"Uncle! There are customers that want more milk tea at the window table!" said Zuko, his voice strained and insistent as he entered the kitchen of the Jasmine Dragon with a tray of empty teacups and dishes balanced precariously on one arm. "I just got here and alrea– eugh!"
Aang and Katara instantly unattached their lips, their cheeks reddening as they quickly put a respectable amount of distance between their bodies. Aang began to busy himself with the tea that Iroh had kindly asked for him to briefly monitor, but Katara didn't bother to mask the obviously uncomfortable situation with an unnecessary occupation, and instead wrung her hands and warily watched Zuko.
"Really?" Zuko said dryly. "You two finally confess your undying love for each other, and now you can't keep your mouths apart. Even in the kitchen?"
Katara recovered quickly. "Oh come on, Zuko," she said, indignant despite her blush, hands finding their usual place on her hips. "It's not like you never make out with the future Mrs. Fire Lord."
Zuko sighed but ignored the comment as he put on an apron and began to unload the tray of dirty dishes. "Have you seen Uncle? It's early, but there's already a line of people waiting outside for a table, and the room is packed."
The city of Ba Sing Se had welcomed Iroh back with much fervor, and business at the Jasmine Dragon had not yet begun to slow down. The Avatar and his friends had decided to use their free time after the war to help out the old man with his tea shop, mostly because it was an excuse for them all to relax together before the aftermath of the war overshadowed their excitement and relief.
Aang shrugged, using his firebending to gently revive the flames under several brewing pots of tea. "He went out to buy a few things with Toph and left us in charge of the tea."
As he spoke, the back door to the kitchen opened. In walked Iroh, hands full with boxes of tea leaves and vegetables as he pleasantly hummed a tune. "Why hello there, nephew," he said, his voice steady and calm. "Why are you still in town?"
The young Fire Lord's irritable mood flew out the window at the sight of the old man, and a small smile lit up his face the way a grin normally would to any other person.
"That's right, Zuko," Aang said, smiling as he hooked his arm around a blushing Katara's shoulder. "I thought you were supposed to leave after Kung Kuei's celebration last night."
Zuko tried not to frown at the couple's antics as he responded. "The Harmony Restoration Movement can wait to start until I get back to the Fire Nation," he said, moving to help his uncle unload the boxes. "Besides, the Council is still trying to get used to someone so young and inexperienced leading the nation, so they won't let me do a whole lot for the time being. I thought I would be more useful here for a few days."
Iroh grinned. "Great! You can help me experiment with these cabbages I just got from a lovely street vendor!" He gestured to one of the boxes on the counter. "I'm thinking there has got to be some sort of good combination I can make between green tea and cabbages...maybe pickled cabbages? Cabbage tea?" He trailed off into the quiet way he often had of speaking to himself, finger poised on his chin in thought.
Zuko turned his attention back to the young Avatar. "Aang, we should probably find time today to discuss plans for how to deal with the situation in Yu Dao."
"Talking politics already?" said a sassy voice from just outside the door. Soon Toph's body followed her voice into the room, and she walked over to lean, arms crossed, against the counter. "Seriously Zuko, we just saved the world from the evil Father Lord, and now you want to try to fix things when everything is so peaceful? I mean, the people in this city are even more peaceful and happy now than they were when they didn't even know that the war was going on!"
Zuko opened his mouth to respond, but a surprised shout from Iroh stopped his words. The old man stood, hands frozen in the air, staring in shock at several discarded cabbages that were strewn on the counter next to him.
The rest of the gang - excluding Toph, who just pouted - walked over to see what was wrong.
"What is this?" said Aang, picking up one of the cabbages. Someone had painted an angry face on the vegetable in black paint. The eyes were big X's and the mouth was a jagged line. "Why would anyone do this?"
"Do what?" called Toph, but the others were too distracted to respond.
"Is it some kind of threat?" asked Zuko, examining one of the blackened cabbages still in the box. Every single one had a unique menacing face drawn on it.
"A threat for who? About what?" Toph tried again, but she was ignored once more.
Iroh shook his head to clear away the shock and began to toss the cabbages into the trash. "I never really liked cabbages that much anyway," he muttered to himself.
"Should we do something about this? Maybe we can go find the vendor that gave these cabbages to Iroh?" Katara suggested.
"Can someone please tell me what's going on?" Toph yelled irritably, stomping her foot to send a slight earth tremor to the others out of spite, effectively getting their attention.
Katara frowned at the girl but calmly explained the angry faces on the cabbages. The blind earthbender's response, naturally, was to laugh obnoxiously and comment on the seriousness with which the rest of the group had handled the situation.
"You're all a bunch of sissies!" she said amid barking laughter. "Are you really scared of cabbages with faces?"
A few minutes later when Sokka entered the room and the ordeal had to be explained once more, Toph began the teasing all over again. Eventually the rest of the group also laughed it off, but the strange occurrence did not go far from their minds.
"Aang, are you alright?" Katara asked, gently placing her arm on Aang's shoulder as they walked behind Sokka and Toph, who were arguing animatedly about underground earthbending matches. With the cabbages ruined, Iroh had sent them on a mission to find interesting new things for him to experiment with in his tea shop while Zuko stayed to help him operate. The group dodged eager shoppers in one of Ba Sing Se's crowded marketplaces, searching lazily for intrigues, but mostly just enjoying the beautiful weather.
"I'm just saying," said Sokka, "that it's not really fair for you to fight in the matches. I mean, you can just sit there and know exactly what they're going to do the entire time! How is anyone supposed to stand a chance against that?"
Toph snorted. "That's what makes me the best! Isn't the best earthbender supposed to win? It's not my fault that those other losers don't know my technique!"
Aang didn't respond to Katara's question so she stopped him, allowing Sokka and Toph to walk ahead, arguing on. The Avatar was being unusually quiet on such a bright and cheery afternoon.
"Hey," Katara said softly. "What's wrong?"
"I feel like someone is watching us," he said, his eyes narrowed, scanning the crowded area.
"What makes you say that?" The scene felt chaotic to the waterbender, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Shoppers argued with vendors about prices as sweet scents from carts advertised delicious street foods, and it was loud, smelly, and cramped, as usual.
Aang frowned, his staff clutched tightly in his hand. "I don't know," he answered quietly, distracted. "I just have a strange feeling…"
Katara looked around and saw a shadow disappear behind a cart in one of the many alleys ahead. She shook her head to clear the thought - Aang's words were making her paranoid. "It's probably nothing," she said softly. "I'm sure you're just worked up because of the weird cabbage thing this morning."
Aang turned to face her. "Those cabbages must have been meant for us," he said, as if his words were a spoken extension of a line of thought that he had been having. "Iroh said that the cabbage vendor just gave him the box for free, right? Why would he do that unless they were meant to come to us for some reason?" He paused, frowning in concentration. "I feel like I'm forgetting something…and the cabbages are a reminder."
"I'm sure it was just a sick joke," Katara said, trying to reassure him and also her. "Don't let it worry you. Besides, if it was a serious threat, why would they use cabbages, of all things?"
A booming noise from further up the road drew their attention, and all of a sudden a huge commotion sent people running in all directions. Aang and Katara ran through the crowd to try to locate the disturbance, but too many people were running against them, shoving and yelling.
"What's going on?" Katara shouted over the noise, but they couldn't see anything.
"I'm going to go find Sokka and Toph and see what's happening," Aang said, opening his glider and taking off into the air. As soon as he was above the crowd, several green objects crashed into him and knocked him out of the sky.
Katara watched in horror as Aang fell onto a rooftop. "Aang!" she shouted, pushing people out of the way as she ran over to the building. It only took a few moments for Aang to appear again, unscathed and standing on the roof, eyes searching the area for the culprit.
He must have seen something, because in an instant he was back in the air, pursuing someone down an alleyway. Katara ran in the direction he had disappeared and found Toph and Sokka sprawled on the ground, surrounded by earthbending wreckage and an immense number of green vegetables. At this point most of the people had cleared away except for a few stragglers trying to understand what was going on, as well as several vendors hurriedly closing their stalls.
"Sokka! Toph!" Katara said as she approached them. "Are you okay?"
Sokka jumped to his feet and brushed dirt off of his clothes. "No, we are not okay!" he said angrily, using wildly animated hand gestures as he yelled. "Someone was earthbending at us and then they threw lots of cabbages at our faces! Why would they do that?!"
"What the heck is going on today?" Toph shouted as she stood up as well. "First there were weird cabbages in Iroh's tea shop, and now they're throwing the disgusting vegetables at us in the market? Who throws cabbages at a blind girl, anyway?"
Katara frowned at the vegetables littering the ground. "I don't know, but Aang seemed to have a lead," Katara responded. "Let's go follow him!"
The trio ran down the alley until they reached the end, where they turned a corner and saw that Aang was facing a group of men at the dead end of the narrow lane, his staff poised in defense. Boxes of cabbages lined the walls near the group.
"Okay Avatar, now that your friends have arrived, it's time for justice!" the man in the front, an old Earth Kingdom citizen with a gray goatee, said as he pointed directly at Aang. The man looked familiar to the brother and sister, but neither of them could quite pinpoint where they had seen him before.
"What on Earth is going on?" Toph yelled, arms crossed, clearly fed up with the entire ordeal.
"My sons and nephews and I devised this plot to lure you here, and now you're going to pay for what you've done!" the same man said, gesturing to the men surrounding him, who all settled into bending stances.
"What is it that we've done?" Katara asked evenly, trying to calm everyone down but still keeping a hand clutched around her water pouch just in case.
"You ruined my cabbages several times!" he shouted, waving a finger at the whole group of adolescents. "And you destroyed my cart - that thing is not easy to replace over and over again!"
"Wait, I remember that…" Katara said softly, recalling at least one time they had encountered a cabbage merchant – was it in Kyoshi? Or Omashu?
Sokka vaguely remembered Aang knocking a cabbage cart into some men, but he was incredulous. "Really?" he said flatly, throwing his arms up in the air. "This is all because a bunch of stupid vegetables accidentally got messed up? We were being chased!"
Toph frowned in confusion. "Wait – I don't even know who this crazy cabbage person is," she said, turning to Sokka. "Was this before I joined the group?"
Sokka shrugged. "I think so?"
Aang ignored the comments from all of his friends, his eyes instead trained on the group of earthbenders glaring at him.
Katara was the first to recover, noticing Aang's seriousness and copying it. "Do you really want to be challenging a master earthbender, waterbender, and the Avatar?" she asked the man.
"Hey!" called Sokka from behind the three benders that were poised to fight. "Don't forget me!"
"Oh, right, of course," Katara said hastily. "Do you really think you should challenge two master benders, the Avatar, and a guy with a boomerang?" she amended.
Sokka made a loud noise of disapproval, but he was ignored by all as the man glanced around at Aang and his friends, sighed, and relaxed his stance. The men surrounding him reluctantly followed suit, and soon everyone was simply waiting for someone to speak.
"I don't want to fight you, Avatar," the cabbage merchant finally said dejectedly. "I know that there is no way I could actually win a battle against so many great benders." He paused for a moment. "I just wanted to have some sort of justice."
Toph and Sokka simultaneously chimed in with shouts of "Are you kidding?!" and "What a waste of time!", but Aang regarded the man seriously.
"I apologize for jeopardizing your business," the Avatar finally said, his voice solemn and full of genuine regret. Aang put his right fist against his left palm and bowed deeply to the cabbage merchant. "I am also sorry that I did not think anything of it at the time."
The cabbage merchant smiled at the Avatar, and simply said, "Thank you," softly in response. He then frowned and added sharply, "But I hope you never end up in Yu Dao, because that's where I'll be locating my business next!"
Aang blanched at the words but decided it was probably best not to tell the man that Yu Dao was exactly where he would be going next. Instead, he just nodded and turned to his friends, gesturing that they should leave.
The rest of the group seemed satisfied with the outcome - well, everyone except for the blind earthbender, who could not let go of the fact that the jerks had thrown cabbages at a blind girl, especially when she had had nothing to do with his dramatic problems in the first place. As the confrontation dispensed and Aang and his friends were walking out of the alley, Toph decided to get revenge.
"Cabbages are a super disgusting vegetable anyway," she said under her breath, using her foot to send a wave of earthbending over to the cabbage merchant. Several columns of rock swiftly rose from the ground, splitting the boxes in two and sending cabbages flying in all directions and their owner scrambling around to collect the vegetables.
"MY CABBAGES!"
"It seems pointless that he brought you to the alley just to make you apologize," Zuko said after the rest of the group explained what had happened to them hours earlier. It was just after sundown, and everyone was sitting in the closed Jasmine Dragon, drinking Iroh's magnificent tea and relaxing.
"It does seem a bit unnecessary," Iroh added, pouring more hot tea into Katara's cup before gently heating the pot with his hand and moving on to another table.
Aang just shrugged. "I guess his cabbages are really important to him," he said lightly, unconcerned.
"I think we should've just fought them," said Toph, propping her feet up on a table, much to Iroh's dismay. "We could've destroyed those idiots in seconds."
"Well, I think you handled the situation remarkably, Aang," Katara said sweetly, smiling at him and receiving rolled eyes and fake gags from the other youths in the room.
"Why he would want to sell cabbages in the first place is a big mystery to me," said Sokka in his mock wise voice. "Vegetables are gross – no offense, Aang – so I'm hoping that the man will take Toph's rather rough exit as a sign and move on to a different, more profitable line of business."
Toph frowned at the wall, but her expression was very clearly aimed at Sokka. "What do you suggest, oh master businessman? Should he move into developing advanced technology or something?"
Sokka shook his head. "Nah, advanced technology will probably get him in trouble down the road. Just look what happened to the airships that Teo and his dad designed!" He grinned and paused for a moment to dramatically add suspense. "He should sell meat!" he said, as if this were the most obvious suggestion.
Aang slapped his forehead, and everyone in the room collectively groaned.