Disclaimer: I don't own any character of this story, I'm borrowing them to make a random spin off.
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Chapter 0: Just another daydream.
The solar eclipse was coming. Soon the moon would cover the sun, and the fire benders would not be able to use their powers. It was the ideal moment they had been so keenly waiting for, there could not a better scenario for fighting; even better: Aang, Katara, Toph, Soka, Momo and Appa had arrived 4 days before their planned invasion, to overthrow the fire-lord Ossay! With the wind on their favor and plenty time to spare the coming clearly were going to be some lazy days. Sleeping a lot, getting back their energies, both vital to keep the body and the mind strong and alert, to face any battle, would be now the focus of the small team…
"Go to sleep already!" Toph yelled Aang, who kept on saying "Good night" to each and every single one of them, and was about to go for another round -two at the time, maybe three- until he had tried each and every single combination.
It had only been one day since they got there and the young Avatar had already started letting the panic he felt –because of the awareness that the time of facing his destiny had arrived– take a toll on his mental sanity. Thankfully, spending all of the previous day beating the crap out of an innocent tree, had earned him enough sleepiness to go once more to the land of dreams…
"Aang, is the middle of the night, you need to go back to sleep" Katara said tiredly, being unable to understand why Aang was restlessly circling a group of sheeps.
"But I forgot my pants and my math test!" Was the oh-so-coherent answer of the tattooed hero, making Katara sigh.
"Aang, please, sleep. For me" She pleaded and soon he agreed.
Now with two days and three nights of near-to-no sleep he was surely going to finally sleep soundly; after all, that was the heartfelt petition that the woman he loved asked for his sake. How could he go against that?
"Soka wake up I need to know what day it is!" Were the first words yelled by the boy with the heavy dark marks under his eyes, when the sun rose.
"What! Who is talking-ouch" was the reply of the half-sleep teen whose sudden awakening came along with a very hurtful face-meet-the-rock kind of greeting. The day didn't get any better for Soka or the two females of the group. The tree of them had reached records level of worry and exasperation, plus they were pretty weirded-out by the behavior of the last air-bender.
It clearly was time for some intervention.
By the time the night fell upon them they had made their borderline-neurotic leader undergo a yoga lesson, a therapy with "Doctor Soka" and some tree trunk massages. The effort of the three was rewarded! Now Aang kind of thought, he sort of, might... slightly feel a little better ( maybe). Now they all could finally drift into a peaceful slumber!
"…"
"AAAAAAAAH!" Aang yelled for the third... or was it four? night in a row, waking his worried and stressed companions once more.
Clearly some people weren't made to sleep during the calm before the storm.
"There is only one thing I can do. I'm gonna stay awake straight into the invasion."
See? Told ya.
And so the avatar stubbornly held on his declaration. Words didn't held the power to beat any sense into the once-bald kid. And so, he stayed swaying back and forth as his friends, one by one, were overpowered by tiredness, and were soon happily snoring –well at least soka snored.
"The eclipse is coming, got to beat Ossai…" The only one awake repeated like a mantra, for what it had to be the millionth time. The constant swaying of his body had somehow dug-out the grass of the spot he was sitting on. Now the circle of earth was starting to cling a bit on his fire-nation "borrowed" clothes.
The day dreams started to kick-in, like they increasingly had since he arrived the sheep-covered island. Soon, he could "hear" and "see" the sheep singing and Momo, with a baton, was directing the chorus of the bizarre musical piece. Once the first chorus was over, the grass blades stated to clap and he could watch how the clouds randomly started coming together in a swirly green pattern, until it looked like a giant green plate was floating in the sky. Then, just when Aang didn't think the vision couldn't become any weirder, a white haired, glowing… teen? came down like a comet, being pushed by what seemed to be green fire.
"Ouch" The hallucination said as he rubbed his smoking black chest, and Aang would have wondered if the blackened portion of that thing's body was his skin or some sort of outfit: but he was too groggy to even care, about the creature's black and white color scheme.
The eyes of the thing blazed green and growled, as "it" looked towards the weird-shaped, imaginary swirl of eerie green clouds.
"Ha! Give up, whelp, you are no match for Skulker, the greatest hunter of the ghost zone!" Announced another imaginary floating hallucination; this one sporting a more metallic feeling and, on top of whose head, green fire of-sorts flared in a way that strongly resembled hair-style.
The tired, sleepy avatar watched mutely as the sheep started to cheer for the first apparition and green fire-balls started flying around, narrowly missing the sleeping trio –who were invisible to the eyes of the two combatants and his awake, albeit mental companion.
"Oh, crud!" were the words the white haired, black bodied being, produced before pushing Aang out of the way of an attack coming from a cylindrical whatever that had sprouted on the back of the creature that wanted the "whelp's" pelt on his wall.
Some sheep cheering, random maneuvers of the two unexplainable apparitions, and Momo tap dancing with Appa, latter...
Like a bubble had popped a silver of rationality finally entered the avatar's dazed mind, making him find his voice and yell, a second before the two intruders flought to be swallowed by the green clouds, that seemed to get smaller and smaller, till the floating green plate vanished with an inaudible *whoosh* sound.
"Whats wrong!"Soka panicky asked, looking towards Aang who was having a heavy tick in his eye, and stood wildly pointing to a perfectly normal-looking piece of sky.
The young monk started to frantic ramble: "The sheep were singing and the clouds became green! And there was green fire, and then-"
"Aang, calm down. You are freking us all out!" Katara declared in as much of a motherly tone as she could summon in her current exhausted and worried condition.
"ARGH! Enough of this twinkle toes, I need my sleep, so... shut up!" The angered, now insomniac, champion earth-bender snapped and threw a boulder to the back of the annoyance's head, faster than "mother Katara" could say "wait!".
It didn't pass a second, before silence reined in the night once more. Katara was predictably upset and wanted to nag the blind bandit about her behavior, but found that she didn't have enough energy left after so many nights of uneasy sleep, courtesy of the unconcious Aang –who now lied on the floor sporting a very notorious red bump in his head. The elder of the group debated for a moment whether to spend some time nursing the wounded with some water turned into ice or not; but in the end, resting on the makeshift bed on the soft ground was far more appealing that taking an action that might wake up the unconscious for another round of sleepless torture.
Soon no awake human could be found in the small, sheep-covered island. It would take a whole night and day, and then the another night, for the Avatar to wake up; but when he did, off he went to face his destiny with an aching body and a homungulous headache. Needless to say that he wasn't successful, mainly because the condition he was in, thanks to the friendly fire.
The last was an incredibly bad week: the paranoia, the anxiousness, the confrontation, the defeat and the depression caused by it, still swarmed in the hearts of the Gaang, blinding them of one very small, but incredibly important fact…
"Have anyone seeing Momo?"
Meanwhile on a very distant reality…
Three teen heaved because of the tiredness earned during a wild goose chase, in which they tried to catch the unidentified white, winged monkey/cat/thing, that was now clutched in Danny's grasp.
"Remember me why we had to chase that thing again?" Danny wheezed in the general direction of the female of the team, who gave the chasing order.
"Because, you can't leave an innocent animal out of his natural habitat for too long. We need to put him back where it belongs" Sam replied easily, her better physical condition allowing her a faster recovery of the marathon that the three friends had just run again –The slippery creature had made more than one escape since it made it to Amity, and, more specifically, to the teens gasp. Then, after she snatched the foreign creature on Danny's hands, the both free handed remaining teens slumped down to the ground.
It took a moment for the slow-minded, blue-eyed Feton to understand the implications of his crush's words: when she said "we" have to put it back where it belongs it meant "Danny" should put it back to that piece of land where the creature had decided to latch itself to skulker's rocket launcher.
The halfa had skipped school to chase the... whatever that thing was, around town, missing yet another exam and loosing a whole day he needed to finish a paper (which he has to hand tomorrow); now he had to make another trip to the zone?
Oh, joy. This day kept getting better and better...
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AN: Hi there everyone! I haven't bee writing anything for way too long, then there was this in my head...
I hope you all enjoyed this one-shot, because I hardly slept the day I wrote it because I deemed it more important than doing a paper I needed to hand the next day -for which I had been thinking really hard on reasons to postpone doing it (I finished it on the nick of time X_X).
Ok, back to comments on this. I did my super, duper, very best to go without a beta, cause the incredibly nice author I befriend around and who is my occasional beta, and for whom I also do bet things, had lost touch with the ATLA world.
I surely hope you remember the chapter "Nightmares and daydreams" that inspired this one; if not, I invite you to look it up! I think is very enjoyable.
I had to go pretty much the same on the start, but then made a few changes on my own. Those who have sen the whole series knows that Aang wasn't knocked out by Toph back there and then, and that I cut out the whole craziness of the last night Aang spent unconscious, however there is no helping it, I didn't feel like I could do any justice to the "samurai duel between Momo and Appa" that the avatar day-dreamed about.
Without further ado, I plead show me your love in a review. I eagerly wait to read what you have to say about this fic... anyone thinks I'm weird for writing this?