"Hey Katara! You got a hairpin?" Sokka shouted over the snowbank while his head was still crammed deep into the engine compartment of the old, rusty motorized sled.
Katara had barely heard her brother's question from her position on top of the fifty-foot tall snowbank that loomed nearby, where she sat watching over the still, frozen landscape. Her brother had asked, no, told her to keep watch while he tinkered with the poor excuse for a mode of transportation. As much as she loathed her brother for being so patronizing of her sometimes, she knew he had a point. Someone had to keep an eye out for any Bearseals or Arcticwolves that were known to roam in this area of the glacier. But Katara found herself looking far further out across the icy landscape than she could reasonably spot any individual predators. In her mind, and in Sokka's as well, there were much bigger and more dangerous predators out there than a handful of hungry scavengers.
"Actually, Sokka, I don't. Since when have I used hairpins?" She responded absentmindedly, and somewhat disgruntled that Sokka was taking so long on the repairs.
This has been the third time in the last two weeks that the motorized sled, affectionately called the Deathtrap, had left the two siblings stranded miles away from their village. That said, Katara was starting to notice that this set of repairs had already taken far longer than those other times. She was starting to get worried as the sun seemed to get closer and closer to the horizon, casting massive shadows from the large set of frozen solid snowbanks that surrounded them, seemingly trapping them in.
"I'm sorry," Sokka began, taking his head out from under the machinery. "I was just the impression that you people have hair products growing out of your toes or something." He then pointed his boot at the irritated Katara and wiggled it around mockingly.
Katara twisted her seated body towards him, dropping the snowflake she had been absentmindedly bending above her hand.
"Excuse me, you people?!" She stammered back at him with an obvious annoyance in her voice.
"You know, girls," Sokka replied in a very matter of fact manner while rummaging through his cluttered and rusty toolbox sitting in the snow next to him. "Polar opposite of guys, picky about their looks, bear children, I'm sure you've heard of them."
Katara exaggeratedly rolled her eyes while crossing her arms across her faded blue parka.
"Sokka, I have no clue where you come up with this crap. I am the only girl within two hundred miles that's even close to your age and you think you got us all narrowed down. And I don't even use hairpins!"
"Your personal situation in this conversation is entirely irrelevant," Sokka retorted while throwing the last of his tools back in his toolbox. "You need to realize that your big ol' bro has plenty of information on a vast variety of topics, including girls. You need to learn to expand your learning environment to beyond our frozen little village. And also, without a hairpin to fix this jam in the belt, good ol' deathwish over here is as good for us as a rotten sea-prune sandwich.
This talk did not sit well at all with Katara. This was her every day, listening to how Sokka was a better warrior, knew more, was a better leader, blah blah blah, and he always seemed to back up his own egotistical statements with these stupid and degrading little comments. No one wanted to leave this place as much as she did. She wanted to something, anything with her life other than generic cooking and household cleaning jobs, which he was always delegating to her in between their hunting trips. She jumped to her feet in anger and started walking and sliding down the snowbank towards her brother.
"Sokka, I'll have you know that while you are sitting around reading books that are two hundred years out of date and flinging your boomerang at pieces driftwood with painted on Fire Nation armor, I have been busting my ass to make sure that you, Gran Gran, and damn near everyone else in the village can eat!"
"Um, Katara?" Sokka said while glancing behind her, but she did not give him any heed as she furiously thrashed her arms around at him.
"Sokka be quiet! For once in your life let me talk before you open your big, fat sexist mouth!" She was screaming at the top of her lungs now, so loud that she could barely hear herself think, let alone the sudden cracking sounds coming from the ice behind her. "You have absolutely NO respect for me at all or what I do! I ask for you to do some chores, so BASIC chores so I can practice my Waterbending, which is WAY more important and useful than your stupid piece of bent flying metal will ever be!"
"Look Katara," Sokka pleaded with her, holding out his arms out to try to stop her while nervously glancing behind her. "I'm sorry about what I said! I was just joking! You know me, always the one for sarcasm! Now, just calm down before you hurt somebody." He finished in a desperate whisper.
"Calm down? CALM DOWN!?" The cracking from behind her was now completely audible to her, but she didn't react or care for even an instant. "You are telling me to calm down while pretending to apologize! Now you listen to ME! Your complete and utter lack of RESPECT for me can't just be apologized away! You DARE to think you can just apologize all your years of blatant sexism towards me away!?"
"KATARA! LOOK OUT!"
Sokka's intense look of desperateness finally broke through Katara's rage, and she swung around just in time to see a giant spire of ice get cut in half with the same motion her hands had made just an instant ago. It toppled towards her, sending a cascade of snow and ice directly towards her. Katara only had time to cover her head with her hands before the force of Sokka tackling her out of the way hit her side.
The siblings landed in the snow as the spire of ice collapsed right behind them in a flurry of snow and ice. The two both froze in place on the ground as the sound of collapsing ice was suddenly overcome by the ear-piercing crunching of metal. Sokka slowly stood up, his face full of fear and worry slowly being replaced by concern and sadness. He slowly turned, eyes comically wide, towards the now unrecognizable pile of rusted metal halfway buried under loose snow and shards of ice.
"NOOOOO! MY BABY!" He screamed in a high pitch tone as he broke his near numb demeanor and rushed towards the remains of his beloved Deathwish. He began to try to dig it out of the snow frantically with his hands.
"KATARA! GET YOUR BUTT OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND HELP ME DIG THIS OUT!" He screamed while desperately trying to excavate the shattered remains of machinery. "YOU GOT US INTO THIS MESS AND YOU BETTER HELP US GET THE HELL OUT OF IT BEFORE WE ARE STUCK OUT HERE IN THE NIGHT DODGING PACKS OF ARCTIC WOLVES!"
He received no response.
Sokka turned to yell at Katara again, but stopped himself when he saw why Katara had remained wordless, still laying on the ground.
She was staring at a large metal door in the side of the snowbank that had been revealed by the falling snow.
"S-Sokka?"
"I see it."
The two slowly walked towards the metal door, which bore a large round wheel on the center which was situated on the direct center of the riveted grey surface. It became apparent as the two moved closer that the door itself did not have any walls parallel to it on either side, but instead led down a similarly sized hallway leading down into the ice. They reached the door at the same time, and right as Katara was about to say something, Sokka grabbed the handle and wrenched as hard as he could to the left. The door didn't budge.
Sokka caught his breath and turned to Katara, who had folded her arms in annoyance. "Must be the other direction," he said.
Sokka turned and once again heaved against the handle yielding similar results. Nothing.
"Well, Katara the door must be frozen shut," Sokka turned on his heal and began walking back to the scrap pile. "No use in wasting the rest of daylight trying to figure out that thing, come on, we need to get busy."
"Sokka!"
"What?"
He turned around to see Katara raise her hand and, slowly and clumsily, ice crystals and water droplets began to flow out of the locking mechanism and coalesce into a loose ball in front of her. By the time Sokka had reached the door again, she was already effortlessly turning the wheel.
"Wait, hold up Katara, there might be something dangerous in there."
"What could possibly be living in some ancient sealed up cellar? The amount of ice buildup means this thing has been closed for years."
"Katara, this is no simple cellar," Sokka argued, gesturing at the several rivets situated in rows across the door. "This door is made of heavy, high-quality steel," He knocked on it lightly for effect. "Whoever made it didn't want any stupid kids like us wandering in."
"Well if that's the case, why would they…" She paused as she, with one solid pull, creaked open the door to reveal a dark and dusty concrete staircase that quickly disappeared into blackness. "Leave it unlocked?"
Sokka jumped back slightly at the ancient groan of the hinges, and quickly fumbled through the pouch he kept slung over his shoulder and produced a flashlight. Much like the late Deathwish, this flashlight was a coagulation of parts that didn't belong to it. The light source was a headlight bulb he stole from a different broken down motorized sled, powered by some batteries he had traded for some seal jerky with a pair of Earth Nation merchants, or scavengers as most people called them. All of that was housed in two tin cans taped together with one end replaced with a round shard of Plexiglas for the light to shine through.
He fumbled with it for a second before clicking it on and shining the beam down the staircase, which was revealed to go down about thirty or so steps, and was covered in cobwebs and dust.
"Looks like you were right Katara," Sokka commented. "This place is definitely uninhabited."
"Thanks, I wouldn't jump to conclusions if I were you, after all, this place is still cleaner than your room," Katara replied with a grin on her face.
Katara could tell by Sokka's look on his face that this had rubbed a nerve. Sokka then took a step back and made a sweeping motion with his hand and said, "Well you know what they say, ladies first!"
"Fine, it's beauty before age anyway," Katara said while snatching the flashlight again and proceeded into the dark and tiny tunnel, batting away cobwebs with her hand.
"Katara, I'm pretty sure the phrase is "Age before beauty".
"What? Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of your cowardice."
The two proceeded slowly and carefully down the stairs, which had several patches of black ice on them caused from water forcing itself in-between small cracks in the riveted metal, dripping onto the crumbling concrete steps below. Sokka had been careful to slam the door shut behind them, citing the beasts that might find their way in there after them. The slam reverberated through the somewhat ancient facility, causing a long echo that seemed to go on longer than it should have, before dying out in the cold, dry air.
"So Sokka-the Wise," Katara asked sarcastically in a slight whisper. "What do you think this place used to be?"
"Well, from what I can tell it looks a lot like a bomb shelter they would have built before the fall, but it doesn't look nearly that old. That and these burn marks don't look like they were caused by a bomb at all."
"Burn marks? What burn marks?" Katara swung her head back towards him in curiosity.
"Shine the light right here," Sokka said, pointing at a darker portion of the concrete wall. She obliged, and revealed a large, ashy scar on the wall, that looked like someone had slashed it with something burnt.
"See what I'm talking about? This mark is at least four feet long, and I think I saw two smaller ones further up. Thing is, it doesn't look anything like bomb marks at all from what I've seen-"
"From what you've read."
"Those books have pictures, Katara, you would know if you ever read one!"
"Well, I can still say that these marks look more like-"
"-Fire Nation," Sokka interjected before she could finish. Katara then turned back around to look down the staircase with a look of nervousness on her face.
"Well I was going to say Firebender."
"What's the difference?"
"You're right, and I think we should go."
"What? Katara, this place is abandoned, you said so yourself. These burn marks are old, no one is down here."
Katara hesitated.
"It might be better to stay down here for the night anyway, and maybe we will find some parts to repair the Deathwish with."
Katara took a deep breath and started to go down the stairs again.
"Fine, but I want us out of here first thing in the morning."
"Oh trust me, I am not arguing with you on that one," Sokka agreed while trying to whack a cobweb out of his loose mohawk-ponytail. "This place gives me the heebie-jeebies."
"Ok, then let's just hurry up and get this over with so we can-OHHHAHHHH!" Katara suddenly screamed as she lost her balance on some crumbled piece of concrete and she fell down the next few steps and skidded across the cold floor at the bottom, the flashlight was sent spinning through the air and turned off as it landed on the ground next to her, plunging the entire bunker into complete darkness.
"Katara! Are you ok?"
"I'm fine Sokka, I just tripped." Katara groaned while rubbing her now sore head.
"Super, now why don't you find the flashlight you dropped so I can see?"
"Everything's all about you, isn't it?" Katara retorted while blindly fumbling around for the flashlight, silently hoping it was still intact. Sokka would have her hide if she had managed to break it. She finally found it laying to her right, and quickly switched it on, revealing a mummified skeleton laying on the ground right in front of her face.
"AAAAAHHHHH!HOLYSHITHOLYSHIT SOKKAAAAA!" Katara screamed as she stumbled backward away from the gaping mouth of the rotten flesh covered skull.
"What is it?!" Sokka exclaimed as he scurried down and arrived at her side. "OHHH THAT'S A DEAD PERSON! HE'S DEAD, THAT'S A DEAD ONE." Sokka shouted when he spotted the corpse. He took a moment to catch his breath before placing a hand on the near-hyperventilating Katara, who still had her eyes and the flashlight trained intensely of the decomposing skeleton.
"Katara, it's ok, it's dead, it's not going to hurt you," Sokka said calmly to her. "And look, its just some Earth nation punk anyway." He gestured to the faded and deteriorating robes of the corpse, which during its life, would have proudly displayed surprisingly elegant green Earth nation designs, something notably more traditional and rare these days, since it wasn't nearly as practical as pants and a shirt, and were harder to come by.
"I'm sorry, it just freaked me out." Katara stammered.
"I couldn't tell. You faced that dead pile of bones with bravery and fortitude." He declared mockingly while going into a soldier's "Attention" stance.
"Sokka quit the theatrics, that was a person, show some respect," Katara said back, while slowly kneeling down in front of the body to examine it. This isn't the first dead body she had seen, she had come across a handful assisting the village's lone doctor with her various sick, and sometimes dying patients. However, she had not seen anyone quite this dead before. It had obviously been laying here in the dry air for years, completely untouched by any animal life or bugs, not that there were many of those in the South Pole.
"Hey Katara,"
"Yeah?"
"Is that the same type of burn mark that was in the concrete?"
Katara, who had been transfixed on the face of the body, turned her head to face the midsection of the tattered tunic, which appeared to have a similar, yet more round and direct, burn right in the middle, creating a small hole which continued into the torso for a few inches.
"Yeah I think so. Poor guy, he never had a chance."
"Unless he was an Earthbender," Sokka reasoned, gesturing to his clothes. "This looks like the type of thing old Earthbending masters would wear before the fall. Very traditional stuff."
Sokka then noticed a small, two-foot long string hanging from the ceiling directly in front of them. He pulled it, which prompted a small shout of reprimanding from Katara, which was replaced with dead silence as a small lightbulb situated in the ceiling flickered on. The dull yellow glow of the flickering bulb was just barely enough to illuminate the room, which Sokka figured was about half the size of the dis-used hockey rink back at the village, and was full of seemingly random piles of concrete rubble. But the room itself was not of immediate concern, since the light had also illuminated more dead, mummified bodies. Lots of them.
Sokka was the first to open his mouth in-between darting his eyes around the room. "Um, let's go, this party is dead anyway." He exclaimed quickly while turning on his heel.
Katara grabbed him by the arm before he could start up the stairs and said, "Sokka, look, you were the one that said they are all dead and can't hurt us. So you are going to help me find out to turn on the heat in this place, since it obviously has power still, and then we will find the parts to fix the Deathwish. Deal!?"
"Katara, you seem to be missing one important fact, there are DEAD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE!"
"And they are going to stay dead unless all your yapping manages to wake them up!"
"How do you know they aren't all zombies that rise up at the midnight hour to eat any brave and handsome warriors that have happened to wander in here!?"
"Because I don't read old horror books every night until three in the morning, and even if you were right you have nothing to worry about!"
"Excuse me, but I have learned many things from those pieces of fine literature. And do you know what rule number one is? It's don't go inside a house with frickin' rotting skeletons strewed across the floor!"
"Well you were the one that said this is a bunker, not a house, and if you want to go up there alone to the cold, Arctic Wolf ridden glacier, be my guest. But I am staying here in this warm, safe and well-lit bunker!"
"Fine, I'll stay." Sokka turned around to face her, wrenching his arm free of her grasp in the process. "But I refuse to call this graveyard warm, safe or well-lit until proven otherwise."
"That is fine by me. Now, let's see what else this place has besides old dead Earth Nation folk."
"Katara, really really hate to continue arguing with you, since we just made up so nicely," Sokka said, looking across the floor of corpses. "But I think only about half of these are Earth Nation. Look, there are two Northern Water tribesmen right there."
Katara turned around as well and looked across the floor. "You're right, and there are even some Air Nomads right beside them."
"Air Nomads?" Sokka responded with shock. "Damn, this place must be old. How many years has it been now?"
"Seven," Katara replied simply, her own gaze focused on two bodies in a corner, which appeared to have suffered much more firebending damage the others. "Sokka, what are those two wearing?"
"Geesh, hard to tell, those two look like their previous lives included being part-time firewood logs." Sokka took the flashlight from her and approached the two, bending down to examine the frayed and singed remains of the ashy remains. "Well would you look at that, Fire nation!"
"Really? Well looks like they got a taste of their own medicine all right."
"Yup," Sokka replied happily as he stood back up. "The only good Firebender is a dead Firebender."
"I wonder who killed them'" Katara replied as casually as one could while stepping over dead bodies towards a door that she reasoned, judging by the tidy bundle of electrical wires running along the ceiling from it, could lead towards an electrical room. "What do you think they did to get them killed by their own men?"
"Nah, these two looked a lot older than what they would usually put in a raiding party. They must have been living here with the rest of them."
"Firebenders and Waterbenders living together? Madness!"
"Right?! Well I suppose it was a different time seven years ago."
"Not that different," Katara replied softly as she reached the open door. She saw a familiar string hanging from the ceiling and without hesitation gave it a pull. A similar dim light filled the hallway, which revealed pipe and wire lined walls leading to a large generation station with large, dusty batteries leading from it. The two made their way through the cobwebs and to a large lever labeled MAIN POWER RESET.
"Ok Katara this thing is old so we should check around for frayed wires befo-" Sokka started before Katara gave the switch a big pull downward sending a hurl of sparks from the system. "-KATARA!"
She jumped back quickly, and the entire facility was plunged back into darkness.
"Katara, you are making it harder and harder for me not to just disown you and move on in life."
Just as he finished, the generator started to make slow, mechanical clicking sounds that slowly sped up, which led to the slow but steady illumination of the hallway and the entryway behind them with bright, blue tube lights situated along the walls.
"Come along, brother, let's look around," Katara said with a sly smile as she walked back down the hallway. Sokka stood there with an annoyed expression for a moment before reluctantly switching off his flashlight and following her.
They worked their way throughout the complex, finding four main sections. The first was the maintenance hallway on the right side of the complex, held some tools, but much to Sokka's annoyance, no parts that could come close to fixing the Deathwish. The next two tunnels were directly in front of the stairway down. The right one led to a simple sleeping quarters with bunk beds and a white flower painted on the far wall. The tunnel next door, however, was far more interesting. It was a large, fifty-foot circular hole in the floor that was just inches from the dark, cold ocean itself. Sokka reasoned that the room must have been an old missile silo, repurposed for a fishing hole. The last tunnel led off to the right, and after several various storage rooms led to a large garage. Sokka squealed at the sight as they approached the garage's lone occupant.
"A Y-37 LONE WOLF SNOW-TREADER! WE'RE SAVED!" Sokka screamed while running up into the chassis of the massive four-seater vehicle, which boasted four separate snow treads situated like wheels to a car. "This thing has a top snow speed of forty miles an hour! If we hurry, we can get back to the village in time for dinner! Oh, Gran Gran is making her special Seal Jerky stew tonight isn't she!?"
"Don't you want to look around here a little bit more? You know, try to figure out what happened to those people?" Katara shouted at him from the ground.
"Nah, they were just victims of a Firenation raiding party, they probably came to off those Air Nomads. Now be a good sibling and find the garage door switch for me."
Katara rolled her eyes and muttered a curse under her breath. She eventually spotted the switch behind several rusty petroleum barrels, and began to push them out of the way to reach it.
"Remember to check for frayed wires Katara!" Sokka shouted through the enclosure of the Snow-Treader, but to Katara could only hear muffled words.
"What?!" She shouted back as she pulled the switch. This time, her pulling it caused a fury of sparks to come from the switch, which landed on the petroleum tanks and set the leaking oil ablaze.
Katara quickly tried to use her waterbending to douse the flames, but she was not fast enough at bringing the snow outside the slowly rising door to stop the spreading blaze. Sokka, upon seeing this, started up the Snow-Treader and opened up the passenger side door.
"KATARA! GET AWAY FROM THERE! IT'S GONNA BLOW!"
Heeding her brother's advice, she gave up her futile effort and ran as fast as she could towards the Snow-Treader which was beginning to groan and wheeze back to life. Sokka put the machine into gear and hit the gas as soon as Katara climbed onto the side.
BOOOOM!
The explosion sent Katara off the side of the Snow-Treader and onto the snow outside. Shrapnel from one of the barrels flew into the back of the newly-awoken machine, decimating the rear passenger-side tread, causing it to jolt to a halt.
"KATARA!" Sokka screamed over the roar of the fire and the sound of metal cracking. "KATARA ARE YOU OK!?"
She grunted and slid over onto her side, holding her side which, while intact, was probably terribly bruised. She gave a half-hearted thumbs up to her brother.
Sokka, knowing her sister was safe, moved his focus to trying to get the Snow-Treader moving again. The dusty and faded LCD screen was flashing multiple warnings, and no matter how much Sokka ignored them, they remained, and so did the Snow-Treader.
"Come on come on you worthless piece of junk move forward!" Sokka muttered to himself while trying to figure out how to turn on front-tread only mode. Meanwhile the blaze was only worsening, sending thick plumes of smoke into the twilight air. The heat was growing intense inside the garage and was causing several metal beams to buckle.
"Sokka! Give it up! Let's get out of here!"
"One minute! I've almost got it-"
CREEEEEAAAAAKKKK!
The entire bottom of the garage suddenly gave way as beams below the floor finally broke and snapped. The entire back end of the garage jerked downwards into the sea, sending the Snow-Treader skidding backward with Sokka still inside of it. Taking note of this precarious situation, he jumped out the door and landed with a thud on the tilting ground. He quickly began sliding backtowards the now open ocean. He let out a girlish scream as he braced for impact before hitting, with a painful thud, a misshapen block of ice that wasn't there before. He glanced up to see Katara with her arms outstretched towards him.
"HURRY! GET UP HERE BEFORE THE TOP FALLS!"
Sokka scrambled his way to the top, reaching out for Katara's outstretched hand just before the rest of the floor gave way. Katara pulled him up and they both flopped on the ground and looked at the smoldering scene before them.
After a few moments for them to catch their breath, Sokka spoke.
"Well, there goes our ride."
"Thanks for your little observation."
"Sokka is here to help."
They both flinched slightly when the distant howl of wolves echoed in the distance.
"We should get back indoors."
"Thanks for your little observation."
The wreck from the aging building sank slowly from its former resting place into the dark abyss below, never to be seen by light again. As it eventually collided with the arctic ocean floor, pieces were scattered everywhere across the featureless landscape. One chunk of concrete happened to bounce and roll off the rest with great force and speed, as if guided by fate itself. It crashed into a large, forgotten sphere of ice that had been frozen in its place on the ocean floor long ago. The collision broke the ice free from the earth that had made it its prisoner, and it began to slowly float through the water that had protected it to the air and heat above, where it truly belonged.
This is the first part of a series I have been planning for a long time, and have just now had the motivation to really start. I really just needed to finish this chapter and get it out there to hopefully get the ball moving in terms of me actually finishing any of these (Which is partially why this chapter ended in a kinda cliffhanger.) Since this is my second story I have ever posted here, any feedback, small or big, positive or negative, would be greatly, greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading! :D