Once upon a Saturday
Disclaimer: none of the characters are mine, but belong to Mike and Bryan.
Once upon a Saturday, Azula, the great and terrible princess of the Fire Nation, woke up to find that she was wearing rather clownish-looking spectacles and a matching red nose. As soon as she had realized that, of course, Azula did her best to remove them immediately, only to discover in the next moment that they were glued on by some construction-strength glue.
There were only two people who would do such a thing to Azula, and the Fire Nation's princess felt more than safe to assume that this was not done by Mai.
"Ty Lee!"
"Yes, Azula?" the pink acrobat looked upside down at the fuming princess with a too-innocent facial expression. "Are you having a good morning?"
"No!" Azula snapped. "You glued clownish spectacles and nose to my face! What's the big idea?"
"I just wanted you to have fun, Azula," Ty Lee admitted as righted herself off a tree. "You know – fun?"
"Fun? What fun, Ty Lee, in making myself look like a laughing stock?" Azula swept around, indicating the laughter that was noticeably absent... largely because the girls were in a forest, devoid of any Fire Nation life forms, save for their steeds. "Mai?"
"Yes, Azula?" Mai did not really look away from her senbon as she tested their dexterity and composition of their metals and alloys.
"Look at me!" Azula yelled – sometimes Mai annoyed her as much in her own way as Ty Lee did in hers.
"We haven't cooked breakfast yet, either," Mai looked away from her senbon to Azula and back to the throwing needles. "And by 'cooked', I mean 'made', because of the three of us, Ty Lee is horrible...and our best cook, sadly."
Azula stared. Honestly, when it came to being stolid, Mai was the anti-Ty Lee but this? Was a bit too much.
"You mean you either didn't notice or don't care that Ty Lee had pranked me?" Azula's voice acquired dangerous overtones.
"Hey, it's Ty Lee. Remember when she tried to give me a haircut after we left New Ozai?" now Mai looked straight at Azula's face. "It's just her way of doing things, remember?"
Azula twitched, or she would have, if it was not for all that paraphernalia glued to her face. When Ty Lee had tried to do that to Mai, the gloomy knife-girl had resisted successfully, and that, as far as Azula had been the fun part – not the actual hair cutting attempt (what is so funny about cutting hair, anyways?). Apparently, Mai had misunderstood Azula's laughter back then, and was making it known to Azula... only now.
"Moreover, what do you want me to actually do?" Mai continued to ask, ignoring Azula's growing anger. "Cut all of the gunk off your face with one of my knives?"
"Oh, there's no need to do that!" Ty Lee said quickly, albeit from behind a tree. "The glue will off on its own!"
"When?" Azula whirled around.
"Within a year?" Ty Lee replied in a thoughtful voice (for her).
"Aaargh!" Azula snapped, whirled around, and released a lightning bolt – missing Ty Lee by a wide margin – presumably purposefully.
"Why did you do that for?" Ty Lee asked, surprised, before no less than seven snowshoe ptarmigan-hares, roasted by Azula's lightning bolt in midflight, fell almost on top of her head.
"Yay! Breakfast!" Mai said enthusiastically (especially by her standards), before pulling out the girls' eating utensils, possibly the biggest eating utensils in the entire Fire Nation. "And a hot one, too!"
And so the girls ate their hot breakfast.
And so Azula let Ty Lee live – for the next little while.
And the spectacles and the nose eventually did fall off on their own – right before the Fire Nation trio found Suki and the Kyoshi warriors and kicked their butts, but that was another story.
End