Burning Sands

A Legend of Korra thingy for Rabolin Week 2013

By

EvilFuzzy9

A/N: The funny thing about this prompt is that today actually IS my birthday. XD

Prompt Two:

BIRTHDAY

Turning nineteen wasn't really a big deal. Not in Republic City, and not anywhere else, either. There was no significance to the age. It wasn't like thirteen, or sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. There wasn't any cultural meaning to it. Nothing important happened when you turned nineteen.

It just wasn't a notable milestone. Maybe, in a sense, it was the last of your teen years, except that even in the amalgamated frankenstein of a culture possessed by the United Republic of Nations – where ideas and practices from many disparate countries were mashed together into a sort of nearly unrecognizable melange of square pegs in round holes – a person was legally recognized as an adult at the age of eighteen, making nineteen just a weird sort of limbo year where, along with twenty, a person was old enough to join the army and vote, but not to drink alcohol.

(And the age of consent for marriage and sex was sixteen, which was still late compared to the rule of thumb fourteen of the Water Tribes, or the traditional twelve of the Earth Kingdom)

So, no, Adi wasn't that excited about her nineteenth. Why should she be? After a certain point in life, a birthday becomes just another day of the year. She wasn't a little girl anymore, a kid who stayed up all night unable to sleep because of excitement over her approaching birthday.

At some point in a person's life, between becoming an adult and starting a family, birthdays stop being really much of a big deal. Maybe friends will take them out to a bar, and family will send a letter or two, but once you become economically responsible for your own damn ass, you realize how expensive they are. And between a combination of factors, from the changing of economic climes from the days when they were a child, to the perverse inability of modern parents and schools to teach kids how to manage their money, a big birthday hullabaloo just becomes distastefully extravagant.

So, again, Adi wasn't that worked up about her nineteenth birthday. She had gotten a few cards from close family and old friends, and collected a very modest windfall thereof, but that was about it. She had no plans for a big celebration, not really. She and her team had a big match the next day, so going out on the town with them just wouldn't be feasible. And with her relatively high-profile as the captain of a probending team good enough to make it to the semifinals, combined with the fact that she was legally too young to drink alcohol in Republic City limits, going to one of the good nightclubs would have been utterly unfeasible anyways.

If she was caught with a forged ID, that could ruin her career. At the very least, it would be a black mark on her name. Adi had no official criminal record (barring a few idiotic stunts from her youth) and she would very much prefer to keep it that way.

So, at most, she figured that she and the team might go out for something sweet after practice. She remembered an interesting place that sold traditional Sun Warrior drinks said to enhance everything from bending to virility... and while the claims were dubious at best, most people who went there only did so for the taste of the stuff, anyways. Cocoa-hot (a corruption of the original Sun Warrior cacahuatl) was an addictively sweet beverage, and Chuck's Ol' Lot, cheesily named or not, was just about the only place in Republic City that sold the stuff hot at reasonable prices.

And their roasted batatas were pretty good, too.

But, however you look at it, Adi just wasn't planning anything big for her birthday. At most, she would just have a modest get together with a couple close friends.

...at least, that was what she had planned on. But her friends had a distinctly different idea in mind.

Adi stared, uncertain what to think, as Bolin slowly and awkwardly removed his body from the over sized cake. She was sitting between her best friends and teammates, Umi and Ula, watching as Bolin climbed – half naked – out of a giant, paper mache pastry.

"Wha..." she whispered. "What is this...?"

"Your birthday cake," said Umi blithely. "Bolin suggested it."

Adi's cheeks turned a bright pink, her eyes trained intently on the ostensibly rival probending captain as he struggled to extricate his surprisingly muscular frame from the opening in the top of the prop cake. It seemed that the breakaway top had been constructed a little too narrow for the broad shouldered earthbender to easily fit through, so he was kind of a little stuck.

"Really?" she said with an undisguised note of disbelief.

Ula shrugged. "Well, he suggested a cake, at least. Me and Umi were the ones who came up with the whole male stripper bit."

"It's very entertaining," added Umi, a hint of laughter in her voice as Bolin's increasingly frustrated attempts to free himself caused the cake to start falling apart... everywhere but where he was stuck. The underlying framework of the prop pastry still held quite strong.

"...though maybe not in the way we planned," conceded Ula, scratching the back of her neck sheepishly as Bolin glared down impotently at the by now bare mesh skeleton over which the external cake facade had been constructed.

Adi looked a little concerned as she watched Bolin renew his furious rattling of the astoundingly resilient framework that held him prisoner. She also had a slight blush on her face, seeing quite well that Bolin was not dressed in much at all, upstairs or downstairs.

"And he actually agreed to go along with this...?" she said, unable to wrap her head around the idea of that big, lovably awkward goof voluntarily doing something so blatantly risque.

"He was indeed hesitant at first," said Umi. "But he relented upon our insistence that you would really enjoy this."

Adi's blush deepened, and she punched Ula on the arm.

"Ow! What was that for? Umi's the one who said it."

"But I bet it was your idea, though, wasn't it?"

Ula chuckled nervously. "Yeah..."

Adi sighed, shaking her head as she stood up out of her chair.

"You two are impossible," she groaned.

Then she started towards the remnants of the fake cake, which still stubbornly held Bolin in place. "Need a hand?" she asked him, and he nodded fervently.

"Yes! Thank you! I would like that very much!" he said.

Adi smiled softly, before jamming a hand through the framework to jiggle it from within, attempting to pry something loose to weaken the structure or widen the opening so Bolin could get free. The wooden bars and struts rattled a good deal, and what little decoration remained yet clinging to the structure was jarred loose by her heavy handed jimmying.

"Mind getting off your butts and giving me some help over here?" she called over her shoulder to Umi and Ula, who blinked stupidly for a moment before getting, looking somewhat shamefaced, and heading over to assist their captain in breaking Bolin out of the imprisoning prop cake.

When they finally got him out, and dressed, the group decided to just go to Chuck's Ol' Lot for some rich, steamy cocoa-hot and sweet, filling roast batatas.

All in all, a birthday Adi would fondly remember for years to come.

A/N: Completely unrelated to the content of the above, but I bought three games for my 3DS on the Nintendo e-Shop last night as a sort of birthday gift to myself. And I just have to say that, holy shit, Resident Evil: Revelations and Pokemon Y are fucking HUGE. Seriously, before downloading these (as well as Resident Evil Mercenaries 3D, but that wasn't at all big in comparison) I had roughly a hundred thousand blocks free blocks on my memory card (which had been largely unaffected by all the other games I've downloaded onto it). A HUNDRED THOUSAND. After that, I had around fifty-three thousand.

Most of that was just those first two games, and even Pokemon Y took a "mere" 13k blocks of memory. I can only assume that RE:R is fully voice-acted and/or has AMAZING graphics.

I played a bit of Mercenaries 3D, and have just gotten to outside the first city in Y, but I haven't touched Revelations yet.

Actually, on the subject of Pokemon Y, I picked that version half because the big red Y-bird looked marginally cooler than the big blue X-elk, and half because Y as in the Y chromosome of DNA, which only males have. Of course, as has become an unofficial tradition for me in Pokemon games, I chose the female PC and named her Ayumu, after one of my all-time favorite female anime/manga characters, Ayumu Nishizawa from Hayate the Combat Butler (and also Osaka from Azumanga Daioh, now that I think about it, who is another favorite of mine).

And for my starter, I chose a froakie and named it Jiraiya, because I am a hopeless weaboo at the weirdest of times.

Regarding the actual content of this chapter, it's been a minor head canon of mine for a while that the Avatar world could totally have stuff like corn, potatoes, chocolate, and coffee, because since the Sun Warriors were so obviously inspired by old South and Mesoamerican cultures like the Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs, it is only natural to think that they totally could have had stuff like that. (Batata is one of the words from which we get potato, and it specifically refers to sweet potatoes, and Cocoa-hot I think is a reasonably believable alternate history evolution of the Aztec cacahuatl, "cacao water", which some believe the Spaniards mixed with the Mayan chokol, "hot", both because caca in Spanish means poop, and Europeans preferred the heated version of the beverage anyways, to produce chokolatl, or chocolate)

...long ass A/N is long.

Updated: 10-29-13

TTFN and R&R!

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