To the troll who's shitposting every chapter: Really, my guy? If you dislike the story so intensely, stop reading it. It's literally easier than clicking the review button.
Sorry about that, every other person. Now, on with the story.
Suki sluggishly returned to the world of consciousness, and regretted it instantly. The last thing that she remembered was drinking that drugged tea. Her mouth felt like it was filled with cotton and tasted like bad kimchi, and her eyelids felt like they weighed as much as an ostrich-horse. She tried to stretch out, only to discover her hands were stuck together. Cracking her eyes open, she had to immediately shut them again from the bright light. But she'd seen what she'd needed to. Thick iron manacles bound her hands in front of her body. Amateurs. If you'd bound my hands behind me, it'd be more than a minor inconvenience.
She finally managed to heave her eyes open again, to find herself in the same cell that she'd spent the last week on her way to the Fire Nation. Blinking as fast as her drugged eyes would allow, she gradually adjusted to the light in the small room, dim as it was.
"Good. The drugs finally wore off." A voice came from the foot of her cot, beyond her body's current ability to check. "Prisoner transfer can continue. Ensigns, take her arms and get her to her feet." She felt an arm on either side of her roughly lift her from the cot. Her head lolled to the side and she stared into an unfamiliar helmet design. Not the skull mask of firebenders or the regular rounded grey of the nonbending soldiers, this helm was a deep crimson with a scarlet visor with a third eye over the forehead. Her brow furrowed in confusion, but none of the guards saw fit to enlighten her. "Welcome to the Boiling Rock, mudblood. The last place that you'll ever see."
The drugs were quickly wearing off, and she slowly regained use of her limbs. She was tempted to kick out their feet and make a dash for it, but she didn't like her odds against an entire ship in the middle of the Fire Nation. You swore to serve, and service doesn't demand suicide. It demands that you live. Suki drew a shuddering breath and flopped her head to the opposite side as they manhandled her through the corridors and onto the sunlit deck. All that she could see was a rocky cliffside, though there was a trace of sulphur on the ocean breeze. I expected something a little more impressive, to be honest. Her body jerked as the guards pulled her along, stumbling over her own feet. A set of stairs carved into the cliff went back and forth, winding their way up in a series of switchbacks with a guard station at the bottom of the stairs.
It took until they dragged her off of the boat for her feet to wake back up and she could finally support her own weight. The guard on her left grunted in satisfaction, while the other one was indifferently silent. She staggered up the steps, slowly regaining her sense of balance. The smell of salt and ocean started to fade as the sulphurous stench began to overpower her nose. The long staircase seemed to last forever, but they eventually reached the top and she began to swear.
"Kyoshi…." The words left her lips involuntarily as she looked beyond the basically redundant secondary guard post at the top of the staircase to the gondola waiting for her. And the lake of boiling water beneath it that led to a hexagonal building with high walls, at least 40 feet tall. With a pull, she was jerked into the gondola. The silent guard stayed behind and pressed a button on a panel beside the gondola, and it stuttered to a start, flinging her to the side for a moment before the movement steadied out. The other guard merely held onto a handrail beside the door, smirking a little at her difficulty. "Let's see you get drugged and have perfect balance, ashmaker." She muttered under her breath.
Apparently not quiet enough, as the guard's fist slammed into her ribs. "Watch your tongue, mudblood. You're here because you proved inferior, and her highness deigned to keep you alive for her own reasons. We wouldn't want you to throw yourself off of the gondola in despair, now would we? She so enjoys breaking prisoners."
"If I fell off, would she care how I got there, or would it be your fault for letting me jump?" Suki arched an eyebrow at him, hoping that her read of the princess was right. Judging by the way that the guard paled and swallowed, she'd been right. "That's what I thought." She coughed as his fist found its way into her side again. Worth it.
The guard sulked in the far corner of the gondola as she smiled, looking over the lake. Wisps of sulphurous steam wafted through the air and across her face, a foul-smelling moisture beading over her brow. Her face twisted, forcing herself to try and ignore the rotten stench. The cabin jerked as it finally docked with the main prison building, and her scowl deepened as she unconsciously tried to brush her short hair from her face and was promptly reminded of her bound hands. She stepped out of the gondola and out onto the prison proper where she was greeted by another pair of guards, both of them looking disdainfully down at her.
"Prisoner 314. Welcome to the Boiling Rock, your new home." The one on the left, a woman with a permanent scowl seemingly engraved into her face, tossed a bundle of dull red cloth at her while her partner, a scruffier man with a chipped tooth in his smile watched her with a disquieting amount of interest. Suki presumed that it was her new prisoner uniform; given that the Fire Nation seemed to like their national colours as the rest of the world outside Kyoshi Island did, she felt as though it was a solid bet. That it seemed to match the clothes given to her on the ship over here also helped. "Any last words before you're tossed in the deep end, dirt kisser?" She mentally identified them as Scowls and Chiptooth before venturing an answer.
"Would you answer them if I did have any?" Suki had an unfortunate feeling that she already knew the answer, but it didn't hurt to ask to see how low to set her expectations.
The other guard, a man with a thin scar on his jaw and a leer that made her feel dirty for simply being looked at, smiled widely. "Clever girl." He motioned her to get moving with a wave of his hand, throwing a small arc of flame with it. Her instincts screamed at her to recoil, but she managed to fight it down into a tiny flinch.
He didn't miss it, if the grin that spread across his face was anything to go by. "You know, I heard a rumour that her Highness brought you in personally. Guess that that confirms it for us. Keep your head down and act the model prisoner, and the guards won't have any reason to firebend at you. The other prisoners, on the other hand…" She couldn't do much more than glare at him before the scowling woman shoved her shoulder, making her stagger forwards a step. She laughed at Suki's plight before the other guard silenced her. "Now move it, prisoner."
She was pushed through a doorway into a long staircase. She tried to take in as much as she could about the layout as she was marched down the stairs. Just because she didn't have plans for a breakout immediately didn't mean that she was giving up and burying any chances of taking advantage of any such situation in the future, no matter how unlikely. The staircase was plain and unremarkable, as were the corridors that she was shuffled through. This was presumably the guard section of the prison; doors were sturdy and unadorned, though a few of the doors had titles on the wall beside them, marking them off as common areas such as the break room. She was taken through a series of locks, areas where only one door would open at a time before she was introduced into the yard.
A large, hexagonal yard occupied the centre of the Boiling Rock. Exposed to the air and sunlight, it was the closest to freedom that the prisoners likely ever saw, and one such group was already in the plaza being guided through slow kata. An excessive number of guards were watching the group; from what she could see of the ground and side walkways hanging off from the main structure, there were at least a couple of guards for each prisoner, all either armed with solid looking batons or odd pouches of some sort on their belt. Some of the movements looked familiar to her, but she couldn't quite place them. It wasn't until small flames started erupting from a prisoner's body that she realised that they were running through firebending forms. She stopped for a second before her guards kept her moving forwards.
"Say what you will, but we're not monsters. Denying a bender their element is just asking for them to withdraw into themselves and eventually snap." Before her eyes, a pair of guards stepped in and grabbed the prisoner, roughly pulling her out of the group and pushing her to the ground. They beat her to the ground with their batons as she held her arms up to protect her head. Deeming her suitably cowed, they each grabbed an arm and frogmarched her out of the yard. The other prisoners didn't even seem to care, a few of them jeering at her lack of control while the rest of them ignored the entire situation, seemingly happy enough to run through their kata clean.
"What's going to happen to her?" Suki couldn't help but think the worst of the guards; this being the most notorious prison in the entire nation for a reason.
"She's just going to spend a few hours in the cooler. Nothing too serious this time." Despite his wandering eyes (and wasn't that disturbing; she'd barely seen eighteen winters), Chiptooth was proving to be surprisingly garrulous.
Something in the way that he mentioned 'the cooler' made all of the hair on the back of her neck stand. "The cooler?"
Scowls cleared her throat and looked at her partner pointedly. "If you're done gossiping, 314 needs to get to her cellblock." Chiptooth looked chagrined for a moment before shaking it off and giving Scowls the lead, dropping into a sullen silence. She led them into another building on the other side of the yard, saluting another guard on the way through the thick steel doors. As her eyes adjusted to the lower light in the cellblock, she saw levels and levels of identical floors of identical looking cells. She was brought up to the second level and shoved against the wall beside the cell as Chiptooth opened the door and held it, fist half-clenched and threatening, embers falling from it. Scowls let her off the wall, unshackled her wrists and waved her into the cell. "Here's your new home. Get used to it. It's where you're going to be spending the rest of your miserable life. No one's ever escaped from the Boiling Rock, and a dirty rock humper like you won't be the first."
Deciding that it wasn't worth the trouble, not yet at least, she gave in. It was a surprisingly roomy cell, half again as large as her cell on the ship had been, though the bunk looked to be identical. "Home sweet home, I guess."