Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Catch-Up Game.
–
The Assassin..
I woke up, and the first thing I noticed was that everyone was looking at me.
It was... startling. Backing up, I glanced from eye to eye, trying to gauge what was going on, why I was the centre of attention. But they were inscrutable, and my suddenness just enhanced their interest. Had they- had I-
A rasp broke the silence.
"Don't worry. You didn't miss a thing. Nothing even remotely amusing happened."
Oh. Okay. Calm down. You didn't do anything. Just breathe.
"Sokka?" Ty Lee is sitting up on her knees, leaning slightly towards me. I took a deep breath, and brushed the hair out of my eyes, shaking my head.
The Guardian.
Now why did I do that?
I mused over that question as Sokka pulled his hair back into that ragged wolftail, stubbornly avoiding anyone's eyes.
What possible reason did I have for defusing that potentially hilariously uncomfortable situation?
I mean, yet another awkward conversation would be annoying to listen to, but I could have just tuned it out.
No, there must be some underlying reason for this. Perhaps it was an attempt to foster good relations with him, so as to have one more ally in the veritable shitstorm that is inevitably bearing down on me?
No. Maybe that will be the outcome, and if so that's all well and good, but that idea never crossed my mind.
Most perplexing. I'm not sure I approve of this new-found spontaneity.
You see, this is why I need Ty Lee around. I lose my sense of proportion as to what is a bad move and what isn't if I don't have a constant example nearby. Generally, if Ty Lee does it, = a bad idea. Must bear that in mind in future.
–
The Assassin.
Ba Sing Se. I'm back.
I must say, I'm looking forward to sleeping in a bed again.
The Guardian.
Oh, I think I'm having a minor panic attack.
–
The Assassin.
We touched down at around midday, outside the house. No sooner had we touched down then Aang burst out of the house, his lemur flapping behind him.
Dignified, Aang. Real dignified.
"Sokka!"
"Hi." I waved distractedly as I made my way down the tail of the flying bison. Glancing up, his expression told me he had noticed the other passengers.
"Um... okay? I'm guessing that there's a good reason for the fact that you've brought a couple of people who, last time we met, tried to kill us?" He did, however, have the good sense not to attempt to attack them. That... could have gone badly.
"Weeeell... how would you define a 'good' reason?"
He looked somewhat nonplussed at that.
The Guardian.
I dragged myself upright, eager to be on solid ground.
That... didn't go quite as planned. Months of utter inactivity and very little food had taken their toll, and I tripped on the rim of the saddle, falling face first and sliding down all the way to the ground.
This is just getting better all the time.
I managed to force myself up onto my hands, but since my feet were (due to the sloping tail) level with my head, getting up was going to be ...undignified.
As I looked up, a pale hand was proffered, and I followed the arm up to see a grey-eyed face with an almost-smile. There was also an almost audible ting as the sunlight caught on his bald head.
Well, I'm never one to let pride get in the way of a helping hand, and I might as well start swallowing my ego now. I grabbed his arm and pulled myself upright. Once I was vertical and on the ground, I dusted myself off.
Oh, how I need a change of wardrobe. Walking around with my knees almost visible is sure to create some kind of scandal.
The Assassin.
Well, it didn't look like Aang was going to be a problem. I had hoped that might be the case- he always is willing to give people another chance- but it was still good to see.
They'd need his support, too. I will not let them get locked up again.
"Hey, Sokka. I see you brought some new friends."
Toph interrupted my thoughts with a punch on the arm and a greeting. She had crept up behind me as I was standing by the house.
"Oh, hey Toph. How've things been?"
"Pretty quiet. Aang and Katara went kind of crazy when Iroh bust in saying you'd been captured," she said, abruptly, and turned away from me.
O...kay?
And Iroh?
Whatever. I somehow doubt I'm up to confronting him today.
"So, Katara mentioned that you had an interesting story about the Dai Li."
"Oh!" She turned back to look at me, a grin firmly affixed. "Come on in, sit down." She promptly dragged me inside by the arm, and sat on a large pillow. I elected to sit on the sofa.
"Okay, so we basically started by trying to find families or something of anyone that had gone missing..."
Nothing. Five thousand men had vanished, and not a single one seemed to have a family. How was that even possible?
As they investigated, it had quickly become apparent that once you were a Dai Li man, you stopped being anything else. They had never been seen to frequent any bars, no one had encountered any one off-duty, nothing.
"So, after about a week of nothing, we decided to use the information that we had found about how freaky they Dai Li were."
"'We'?"
"Me, Iroh, and Zuko. Angsty McScarpants was actually pretty helpful after a little while."
"Where did they sleep, then? Surely we would have heard if five thousand men simultaneously stopped paying the rent."
Zuko frowned, wishing that his uncle did not have to divide his time between helping them and training the Avatar. But he would solve this. It was a test, a challenge.
"Perhaps," he started slowly, "perhaps we should have another look at their headquarters."
"And guess what we found?" She didn't give me time to answer. "First, we didn't find any evidence of sleeping quarters. Secondly, we found that the walls were a whole lot thicker than they should have been."
Earthbending tore into the walls, and Zuko raised his flame-enclosed fist higher. Padding the walls was a mess of burnt scrolls, which collapsed forward in a spray of ash and collapsed at the prince's feet.
"Ha! I knew there was something there." Toph sounded very smug. "...What is there, anyway?"
"Scrolls. Burnt scrolls."
Toph seemed to deflate. "Oh. Well, that sucks."
"Not...exactly." Zuko sounded almost like he was dazed. "Fire needs air. Burying the scrolls like this would choke the fire, if they weren't thorough, and they would be in a hurry, so..." he knelt down, scrabbling among the cinders. "Yes, here we go."
"What? What is it?" Toph asked, impatiently.
"The ones at the bottom aren't fully burned. We should get these back to Uncle."
"Most of the bits were useless, but a huge proportion of them made mention of a place called Lake Laogai, and a couple of uses of the phrase "leaks"- meaning that something was surrounded by water. We figured that would be the best place to start looking. And I had just the thing."
"Miss Bei Fong, why, exactly, are we wearing blindfolds?" The old general Xiaohong was a kindly man, but even his patience had limits. He and a hundred of his best earthbenders were in the training grounds, sashes over their eyes.
Toph sighed. "You've got to learn to see with your earthbending. Reach out, like you're going to bend, but don't do anything. You'll see what I mean."
"They were pretty good at it, too, after a while. It only took some of them a week to stop walking into walls."
It took a month before Toph considered them good enough, but at the end of that month the hundred were down at the lake's edge, scouring for anything out of place.
It was one of the older men that found it. A secret well, leading to below the lake.
"We came back with a whole bunch of guys, and Zuko too, just for kicks."
Toph cracked her knuckles, getting a feel for the leather armour she had been presented with. She turned to Zuko with a grin.
"So, ready for a field trip?"
He nodded, surprisingly certain.
"We busted in with a whole army of guys- it was pretty awesome, let me tell you. We were completely outnumbered, but let me tell you we kicked their asses.
"But what's really interesting is what we found afterwards." She leant forwards, her voice equal parts horror and awe. "We interrogated them afterwards- and it was so strange; every one of them could tell complete lies but think they were truth. We figured that they were just trained to keep their cool- until we found the machines."
Zuko stood, torch raised high, running a confused eye over the bottles on the shelf to one side, the chair with the restraints, the lamp on its circular track.
What was it all for?
"General?" he called, back down the hallway. "General Xiaohong? You'd better come have a look at this."
"They had brainwashed each other," she breathed. "That was why they couldn't answer some questions, why there were only about twenty past lives between them- one in twenty grew up on a farm, another one in twenty had lived in the lower ring, the son of a shoemaker, and so on- and why they were all so weird. It's what had been done to the Joo Dees, too."
"Joo Dees?"
"Oh yeah, there were hundreds of them. Really freaky." Toph shook her head. "But there were a few Dai Li who weren't like the others. They couldn't lie without their heartbeats spazzing, for starters. We figured them to be the ringleaders, and there were only about forty-five or so of them."
I shook my head.
"I really hate this city."
Toph, for her part, just shrugged. "I don't know. I think it's starting to grow on me. I mean, when I say jump, people do it now."
–
The Guardian.
We were all staying at the Avatar's house.
Actually, General Iroh and Zuko weren't. They still had that tea shop.
I haven't seen Zuko yet. But there's no rush. No rush at all.
So we were all sitting down, relaxing over a pot of tea.
Well, attempting to relax, anyway.
Well, I was attempting to relax. Everyone else seemed to be waiting for the right moment to stab one another.
Well, the waterbender and the midget earthbender seemed to be waiting for the right moment to stab Ty Lee, anyway. She had had the audacity to sit next to Sokka, and actually engage in conversation with him. Nothing particularly interesting, but they seemed...comfortable.
And that was ticking off the two girls, much to my amusement. The Avatar seemed oblivious. Or perhaps he was trying to ignore it.
"So... Avatar," I began.
"His name's Aang" the waterbender filled in, waspishly.
Well, I didn't know that.
"Okay then. A pleasure to meet you, Avatar Aang," I said, and stood, bowing low.
As I sat down, I noted with no small satisfaction the look on the waterbender's face. It was one I was expert at drawing out- the fact that she knew I was mocking her, but she had absolutely no way of pointing this out. Great fun.
"Anyway, what's the deal with the tattoos?" I realised that I was drawing a few strange looks. "What? It's bugged me for a while."
The Avatar just smiled broadly, and explained. "They're Master's Tattoos. I got them when I became an official airbending Master. They run along chi lines."
Ty Lee looked up at that. I supposed it was her territory.
"Ah. Okay then." A thought occurred to me. "Didn't that kind of hurt?"
He winced at the memory. "Oh yeah."
"And how old were you at the time?"
"Twelve. The youngest Master ever," he boasted. I wasn't really impressed- he was the Avatar, of course he was supposed to be amazing.
"Um, ouch?" Ty Lee offered, to (of course) furious glares from the waterbender, who has yet to learn that it takes a lot more than glaring to dissuade Ty Lee from anything.
After that short exchange, the Avatar at least was free from the uncomfortable atmosphere, and was free to join Sokka and Ty Lee in light conversation. No one else spoke much, until we all retired. Ty Lee and I had been given the earthbender's room, and she was bunking with the waterbender.
Maybe that was the reason for her enmity.
I finally came up with a plausible explanation for the canon behaviour of the Dai Li. Fifty men would be much easier to sway than five thousand. Now I'm kicking myself over the fact that not only was it retardedly obvious, but it took me over a day to figure it out.
Also, tommorow is my birthday, so I will probably get rascally drunk and not have time to pull my awesome April Fool's prank. Essentially, it would have been updating this story with the chapter, verbatim
"Rocks fall. Everyone dies. Except Toph, because she was the one who threw the rocks in the first place."
And I would promptly have been lynched. So it's all for the best, really.