I just started playing Assassin's Creed II recently, so that's where I've been these last few days. Sorry guys, but here we are.


Hold on guys. Just a second.


"Thirty-one." Aang pushed his face against the window. His nose scrunched up on the glass, giving him a pig-like appearence when viewed from outside of the car.

"That makes an average of two point three eight cactuses per mile," Sokka declared from the front seat. He and Aang had spent the last thirteen miles calculating the mean number of cacti on the left side of the road.

"I think that's 'cacti',˝ Zuko suggested.

"Thirty-two." Aang pushed his lips against the glass and puffed out his cheeks.

Sokka did the math on the back of the road map. "Two point four six one."

"Fourteen miles." Zuko said.

Katara looked up. "Hey guys, what about all the cactuses on the right side of the road?"

"Cacti."

"Shut up Zuko. Well Katara, due to the law of averages, the mean number of cactuses on the right side of the road is two point four six one."

"Guys, it's cacti. The plural of cactus is cacti."

"All those who give a fuck, please raise your hand," Katara said.

Nobody but Zuko raised their hands. He grumbled resignedly.


Zuko could have had any car in the world. As the Firelord's son and then eventually Firelord, he had access to one of the largest operating budgets in the world, and with it the largest catalog of cars right there behind the Earth King himself.

Instead Zuko had an old 86 Karik, which he'd bought from a junkie shortly after his coronation. When asked, he said it was simply because she was reliable and he liked the color. He never said anything about the eighty dollars worth of heroin he found under the passenger seat.

The problem with nearly-twenty year-old infrequently maintained cars is that they generally suck. Zuko discovered this when his engine made a grumbling noise and started to smell funny. Then the gas pedal stopped working.

"What- shit, shit-"

Sokka wrinkled his nose. "What's that smell?"

"Uh... the engine." Zuko pumped the gas to no avail.

"What's wrong with it?" Sokka looked at Zuko, who was frantically trying to get the car to drive again.

"I don't know, it's never done this before!" He tapped on the fuel gauge frantically. "It says there's fuel in it!"

Sokka leaned over to look at the dashboard panel. "The Check Engine light's on."

"I can see!"

"What's wrong?" Katara asked.

"Nothing Katara, the car just broke." Zuko gently pulled over to the shoulder.

The main reason Zuko was so upset was that it had been a long time since they last saw a sign of civilization, and that was at 100 Kilometers an hour. It would take them a while to walk back to fix the engine.

In addition the engine failure, it was forty-five degrees outside and there was no wind.

Zuko gently parked the car and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Sokka stared at the dashboard. Aang hadn't looked up from his book. Katara looked back and forth between Zuko and Sokka concernedly.

"What are we gonna do?" she asked.

Sokka opened the door and got out.


Zuko was by no means a mechanic. He couldn't tell the difference between a ratchet and his left hand (Much like my sister) and would die if tasked with fixing something simple as a pencil sharpener.

Lucky for Zuko, after the war Sokka had spent a couple of months in the Northern Air Temple apprenticing for The Mechanist and a strange man whose name escaped him.

Sokka opened the hood and looked inside. The engine was smoldering and still smelling funny.

He knew this would take a while.

Zuko stayed in the car tapping the steering wheel nervously. The air conditioning was off so the car was getting warm quickly.

"Aang."

Aang did not look up. He was still reading.

"Aang!"

"Hm." The Avatar still didn't look up, but at least acknowledged that there was a universe outside of his book.

"Do you think you could blow some air around to cool us off?" Zuko rubbed the sweat off his forehead.

Aang stalled a second then looked up from his book for the first time in several hours. "Why'd we stop?"

Zuko groaned and Katara made a face-palm motion.


It was really goddamn hot outside and Sokka was standing there looking at an engine in it.

He squinted at a bolt deep within the block and leaned toward it, doing math in his head.

Finally he stood up, wiped his hands together and closed the hood. "Zuko," he called.

From the front seat, Zuko looked up quickly. "What?"

"Come here." Zuko started to open the door. "And grab the map." Zuko fumbled with the map for a second and got out of the car with a clunk.

"What?" He moved towards the front of the car and set the map on the hood gently. Sokka rotated the map upright and began to peruse the mess of roads and highways.

While this happened Zuko stood to the side silently. "Did you figure out what was wrong?"

Sokka nodded and traced a finger down a red line on the map. After a second he stood up and turned to Zuko. "Your oil filter blew up. You need a new one."

Zuko leaned forward slightly and opened his mouth. "A... a new one?"

"Yeah. There's no way to fix it. Now-" Sokka took a step backwards and placed a finger on the map. "We just drove through this town right?" Zuko craned his neck forward to look.

"Yeah."

"But we haven't driven through this one?" Sokka slid his finger down the map about three centimeters.

"No."

"Ok." Sokka leaned back down to look at the map again. "I think these towns are about nineteen or twenty miles apart, and we're somewhere in the middle."

"Uh-huh."

Sokka explained his plan to Zuko.


"There's a town that way," Sokka stated pointing down the road in front of the car.

"And one that way," Zuko added quickly pointing in the opposite direction.

"Right. So we're somewhere in between, but we don't know which is closer and by how much."

Zuko and Sokka were both smart guys and often developed a sort of tag-team when explaining things. In fact Katara sometimes called the two of them together the Tag Team, although not to their faces.

"So we'll need to break into two teams. One will go back and the other that way."

"Since the the cities are about twenty miles apart, that means we can't be more than ten miles from a city."

"And that means that each team will only have to walk ten miles, and if they see the town at some point, that means that we're closer to that one."

"And we can buy the part we need. If we don't see the town after ten miles, just turn around and walk back to the car." Sokka pounded his fist on the hood. Zuko cringed.

Katara and Aang stood perfectly still in absolute shock. "We have to walk ten miles?" Katara said after a moment.

"It's the most efficient way to make sure we find the part we need," Sokka replied with a shrug. "Ok, so teams. Uh, Zuko, you and Aang maybe-"

"Actually what if you went with Aang?" Zuko said abruptly. "And I went with- with Katara." He stepped behind Aang and Katara and glanced at Sokka."

Sokka blinked a bit. "Uh, ok, that's fine I guess."

"I just think that... it might be a good idea if we have a master waterbender on each team." Zuko stuttered.

Sokka wasn't about to argue and didn't know why Zuko was trying to. He shrugged. "Ok, me and Aang and you and Katara."

Katara and Aang were still reeling ffrom being forced to walk ten miles. "This wouldn't have happened if we'd taken Appa," Aang muttered sadly.

So they set out on their long hot walk, never to see each other again.

Haha, just fucking with you. Stay tuned for the next chapter, which at this rate will come out just after the nnext season of LOK.


I'm so sorry this took as long as it did. If you're curious why, look at the top of the chapter... and as I get ready to post this, I'm currently almost finished with Assassin's Creed Revelations. So, that's why.