The Tales of Henwa Island
The Wedding of Chief Hakoda and Lady Ursa
"A civilization has begun to die when everyone knows what you should do during a ceremony, abhors you for not doing it, but can't explain why in the world you had to do it in the first place." Karo Zhao.
Karo didn't give voice to his discomfort. He didn't take religion seriously but his mental furniture had already been set in place by his doting mother and his homeland. Suihan rationalism informed his opinions and one thing they told him was that the Universe operated like clockwork. The mental model he had in his mind was of a Universe that worked like a clock and he may doubt the nature of the clockmaker but didn't doubt his existence. He figured God would explain it all to him when he died. The Universe simply worked according to rules laid down at the Big Bang and simply ran on as if would up at that time by the maker and let to do its thing. When the Fire Nation Priest began to burn offerings of idols to the Sun; Karo felt insulted. God had created the Sun and it was a physical body with no divine properties. It was a cog in His grand machine.
Azula shared this model. She hovered between denial of God to believing the Creator had left the clock shop to let things unfold on their own and abhorred His shoddy workmanship. Even she never could be absolutely sure. She knew the Moon was a dead rock – she had seen it. When the Water Tribe Priestess began with an invocation to the Moon spirit – a woman; Azula took some offense at the sheer ignorance of this.
The Fire Nation Priest and the Water Tribe Priestess began the show.
"In the ancient days..." The Water Tribe Priestess explained like a hockey referee. "We learned the power of the Moon to pull in the tides and began to learn the wisdom of the Moon. We learned to harness Her power."
A huge moon of wobbly water formed over the stage illuminated by blue fire from her Fire Nation Priest.
In ancient times, the Sun Worshipers discovered the power of the Sun." The Fire Nation Priest announced.
"We won't run out of hot water." Azula muttered this in Suihan so Karo would hear but others would not hear her words.
"The wedding of Chief Hakoda and Lady Ursa have united our two great nations" The two religious officials announced in a co-ordinated ballet. "We have a union of Fire and Water. On cue, a blue fire and a cold ice melted into steam. "Lady Ursa and Chief Hakoda are to wed!"
A harsh music swelled. A string on a traditionally untutored violin rang out as Lady Ursa dressed as well as economies would permit walked out on stage hand in hand with Hakoda of the gray hair.
Karo hated this moment as his ears tried to make sense of the chorus of Water Tribe singers and the chorus of Fire Nation singers who had begun singing in unison offstage. He had learned the minor and major scales and this was an offense to both. Karo had perfect pitch and he really hated the pain of hearing the notes of anything off with his carefully calibrated ears.
Lady Ursa and Chief Hakoda walked out slowly.
They looked majestic. Lady Azula wore the best and finest clothes of the high female of the Fire Nation. Azula had no doubt her mother was majestic. Hakoda wore the best robes of his tribe and they walked hand in hand. Neither of them looked comfortable.
Chief Hakoda and Lady Ursa arrived at the shiny brass microphone stand at the same time.
They intertwined their fingers.
"Lady Ursa of the Fire Nation – do you take Chief Hakoda as your lover forever?" The Fire Nation Priest asked.
"Forever being about three years at their age and health."Azula groaned. The one time she didn't want to be understood and used Karo's language to obfuscate was the one time someone picked up on her words and a spot light fell on her. "As is our tradition...the Water Tribe will hear any objections from the family of the bride."
"Have you Hakoda of the Water Tribe woven the necklace of betrothal?" The Water Tribe aged priestess announced.
"Yes." Hakoda answered.
"Have the parents of the bride accepted you into their family?" The Water Tribe Priestess asked with great ceremony.
The spotlight danced around the room.
Karo and more importantly, Azula knew what would come next. Gran Gran had given her approval but both of Lady Ursa's parents had died. Her grandmother had died of some sort of rapid acting cancer the best doctors couldn't cure while her grandfather had died under mysterious circumstances after ingesting thallium – rat poison – presumably by accident.
All great ceremonies had moments of grave discomfort.
The spotlight shone down on Azula.
"I thought my twit of a brother would have all the say in this." Azula winced in the bright light.
"Our customs are not beholding to you; but your mother wished to know if you approved of Hakoda." The Water Tribe Priestess's voice dropped about an octave as she spoke. "Fire Lord Zuko gave his blessing."
"Why do you need mine?" Azula tried to focus on the priestess. "My mom wishes to marry Hakoda of the Water Tribe. I have no real problem with this?" Azula squinted. "Can you ask the stage hand behind that limelight to turn down the follow spot – I can't think straight. I feel like the secret police are interrogating me."
The light dimmed. Azula could see the elderly priestess as a silhouette.
The priestess had hoped someone had briefed Azula on the part of the ceremony where she had to give her approval for her mother to marry as her only living daughter.
Azula had a dazed and confused look.
The Fire Nation priest had not even begun his part in the formalities and he could sense something had gone badly wrong. Memos had circulated, the Fire Nation Ministry of Culture had researched the traditions (if any) instantiated by the marriage of a Fire Nation widow and a Chief of the Water Tribe and found little of any use.
At the back, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Culture wondered who had screwed up the memo that would have informed Princess Azula she had to give her consent to the marriage. He hoped that wasn't his job. He had risen up the ranks through the Ministry of Agriculture and still had nightmares of the heaps of subsidy checks given out to rice farmers to keep growing rice on their three acre plots. He had left that ministry shortly before his supervisor had discovered some vast incompetent had handed out checks to people claiming to farm sushi. He pulled at his collar.
Azula fidgeted and tapped Karo who stood up obediently.
"What did I do?" Karo whispered.
"I have no problem with my mother marrying Chief Hakoda of the Water Tribe." Azula said confidently.
"You're speaking Suihan." Karo whispered back. "Can you rewind that and say the same words in Fire Nation Chinese and we can soon be enjoying our dinner of rice harvested by farmers with larger subsidies than most public schools."
"Oh...right." Azula blinked because her eyes had grown dry. "I say before all of the assembled company of witnesses." She whispered to Karo. "Was that in Chinese?"
"As far as I know."
"Trying to express myself in formal Fire Nation Chinese is like trying to play an orchestral symphony on a Whack – A – Mole game." Azula turned away from Karo and faced the silhouette. "I give my consent for my mother to wed Chief Hakoda of the Water Tribe."
"Kill me now." Azula came out of the washroom holding a hot white towel a friendly washroom attendant had handed to her. "When the temple chimney belches white smoke, does that mean the marriage has run to completion."
"I think we do that when we elect deacons." Karo threw the towel the attendant had given him into the bin provided. "We still have the Fire Nation part of the ceremony to sit through and I haven't eaten yet. I would hate to have to go through this again. Why does everything here have to have such a decorous and baroque aspect to it. The washroom had gold faucets and a man handed me a scented hot towel to dry my hands with. I had thought a napkin dispenser would work for less."
"Did you ever notice the gold leaf they hammered into the church interiors of your homeland?" Azula said rather impatiently.
"An angel covered in gold leaf gets that way because people in the church raised the money to put the angel in gold leaf. I won't defend that kind of spending either but the church doesn't impose a twenty percent value added tax on everything." Karo replied. "Cherubs and tropical hardwood pews are just as decadent but they don't infringe on my time." He scratched his head. "I would think the napkin dispenser wouldn't need gold leaf or cherubs but that may be a matter of taste."
"Nice speech Azula." Lady Mai smiled as she approached Azula and Karo. "So you think the glorious language of the Fire Nation lacks expressive power?"
"I whispered that to – wait you heard that?"
"I can speak some Suihan." Mai grew instantly serious. "I had never imagined the daughter of the great Fire Lord Ozai would come to speak a language used by merchants."
"Please don't fight." Karo pleaded although the insult from Mai stung him as well. Karo thought the language of merchants gave Suihan a kind of democratic cache. Karo knew his Chinese had an accent with a rolled 'r' he could never drive below the surface.
Azula had not given this much thought at all.
"When do we get to the point where we chuck grain at the newly married couple as they drive off in their car with the tin cans trailing behind them?" Azula asked Mai.
"We throw rice as they leave the palace."
"I brought a bunch of heads of corn." Azula replied. "As you know, Suihan has periodic monsoon failures and so rice growing never took hold because rice takes too much water and so we developed corn cultivation."
Karo said nothing. He knew The Dominion was a big island and grew a great deal of corn. The Co-Op sign hung above the warehouses of the docks where various ships loaded corn or corn products. The grew a good deal of olives and other plants that didn't croak and cause famine if they didn't get soaked and flooded out.
"The Fire Flakes you love so much are made of corn – not rice." Azula explained. "Can I huck maize at them?"
"Not unless you take it off the cob." Was the end of Mai's remarks at this time.
In Karo's hometown, the city had bylaws for every eventuality – including snow. It had not snowed ever on the island he called home but this gave by law writers a job.
Azula began to understand how asteroid spotting telescopes could find a faint image moving against the backdrop. They had found the planet Pluto using much the same technique.
Fire Nation ceremony had all the excitement of sitting on top of a mountain exposing photographic plates over several hours without the minimum wage pay the University paid the undergrad astronomy students.
According to Fire Nation theology; which came out after a long and extended explanation by the priest, volcanoes were sacred spots.
This left Karo wondering if real estate investments in the Fire Nation came at too high a cost.
Azula felt her hair on her arms bristle.
A shot of lightning flew out over the room.
"Our beloved Lady Ursa is to wed the handsome Chief Hakoda."
"What happened to the twin old ladies who used to do the public announcements?" Karo whispered to Azula.
"When I met them," Azula answered back, "they had lived long enough to witness the process of evolution in our species but at the young age of three hundred or so; Death claimed them. Now our public announcements are done by some anonymous news reader between the rugby scores."
The Fire Nation priest began reciting the names of the major deities inhabiting volcanoes.
"Mount Fuji?" Karo's mind drew a blank. "Fujiyama? Mount Unzin -Unzinyama. I sense a linguistic pattern. How many volcano gods does this country have?"
"One for each virgin they have to sacrifice to keep them from blowing up."
"I gather Ember Island missed its volcano virgin?" Karo stifled a yawn.
"Did you think human sacrifice would prove effective against the whims of plate tectonics? Some idiot a few thousand years ago thought this volcanic archipelago would make for a nice homestead." Azula leaned over and whispered in Karo's ear. "Then they discovered that the reason the rice grew so well was due to fertile volcanic soils. We've been screwed ever since."
A nervous waiter brought a phone to Azula on the center of a silver tray. "Madame has a call from an unpronounceable gentleman in the Dominion."
"I can no...wait I can wait perfectly happily outside of...I have no say in this: I have grown tangled up in the phone cord." Karo complained. "What kind of a person has a four hundred meter long phone cord? What kind of person would pick that shade of red to make a phone but I digress. Outhouse brick red for everything! You always drag me along on your little adventures and I really don't have enough nerve to refuse you."
"It could be worse."
"Lady Mai could want the use of the woman's john?"
"I wouldn't have picked that shade of pink for the marble sink and the Creator of All that Is knows I shouldn't even know what a Feminine Hygiene Product Dispenser looks like!" Karo pleaded helplessly. "This one actually wants a bronze piece for its good work."
"No...my fiance wants to buy a tampon." Azula spoke over the phone. "I will be back home the day after tomorrow."
Azula hung up and wondered if she had to reel in the long phone cord.
Azula jammed a bronze piece in the machine. "My mother now owns a hotel in the resort city of Torquay an hour north along the coast by train from our lovely hometown."
Karo pulled at the red wire. "How much does she have to cough up for the privilege on doting on tourists?"
"She paid a cool quarter of a million." Azula tried to undo the wire from around Karo's neck. "The old owners wanted to offload the inn so we actually got quite a good deal. Hakoda had the idea of buying her a nice home." Azula explained as Karo realized he stood in the girls' washroom. "My brother decided to front the money to buy a small bed and breakfast in the seaside resort of Torquay as a wedding gift. Made our gift look like we bought it out of a vending machine for a bronze piece."
"I have about one two hundred and fifty thousandth of the money required in my bank account." Karo looked around the washroom hoping his visit to the forbidden washroom would go unnoticed. "Why did you have to take the call from the estate agent?"
"My brother put up the money but he needed my help with the paper work and deeds." Azula began to guide Karo to the door of the washroom. "The Dominion uses Suihan as the official language and so my brother had to have my help as a translator. He promised me one political favor and so I helped."
"Oh Sweet God!" Karo looked at Lady Mai and her two servants and at her daughter who seemed to appear out of nowhere. "She brought me here. I didn't want to come with her but then again I couldn't figure out how to free myself from this phone cord."
"You are too nice for that bitch." Mai told Karo.
Azula seethed with anger.
"Hitting me with the phone won't help your case!" Karo pleaded. "Who is too nice for what bitch? I have no doubts this involves me in some – please quit strangling me with the phone cord!"
"What does my brother see in you." Azula replied.
"Please...I have a blood clotting disorder and this won't help my health."
"Your brother would have killed you had Katara not stopped him." Mai hissed back. "I hope you enjoyed your stay at the asylum...I know I did."
"I can't breathe." Karo tapped Azula's shoulder. "I have it on good authority that I need oxygen. Can you please loosen the cord?"
Karo dropped to the floor when Azula snapped the phone cord.
"Out of respect for my mother and because your daughter needs her mother; I won't kill you where you stand."
"Eegh!" Karo hit his head on the underside of the sink. "Did I tell either of you that I have had no fun tonight?"
Karo held his head and pushed up his glasses.
Azula and Karo returned.
Karo sat down at his seat and rubbed his neck. "How many volcanic mountains does this country have?"
"About a hundred."
"How far down the list has our priest gone."
"About half way." Azula remembered quizzes about the important or deadlier volcanoes in the Fire Nation. She had always scored rather well on those tests but none of the names she heard sounded at all familiar. "The Fire Nation resides on a volcanic island chain."
"This explains why no one mows their lawns?" Karo had spent many of his good Saturdays mowing the lawn of his mother's house and hoped everyone suffered equally. The Fire Nation evidently didn't consider weeds a concern. "I saw a thistle of some sort – may have been carnivorous – that had grown taller than the ugly tin shed it shaded. I don't quite know how to take that."
Karo had not expected this. He had expected a once powerful nation to exercise lawn care but he had seen some hideous weeds that had gone far beyond what by law enforcement officers should have considered decent. He had expected solid and grand architecture but most houses in the Fire Nation begged for a good coat of paint and had a leaking fuel oil tank on stilts standing in front by the front door. He wondered if the flammable liquid should be stored near the escape route from fire.
The Fire Nation speaker droned on as he listed each and every volcano.
"I may not be the brightest bulb in the six pack but should I worry that I have set foot on an island with more volcanoes than telephones?" Karo whispered to Azula. "Last year, your country flooded basements and took out marinas in our country. Am I safe or do you plan to cash in my life insurance?"
"Wait till you see the horrible bugs." Azula answered back. "We have a wasp the size of your foot."
"You offer no comfort."
"Don't worry. One day they will land on Dominion soil and take over from the cane toads."
"Evolution in action." Karo pushed his glasses up his nose. "The Fire Nation motto – Nature Will Do Everything to Kill You?"
"Can you make that rhyme?" Azula pushed her glasses up her nose. "I might sell Zuko on it."
The next part of the Fire Nation part of the ceremony involved belching white smoke.
The priest made a call out to the power of the Sun as stage hands lit fire works using elaborate fire bending gestures.
"As we learned to harness the powers of the Sun on Earth..." The priest announced as reeking white smoke surrounded him, "our wise ancestors discovered Fire sustained all life."
"Fusion?" Karo whispered to Azula. "The Sun runs on Fusion of hydrogen while fire is the rapid oxidation of chemicals."
"Don't tell them now." Azula brushed the smoke away from her face. "Wait until he brings out the live dragon."
"As life needs Fire to grow, let this union of Hakoda of the Water Tribe and Lady Ursa of the Fire Nation signify the union of two souls." The Fire Priest made a grand gesture and the fire works died off leaving the room filled with white acrid smoke. "May they grow together in spirit and in prosperity."
Lady Ursa came from the left side of the stage. Hakoda came from the right side.
The hall went quiet except for the ceiling fans some thoughtful stagehand had turned on.
The lights lowered and a red spotlight lit up the couple standing next to the priest.
Karo knew seeing a live dragon was next to impossible. The average dragon was an exceedingly rare creature due to excessive hunting.
A badly tuned gong sounded.
"As Hakoda is not of the Fire Nation; our ceremonies are not binding on him." The priest spoke as small blue flames grew around the couple. "Have you chosen this man out of love?"
"I have." Lady Ursa said ritualistically. "I wish to spend the rest of my life with him."
The blue flames grew up, laser straight and formed a circle then died down.
"All nations of the World shall recognize Lady Ursa as wed to Lord Hakoda."
"I half expect to see hockey players to skate out of a cloth mouth of a bear and begin a play off game." Karo whispered.
Laser sharp red flames grew out of the stage. A dozen fire benders of great skill hiding in the darkness of the stage gestured to weave the flames into intricate geometric patterns. Hakoda and Lady Ursa stood still. The lines of flames danced and rotated in opposing directions with the blue moving clockwise and the red flowing clockwise.
The lights silently died out, the flames subsided and all was silence.
Voices murmured.
Azula nudged Karo. "Is that all?"
"How would I know?"
"If you knew Sushi like I knew Sushi. If you (singular) knew sushi?" Karo looked at a dainty white china 'square' and a set of chopsticks and tasted the green paste and instantly regretted it. "I know fish would kill you but couldn't they have given me a steak like yours?"
"This is dead dolphin steak." Azula pointed at a brown piece of meat. "This won't kill me but it has given rise to the kinds of feelings in me that watching a fire truck racing towards your plane inspires."
"Oh...I have some moral objections to eating an animal capable of algebra." Karo's face grew sour and he blushed. "What the hell did I just ingest and is it governed by strategic arms treaties as a biological weapon?"
"The green stuff is wasabe or as you might know it – pickled horseradish."
"And the stuff they used to wrap the thing that looks like a cinnamon roll does to a color blind guy is what?" Karo had his opinion set on cellophane. "No one told me I needed a guidebook to figure out what I'm eating. What is the wrapping stuff?"
"Some kind of seaweed."
"I didn't sign up for the full Fire Nation cultural immersion experience." Karo looked at Azula. "My mom and I fled the Fire Nation as political refugees. Don't you think this gives me some right to question their food?"
"Wait until you eat dessert?" Azula said enigmatically.
"That soda is revolting!" Karo scowled at a glass of a drink that only appeared to be lime soda but had some horrid bean like taste to it. "Carbonation and that taste do not blend well together."
"Tofu flavored soda...we have some of the more inadequate food chemists." Azula answered. "We have an entire food industry based on what you ought not to do with soybeans."
"Soybeans?" Karo looked confused. "I had no idea you could eat them."
"Your people use the same basic recipe to make fire fighting foam." Azula raised her eyebrows. "I would have warned you but if you don't learn on your own; you never will."
"What do I do with the wooden sticks?"
"You use them to ingest the food."
Karo held the sticks in his hand. "And metallurgy just happened to other people? And what is the food? The tofu soda left me more than a little gun-shy of your cuisine."
"The white sticky stuff is rice and the reddish brown stuff is fake crab." Azula had a fork and knife. "The green thing beside the fake crab is some kind of vegetable."
"The word 'fake' startled me. What in Christendom is 'fake' crab? I have seen crabs and nothing about them warrants counterfeiting." Karo looked down at the plate. "Is it me or does my plate look like one of those modern art statues found in trendy mall food courts?"
"Fake crab is tan on one side and red on the other." Azula explained. "Fire Nation cuisine has grown from a grand tradition of thousands of years or that is what they told me as I came out of anaphylactic shock from eating it. The plate must have a perfect 'zen' form and express balance."
"You made that up to see me eat raw fish, didn't you?"
"The advocates of refined culture would have you believe that." Azula added. "I think we're going to have an underdeveloped tourist industry until we fix our food but then again everyone else has eaten it."
"Are you going to eat your dolphin or may I borrow your knife and fork?"
Azula handed the utensils over. "You shouldn't eat sushi with a knife and fork. They consider it the height of uncultured behavior to eat with cutlery or your fingers – in case you wanted to have a go at it like you can with finger food. They will regard you as a bad mannered Gaijin. They may even laugh."
"Are you making up new words?" Karo asked pensively. "What does Gaijin mean?"
"Uncultured idiot."
"Remind me of this cultural attitude when I have money to invest in the tourism industry here." Karo moaned. "Of course the people here might think me a Gaijin or 'uncultured idiot' for any number of reasons: I have a different religion, I like the metric system, I have a house made of bricks, My house has running water. Any other cultural norms I'm unaware of?"
"Eat your raw fish." Azula said. "You may come to acquire the taste."
"I am a victim of the Emperor's New Clothes." Karo looked at the green paste that had caused him much pain. "Will they give me the antidote for the internal parasite I may acquire from eating raw and uncooked fish? I like fish but had come to expect it to have a breaded coating and be cooked. I seem to remember that uncooked fish did a job on your innards and provided an opportunity for liver flukes to digest you from the inside out."
"Don't eat the puffer fish then."
"I had no idea you could eat that. In fact I would have gone out on a limb and told you that eating a poisonous fish would be a very bad idea." Karo tried to figure out how to gracefully use the chop sticks but nothing came to mind.
"They call it 'fugu'."
"Of course. How do I know I'm not feasting on 'fugu' now?" Karo turned a brighter shade of green. "I may have been fugued and not known about it until I began to die of cardiac arrest."
"I really, really can't eat dolphin." Azula complained and pushed her plate away from her. She even found herself staring down at the shaved horseradish and white rice topped off with some kind of green onion. "This is why socialized medicine is a bad idea. When you have your health cared paid for; you have no incentive to stop you from poisoning yourself. You can eat fugu as a test of your manhood and expect to have the state pay for your recuperation."
"How does anyone eat dolphin?"
"You throw a beach ball out of the end of the dock and shoot the dolphin that comes to play with it." Azula pushed her square plate. "Or you start one bite at a time. I don't really care about the stuff vegans go on about but if dolphins are intelligent then they have nimble enough minds to plot revenge. If they ever do make an atomic bomb; I want them to aim it away from the island I live on. Quite frankly; this place is a dump and probably deserves being blown up."
It occurred to Karo that they always called The Fire Nation – The Fire Nation but that he had no idea what name the main island actually had.
Azula stood up and tapped the microphone.
Karo stood next to her with an irregular verb that begged to be conjugated in belch form.
Azula didn't shine forth as a prop comic but she produced a piece of paper. Her level of unusual discomfort made for an amusing sight in the eyes of Lady Mai.
"Is this on?" Azula tapped the microphone.
"I had planned to say something profound at this point. As Katara pointed out, this joins the Fire Nation and Water Tribes in some way blocked only by menopause, certain unenforced laws and death. As only a minority of you have any familiarity with the Suihan language; Karo's ability to belch verbs conjugations in that language would be a lost art to you. So many gifts go too long unappreciated."
"Keep me out of this." Karo begged. "I have no idea why you dragged me up here but I'd rather be sitting at the table trying to fold my napkin more than seven times."
"As some of the more perceptive of you know; I'm Lady Ursa's daughter – Princess Azula. I grew up in the palace and went insane." Azula began walking across the stage. "I now program computers for a living. As many of you don't know; a computer is a nice room sized machine that runs software for people who enjoy mathematics or making machines cream you at chess. It uses slightly less power than a large aluminum smelter. I would like to tell you my mother had an influence on me and my choice of vocation but she had no effect whatsoever. My hubris, impatience and stubborn laziness played a huge role. My mother and I are really quite different people and we share little in common."
"I have no direct place in any of these proceedings." Karo complained. "Those who serve raw fish as a food item should also provide the barf bags for the aftermath. I'm not complaining but some cultural traditions like eating human brains and communal suicide after battle are bad ideas. Stupidity and culture are often synonyms."
"Have you finished?" Azula asked.
"I will be once I name my liver fluke."
"Move those chess pieces and you will taste my revenge." Azula announced suddenly as a servant picked up used napkins from the table. She had left the miniature chess set on the table – she had passed the time trying to figure out why Karo – a man who lacked her acumen for mathematics – could beat her two times out of three. "I have Karo trapped in an ingenious trap which unfortunately has left me without my queen, the knights and a few other pieces save the bishop and the rook."
"I remember when I met Karo." Azula strutted across the stage like a comedian. "Unfortunately, Uncle Iroh has taken ill from the effects of diabetes and advance age and has been in hospital for some time. I miss him. When I left the hospital; I went to Ba Sing Se and lived in the guest cottage of his tea shop. I met Karo one day when I had a raccoon in my little cottage. To say Ba Sing Se has a raccoon problem understates the true magnitude of the problem by several degrees. Ba Sing Se has the famous walls that have repelled countless attacks." Azula snapped her fingers for dramatic effect. "Cholera and raccoons got through like nothing. Killing the raccoons on sight is a matter of policy."
Karo blushed.
"Our noses met over the smell of roasted raccoon." Azula looked at Katara as she walked on stage. "Oh for crying out loud I didn't even list 'kill raccoon and brag' on the Azula social screw up table!"
" I came out because it symbolizes forgiveness."
"Screw off." Azula hissed back. "Forgiveness is a tactic losers use to explain why they lost...why are you hugging me?"
"You may not know this...but I forgive you for your evil."
"Quit touching me...I have no idea where you've been." Azula snapped back. "You told me to tell a touching tale. I could have begun explaining how a nuclear reactor works. Okay...well if you enrich Uranium..."
"I once hated you." Katara sang out.
"I can't drink because I take medication but you simply shouldn't because your at the 'confession stage' of drunkenness." Azula trailed on. "You still hate me. You now do me the service of telling me that much. Just last night as I hunted through the palace kitchen to find tea you told me that unspeakable horrors would follow if I made tea."
"I consider you my best friend." Katara hugged Azula.
"My mom is giving me the 'stink eye'." Karo said gently. "We're holding things up. Just let us tell the parishioners that Bingo is on Wednesday at seven in the evening and then we can get on with the hymns. I like good old Number 403."
"We All Believe in One God?" Azula answered.
"I thought you slept through the sermon."
"Can I continue?" Azula pried Katara off of her determined hug. "We met at Uncle Iroh's tea Shop and I decided Karo was not too offensive as a male. He smelled nice and he can play the most beautiful music. I have no idea if I fell in love with him but I do love him."
"How sweet!" Katara wiped away a tear.
"My mom has found a man with facial hair. I have no idea why she likes him but she does. A few weeks ago she feared telling me that she had decided to wed this man because she worried about what I might think." Azula pushed Katara away. "Katara made my life hell for a week until she confessed that our remaining parental units were going to marry. This evening makes the sleeping together formal." Azula held back Katara as the Water tribe Goddess began another hug. "I will regret those words but if I thought about everything I said, I'd never get anything said. Now Katara and I are step sisters."
"I have missed the best years of my life." Katara sobbed.
"Indeed." Azula answered. "You are a year older than me."
"I have never found my true love!"
"You whore yourself out plenty of times." Azula pushed Katara away. "How many mojitoes have you had?"
Katara meant a dozen but raised ten fingers.
Four hundred meters of red phone cable snaked from the coatroom of the hall, through the back door of the visitor's reception office, down the hall in lazy loops and terminated on the table of Karo and Azula.
Other guests danced at the front of the hall.
"Apollo's Pizza?" Karo adjusted his glasses. "Taiko 7453."
Azula began dialing. She didn't hold up much hope for a pizza. Everyone in the city had closed for the evening or didn't deliver or delivered only before a certain time or couldn't deliver in less than thirty minutes and didn't want to give away free food.
"Hello Karo." Koko stood over him like a badly placed skyscraper over a prairie landscape. "Do you mind having a dance with me?"
"Don't do it Karo." Azula hung up the phone.
Koko was a Kyoshi Warrior and everything Azula felt she deserved to be but missed by a full head height. Koko had a beautiful earth toned and graceful dress and had her hair done up in the finest style mere human hairdressers could accomplish. Koko looked like a black haired Viking Goddess without her exotic makeup. Azula had wondered how many frighteningly good looking women had come to live on a remote, volcanic Southern Hemisphere island. Did this involve some kind of recruiting or a secret breeding program? In all respects, Kyoshi Island was a dump but they had good looking virtuous women.
"I hope you don't mind if I take the next slow dance with Karo. He's a nice man and I haven't seen him in all these years." Koko sat at the table. "Why do you have a phone?"
"Karo and I volunteered to raise money to build a new wing on the hospital and are taking calls for the radio telethon." Azula felt a tad jealous. "I need some real food to eat. We had sushi and fish for the main course. I can't eat seafood because of allergies so they served me a dolphin steak. I refuse to eat any animal that can outwit me in a game of chess. I couldn't even eat the parsley. I went to the kitchen because as the princess of the Fire Nation I have the right to use the kitchen. Having the right doesn't mean having the ability."
"Dolphin meat is some of the finest." Koko commented. "We serve it to our most honored guests."
"Ew." Azula shifted uneasily. "Kyoshi Island lies at 43 degrees south and 138 degrees east? When the dolphins built their first atomic weapon; I want them to know who to vaporize. Anyhow, I can't cook and when the pressure cooker exploded; I had to leave before the staff found macaroni and cheese all over the place."
"Do you mind?" Koko asked again. "I will bring him right back."
"Sure." Azula began to work the phone. "I warn you Karo has a natural sense of rhythm but not the same one as the rest of our species so you have to lead and he will step on your foot."
"Ow!" Azula found Toph standing next to her in a nice green dress (Azula had never seen Toph in a dress). Toph had the odd ability to sneak up on people even though at most of the time, she had the same level of stealth as a scream.
"That was sweet."
"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself." Azula knew she didn't have to hide her emotions from Toph because toph could sense them but at this time, Azula wanted the sarcasm to be 'in your face'. "Before I kill you by tying your legs to a sack of hammers and sending you for a swim; why did you hit me in the arm?"
"Koko has a 'thing' for Karo." Toph pulled herself up onto a chair. "She likes him."
"Well after dancing with him, she won't make that same mistake twice." Azula pushed the phone directory into the center of the table.
"Koko had a short and sad marriage and now is lonely." Toph shifted in her seat. "I think its sweet you let her have a dance with your guy."
"I have my eye on both of them." Azula told Toph in a grim voice. "Koko has behaved herself so far but Karo looks very uneasy. Life is too short so enjoy it while you can."
Lady Mai came up to the table. "When I went to the Servant's Office to place a call for one of our guests; I found no phone. Why do you have it?"
"I have an anthropological interest." Azula cooed and Mai knew something awfully insulting was coming. Mai braced herself. "Actually I have a reverse anthropological interest. I wanted to find a place in the Fire Nation capitol that served the kind of food I like to eat. Dolphin steak and parsley? You set that up didn't you?"
"Please give me the phone." Lady Mai asked patiently. "We need it."
Toph could feel the tension but said nothing. Toph knew Lady Mai had plotted to disgust Azula and was concealing the fact.
Karo sat down and Koko gave him a small kiss on the cheek. "You dance far better than you think."
"Farewell and good night." Koko said. "I have to make sure Aori isn't tormenting the babysitter and it has been a long day for me. I hope to visit all of you guys someday." Koko blew a kiss at the table as she gracefully walked away.
"Best wishes." Karo answered back. "You have our address so feel free to write."
Azula shoved the phone toward Mai.
"I have had a long day with far too much dead dolphin meat and not nearly enough time with pizza and a good soda." Azula whined. "My good Lady Mai, meeting you again has reminded me to count my blessings. I get to go home and forget about you in a day or so."
"I won't get those six hours of my life back." Azula flopped onto the bed. "Tomorrow, my mom and Hakoda leave on a three week honeymoon to your neck of the woods. My mom will then begin her career as an innkeeper."
"Katara seems to have accepted things."
"Wishful thinking like world peace or edible bean curd." Azula snorted. "She hasn't fully come to accept anything. The next time I do something to bother her; I expect a knife in my back."
"Go outside and bang trash can lids together under her window." Karo suggested helpfully as he sat on the bed. "Come back and tell me what she threw at you."
Azula sat up. "The idea appeals to all of the better and nobler urges of my soul."
"Which should tell you not to do it."
Azula lay back down. "I feel like I have sat in that hall and baked."
"Did you get enough blowhole with dinner?"
Azula had lived outside of the Fire Nation long enough to understand many cultural norms made very little common sense and she hated most of the food. She hated rice and was allergic to fish.
"Are you hungry?" Azula asked Karo. "Did you get enough to eat?"
"I can still taste the wasabe." Karo decided the hint from Azula was a good one and wondered if real food could be had on the palace grounds. "I have a hint of that tofu and humiliation because everyone looked at me fumble with chopsticks."
"Now we need a phone book and a phone." Karo stood up and rummaged around looking for what he expected to be a brick red phone. He found it on the desk under a jacket he had tossed their for safekeeping. He rummaged through the desk and found a thick phone book. "Honorable Miyagi Prefecture Telephone Listings thank you Oh Honorable Customer for using the directory listings."
"The use of the vocative 'Oh' seems excessive in that context." Azula had forgotten much of the baroque machinery the Fire Nation used to mandate politeness. She had never had much occasion to use it in her life and had once sat on top of the social pyramid and had no one to be deferential to. "What restaurants do we have to chose from?"
"A single Fat Boy restaurant across town that's closed because they all close at eleven." Karo studied the restaurant listings page. "We have Sushi place on every block, a take out and deliver all night tofu place. French fries, a coke or cream soda and a few pieces of chicken sounds like a tall order.
"I wonder...the palace staff room had a vending machine." Azula sat up again. "Follow me for salty snacks."
Quick Facts
The Fire Nation is a volcanic archipelago with a population of 120 million. It has over two hundred inhabited islands but Kaido is the Main Island and is about the size of the State of California. The climate is temperate in the north and in the highlands of the main island. Southern Islands like Ember Island have a subtropical climate. The summers tend to be hot and humid, winters are cool with heavy rainfall during the winter and spring. The dominant crops are rice and vegetables and fruits such as apples. The Fire Nation once had a powerful industrialized economy centrally planned by the nobility and geared for war. As the Fire Nation depended on its possessions such as Suihan for resources, they have experienced a sharp economic decline as they lost access to these resouces and their industries lacked capitol to remain competitive.
Suihan consists of two islands: Vasayas and Orencia. The archipelago includes up to 1400 smaller islands. Orencia is the main island and is the third largest island after the Northern and Southern Water Tribe Islands with an area about the size of Texas or France. Vasayas is a third the size and in total they have a population of 82,450,000 with 15,900,000 living on Vasayas. They lay off the West Side of the traditional Fire Nation map and were often ommitted as the Fire Nation had acquired them as autonomous colonies two and a half centuries ago. The Suihan had a small minority of fire benders and staged wars of resistance. Others sought to ally themselves with the Fire Nation for economic opportunities. The Islands had rice reserves of coal, iron, bauxite and other minerals and during the War the Fire Nation invested heavily in developing the islands.
The Treaty of Muckden and the Treaty of Odapest were signed weeks after the War. Suihan gained political independence and the Fire Lord became the constitutional monarch. Six years later, Suihan simply repealed Zuko's status. The Island of Vasayas became a province of Suihan but the Treaty of Odapest created a The Autonomous Zone and ceded title to 1000 square kilometers directly to Aang and gave The Air Nomads two seats in the Dominion Parliament.
Orencia lies in the rain shadow of the Seelong Desert off the coast of the Earth Kingdom at around 30 degrees North. The climate is monsoonal with a long ten month dry season and two month Monsoon. The climate played an important role in history. Rice growing proved too expensive as the long dry season and the frequent failure of the monsoons caused crop failures so they fell back on the traditional corn and wheat. In the monsoon years, the Northern coast receives up to 70 cm of rain. Drought years can dip below 30 cm. The summers are hot with daytime averages around 34 degrees and the winters have an average daytime high of 17 degrees. Corn, wheat and olives are the main crops. The nation is heavily industrialized and produces cars, raw and finished metals such as aluminum, manufactured goods, chemicals, processed food, machine goods and electronics.
Vasayas lies directly to the south and lies at around 16 degrees north. The coastal climate is tropical with rainfall of 45 to 55 cm a year as the monsoon is weaker but typhoons can land with great fury. On the coast, temperatures average between 30 and 35 year round. Most people live around the coast where cash crops such as sugar cane and bananas, papayas and pineapple grow well. The Western Air Temple lies in the highlands at 2000 meters. The climate is cooler by 5 degrees but the climate is semi arid with only 40 cm of rain per year. The island has rich deposits of coal, oil, gas bauxite and iron and metal refining is a huge industry. Vasayas produces more aluminum than all other countries combined and steel production matches The Earth Kingdom and has grown steadily.
Suihan has a GDP when measured in Fire Nation Gold pieces is eight times larger with per capita GDP per annum at least ten times as great as the Fire Nation. They have had the funds to invest in infrastructure but also have created environmental problems such as water pollution and deforestation. On Vasayas, forest fires remain a constant concern as they have caused more damage than any other natural disaster in the last century. The country has typhoons that can cause massive landslides and flooding. The island has few large earthquakes but the populated northern coast is vulnerable to tsunamis from other nations around the Great Ocean like the Fire Nation.
The Dominion of Suihan and the Avatar have several outstanding disputes. Suihan plans to use the Temple River Canyon to build a vast hydroelectric project. The Lower Canyon dam already produces electricity. Aang fears the massive upper dam could damage the ecosystem around the Air Temple on the Island and destroy fisheries. Avatar Aang has doubts about the presence of Uranium mines just outside the Autonomous Zone. Suihan has a tropical climate and as a developed nation in a warm climate has huge energy needs. The Dominion has begun research into atomic power funded by a consortium of companies and the government Department of Energy. They use a site on the Southern Plain of Rovesa – The Rovesa Research Labs as well as facilities around the country. The project has a great deal of secrecy about it and little public oversight.