16th Day, Peach Moon, Year of the Tiger
Mai

For someone whose best friend had just died, Ty Lee seemed to be taking it very well. She hadn't cried once, and Ty Lee was the kind of person who cried if she found a dead caterpillar. Mai's mother said that the younger girl was in denial and was in for a rude awakening when Azula was officially declared dead (a declaration that was coming any day now, since Azula couldn't possibly have survived floating in the ocean for so long, Fire Princess or not), but Mai couldn't bring herself to dislike Ty Lee's ignorance.

It was sort of nice to have someone she could be around who wouldn't lecture her on how Azula's death had ruined the family prospects or how Mai's grades at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls had slipped in the last couple of days. Besides, watching Ty Lee do flips on the wall that divided the garden that belonged to her family from the one that belonged to their strange neighbors was slightly less boring than anything else Mai could be doing after school.

"This is boooring," Ty Lee whined. She flipped onto her hands and began walking up and down the wall with her legs in the air and her skirt flopping around her middle.

There was probably some way to tie the skirt so that it would stay up, Mai decided. That way it wouldn't scandalize her parents if Ty Lee ever did a handwalking routine while one of them was around. Ty Lee was wearing leggings underneath her skirt, of course, since that was part of the Royal Fire Academy's dress code, but Mai knew her mother would pitch a fit if she could see what Ty Lee was currently doing.

"If you keeping walking up there like that, the neighbors will notice you and want to know why we're spying on them," Mai said. She wouldn't be all that upset if they did, since the worst that could happen was Ty Lee and Mai being told to mind their own business, but this spying thing had been Ty Lee's idea in the first place and it was a little disconcerting to see her approach it without a lick of common sense.

"No they won't. I do this all the time." As if to prove it, Ty Lee smiled and waved in the direction of the house. There was not so much as the rustle of a curtain to indicate that anyone had noticed her action.

"Wonderful," Mai said. "Do your neighbors ever come outside, or do they just sit in their house with the windows shut?" After three days spent hiding by the wall watching the house, Mai was starting to suspect the later and fall back into her usual boredom.

"They come outside every day," Ty Lee said. "The little girl and the servants at least. I've only seen the older girl a couple of times, though. I think she might come out more when we're at school." Ty Lee turned to grin at Mai, and the tilt of her smile making it quite clear what she was thinking.

"We aren't cutting class to spy on your creepy neighbors," Mai said. Mai was not risking her Mother's wrath in order to sit on an uncomfortable stone wall and stare at a seemingly empty house, especially not since school was the only time that Mai was actually allowed to do anything. "It would be better to figure out how to get into the house."

"We can disguise ourselves as servants!" Ty Lee said, her excited voice loud enough to make Mai wince.

"Quiet," Mai hissed.

Ty Lee whimpered, her lower lip trembling as though she were about to burst into tears. Mai's heart began to race as something that felt uncomfortably like panic rose up in her chest. It was silly, Mai knew, because even a crying fit from Ty Lee was unlikely to attract much attention, but she didn't like the idea of bringing the other girl to tears. It was the kind of thing that Azula did when she was grumpy and Mai had always hated dealing with Azula when she was like that.

Mai said the first somewhat apologetic thing that popped into her mind,"I meant don't talk so loud, not keep your ideas to yourself," She decided not the mention that there was no way anyone would believe they were servants. Especially not Ty Lee, who was only four feet tall and still had noticeable baby fat.

"Oh." Ty Lee perked up again, her eyes alight with her plan. "If we're going to be servants, then we're going to need servant clothes. I've got some old clothes that might work, once they get altered."

"I don't think anyone is going to believe that your old clothes are servant's things," Mai said. "And when none of the servants recognize us that's going to be a dead giveaway that we aren't supposed to be there."

"Yeah, but if we disguise ourselves–"

"That's not how disguises work." Mai resisted the urge to tack on 'cactus brain', both because it was unladylike and because it might make Ty Lee start crying again. "The idea of a disguise is to make it so that no one recognizes us as ourselves, or to make them think that we're servants instead of nobles. Not to make them think that we're anyone they know."

"But I saw a play once where they did!" There was something absolutely fascinating about Ty Lee's misguided optimism, even if Mai knew that she would have to keep it firmly in check to prevent this entire spying thing from ending with Mai and Ty Lee in serious trouble. "There was an Earth Kingdom general and the hero took his clothes while he was swimming and went into the Earth Kingdom camp wearing them and everyone thought he was the general so then he ordered the entire Earth Kingdom army to surrender and–"

"That was a play, Ty Lee," Mai said, before Ty Lee could detail out the entire ending of Honor and Victory. "Not something that could actually happen."

"But it tells the story of something that actually happened. It said so on the poster." Ty Lee's eyes were wide with a kind of innocence that Mai doubted she could dispel at all, much less in the kind of time frame it would take to come up with an actual plan to get into the neighbor's house.

"I'm sure it does. And Zong Li was a grown man with lots and lots of practice who was way better at disguising himself than either of us."

"Oh." Ty Lee's head cocked to the side. "That makes sense. Do you think if we spend lots of time practicing–"

"No."

Ty Lee's lower lip jutted out, but it did not tremble, so Mai thought it was safe to remain uncompromising.

"We're not going to waste time practicing disguises when we could be finding a more sensible way to spy on your neighbors," she said, although Mai was personally beginning to doubt that they had any anything worth spying on.

"Look," Ty Lee whispered, tugging on Mai's sleeve and pointing to the front of the house, where a couple of people were waiting to be let in. Evidently she had been too distracted by the arrival of the visitors to pay any attention to what Mai was saying. "Who do you think they are?"

"Probably merchants of some kind," Mai said, without putting any thought into her answers.

"They look sort of rough to be merchants," Ty Lee said. "That one even has a tattoo!"

Mai squinted, looking a little closer at the pair of men. While the one in front looked respectable enough, Ty Lee was right about the one in the back. His sleeves looked like they had been torn off rather than properly hemmed and he did have a tattoo on his shoulder, a funny sort of symbol that looked a bit like someone had inked in the character for dock and then decided they would rather have a bird.

"I'll ask my sisters and see if any of them have seen a tattoo like that before," Ty Lee said. She sounded thoughtful rather than enthusiastic, and Mai wondered what had happened in the little acrobat's mind to make her start taking this seriously. "That way we can find out who's coming to visit!" And there was the enthusiasm, back with full force.

"I'll ask around the school," Mai said, knowing that her parents were likely to disapprove of such unladylike ventures as tracking down suspicious characters. "If you could draw me a picture of that symbol to take around it would help." Mai's calligraphy was good enough, but her drawing skills were rather lacking and she knew that if she attempted that bird it would come out looking like it had been squashed.

"That's a good idea," Ty Lee said. "I'll ask at school too."

Mai thought it was rather unlikely that any of the girls Ty Lee's age would be allowed out unsupervised long enough to notice a tattoo like that, especially since they would need to go to one of the seedier areas of the Capital to do so, but there was always a chance and no chance, however small, ought to be passed up in an investigation like this. "You do that."

The door was answered and the mysterious visitors ushered inside with what looked to Mai's eye to be an unseemly amount of haste, as though the servant who let them in was nervous that someone would notice them if they spent to long standing on the doorstep. "Have your neighbors ever had visitors like this before?"

"I don't know," Ty Lee said. "I've never watched before." She flipped back onto her hands and giggled. "This gets more fun every minute!"

Mai had had too many lessons on etiquette drilled into her by her mother to do anything more than smile but she privately agreed.