The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Avatar Realm
A Story of Azula and A Butterfly
'Computer programmers and rats are two species that should never be allowed to breed in large numbers – Azula Kai.'
Azula would have called ahead to reserve a special place in hell for the idiot physicist who had asked her to write the climate simulation program she had finished running on the computer.
The program simulated something about climate. Azula had written the program for a professor interested in understanding typhoons since they struck the island every generation. Henwa had discovered how to build in thick brick and stone which resisted high winds but the worst storms could kill hundreds so it made some sense to understand them. Azula didn't give a flying fig about typhoons but she wrote and ran the program as instructed.
Azula found the behavior of this program peculiar. The Admiral 670 mainframe compiled and ran it on the first go rather than crashing or behaving erratically. That wasn't what bothered Azula. The Admiral 670 ran the climate simulator in batch mode: using all of its power to run one piece of software for speedier execution and because while The Admiral was a solid, stable and reliable system with easy to use tools for programming; the Omix OS was far from it. Because Azula wrote the Omix operating system as a multiuser and multitasking operating system and it had poor memory management and cryptic commands; and it crashed when it felt like it. Because Azula made implementing anything useful such a difficult task, Omix became popular. With the low self esteem of programmers and the well documented fact computer people got their jollies in odd ways, even in the first years of computing; getting something non trivial done in Omix gave them an ego boost.
Others like academics and mathematicians used 'batch mode' knowing they could avoid Omix and accomplish something useful.
The program did random things to the data and the printout changed each time the program ran. Azula had a printer about as sophisticated as moveable type so the printer merely represented the data output as asterisks and it was the job of Azula to play 'join the dots' with a green pencil crayon. The result was a wobbly green line that looked like a stock chart.
Unexceptional by itself.
Azula discovered the wobbly lines were different for each printout. In a general way; they looked the same and would look alike to the untrained eye but Azula had a trained eye and she noticed the lines didn't match.
This bothered her. She liked to believe she understood every tube, diode and cold cathode lamp in the machine and had a good bead on the fundamentals of the Admiral 670 and this kind of irksome irregularity preyed upon her obsessive nature.
The program had no errors that could explain the difference between printouts. The data had no errors and all the runs started with the same conditions.
A beautiful butterfly with iridescent gold and black wings ten centimeters across fluttered around the room. Azula caught sight of it as she sat at the teleprinter console. She incinerated it with a casual bit of fire bending and the smell of burnt chitin wafted through the air. Azula hated invertebrates as a matter of policy and had a special hatred for insects and spiders.
Katara entered the room as Azula ended the life of a very rare and beautiful butterfly. She saw the brief blue flash of fire and then the smoke.
"What did the butterfly do to you?" Katara leaned against the door. "Insects have their place in nature."
Azula spoke from behind the printout as she tapped it with the green pencil crayon. "God wouldn't have given us DDT if he meant them to live. What brings you here?"
"Can't I drop in on friends after work?"
Azula looked skeptically at Katara over the printout. "When did we become friends?"
"I consider you one of my friends."
"Which one of my hideous relatives turned up on the doorstep?" Azula glowered. "My mom and Mai turned up at Ty Lee's baby shower and my hideous brother has a country to run into the ground – well you have me stumped."
"Ty Lee had a son." Katara waved a telegram. "Aang and Ty Lee haven't decided on a name but the mother and baby are healthy." Katara didn't know if Azula cared but she decided to spread the good news anyway. "A baby air bending boy."
"She made me pat her belly like she was one of those fat ceramic figurines of that ancient prophet or guru." Azula commented as she snapped her fingers trying to provoke her brain into bringing up a name. "The Henwanese call him the Patron Saint of Door Stops."
"The Buddha?" Katara answered.
"I'll take your word for it." Azula scratched her head with the blunt end of the pencil crayon. "I have one of those annoying problems I can't figure out. A physics professor had me write a program to simulate climate – he wants to try and understand typhoons for some reason that escapes me at this moment. The program works but not in the way I thought and I can't figure out why." Azula handed the printouts with the green lines to Katara. Azula didn't think Katara had much acumen for math and science but Azula loved to talk about her work. "The green lines model our climate over time but despite the fact the program and initial data are identical as far as I can tell; the printouts look different. The look generally the same but the two lines drift apart and never repeat the same pattern."
"When have you ever had two years with exactly the same weather?" Katara gave a common sense as she saw it opinion.
Azula smacked her head since Katara stated the bloody obvious and Azula's nimble brain had never even thought about the fact she had spent many hours programming the machine to run the physicist's complex, non linear equations.
"Karo bought an electric blender last month." Azula spoke more to think things out that to fan Katara's non existent interest. "I ragged on him for wasting money but I ended up using the thing to make fruit smoothies. The thing has a cup with a set of blades at the base. A motor spins the blades. The thing is so simple even Mitsumi the Lemur can work it. I can drop a strawberry in the thing but a few seconds later utterly lose track of it."
"Oh and your therapist's office called to remind you that you have an appointment at 2:00 pm," Katara mentioned as a matter of passing, "and his couch has been fixed and the shoddy spring that poked your back won't bother you."
"I saw a bunch of city workers putting in cobblestones," Azula said as she sat down next to Karo on the couch they had affectionately dubbed named Big Red. "How much would it cost for one of those big lump hammers they use for pounding stones into place?"
Azula tossed the printout with the green lines on the coffee table.
Karo wondered if all scientists were as difficult to understand as Azula. "What do those green lines mean?"
"I have no idea." Azula crossed her arms and pouted. "I can't make any sense of what they mean but I wrote the program that printed them out."
Karo unfolded the printout. "Trying to break the stock market?"
"Climate modeling." Azula opened the folded printouts. "If that computer is having one over on me; I'll reprogram it with a lump hammer."
"What were you trying for?"
"The program ran with exactly the same set of data but the two printouts don't look the same."
"Why? Should they?" Karo began looking at the mail. "I took economics and my first question amounts to the bleeding obvious – we don't understand how weather works anymore than we understand how finance works. How do you model it?"
Economists like Karo had decided that stock prices varied at random and a chimp throwing darts at the financial page of the newspaper could pick as lucrative pot of stocks as could any mogul. Most economists never became rich and preferred to believe the stock market behaved randomly and that the reason they never struck it rich in spite of their wealth of knowledge was that they couldn't train the chimp to throw darts. One economist did have a try but the chimp ate his face.
"I hate not knowing why something happens." Azula spoke emphatically. That printout bothered her because she couldn't explain it and the program ought not to have behaved that way. The green lines that didn't match stared at her and in her mind had declared a mental battle of wits – a mental Agni Kai.
"Maybe the computer did what you told it to do." Karo had seen these charts and the mind bending mathematics that went with them in economics classes and he had become a cartoonist. He understood the numbers always did exactly what the mathematician told them to do even recording gross or grand errors for posterity. He had seen decimals slide out of place (fouling up a thesis or making a prototype airplane crash into the sea). He had read of engineers that had decided to shave a few decimals off a complex calculation to save time while designing a new railway bridge over some Earth Kingdom river. The family of the train passengers killed when the locomotive going over that bridge fell into the river had much more precise sums of cash in mind in their litigation.
Karo had always found it odd that Azula had also never noticed that the 'Agni' in 'Agni Kai' meant 'lamb' in Henwanese.
At one in the afternoon, the computer crashed.
"Son of a bitch!" Azula yelled out. "What happened? You take a late lunch Katara?"
"No..." A male voice responded. "I am Bokutan of the Northern Water Tribe."
"Congratulations!" Azula started to type commands into the teletype with the back end of the green pencil crayon. "Can I say something?"
"By all means."
"Go away."
"I'm Katara's lover."
"I have no idea how to administer the mercury treatment for syphilis...so go away and she isn't here." Azula countered.
"I bought an engagement ring, maybe you'd like a look see?"
Azula turned around, speculated upon the tall man in Water Tribe clothes and decided to make him feel socially awkward. "Does this mean I can't sleep with her anymore?"
"Can I watch?"
"No – well maybe. Let me think on it."
"Does she sleep with you?"
Unfortunately no." Azula said with a hint of regret. "Why are you here?"
"Katara told me of her friend – the genius Azula – and how witty and wise she was."
"Quit looking at my boobs."
"You have none...she told me of your flat chest."
Azula tapped the green pencil crayon against her forehead as she watched the teletype. This Water Tribe man was good at sarcasm.
"I want to propose to her so I bought this ring." The tall water tribe man replied and held out an open velvet blue ring box.
Azula smelled the ozone generated by the electronics in the room and examined the ring. "Well this brings a question to mind – she that good?" Azula examined the delicate gold band for flaws. "She wants a huge family and lots of kids."
"So do I." The man replied confidently.
"Insanity must be a Water Tribe trait. I hate kids and men but as a wise man once wrote – kids are a wholesome meal."
"Yet you are engaged to Karo."
Azula walked casually up to the man. "You know an awful lot for a man holding bling." Azula glanced at the floor. "I used the word 'bling' so we're undergoing a decline in vital civilized values."
"Katara has mentioned a few things to me."
"Do you have a criminal record in Henwa?" Azula gave a sly glance.
"No."
"Grab that metal toolbox over there," Azula pointed to a red steel box siting on top of one of the paper tape readers. "If you don't have one now, then you might by the end of the afternoon. I have a vital and urgent need to commit theft."
"Theft of what?"
"An air raid siren," Azula wagged her finger at the toolbox, "I need to test an idea of mine and one component of the experiment involves an air raid siren."
"Holy hell!" Karo dropped the mail on the floor as he stared into the massive horn (big enough around for him to walk into) of an air raid siren painted a pleasant beige.
"You might not want to stand there." Azula shouted from behind the horn.
"Might not want to stand in front of what?" Karo interrogated. "Am I slowly being baked from the inside out by forty gijillion watts of radio wave energy?" Karo slid between the end of the horn and the wall. "You did that experiment and then some...we ate lots of crappy tasting popcorn and really crappy tasting boiled sea cumquats."
"This is a Fire Nation Air Raid Siren Model 50." Azula spoke proudly from some occult location in the living room.
"Of course...why is it in the living room and not on top of the twenty meter steel pole getting pooped on by the pigeons?" Karo ran his hand over the dirty surface of the horn and realized much of the beige came from a decade or two of pigeon crap. "Or will I regret asking you this question?"
"What the!?" Lady Zhao walked through the door. "Azula!" She yelled a moment later. "For a woman who will never give me grandchildren; you impose a hell of a lot! Why do we have military surplus in our living room!?"
"Karo has perfect pitch..."
Karo looked down the horn at his angry mother. "I have no idea either."
Karo has perfect pitch and I wanted to wire up this thing to play back a computer printout." Azula had attached her theramin to the horn with a huge bundle of wire. "Maybe Karo could find a pattern in the sounds?"
"Is this one of what your therapist terms 'your issues'?" Lady Zhao located Azula and pulled her by the scruff of the neck. "Take this fall out from the Fire Nation and put it outside or back...whichever is quickest and raises the fewest questions!"
"It weighs half a ton." Azula protested as Lady Zhao yanked her to the front of the horn. "I had to recruit a water bender to get it in here."
"I hate to raise such a minor point except that it may provide pertinent information," Karo picked up a fragment of pottery. "The fat bare bellied door stop is busted into tiny bits."
"You mean The Buddha?" Azula corrected, "The Patron Saint of Quiet Screen Doors?" She looked at Karo. "You going to just stand there or will you help?"
"Where's Katara?" Karo asked as he examined pieces of the shattered Buddha.
"She decided to go to dinner with her future husband." Azula had not yet been released by Lady Zhao. "He stole this for Katara."
Karo looked at his hands and scratched his forehead, adjusted his glasses and asked the obvious: "Has the Universe recently gotten very strange or has it always been this way and I was too deluded to notice?"
"Can you tell my mother in law to let go of my neck so I can fetch my tools and take this thing apart so I can get it out of the living room?" Azula pondered.
"I plead not guilty on the grounds of my uterus."
Karo doubted that this was the sort of thing Azula should have told the police officer who had come by to investigate the theft of the air raid siren but as with much of what Azula did; the best policy was to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission.
"Uh...er...what has that to do with public vandalism." The police officer asked sternly.
"Explain it to him," Azula nudged Karo.
"What am I explaining?"
"How I get 'unpredictable' at that time of the month."
"What time of the month – ow!?" Karo suddenly found his world go out of focus as his glasses fell off his face and fell to the ground. "I think it requires a full measure of insanity at the best time to climb up a pole to put an air raid siren back in place because my fiance took it down by some as yet not adequately explored reason."
"I'm menstruating; having a woman's period."
"That doesn't explain why I climbed up here." Karo complained. "Would the officer accept general stupidity as a suitable excuse?"
Azula grabbed Karo and pressed a metal switch on the back of the metal box that held the control gear for the siren. She engaged the 'test' function and about a quarter of a million people looked up into the sky for signs of a blimp.
"I'm going to hear that E Minor chord for the rest of my life!" Karo wondered if a: his ears were bleeding and b: how much upper body strength Azula had to carry him down the pole that held up the air raid siren and clean and jerk him into the house.
"I had no idea it would be that loud!"
"I think my brain is bleeding." Karo tried to sort out the fuzzy outline of his hand from the fuzzy background. "Did you find out what happened to my glasses?"
"No." Azula affirmed. "We'll point you in the general direction of the optician."
Katara opened the door.
"Ah good...Katara, how often do you menstruate?"
"I'm doing fine. Thank you for asking." Katara replied sarcastically.
"The city already billed us to repair the siren," Karo winced as he held up two fingers and tried to resolve them into two fingers and not one fleshy colored blur. "They will still want five hundred gold. They will get it – with or without your co-operation and like me; they are apathetic to your hormone cycles."
"Rounding errors!" Azula snapped her fingers. "Say I ovulate every 29.8789889987 days but decided to base my schedule around a figure of 29.9 days – eventually I would end up buying feminine hygiene products on the wrong day because of the small difference between the actual time and my calculations."
"I see two people shaped blurs," Karo said lazily, "I can hear Katara so either I've really had a stroke or two people came in the door."
"I'm Katara's fiance: Bokutan of the Northern Water Tribe." The man introduced himself. "I helped Azula steal the air raid siren and I understand she's the mad scientist of the Fire Nation."
"My glasses broke when we tried to put the air raid siren back." Karo countered. "We owe the city five hundred bucks between fines and the actual cost of fixing that damned siren. My soda pop bottle glasses will cost another few hundred to replace and until then I'll be barking my shins and banging into things. I may grow to like you as a person...Bowling Pin of the Water Tribe. Right now I curse your name for violating the most important rule of life in our family: since Azula is basically evil; don't go along with her schemes!" Karo shook his finger emphatically but the real impression was humorous since he pointed to thin air. "The ringing in my ear has changed to a G Major chord."
"I found my answer!" Azula jumped up off the couch. "As a lazy person, much of my thinking gets applied to saving myself work and hassle. Ninety percent of the problem gets solved by ten percent of the effort so they say."
"This would explain Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap." Karo said with irritation. "Do you know I almost saw the sound waves traveling through my brain? I can't think."
"The computer couldn't handle figures carried to ten decimal places so I used only one." Azula explained in spite of Karo's off mood. "As the program ran, the small difference began to grow bigger until the two climate model runs didn't resemble each other at all."
"Which looks better?" The optician asked Karo as Karo stared at an eye chart.
"This?"
Click!
"This?"
Click!
"This?"
Karo's mood had not improved overnight. "Go back one...its not quite in focus but my life works better when I can't see the world."
"How long until my fiance can see again?" Azula asked impatiently. "Can you have him up and seeing or should I put a bomb sight on the toilet?"
"Have you ever had your eyes checked?" The optician asked as an attempt to draw up more business.
"Just fix Karo." Azula commanded. "His eyes I mean – to be clear."
"I will do that."
"He needs bifocals and I'll put a rush order on them but they won't be ready until tomorrow afternoon." The optician wrote out the prescription on a pad of paper. "But you need corrective lenses."
"I have perfect vision." Azula asserted.
"Indulge me." The optician swiveled on his chair. "Now look at the chart and read the numbers off the top row."
"One" Azula answered.
"That's a seven." Karo said from behind the optician's gear.
"They both look alike."
"They look nothing alike." The optician commented.
"The line below that reads 3, 5 and 8."
"Two...two and zero." Karo corrected. "How long have you been having trouble seeing?"
"I don't need glasses and any blurry vision comes out of quantum uncertainty!" Azula protested. "Everyone in my family has perfect vision except for one of my great uncles who had his eye gouged out by a wild platypus bear. Aside from Great Uncle Winky, no one in my family has ever had bad eyesight. A few others developed Parkinson's Disease later on in life including Aunty Shake 'n Bake who kept fire bending in spite of her disease which explained how she died of self inflicted third degree burns. I don't need glasses!"
"I'll have a pair of glasses ready for you as well." The optician scribbled on his pad of paper. "They will allow you to function much better in life and you'll soon come to rely on them."
Screech! Pop! Pop! Wheee-ooooo!
Azula peered over her wire framed glasses as she sat on the couch affectionately named 'Big Red' and put down her green pencil crayon.
"This is a test!" A crackling male voice announced.
"This is only a test!"
"Of what?" Katara asked as she came up the stairs.
Azula glanced over her glasses. "Get your HB Pencil and fill in the circle you select completely."
"This is – eeee - est!"
"What order of animals evolved from the ancient dinosaurs?" Azula pointed her pencil crayon at Katara.
"How would I know?"
"This is a test," Azula spoke from behind the blunt end of the pencil crayon.
"Test! Is this on!?"
Tap! Tap!
"Trick question: the Earth was created by an all knowing God on October the 14th, 6000 years ago. The Dinosaurs are God's way of throwing us off the scent." Azula answered. "I don't fancy the Earth as a Libra though."
"This is a test of the Emergency Alert System! Had this been an actual emergency; this announcement would be followed by instructions to assist you."
"Run for your life." Azula added to punctuate the terse speech coming over the air raid siren.
A pop and a bit of feedback followed.
"You look cute in those glasses – they suit you." Katara sat beside Azula. "I've set the date of my wedding for May the Fifth."
"May Day?" Azula raised her eyebrow. "I'll refresh my memory and sing The International at the ceremony."
"Suki will be the maid of honor," Katara said cheerfully, "do you want to usher?"
"Park your ass here and shut up because you're getting free food?"
"I'll ask Karo."
Azula pushed her glasses up her nose and grimaced: "I've started doing The Karo Maneuver!"
"The Karo Maneuver?"
"Pushing my glasses up my nose like he does. I've picked up a lot of his annoying nervous habits." Azula took off her glasses and examined them. "I have an astigmatism; which is eye doctor talk for 'makes me a packet of money' and is some ancient word for 'not completely covered by the University's expensive but cheap-ass medical plan'.
The wire frame glasses added something to Azula's delicate features. Katara had long viewed Azula as a deeply beautiful woman in a dignified sort of way and the glasses added a nice touch to her stern but well proportioned features. Such a description didn't quite capture her personality.
"Where is Karo?"
"It stopped raining and so he's outside somewhere cutting the grass or something." Azula pointed behind her out the living room window. "If you listen; you'll probably hear him cursing. If he had his way, we'd pave the lawn or cover our front lawn with gravel. He doesn't get his way because his mother likes a neat lawn and the dandelions and crabgrass need room to grow."
Katara sat up. "He might be a good usher."
Azula waved dismissively as Katara left to find him.
Karo hated mowing the lawn and hated pulling dandelions from their cramped position growing up between the cobbles. Like Azula, he hated labor of most kinds but had a more polite 'do what mom orders you to do' attitude to it.
"Karo?" Katara found him trying to uproot a difficult dandelion that had grown up next to the cobbled driveway.
"I have a birthday in a few weeks," Karo spoke as she approached. "If you want to get me a useful gift; a couple of drums of a good herbicide would do just fine. I swear the roots of your average dandelion go down at least to the outer core of the planet."
"As you know, I'm engaged and so I wanted to ask if you would like to be an usher at my wedding next spring?"
Azula watched as a beautiful blue butterfly did a death spiral into the artificial sun known as the light bulb. Azula knew the beauty of such creatures came out of some of the most horrific looking, gaudy colored and just plain butt ugly caterpillars in the known world. One of the reasons Azula disliked taking the various bits of the computer apart came down to the fact she hated cleaning things and the computer came with a service contract. She also had a vague idea how many bugs lurked inside it. Spiders specifically loved the warm insides of a computer. The Henwa Bamboo Spider held the record for the height Azula jumped when she found one crawling up a date palm along the street – three hundred and seventeen centimeters. The name 'Bamboo Spider' was a misnomer as they liked living on date palm trees. She squealed and incinerated the beast on the grounds the Order of Creation ought not to allow for spiders as big across as a phonograph record.
"I always smell burned butterflies when I come in here." Katara didn't even knock: the door was open and she had decided to check on Azula after she finished work.
Azula stared at the severely burned butterfly and watched it twitch: "Universities like to have plenty of trees to make walking a straight line from the student pub to the dorms a royal pain in the ass. This butterfly grew up as a blue and green horned caterpillar that eats the leaves of those trees and having evaded the groundskeeper with the DDT; has chosen to die by flying straight into a light bulb."
"Aren't you going to do anything?" Katara beseeched Azula.
"Mitsumi's vet has gone on holidays and I have no medical skills." Azula raised her foot. "I think he's screwed but any creature so dumb as to fly headlong into hot things should die as a part of the Survival of the Fittest." She crushed the butterfly with her boot.
"You shouldn't do that." Katara moralized. "We're all part of the Grand Circle of Life."
"I'll remember that when a shark bites you and your surfboard in two." Azula scuffed the sole of her boot on the Battleship Gray linoleum in a vain effort to clear the butterfly goo off the sole of her boot. "You've come down here twice in two weeks. What's going on?"
"I'm looking at wedding dresses. I thought I'd bring a few wedding magazines and pick your brain." Katara plopped her blue cloth bag onto the top of one of the gray metal mainframe consoles.
"When I marry Karo; in no way will I wear a dress." Azula asserted. "Karo might though. I will see if I can goad or prod him into it."
"That's not very nice."
"Which makes it fun." Azula pulled out one of the wedding magazines and began leafing through it. "Tienanmen Tiaras Run Over the Competition! I wonder if the skin tight Wonder Woman super hero suit comes with the purchase of a tiara?"
"I plan to make my own dress," Katara admitted timidly, "but I need ideas."
"You need to talk to Karo." Azula advised. "He has the fashion sense in the house. I wouldn't know a decent looking wedding dress from a burlap sack if the sack didn't have the logo of the potato grower on it."
"Turn to page 89 and you'll see the kind of dress I have in mind." Katara tapped the back of the magazine.
Azula turned to the page. "More Doctors Recommend Refreshing Lucky Stroke Cigars? Oh I see...you plan to make this frock? It looks like something a fairy princess in a child's fairy tale would wear and it looks like you need an advanced degree in engineering, mathematics and physics to build it." The light blue color and Water Tribe theme suited Katara but the whole thing looked like something erected not sewn.
"I don't mind." Katara smiled. "Lady Zhao has a sewing machine and nothing worthwhile is ever easy."
"Did I tell you Bokutan has a six year old daughter from his previous marriage?"
Azula coughed roughly. "Can we eat the kid?"
"Children have no off switch." A scowling Azula explained to Karo as she tried to draw out a geometric map suggested by the numbers and the printout. The physicist who had done the climate modeling research had suggested she try to make a picture out of the graphs to better understand them. He told her that the data might have some underlying pattern to it but Azula had grave doubts.
Bokutan served on a Water Tribe fishing ship as the captain and had dumped his daughter Timiko off with Katara while he went out to sea for six weeks to violate fishing treaties. As a fishing captain, Bokutan was wealthy and had prestige but he had to put to sea for weeks at a time.
Azula glowered with irritation. In her mind a fishing vessel was a perfectly fit place for a girl to grow up – a Water Tribe girl anyhow. No one else thought so and now she had to put up with a screaming kid.
"Explain to her the fundamentals of modular functions – that makes me fall asleep." Karo spoke from behind a graphic novel about the future where machines called Terminators traveled through time. Not great literature but The Terminator series had an interesting drawing style.
Timiko-chan ran past both of them. She was six and a water bender with endless energy. She looked like Katara in a general way that all water tribe people looked alike. Karo pulled his legs up as she ran past with her long brown hair in a braid trailing behind her.
"Katara?"
Katara had spent the evening working on mailing wedding invitations to prospective guests. The required invitations had come from the printers. Karo had done the artwork and selected a light blue linen paper with gold trim around the edges. Katara had written a letter, amassed copies of the city map and written detailed instructions on how to get to the Jubilee Park Tea House from the airport, train station and harbor.
Timiko squealed with glee as she chased Mitsumi and ran past Karo and Azula another time.
"Can leap tall buildings in a single bound." Azula grumbled as she played with numbers in her head and Karo's 128 – Color Pencil Crayon set. "Katara!"
"What?" Katara replied calmly.
"I have to make a phone call to the army."
"Really?" Karo had long learned he could not tell if Azula was being sarcastic or serious but any misjudgment on his part led to problems in the future.
"I need to find a nice and quiet minefield to dance in." Azula made a mock gesture to reach for the phone. "I suppose I could call the physics lab and get enough Uranium to make a big bomb."
Timiko let out a gleeful noise as Mitsumi sat on her head.
"What are you trying to say?" Katara queried.
"We have your fiance's six year old kid running around the house at ballistic speeds making noise and you don't notice?" Azula complained. "If she runs around the living room any faster the air friction will cause her to spontaneously combust."
"She's a sweet kid." Katara answered back. "She likes playing with Mitsumi and she can't go out because its raining."
"Aunty Azula drew a butterfly." Timiko told no one in particular. She stared down at the mathematical drawing Azula had spent the evening working at. Even Azula could not do the millions of calculations needed to test the climate physicist's hunch. She had the computer do the calculations but the machine had no real graphics system except Azula and Karo's pencil crayons and Azula's obsessive 'join the dots' skills.
Azula had no idea what to say. She had always considered children about as useful as blind pilots but Timiko blurted out the obvious.
"It does kind of look like a butterfly in a mescaline induced kind of way." Azula had often wondered if spending life stoned would improve her insight but blowing her brain was the much more likely outcome.
Karo unfolded a poster which had a 'circuit diagram' of the insides of The Terminator T-1000 series model. Like most technology in graphic novels; Terminators worked on not very carefully thought up principles and magic. Someone had come up with a card sized fuel cell to run the cyborg which since Karo knew was simply impossible: batteries were huge lead and acid – filled boxes.
The Jubilee Park Tea House didn't offer time travel so the nicely alliterative slogan Time Travel Tea House went to someone else. They did offer to host and cater to weddings, christenings or special occasions. Azula knew this because they told you in their yellow pages ads, newspaper ads, business letterhead and wherever else they could print it.
Azula wondered about time travel. What a wonderful service to offer tea house patrons – a visit to the past or future in the comfort of a Victorian wooden house with green gables and fine hardwood flooring. She could travel to the future and dodge the wedding and a cute looking House of Green Gables must be a universal sign of peace to any future intelligent race thus assuring the safety of the patrons. Such a machine could at long last settle the debate about why the dinosaurs went extinct (one theory suggested a meteor, Azula pondered whether listening to endless wedding preparations could have made them suicidal). She didn't say this because Katara had told her not to act out while they met with the owner of the tea house to book it for May the Fifth.
Katara had brought Azula along for one good reason: Bokutan was out to sea and Karo had agreed to loan her the money and she needed Azula to sign the check for the deposit. That didn't mean Azula would make things easy.
Azula had not yet quite adjusted to the new glasses and she kept pushing them up her nose and fiddling with a pamphlet for the tea house intended for tourists.
The owner was L. Cee (she had a brass plaque on her desk and a dozen 'Business of the Year' awards with her name on them). She was a gray haired dignified looking lady who – unlike Azula – both valued and practiced manners. She was tall and imposing: she had a bearing that hid her age very well.
'Azula had to have the checkbook – damn!' Katara thought. Karo would have behaved better but he had another deadline to meet and so could not accompany his checkbook. He had warned Azula to pay the deposit and grumbled about how he must not have had his head about him when he gave Azula access to that account. He had remained at home to babysit Timiko and finish his Sunday comic strips.
Katara could feel Azula's discomfort. She sat next to the young princess and knew Azula would rather be dying on the hot sulfurous surface of Venus than spend time in this room.
Azula wondered if the Special Theory of Relativity pertained not only to time and space and their relationship to gravity but to listening to wedding plans. Katara and L. Cee politely discussed all sorts of wedding details like seating and floral arrangements.
Azula had the attention span of a hummingbird. She fidgeted and pushed her glassed back up her nose.
"Is there something I can do for you young miss?" L. Cee spoke with a reserved politeness. "You seem uncomfortable."
'Spirit of the Moon...I will be in your debt if she doesn't say anything stupid.'
"I'm in need of the use of the washroom...if you will excuse me." Azula pulled the red leather covered check book out from her vest. "I signed the check in advance so fill in the rest once you have settled upon an amount for the deposit."
Katara shrugged as Azula handed her the checkbook. This came as something of a relief as Katara had come to expect much worse.
"Of course...we'll be done in a minute." L. Cee gave a forced smile. "The washrooms are on the second floor."
'I sense trouble...' Katara thought as Azula left and quietly closed the door behind her.
"Is the young lady your Maid of Honor."
"She is no young lady." Katara replied as a voice in her mind uttered the thought 'Crap!'
A clumsy moment went by.
Katara felt almost relieved when the sound of a lightning rod hitting the grass outside was followed by the sound of Azula in a free fall cursing God. She didn't hear well enough to know if Azula meant the plural of God.
Azula lay on the ground winded for a split second. She caught her breath and yet she lay on the damp grass cause she knew she was busted. Azula could see L Cee standing over her with her arms crossed and with a look of disdain. This fact told Azula her glasses weren't busted.
"You were all out of those lemon scented wipes," Azula lay back thankful it wasn't raining, "and the cable to the lightning rod couldn't bear my weight."
"I should explain..." Katara began, "Azula's a tad eccentric." Katara looked down at Azula with a look of anger. "I do not understand why she tried to crawl out the bathroom window but I'm sure she'll apologize." Katara gritted her teeth.
"Apologize!? I didn't do anything that bad." Azula had a mind that found apologies repugnant. "Can't I pay to fix things after my lung re-inflates?"
At first L. Cee said nothing but merely collected the lightning rod from where the copper ball had impaled it in the soft ground. "You're reputation precedes you. I served as a Colonel during the War and knew full well of the Great Princess Azula and of her fate."
"I see..." Azula began rolling through her mental Rolodex to identify the woman standing over her with a metal rod.
"Your mother used to tell me you had great promise and she disapproved of you going to military school. She wanted you to become a doctor or scientist." L. Cee said sternly. "If you will excuse me; I will finish speaking with Lady Katara."
"You knew my mother?" Azula jumped to her feet. "Who are you?"
"That would be telling."
Azula had not discovered 'The Butterfly Effect' but the climate physicist gave her credit below the names of the half dozen other climate physicists who had collaborated on the paper. They learned bugger all about typhoons. In the publish or perish world of academics, they had a whole new thing to hang their hats on.
In theory, the state of the climate was dynamically unstable. In simple terms; seven academic physicists and Azula the programmer had discovered what every family planning a picnic knew – prediction of the weather in any exact fashion was impossible. The oddest thing was that small effects in one far off part of the Realm like a seal belching or a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a cascade to cause a typhoon to flatten Henwa Island.
Azula called this The Seal Belch Effect.
The family at the ruined picnic called it the bleeding obvious.
The other academics wished for a more mystical and pretty name and named the effect The Butterfly Effect.
Azula hated butterflies but knew any new idea needed a salable name and The Butterfly Effect had a kind of mystical ring to it. One of the physicists might wish to write a book and such a name made its contents more marketable.
Azula had another preoccupation for which the computer proved of no help whatsoever.
She sat in her chair in front of the teletype and played a game of chess with the hulking machine as she pondered the idea of L. Cee.
She had kind of won againstthe computer. She had never outright won against the mass of diodes and tubes but given the speed at which the number of possible moves grew from a dozen to the kinds of numbers used to contemplate the number of atoms in the planet, Azula counted it as a win when the machine took several hours to decide the next more or the software crashed.
This time the teletype printed an error as the computer ran out of useful memory and decided to pack it in. This time Azula won with an all out system panic – the whole computer closed up and waited for a human to toggle the 'boot switch'.
"Ah hah!" Azula pointed at the teletype in triumph.
Someone skilled at chess at Ba Sing Se University had written the chess program and had done a fairly good job as the machine did play good chess. Azula walked over to the mainframe console and saw all the little orange and red Nixie lamps had frozen and quit flickering. She held her hand over the boot switch and toggled it.
Timiko rushed in the room holding a few wretched looking blue flowers she's plucked out of the flowerbed in the quad. Her green eyes glowed with happiness as she rushed up to Azula.
"Aunty Azula!" Timiko gave Azula a warm hug around the waist. "Katara says these blue flowers bring good luck."
Katara walked in.
"Why is this child taking the pleat out of my pants?"
"She likes you." Katara answered as she placed her bag on the top of one of the computer banks. "I need to run errands so can you look after her for an hour or so?"
Azula didn't overreact but had a blunt opinion on the matter. "I have seen that child run around the house with little or no attempt at containment. I have heard bombs that made less noise. She can scream at such a high note; bats think she's one of her own."
"Please don't be like that, Timiko's no problem. Take her to the cafeteria or library."
"Can you at least give me schematic that shows me how to disconnect her battery?"
Timiko liked Azula not because Azula had a mother's touch and a kind heart but because her father believed in manners, good conduct and kindness to others and Katara shared this belief. Azula had no concept of self discipline and could care less about how Timiko actually acted and Azula blew stuff up.
"I have work to do." Azula offered as an argument albeit a rather weak one.
"You were playing chess," Katara lifted up the ream of paper spit out by the teletype, "so you can help me."
Katara needed to run some errands and Timiko was a precocious child. She didn't want to leave her with Azula. No one else was available and so Azula became the only choice.
Azula had never had to entertain a child. She decided to 'borrow' two lab rats from the psychology department and teach Timiko how to race them. She managed to kill them and had to ask for two more but given the rather abundant quantity of rats; replacing the dead ones was not a problem.
Katara knew a few hours with Azula would involve much deprogramming after the fact.
A black and white spotted rat with wires protruding out of its brain raced past her as she walked into the lab. The wires led to a shiny metal control box in Azula's hand. Katara had fears of this kind of thing. Azula and Timiko sat in chairs with shiny metal control boxes.
"Mine keeps having seizures." Azula complained as her tan colored rat packed it in and twitched in a corner. "The University must buy them from a crappy low cost supplier."
Katara looked at the rat. It twitched in a sort of 'had my brain fiddled with by whackos' kind of way. The lesson from Azula for Timiko amounted to: removing free will from creatures.
A relay clicked and the tan rat stopped twitching.
"I've killed two of them." Azula complained. "The psychology geeks will have many questions."
"Three." Timiko corrected.
Azula put the metal box down. "The one that ran into a wall doesn't count. He chose to commit suicide rather than obey me...I find it odd that I have come to expect this sort of thing." Azula had tried running a dark brown rat but evidently the living nightmare of having his pleasure centers wired to make him do the bidding of a twelve volt power source didn't suit him so he decided to dash his brains out against a wall.
"So teaching Timiko that removing the free will of fellow creatures is your lesson for the day."
"Oh?" Azula pondered. "Is this a bad lesson?"
"Blood bending is evil..." Katara watched as Timiko parallel parked her rat between a space set by two wax paper cups.
"Blood what?" Azula asked but expected no clear answer. "Anyway, we didn't wire the rats up for remote control – some graduate psychology students did that. Some kind of study into the nature of the brain and what not. So snapping their necks in a spring loaded trap is morally correct but shorting out their brains in the pursuit of – have no clue what this really tells us – is not?"
"My rats won!." Timiko offered. "What's blood bending?"
"Using water bending to control others to make them do your bidding – an evil practice which is illegal." Katara answered sternly. "I used it and I don't want to talk about it."
"This has nothing to do with bending." Azula answered Katara's objections. "Anyone can do it with surgical tools, a map of the rat brain and some copper wiring – oh – and one of these consoles with a flashlight battery."
"Like blood bending for geeks." Azula kicked the tan rat. "This one is good and truly dead. I guess you do win."
"Bad enough that you taught her to swear in Henwanese...now you've taught her how to kill rats?"
"Swearing is a vital skill and a universal language. As for killing rats, a sharp blow with a shovel is more efficient than running up the electricity bill blowing out their central nervous system."
"Bad enough that I have to explain to my stepdaughter what a bastard is."
"Do you know any good recipes for rat?" Azula held the rat by the tail. "Final contest...can I sink the rat into the waist basket from across the room?" Azula flicked the rat and with a meaty thump it hit the opposite wall and dropped into the gray metal waist basket.