Chapter 3: The Lieutenant's Amnesia
It has been an entire day since the incident... I am still completely unsure of what to think of this Lieutenant guy. On one hand, he is the guy who kept me from being killed, but on the other, he seemed so enraged that he could kill the guy. But I had to admit, the clothes that I'm wearing were probably silk woven so precisely that it probably puts the clothes of royalty to shame. I finally convinced him to allow me to ask questions about him and the fire nation and he would ask questions about me.
"So..." Sokka said awkwardly, unsure of what exactly to say.
"So..." replied the Lieutenant, mockingly.
"I guess my first question would have to be, what is your name?"
"Next question." the Lieutenant replied casually.
"What!? We had a deal... I ask you questions and you ask me questions". He barely said three words and I am already agitated, this can only possibly go one way, and that is downhill.
"True, and I am indeed a man of my word. We agreed to ask each other questions, nothing was ever said about answering those questions". The Lieutenant was apparently witty too now, which I mentally noted.
"Alright then, what questions will you actually answer". Yep, downhill indeed.
"How could I possibly know what questions I would answer, do you have a list which I can choose from, because otherwise, the number of different questions you could ask me is infinite". It was odd to finally see this guy in a happy mood, hopefully this is normal or this ship ride is going to last forever. That still did not change the fact that he was becoming aggravating to me.
"Fine! Um... to answer your first question, I don't honestly remember my name." The Lieutenant said reluctantly.
"What!? How do you not even know your name?" Sokka was quite shocked at the current situation... how does someone just forget their own name.
"Well... It actually all started a few weeks ago, you cannot tell anyone else this though."
I woke up, covered in dust, it was an odd dust though, a mixture of stone and ash. The first thing I noticed was that I was suffering from extreme hunger, it must have been weeks since I have eaten. I opened by eyes to a smoke filled sky, fires were everywhere, in the near distance, there was a massive hole in a massive wall. Bodies were sprawled everywhere, some in green colored armor, severely charred and singed to death, others in red armor, covered in dirt and gravel, dying from suffocation and internal bruising presumably. As he looked down at his own body, he noticed that he fit into the latter category of people, except without the gruesome death part.
'Great', he thought, 'I woke up in a war zone'.
As he walked around, he started to think about what had happened before, and realized he could not recollect the battle, in fact, he could not even remember anything before the battle.
'Alright, this is not good. I cannot remember anything and I am surrounded by what I can only assume are dead comrades and dead enemies.
Since I am the only one alive here, I guess we won.' He chuckled to himself before the realization of him being surrounded by dead bodies set in again.
"I think I saw movement over here. I'm going to go check it out." He heard from a distance. Fearing that it was possibly an enemy, he quickly hid behind a pile of ruble. A soldier dressed in red walked around the corner, with a mask mimicking a sea raven, the uniform only matched his by color.
'Wait, our uniforms barely match at all, maybe we are not allies. No, that's the stupidest thing I've ever told myself.' He thought for a moment before realizing that he had nothing to compare it to anyway.
As he glanced around, he noticed a dead soldier wearing a uniform like the one the soldier who had just appeared before. He crawled over and as quickly as he could, switched his and the dead soldiers uniforms, trying to mask as much disgust as he could, then decided quickly to bury the man in a shallow grave, so as not to arouse suspicion.
"Hello... is anyone out there?" the sea raven masked soldier called out. He slowly rose from his crawling space and walked out into the open.
"Lieutenant, I thought everyone that was living had already been picked up, say was that you who I saw moving around just a minute ago."
"The one and only." He replied, his voice attempted to give confidence, yet came out hoarse after what must have been weeks without use.
"Well, it's been a week since then, I don't know how you managed that, but you must be pretty hungry." The other man seemed relatively light-hearted, seemingly easy to deceive, I could play along blindfolded and hands tied behind my back.
"If I don't get food now, I'm probably going to starved to death out here, definitely the least heroic death out here." The other soldier chuckled slightly, I faked a slight smile.
"Well, come back to camp, we're cooking right now, you could get washed up really quickly and then dinner should be done. By the way, we're leaving this dump tomorrow to head back to the south, we've been told by the fire lord to go back to raiding the Southern Water Tribe. Back to the old routine."
Great, now I am going to travel presumably far away from here, where it will be difficult if not impossible to figure out who I am.
Its too late to turn back now.
