Disclaimer: Still don't own ATLA. If you've been on FFN for any amount of time, you know that no one here owns any source material. Still own OC's, till the end of copyright (∞).
A/N: And here we go, after the first chapter, a second one appears over the horizon! I wasn't expecting to take this long to update, but then again I did say sporadic updates, so I have myself there. Also I would like to thank to those who bothered to review, because you are awesome!
jakefan- Yes.
EverleafOwl- Yes. And also I got a C in my sophomore English class, but am able to write this. Go figure.
Basically I plan to have this story loosely follow canon, as in, major events happen, but minor details are always subject to change by me, because AU's. Also this chapter is actually what I had planned out to be two, but I thought each weren't substantial enough on their own to meet my wants. Basically they are adrift in the ocean, and stuff happens. Also, I'm doing away with the (POV) thing. It seemed so pointless, now. Don't worry; we'll get to "The Boy in the Iceberg" in like, one or two chapters. Calm your ostrich-horses. Just sit back and enjoy fanfiction. Remember to review! I know you're there, lazy reader!
CHAPTER 02: Adrift In A Strange Sea
Of course something had to have gone wrong, otherwise his quantum-tunneling device would have worked and it would have been a happy ending. Slamming into a random patch of ocean at a hundred miles per hour just seemed a final insult.
As he landed, Alex's head slammed against the control panel and he was thrown from the vehicle into the freezing water. Half-dazed, he pushed his way back to the surface and latched onto the machine, gasping. Noticing his brother wasn't there, he looked under the water and saw movement, something sinking slowly through the water.
Shit… Alex thought as he dove under the water, pushing against the undercarriage and speeding towards his unconscious brother. Grabbing him by the armpits, it seemed like forever before he broke back to the surface, pushing him onto the floating wreck and then hauling himself on, only to unceremoniously pass out several seconds later.
He dreamt. Dreamt of a landscape of ethereal clouds, with the sun a glowing crimson, far in the distance, casting beautiful shades of orange and red all over the cloudy… floor.
"So, what are you doing here?" said an elderly voice from behind them. Alex turned to face an all too familiar old man in red clothing, white hair, impossibly wise, friendly, but menacing eyes staring at him, almost through him. A man Alex had not known outside of… television.
"…Roku?"
The old man sighed. "You are not of this world. You forced your way through to it, with that machine. "It threated the safety of reality and balance in all worlds, across all realities. Do you realize that?"
"I… I… meant no disrespect! It was built for benevolent purposes, for exploration, for discovery!" Alex began tearing up.
Roku seemed to consider this. He mused for several seconds. "Well, since I intentionally attacked your machine, knowing its horrifying implications, I suppose I did not consider what would happen-"
"That was YOU? Why? You've stranding us on your world, in possibly the most remote location, for what? Because you were scared of something that you knew little about had hostile intentions? You lashed out, for fear and nothing else. You deserve to be ashamed."
Alex was actually surprised by the words that had just escaped his lips. Maybe he was just mad about how the machine had exploded and his brother had almost died, damnit. He was impressed because Roku seemed to be at a loss of words after that.
"Fate is a funny thing, boy. It can lead you down paths you didn't know existed, or open up doors you couldn't before reach. I suppose this is a special case. I will help you. It shall be as if you were part of this world from the very beginning. I do ask one thing of you, however."
"And what would that be, your spiritness?"
"I ask that if you successfully are able to rebuild your vehicle, that you are free to leave and never come back. I can make sure that the way you came in is the way you will leave as well. You, and your brother, also intrigue me, as nothing like this has happened in several thousand years. "
Alex froze. "So you wish me gone then, is that it? For the same reasons you exploded my ship." He scowled straight at Roku, not caring about his importance.
Roku looked back. "I am sorry. This is simply abnormal. Strange. A wild card enters the game, I suppose you would say. Goodbye. May the spirits favor you."
Slowly Roku began to fade, and his whole dream turned white.
Alex awoke suddenly, with a wicked pain pounding his head, next to his brother on the makeshift boat the device had become.
"Carson? Carson!"
Alex shot up and turned to face the brother lying next to him, fainted.
"Carson!" Alex slapped him clean across the face, sending him flying awake with wild eyes.
"…Oooowwwww!" he screamed as he held the right side of his face. "What was that for?"
Alex immediately embraced his brother with a massive hug.
Startled, Carson said "What? Did I almost die or something?" His eyes went wide.
Alex chuckled whilst in his brother's embrace. "Yeah, something like that, Haha."
"Okay, okay! I'm not dead… or dying! But your head looks like it may have a concussion, just saying." Carson looked worried as he gazed over at Alex's scalp.
"I'm sure its fine… by the way, you may think I have gone crazy, but I think I know where we are."
"Avatar: The Last Airbender universe." Carson grumbled.
"Yeah... wait how…" Alex faltered.
"I had the same dream as you. I just stood behind you while you did all the talking with Roku."
"Oh… well then, I know my concussion isn't causing my mental faculties to break down, yet." Alex laughed again, and then winced as he put his hands to his temples.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, just… my head hurts."
"You don't say, genius."
"So, where do you think we are? And when? Who will we meet if we meet anyone out here?"
There went Alex, always being a futurist, concerned about what will happen, not what is happening.
"That doesn't seem like a big deal right now considering we're in the MIDDLE OF THE DAMN OCEAN!" Carson proclaimed.
"Well Roku did say he would help us." Alex noted.
"He also said that fate is a funny thing, I'm not so sure about what will happen to fulfill that promise." Carson replied.
"Well I suppose that means that that we aren't going to die and that someone will find us before we die of hunger of thirst or boredom."
"Boredom? I know how we can fix that!"
"How?"
"By helping see exactly how the machine exploded and fell out of inter-dimensional space." Alex said proudly.
Carson gaped. "I know almost nothing about how this machine works, much less the physics behind it."
"Just help me find what exploded."
After several minutes of analysis several things became apparent.
One was that they shouldn't be floating. Carson noticed this because the craft was a good deal metal without much of any sealed areas, yet it floated. Alex thought that it was due to the quantum distribution field, the "big glowy sphere of light" along which that actual fabric of reality was ripped, was still technically active in the three normal special dimensions and so that was how they floated.
Two, Alex found that the problem had come from fracture of the main axial rotor, and so it needed to be completely replaced. Whatever Roku had done to crash them had been swift and effective. Alex had to face a grim reality.
"I… I think we may be stuck here… forever."
"What?" His brother was horrified. This was his brother, Alex, the golden-eyed genius who brought many a science convention revelations or new perspectives on topics so complex that the media hadn't even really caught on to how much of a genius he was. His brother, who programmed a considerable fraction of IBM Watson and Windows 7, his brother, who invented a cheese ray, that even though it got cheese everywhere was still amazing in its own right, his brother, who constructed a freaking dimension-jumping machine, couldn't fix a simple mechanical problem in his own machine.
Bullshit.
Alex continued, "The methods involved with repairing the axis are up-to-date and impossible to replicate without a huge number of prerequisite technologies, none of which exist in the ATLA universe. It simply cannot be done."
Alex saw Carson pale. "I'm sorry."
"Can't we do anything? At all?" Carson pleaded.
"The only way I could foresee us ever being able to repair it is if we somehow got the entire scientific backing of the Earth Kingdom or Fire Nation, which I very highly doubt will ever, ever happen."
"Great. So what do we do now?"
"Wait. For something. Unless you want to swim in some random direction and have almost zero chance of living, there isn't much we can really do."
"You know, I never thought I would end up in the Avatar universe. Aren't you excited? Or something?"
"I think I'm mostly just depressed that my machine exploded." Alex pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned.
"That wasn't your fault, remember. Roku sent us exploding and then we fell into the Avatar universe. I still can't believe we are actually here."
"It could be a shared hallucination! Right?"
Carson assumed a really? face. "Do you honestly believe that?"
Alex smiled. "No, but we haven't really had any real evidence in support of it."
Carson laughed. "Shut up. Just wait. Something will happen."
Alex rolled his eyes. "We can only hope."
Later…
There is saying, I forget what it is. It has something to do with a ship barreling down on you, and being oblivious. Well, that is pretty much happened to us. Haha.
Both boys had given up trying to do anything in particular and ended up falling asleep under the sun. Of course one cannot simply be a teen floating on an extremely unusual piece of machinery in the middle of the freaking ocean without attracting attention. A metal ship pulled up alongside them, the boys still asleep, a ladder was thrown over the rail and a man climbed down to investigate.
The man coughed. "Hello?"
Alex and Carson snapped awake and whipped around to find a man standing on the machine near them, while they were anchored to a massive metal ship.
"Um… hi!" Alex extended a hand to the man. "Mind telling us where and when we are, as well as who you are and what you are doing here?"
The man seemed taken aback by Alex's inquisitive greeting.
"You are in the middle of the Southern Ocean, next to the ship of the Fire Prince Zuko, the winter of the year 100 A.S.C. My name is Lieutenant Jee, and I am sorry about this."
"About wh.." Carson asked just before he was knocked out by a swift punch to the head.
"Wait! I can explai…" Alex was knocked out too.
"Oh boy, Zuko won't like this," Jee remarked.
More Later…
Zuko thought he had seen everything. He was wrong, of course, when Jee just had to stop to pick up the strangest pieces of flotsam ever seen. Said junk included an indecipherable machine and two unconscious boys, seeming to be brothers about the same age a little younger than Zuko himself, maybe fifteen?
One boy was tall, lanky, with black hair, pale skin, and a hug welt on his skull that was slowly trickling blood. The other boy seemed strong, fit, and slightly shorter than his brother, with tan hair and moderately tanned skin like someone who fell consistently fell asleep under the hot sun. Both wore unrecognizable clothing, like nothing the world had ever seen before. All three objects were being carried across the deck when Zuko came out to ascertain why they had stopped.
"Jee! Have you lost your mind? What are you doing picking up…" Then Zuko realized something.
What would two kids barely younger than he was doing on a device that certainly didn't seem remotely seaworthy, that flashed reflected light everywhere…
He decided this was, in fact, something worth investigating. He ordered Jee to put the device in the cargo hold until further notice, as well as to have the taller boy be escorted to the healer immediately for looks at that head wound, and his brother to be put in the brig.
Iroh had a few words to say on the matter as well. "This is a very strange matter… and I don't deny your suspicions, but I think that more may be at play than you realize, my nephew. Consider your decisions on this matter very carefully."
Jee had sent some things had found in a locked compartment in the device up to his room on request. They included food packages Zuko interpreted to be rations, a cylinder of clear solid material filled with water, a wrench, a small square with many, many buttons on it that Zuko couldn't even begin to decipher, and the greatest treasure, or at least Zuko assumed it was, a book. It was a book of at least a thousand pages, written in a script that he could never begin to make a head or a tail of. Glancing through it, there were many diagrams for mechanisms and natural phenomena. One thing caught his attention, however. He stared hard at the word under it, guessing that it was a label of some kind. He attempted to form the characters with a brush, although simple, they were still foreign, and required concentration. Afterward, he compared the two words and decided in was good enough. Zuko's paper read F-i-r-e.
Post-Fainting...
Carson awoke with a wicked headache. What happened? The last thing he remembered was… Alex's overcomplicated hello, …and Jee knocking him out.
But… What did Jee say?
…ship of the Fire Prince Zuko…
…winter year 100 A.S.C…
Zuko… Carson wasn't sure whether that was good or bad for him, since he had no idea when he was in the series. Wait… yes he did. 100 ASC? Hmmm… But winter… That could be at any point in Season One, if he was right. Therefore Zuko was still the Angry Jerk. Great.
Only then did Carson realize he was in a prison cell.
Congratulations Carson, you've won yourself an all-expenses paid trip to jail for falling through from another dimension!
And he realized that Alex wasn't there with him.
Shit… did that mean…
Carson's train of thought was interrupted when Zuko himself entered the cell, closing the door behind him.
Zuko looked just like he did through Season One, topknot, baldness, scar, and all.
Carson should have been angry, or scared, or worried, or something. Instead, he was stunned by the fact that this was actually real, that this was really happening to him. So he did something he rarely did, he cried.
Zuko didn't seem to expect this at all. His mask of indifference melted into one of worry. "Hey, hey, HEY!" Zuko yelled at him. Carson looked up at him, his eyes red.
"There you go. I know your probably scared shitless of me, but don't be. Your friend is going to be fine, by the way."
"Where… is he?" Carson asked shakily.
"With the healer. You woke up first, so I came to you first." Zuko assumed a neutral expression again.
"Okay… so what do you want? Why did you lock me up in here?" Carson snarled.
Zuko paused and then spoke. "I have no idea who you are, ad judging by that contraption you were on, you are probably more capable than you seem, which is why I am taking precautions against you, namely keeping you here for the time being." Zuko's response seemed half-hearted.
Carson's eyes narrowed. "And what do you really… want?"
Zuko sighed, and then laughed. "You could start by telling me how you came to be in the middle of an open ocean on that thing.
Carson replied, "You should let Alex explain that, he's the who built the damn thing. I barely understand it."
Zuko continued, "Alex is the name of the one with you, the one who I may assume is your brother?"
Carson blinked, realized he wasn't supposed to be giving away all this info to a fictional character that Alex knew infinitely better than he, considering he was the one ho introduced him to the awesome show in the first place, long ago.
Carson gave up. "Yea, he's my brother."
So can you tell me what this is? Zuko flashed a textbook at him. One of Alex's books.
College Level Physics: Introductory Through Mastery it read.
"Where did you get that from?" Carson asked in apprehension.
"Can you tell me what this is?" Zuko repeated.
"It is something that I really dont understand very well, one of Alex's books. I don't know much about it." Carson admitted.
It was true; he had yet to take high school physics, much less in college.
"Can you simply tell me what this word means in your script?" Zuko asked as he moved over to the wall, where he wrote "Equation" in the dust along the wall.
"Equation. Something that says that one thing is equivalent to another. It's something that comes out of mathematics."
"Mathematics, okay, not very interesting. Thank for telling me, I suppose." Zuko turned to leave.
"Oh, and it was nice to meet you, Zuko. I mean, you being the Fire Prince and all." Carson smiled.
"And what would your name be, then?" He turned his gaze back towards him, but only for a second.
Carson hesitated, but then saw no reason why he shouldn't tell him.
"Carson."
And… post head bashing.
Zuko supposed the other boy looked better; the doctor insisted that the pale boy, Alex, had held up surprisingly well. He would've though the boy would catch some kind of illness, but remained unconscious mainly because of the combination of his head injury and Jee hitting him in the head again.
It was strange. Zuko tried to guess where they might be from, the best he could do was that Alex had Fire Nation blood and Carson was from the Earth Kingdom, but there was just something a little… off.
Well maybe its because they are in the middle of the ocean on the way to the South Pole, suddenly finding two teens without any probable means of getting there. Or the strange clothes.
Carson had refused to change into fresh clothing, but the healer had already gone ahead and replaced Alex's clothing with gray pants and a red and gold tunic. He could pass for any man on his ship, except for the giant welt on his forehead as well as his age. No one on Zuko's ship was younger than Zuko himself, but he conducted himself to be much older than he appeared.
Since he had nothing better to do to occupy his time, he sat in the medical bay watching the healer tend to him while attempting to decipher the mysterious book. Even though Carson seemed to think that the book was something that didn't matter very much, for one, Alex seemed to be the smart one of the pair, and for two, just by looking through the book, it betrayed the massive amount it carried with its seemingly endless script, going on tighter and smaller than anything he seen. It became obvious after a while that staring at graphs, diagrams, etc. alone would allow him to understand it.
Sighing, he placed the book down next to the boy and left.
"Should I notify you when the boy awakens, Prince Zuko?" the healer asked.
"No, wait until you think he has recovered enough that he can move around unaided, then notify me."
Zuko left.
He returned an hour later to discover the boy standing upright, although without the greatest of ease, clutching his head and drinking some concoction the healer had made.
"Hello, Alex."
The boy froze, but then tried to ignore him by refusing to answer.
"Well? Answer me!" Zuko bellowed.
"…Hello. Why am I here?" He said it like he didn't know whom he was talking to.
"You are on my ship because," Zuko began.
"No, why here? Why the medical bay? Why not with my brother with whom you've obviously already spoken."
Zuko faltered. This boy was definitely smarter than he looked. He would have to be careful in how he talked with him.
"That head injury is worse than you probably thought it was." Zuko explained. "Without help, you probably would've gotten brain damage or something of the like."
"Hmmm…" Alex mused. "And how did you find this?" Alex showed him the book.
"It was in that device, and," Zuko began.
"It was in a sealed compartment, which you obviously broke into. Now, what has Carson told you, other than my name?"
Zuko suspected that he was trying to make up a fake story for himself and his brother; asking for details so that it would be consistent between them.
"He said that that book contains many weapons schematics, and that you've always kept it out of it. He said that what you were doing was seriously illegal and treasonous, and he begged me for mercy. I suggest you do the same."
It was a total lie, which of course went right over Alex's head.
"Close, but yet so far, Prince." Alex turned. What I think you've done is take what you think you know, and what Carson may or may not have said, fill in the gaps, and try to feed it to me expecting to hear all my secrets.
Well… shit. This kid can't be forced into anything. If I'm ever going to get anything out of him, I'll need to stop treating him like a prisoner.
"How about I take you up on deck for some fresh air to clear your head? Won't that be nice?" Zuko hoped Alex wasn't totally inconvincible.
"Sure… if you let my brother come out from wherever you're keeping him."
Zuko hesitated for a second before saying; "Sure, I'll take you to him."
When he opened the door to Carson's cell down in the brig, suddenly it was only those two boys in the whole universe, and they embraced.
Well, they are certainly brothers… Zuko thought to himself.
Up on deck, Carson started the ball rolling with a comment about Alex's Fire Nation clothing.
"Wow, you already seem less like the brother I know, and more like a Fire Nation soldier."
"Haha. I'm sure they were just being nice. Or sanitary. Or it was done for some ungodly reason we can't even begin to imagine." Alex rolled his eyes.
"How about we go with 'nice'." Zuko said as he came up behind them.
"Oh, hey there Zuko," Carson said.
"How about we go inside the meeting room and… talk. I'm sure that we have a lot to ask one another."
"Sure," Alex replied, "Just as soon as I ah.. ah.. CHOO!" He sneezed and shot fire from his nose.
Everyone looked stunned, especially Alex, who lay on the ground, looking up at Zuko as his eyes shone with knowledge and fear.
"A lot to talk about." Zuko restated.
A/N: Wow. Just wow. Review! Do it naow!
Too much for that cliffhanger? Maybe?
IN THE NEXT EPISODE...