Aya's day was off to a truly miserable start. In the span of twenty minutes the universe had chewed her up, swished her around and spat her out again. She was adrift on a dead vessel, with nothing to look forward to but the various ways in which her life could end. Maybe a boarding party, she thought. It would be better than freezing to death after all. Maybe she would get fractally bisected as she fell into Beifong. That was her single most frequent nightmare, so it seemed only fitting. Somewhere in the list, between asphyxiation and having her fluids squeezed out by the vacuum, Aya saw a flicker of light appear. As her eyes focused, so did her immediate memory. She sat up, and pain tore through her head like a driving piston. She fought through it and looked towards the pad.

Standing on it was a sagely women in ragged gear, holding a small ball of flame above her open palm. Aya opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She was dumbfounded. In all her thousands of predictions (and she had written thousands) she had no precedent for a human being appearing on that pad. It floored her, and flooded her mind with questions.

The mysterious women began murmuring to herself. "Aaaah," she said quietly, "That makes sense. Not what I was expecting, but it makes sense…" She waved the flame along her vision as she panned around the room. She turned until she was facing Aya, and stopped. "You!" she exclaimed, and started towards her. She stumbled weakly, her legs shaking, and slowly made her way over. "Sorry about that," she said. "Swimming in the river of time can make walking seem so… so…" She stopped and pondered on the right word. "linear," She decided. "It seems hard to talk about with words. Language has a lot of pedantic nonsense like… tenses. You must be Aya!"

Hearing her own name was like getting splashed in the face with ice-water. "Wha- yes! H-how do you know who I am?" She said meekly. Aya wasn't sure if she could take even one more surprise. It was an unlucky state of mind for the present situation.

The women gave a warm smile and knelt down, examining Aya's injuries. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for a very long time. Well, I guess you could say a very long time, capped with a brief period of infinity…" She gracefully moved her arms, and a spout of water snaked out of a flask at her hip, and began to glow as it gathered at a gash on Aya's leg.

Aya wasn't simple. She had been putting the pieces together ever since this impossible women threw a wrench into her perception of reality, they were just pieces to a puzzle she dare not solve. The implications of this puzzle were deep, complicated, and nearly unfathomable. She opened her mouth, and paused as the words became caught in her throat. She felt like she didn't need to ask the question, but at the same time, prayed for literally any answer that differed from the one she had deduced. "Who are you?" she asked.

The women looked at Aya, her face creased with the tell tale signs of old age, and gave her a look that was somewhere between a grin and a smirk. "You've been searching for the answer to that question your entire life, Aya Sol."

Aya's eyes glazed over, and her jaw moved up and down as she began processing it. Her face was a tangled knot of conflicting emotions. After a few seconds it settled on horror, and she backed away towards the wall. "I- did this… it was me…" she began, each word punctuated by the beginnings of a sob. She stared at her own hands in shock. "The Vanish, the end of the Avatar… It's my fault…" tears brimmed in her eyes and she balled her fists.

Korra burst out laughing. She put out a hand and waved it furiously. "Oh, no no no! this little thing?" She began, motioning to the pad behind her. "There's no way. Your little gadget isn't that good."

Now Aya was even more confused. She stared at the Avatar, dumbfounded. "Then, how… what…" She trailed off, her words fighting for traction in the torrent of her thoughts.

Korra pointed. "That face. You have no idea how long I've been waiting for that face! Though I guess neither do I…" She shifted position, and the glowing water flowed up to Aya's forehead. "Your machine didn't rip me out of my place in time, it was just a convenient exit point." she plowed past the statement like it made all the sense in the world, and glanced around the room. "We're on like, some sort of airship, but bigger right?"

At some point after the tidal waves of confusion were done crashing in the surf, Aya would muse over the description of the Skybison as "an airship, but bigger." For now, there were more pressing matters. "hold on, hold on," said Aya. She put her arms out as she felt the room begin to spin around her. "How do you know my name?"

The Avatar paused, and thought about it for a second. "You know? A wise monk once told me that premonition isn't some mystical thing. It's just memory in the wrong direction." She paused, and looked down at her knees. "I was amused by his words. But then I started getting memories of this place, an adventure like none I could imagine, and of you..." She glanced into Aya's eyes, and it sent shivers up through her spine and into her shoulders. Korra made a face. "Where's that geeky firebender? Teelo, I think?"

Teelo's head popped up from behind the control panel. He stared at her with big, round eyes. "Is it… really…"

The Avatar roller her eyes, and stood up. "Alright, let's get this over with." She raised her hands. "It is I, the great and mighty Avatar Korra! Now let's, you know, move on?" She made a cycling motion with her hands.

Aya had been thinking. "Wait, so does that mean we live?" Teelo joined Aya in looking to Korra for an answer.

Korra knelt down again and gently touched Aya's hand. "This is the hard part, guys," She said, glancing at Teeo before returning her gaze to Aya. "If we simplify it to three dimensions, time is like a river." She made the water from the canteen into a flowing line. "It forks into many winding paths". The water stream split and split until it resembled large tree. "All of those paths exist. They are all real, they all really happened, will happen, and are happening." She paused and sighed. "You know, tenses really are tedious… anyway," She moved her other hand and all but one of the branches fell away, spilling into a puddle on the floor. "I have a few memories from only one of these paths. If at any point we diverge, I'm totally in the dark. It also means I can only tell you what I remember telling you. Giving you information you shouldn't have is…"

Aya sighed, realizing they weren't going to get an answer to the question. "The fastest way to jump the track…" she finished.

"Exactly…" Korra somberly concluded.

There was a long pause. and a silence thickened the air. It seemed almost viscous with implications and unanswered questions. Korra held up her hand, paused for a second, and snapped her fingers as the dull glow of the emergency light-strips flickered on, illuminating the group from the ground. "huh, that was more amusing than I remembered." She got up, dusted herself off, and finished her thought. "Anyway, that means I can't tell you who potentially lives or dies, or what the outcome is, but either way, we need to get off this boat."

"Good luck with that" spouted Teelo. "All of our scouts were getting ready for dust-off, they all got fried by the EMP." He walked over and sat down with them as he talked. "It would take the best electrician an hour to get one up and running by hand, and the Spirit Crusade will have boarding parties over here in ten minutes."

Korra cocked her head slightly. "Spirit Crusade?"

They both looked at her with confusion. She nodded. "Why don't I remember them?" She voiced the question in their heads. They nodded, and she answered it. "I can only remember brief, disjointed pieces. Everything on this side of infinity is broken into small, fleeting moments, usually interactions. I can infer some information from them, but it's like trying to remember what happened on your fourth birthday. Plus, this brain is old and crusty." She gave a toothy smile as she prodded her temple. "Cut her some slack!"

"Well," Aya began. "The Spirit Crusade are a radical militia of traditionalists."

Teelo huffed. "That's a very delicate way of saying 'bloodthirsty terrorists'"

Korra threw up a hand at Teelo. "I'm not a fan of sensationalist labels. for groups like these, killing is an unpleasant means. It is never the goal."

Teelo looked slightly shocked. His face scrunched in agitation. "Those people? That 'radical militia?'" He made air quotes for emphasis. "They are butchers, Avatar. They are a bigoted thorn in the side of progress, and their tantrums have body-counts in the thousands. They will board this ship, take whatever supplies are useful, scuttle our reactor and leave us to our decaying orbit until Beifong swallows us whole."

"Beifong!" Korra exclaimed, cutting into Teelo's rant with unwarranted enthusiasm. "That's the thing out there, right? What is that thing?"

Aya answered without thinking. She'd attempted to explain singularities to everyone in her family at least once. "It's a Black Hole. It's what happens when a star collapses in on itself."

Korra smiled. "That's a Beifong alright…"

Aya was still lost in thought. She sat on the floor, thumb planted on her chin, churning through the new data that was being thrust upon her. "How the hell is there a version of this scenario in which we survive? I mean, you," She said, motioning to Korra. "You might survive. You'd be useful to their cause. but us? I mean, we're dead, right? We have to be."

Teelo squirmed. He hated Aya's annoying habit for making sense regardless of how unpleasant her conclusion was.

"On the contrary, I'm never making it off of this ship without the two of you in-tact. Seems to me we either all die right here, or we all make it out. Or some other third thing, who knows?" She gave a light-hearted shrug.

Aya and Teelo exchanged incredulous glances.

Korra stood up again, and her smile faded. "Teelo, they will have weapons of some kind. I need you to catch me up on how far we've come in terms of weaponry. What are we dealing with?"

Teelo was caught off guard. he felt his heart pound against his ribcage. There would be fighting. It was already etched into Korra's memory.

"weapons…" Teelo regained his nerve, and straightened his posture, "Right. They'll probably use spectral beam cages. they'll have spatial flares and fractal darts, too."

Korra looked at him blankly. "What are any of those things?"

Aya leaned her head back against the wall. "They are all devices that you launch into a room to turn a lot of people into a lot of dead people, instantly."

Korra whistled. "Great Laghima's ghost!" she said, staring vacantly.

Aya sighed. "Yeah, we've come quite a long way in three hundred years." she let out a long sigh. "Conflict has become efficient."

The Avatar smiled again. "In every struggle there is balance." She spun around. "Every move in the pro-bending arena has a counter-move. Whaaat do you got… Teelo!" She pointed a finger at him, and he looked around as if it could have been meant for someone else. "These weapons, they run on some form of energy, right? This future still consumes energy as electricity. That's fire-bending, that's you."

Aya was suddenly blindsided by a sudden giddiness at the mention of pro-bending. She had ALL of Korra's filmed matches on her holoscreen, and she had even started listening through the early audio-only matches.

"Well, security squad sparkies use an EMP technique to wipe out their weapons. But we're a science vessel. we have a security team of twenty people, and only four of them are firebenders…"

"So, can you?" She repeated blankly.

"Oh, me? I don't really do the whole 'violence' thing. I'm useless."

Korra closed her eyes and took a breath. "That doesn't answer my question, Teelo."

He swallowed. "Not really. I'm garbage at it, I'm a novice at best. It works when it wants to, which is almost never. If I missed one single pulse none of us would even have enough time to regret the mistake."

She walked over to him, clasped him on the shoulders and gave him a wide grin. "You're going to be perfect. Give yourself some credit, kid."

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

She turned to Aya, then back to Teelo. "Alright then, we're gonna need some space-suits."