So. We're going to see some things in this upcoming chapter that were inspired by the old shaman we saw in LoK, when Korra lost her memories in Beginnings, and also my own thoughts and suppositions of how things might work if everyone were less combat oriented. So. Yeah.
Reviews!
SNicole25: What a fool!
Goddragonking: Thank you so much! I hope this is up to standards!
Devi-Angel17: Hamlet is correct! Five points to Ravenclaw!
curlystruggle: Doubly lucky, here's more!
OddShadow: And points for Hufflepuff too! Suki showed up after they got their tickets, and gave Sokka a hard time.
JamieTheMonster: What an ominous name. I love Hamlet, after MacBeth it's my favorite Shakespeare play ^^
Guest from Sep. 27th: Shits getting real!
DearChibico: And now yet more points awarded!
The walls of Ba Sing Se were a sight to beheld. They towered above the earth and cast massive shadows that stretched on. Thicker than a mountain, there was nothing that should have been able to penetrate them, no force on earth. Not even a bender of it.
Yet, the Fire Nation had returned to throw themselves at it again.
For some reason, Lien was not surprised.
The girl leaned over the wall, her eyes narrowed at the great drill that threatened the city. Inside of that was Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai. All of which she was relatively certain could kick her ass six ways to sunday. She had no desire to face them.
Yet, if she was going to stay with Aang, she was going to have to.
"How are we gonna stop it?" Aang asked, and everyone else looked towards Sokka, Lien included. The boy bristled.
"Why are you all looking at me?!" he demanded, crossing his arms in a huff. Ying and her family had left, taken into the city by some of the guards. None of them would look at Lien on their way out. They did not bid her farewell even when she wished them well.
The girl pushed back the sick feeling of betrayal to look downwards again.
"You're the idea guy," Aang explained, as though it were obvious.
"So what, no one else can ever come up with anything?"
Lien smiled when his voice broke.
"I could try to melt it," the firebender offered half heartedly. It wouldn't work, but it might look cool. She could draw designs across the metal in molten red…
"Oh look," she pointed to the ground, "They lost."
Ty Lee and Mai were kind enough to let them take the injured earthbenders back, dragging them up the wall to safety. When Katara ran over to help, Lien wandered after her to watch. She had always wanted to see a waterbender healing.
Unfortunately, she couldn't do much for the men lying prone in their beds.
Or, she didn't think she could…
"Hey, let me try that," she stepped up to the girls side, and Katara gave her a wide eyed look.
"You're not a waterbender," she objected. Which was true. She was about as far from that as it was possible to get and still be a bender at all. The others were also looking at her, like she'd totally lost her mind.
"Well, no," she agreed, then reached into her bag and pulled out a scroll. "But I found this in the Library years ago. I've never used it on a human before though."
The man in the bed paled. "What do you mean? What is that?"
"Oh hush," she scolded. "I practiced on magic foxes. How different can it be?"
"What is 'it'?" Aang asked, slipping up to look over her shoulder. The scroll lay in front of them, depicting old forms and diagrams.
"It's something not practiced much these days. My father's people are all far too busy with physical matters and furthering their own agenda," Lien explained. Then, she raised her voice to say, "Aang!"
The young airbender jumped in surprise, and the man on the bed was really starting to look scared. Lien tried not to laugh at the look on his face.
"I'm right here, what?" Aang asked, frowning up at her. She was a full head taller than him.
Lien tucked a long, waving strand of black hair behind her ear.
"Tell, what is fire?" she asked instead of answering him. Now everyone looked confused.
"Fire?" he repeated, and the girl nodded. "I don't know. Fire is, fire. You said that it was light and all that, but it burns stuff and-"
"And, that's not what I was hoping you were going to say," she cut in. Lien looked back down at the poor sap before her.
"Fire is, in essence, energy. It's made up of three parts. Heat, fuel, and air-"
"Air?" Aang looked stunned.
"Air," she confirmed. "Normally, fire is burning on a log or a lamp or something. In that case, the fuel is wood, or oil. The air comes from around it, and the heat is self sustaining," Lien was actually pretty sure that he could stop fire period if he practiced it a little. "In bending, those two things are still mostly true. The biggest difference, is that instead of wood it feeds off of the chi of the fire bender. Cut of the chi and the fire goes out, unless it's caught onto something else. Now, when you firebend, it's still pretty similar to regular bending, in that you can use pre established flames for it. Similarly, it's possible to take pre-established energy, and manipulate that," she said carefully.
"So you're what, energybending," Sokka mocked, waving his hands like they were casting spells and flying on brooms.
Lien snorted. "Ah, no. Energybending is totally different. This is just a subsidiary effect of firebending based on the inner workings of the human body. Similarly, if one was good enough at lightning bending, they could completely destroy the nervous system, or even take over the actions of one's body," she listed.
Sokka went so pale he almost looked caucasian.
"Not that anyone ever has," she quickly amended, "This is pure speculation."
"Speculation over firebending, that you want to do on me?" the poor mans voice broke.
Lien patted his shoulder. "You'll be fine, just hold still," she chided. Then she held her hand above his, and heat shimmered between the both of them before it sparked into a small flame. The man beneath her sucked in a sharp breath, which she ignored.
Instead, she turned her attention to the feeling of the energy in his body. She let the quick sparks of nerves run past, and focused on the slower crawl of chi. Or, it should have been a crawl. Rather than that it was still, bits of it trying to escape the new prison. Like a dam, or in the case of firebending, a fire break.
Lien let her own power sink in, letting the fire grow up towards her fingers. She caught onto the block, and with a wave of her hand she pulled it free, sending the Chi rushing to the other one, which she freed as well, all the way down to his finger tips. What she left behind was red, heated skin, and a distinct lack of arm hair.
"You burned me!" The man accused.
Lien rolled her eyes. "If you were burned you would be crying, you big wuss," she snipped. It was a burn, really. First degree, totally harmless. It would be gone in a few hours. "Now earthbend something."
Looking none too happy with her he still threw his arm out, and sure enough the bricks swelled and split to allow a column to rise from between them.
He stared at it, stunned. "I can bend again!"
Lien tilted her head back towards the sky. Was it too late for her to go home yet?
"Once I whip up some cover you won't be able to see, so stick close to me."
Lien was barely paying attention to her. Her eyes were locked on the drill in front of them, a massive, looming shadow of destruction that she could not hate more if she tried. Her heart was in her throat when they sprinted into a massive cloud of dust that Toph managed to draw off of the ground.
As the dirt settled down down on the ground Toph worked a hole into the earth and the five of them leapt in. Lien closed her eyes, trying not to see the dark, trying not to feel the earth pressed against her shoulder. She stepped closer to Sokka, her breath growing harder. Her stomach hurt, her heart raced.
From far off memories she heard metal crunching. From above she heard it groaning.
She started shaking.
When the light poured in and released them Lien was the first one to launch herself out of the hole after Toph.
"What's wrong with you?" Sokka asked, looking at her in bewilderment.
Lien swallowed thickly. "I don't like small spaces," she said simply. When she had been in that bubble years ago she had been too busy to be afraid. She had been more worried about ways to get out, and oxygen deprivation did wonders to keep someone calm.
Aang flew up to hang upside down and give the rest of them a boost, minus Toph. Lien walked away from the hassle of trying to convince the blind earthbender to join them. It was hot in there, a wet heat that came from steam engines. It was so unlike the dryness of her home. This was damp and oppressive.
Huh. Turns out she could hate it more.
"You know, maybe I'll just go back down with Toph," she suggested, looking up at the hard, unending metal hallways.
"Don't be silly. We need you here," Aang dismissed, tugging her away her staring blankly at a gage.
Sokka took the lead, taking them through the dark, red tinted hallways. It reminded her of old memories she had of the inside of submarine's, or the pictures she had seen when she was someone else. When she was not a lotus but something else. When she was-
"I need plans for this machine," Sokka cut in. "Schematics of what it looks like on the inside."
If the hole had been bad, this was worse. It wasn't as tight but it was long and metal and there were pipes hanging down. Pipes, pipes that might fall, might move in, might skewer-
"Lien!" Sokka grabbed her arm and pulled her back into a nook in the metal. She sucked in a sharp breath filled with hot steam. "What's wrong with you?" he hissed in her ear. The firebender tried to burn him by accident.
"I told you. I don't like small spaces," She let out a breath that flickered with sparks and Sokka jerked back, letting go. Part of her wished that he hadn't. She could have used some kind of contact right about then. "They remind me of death."
"I- look, we don't have time for this. We have to take this thing down!" he gestured through the mist. Footsteps echoed and they shut up, watching Katara take down the engineer with only a single push of ice. Lien tried to focus, but it was hard. This was so like her death.
She really should have stayed with Toph.
While they looked over the map of the machine Lien worked to bring her breathing in. To focus. This was not a subway, this was not underground. She was safe from falling poles and collapsing trains.
She let out a breath. Then in again. This was fine. This wasn't a subway, it wasn't underground.
It wasn't a subway it wasn't underground.
She repeated the mantra all the way into the wide open spaces of the outer shell of the drill. As soon as they were there she found she could breath easier.
"Wow," she said dryly, approaching one of the massive beams. "This is gonna take a while."
"We're going to have to work hard for this," Sokka agreed, and his sister scoffed.
"What's this 'we'? Aang, Lien and I are doing all the work," Katara scolded, crossing her arms at him. Lien smiled at them and wondered what it was like to have siblings like that. The closest thing she had to that was Ghashiun, and they were hardly on friendly terms. They never had been, and her actual sister…
Lien shook off her thoughts and went to a bar separate from Aang and Katara's. She lowered herself into a stance reminiscent of what a real firebender might use and threw a punch. Fire streamed from her fist, onto the metal. How hot did it have to be to melt, she wondered.
Half an hour found her sitting on the ground, sweating through her gifted clothes and glaring harshly at the pole. It had warped slightly, but it wasn't melting.
"Do you have any poems for this?" Katara asked from her pole. She was glaring at it like it was personally offending her. Which is might as well have. Lien was insulted for sure.
Dryly, the firebender said, "Lost time is never found again."
"Come on team, don't quite now!" Sokka cried, "We-" a glare from Katara had him backtracking. "I mean, you guys are almost there!"
Lien crossed her arms and watched them go through the last few inches. She knew what would happen, and sure enough the structure groaned and the support slid, hers even compacted further, but it didn't come apart and nothing stopped working.
"At this rate, we won't be able to do enough damage to stop the drill before it hits the wall," Aang mourned.
"I don't know how much more of those I have in me," Katara confessed.
Lien waited for Sokka's next grand plan, and it appeared right on schedule, after a few seconds of him touching his chin and looking around at their surroundings. The eiry red glow freaked her out to no end. It was like some kind of weird metaphor for hell, and her earlier Dante quotation came back to her.
All of a sudden the drill started shaking and his face lit up.
"Do you hear that? We did it! We took it down!" he cheered. "We better get out of here, before-"
"Before nothing," Lien interrupted. "That's not the drill falling apart, that's not metal caving in on itself," she knew that sound all too well, "It's-
"Congratulations crew," boomed the overhead loudspeaker, "The drill had made contact with the outerwall of Ba Sing Se."
"Yeah, that," Lien pointed up at the tube that produced the noise.
Sokka started panicking about then. They all did. The only nonbender among them threw himself against the metal, begging the brace to budge while he shoved with all his might. Lien sighed softly.
"This is ridiculous," she declared, "We're putting everything to getting these things cut down and its not working. We'll never get all the way through all of them." she waited, prepared to 'have' an epiphany of her own if it was needed.
It wasn't.
"That's it!" Aang leapt up. "Maybe we don't need to cut all the way through them Toph has been teaching me that you shouldn't give 100 percent of your energy to any one strike." Lien laughed when the airbender used Sokka as a demonstration mechanism for his plan, beating up the poor boy. He always got the short end of the stick.
Even when they were attacked, it was him that almost had his hair burnt off by blue fire. Blue fire.
Lien cursed softly on the sands and seas.
"You were right Azula," Ty Lee smiled brightly. "It is the Avatar. And, friends," her smile changed when it face Sokka, who melted just a little bit.
"Who's the new girl?" Mai asked, her dark eyes landing on the young firebender.
If only she could melt into the ground. "We should run now," she advised.
"Gee, ya think?" Sokka asked sarcastically. Azula shot out another fireball at them and Lien grabbed his hand to drag him out of the way, starting the sprint out of the great monstrous machine.
"Why didn't you block that?" he demanded.
Lien made a high pitched, panicked sort of sound in the back of her throat. "You shouldn't reveal everything you can do at once. The longer it takes the Fire Nation to figure out that Aang is learning firebending the better. Also," she tacked on, "I've never met another firebender in my life. I have no idea how to block it."
Sokka's jaw dropped. "Are you kidding me?!" he shouted at her. The girl shrugged.
"Where am I going to meet one? In case you didn't notice, they aren't exactly interested in the Si Wong. No one is. We've been untouched by this war directly. I think the last person from the Fire Nation to pass through was my father, and he's dead!" Or close to it, at least. If she recalled correctly, Zhao ended up in the Fog of Lost Souls.
They skidded to a stop when Aang broke off from them.
"You guys go!" he ordered, "I know what I need to do!"
Katara unstrapped her water pouch and threw it at him. "Here! You need this more than I do," she announced, and turned to start sprinting again.
Lien had no problem over taking them. Her legs were longer, her strides took her farther and she left scorched metal in her wake, her fear awakening fire to push her faster, farther.
What she wouldn't give for a sailer right about then.
They came to a halt in front of the slurry pipeline, and after looking in Lien stepped back and shook her head.
"Yeah. No. I'm not going in there," she declared. Sokka grabbed her arm and tugged.
"Come on, it's our way out!"
Lien jerked out of his grip and took another step.
"Not on your life! That place is small, dark, and full of water. Have you been listening to me all day? I'm not going in there! I'll take my chances with the fire princess, thanks."
Sokka paused, and looked at her suspiciously.
"Can you even swim?"
Lien wanted to scream, 'I'm from the desert! Of course I can't swim!'.
Instead, she hissed, "Not well."
Sokka groaned and looked behind them, where Mai and Ty Lee were rapidly approaching. He grabbed her without warning and dove in, ignoring her horrified shrieking and the fire that jumped from her fingertips. It sputtered out the second they touched the sludge, and Lien started thrashing in a panic.
"Stop- struggling!" Sokka snapped, tightening his grip on her. Full of fear and panic, Lien grabbed the boy tight.
It was all she could do.