations as well as a place to rest in the harsh Song Yi apart from the people they called the "rock hounds" in the Earth Kingdom proper. Toph grimaced at the comment but couldn't feel anything on the ground- she felt really helpless in this environment and was showing her frustration rather openly.
"We're not sure if you take Omashu currency, sir…" Aang held out some of King Bumi's coins. The waiter looked at them and pocketed two of the three coins Aang had on offer, nodding sagely.
"We do accept Omashu currency, if you know Sand Benders we accept all currency!" he cackled as his busboy delivered the teas." But Omashu currency is what we prefer here, as the Native says that the king there was always nice to him and the original people of this town."
"There was a town here in the middle of nowhere?" Toph took a sip of her tea, which was surprisingly cool and refreshing despite the earthen grains she could sense at the bottom of the cup.
"There was, until the time of the Fire Nation invasion. Story is, they even came as far as here before besieging Ba Sing Se and eventually going home. The Native is the only person crazy enough to stay here full-time. The rest of us folks- he shot a look at a customer trying to get away- we move in and out. The Rock is sacred to us, so we come here. But we never stay, if you know what I mean."
"Who's the Native?" Sokka asked, gulping his tea down in one go. "Some hopped-up old guy, like the king in Omashu? Oh, sorry Aang," he turned to his friend.
"Well, Bumi is a hopped up old guy," the Avatar smiled.
"Not at all, young man," the waiter poured Toph another ice tea, "he's about your age, as far as we can tell. He's rarely out here; he's usually at the library."
"A library?" Aang shot up. "Where is it?"
"In the old quarter over there, you can't miss it. It's the only building that well, looks like a library."
Against Toph's protestations they paid the remainder of their bill and set out to this library. The Sand Benders passed them by as they went, until only Aang and his friends were left standing in what looked like an old town square. True to the waiter's word the library was right there, a giant door etched right into the Rock, surrounded by empty houses and what looked like dried up fountains.
"Call me Mr. Obvious, but that looks very much like a library," Sokka tapped at the door. "Where's the handle, though? Do we push through it?"
"No, the inscription in the front says 'only to be opened by those who love and hate the elements'"
"Benders, of course!" Aang sprang into action and sent out a gust of wind, slamming it against the door. The only thing that it moved was dust on the door, sending the Avatar flailing over a house.
"Obviously it's an Earth door?" Toph assumed her power stance and sent a wave against the door, only to have it repelled by an unknown force and sending her right into Aang.
"Maybe… not an Earth door?" Katara wiped some more dust off the rock face.
"I love puzzles!" Sokka looked keenly at the door, poking it with his instruments and boomerang.
"Hey, you pony tailed moron," a voice came from inside.
"The door is talking to me!!" Sokka almost jumped into Katara's arms.
"What's the best way to get inside a door?"
"A riddle door?" Sokka scratched his chin. Before he could try the first of his 100 great ideas Katara simply knocked lightly on the door. A sound like a latch could be heard and the doors slowly groaned open.
"Hah, Water Benders always think of the best way to do things," the voice sounded.
"Um, Great Spirit of the Rock Library…" Aang called out in to the darkness.
"Hey, I'm somewhere between the history section and the economics of the Fire Nation references. Do come in, if you need light, just ask your Earth Bender."
"What am I supposed to be doing?" Toph wondered, until she heard the faint vibrations of crystals on the rock walls. She sent a small wave across the room and apparently set off several glowing crystals that colored the room a bright green.
"It's ironic, isn't it?" the blind Earth Bender sat on the rock floor, grateful at least for the return of her 'sight'.
Aang and Katara walked the halls of the vast complex, hearing anything from desert rat-cats to the cackling of a squirrel bat. There were tons of tomes and scrolls here in languages that people had seemingly forgotten, entire slabs of stone tablets laying on the floor in glass cases.
"Hello?" Aang called out into the racks.
"Hello there!" a voice above them replied, three books dropping at Aang' s feet, narrowly missing Katara 's head. She screamed as a face popped up right in front of her, bobbing up and down with dark eyes.
"Little help, please…" the masked man pointed to a rope around his ankle, which Katara untied quite easily. He fell in a heap, crumpled like an old piece of paper