"So…..you wanted to talk about the domes." Junior said awkwardly as he stood up out of the dining room chair. "I had started coming up with diagrams back at the south pole. These new ones could use the same honeycomb reinforcements we put in the Colossus to reduce weight, meaning we could open and close them faster."
"Junior, I didn't really want to talk about the domes. I mean we're pretty low on metal at the moment anyway." Bataar senior explained a tad sadly. He reached into the folds of his robes and pulled out a pair of glasses. They were thick, black, as much tape as frame. They were Bataar's old glasses.
Wing and Wei entered boldly with Opal and Huan following after them.
"What is all this?" Bataar Junior asked suspiciously. "Some sort of family intervention."
"No." Said Wei.
"Well not exactly." Wing added.
"Your mother's discussing it with Kuvira now." The elder Bataar began uncertainly. As he spoke his children sat around him, all of them watched Junior intently. All save Huan who seemed rather distracted at the moment. "We need her help, and yours to stop one of your generals from launching an attack on Zaofu."
"We could lose thousands, Bataar." Opal said softly.
"Our whole city, our whole way of life is at risk." His father resumed. "Kuvira can provide strategic insight and we need your knowledge to come up with defensive countermeasures."
"I will if she will." Bataar responded. "It's good to see you're finally starting to trust us."
"We wouldn't if we didn't have to." Wei huffed angrily.
"Well we wouldn't trust her anyway." Wing added. Wei huffed again but refused to comment.
Bataar removed the crude, heavy, imprecise glasses he had been lumbered with and slipped on his old pair. He blinked slightly, in disbelief, he had nearly forgotten what the world was like when his view of it wasn't being marred by the murkiness of his plastic lenses. His father's face was even more heavily lined than he remembered with new worry lines around his forehead and dashes of ice white hair in his beard and eyebrows. In a year stress had aged him by a decade. Stress Bataar Junior had no doubt had a hand in. "I suppose we owe it to you either way."
Kuvira stood there dumbly, she barely even noticed an orphan catch her in the leg with a very hard wooden doll. Slowly she opened her mouth and in due time she managed to force a sentence out. "Su….what am I supposed to do." She finally managed, meagrely.
"Kuvira, I want you to help me fight your warlord." She whispered before she grabbed her by the hand and yanked her out into the porch again. "When we've got more information on whoever's heading up this little horde you're going to tell me everything I need to know about how to defeat them." She said authoritatively.
The momentary appearance of Su the mentor was once again replaced by the ever more apparent Su the matriarch. For a moment Kuvira wondered if this proposal was a chance to earn her respect or a simple compromise to get her help. It didn't matter.
"Yes." Kuvira said emptily. As an afterthought Su Yin quickly extended a hand. Gingerly Kuvira took hold and shook it. The look of scepticism on Su Yin's face was clear enough as was the stone crushing grip she had chosen to employ.
A throat was cleared behind Su's back, it was the orderly with a gift basket. "Sooo." She said nervously. "I take it you don't want a gift basket."
"No. But I can arrange extra funding if you're quiet." Su responded before she bundled herself and Kuvira out into the street.
Back at the Beifong estate Bataar was being marched to meet her with the rest of his family behind him, as well as a guard contingent. A singular guard who hadn't even bothered to wear his armour but a guard none the less. As soon as he caught sight of Kuvira he bolted towards her. The guard probably would have lashed him with a bending cable if Su hadn't waved him off. He half hugged half tackled her, staggering her back a few paces.
"Did they tell you." He whispered into her ear happily. "They want us on their side." He said a tad louder before he released her.
"Su told me." Kuvira answered morosely. "I…"
Before she could speak further Su bellowed a command. "Guardsman Kong, take them back to the Villa." She declared casually on her walk up the steps to the central mansion.
The guard approached wearily, just at the tips of his gauntlets his cables began to snake their way out as if he expected to drag them back to their summer home turned prison. It proved unnecessary when his charges just shuffled back home without comment or resistance.
Huan had been kind enough to right most of their furniture and bend most it back into shape, or at least a shape he liked. When they flopped back tiredly into a sofa that now bent in on itself at an acute angle it more or less felt like they were relaxing in actual furniture.
"You know my father came around." Bataar commented briskly. "They're prepared to trust you. I think if we show a united front we can really show them how far we've come." He finished with an optimistic little grin.
"We can't have come that far." Kuvira answered sadly. "We're just leading another war."
"Feels like it's been ages since we did this." Mako said as a servant laid down his meal.
"I know, and I've missed everyone in Republic City so much." Bolin said a tad morosely. "How is it over there anyway?"
Mako thought to spare his brother's feelings but in the end he replied honestly. "It could be better, with so many displaced citizens there are a lot of vulnerable people and the triads are taking advantage." His tone lightened for a moment. "But with the new Spirit Portal Chief Tonraq's been able to send almost constant aid; you know Senna mustered half the college of healers for the refugee camps." He added more optimistically.
"What about Eska and Desna, are they sending any help?" Bolin hazarded.
"Asking about your exes, really Bolin?" Opal said with a mock pout and crossed arms.
"I-I…." Bolin simply stammered, red faced.
Mako interrupted for his brother's sake "I told her you were with Opal and you were very happy….." He turned in his seat to face Opal. "She said you weren't terrifying enough."
"I'll try and take that as a compliment." Opal said slowly. "Although I could stand to be a bit more terrifying." She said slowly as she leaned into Bolin with a cheshire grin.
"Still how about this restaurant." Bolin said cheerily, with a mouthful of Mango pudding. "Don't tell Chef but I've been meaning to get on the waiting list for ages." He whispered to Opal, conspiratorially.
"Well, I am technically a visiting dignitary." Mako said, with a terribly pleased grin. "Didn't think I'd ever be saying that."
"Feels like just last week we were begging Butaka for food money." Bolin commented.
Korra and Asami arrived with their usual gravitas. The avatar barged her way through with some comment to the concierge about dealing with it and Asami backpedalled after her whilst she quickly muttered an apology to the staff. Asami had come out in a short, slim dress of bold red whilst Korra wore her usual ensemble of fighting gear with some.
"Korra!" Bolin squaled. "Asami." He again squealed. "Sorry we ordered without you, I got soooo hungry."
"Okay, but why did you order desert?" Asami asked cooly as she slid into the booth alongside him, followed by Korra.
"We didn't." Mako groaned, presenting an appetizer plate of fried shrimp. "That's just how Bolin eats now." He added, vexed.
"I…don't have the heart to stop him." Opal responded before she leaned against the sweet-toothed lavabender.
"Besides." Bolin said with a broad smile. "I might be enjoying my desert but Mako's the one who's been gaining weight."
"I am not." Mako pouted and crossed his arms. As he dipped his head to better smoulder he felt his neck fold into a slight double chin. His head snapped straight upwards a moment later. "Well it's stressful being a Captain." He muttered by way of an excuse.
"I think it makes you look cuddly." Asami said gently. "Like a teddy platypus bear." She released an awkward snorting laugh.
"Are you teasing me?" Mako said, almost offended as he leaned over the table.
"Well you are very teasable." Korra noted.
Mako's face dropped for a moment then his eyes widened as a though crossed the back of his mind. "Well I was working a case on Republic City University and I saw a little photo of a certain someone on their distinguished graduates list." Mako explained. For the first time since Asami hit him with a moped he saw her demure face drop into an utterly terrified gasp.
"Wow, Mako, you're really embarrassing her." Korra quipped as she took hold of Asami's arm. "Whast next are you going to tell me about the time she graduated early or built a moped or something?"
"Mako, come on don't." Asami begged in a long groaning drawl.
Undaunted the Captain reached into one of the pouches on his utility belt and presented a small sepia photograph. It was Asami, just about. A skinny, awkward, stick of a girl, her face peppered with some fairly heavy teenage acne. Her hair stuck out from either side of her head in tightly wound pigtails. She stretched her lips into a nervous smile that revealed a set of braces. In the present Asami was blushing bright red before she buried her face in her hands. Mako chuckled as he felt a warm sense of victory well up inside himself.
"Is that why you wouldn't let us see you without your makeup?" Bolin asked idly.
"Hey, come on." Korra said softly tipping Asami's head up and out of her hands. "It's not like I love you for your looks." She said softly. Almost immediately her face froze in shock.
"What did you say?" Asami asked with the biggest grin she had ever made. "What did you say she repeated."
"Gloves." Korra said too quickly and too loudly. "I said something about…..your gloves and…..how nice they are."
"No you didn't." Asami squealed as she grabbed a hold of Korra's hands. "You love me, you said you love me!" Before Korra was even half way through thinking of a response Asami led with a kiss directly on the lips. When she pulled back enough of Asami's lipstick had rubbed off that Korra's mouth was looking just a touch pinker.
"Wow, Mako you really showed her." Opal teased.
"Sure did." He said, leaning back into his chair with a little smile as he watched the two lean in much more slowly for another kiss. Again he felt a warm sense of victory wash over him.
"How did your chat with Su go?" Bataar asked as he and Kuvira slid into bed. He passed her a cup of herbal tea and then took a sip of his own. As ever she slurped hers and he let out this low hissing sigh after every sip. They both hated the other's ridiculous little noise but it didn't feel like tea without it.
"Not well. She still hasn't forgiven me. I'm not really surprised" She said with a little pout after another slurp of the slightly bitter health drink. "But she wants to work with me, to talk with me. I think that if we do well on this, make it clear how we feel….well maybe we could start healing." She said with the most brilliantly optimistic smile that Bataar could only sit back and watch.
"Feeling a lot better than this morning, aren't you?" Bataar commented as he snuggled up to her.
"You'd be surprised what a difference a day can make." She said warmly.
A small farming village named Se Rhu sat in the shadow of a mag-lev track that was never completed. Twenty families and one satomobile all congregated together in old wooden halls and houses, the only disturbance in miles of soft green grass and dry shrubbery. In a hut on the outskirts of town a farmhand looked found something in the distance as he stepped out onto his porch. An army, or at least the closest thing to one for a thousand miles. He reached for an old telescope he had bought as a boy and studied them. Battle damaged mecha-suits and commandeered tanks jostled for space amongst a contingent of washed out Imperials, a few barbarian tribes and a small army of brightly coloured mercenaries. They walked on foot, on the back of ox carts and in old army transports. And like the thunderhead of a rolling storm it was advancing directly on Se Rhu.
The farmer ran into the main and only road down the middle of the village and in time a few of them would join him, takin turns on that cloudy old spy glass as they watched the army rise upon them.
By the time the first of the army had arrived most of the villagers were cowering in their homes or their barns or their cellars. A brave few watched from the windows but only the farmhand dared to remain in the road.
A trio of mecha-suits led the central column of their army down the road. A column to either side began to surround the town. The central one was painted with a ridiculously gauche paintjob of shined emerald green with gold filigree decorations of a lotus flower on the chest, some cloud like swirls on the headpiece and golden dragons coiled around the biceps. High gain radio masts with tattered green and gold banners fluttered off his back like a dead bird's wings. In one hand he carried a ten foot great sword, made from a biplane's propeller welded to long haft of metal.
"Seriously. This is what they send?" He growled as he saw the single farmhand standing in the road in front of him. He was dressed in dusty, loose fitting workman's gear with a narrow face buried under a drooping, oversized hat that completely concealed his face. "Or is this where you reveal that you're some great master who ran here to escape his past."
"It isn't." The farmhand yelled back simply. "I'm just a citizen of the Earth Nation, and a proud one that won't let a bully like you from marching in and setting us to work." He yelled defiantly as he approached. He threw his hat off, revealing a young man with a mop of long black hair tied into a traditional topknot. "So I challenge you to strike me down if you really think you can kill an unarmed civilian. And if you do, I promise you, there will be a thousand more men, and a thousand more villages that will never bend a knee to tyrants like you, ever again."
The hulking mecha suit stood entirely still for a moment. With his head hidden under the dome of the suit's armour it was impossible to judge watch might have been going through the warlord's mind. He buried the sword edge first into the loose, trampled soil of the village road and approached the little farmhand. He flicked open the dome revealing a man with a trim beard and the hair on his slowly balding head was gelled and groomed into a tall coif. His ears were lined with gold rings and he formed a slightly mischievous grin as he leaned towards the farmhand. "Okay." He said cheerily.
With that he grabbed the farmer's head in his hand. The villagers heard a muffled shouting, then a high pitched scream and finally a sick wet crunch.