Disclaimer: Any characters you recognize I don't own. This is just a fun writing exercise.

Chapter One: The Ill Made Wish That Changed A World

Taylor Bennett loved Avatar: The Last Airbender maybe a just little too much. Taylor's grandfather on the other hand did not. "Turn that racket down!" his grandfather yelled.

"Stupid old man," Taylor muttered, " I don't need him here. I don't need a babysitter. He really didn't. He was fourteen years old, plenty old enough to be left by himself. But no, Taylor's dad just had to invite his dad over while him, and Taylor's mom were spending the evening out. Taylor was just ready for this night to end. He sat there hunched up on the couch in the living room, his feet tucked under him. Up on the TV was Uncle Iroh complaining to the Earth Kingdom soldiers that his chains were too loose. Now this was a cool old man. Even when he was defenseless and at the mercy of others, he was cool. Much cooler than Taylor's grandfather.

"Feet off that couch!" Taylor's grandfather shouted as he barged in the room. "I won't have shoes on the furniture!"

"It's not even your house," Taylor muttered, "You're acting more like a fussy old lady than-
"I heard that!" His grandfather was standing in front of the coffee table blocking the view of the TV screen. "What is this?" the old man asked gesturing at all the anime DVD box sets that Taylor had stacked haphazardly on the coffee table. It was a big stack Taylor had pulled out half an hour ago, when he couldn't make up his mind what to watch.

"Clean this up!" the old man yelled.

"No!" Taylor yelled jumping up, "You're not in charge of me. You're not the boss! All you've done since Mom and Dad left is give me orders. Do this! Do that! No! You're worse than a drill sergeant!"

Taylor moved around his grandfather to point at the TV screen. "Why can't you be more chill. Why can't you be more like him?" He pointed directly at Uncle Iroh on the screen. "I wish Iroh were my grandfather!"

Suddenly his grandfather went still like a statue, like someone had hit a pause button. The whole room turned black and white like an old photograph. Even the image of Iroh on the TV had turned grey.

"Grandpa?" Taylor said nervously. He waved a hand in front of the old man's face. No response. "Okay, this is weird. Really weird." He tried to pick a glass off the coffee table, but his hand went right through it.

"You really mean that wish kid?" a voice asked out of thin air. The voice was male, youthful sounding, and very playful.

"W-who's there?" Taylor asked. He looked around but all he could see was the living room and his grandfather. He stared at the stack DVDs with a Tenchi Muyo box on top.

"Never mind," said the voice, "It does not matter if the wish was meant or not. Wish granted. Now I'm giving a gift. Pick a name, any name.
"No, tell me who you are!" Taylor demanded.

"Just pick a name, the voice said.

"Then you'll tell me who you are?" Taylor was scared, but he wasn't going to show it anymore than he had to.

Again the voice said, "Pick a name."

Giving in, Taylor said, Tenchi." It was the first name that popped up in his head.

"Of heaven and earth, eh?" The voice sounded amused. "It only somewhat fits. For a child of the Earth kingdom touched by spirits it is a very fine name. But you will also be a child of the Fire nation as well."

"What do you mean by that?" Taylor asked.

The voice cackled. "You made the wish kid. You should be able to figure this out. You are going to be Lu Ten's son, his love child with an Earth kingdom peasant, conceived before the end of the siege. You being in that world is going to create such lovely butterflies."

"Butterflies?" Taylor was feeling lost here. Lost and scared half out of his mind.

The voice grew annoyed. "And you call yourself a geek. The butterfly effect. Change one thing and everything starts changing."

This whole thing was starting to sound like a really weird, really bad fanfic. He had to be dreaming. This was just too crazy. Taylor needed to do something, but what? The only weapon he had was words. Could he poke a hole in the voice logic. Would that stop this?

"Okay Mr. Mystery voice," Taylor said, "Let's say I believe you. Explain how Iroh is even going to know I'm his grandkid?"

"That is actually a good point," the voice said, "We could tell Iroh about you, but that will not help him find you. More so that will not tell him that you really are his. So we will give you a token. Or rather Lu Ten will give his lover a token that will later be given to you." There was more cackling. "I see what you are trying to. Trying to stall are you? You are not getting out of this, Tenchi. You and the new timeline your presence creates for your favorite story, are going to be the best entertainment I have had in eons!"

"My name's not Tenchi! It's Taylor."

"No, it's not."

Suddenly everything was back in full color. Not everything. Somehow Taylor was black and white. And see through?

"Don't you dare take that tone with me young man!" his grandfather shouted.

Taylor looked. There was his grandfather and himself?

The other full color Taylor was yelling right back at his grandfather. "You are not the boss of me!"

Everything faded away, and Taylor found himself standing in an impossible white cloud like space.

"That is was not you," the mystery voice said, "You are Tenchi."

"I just gave you that name!"

"True," the voice said, "You named yourself."

"Okay," Taylor said, trying to out logic the voice, "If I named myself that, what was my name before?"

"You had no name," the voice said, "Or rather you did. You had Taylor Bennett's name. But you are not him, not anymore. His life goes on. But now so does yours."

Taylor found himself shivering. His hands, skin and clothes all still looked black and white. He was also see through, like he was some sort of spirit or ghost.

A baby, a newborn, appeared a few feet away. This," the voice said, "is you, or rather what you will look like shortly."

Taylor could feel himself drifting helplessly against his will towards the baby. He was not in control of this situation, not at all. If the spirit was telling the truth, he was going to wind up a baby in another universe any second. This was really really insane! He'd read fics where self insert characters had been born aware. He didn't want that. And he didn't want to not remember who he was either. He didn't want any of this! There had to be something here he could say or do.
"Wait a minute!" Taylor said, "Babies are really boring! You don't me remembering everything from the womb or my birth. No way. I don't want that!" He stopped drifting just inches away from the baby.

The baby disappeared. A very small child appeared standing in it's place. It was an Asian looking toddler who looked about two years old.

"Is this better?" the voice asked, "When you remember who you were makes no great difference to me."

Taylor dropped down to one knee to better look at the boy in front of him. The kid had yellow eyes and short black hair that stood up all over the place. The kid was dressed in brown and beige clothing, definitely oriental in style, and kind of shabby looking, a size or two too small.

"Just touch him already!" the voice shouted impatiently.

Taylor reached a hand to the boy. The next thing he knew, he wasn't down on one knee. He was standing. He looked at his hands, now very small. They were the boy's hands. He was wearing the kid's clothes too. "I'm him?" Taylor said in disbelief. His voice came out higher pitched and younger, startling him.

"Yes. Yes," said the voice sounding bored. "You're Tenchi. You're three years old now. From your prospective this is good bye. You won't hearing from me for a while, if ever. I'm merely the one to grant your wish. Now go be Iroh's bastard grandchild."

"I'm not a bastard!" Taylor shouted, "And I didn't mean this! I didn't want this!"

The clouds at Taylor feet rose up surrounding him so that he couldn't see anything else. When the clouds faded, Taylor was standing on the street of a village that looked like it belonged in ancient China. The air was chilly. The clothing his new body was wearing was too thin. His feet were bare. He could feel the cold dirt road beneath his toes. He was shivering now from both fright and the cold. But as he looked around, everything began to look familiar as if he'd seen this street, these shops and houses, hundreds of times before.

"Tenchi! Tenchi!" a woman yelled. He knew that voice. It was his aunt Min. But he didn't have an aunt named Min. No. Taylor didn't. But Tenchi did. He was remembering things now, a year, maybe a year and a half of memories, the memories of a small child. It was these memories that told him that somehow he really was Tenchi now every bit as much as he was Taylor.

Tenchi ran back toward his aunt's house. He didn't want to make her mad. She was much scarier than Taylor's grandfather had been. Her threats weren't empty bluster. They were real. As he ran, he started wondering why was he running to her. He had several bruises on his body that had come from her hands. He was moving with a slight limp. His right leg was a little shorter than his left from an badly healed broken leg months ago. She was at fault there too. The part of his mind that had been the little kid had never known anything different than living with Aunt Min. She had raised him after his mom died in childbirth. But the Taylor memories were fitting together now with the Tenchi ones, giving him new insight and understanding. He had been abused. Why should he go anywhere near her?

"Tenchi!" his aunt bellowed. Tenchi was pretty sure half the village heard her. He saw her come his way, and the strangest feeling came over him. It was as if he'd never seen her before, and at the same time had seen her a thousand or more times before. She was somehow both familiar and a stranger. Aunt Min, in her simple home sewn but expensively dyed dark green dress. Aunt Min with her elaborately piled up dark brown hair which made her look even taller. She was so tall, that there wasn't another woman in the village taller than her. His Tenchi memories told him that he had always envied her height. Where she was so tall, he was so small, the smallest boy his age in the village.

Min grabbed Tenchi's arm and dragged him away, yanking him so hard, it hurt. "You're coming home right now. You've spent enough time playing out here with other boys."

He hadn't been playing with them, Tenchi remembered. Right before the mystery voice merged Taylor with Tenchi, the little boy had been off by himself. None of the other boys wanted to play with him. Their parents wouldn't let them. It was his eyes. Like Rudolph's red nose, Tenchi's eyes marked him as something different. Also, he was smart, too smart for his years. Even before now, before the memory merge, Tenchi had been that way. Something was different here. As Taylor he had never thought as fast as he was now.

"No way," Tenchi muttered. "I'm like Bean from Ender's Shadow, kind of." Expect that Bean had been a genetically super human. Which Tenchi wasn't.
"What are you mumbling about child," Min asked, "You want beans for supper?" She dragged him onward. Dragged was the right word too. His small legs could not keep with her speed.

"Please Aunt Min stop!" he cried out, "You're hurting me!"

She paused for a moment and very roughly swept him up into her arms. A minute later she carried him into her house. It was a small place, made even smaller for being crammed with all kinds of broken junk. That most of the junk had once been expensive didn't make it any less junk. Tenchi saw all like one with new eyes. Before it all seemed liked great treasure. Not now though. There were only two rooms here, so much smaller than the house Taylor had lived in. This entire house was not much bigger than Taylor's living room.

Tenchi's aunt set him down, and quickly set him to snapping beans for supper. On the floor beside a low table he sat there with the string beans, thinking When Min wasn't watching, when she was focused on starting a fire in the big cast cook pot, Tenchi fingered the necklace, the leather cord around his neck which he usually kept hidden under his shirt. Tenchi's aunt had given it to him for his birthday a few months ago. On the cord was a gold ring that had belonged to his mother, and before that his father. The ring had an stylized Chinese dragon on it. On the inside there was an engraved Chinese character, the meaning of which he still didn't know. It was a shock to realize that he was pretty much illiterate. But he still remembered how to write in English. He knew two languages now, he realized.

"Put that away," Min scolded, "Before I take it away. If I thought I could sell that ring I would. But that's more trouble than it's worth. The whole village suspects you're a fire nation's soldier's bastard. You don't want to give them reason to know that you are."

Tenchi was realizing a whole bunch of things. His aunt Min wasn't all bad. She wasn't all either good though. Mostly, she was very broken. The daughter of a rich merchant who had lost everything but her sister and all this scattered junk in the war. The sister who was his mother, now dead for three years. His aunt couldn't move past his mother's death. He saw now that she blamed him for her sister's death. He didn't think she meant to hate him or blame him, but she did some. Tenchi had no future here. He had to get away from his aunt and the village. He just didn't know how yet. He was so darn small.