New chapter, and I must say I'm particularly happy with this one. Hopefully you will be too, and I think my writer's block is over for the time being. Enjoy! Still no owning of Avatar, but a fan can dream.
Chapter VIII: Thought and Action Part 2
The water around him is ice-cold, and he feels it beginning to sap his strength. He doesn't know how long he's been swimming, only that he has to get to the person drowning in front of him. As he swims, he must fight to stay calm and make the most of each stroke. Flailing madly will get him nowhere, but he knows he's not moving fast enough and he's panicking. The person's head disappears for a moment, then rising again to the surface, and he notices that the water is no longer calm and empty. Waves are growing, tossing the new occupants towards the jagged rocks on the shore. There are hundreds, thousands now, all blindly struggling to save themselves. He knows he can't save them all, in fact he hardly even notices the others. All he knows is that he started out to save one person, and once that one person is safe, he can come back for the others.
He finally reaches his target and feels a flood of warmth as he wraps one arm around the figure. Now the waves are driving him back to shore, although the use of only one arm slows him considerably. The shore is close, he can pick out one spot that looks safe to leave the person, but he feels a hand grab his leg and he falls below the surface. Gasping as he fights back to the top, he now feels more hands grabbing at him, at the clothes he wears. The others press against him, and he feels the first, his original goal, torn from his arm. Instantly, it seems a weight has been lifted. All the hands, all the bodies weigh as nothing, and he can strongly push himself towards the near shore as the crowd swims tethered behind him.
But something makes him look back. He sees the lone swimmer disappear again, and this time it takes too long to come back to the surface. He knows he can't leave the swimmer, and he turns and once again fights the ever-increasing waves to reach his target. He grasps the arm, and insantly is pulled under by a crushing weight. Fighting to break the surface, he sees the faces around him, faces that he has known before, and others that he knows he will know someday. He looks down at the lone swimmer, still held to his arm, and he feels the cold of the water crushing him as he prepares to make his choice...
The water hit him across the face like a physical blow, jerking him upright in the back of the cart. The ostrich-horses, gentler than the native komodo rhinos and easier to guide, stood grazing nearby. Taking in their surroundings, Akira noticed surprisingly little to take in. A small clearing off the trail, seemingly placed by the traders themselves, held the dense jungle at bay. Past the edge of the clearing, the wall of greenery was as impenetrable as ever.
"Well, now that you're awake, are you going to eat something or not?" The man held up half a loaf of bread and some kind of meat. Too exhausted to argue, Akira took the food with a muttered "thanks," sitting himself up on the cart as he bit into the bread.
She ran from one deserted back alley to the next, slowly learning just how many supplies the market needed for daily operation. Warehouses for goods, construction materials for stands and displays, and rest areas for workers and security branched off from the main paths in a dozen different directions. Leaning against a wall to catch her breath, she thought she could hear movement from one of the buildings. Probably just a mouse, she thought, but she might as well make sure. Slowly approaching the door to one of the warehouses, the noise intensified, and she now noticed an odd scraping sound, followed by an odd, heavy thud. Definitely not just animals. The warehouse had been left partially open, and she barely squeezed through the metal doors. Hurriedly ducking behind a stack of crates, she could hear voices out on the floor. flipping up the stack, she grabbed onto a pallet loading crane and hoisted herself up to the support beams on the ceiling. She could now see several men dragging heavy pallets across the ground to a line of carts parked at the far end. Near a large group of the pallets, two men were talking. One, she noticed, was wearing the same cloak as the man from the market. Straining to hear the conversation, she moved along the beams until she was nearly over the men.
"...thinking, you could have led the Fire Nation military right into the building! You said you were going to buy us more time!" The other man was tall and thin, and wore bedraggled robes that must have once been impressive, but now looked like something a peasant would pick up at one of the noble families' charity giveaways.
"We did buy time! There was an archer snooping around the back streets earlier, but we led the idiot all over the market in a wild hog-monkey chase, and we should've lost...uh, him."
"Should have? As in, you didn't?" The thin man advanced on the cloaked one, a look of pure rage in his eyes, "Then why aren't you out there making sure that the interfering archer is no longer a threat? Get out there and earn your pay, or don't come back at all!" The cloaked man went running for the door as the man glared at him.
I'm probably leaning too far from the beam, what if...
By the time she felt her foot slip, there really wasn't much she could do. So she just stared down at the floor as it came up at her and screamed her lungs out.
She felt something break underneath her, and probably inside her as well, and all she could hear was a horrible splintering noise. Finally realizing that she hadn't put a hole in the floor all the way to the Spirit World, she reopened her eyes and found herself staring at the thin man she had seen earlier.
"So, a spy. I knew that archer couldn't be the only trouble for us." The man's voice was calm and collected, and Ty Lee thought she would have felt safer if he was shouting at her. "So, which group are you from? Not that I expect an answer yet, but I might as well ask and see if we can spare the whole time-consuming process."
"Huh? Spy? I'm not a spy, I'm just a kid!"
"Then what were you doing up in the beams? You should be thanking me, by the way, I sacrificed a load of merchandise to keep you from breaking something important on impact, just so we could have this talk. You'll find that I take a personal interest in who my enemies are hiring, and I dare say you won't enjoy the attention. Now I'm going to ask one more time, who hired you?" The man's voice threatening voice reminded her of Azula, and she thought she knew now why the Princess always got her way.
"Even if I was a spy, which I'm not, why would I tell you anything? You're a mean and skinny old man who has other people do your work for you!"
The man's eyebrows shot up in response to the outburst, and the corners of his mouth twitched. "My, this one has some spark. Well, lads, looks like we have our work cut out for us, hmm? Get her out of here, do whatever you want, I'll attend to the interrogation later."
As the two men reached down, Ty Lee kicked out from her position, catching on in the groin and dropping him, whimpering, to the floor. The other grabbed her foot and simply began dragging her across the floor as she struggled to gain any leverage for a strike. Finally getting her other leg positioned, she struck at the back of his knee. Unfortunately, her shot went wild and the man roughly jerked her foot as he regained his balance, sending pain up her leg. Gritting her teeth, in annoyance as well as pain, she brought her leg back again, when a massive explosion lit up the warehouse behind them and threw the man to the ground. Ty Lee was on her feet instantly, but leaning over to incapacitate the man, her side suddenly spasmed with pain, doubling her over. She did manage, through misting eyes, to deliver strikes to the man's legs and one arm, then grabbed her side again and simply stayed as still as possible. The pain gradually subsided, leaving her breathing raggedly as several new explosions threatened to throw her off-balance again. She looked over as an explosion engulfed two more of the carts, along with the guards tending them. Looking around, she finally spotted Mina on the stack of crates Ty Lee had used earlier. Drawing another arrow, she flicked it downward and the arrow lit up with a bright flame along its length. Drawing the flaming projectile, she sent it straight into the last loaded cart, which responded with a final fireball, and the room was now filled with a dead silence.
"Congratulations, you've just lived through your first Deo, Lee."
"Deo?"
"Mean's Doesn't Exist Operation, it's what the other guys call these kind of behind-the-scenes things. A perfect Deo is one that no one ever notices. This one, well..." She gestured at the smoking piles where the carts once stood, "I get the feeling that whoever owns this warehouse is either dead, or is going to notice something big time." She sighed, then jumped off the boxes she had crouched on. "Nothing a bit of government money can't handle, and given what was going on here, I don't think it should be a problem to get that."
"Umm, what was going on here?" Ty Lee walked over to the girl, clutching at her side. Although breathing wasn't too much of a problem, it really did hurt, and she wondered if the other girl knew anything about first aid.
Mina, of course, noticed the acrobat's behavior, with a huffed, "Get over here!" she pulled out a roll of bandages from a pack on her waist. "Here, take your hand away. Let me feel." Mina's hands moved over her side with methodical patience.
"Yaa!"
"Sorry." Keeping one hand over the spot, she unraveled a section of the bandage roll. "Okay, this may be the spot, but this works better to cover the area around it as well. Here, get that out of the way, it needs to be directly on skin or the healing herbs won't do any good." Ty Lee complied, feeling slightly uncomfortable as the girl wrapped the bandages around her chest.
"Umm, are you a medic?"
"Nope. Medics don't heal, they just make people more comfortable as they die." The girl looked up with a smile only to see Ty Lee's somewhat alarmed expression. "It's just an expression," she quickly added, "although on a battlefield, that's usually all they have time for. I suppose you've never seen an actual battlefield though, have you?"
"Uh, actually, I kinda have. I've spent most of my time in the Earth Kingdom recently."
This got a reaction from the girl. "Really? Oh man, I envy you so much! I've never left the Fire Nation! Well, my unit has, but I was still in training so they wouldn't let me go. Wow, so what's it like out there? Is it really this huge lifeless desert like they say?"
"No, not at all. There's lakes and rivers, and forests, and...and, uh, swamps, and, uh, well there's desert too, but it's only part of it. It's really pretty beautiful, especially in the places we went."
"Oh, and who would "we" be?"
"Uh, well..." Should I tell her about Azula and Mai? Would she even believe me? She seems nice, and she's really helped me so far. But Azula would probably be so mad if she found out. But, I guess what she doesn't know won't hurt her, and anyway she's been really mean lately. "Well, actually, I was traveling with the Princess Azula to find her brother Zuko and his uncle Iroh."
Mina's eyes widened, "Okay, you're lying to me! You have to be lying to me!"
"Nope, Azula came and found me and said that she needed my help and then I traveled with her. It was really pretty fun, and we got to meet all sorts of new people."
"Wow, that's just...wow. So you're telling me that you actually hunted down the Dragon of the West? Three girls against him and his nephew?"
"Well, there was the Avatar too, and his friends."
"What? Okay, hold on, here we go." She tore off the end of the strip, then gave the area a healthy slap. Hearing Ty Lee's sharp draw of breath, she looked up, "Don't worry, they're just bruised a bit. If anything had been broken, you'd be out on the ground right now. Standard battlefield test, really sorry." She stuffed the roll back into the pack and grabbed her bow off the floor, "Anyway, you've got some fast talking to do, Pink. Now, spill. What were you doing with the Avatar?"
"Well, okay it's a long story, but here goes..."
"No way! That's unbelievable! So, then what happens?" The two girls sat on a pile of crates in one of the back streets. A large bag of fire flakes sat between them, and a small calico ball of fur purred in Ty Lee's lap. True to her word, Mina had paid Ty Lee for the trouble, actually paying for the animal herself, on the condition that Ty Lee buy her the bracelet from the jewelry shop. It hung on her right wrist now, the silver wire and red and purple ornaments catching the fading sunlight as they talked.
"Well, of course I couldn't move a bit, and then they take the bear and walk off. I mean, they could have easily taken Mai I'm sure, or at least the Earthbender could have, but they just took the animal and left. I'm actually kind of glad they left Mai," Ty Lee giggled, "She was the one who got me out--chiseled out the stone with her daggers. I keep thinking she's going to make me buy her a new set, but she never mentions it, so..." She shrugged.
Mina looked down for a moment, then back up at the acrobat. "You know what? I believe you. I don't see how anyone is supposed to make something like that up, especially with all the details that you were mentioning and everything. Hey, I've been wondering, well if you still feel up to it, well.." She faltered, looking up a Ty Lee sheepishly, "Well, I could use your help out here. I mean, wait of course until you heal up a bit, but you know, just small stuff that I need help with, something to get you out in the city. You interested?"
"Of course I'm in, haven't you been listening? I love this stuff!"
Looking out over the city as the sun fell, Akira couldn't help but feel it was more of a town that decided to call itself a city just to make itself feel important. After being woken about an hour ago to the announcement that they were approaching Gyudon, he had sat in the back of the cart and tried very hard to think of nothing except his mission. Determine the threat of rebellion, determine existance of spies, determine existance of living Avatar. I wonder how Ty Lee's doing? I hope Azula isn't being horrible to her again. I'm glad that she at least talks to me now. I wonder, does she still have that old gi? Not like it would fit anymore, but still it was nice fabric, and--yeah right, just keep thinking that, like it'll ever--Focus! Determine the threat of rebellion, determine existance of... He frowned, thinking that nowhere in his instructions had it detailed what he was supposed to do if any of those things were found. Should he report to the government first, or proceed on his own and neutralize the threat as quickly and efficiently as possible? As the wagon entered the city, he lept from the back, hurriedly drawing the cloak around him and pulling the face shield over his mouth and nose. He would need to use shadows to work on this assignmant, and the setting sun gave him many to use.
So, how was it? After a few revisions, I think the opening dream sequence turned out closer to what I wanted, and writing Mina kept reminding me of a whacked-out mix of Toph, Katara, and Sokka. Well, hope you liked it, and get ready for the Gaang's appearance (I swear) in either next chapter or the one after that. Thanks for reading!
