Prologue
Katara sat to her side on a large firenation ship. She had been prisoner here for about 5 months, as a slave, and knew that soon she too would be sold to another cruel, unforgiving master. The deck was warm for just beneath her was the engine of the huge ship. The night was bright, but the moon was small, so Katara of the Southern Water Tribe felt a bit safer. Tonight they were scrubbing the decks, again, after a massive shipment exchange. They had a lot less slave to help her, but a lot more money to pay the crew. On this night, Katara could see something in the stars, a sign that things were going to get only brighter.
The young lady had been snatched from her homelands only a year after the Avatars grand victory against the dangerous fire nation. She wondered how Sokka coped with her disappearance, did he tell Aang? Did he tell the new Fire Lord? Were they all looking for her now? Katara doubted they did, perhaps they presumed her as dead, as they would have found her by now. The ship she was on was huge and hard to miss. But then again, she could have been below deck when they passed. Katara sighed and looked down at her lap and the ragged clothes on it. Her once proud fishing clothes were now bleached by the sun a little and had lost their pride. Life, it seemed, was in a very cruel mood lately.
So beneath the quarter moon, a one contented world hero scrubbed the wooden flooring of a firenation, slave merchant ship, half hearted and homesick. But, even though the others were elsewhere on the deck, she wasn't totally alone, for some time she wasn't and for some time she won't be, for inside of her teenage womb was her first child. She had no idea of the identity of the father, but, for the time being, she didn't care. The being growing inside of her kept her mind off of the severity of her situation. The hormones kept her and the men around her on their toes, the girls also showed her a low level of respect, on comparison to the respect that they show the master. One more thing that this child done was to keep her spirit in tact whist others was broken.
In her boredom, Katara bended a small ribbon of water from the bucket of soapy water she was using to wash the floor. A dirty hand smashed through her little bit of entertainment on this completely boring ship.
"No bending whilst you're cleaning!" Snapped the deep voice of the slave driver. Katara turned back to her brush and scrubbed angrily on the floor.