The Day Combustion Man Rode In
by Nevermore's Shadow
Author's Note: Written for Pro-Bending Tournament Round 4
Team: Laogai Lion Vultures
Genre Prompt: Western
Prompts -
Easy: Fairy
Medium: Combustion Man
Hard: Non-bending!Bender
Element: Water
Word Count: 1,165
Well, they always say that the beginning is the best place to start, don't they? You wanted to know about the day that the guy they call the "Combustion Man" rolled into town and fought… well, I don't know exactly what they call that kid who fought them. Out here on the frontier, things are a little… different… than they are off in the big cities. You see, there's been a lot of conflict out here lately, due in part to this land baron, a leader of those fire benders that you always are hearing about, who says that all of this land is his. There are some that dispute that, but so far very few of these little frontier towns out here have been able to keep him from rolling in and taking over the town. I'm getting too far off track. This here town is called Xi Cheng Qu. They've mostly managed to stay out of all of these conflicts, but every now and then trouble visits. Trouble had visited recently when one of the land baron's, I think they call him the Fire Lord or some such nonsense, posses had rolled into town and taken over without much of a fight. Then this kid rolled into town riding on a flying bison. Have you ever heard of that? A flying bison? Ridiculous, I say. We've got plenty of bison-pigs and bison-horses out this way, but not any that fly. They know they belong on the ground, firm and steady.
It was shortly after that kid and his friend's showed up that I arrived in town, pulling my wagon of cabbages with me. I saw the last of the big brawls that drove the Fire Lord's men out of town. Nearly knocked down the town's saloon, the Drunken Fairy, but she stood just fine, yes, indeed. The kid was all tattooed with arrows and always insisted on wearing this big, red hat with a wide brim that was far too big for his bald little head. Always fell down over his eyes, it's a wonder he managed to drive that posse out of town without tripping over his own two feet. Or, well, it would have been a wonder if he wasn't able to fly himself. I hadn't mentioned that yet? Yup, that kid could fly, using some sort of contraption that collapsed into a fighting staff of sorts. He had a few friends with him, as well, from all over the various regions. One boy, a fighter, who seemed to always be talking about one thing or another. Thought he was real clever, but never made sense to me, not one bit. There was a girl, that boy's sister, who was a Waterbender and a healer. Boy, I'll tell you, she really helped this town out. A lot of people had gotten hurt in the fights that had broken out since those barbarians had rolled into town, and the town's doctor was more than just a little overwhelmed. The last one in their crew was an even younger girl, a little pipsqueak with a lot of guts. Girl was blind and still managed to take on several of those Firebender thugs single-handedly. Or… single footedly… there was a lot of kicking involved with her bending, I don't know.
All right, I see you're getting impatient, so I'll get on with it. One day, as we were all minding our own business – and speaking of business, you should have seen the cabbage sales I was raking in that day. Enough to build a whole new cabbage plantation, I'll tell you, a stranger came into town. He was big, tall, and didn't say a word, just glared a lot. He had a weird tattoo on his forehead, looked like a third eye. I thought he might know the kid who had become our unofficial sheriff, and apparently he did. After wandering about for a while, he opened up his long coat and pulled out a stick of dynamite, which he chucked straight into the Drunken Fairy. I was amazed that everyone got out safely in time. That's why when you rode into town, you probably noticed that there wasn't a saloon, just a great big pile of burnt sticks. The Waterbender girl did a dang fine job of putting out that there fire with the water from the ostrich-horse troughs outside of the saloon, but the damage was already done. The kid responded to the attack pretty quick-like, trying to talk to the big fella, like people like that could be reasoned with. The Combustion Man just kept tossing dynamite and little bombs this way and that, trying to finish off our little hero in one fell swoop. My poor cabbage cart got taken out by a stray bomb in the fight, and I'm afraid there just isn't much of a market for shredded, burnt cabbage. Maybe someone will buy them for bison-pig feed. Any which way, the fight just raged on, fires catching everywhere in the town, faster than the tattooed kid's friends could keep up with. I thought that the Firebenders had been doing a lot of damage, but this guy, with no particular talent, seemed to be burning a heck of a lot more than they had managed during their stay. The fight escalated, with the kid taking his little glider to the sky in an attempt to keep that Combustion fella away from any more major buildings. The whole thing came to a pretty climactic ending when Combusty – I keep trying to come up with a good name for that guy that's shorter than "Combustion Man," I heard that fighter kid call him "Sparky Sparky Boom Man" but that seems like it takes even longer to say – tossed a small bomb near the edge of town at our flying hero, who used his staff like a bat to send the bomb flying straight back at Combustion Man, smacking him straight on in the forehead. Well, that bomb went off not a second later, and that's pretty much all there is to tell. It was messy, and very much not pretty, but at least everyone was safe again, with the flying kid helping his Waterbending friend with extinguishing all of the fires that had caught up in the town. We're still not sure who sent that fella into town to try to take out the little sheriff, but it was enough to make the kid realize that the town wouldn't be safe if he was around. Downright heroic, if you ask me, leaving off into the wilderness like that. Can't rightly say where they were all heading to. Now, I hope that story satisfies your curiosity. Say, you keep that brim pulled down might low, stranger… looks like you've got a heck of a scar there on your eye. Might want to see if the town doctor can do anything about that, he's got a lot of experience working with burns.