Author's note: Hey, I decided to redwrite this story, so I'm sorry if you liked the original version better, but this is how it's going to be from now on. Hope you enjoy it. :)

Chapter 1: Shun Yi

One Year Earlier…

A group of nomads, known as the Aditi, were traveling together from one Earth Kingdom city to another. The Aditi were a diverse people who didn't consider themselves citizens of any one country. They believed everyone and everything was connected.

But the war with the Fire Nation was testing this belief. Since they intermarried a lot with people from different countries, they had a few members who were descended from the Fire Nation and could bend fire. With the animosity many Earth Kingdom citizens felt toward the Fire Nation, they began to hide their true heritage when they were in a town or city to avoid persecution. The rest of the tribe was accused of being traitors for sheltering the firebenders if they were discovered. Even though they had nothing to do with the war, they would still become a target for the hate and frustration of those around them and were treated like enemies.

But like the rest of the world, the Aditi, including the Fire Nation descendants, had fallen out of harmony with the Fire Nation. They could understand the Earth Kingdom's reaction, because the Aditi were targeted by the Fire Nation as well. They lived in fear of the next raid, when the Fire Nation would catch up to them and take away anyone who could bend as well as their best metalworkers. The people they took were never seen or heard from again.

"Shun!" a woman with dark skin, blue eyes, and reddish-brown hair called.

"Yes?" said a girl with golden skin, green eyes, and black hair and a girl with tan skin, brown eyes and brown hair.

"I meant Shun Yi," the woman said. The brown-eyed girl shrugged and walked ahead.

"What is it, Aunt Arushi?" the girl with green eyes asked. She called Mrs. Arushi 'aunt', but they weren't related. The girl with green eyes was twelve and had a mole just under the corner of her left eye. She was dressed in a colorful langa voni (or half sari) with a green and orange short-sleeve top, orange and gold skirt, gold belt, and a hot-pink cloth draped around her waist and over her shoulder. She had two steel wrist cuffs, silver anklets with tiny bells, a gold necklace with a small red gem and two small white gems, and silver bell-shaped earrings. Everyone around her was dressed in equally colorful clothing and jewelry.

"You dropped this," Mrs. Arushi said kindly, holding up a jade hair stick with the design of a stylized dragon.

Shun recognized it immediately and instinctively reached up and felt her hair. It was still half up in a bun wrapped in braids that were secured with gold bands at the ends, and the purple flowers were still in her hair. But her hair stick was definitely gone and in Mrs. Arushi's hand.

Mrs. Arushi returned it to her.

"Oh, thank you!" Shun said, scared that she had almost lost it without realizing and relieved to have it back. It was the only thing she had to remember her mother by, not that she really had any memories of her. Her mother had died the night she was born. As the story went, her mother had stumbled across the Aditi, badly burned and going into labor. The Aditi had tried their best to help her, but the combined shock of the burns and childbirth were too much for her mother. The Aditi didn't know anything about her mother or her father, so they took her in and raised her themselves.

It wasn't an unusual story. With the war, the Aditi were always picking up orphans here and there. They gave all the orphans like Shun, who came to them as infants, the surname "Yi", and encouraged the children to form their own family unit and help take care of each other.

"Lucky Mom found it, huh?" a girl who looked just like a younger version of Mrs. Arushi said. She was Shun's best friend, Aruna. Aruna wore her hair in braided pigtails with a large pink flower on the side of her head.

"Yeah," Shun agreed, sticking the hair stick back in her hair, making sure it was more secure this time.

"Shun! Shun!" a younger girl called, running to catch up to them. "Tell us a story!"

A boy about the younger girl's age and a boy even younger than them also hurried over.

"It's boring," the older boy said, backing the girl up.

"Story!" the younger boy insisted.

All three children were part of the Yi 'family'.

"Which one?" Shun asked.

"I want one about a princess!" the girl, Gita, said.

"I want one with a monster," the older boy, Guiying, added.

"I want magic!" said the younger boy, Ping.

"Okay," Shun said, thinking quickly. "Once upon a time..."

"Fire Nation!" someone shouted from behind.

They all whirled around and saw that a small army was closing in on them. It was a light calvary unit using ostrich horses whose heads and front torsos were protected by form-fitting armor.

"On the cart!" Mrs. Arushi yelled and picked up Ping and put him on the back of the nearest cart. Shun followed, helping Guiying and Gita up, too. Aruna and Mrs. Arushi climbed on, and the man driving the cart urged the ostrich horses pulling it to run as fast as they could.

All around them, everyone was doing the same thing, piling children into the wagons and mounting their ostrich horses if they weren't already on them. They tried to put some distance between them and the Fire Nation cavalry, but they couldn't outrun them for long. Their ostrich horses only had one rider each, weren't as weighed down, and ran faster. Even though the Aditi had a head start, the Fire Nation was gaining on them.

"Stop! I, General Hanzou Hino of the Fire Army, command you to stop!" a man with noble features ordered.

The Aditi didn't stop. They knew what would happen if they did. Families would be torn apart; their supplies of metal and food would be confiscated.

"Stop!" a young man in the Fire Army, who looked about seventeen, yelled. "He told you to stop!"

"Don't break formation, Isamu!" the General ordered.

The Fire Army calvary unit was almost upon them, when Mrs. Arushi and several other benders jumped from the backs of wagons and ostrich horses to stand and fight.

"Mom!" Aruna cried.

Shun started digging in her wooly pigskin bag.

Mrs. Arushi used the supply of water she kept on her in a waterskin to whip the ostrich horse of the soldier closest to her. The ostrich horse was startled and threw its rider. Two earthbenders slammed their hands against the ground and created a high wall that the soldiers had to go around. As they came out from the behind the wall, the soldiers were met by Aditi firebenders, who frightened their ostrich horses and knocked them off their saddles.

But then Hanzou and Isamu came around the wall and forced the firebenders back with their own fierce firebending. They dodged the earthbenders' attempts to stop them and forced them to retreat. The other Fire Army soldiers pulled themselves together and rallied around the general and Isamu.

Mrs. Arushi tried to whip Isamu off his ostrich horse, but he evaporated her water with his fire and reached down to grab her.

"Mom!" Aruna screamed.

Shun pulled her hand back out of her bag, clutching a gun with a wide, short barrel and hard paper cartridge that was a little longer than a shotgun shell. Shun opened the gun at its breech and loaded the cartridge. She snapped the gun shut, aimed for Isamu, and pulled the trigger. A red flare shot out and nailed him in the shoulder.

He cried out and fell from his ostrich horse as he released Mrs. Arushi. She and the other benders retreated, scrambling onto their ostrich horses or running for the carts.

"Isamu!" Hanzou shouted and steered his horse over to him. "Keep charging!" he ordered the other soldiers. "Don't let them escape!"

Shun reloaded her gun and fired it at the next soldier who was close to grabbing a fleeing bender, hitting him square in the chest. He screamed and grabbed at his chest, lost his balance, and fell off, too. She reloaded again.

"I thought that was just supposed to be for making signals?" Aruna said.

"Yes, but they're dangerous to people, so…!" Shun said, hitting another soldier in the chest. She was hitting them in their armor, so she didn't think she was killing anyone, but she sure was scaring them. The calvary had fallen back, putting a more comfortable distance between them, afraid to get too close.

A canyon framed by sheer cliffs was ahead of them.

"Keep firing, Shun!" Mrs. Arushi said as one of the earthbenders pulled his ostrich horse up next to their cart, sitting behind him. "If we can make it to the cliffs, we can close up a wall behind us and cut them off completely.

Shun fired again. This time she missed, but the cavalry fell back again when they saw that they were still within her range of attack.

"Charge! Charge!" Hanzou ordered, ridding to the front of the formation with Isamu on the back of his ostrich horse. "She can't hit us all at once!"

The cavalry surged forward.

Shun fired and hit another soldier in the chest, but as he fell back, another soldier rode around him to take his place.

They weren't afraid now that their general was in the lead.

Shun reloaded and aimed for the general, but before she could fire, they entered the canyon, and the earthbenders threw up a thick wall behind them that was too high to jump or climb.

But the Aditi didn't slow down, they kept running for as long as they could to put as much distance between them and the Fire Army as possible.

"Did you see that?" Hanzou asked his men. The soldiers Shun had hit would have been killed without their armor. "That weapon could change the course of the war."

—∞—

That night, the Aditi celebrated their escape and Shun was treated to her all her favorites for the part she played. They though they were well rid of Hanzou and his men.

—∞—

Three Days Later…

But they weren't rid of him. Hanzou and his men were chasing them again.

"Capture her!" he ordered his men. "Capture the girl and her weapon!"

Shun realized they were after her, and they didn't seem to be as interested in the benders this time. She was riding on an ostrich horse with Gita sitting behind her, holding onto her waist.

Shun pulled up next to the nearest cart and said, "Take her!" Without stopping, the others helped Gita into the cart with them. Shun gritted her teeth and broke away from the rest of the tribe, riding off into the sunset.

"Shun!" Gita and Aruna yelled.

"Come back!" Mrs. Arushi called anxiously.

But Shun didn't go back. She kept on her new course, and the Fire Army soldiers followed her. Shun pulled ahead of them and rode hard through a forest, dodging around and weaving through trees, until she reached a shallow river, then she drove her ostrich horse downstream a fair distance before moving back onto dry land. She looked around. She seemed to have lost the cavalry.

Shun knew where she was. She had been there before. She also knew she wasn't far from one of the places the Aditi tribe liked to make camp, so she headed in that direction.

They were all relieved to see her when she found them. Shun was relieved, too. She had been worried that the Fire Army might go back to chasing the others if they couldn't get her.

"What was that about?" Aruna asked. "Why were they after you?"

"They wanted her new weapon," said Master Bibek, the man who had trained Shun in metalworking. He walked forward to stand in front of Shun.

"But it's not a weapon," Aruna said. "It's supposed to be for signaling—"

"She used it as a weapon, so now it is one," Master Bibek said, looking at Shun. "What do you think will happen if the Fire Nation gets hold of something like that?"

"Then we have to protect her," Mrs. Arushi said grimly, placing her hands on Shun's shoulders.

Shun stared up at her metalworking master. She knew what he was trying to say, and she understood. She had to leave, before the others got hurt protecting her, because she knew they would never abandon her. She might be able to hide from the Fire Nation better if she was on her own, too.

She waited until everyone else was asleep, then wrote a goodbye letter to Aruna and the others. She looked at Gita, Guiying, and Jun. They were all really attached to her, so she was worried they would be hurt when she left, but she knew Aruna and Farhan, another boy in the Yi family, who was about Shun's age, would look after them. As would the rest of the tribe.

Shun packed her wooly pigskin bag with everything she might need and crept outside on silent feet.

"Where do you think you're going?" Master Bibek asked, startling her so much that she jumped.

"Shh! I have to leave. We both know that," Shun whispered. "If I go off on my own, they'll chase me and leave the rest of you alone, probably."

"Probably," Master Bibek agreed. "But you won't blend in anywhere dressed like that." He handed her a bundle of folded clothing.

Shun looked at it. He had just given her clothes a boy might wear in the green and brown hues of the Earth Kingdom. No one looking at her would ever guess she belonged to their tribe if she wore it.

"And don't forget this," Master Bibek added, handing her a conical straw hat.

"Right," Shun whispered. She took the hat, too, and ducked back into the tent. She changed as quickly and quietly as possible, then stepped back out into the open.

Master Bibek nodded his head in approval.

"Hardly recognize you," he said.

"Thanks for everything," Shun told him. It seemed inadequate. He was the closest thing she had to a father. She hugged him before he could object and dashed off to get her ostrich horse. She found it, mounted it, and rode off into the night. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw Master Bibek still standing there, watching her leave.

—∞—

The plan had been to blend in, and Shun did. She supported herself by working for the local blacksmiths, but she was usually underpaid for her work, which the master there sometimes passed off as his own. She learned not to stay in one place for too long. The Fire Army caught up to her a few times, though they didn't realize it until it was too late. When they bullied the townsfolk, Shun snuck into the place where they kept their munitions and blew them up with the Fire Army's own blasting jelly.

She was always quick to get out of town after that, but they figured out it was her, and it didn't take long for these crimes to be added to her wanted posters. She was constantly having to outrun and outfox Hanzou and his men.

Shun became homesick. She was used to moving around a lot, but she missed her friends and the people she considered family. She wondered about them often and hoped she was keeping the Fire Nation too busy to raid the tribe again.