"The Swampy Water Tribe is scattered throughout the south, south-western, western coasts of the continent," said Zei, as he tapped at those areas of the map with a ruler. "They are elusive - however - they are people - not aliens, not spirits, they may or may not be mystics - I leave that to you." A chuckle echoed about the chamber. The professor tabled the ruler and faced the audience - the students were etching his lecture into their tablets. "As their swamp bending style attests, they are related to the Northern Water Tribe, with bits and pieces of a very early form of Earth Kingdom Civilization adopted into their society. Yes - a mixture again! They date to the Migration - fifty thousand years ago - they existed long enough that a degree of inter-nation-blending occurred in spite of their isolation. It stands to reason, then, that swampbending itself is also a form of mixed-style-bending. Water. And. Earth." Zei paused - and blinked, spotting what had to be script drawn onto a girl's fluttered eyelids. He adjusted his spectacles and resumed his chalk on board lecture. "A mixed-style-bending, like the kind exhibited by the sandbenders - air and earth."
The gong was struck - and in the wake of its vibration the students arose and fled toward the exits.
"Just to remind you - next week we are going to finish the Migration, then we are going to reconstruct the world as it existed prior to Elementation, then..." he shouted into the void of auditorium emerging as the students were leaving and, as he was about to talk about their exam, they were gone and he stood alone.
He sighed, then, shuffled away through the corridor.
"Zei?" It was Mako - the Dean of Archeology - approaching at the other end of the passage. "I'm truly, truly sorry about Koji - I was only just informed about it."
"Mako." Zei grasped the man by the shoulder. "I thought it would be the end of everything. It - did you read all of my letter?"
"All of it - it was short, though, tragic," he added, shutting his eyes and shaking his head. "Awful. Come - we need to talk."
Mako gestured and Zei followed. It was like an adventure of a kind. The Office of the Dean - a map was needed simply to find where it was located. It lay past stairwells, doorways. Into a cellar filled with mazes of crates that students were too afraid of to explore. Onto an alcove marked by the name 'Tenzin'. There, at the sanctuary, the office was shut and a lamp was lit.
Alone - without the Dai Li to spy - they were able to speak freely.
"I fear the Dai Li may be onto your system," said Mako at the back of the desk. "I deciphered the letter, though, without difficulty."
"I kept it short, deliberately, short and to the point," explained Zei, sitting, leaning at the front of the desk. "I hesitated to reveal everything that happened at Volcania. I feared they'd catch wind of it, then come and search my belongings at the gate to Ba Sing Se. I almost left the materials at my other home." He whipped the sack onto the desk and put a hand on top of the pile. He took a deep, deep breath then relaxed. "You ... I still can't make heads or tails about what I uncovered."
"Volcania was never an easy topic to discuss, frankly, I don't think Tenzin understood it all." The dean lit another two lamps and set them besides the sack. "I gather you retraced my old master's steps." A nod came as a reply, then a look down, away."And the tunnels? And the station?"
"I found the complex as it was intimated by the journal." Suddenly, as their talk focused onto the archeology, then and there they seemed to be reanimated. "All of it, almost as he found it, yet," the professor leaned into the desk, "we were not the first to reach the complex. Another group of men - an army of sorts - came to the island after Tenzin and we found evidence of their occupation."
"Fire Nation?" he asked.
Mako reached into a drawer and produced out of it a bottle of tonic.
Zei filled a couple of glasses with that concoction.
"Unknown," he replied.
Taking a sip of the brew, he added: "We found them - those who came after Tenzin - dead. They had been killed by the effect of an eruption at that station. We discovered a trove ... artifacts ... that were not native to that site and were, instead, added by said interlopers." He sipped another taste of twangy, sharp spirit - then untied the sack and displayed its treasure. "An armband, taken from a body. A map, taken from a laboratory - that had been created by that army. A light-cylinder, an example of their technology, taken from that chamber."
"A light-cylinder?"
"A light-cylinder!"
Zei gathered the artifact - it had been split - and arranged its components in front of Mako.
"I took it apart to thwart the Dai Li if my travel had been intercepted. What you see, splayed, appears to be harmless. Strange, yet, harmless. The shaft is hollow like a pipe, these shorter, fatter cylinders fit into the shaft and provide it with energy. The bottom end is a spring. The top end is a construction of glass. They both need to be screwed onto the shaft. The light comes out of the glass - out of the bulb to be exact - when it is activated by a button."
As Zei spoke, demonstrating the components and putting the parts of the light-cylinder together, he gave the finished product to Mako who then took it apart, again, to examine the artifact with a magnifier.
The outside was both remarkable and unremarkable as judged by its lack of detail when compared with the rest of the artifact. The inside - those short, fat power-cylinders Zei insisted energized the object - were covered with writing Mako identified as a type of Meiguo. They were absolutely identical, each and every power-cylinder, carried the same, exact text. Attention then turned onto the bulb, a combination of glass and metal, that appeared to be hollow except where it contained a framework of tiny, needle-like filaments.
"A simple object although its workmanship is astounding," the dean remarked as the professor assembled the artifact. "How did they add the metal into the glass like that?"
"A wonder," he uttered the only answer that could be given, "and it is the bulb that glows and makes the light."
Zei aimed the device at the ceiling and turned it on - a beam of light, bright as day, illuminated the office.
Mako poured another shot of tonic.
"That laboratory the interlopers added onto the complex was filled with many other devices like this. And - it was incredible - how much of it they looted and how much of it survived I cannot say."
He shook out of the shock that the light-cylinder imparted.
"Yes, of course, that foreign ... expert ... Kuzon?"
"Koji tried to warn me about the danger." Zei took a sip then pushed the glass away. "If it were not for Turuk, I would be stranded, dead ... I donno. Kuzon followed my boat out of Chin City - which was where I hired Fen and Xi - they had been planted into my party deliberately."
"The eruption was violent," Mako added, recalling news that spread, even into Ba Sing Se, about a catastrophe at the Fire Nation homeland. "You suppose Kuzon left the island alive?"
"I donno." He paused to sigh. "My vessel was damaged and, with the kind of eruption that followed, it could be that they were swept away."
Mako watched Zei take the light-cylinder apart.
"It's too dangerous. It's too dangerous. Zei - as your advisor and your friend - all of this could be a disaster for you." Mako reclined, folding his hands atop his lap, and recalled what happened when another archeologist he knew very, very well went too far, too fast. Then he noticed the other two artifacts brought out of Volcania.
"There's a reason the Dai Li censored Tenzin's journal. Which, I need to say, after your letter arrived, they started to look for it at the archives."
"Er, it was returned, if they search again it will be like it was always there," Zei whispered. "Mako - think of the truth - first and foremost. If archeology teaches us anything, it's that nothing is forever. The Dai Li will be in a museum and torment nobody but historians!"
"Perhaps," the dean replied and with a wave of the hand - the wag of a finger - direct at the professor he lectured: "until that day we need to be mindful. Trust me, I know of your respect for Tenzin and his theories..."
"His ideas can be proved. Can there be any doubt of it now?" He took the power-cylinders and tapped them onto the desk. "Look at them. New. Mint. Like it came out of a factory. And covered with the Meiguo. Can there be any doubt of it now! That not only was there an advanced and planet-wide civilization but that parts of it, someway, somehow, remain with us."
Another bottle of tonic was uncorked.
Zei stood and gazed at Mako's original tile mural - of Wan Shi Tong's Library - letting air, seeping through vents, work into his lungs. He took another sip of the brew and let a thought slip: "I bet Kuzon knows of this idea, too, and is looking for that civilization. What was it he said? We shared the same aim, or, something like that."
Mako noted the archeologist's steely, cold gaze. It was a manic sort of urge - that hunger to explore the great wide world - condensed into a mere piece of anatomy. It was the fever of a man at the verge of discovery. It was familiar and he sat and gulped, recalling his ancient master Tenzin.
"Long ago I sensed it within you," he started out of the blue, "I hoped that with experience the fire would be mollified, somewhat. You are a brilliant teacher, Zei, the life of an academic - with its listless day to day politics - it's not the kind of world you want. You want to be out there, in the field, digging a trench, getting dirty. There's a freedom beyond the walls of Ba Sing Se. I will not deny that I feel its tug - from time to time - this talk of far-flung, ancient civilizations, it drove everyone mad who delved into it."
The Dean of Archeology sighed - then examined one by one the other two artifacts.
A map printed onto a sheet of silk and folded like a pamphlet. The first side was filled with lists, figures - tables of symbols - their meaning incomprehensible as they were written with the Meiguo. The second side displayed a strange and unknown landform - an island by the look of it.
The island was a plethora of structure. The south was wide, semi-circular with a few indentations here and there. Its east and west were large and small, respectively, and adorned with a couple of coves like bays. The north was dominated by a feature - a curved peninsula surrounded by an archipelago of tinier, misshapen islets. The edges of the coastlines were highlighted with squiggly blue arcs that suggested a coast. Amazing that something like that, an alien map of an alien land, would have displayed such a familiar idea. The image was superimposed with concentric circles and rays emanating out of a red marked point.
There were a few other points - cities? - confined at the coast. A series of peaks, drawn by hand, clumsily, after the rest of the map was completed, suggested a range that snaked up and down the island. Again, like the power-cylinders, like the lists, figures, all of the writings were examples of the Meiguo.
"And with that kind of technology - we cannot yet imagine all of it - if the Fire Nation industry was to get a hold of it? Someway. Somehow. They got the notion that they were superior. Yes, it was something Kuzon said - I remember. A superior race. Destined to rule. Establish a new world order. But with that kind of technology, a their disposal, it would be hard to argue against it, the whole world would be liable to buy into it, wholesale."
"Yeah, it would be intoxicating - corrupting, even - to gain a power like that. A colleague of mine who was into myths, legends, that sort of thing. It reminds me of - yes - fire, it was the element of the gods. And there was a story about a titan - a spirit of a kind - who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. If they were given or found or were taught about material, like that light-cylinder, it would not take much after that and they would be believing they were the gods themselves..."
"That," Zei said, "it too, too much like an ancient desert belief. Their gods came from the sky as whirlwinds of fire and air. I doubt the Fire Nation would want to be associated with tribes related to people they butchered."
Mako nodded and examined the last artifact - the armband. Red. With a white circle. With a black crocked, bent cross at its center.
"I saw an object like this," the dean confessed, sitting aback. "It was an artifact Karasuki uncovered."
"Karasuki?" asked the professor. "The madman?"
"Karasuki and I were students of Tenzin. Karasuki was a genius, a true, absolute genius. It was he who originated the theory. And deciphered the Riyu. And possibly the Meiguo. Of course, he went mad, the Dai Li made sure of that."
Mako jotted an address on a card and passed it to Zei.
"If you want to do it, indeed, it may be ... instructive ... to meet with the man. Karasuki may be of use to you."