Title: Despicable We

Author: overlithe

Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender

Summary: The family that slays together stays together. Or, a day in the (evil) life of Ozai/Flashpoint, Ursa/Phantom, Azula/Slingshot, and Zuko/I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT, OK? Super-villains/super-heroes action comedy AU.

Characters/Pairings: Azula, Zuko, Ursa, Ozai, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Aang; gen with some Ozai/Ursa

Prompt: fanfic100 prompt 043. Square

Word Count: 9,738

Rating: K+

Warnings: Cartoonish violence, super-villains doing their super-villain thing.

Disclaimer: This was inspired by many, many comics/movies/books, including, but not limited to, Despicable Me (obviously), The Incredibles, the DCU, the Fantastic Four, the Addams Family film series, etc. (There's a full disclaimer at the end of the fic.)

Author's Note: This fic is a gift for the amazing muffinbitch, who also came up with the rabid octo-bears. Hope you enjoy this, my dear! Many thanks to greedyslayer for her suggestions regarding Azula and Zuko's super-powers. In keeping with the whole comics feel I'm trying to go for, this story takes place in a version of the canon universe with steampunk-ish counterparts of our contemporary RL technology (and with super-powers instead of bending, obviously). A big thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting on these AU stories—I hope you'll enjoy this one!

Despicable We

Azula looked out the window and let out a sigh of displeasure. They were stuck in a snarl of traffic, moving at a snail-sloth's pace over a canal bridge. It was still early morning, but it was a hot summer and the air was already hazy with heat and the milky spill of water vapour from the car engines. The city glinted in the hard sunlight. She glanced over at Zuko, who was making a point of staying on his side of the invisible line bisecting the scarlet-and-gold seat. Their eyes met for the briefest second and he went back to staring out his window, his face bearing an expression of constipated glumness.

Not that he really had any other kind of expression.

She leaned back in her side of the seat and stared at her fingernails for a few seconds before she let her fingers droop, soft and boneless like uncooked dough. They fell down to her wrist, then her elbow. She swung them back and forth a little.

Zuko kept staring, perfectly still, but she could see a muscle twitching in his cheek.

She started twisting her fingers together.

'Quit it,' Zuko hissed. Despite everything, he was still her brother, so he managed to hiss a sentence that had no sibilants at all.

Azula made a show of ignoring him and began working her fingers into a fetching braid.

'Stop using your power,' he said. 'We're not supposed to do it in—'

'No one's seeing me, Zu-Zu,' she said, sounding as though she were explaining things to a particularly dim toddler. She stretched the tip of one of the braided fingers until it was wriggling on the no man's land in the middle of the seat.

'Stop it,' Zuko said, and yanked on her fingers hard enough for them to nearly slap her own face as they bounced back.

She ignored the sting in her hand and increased the pitch and volume of her voice. 'Mother, Zuko hit me!'

'What? You started it! Mother, I was only trying to get her to—'

Even though the traffic was nearly at a standstill, Ursa didn't bother to turn her head to look at them. 'Children, you will have plenty of time to try to kill each other later. Now behave.'

'But—' the two of them chorused, but when Ursa cut in, her voice was streaked with steel.

'That's enough. Do not make me activate the ejection seat.'

Azula grumbled to herself as she settled back into her seat, resisting the urge to stick her tongue out. She could stretch it into all sorts of shapes, so it took considerable willpower. She couldn't, however, resist stealing another glance at Zuko, who had gone back to staring out his window, his expression having darkened from "constipated" to "just swallowed a scorpion-bee".

She made a point of ignoring him during the fifteen minutes it took mother to drive out of the rush of traffic and into a warren of smaller streets criss-crossing the city centre. They circled Hu Xin Plaza, its white stone speckled with porcupigeons, and edged into an alleyway snaking between buildings.

'Come on, children,' Ursa said as the motor quietened with a clang of gears. The three of them stepped out of the car. 'Let me check you.'

Azula wrinkled her nose in distaste as she almost stepped on a clump of noodles that had oozed out from a rubbish barrel. The air smelled of tea grounds and, faintly, of stale oil. Ursa adjusted collars and sleeves—Azula tried not to squirm—and finished by straightening out Azula's pigtails. 'Look at you,' she said as she placed her hands on both her children's shoulders. 'Oh, I could just eat you alive! But no, you're still too young,' she finished with a wan smile and a pat on Azula's cheek, as if testing for plumpness. Her hands withdrew; she straightened up. 'Ready?'

They nodded. Azula made sure she nodded more vehemently than Zuko, who glared at her.

'Come on.' They wandered out into the plaza, mixing with the morning crowds. They approached one of the buildings, walked up a flight of marble steps and under the banner saying Zhen First Bank—The Capital City's First Choice, and moved past a set of elaborately carved double doors. In the wide hall inside, customers and clerks milled about. Azula smiled vacantly as she scanned the place for threats, hoping she looked like a fourteen-year-old girl on an errand with her mother.

Well, an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl on an ordinary errand with her mother.

She was sure she could look ordinary better than Zuko did, in any case.

Once mother was sure the guards' attention slid right over them, they ducked behind one of the pillars and into a short corridor. Ursa signalled to Azula and Zuko, then light bent around her. Her shape blurred; in the blink of an eye, she was completely invisible. Soft-sounding footsteps drew away from them. The door at the end of the corridor slid open, as if pushed by a phantom wind.

There was a brief squeal and a couple of thumps.

The door opened again and a hand popped out, beckoning them.

Azula and Zuko entered the bathroom, where mother had finished stuffing the attendant into a closet, and was now changing into her costume. Finally, Azula thought, and promptly got rid of the revolting pigtails. Seconds later, she was back in the scarlet-and-black costume, the mask settling on her face like a second skin. Her heart beat a steady tattoo in her chest.

When she put on the mask, she wasn't just the daughter of two of the greatest super-villains in the world. She wasn't just Azula—even though being Azula was being practically perfect in every way, she thought with a quick flush of satisfaction. It wasn't arrogance when it was true, after all.

When she put on the mask, she was—

fearless doubtless

—Slingshot, brilliant like a diamond and twice as hard. Slingshot, who would one day be the super-villain other super-villains told scary stories about. Slingshot, the scourge of…

Well, the scourge of something. She was still working on a suitably terrifying tag line.

'Ready, children?' mother—Phantom—said, and dug out the timepiece from her utility belt. 'We break the safe open at 10. Synchronise timepieces.'

Azula hurriedly worked the mechanism on her own timepiece.

'All right.' Ursa erased herself from sight again. 'See you down there, and be evil.'

The door slid open, then shut. Azula headed over to one of the windows, grumbling 'I'm always evil' under her breath. 'Come on, dum-dum,' she added, louder, but only once she was sure Ursa was out of earshot.

Like the blueprints had indicated, the bathroom window opened into a slice of gated courtyard abutted on all sides by the backs of other buildings. There had been a drizzle of rain during the night, and despite the heat, the ground still smelled damp. There was probably some sort of philosophical statement to be made about the chipped plaster and concrete and the rubbish barrels hidden behind the gleaming facades of Capital City, but she had never been one for philosophy.

Epic crime was more her style.

Zuko climbed onto the sill. 'I don't see why you have to be the one to get us up there,' he said.

'We're trying to be discreet here,' she said, and stretched upwards. Her hands clamped on the edge of the first roof. The tiles dug into her palms, but she held tight.

'I can be discreet,' Zuko said, and grabbed onto her leg as she snorted in derision. Azula focused on the next storey—using her power felt like having itching powder under her skin, but she had long since learned to ignore the sensation—and swung her legs up, the air whipping her face. Zuko landed on the second roof with a thud and grabbed her hands as she snapped to his side, using her momentum to swing her up.

Her feet scrabbled for purchase on the next roof, but she didn't even think of the fall or the weak pull in her stomach as she shot up and hoisted her brother onto the roof above her. She was sure she could do this balanced on a razor-thin line. She was Slighshot and she was unstoppable.

'That must be why I have to carry you,' she said as she swung onto the next roof. The city spread above her, a cloud of stone and steel and glittering glass. 'Because of the size of your… discretion.' Unstoppable and witty, she thought, and smirked smugly to herself.

'I'm the one carrying you!'

'Yes, you're indispensable. Maybe we should change your mask name to Ballast.'

They landed on top on the building before he could reply. Their bickering would be shelved for a while, she acknowledged with a glance as quick and sharp as a whip-crack.

There would be plenty more time for violence later on, anyway.

Zuko strode over to a small cube of concrete and ripped its door off, inch-thick metal crumpling under his fingers like rice paper, then reached inside and yanked out a mess of wires, which writhed and fizzed for a few seconds. Water dripped from the hydraulic system. Azula wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning copper. 'Silent alarm… silenced,' Zuko said, and glared at her, presumably expecting her to giggle like an idiot.

Instead, she rolled her eyes and walked over to the door leading back into the building. His expression turned, somehow, a fraction more sullen—she made a mental note to mock him later about that being his real super-power—but he hurried to her side and yanked the door off its hinges.

A quick look at her timepiece told her they only had five minutes to get down to the basement containing the vault, but it was easy when you were fast, had the blueprints memorised, and could punch people around a corner. They reached the vault's door with a minute to spare.

Restraints were tying themselves around the last of a pile of unconscious guards.

'There you are,' Ursa said, and shimmered back into sight. She gave her unconscious victim one last shove and straightened up. 'Did you knock out a lot of people?'

'I knocked out more,' Azula said before Zuko could reply, and scurried over to the vault door. It was the size of a monorail tunnel. Light slicked bolts and tumblers larger than her head.

A barely worthy challenge, she told herself, and stretched and twisted one hand into a thread thin enough to slip into a gap in the mechanism. 'Fifty seconds,' Ursa said, and Azula was suddenly very aware of her own breath and the hard edges of the metal encasing her arm. She kept pushing, deeper and deeper until the world had tightened to the width of her fingers.

'Forty seconds.'

I know! she almost snapped, but instead gritted her teeth and glared at the groaning lock. She was Slingshot; a mere lock couldn't defeat her. She pressed onwards, the itchiness under her skin pushed away by dull pain. Blood beat in her ears. Turn, turn, flip, turn. Come on, lock. It's time to surrender. Another tumbler began to turn, then ground to a halt. She kept pushing it, but her arm felt like it had been welded in place.

'Thirty seconds.'

Come on! She was Slingshot! She was invincible! She was unstoppable! She was—

'Are you stuck, darling?' mother asked. Her tone was even, but Azula was sure she was trying not to laugh.

Twenty-five.

'… No.' She looked at the lock again. The light-whitened steel looked like a toothy grin, mocking her. 'I'll be done in a—'

'No time,' Ursa said behind her. 'Zuko, we need your special skills.'

Twenty.

Azula wrung her arm out of the lock; it flopped to the floor in a rubbery heap. 'Yes, Zu-Zu, do your thing,' she said, voice dripping with acid.

Zuko's gaze went from her to their mother and finally settled, as he sighed, on some point between them. He undid his belt and reached for his costume.

Fifteen.

'No time!' Azula said, and she couldn't avoid a note of satisfaction. Nothing soothed embarrassment—not that she couldn't open the lock, the only issue had been time—more than passing it on to somebody else.

Especially if that somebody else was her brother.

Ursa glanced at her timepiece. 'She's right. Go on, dear.'

Ten.

Zuko pressed his lips together so hard his mouth almost vanished and walked over to the vault door. Azula smiled sweetly at him. Whoever had said you couldn't kill with kindness had obviously not grown up in her family. You could kill with practically anything. Kindness. Friendship. Understanding. Fruit pies. I hate you, her brother mouthed. I hate you more, she replied, then stepped back. 'Five seconds, hurry up.'

He didn't need five seconds, she knew: it took him less than one to burst out with a sound like a rockslide. Black and red rags fluttered to the floor, the heat-resistent, stretch-resistant, everything-resistant fabric still unable to resist her brother.

He crouched in front of the vault door, a creature too large to stand up straight in the corridor, looking as if someone had decided to carve a small mountain into a humanoid shape and had given up halfway through. You almost expected some moss, and possibly a cloud or two.

Not that he was actually made of rock. Unlike rock, her brother could withstand direct hits from blast rays, extreme cold, extreme heat, and acid. Mother and father had conducted extensive tests.

She'd helped.

'Do it already,' she drawled. Zuko took a breath like a rumbling factory engine—presumably he had lungs of some sort somewhere inside—grabbed the vault door with hands the size of koala-sheep, and yanked. The door came off with a burst of dust and a scream of shattering stone. He put it to one side as if it were a cardboard prop.

'Ah. Good timing.' Azula turned around to see their father stride into the corridor, wisps of smoke still clinging to him. She hurried to his side, but he didn't break his stride. 'Sixty seconds, everyone.'

'We just opened up the vault,' Azula said, stretching her legs to keep up with his pace.

'Yes, I can see that,' father said. He glanced around the corridor. 'Do put some clothes on, son.'

'I'm trying!'

Azula rolled her eyes at her brother. He'd gone back to his human shape and was crouching half out of sight behind the vault door, rummaging in his utility belt for his spare uniform. Luckily for him, it folded tightly.

'Any trouble upstairs, dear?' Ursa asked as Ozai drew closer to the steel bars behind the eviscerated vault door. White fire spilled from his hands to his elbows, licked at his hair. Two fire balls slammed into the bars and the steel melted with a smell of burning phosphorus.

'Same as always,' he said. The white flames died down. Molten steel dripped down like smoking rubies. 'You?'

One of the tied-up guards came to with a moan and tried to squirm out of her bonds. Ursa whipped out a spray from her belt, doused her face, and kicked her back onto the human pile. 'Can't complain,' she said. 'Come here, children.'

Azula hurried to her side and Zuko hopped into place, still adjusting his uniform's left leg. A force-field rose in time with Ursa's hands with an almost inaudible hum and a faint scent of ozone. Cold trickled down Azula's neck. No matter how many times she'd been under her mother's shields, she still couldn't help but be a little mesmerised by the way they made everything look distorted, as though seen through rippling water. The first time she'd been inside a force-field underwater—they'd been making a getaway through the sewers—she'd expected it to look like a bubble of glass, but instead the distortion had just intensified. She'd tried to put her hand through the shield, to see if it was as hard to penetrate from the inside as from the outside, but Ursa had told her to stop messing with the force-fields, then added that if she was going to cut off her child's hand, it was going to be on purpose.

Liquid metal dripped on top of the force-field and the ragged edges of the bars bent of out the way as the four of them stepped into the vault, which was pretty much like all the other ones Azula had seen before: piles of bags full of coins and paper money, row upon row of identical drawers. Azula stepped closer to some of them as soon as the force-field winked out. Inside the safes there must be uncut diamonds, letters of credit, jade necklaces, rare documents. Secrets. She glanced at her timepiece. Forty seconds. 'May I—'

'No,' Ozai said curtly, and stepped over to their real target.

There was one exception to the vault's bureaucratic greyness. Off to one side, nearly tucked out of sight behind a set of shelves, stood a display case. The glass was so thick the object inside looked like it was clouded by water, but the four of them thought, tasted, dreamed, and breathed crime and its (highly profitable) wages. They'd find a piece of loot like the Golden Dragon Egg blindfolded and upside-down inside a sinkhole full of quicksand.

Ozai shot another fireball at the panel in the stand, making metal burst open and gears spill out. Another blow of white fire smashed the case open. He reached forward and picked up the Egg gingerly with both hands, shaking shards of glass away. Light careened over ruby and emerald eyes, curling dragons with jewelled scales, elaborate gold filigree. 'At last,' he said, and let out an evil cackle. Azula perked up; her father could make even words like "noodles and sauce" sizzle with malice.

'At last,' he repeated, cradling the Egg in one arm. It was worth the emphasis. The Golden Dragon Egg had a length history, rich in bloodshed and madness. Like any great super-villain trophy, it had driven people to murder, theft, insanity. After Black Venom's latest trip to the Asylum for the Criminally Super-gifted, it had vanished out of sight, and it had taken them months to track down its new whereabouts. To be fair, half of that time had been taken up with constructing a place of pride for it in the lair and picturing the look on all the other super-villains' faces, but that hardly diminished the effort. 'And now it's all mine.' Ursa gave Ozai a look that would be deadly once she completed the research. 'I mean yours,' Ozai said hurriedly. 'I mean ours.'

Mother's frown softened into a slight smile. 'Let's head back to the lair.'

They climbed back to the bank's main room with fifteen seconds to spare. Smoke still lingered in the air. Everybody who'd been in the room was still on the floor, a few passed out, others looking from side to side, eyes wide and watery, like small furry animals scanning for predators. A row of guards and bank workers sat bound and gagged against a counter, all holding small round devices connected by a wire. The face of the man in the middle was shiny with sweat and possibly tears.

'See?' Ozai said to him. 'I told you those things wouldn't explode as long as you didn't shake them.' He kicked the device off the man's hands. Gasps rang out. The sphere rolled to the ground, drew to a halt, snapped open, and started playing a cheery tune.

Even Zuko joined in the laughter.

'Citizens, thank you once again for your co-operation,' Ozai said as they walked towards the front doors. 'You'll live to be terrorised another day.'

Ursa slammed two force-fields into the ceiling. Chunks of masonry rained down; screams rippled out.

'See you in your nightmares,' Azula said.

'Don't, uh, close your eyes,' Zuko said, then his face hardened, this time metaphorically.

A burst of white fire blew the front doors open. As they headed outside, Azula looked up. Scorched stone was not the most viable of writing media, but even so, Azula could make out the characters. Her father had burned Crime pays over the bank's front doors.

There was a reason the classics were the classics.

:=:

'We have company,' Ursa whispered as soon as they stepped into the light outside.

The words were unnecessary: a half-ring of cars floated right in front of them, hovering like metal buzzard-wasps. A trio of costumed figures stood several yards away on the white stone, the cars trembling in time with the raised hands of the girl in the middle. Grey swirled in her costume and mask, and even her hair was gathered up in a pair of ridiculous loops. A shorter, stockier girl stood on her right, cape streaming in a breeze, her hood a particularly bilious shade of green. A boy with a belt and a pair of bandoliers laden with gadgets flanked her on the other side.

Behind them, the plaza had emptied. People abandoned vehicles stuck in side-streets, ducked into shops. Even the porcupigeons seemed to have flown away, only a few stragglers remaining here and there. The only sounds were the babbling of the fountain in the middle of the plaza and the rustle of Shockwave's cape.

Azula glanced at her family. Father smirked. Mother's face was still. Zuko's expression was… well, few things made it change much.

'Well, if it isn't the Fearsome Four,' said the girl in the middle.

Pebbles rolled on the ground in front of Shockwave. 'It's great you guys have learned to count that high,' she said.

'Well, if it isn't the Minutemen,' Ozai said. 'Still advertising your troubles with performance, I see.'

Azula let out a peal of laughter. It echoed across the empty plaza and startled the few remaining porcupigeons into a flutter of wings. Oh, yes, Azula thought, and beamed to herself. That one evil cackle had been perfect.

Once the sound faded, she realised Boomerang had joined in with a chuckle. Enigma glared at him; the hovering cars wobbled a little.

'What?' Boomerang said. 'It was funny.'

'I told you guys we should have gone with—'

A burst of white fire struck the ground in front of the trio. Enigma sent the cars flying, but they crashed into Ursa's force-field with a scream of metal and a shower of glass and metal chunks. Ursa pushed the shield forward, sending the wreckage spinning towards the three Minutemen.

Azula glanced at her family. Father nodded, then looked at Zuko.

Time slowed. She darted down the steps, lightning zipping through air. The knot in her muscles vanished. Her nerves turned to live wires.

This was the best thing about being a super-villain. Better than the look of terror on other people's faces. Better than showing up in five-column headlines involving the words "super-villains terrorise city". Even better than sneaking into Zuko's bedroom to rig booby-traps in the floor around his bed.

She could see the sun striking jewelled fire off the fountain's water, the waver of vibrations in the air in front of Shockwave as she rushed towards her.

'Here,' Ozai said, and tossed the Egg to Ursa, who promptly turned invisible.

'Get her!' Enigma said. Azula stretched out of the way of one of Shockwave's strikes and spun around her to grab her from the back. Enigma sent one of the smashed cars flying towards them. Azula dodged out of the way, pulling her prisoner along with her, but Shockwave grabbed her hands—the other girl might not be able to see her, but she could sense her—and let out a burst of sonic waves that rammed into her like a closed fist and nearly made her eardrums bleed. Azula jumped back and stretched her hands to shield her ears. Before she could swipe Shockwave with her leg, Boomerang hurled a black sphere at her.

She wove out of the way and the ball exploded on the spot where she'd stood half a second before. Off to her left father was covered in white fire, propelling himself off the ground so he could shower down strikes on Enigma. Zuko ripped up large chunks off the cars on the ground to throw at Shockwave. Azula dodged out of the way of Boomerang's explosives again, once, twice, three times. Her arm shot forward and punched him in the stomach; he reeled backwards with a grunt of pain. She stretched over him and wrapped her other arm around his neck and shoulders.

'You don't actually have any powers, so I doubt you realise this,' she drawled as her arm tightened around his neck and she tried to pull him down to the ground, 'but if you're going to fight us, you need to be a lot more… flexible.' She spun him, but he managed to swing a kick at her. She twisted her torso out of the way, and his foot barely clipped her hip. 'Also, black leather costume? Please try to live in the now.'

A seismic wave ripped through the ground. Paving stone cracked open, rippled up and down like a choppy sea. Ursa reappeared, about to lose her balance. She threw the Egg to Zuko and jumped away from the faultlines before hitting Shockwave's attack with a force-field.

Zuko managed five steps before Engima twisted the top of the fountain and struck him with a high-pressure spray of water. He yelped and the Egg slipped out of his grip and rolled on the wet ground.

'I've got it!' Azula yelled and released Boomerang with a dizzying spin, then raced towards the Egg, which was rolling faster and faster out of reach. Zuko was closing in on the other side, but she stretched her arms and her fingers wrapped around the artefact. She pulled it towards her and threw a look of triumph at Zuko—

—an arc of electricity struck him and he fell with a scream, spraying water as he writhed on the ground.

Azula whipped around. Boomerang was still holing his electro-shock device, readying another strike.

'Only I get to inflict hideous pain on my brother!' She stretched forward and splayed her hand into a thin, rubbery layer of flesh, slapping it onto Boomerang's head so hard the crack echoed across the plaza. 'The rest of you will have to stand in line.' He staggered back and tried to pull her hand off, but she spun him around and rammed him into Shockwave. He fell on her cape; she went down with a strangled yelp. 'You didn't see that coming, but just so you know, Quivers, that's why we don't wear capes.'

Before either mother or father could move in for the strike, though, Enigma levitated the slab of stone Shockwave and Boomerang were lying on. Azula stretched her body a hunded-fold and hit the slab like a giant drum skin, sending it spinning to the ground, where it crashed with a satisfying boom and a spurt of dust. She shrank her body back to size and pouched one arm around the Egg, ready to run back to the alley where mother had left the Stinger. Total annihilation would have been better, but just picturing their faces as they wallowed in shame and humili—

Something hot and slippery rained on her. She nearly laughed, not even bothering to look around. Did the super-idiots really think they were going to defeat her with some warm oil, for—

She tumbled to the ground, hitting the paving stones with a crack of pain. The Dragon Egg slipped out of her grip. She tried to scramble for it, but she was stuck in place, black goo holding her to the ground like a spiderfly on glue paper. She groaned in frustration and tried to stretch her body until her muscles burned, but the more she struggled, the more the goo trapped her. Her limbs felt like lead instead of rubber. Goo droplets sprayed on her face. Stone dust filled her nose and throat.

'I bet you didn't see that coming, Rubbers,' Shockwave's infuriating voice said above her.

'It's called the power Of Science,' Boomerang said. 'Learn it.'

She couldn't even turn her head around to glare contemptuously at him.

A wave of white fire roared above her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ozai sweep up the Egg with one hand as he delivered another strike. 'It's called fear. Learn it.'

Stone shattered behind her, showering her with debris. She struggled even more furiously than before, her heart hammering her ribcage like a frightened bird, but the goo stuck the side of her head to the ground. Shockwave's vibrations filled the air again; Azula let out a cry as a chunk of paving flew widly towards her.

It smashed to powder. She rolled her one open eye as far as she could. Zuko stood above her like a rocky outcrop, a few strips of his uniform's fabric still clinging to him.

'I'll hold them. Grab her!' Ursa yelled. Boomerang raced towards him and Zuko batted him away, sending him crashing into a shop window. Roast turkey-ducks rolled out onto the street; a bucketful of spilled lizard-eels made a mad dash for freedom. 'Don't worry! We'll pay for all this stuff!' Boomerang yelled as he climbed out.

Zuko grabbed her one-handed and pulled her off the goo. She came free with a sound like a shoe sucked out of mud and promptly squirmed out of her brother's grip, trying to ignore the cold lump in her throat.

Of course, she'd never actually doubted they'd help her out of her little momentary predicament, not that she wouldn't be able to find a way out herself if she really had to. After all, the very first rule of the Evil League of Evil was "a super-villain will never leave another super-villain behind if there's nothing to be gained from it."

At their side mother had encased Shockwave and Enigma in a force-field, pouring all her energy into it as strike after strike hit it from inside, filling it with a storm of gravel and dust. Ursa's face was pearled with sweat. She was being slowly pushed backwards, her boots digging furrows on the ground. 'You two… ready?' she said through gritted teeth.

Ozai raced around the shield and covered it with waves of fire, making the air boil with heat. 'Drop it,' he yelled. A river of flame roared down. Ursa staggered back. 'Let's go!' she said.

The four of them raced towards the alley. Azula twisted her neck around; Enigma and Shockwave were clearing a path out of the dimming fire, alive but too far behind to catch them. She looked forward again as they neared the mouth of the alleyway. Father held the Egg firmly under one arm. Mother ran with one hand on her utility belt, ready to pull out the Stinger's remote. 'They'll never,' Azula panted triumphantly, 'catch u—'

Something whooshed past her so fast she spun out of balance and she had to stretch an arm to the ground to catch her fall. She straightened up, her breath coming in ragged puffs.

A cheerful voice rang out above. 'Looking for this?'

She looked up. A young boy sat cross-legged in mid-air, balancing the Golden Dragon Egg on one hand as if it were a kuai ball. A toothy grin split his face. Everything from his bald head to his orange-and-yellow costume complete with stylised arrows should make him look ridiculous, but instead he always looked as if he were privy to some joke of which you were the unwitting target. 'Thanks for stealing it, by the way!' he said as he executed a series of tumbles in mid-air, too fast to hit. 'Saved me the trouble of tracking it down and stealing it myself.'

'Airstrike!' father spat out, and flames burst out of his body with a roar. He propelled himself upwards, but Airstrike flew around the four of them in a super-sonic blur. The air grew to thin too breathe. Father dropped to the ground, his flames extinguished.

'Hey, don't tire yourself like that at your age,' Airstrike said jovially as he shot up into the air, tossing the Egg up and down as he flew. 'Wow, do you three look like idiots.'

Azula turned around. The Minutemen were approaching, every exposed inch of Enigma and Shockwave's skin covered with soot and sweat. The weren't moving towards Azula and her family, though. They were rushing towards Airstrike.

'Well, I'd love to stay and play,' Airstrike said, 'but I've got a toy to deliver to my pet bison. Yip yip, losers!' He sped away in a streak of yellow and orange followed by a sonic boom.

'After him!' Enigma said.

'What?' The air around Ozai swirled with heat. Flames raced up his arms, almost blue with fury.

Sirens began to wail in the distance. 'We'd better leave,' Ursa said.

'Yeah, piss off, you freaks!' someone shouted from a window above them. Ozai shot a fireball at the building, nearly blasting its fifth storey open. Screams rang out. Shutters snapped close.

Ursa grabbed his shoulder. The sirens were drawing closer. 'Come on. We'll come back later to make their children pay for them.'

They rushed into the alley and Ursa pressed the remote, making the Stinger spring to life. Reinforced glass slid up. Black and scarlet fins popped out.

'Where's Zuko?' father said as they piled into the vehicle.

A human hand rose from behind one of the rubbish barrels in the alleyway. 'Er… does anyone have an extra pair of pants?'

:=:

No one said anything as the Stinger glided through the canals, a small cloud of river silt rising in its wake. The occasional boat passed overhead, propeller noise muted by thick glass and fathoms of water.

Azula sunk into her seat, feeling as though she'd just been caught on camera hugging kittens and orphans. The aches and exhaustion from the fight in the plaza had finally caught up with her, turning her flesh and bones to curdled cow-hippo milk. Sweat pooled under her uniform, and the streaks of black goo were starting to fill the air with a rather unpleasant scent. She didn't even feel like tormenting Zuko, and judging from his expression, it would either be a very long time or a very short time before he put blades inside her dumplings again. She could see the ghostly outlines of her parents' faces on the glass: her mother's expression was a frosty blank as she drove, and her father seemed to be doing an eerily accurate impression of some stone sculpture entitled Man Looking Foreboding (and Displeased).

Her hand slid down to her utility belt and her fingers fell on something hard-edged. Oh yes—she had forgotten all about these. She dug into a compartment and fished out a handful of precious stones. The bluish light inside the Stinger made them look like they were covered in some strange, oily film.

'I managed to steal a few gems in the vault,' she said, trying to sound as triumphant and uncaring as ever.

Mother's expression didn't change. Father's frown managed to, somehow, grow deeper. No one said anything.

Azula put the gems back into the belt compartment. An almost perfectly spherical fish, bearing a third, milky eye, swam by one of the windows. Without changing its truculent expression, it opened its mouth and belched out something that had probably been some toxic effluvium at some point.

Yes. That seemed to sum it up.

:=:

No one spoke for the rest of the trip back to the Evil Lair. Azula couldn't help but think the moat looked less threatening, the spikes on the wall less sharp; even the clouds gathering around the lighting rods looked a little lighter than usual. Only the sign on the wall saying "Deliveries please use side door" looked like it always had.

Mother parked the Stinger in the warren of caves under the complex and the four of them remained silent as they changed back into civilian clothes and headed to the secret entrance into the library. The caves were full of the accumulated trophies of generations of super-villainy, but even those seemed to have lost their shine. The edge of the giant pendulum looked dull, the bottomless pit shallow, the giant crocosquid's teeth blunt. Father said nothing as they walked past the spot that had been reserved for the Golden Dragon Egg, but when his gaze smouldered, he didn't mix a metaphor.

A gaggle of minions was waiting for them as they walked into the library, surrounding them with a chorus of excited squeals. 'I'm sorry, minions,' Ursa told them. 'It has not been a good day for evil.' The minions sighed and looked dejected, insofar as lumps of pure malevolence (some of them wearing fetching pink goggles) could look dejected.

'But isn't a bad day for evil good—I mean, bad—' Zuko spluttered, then trailed off. Father turned towards him very, very slowly.

Azula rolled her eyes and grabbed her brother's hand. 'Come on. Let's go feed the piranha-sharks.'

:=:

For a while, Ozai stood in the library, silently looking at a spot where wall-scrolls were wedged between axes, meteor hammers, butterfly swords. Ursa approached him and made a mental note to tell the minions to pay particular attention to the weapons during their upkeep: some of the blood on the blades had nearly flaked off completely. Come to think of it, she was sure some of the gates in the lair weren't creaking as ominously as they should. She glanced over at one of scrolls, a swell of happy memories in her chest: it was from the time before Zuko and Azula were born—though perhaps "spawned" or "decanted" was a better word—when she had broken Ozai from prison for the first time and they had travelled the world for a while. There had been no worries, no responsibilities and, most important of all, no survivors.

But Ozai was instead contemplating the scroll from his last day at the Academy for the Unusually Gifted. His teenaged self stood at the forefront of the picture, smiling in his gold-sashed uniform. Of course, the flames and smoke rising from the school building behind him made it hard to make out details; Ursa's own graduation picture from the Institute of Mad Science showed the expressions of pure terror much more clearly. 'Am I not unspeakably evil enough, Ursa?' he said, finally, and half-turned towards her. 'Super-heroes escape unscathed. Some normal dares to insult us. A revolting child mocks us. Is it possible… Is it possible that he's worse than we are?' His expression made it clear that getting the words out was like biting into a razor-filled lemon.

Ursa tried to smile reassuringly. 'Nonsense. We'll soon be inflicting unspeakable torture on him.' She pondered this for a moment. 'Maybe with acid.' Ozai didn't reply. She edged a little closer to him and patted his arm. 'Don't beat yourself up, dear. That's my job.'

'I simply do not understand why we can't crush him. Haven't we lied, betrayed, looted, and slaughtered our way to the very top? Haven't we been spawned by two of the foulest lines to ever blight the face of the world? Haven't we beheld the unspeakably putrid maggots who feast on the wretched milk of human misery?' He paused and gave her a quizzical look.

'I think they're still feeding the piranha-sharks.'

'We shouldn't be out-villained by some giggling infant barely out of his evil diapers,' Ozai finished grumpily.

Ursa sighed. 'I heard he's actually much older than he looks. Some kind of stasis chamber.'

Ozai let out a derisive snort. She knew it wasn't directed at her. 'Look,' she said, her tone blunter than usual, 'he's hardly the first super-villain to try to supplant us. Let him think he's having his day in the death sun. He'll find out soon enough what kind of life our enemies have: short.' Her lips curled into a smile. She let the evil cackling to Ozai, its undisputed master, and she seldom put her full malice into her smiles. When she did, however, she knew the effect was deliciously skin-crawling. 'Though not nearly as short as he'll wish for.'

'Ah. Yes,' he said, his expression turning from gloomy to predatory. Even after decades of super-villainy, Ursa couldn't help but feel a thrill of excitement. He placed a hand on her shoulder. 'You never back down as it comes to evil, do you? It's one of your most wonderfully malevolent qualities.'

'Well, no, I don't,' Ursa said, feeling rather flattered. 'At least not since my first armed mob,' she added, and entwined her fingers with his. Maybe she should change into something else. Maybe with spikes. Her tone turned sultry. 'Why don't you and I go upstairs and try out the Death Ray again?'

Ozai brightened. 'I'll summon the minions.'

Everything always worked out for the best.

Or worst, rather.

:=:

The piranha-shark tanks were wedged between the cat-gator moat and the Corridor of Terror, and as he and his sister walked down it, Zuko couldn't help but look at the pictures covering the walls: great-grandfather Doctor Fate, founder of the Evil League of Evil (nominative imagination had never been one of their family's good—as it were—points). Great-grandfather Nightshade, the first super-villain to combine volcanoes and evil lairs. Grandmother Riot, who could not be contained in any prison and who had required the construction of the Asylum for the Criminally Super-gifted.

The greatest super-villains in history, looking down from portraits, news-sheets, and mug shots. Azula loved coming here—she had already decided which slice of wall would best display the dramatic pictures from her future first prison escape—but Zuko couldn't help but feel a little uncomfortable, the weight of his ancestors' gaze making his shoulders slump. He nearly tripped over a group of minions coming in the opposite direction.

'Have you ever wondered…' he started to say as soon as the minions' tittering drifted out of earshot, then fell silent. He was wearing a plain house robe, same as always—his clothes never lasted for very long, after all—but it felt uncomfortably tight. He looked down at the scarlet carpet as he walked around the traps hidden under the floor. Azula slid open the door standing between the stairs to the dungeon and the broom closet. They'd all tried to make it an evil broom closet, but without much success so far.

'Wondered about what?' she said as they stepped onto one of the catwalks stretching over an elaborate pool glowing an eerie blue. The air was full of the tang of salt. No, of course she hadn't wondered; she was as sleek and dreadful as the toothy shapes gliding in the water below them.

'What it would be like to… you know… not be like us,' he finished limply, and felt like slapping his own forehead.

Azula looked at him as she pulled one of the levers and a panel by the tank slid open, followed by a splash. For a moment, they both looked at the water, saying nothing. Feeding frenzies were always worth a look.

Finally, Azula spoke. 'Are you trying to strap me into your powers-switching machine again? I'm not falling for it, dum-dum. Besides, I managed to seal you up in that sensory-deprivation box. It'll take you a long time to catch up.'

'I would have caught up if you'd been just a little slower,' he grumbled. After he'd broken out of the box, he'd chased her for a while with one of the ray guns. Isn't it nice when they play together? mother had said. 'Anyway, that's not the point,' he said as Azula moved on to another catwalk. Fins sliced through the water. 'Did you ever wonder about what it would be like to… not be a super-villain?'

More piranha-shark chow splashed into the pool and vanished under the surface after a brief and pointless struggle. 'What do you mean?'

Zuko headed to the catwalk nearest the tank room's east side, as if moving would make the words as smooth as the sterile white walls. It didn't seem to work. 'I don't know. Like being… an accountant. Or something.'

Azula cocked her head. 'You mean like an evil accountant?'

'No, just—'

'So you're telling me you'd like to be a—' She paused in thought for a second, shook her head, and carried on. '—a… non-evil accountant?'

'Forget the accountant!'

His sister shrugged and stretched out an arm around her back to adjust her topknot. 'I'll be happy to. It's not like you're making the slightest bit of sense anyway.'

He looked down at the lights at the bottom of the tank. His hands tightened on the metal railing, and he had to force himself not to twist it. He knew he wasn't making any sense—no, it was worse than just not making any sense. He was sure the heaviness in the pit of his stomach would feel exactly the same if he came across photos of himself stopping crime, or if he broke one of the rules of the Evil League of Evil, even though they were actually more like guidelines, really. He thought back to the time when his power had first manifested. Azula hadn't even been three when she'd first stretched her arms a few feet to play with the little figurines hanging from tiny black nooses above her bed.

But he—he had been eight when he'd first done his… thing, and even then only because father had grown tired of waiting and drop-kicked him out of a fifth floor window. He'd promptly transformed in the last few feet down—he still remembered the oddly painless feeling of his body expanding inside-out, or possibly upside-down—and everything had been fine. Well, except for the pavement. And a bunch of parked cars. And his clothes.

But that was the issue, wasn't it? Everything had been fine. No, everybody had been happy. Even Azula had stopped her tantrum after mother had pulled her aside and had said in a scolding tone that she and father were always willing to drop-kick her out of a window, but today it was her brother's special day. He wondered how things would have been like if he'd been born into a family of normals and had transformed for the first time while they were drinking tea and talking about the weather, or whatever it was regular people did. Maybe they would have been open-minded and let him live in a basement or something, or ask him—

piss off you freaks

—if he had tried not turning into a hideous monster, no doubt in an encouraging tone of voice.

So why did he sometimes feel like he was dragging along some hot, leaden cloak even he couldn't burst through?

'Just forget about it,' he snapped. 'Not that you'd ever get it, being such a perfect super-villain.'

Azula sighed dramatically. 'Why, thank you for acknowledging my obvious superiority. I do try. Like now.' Before he could react, her arm shot out past him and yanked one of the levers behind him. His catwalk promptly pitched him a pool frothy with teeth and ribbons of blood. The water hit him like a slap, stung his throat and eyes. Something slid past him and scurried away.

He stood up in the tank, spilling a small wave onto the floor. 'Great,' he rumbled, and picked up a fragment of clothing with fingertips that were now the size of rice bowls.

A peal of laughter rang out and Zuko turned around in time to see Azula bounce over the puddle. 'That was fun,' she said as she landed, then stared intently at what, for lack of a better word, could be called his face. He ignored her at first—everybody stared at him when he powered up—then she spoke. 'Er… you have something on your… One of the little ones…'

He sniffed. A small piranha-shark flopped onto the water, flapped its fins rather indignantly, and darted away.

'You should have seen yourself,' Azula said with a sharp little snort. 'Come on. You can laugh. It's funny.'

Zuko gave her a look so old-fashioned it was probably right next to fossilised bones, then stepped over to the side of the tank and climbed out. Azula ignored him, only stretching away to avoid the wave of water he spilled out. The floor groaned under him as he sat down, his legs still in the pool, looking like two enormous barnacle-encrusted pilings.

'Aren't you going to change?' Azula said.

A shrug passed through him like a tectonic movement. There hardly seemed to be a point.

'Suit yourself. No pun intended,' she added sharply, and turned away. In the pool, the water was nearly smooth again. He resisted the urge to sway his legs; he'd probably crack the side of the tank wide open.

'Did you mean it, or were you just mocking them?' Zuko said without turning back to face his sister.

There was a second of silence.

'Did I mean what?'

'When you said that only you got to inflict hideous pain on me.'

Even without looking, he knew the corners of her mouth had curled into a smirk. 'I'm always willing to inflict hideous pain on you, dum-dum.'

That's not what I meant, he thought, but didn't say it. The feeling was mutual, anyway.

Only instead of hearing his sister walk away with a parting quip, footsteps sloshed towards him. He twisted—or landslided, rather—around; the pool edge groaned underneath him. Azula couldn't do much to him while he was in this… state, but it always paid to be prepared.

Azula didn't, however, look like she was readying something inventively awful. Her face was blank, and if she'd been anyone else at all, he would have been sure he saw a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. Then she spoke and the illusion vanished. 'Of course I meant it, Zu-Zu. Believe it or not, I actually think family means something. It just isn't the same thing if some… outsider gets to kill you, is it? Especially one of those goody-two-shoes super-idiots,' she added with a shudder of disgust. 'I mean, look at Uncle Iroh. Do you think dad would let anyone else send us explosive packages?'

'Hmph,' he rumbled, but hard as it was to admit it, she had a point. That had been such a good time.

'Besides,' Azula said as she propped herself against his leg like someone lounging casually against a stone wall, 'I may have said some things in part because—' She turned her head towards the water, where a dark shape glided below the surface. 'Well, because, deep down, I may have been just a little bit…' Her voice narrowed to silence.

He resisted an urge to prod her into finishing. A shrug of his leg would probably bounce her into the pool, and tempting as that was, he couldn't help but feel curious about what she was going to say.

'Jealous,' she whispered.

That, he hadn't expected.

'Whatever,' he said after a few seconds had trickled by. This time he did shrug; Azula edged away, but her gaze remained fastened on the pool. Zuko was sure that if she'd been their father, the air around her would be curling with heat, and the ends of her hair would start smoking.

'It's not that I'm complaining, of course,' she added with a quick turn of her head, and began studying her fingernails. 'I am obviously superior in every single dimension of super-villainy. But—' She paused, glared at him. For a moment he wondered if he had another piranha-shark stuck to his face, but even he would probably have noticed by now.

Then she threw her hands up and rolled her eyes. 'Oh, fine! I am jealous of your super-power. There.' Her tone cooled. 'Try not to crow about it for too long. I'd hate to have to rush the schedule of the next horrible thing I'm going to do to you.' She didn't sound like she'd hate it in the slightest.

'Really?' he blurted out, before he could stop himself. Her expression sharpened, ready with mockery, then—another surprise—softened.

It was almost as disturbing as one of mother's evil smiles.

'You really haven't noticed? I must be an even better actor than I thought,' she added with a mechanic touch of superiority, then went on. 'I thought for sure you'd have realised it when you finally got to use your power for evil. It just didn't seem fair that you would turn out to have the best power in the family.'

'Ending up naked everywhere isn't the best power in the family,' he growled, unable to keep a note of annoyance off his voice. That he hadn't noticed any of what Azula was telling him seemed somehow unfair, as if he were the only person carrying a large parasol on the one day it rained gold. It was a childish thought, he knew, but knowing didn't make it any better.

His sister punched his leg and her arm bounced back several yards. 'Of course your power is the best, dum-dum,' she said as she shrunk her arm back into place. 'See what I mean? I bet you didn't feel this. I bet you didn't feel anything even when I buried you under that avalanche.'

'That's not true! It stung a little,' he added defensively.

She stretched her legs until she was at eye-level with him. 'Oh, Zu-Zu. Do you have any idea how hard it is to try to torment a brother who can turn into a giant, super-strong, invulnerable…'

'… thing,' he finished.

'I was going to go with "abomination", but that's the whole point, isn't it? Every possible choice just positively drips with super-villainy. You don't even have to try. Not that it's any kind of challenge for someone like me, of course, but sometimes I wish I didn't have to, oh, make balloon animals for small children so I can pop them afterwards. Just show up and change.' She fell silent for a while, swaying a little on her stretched-up legs as she stared at the water. Then she glanced back at him and a flush of anger or embarrassment—no, this was Azula, it was almost certainly anger—spread through her face. 'You're not going to blab about this, are you?'

'No,' he grunted.

Her eyes narrowed. 'Are you lying?'

He wanted to sigh, but he was sure it would come out as some sort of small eruption. 'No.'

'You're lying,' she said as she shrank back to her regular size, but she sounded pleased rather than annoyed. 'That's all right. That's what family is all about, after all. Oh, and coming from the same strand of horribly mutated DNA.'

'Don't forget the explosive packages,' he added, and realised, as his sister let out a giggle like bright, poisoned candy, that he actually… did not mind this. He didn't know if Azula was right about his power—father always said the octo-bears were always more rabid in a rival's cage—but he thought that even though she was, well, Azula, she wasn't wrong about family. About them.

He looked at the pestiferous little sister who'd always done her utmost to drive him crazy ever since mother and father had shown his toddler self a small loaf of flesh wrapped in a blanket covered in biohazard stickers and she'd promptly thrown up on him, then followed it with a malevolent little gurgle.

But that was the whole point, wasn't it? She would stir some new deadly poison into his rice porridge, he'd retaliate by switching her hair oil with some of the flesh-eating acid the minions had cooked up in the lab, and on it would go until one of them either declared victory or ran out of places in which to set traps…

… Only nobody else got to do it. He thought back to Azula stuck to the ground, about to get hit by a half-ton chunk of stone. The cold lurch inside him at the realisation that his sister was about to get hurt, maybe killed, and he wasn't going to be the one to do it. They were the Fearsome Four. He'd never really thought like this about the second half of the name.

It was almost heart-warming, or would be, if he actually had a heart. Or warm blood.

Or indeed blood of any kind.

Maybe he had some kind of sludge circulating around.

Azula's arm stretched out and settled around what could charitably be called his shoulders.

'What are you doing?' he said.

'Being… sisterly, dum-dum.'

'You're trying to put something on me, aren't you?'

She withdrew her arm and slid the small explosive back into her pocket. 'Of course I was.'

'That's all right. I already put something in your—' He paused. 'Never mind.'

She frowned. 'What?'

'Nothing.' He looked back at the pool.

She stretched up and around to face him, brow furrowing and eyes flashing. 'What did you do?'

'Nothing,' he repeated, but of course Azula didn't believe him; she let out a cry of frustration as she snapped back into shape.

He smiled. He didn't smile a lot, and never at all in this form, so he was sure it must look like a mountain crevasse, but he couldn't help himself.

It felt good to be bad.

++The End++

Author's Note/Disclaimer: So I took this family and turned them all into super-villains, and the biggest difference is that they're now happy and functional. Sad, isn't it? ;) (But can you imagine? "Father, I won't fight you! Not in such a poorly-appointed arena! There aren't even any acid tanks!" "My own mother thought I was a monster—isn't it wonderful?" (Also, the rest of that AU Ozai vs Zuko duel, courtesy of muffinbitch: Zuko: Where are the laser-sharks? It's like you don't even mean it! Ozai: Of course I mean it, son! What if I bring in some rabid octo-bears?)) True, Zuko is still doing the equivalent of, as muffinbitch put it, locking himself in his room listening to The Cure and seething about how no one understands him, but he's a teenager and also Zuko, and deep down he probably loves every minute. Anyway, here are the sources of the lines/concepts I borrowed for the story:

The title, the minions, some of the Evil Lair's aesthetics, the notion of giving a child a balloon animal just to pop it, and the plot-line with the rivalry between older villains and a younger, slicker villain all come from Despicable Me. The line "Family is about (…) coming from the same strand of horribly mutated DNA" is paraphrased from one of the minions training videos in the Despicable Me DVD extras.

"I could just eat you alive… but no, you're still too young."; "no worries, no responsibilities, and, most important of all, no survivors"; and "Don't beat yourself up, dear. That's my job." come (with some alterations) from some of Morticia Addams' lines in the Addams Family film series. Conversely, some of Ozai's lines in their scene together are very loosely borrowed from some of Gomez Addams' lines in the same movies. The family's whole ethos and relationships with each other owe a fair bit to the Addams Family too.

The Fearsome Four's name and powers are a loose parody of the Fantastic Four, with Ozai/Flashpoint = the Human Torch, Ursa/Phantom = Invisible Woman and Azula/Slingshot = Mr Fantastic. Zuko is, of course, The Thing.

Enigma, Shockwave, Boomerang, and Airstrike's (who are, of course, Katara, Toph, Sokka, and Aang) costumes, powers, and mask names are an amalgam of their canon powers/characteristics and a number of comics super-heroes/super-villains. (Obviously, the whole fic is an homage to super-hero comics and movies in terms of, well, everything, really. ;))

"You need to be a lot more flexible" comes from the film The Incredibles. Azula's line about capes is inspired by the same film, though it isn't a direct quote (for an additional reason as to why capes are sooo last year, see also Dollar Bill from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen).

"Please try to live in the now" comes from Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. I doubt Boomerang/Sokka looks like DeBarge, mind you.

The bit with someone calling Ozai & co freaks was inspired by a similar scene in the second Hellboy movie. (Of course, Hellboy is played by Sozin's VA. Six degrees of separation and all that.)

The Evil League of Evil comes from Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and its rules/guidelines are a reference to the Pirate Code in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series.

I also note without any surprise whatsoever that, no matter the generation, the time, the setting, the characters, or the circumstances, this family's travails always involve, sooner or later, a lack of pants.