Mr. Snuffles curled up in the corner of the stable, delighting in the sound of his needle-like claws scraping against the cold metal walls. Like most other mongoose-lizards, he had an odd affinity for the sound of nails against metal, finding it to be a familiar and calming noise after the din of battle. How mongoose-lizards could stand, let alone enjoy such a sound was a frequently debated topic amongst Fire Nation scholars and a source of never-ending frustration for those tasked to keep them.

The side hatch groaned and hissed as the mechanism to the door opened. Mr. Snuffles arose from his prone position when Azula walked in. Azula patted him on the head. "Get up," Azula said. Mr. Snuffles whined, his eyes asking a single question: "Scritchies?"

"Fine," Azula said. "I'll give you a belly rub, just get up afterwards, okay?"

The mongoose-lizard rolled onto his back so that Azula could rub her hand against his scaly underbelly. He purred in satisfaction. To his chagrin, Azula stepped back.

"Time for you to get up now," Azula said. Mr. Snuffles stood up and sniffed the air. Beyond the familiar scent of Azula and the tank train, he could smell burnt fabric and sweaty skin and iron. Azula reassured him. "Don't worry, Snuffly. They're just some mud slugs. Here, come out." Azula led Mr. Snuffles outside. The four captured soldiers were still there. Mr. Snuffles growled and pounced on one of them.

"Good boy!" Azula cooed. "Make sure none of them try to escape, okay?" She patted him on the head then walked off in search of the saboteur, finding him a few feet away attempting to crawl to safety.

Azula knelt down and grabbed him by the collar."Oh, spirits, no, please, no!" he screamed.

This one should be easier to crack, Azula thought. She looked back down at him. "You were the guy mucking around with our treads, right?"

"No," he said, receiving a hard slap across the face for his attempt at deception. He nodded swiftly. "Yes, yes, that was me, I did it."

"You broke a sprocket, yes?"

"Yeah, third and fourth sprockets on the left tread," he confessed.

Azula clasped her hands around his neck. "Tell me how to fix it."

The man was at a loss for words. Apparently, breaking a piece of machinery was much easier than fixing it up afterwards. His method of sabotage wasn't particularly sophisticated. He had simply unscrewed the sprocket from the treads and crumpled it into a ball with earthbending. The problem was that un-crumpling the sprocket was next-to-impossible, and there was an angry Fire Nation princess who would be more than happy to immolate him after she found out that the sprocket was unrepairable. The best option: stall.

"Uh, right…" he said. "I left the sprocket over there, should be underneath the back of the tank. It's not too damaged. Once I have it, I should know how to fix it. I'd just need you to provide some heat so I can…bend it back into shape." He grinned nervously. "Right, so just grab the sprocket for me and I'll fix it up."

Azula stared at him like he was a recalcitrant five year old. "I'm not an idiot," she spat. "I know that as soon as I leave to get the sprocket you're going to run off. So this is what's going to happen: You are going to retrieve the sprocket for me and you're going to tell me how to fix it."

The man nodded. "Yes, yes, I'll do that." He shuffled back to the tank, a hangman walking to the gallows. Once she saw the state of the sprocket…he didn't want to think about it. He got onto his belly and crawled under the tank. He saw the sprocket—or what was left of it anyway—and grabbed it with trembling hands. He crawled back out and, with quivering arms, presented the ball of deformed metal to the princess.

She stared at it with an uncharacteristically calm face. "So you just smashed it with a rock. I can see you Earth Kingdom folk are very clever. Out of curiosity, do you have schools in the Earth Kingdom?"

The man paused, wondering where this line of questioning would go. "Yeah, we have schools and—"

"It was a rhetorical question, dum-dum. Of course you people don't have schools," Azula said. She looked back at the ball of metal and glowered. In the condition it was in, she knew there was no easy way to fix it.

"It's too deformed to bend back into shape," he pointed out nervously, not knowing what else to say.

"You think? Please keep stating the perfectly obvious," Azula interrupted, glowering at the man as if he were some kind of rodent. Well, that's it for me, the man thought.

"Sorry, sir." He apologized profusely before launching into his proposed solution. "However, if you give me another sprocket, I can make a mold out of stone. You'd just melt the broken sprocket in there and voila! New sprocket." Sweat ran down his forehead as he waited to see if she would accept his plan or roast him on the spot.

Azula thought for a moment. It was possible that the engineer just wanted to get his hands on another sprocket so he could smash it too, but she doubted it. He seemed to actually have a sense of self-preservation—unlike the corporal. She counted on that to keep him in line. "Alright," she said. "Grab another sprocket."

He scurried over to the treads and hastily unscrewed a second sprocket, then walked back to Azula to make the mold. After doing so, Azula herded him back to the other prisoners. Azula chuckled upon seeing that while she was gone, Mr. Snuffles had opted to pile the prisoners into a human lump. Mr. Snuffles looked at the fifth prisoner, picked him up with his mouth and plopped him down on top of the heap. Okay, Azula thought. I have the mold, I just need to put the scrap metal in and melt it. Shouldn't be too hard. She put the crumpled sprocket in the mold and brought it to her chair. She sat down crosslegged and began to melt the metal with a bath of blue fire. After roughly an hour, the metal was completely liquified and had filled out the mold—yet there was something strange about it. The sprocket looked swollen, its surface dotted with domed protrusions reminiscent of the pustules caused by septapox.

Azula walked over to the soldier dog pile and dragged the engineer out. "I thought you shaped the mold correctly," Azula said.

The engineer raised his hands. "I shaped it using another one of your sprockets. You saw me make it."

"Then what are these?" Azula pointed at the lumpy exterior of the molded sprocket.

"Those…those are air bubbles, I think," The man responded.

"Okay, sure. Air bubbles. How do you get them out?"

He blanched. Looking at the raised surface of the metal, the fact that it had been ruined by air pockets was apparent to anyone with even a minor technical background. But the issue wasn't the diagnosis, it was the treatment—every single bubble would have to be hammered out by hand. Getting rid of the exterior bubbles was relatively easy, the challenge lied in eliminating the trapped air in the interior. The task could take days—not that he'd tell the princess.

"Don't worry, it's easy to fix," he lied. "I'll just hammer them out. Should take a couple hours, tops."

"Good," Azula said. She walked off to make sure that the other prisoners hadn't bolted while she was away.

"Um, sir?" the engineer called. Azula turned around. What does he need now?

"Sir? I…need a hammer."

Azula rolled her eyes. "Just use a rock," she said. Imbecile. For Hei-Bai's sake, earthbending is just the fine art of smashing things with rocks, and he needs a hammer? Azula considered insulting the man further, but decided to save her breath.

Out of an absence of anything else to do, she gazed out at the surrounding landscape. The sun was beginning to peek out of the clouds, illuminating the world in a soft orange light. Morning. More than a few hours had passed since Mai and Ty Lee left. They should be back by now. What if the soldiers gave a false location, what if it's an ambush, what if—no! Mai's mongoose-lizard is just slow. They should have taken Mr. Snuffles.

With the sun now out, the open area that looked like a shrouded battleground at night was now just a desiccated plain filled with scraggly grass and dotted with a couple dead bushes. Azula scanned the landscape, trying to figure out how the soldiers got the jump on them. The whole area was flat, with absolutely no cover and nowhere to hide. Her face flushed with embarrassment as she realized that the soldiers probably didn't even hide anywhere—they just stood out in the open. Lesson learned: don't drive in the dark without turning on the frontal lamps. Azula looked back at the shattered windshield, unable to believe that a bunch of mouth-breathing dirt eaters managed to do so much damage to the tank.

"Here, the bubbles are gone."

Azula turned around. It was the engineer, holding up the newly forged sprocket. Azula snatched it out of his hands and screwed it back into place. She turned around to look at him and the other prisoners, now burdens who have outlived their usefulness. They already fixed the tank and gave her the location of the army hospital. There was no reason to keep them around anymore. Bringing them back to the mainland for imprisonment was out of the question. They were already deep in the Earth Kingdom, and turning back to drop off a couple peons at a labor camp would probably take them at least three days, more than enough time for the Avatar to slip out of her grasp. There was an easier solution.

According to Fire Nation military protocol, prisoners of war could not be executed without a verdict from the Court of Sozin. It was an arcane and largely unenforced rule put into effect after the Camellia-Peony clan war and quickly forgotten about. The only reason her father hadn't bothered to repeal it was that no one followed it anyway. Most generals ignored the order entirely or brought along a low level functionary to hand out death sentences by the dozens.

Execution it is. Azula put Mr. Snuffles off guard duty and sauntered over the prisoners. She looked down at them less like a guard watching her prisoners and more like a buzzard-wasp circling in the air over its eventual meal. She thought of spinning up a bolt of lightning and ending them all right there. It would certainly be the quickest way of doing it—the soldiers were already clumped together and it would only take a single bolt to kill them all. But as she thought of the rock smashing through the windshield, Ty Lee slumped over the seat, glass shrapnel biting into her skin, the river of rage flowing through her froze into a single murderous spike. No. These scum don't deserve quick.

Corporal Sensu began to stand up, only to have his legs swept out from under him. He landed with a hard thud and glowered at the princess standing over him. "Whatever information you want from me, you'll have to get from someone else," he said, still under the impression that he was being interrogated. "I won't talk."

Azula smiled at him. Her voice dripped with false sweetness. "Don't worry corporal, I don't expect you to talk…I expect you to dig."

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Eh, I don't particularly care for this chapter. I didn't really have any good ideas on how to advance the plot, since the story seemed to be at a bit of a lull after the fight was over and Mai and Ty Lee were gone. In the ending stages of writing this chapter, I realized that it was really rather dull: all that happens is that Azula harasses some soldiers and forces one of them to repair the tank. I was tempted on scrapping the whole thing and starting anew, but by the time I realized I already had three pages written. Don't worry, the next chapter will be better. Hopefully. Again, I appreciate all reviews, good and bad.