AN: Finally updated. Sorry about the delay. I promise to be better about this in the future, I just hit a writer's block for this one before. It's all good now, though; I actually know where the plot is going this time.

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With time, it's possible to make someone unreal within your mind.

Kimiko made her mother unreal, a mere shadow in the back of her mind. She plowed through martial arts classes, immersed herself in fashion. She made friends in her class. She developed a crush on a boy from her school. Her life was a whirlwind of distractions. Dance classes, video games, anything and everything at all she could find. Tohomiko Kimiko went from a somewhat quiet girl to a fullblown social butterfly, and never looked back. With time and effort, she buried her mother under so many activities that she never mentioned her to anyone, not even at home. It was hard, and it hurt, but she had to. It would've hurt more to dwell on it. Fire wasn't an element capable of inaction. She had to do something, and that something was utter denial punctuated by lonely nights spent crying into her pillow, wishing for a mother.

Her fire powers, though at their most basic, were enough to have her father enlist her at the Xiaolin Temple. It was understood by both, though unspoken, that she was going to do something good with her life, unlike her mother. And Kimiko accepted this, because as she had grown, so had her understanding. She knew now what it really meant to be a criminal. Her mother was not someone to be spoken of - she would shred the Tohomiko family's reputation. She was a shame, a spot of black on a shining white reputation, a gaijin in a nihonjin family. The world needed to see a Tohomiko woman doing something good. They needed to be distracted so that the past wouldn't be uncovered. Kimiko never objected to going to the Temple, not once. Maybe she could become the daughter her father always wanted.

There were moments, she knew, where she was alarmingly like her mother. She saw it in her father's face every time. When she got in trouble, when she scored low in kanji, when she wore her hair in a single ponytail - his eyes closed, he sighed and there was an energy in the room that told her she'd done it again. She always tried to explain her actions, went over her kanji for hours, and ripped out the ponytail holder, but it was too late. She was her mother's child, whether she liked it or not. Kimiko was like her in ways that could not be controlled. The narrowing of her eyes when she was mad, the way her fists shook when she was scared, and the startling, untaught ability to run without tiring for huge distances. She didn't know whether to be pleased she was like her mother, like a normal girl would've been, or to be annoyed, like her father was. The moments brought forth emotions she didn't understand or identify. That was why it was so important not to think of the woman. The more she did, the more that things seemed to go wrong. There wasn't really any way to win in all this, just to survive.

If she could keep her mother as a figment of the past, she'd make it through life. If she could keep picturing her as someone she never had to worry about meeting, who was probably dead, maybe she could go through life not caring. It was hard, keeping someone so dear so distant in her mind. Though being with people and doing things helped, there was no denying that deep inside, Kimiko still wanted a mother. She wanted to do normal things like shopping with someone other than her housekeeper. She wanted to have girl talks and do hair with her mom like all those girls on TV. She even wanted to be scolded like a normal girl. Somedays she didn't know what hurt more, pretending nothing was wrong or knowing everything wasn't right. All she could do was ignore everything she felt and act as if her mother had never existed at all, because acting came much more naturally to her on this subject than genuinity did.

And so it was unreal, to her, when the latest Shen Gon Wu was unveiled...

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"The Anklet of Anetkah," Dojo read off the scroll to the gathered Dragons, "Oh, I could tell you stories about this. Grand Master Dashi even thought about renaming it The World's Worst Wu. So many people have killed each other over this one..."

"Why?" Omi asked, looking at the scroll with eager eyes, "I do not see what it - IT LETS YOU FIND ANYONE?"

Raimundo snatched the scroll from Omi, and, being taller, held it up high while Omi jumped up and down repeatedly. "Nice. Think we could get a date with this?"

Clay rolled his eyes, half smiling, as Kimiko giggled behind her hands. Omi, not getting even this simple joke (bless his little heart), snatched the scroll from Rai and looked it over again. Dojo was shivering slightly, probably from the Shen Gon Wu activating, but for a moment they were silent in the stillness of the late morning. Then Omi's forehead scrunched into an expression of confusion as he read over the Chinese. (Kimiko tried to read the scrolls sometimes, but Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzhi didn't have enough similarities for her to be any good at it.) Omi turned to Dojo, confused.

"Why does it not let you find your enemies?" he asked, annoyed. "What is the sharp end if I cannot use this in battle?"

"You mean the 'point', Omi." Dojo grinned as he slithered outside, "See, the problem was that the original design let you find anyone. Chase Young got a hold of it back in the day. He used it to find more than a few Xiaolin warriors that he knew he could take in a fight. Things got pretty awful for half a century, and we lost about half our monks. Once Dashi got a hold of it again, he made it impossible to use to find enemies so that we wouldn't have to post a bunch of 'now hiring' signs everywhere. It's still pretty dangerous, though. There's no telling what criminals could do with it..."

As Dojo unfurled into his full form, something clicked in Kimiko's mind. She didn't want to say it, she wanted to forget the thought even crossed her mind. Her brain fought the words down the second the idea formed. That well honed feeling of denial struck her even as she climbed onto Dojo's back. No, she should leave the past alone. She couldn't keep trying and giving up and trying her whole life. She had to keep personal issues out of her duties to the Xiaolin. She couldn't run around using Wu for her own issues. But her mind and her heart were disconnected. A chance to find her mother. Her mother, who she'd never even met. She tried to keep her mouth shut and think about something else.

She couldn't. Suddenly, she blurted out, "Could I find my mother with it?"

Dojo blinked. "Well, yeah, if she's alive, this baby will find her. Why'd you ask?"

An embarrassed blush worked its way up Kimiko's face, now that everyone was staring at her. The Japanese part of her mind, the part that was prideful, told her to shut up. This was not a subject anyone else could ever know about. She'd lived the last six years under the premise that her mother was dead and that was that. The Tohomiko family, as far as anyone knew, didn't have a clue what happened. The world was not supposed to know anything else was known. Her heart, on the other hand, was not listening to her mind. How many times had she wanted to tell someone, to run to someone and ask for their help? Even Keiko didn't know about this. Secrets weren't the giddy fun movies made them out to be. Secrets weighed on her like a thick blanket. Her father would kill her for this, but she couldn't keep it down anymore. It was like water waiting to break forth from a dam. Screw what she'd been trying to tell herself. There was no pride among the Dragons, because all of them had seen her at her worst as it was. If anyone could keep a secret, they could. She trusted them, she realized, more than she trusted anyone else. And in that moment, all her work making her mother unreal was undone instantly.

"I never knew my mother," she admitted after a pause, voice wavering slightly as she avoided meeting anyone's eyes. "She left my dad and I to go live in China when I was small."

"Why?" Omi asked as Dojo took off, gliding easily into the air. "Were you not a cute baby?"

Kimiko smiled in spite of the heaviness settling in her heart and mind. "It wasn't that, Omi." She sighed, and ran a hand through her hair. "I'm not really sure why she left. My dad said she got involved with a Chinese crime lord and disappeared, but that's all I know."

"I see." The Water Dragon paused, his round face dead serious. "Then we shall rescue her!" He pumped a tiny fist in the air. "We shall get the Anklet of Anetkah, arm ourselves with all the Shen Gon Wu we can carry, summon a thousand warriors from across China, and march into the criminal's home in the dead of night, rescuing her once and for ALL!" As Omi spoke, his tone grew increasingly intense and dark as he stood up and waved his fists angrily.

Now everyone stared at Omi, instead of her.

"That... might be a bit much, partner," Clay said, slowly, as Raimundo rolled his eyes. "Let's take this one step at a time. No need to count our sweet peas without opening the pods. We don't even know where it is, and where Kimi's mom is. For all we know, maybe she escaped and is trying to make it home on foot. China's a big country; she might be hauling butt and not be anywhere close."

"Yeah, and besides, we have to keep the thing away from Chase, first," Raimundo added, rubbing his chin. "I know I don't say this often enough, but everybody, beat the crap out of Jack. This is important."

"Speak of the devil," Clay muttered, and it was at that point Kimiko burst into much needed, desperate sounding laughter.

Jack Spicer was hanging upside down from a tree. His pants had fallen down, pooling around his thighs and revealing knee high, pink and red heart print socks. As Kimiko's laughter died into a fit of giggles, his face went the exact same shade of red as his socks. Each sound seemed to bounce back in China's Jie Jing forest, making Jack more infuriated as he desperately flailed his arms, which only caused hundreds of pine needles to stick themselves onto his coat, tinging his body orange. He was quite a sight, and the Japanese girl quickly snapped a picture of him on her cell phone while muffling her laughter with one hand. Raimundo just outright laughed.

"And I thought Omi was fashion backwards," Kimiko said, still smothering her laughter with one hand.

"Shut up," Jack muttered. "Help me get down, please? I can't feel my legs anymore!"

"How did you get up there?" Omi asked curiously. "And why are you stuck? It is just a tree."

"Not exactly," Jack said, shaking his head as best he could. "All the trees here are coated with some kind of sap. My robots and I have been stuck here for hours."

Raimundo raised an eyebrow. "But these are just normal trees... aren't they?"

At this point, Dojo coughed slightly, drawing all eyes to him. "The Anklet of Anetkah has been known to put some traps to keep people from getting it. Nothing major, though. Just sticky trees, quick sand, and the occassional weather freak out. I didn't think it'd be up and going already, though."

Kimiko's cringed visibly. "Are we going to be able to get to it at all, Dojo?" Her voice sounded a bit more scared than before.

"We should be able to find it, if we split up. It can only generate one trap at a time." Dojo stated firmly. "Which is good, since I have no idea where in the forest it is - um, Kimiko, where are you going?"

The Japanese girl gave him an unreadable look, face set in a determined frown. "I'm going to find my mother."

And with that, she was gone in a flash.

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On the back of a piece of paper Kimiko found in the attic, there was a list of names.

One column was marked Boy Names. The other was Girl Names. The handwriting was neat and extra tiny. A lot of the names were crossed out or had been circled. One name in the girls column was marked as 'this one'. If the handwriting meant it was her mother's writing, then this was a list of possible names for her daughter. Kimiko read over the names, excited. Her mother had considered naming her a lot of things, but had settled on Shihong. Kimiko tried saying it outloud. It felt foreign in her mouth, and very distinctly Chinese. That day, she had put her hair up in Chinese buns, and signed up for Chinese next semester at school.

It was her last ditch effort to make some kind of connection to her mother. In her mind, maybe someday, she would be brave again. Maybe some day she would go to Chinese and look for her mother. Maybe then her father wouldn't be so overwhelmingly sad. Maybe it wasn't too late to fix everything. It was such a distant dream. It was such a long shot. So sue her, she didn't want to give it up. She wanted to believe that one day, everything would change. One day, she hoped, everything would be better. Dear God, she wanted to forget her mother, and pretend she'd never had one. She wanted to make believe nothing was wrong. She just couldn't. A part of her would always be like this, at war with her, struggling to find the lost piece of the puzzle.

Shihong means 'the world is red'. Kimiko wasn't sure whether to equate that with love or anger, so she had long ago told herself it meant passion. In her darkest hours, it was something to draw strength from. When everything was going wrong, she would shut her eyes tightly. She was Shihong. She was pure passion. Passion was fire. No one spat out a fire, no one stepped on a fire and didn't get burned. She could do this. She was passion and anger and love. The world was red.

In the past, she'd used that determination as a guilty little cheat sheet for life. She'd been trying to pretend she hadn't had a mother for a long time, and yet when she needed strength, she turned to her. It was not right to dwell in the past, let alone draw strength from it. It was just so hard not to. There was something enpowering about knowing her mother, wherever she was, loved her and named her and wanted her. Somedays, even in the Xiaolin, the powers of love and friendship weren't enough. Some days she needed some personal inner fire to draw from. Was it right? No. Did it make sense? Not really. But it was the last little piece of her mother she could cling to. It was the only way to think of her mother without worrying about slipping up and drawing attention to herself.

Plowing through the thick forest at top speed, not caring about the scratches of tree branches, she didn't even register that it was Chase Young in front of her. Her mind only registered a threat to her quest for her mother. She slammed into him, fists blazing with uncontrolled fire, and they toppled to the ground. He was startled. She was viciously burning him, on accident, from sheer terror and love and a whirlwind of uncontrolled emotions. All of the Xiaolin had to watch their emotions closely, or else they lost control. Even so, this was the first time he had ever seen one of the Dragons act this way. Chase paused underneath her, no longer struggling, and examined her closely for a moment. Then, with a smirk, he vanished, leaving Kimiko alone with the Anklet, the sound of her own heavy breathing, and a note.

A note that read, quite simply, Meet me at one am tonight in Beijing's city square if the name Laan Se means anything to you.

Laan Se. Lan se was Mandarin for blue. Blue. Ao. Kimiko's knees gave out beneath her in shock.

"Mommy..."