Three Families

by James Golen

Three Families seek the Avatar. Three Families find the Avatar. Three Families use the Avatar. The story of how three sets of siblings are changed by the Avatar, amidst an endless war. AU, Want of A Nail.

12. The Oracle

Sorry for the gap. Chp.16 got big. This was always one of my favorites, though. It has the best Sokka lines. One counter nit-pick; military mortars were invented during the 15th century in reality, and they're pretty good at shelling. Given that for the state of technology to be in the pseudo-20's in Korra, the technological/philosophical level must be equivalent to the mid 19th century somewhere in Avatar-world (Given that technological innovation grows in curves and not in steps which can be skipped), who in this world would have the technology and desire to invent a similar device, I wonder?

---

Water flowed easily down the river, and the lush plantlife flowed with it, if mostly because water was hard to find in the East Continent these days. People were digging deeper and deeper, stemming rivers farther and farther, just to keep irrigation in the fields, and water on the tongues of its people. It was telling, how even the Northern Heart Coast, a place once overwhelmed by forests and greenery, there was only the dull brown of dead plants, choked in dust and starved for water. All but here, at least. Here, there was the river. Here, there was life.

And there was also one particular fish, who was making it his life's ambition to stymie a Tribesman.

"Stay still you little bugger!" Sokka said, outright hacking at the water with his machete.

Katara shook her head, and then turned back to her task, which was keeping Aang focused on the flowing of water. She still felt a bit weak, and Aang had been very stern about her not trying that waterbending healing again. She didn't see why he was so concerned. It worked, after all. Sokka wasn't just alive. He was back to his old self, if a little rougher of hide for his brush with death. "Alright, now you have to flick the wrists, like this," she said, snapping out another water whip, which cracked pleasingly over the water's flow. "Keep trying. You'll get it right."

"I had it right," Aang complained.

"You were lucky, and luck runs out," Katara said plainly. "So practice. I've been practicing hours a day since that ash-head's little bribe backfired, and now who's teaching who?"

"Whom," Sokka corrected from the water, before letting out a stammer, then an angry scream, and hurling himself bodily into the water, hacking wildly.

"You are," Aang admitted. No great surprise in that, Katara considered. For all Aang was the Avatar, and therefore so much more powerful than any other bender on the planet that the gap was beyond definition, when it came to skill, she actually put in the effort to do what she did right. And it showed, in that she'd mastered every single form that the stolen scroll she liberated from that firebending brute had to offer, whereas Aang was still puttering around with the most basic technique available to it.

"Stop taunting me! I'm going to sooo eat you!" Sokka sputtered as he thrashed in the water, before finally letting out a cry of triumph, and began to haul a ghostfish almost the size of his leg out of the water, even as it thrashed and flailed, trying to slip back into the water where it would return to nigh-invisibility. He was laughing like a madman as he finally brought the thing to the shore and flopped it onto the ground. "Yeah! Water Tribe one, stupid fish, zero!"

"Try to ignore Sokka and focus on your waterbending," Katara prompted. Aang did as she asked, and the water flowed in his control, but after about a minute, he heard something else, and his control started to wane again. "Aang, what did I just say?"

"I can hear something," Aang said.

"I don't hear anything," Sokka said. Then, he let out a yelp and hurled himself bodily onto the fish which was in the process of flopping back into the river. Of course, doing so only made it slip through his grasp and slip back into the flow with barely a ripple, but a heady charge of Yqanuac profanity chasing it.

"Wait, I hear it too," Katara said, calling her cursing brother to silence. When they were little, Dad described a trip he'd made all the way up to the equator – which it still staggered Katara to realize that they'd already bypassed – in which he and several of his elders got waylaid after running afoul of rocks in a storm. Hakoda had been the youngest of that party of eleven, and they all had to cross through storm-soaked forests before they could reach a port to return home. It sounded a lot like he'd gone through Hanyi, now that Katara had seen what he'd seen. But of those eleven, only three made it home... because they had come afoul of the wildlife. There were dangerous beasts in the South. Mole-r Bears could bury you. Feral Polarbear Dogs could rip you to shreds. But there was a beast which Dad described as surlier and more brutal than any of those bear types.

The Platypus Bear.

Sokka and Katara were already running as soon as the loudest roar sounded in the air. They had tried to bring down one of those beasts, but found that its massive strength, its razor claws and beak full of needle teeth was the least of its defenses. It also packed a horrible poison, which afflicted all of the five who survived the initial assault. Of those five, only Dad, the old healer Gnud, and his daughter Doru made it to civilization and back home, and Dad would only describe that experience as 'the most horrible, painful, and tortuous three days of my life'. And from the sound that Dad described, one of them was close, and angry.

"Where are you going?" Aang asked, pelting up after them as they crested the hillock the river bent around, and looked down upon a scene which ought have made Katara's blood run cold. It was just as Dad described. Standing ten foot tall if it was an inch, a monster of brown fur and subtle quills, massive paws and deadly claws, a broad beak full of unkind teeth, clawing and swiping and roaring loud. Its target was a middle aged man, probably one quarter of the beasts's size and weight, a man unarmed and unarmored, and from the look of him, no bender either. It should have been horrifying, terrifying, and inherently sad. But...

He was as calm as a man asleep. A faint smile graced the man's face as he effortlessly moved around the swipes and lashings of the beast. A paw swiping for his head caught only the bark of a tree beyond it. A bludgeon of its paddle-like tail struck nothing but dirt. It bounded at him, trying to pin him down and tear at him, but he stepped aside as easily as Sokka went to sleep. He finally seemed to notice that he wasn't alone with the Platypus Bear, and that grin grew wider, and just as innocent. "Oh, hello there children!"

"Make a loud noise and drive it away!" Katara shouted.

"No, play dead and it'll lose interest!" Sokka contended.

The beast took another swipe at the man, and he ducked under it, before taking a long step back. "Well, that was a close one, wasn't it?"

"Run up a hill!" Aang shouted.

"No, down hill, then in zigzags!" Sokka countered.

"Punch it in the bill!" Katara tried. In truth, she didn't remember how Dad said he'd driven the bears off. It might have been as simple as 'I stabbed them with my spear', but lacking spears and a guy in the crossfire to take care of, that wasn't an option.

"No need. I'll be fine," the man said, as though nothing in the world was wrong. Aang muttered to himself, then turned and whistled, before bounding down and interposing himself between the man and the beast.

"Stay back!" Aang shouted, flicking with his staff a blast of wind which drove the Platypus Bear back a step, but only seemed to further enrage it. But then, there was a heavy thump, as something far bigger than a Platypus Bear landed behind it, and let out a rumbling bass bellow of its own. The bear tensed for a moment, then ran off into the woods, leaving a spotty egg behind.

"Ha! Scared the eggs out of 'er!" Sokka said as he jumped down and quickly crossed that stream where it grew shallow. He grinned to himself as he picked up the egg, roughly the size of his head, and tapped on it with a finger. "Mmm. Breakfast."

"You should really be more careful," Katara added, ignoring her brother's inclination for thinking with his stomach.

"No need," the man said. "Madam Wu told me I'd make it home unharmed, and it turns out, I will."

"You almost got torn in half by a Platypus Bear," Sokka said, his expression flat.

"I'm still unharmed," he said evenly. "Wu was right. Her fortunes always are."

"Fortune telling is just a bunch of nonsense," Sokka said, the annoyance in him such that he actually handed off food in order to put his fists on his hips in pique. "She was dead wrong! You almost got killed!"

"But I didn't," the man said pleasantly. "Well, you can see for yourself. You're probably headed to Makapu like I am, so you can talk to her and get your fortunes read yourselves. See if you still doubt her then."

"It's just a bunch of silly superstition and hokum!" Sokka argued.

"Oh, and she said to give this to any Tribesman I met on the road," the man said, producing a towel and handing it to Katara. "Good luck, kids!"

Katara turned to the still wet Sokka, and offered the towel. "No. That wasn't a fortune telling. He saw I was wet and offered a towel. That's it."

"But there's no reason we shouldn't go to..." Aang began, but was cut off when Appa let out a snotty sneeze, which struck Sokka on the back, and made him tense up, a look of utter disgust on his face.

"Why... Why does he always sneeze on me?" Sokka complained. Once again, Katara offered him the towel, and he took it with a grumble. "Still doesn't prove anything."

"I don't know. I think I want to see this woman," Katara said. "Who knows, it might be fun getting our fortunes told!"

"Yeah, it sounds like a great time," Aang agreed wholeheartedly. "Just the three of us and some harmless mischief. What could go wrong?"

Sokka halted scrubbing the sputum from the back of his neck and levied a glare at the Avatar. "You just had to say that, didn't you?"

But nothing could dampen their spirits, as the three of them began to take the road to Makapu. But in their wake, a wagon rumbled up the road, with one person driving the Ostrich Horses, and a small family riding in its back. The jostling kept sending the hair of the smallest of them waving before her eyes, which was a somewhat moot proposition. It wasn't like she was using them.

"Are we there yet?" the man asked.

"If you ask that one more time, I'm kicking you off the wagon," his wife answered. He gave her a scandalized look. "Yes, I'm joking, Lao."

"Sometimes, I cannot understand what you call humor."

"It was pretty funny," the girl offered.

"See? Toph agrees with me."

"This is interminable," Lao muttered.

"And it's almost over," Poppy said. "And we still have most of our money. Isn't that for the best?"

The patriarch of the Beifong family was mum. But even though the youngest of them didn't look it, she was 'watching' closest of all. Because the matriarch was keeping something back, and that bugged the young Toph endlessly. And there was little which bugged her more than not having an answer to a question.

Thus went the Beifongs, fallen so far, into the village of Makapu.

---

Chapter 12

The Oracle

---

It was a lovely town, all things considered. Handy enough to a river that sanitation was no problem, hosting a bridge over those burbling waters, and nestled in a crossroads of bustling trade, Makapu seemed like a fairly sad place to live, nevertheless. The fields milled with people working their backs into dust, and the stores showed meager provisions if any at all. The cobblers often had only a single pair of demonstration shoes, and the townsfolk looked to have the leanness of long hunger and calorie poor diets. That said, they looked far, far happier than the situation ought call for. And the sum total of this made Sokka very, very suspicious.

"Twenty gold says that she's got them all mind controlled and eats the ones who investigate her," Sokka wagered.

"Sokka!" Katara said, swatting his arm. "She's probably a nice old lady. There's no reason to accuse her of cannibalism."

"I'm just saying," Sokka said switching both gears and languages. "Something about this place doesn't seem right. They're poor, hungry, and that guy is frickin' filthy, and yet they're all crazy-happy all the time. If this doesn't say 'deranged cult leader throwing questionably-willing maidens into a volcano', then I don't know what it says."

"I think you're reading too many of Bato's old books," Katara said with a head shake. "Come on. We should get our fortunes read. What's the worst that could happen?"

"Thrown. Into. Volcano."

"I think Katara's right on this one," Aang piped up. "It'd be neat to know our own futures, after all."

"The future doesn't work like that!" Sokka shouted, before descending into a glowering huff. Ahead, a youngish man with shock-white hair bowed to the doors, which stood open into the dusty street.

"Aunt Wu is expecting you," the man said.

"That's amazing," Aang said.

"No it's not! He probably says that to everybody!" Sokka snapped. Still, they all moved through the halls of the building. It was... garish, to say the least. Like it had been built drab, and then somebody of extremely questionable interior-design sense decorated it. But large, without a doubt. In fact, from the looks of things, it was probably the manor of a local earl or duke. What it was doing in a hokum-slinger's possession warranted a moment's ponderance. They got a chance to, when the white haired laconic fellow had them sit in a foyer, and he returned to his place. Sokka sat for a moment on a well worn cushion and smirked. "See, she didn't expect us, or she'd be waiting for us."

"Hello," a girl's voice cut in on his rationalistic bragging. "I'm Meng. I'm Aunt Wu's assistant, and she told me to make sure you were all comfortable and relaxed before you..." she trailed off, and Sokka wondered at it for a moment, before he saw that she was staring slightly slack-jawed at Aang, and a deep blush had come to her face. This despite Aang looking distracted, goofy, and having one of his fingers two knuckles deep in his ear. She was a small thing, with a gap in her teeth where one of her milk teeth had fallen out and not gotten replaced yet, and hair on the far side of unmanageable.

She sidled very close to Aang, her eyes wide as saucers, a smile threatening to split her head in half. "Well, hello there," she said. Aang paused from excavating inside his own skull to give her a confused look.

"Hey," Aang answered.

"Can I get you some tea or some of my bean-curd puffs? You know, to be nice and relaxed for Aunt Wu?"

"I wouldn't mind a curd puff," Sokka said, but she held up a hand in his face, doing so with such speed that she'd almost slapped him in the face.

"Just a second," she chastised. "So what's your name?"

"You work for a sooth-sayer and you couldn't get a name out of her," Sokka said. He gave a pointed glance to his sister. "Seriously? Any half decent 'fortune teller' would be able to..."

"I said I'm not talking to you, Sokka," Meng cut him off, causing Sokka to wilt slightly. How did she...?

"Oh, I'm Aang," came the response she was looking for.

"Wow. That rhymes with Meng! And look at your ears. You've got pretty big ears!" she noted, leaning in close.

"I...guess," Aang said, befuddlement plain.

"Don't be modest, their huge," Sokka said, slapping him on the back. Then a notion occurred to him. She must have just heard their names somewhere. Probably from that guy who they'd saved out in the woods. That was the ticket. But why didn't she know Aang's, name, then? Aang took that comment a bit harshly, and covered his ears self consciously.

"Well, Aang, it's nice to meet you... Verrry nice," Meng said, before drifting away, not breaking eye contact with the Avatar until the last moment, lest she walk into a wall.

"Aaaw, that's adorable," Katara said. "Somebody's got a crush!"

"Katara, she's, like, twelve!"

"You're, like, thirteen," Katara countered. "Wouldn't those two just be adorable? No hair meets crazy hair!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Aang said simply.

"Personally, I can't believe we're puttering around in this house of nonsense," Sokka complained.

"Keep an open mind for a change. Who knows, she might even know how this whole 'beat the Fire Nation' thing is going to turn out!" she let in a sudden gasp. "She might even know if I find a waterbending master! Or who I'm going to marry!"

The door slid open, and a woman came out, looking resolute, if not particularly happy. "At least... now I know. And at least now I have some closure," she said sadly.

"I'm sorry I didn't have better news," the other voice came from behind her. Meng quickly darted around the young woman and the old, bearing a tray of tea and fried snacks. "But this is the way things are. You are still young, and you are strong. You will find love again. I can promise you this."

She nodded, sniffling, as she walked away from the older woman in oddly Fire Nation-ish clothing. For all she lived here, there was much more red and yellow than Sokka was used to. As well, it struck Sokka a bit odd that any fortune-teller wanting repeat business would give bad news. That seemed the sort of thing that might get somebody set on fire. Meng squatted down trying to serve Aang the tea, while pointedly ignoring the other two. Of course, doing so, she fumbled and almost dropped the entire tray, but Aang caught it with barely a glance and not very much effort. But doing so, their hands touched. She blushed like the sun. He was utterly oblivious.

"I... Enjoy your bean puffs!" she said, before practically sprinting away.

"What was that about?" Aang asked. Sokka, though, quickly grabbed the snacks and began to dig in with a furor usually reserved for starving wolfbats.

"Forgive the lateness of my duties," the older woman said. "Her lover died on the road to Misty Palms this morning. It is not always a happy duty I perform," she said. Sokka raised a finger, about to point out something, but she cut him off. "But enough of grim talk. I find enough of it over the course of a day. What odd travelers we have. Two Tribesmen, seeking their father and tutelage in the north, and even the Avatar himself."

"Wow. You really know your stuff."

"Yeah, or she just knows the reputation that's preceding us," Sokka said. The old woman, Wu, obviously, turned to him.

"You don't believe in what I do," she said simply.

"What was your first clue?"

"Perhaps you can be persuaded otherwise," she said. Sokka pointedly dug into the puffs as a rebuke. "Very well. Who would like to be first? Come on, don't be shy," she said. Between Aang's general befuddlement at the situation he found himself in, and Sokka's outright dismissal of all of this as a gargantuan hoax, it was Katara who stepped up to the metaphorical line.

"I guess it'll be me, then," Katara said brightly.

"Enjoy your fraud," Sokka said. Wu turned to him, and he expected a sharp glare, but instead got a thousand mile stare.

"The white flower chooses well; the madman tilts the balance scales and the wheat is separated from the chaff. The equal will be found in the girl in blue, and she will snare his mind and heart," she said, her voice empty and genuinely, unsettlingly spooky.

"..." Sokka managed.

"I apologize," Wu said, giving herself a brief head shake. "Sometimes, I find I am not able to... properly interpret the fortunes I tell. Perhaps this means something to you?"

"Any fortune which can only be figured out in hindsight is a pretty crummy fortune," Sokka said, but his heart wasn't in it.

"Ignore my brother," Katara said, taking Wu's hand and spinning her back around. "Come on. I want to see what my future holds."

"Then let us hope that I have fair fortunes to tell," Wu said, leading Sokka's sister away. Aang turned to him.

"You know, sometimes you can get a bit opinionated," Aang said.

"Fortune telling is a hoax. Any real foreknowledge of events violates at least three laws of physics, and renders the future it portends utterly impossible to come to pass!" Sokka complained.

"I just heard blah blah blah I hate fortune telling blah," Aang said, but not mean spiritedly.

"You are such a little kid."

"So?" Aang asked, before swiping Sokka's bean curd puffs. Oh, this was an act of war! And with that, Aang and Sokka began to tear-ass around Aunt Wu's house; the prize of their battle, the vaunted bean curd puffs of glory and yore!

---

There were a lot of things which Aang could have expected out of the great curd puff battle of Makapu, but getting the bowl filched out of his hands was not one of them. In a way, it was downright embarrassing that Sokka had managed to not just catch up, but put one over on Aang. It was something which Aang was going to soon remedy, obviously. The issue was, could he do it before the Tribesman ate all of the snacks?

Aang's strategizing was cut short when he started to hear Katara's voice from one side. His brow furrowed, and he leaned to the paper and wood walls which separated the hall from the room beyond. It was astounding just how 'Fire Nation' this place was, really. "...saw her again. To tell the truth, I don't know what became of any of them. I was too young to remember. That's just amazing!"

"Such wounds of the heart are plain, when you learn how to see them as I have," Wu answered. "Now let's try looking forward. Now, I'll just take your... how soft! Do you use a moisturizer?"

"I've got a balm I use," Katara answered spiritedly. "Seaweed, seal blubber and lights. Smells terrible when you're making it but... well, the results speak for themselves."

Aang had to forcefully restrain a gag at the explanation of just what she was putting on her hands. It was lucky he didn't go around kissing them, because he was fairly certain that getting 'lights' in him would count as breaking vegetarianism. Then, he had a moment of horror when he started to wonder what else was in the cosmetic products he saw on women. Seal lung was probably the least of their depravity.

"Hmm. There will be great power in your future, and with it comes balance," Wu said. "With one hand you destroy, and with the other, you build."

"That doesn't sound so good," Katara said warily.

"Some things need to be destroyed so that others can be created," Wu pointed out. Aang agreed with that, actually. While the Air Nomad philosophy discarded the notion of ending lives, it held that death, when its time had come, should not be avoided. To do so was almost as bad as spreading death recklessly, and some of the Elders even hinted that such had happened in the past. Knowing about the Storm Kings now, Aang wondered if that might have been what they were talking about. "I wouldn't worry. I don't even need to read your palm to know you're not going to enslave the world or murder people at random. It just means you have the power to harm and heal in equal measure. Most do. Some just don't realize, or accept it."

"Oh. That's not so bad. I guess," she hesitated. "What about my love line? Do you see anything there?"

"Hmm."

"That's not a good 'hmm' is it?" Katara asked.

"I refuse to lie about my predictions. It is not a 'great' romance, but there is love there."

"Wh... Who?"

"He is son of a king, but no child of a king, born of a shattered family..." Wu said, but Katara cut her off.

"No. Tell me he's not a firebender, please!"

"What? No. He's not a bender at all. You haven't even met him yet. Why? Does somebody from the West have his eye on you?" Wu asked with a laugh. Katara just let out a relieved sigh.

"I was just worried that Fate paired me up with Zuko, for some reason."

"The Fire Lord's child?" she asked. Then she let out a deep laugh. Aang just shook his head with a smile, and wandered back to the foyer, still plotting how to track down and re-take the vaunted puff bowl of the golden dawn! Or something like that. But his plotting, conspiring, and scheming was cut short when he returned to that entry area, and found Sokka lounging, and munching on those puffs with the most smug look on his face. With a smirk, he tossed in the last of them, and up ended the bowl to showcase its emptiness.

"Sorry. Last one."

Aang's brow twitched. "You know, there are days that I really don't like you."

"Oh, you love me," Sokka said with a bray of laughter. He was right. It was hard to stay angry at Sokka. And it wasn't long until that door opened again, and Katara came out, looking fairly relieved. "So how was your hokum?"

"It was... better than I feared, I guess," she said. "Bit spooky, though."

"Alright. Let's get this over with," Sokka said rising to his feet and stretching.

"Actually, I think I'd prefer to speak to the Avatar for a moment," Wu said. "Besides, you already know enough."

"What you said didn't even make sense!"

"Did it?"

"...NO!" Sokka shouted.

"Did it really?"

Sokka stalked away, grumbling. Aang allowed himself a chuckle at Sokka's antics, and then was guided inside the room at the center of the building. The dichotomy of Fire Nation décor against Earth Kingdom construction was most stark here, as it became obvious that this room was once built like the dining rooms from Bumi's palace, if smaller and lacking a central table; it was just that wooden and paper walls had been put up to subdivide the space. Still, Wu's eyes and complexion didn't immediately mark her as a Westerner. It might have been the proprietor before her. She sat him down before a brazier, and opened up a box and held it toward him. Inside were a bevy of white sticks. She then closed it, and shook the box vigorously, shaking its contents all about.

"This is a form of osteomancy," Wu said. "Please, take one."

"Osteomancy?" Aang asked, taking one of the slivers from the box. It had a weird mark on it, he noted, before handing it back to her.

"The bone rods are placed on the fire, and from the cracks, I can deduce your future," she said. She then set the sliver on the fire. "It is my most reliable form of augury, if the most time consuming."

"How long does it usually take?"

"It can take as much as an hour for the bone to crack, sometimes," Wu said. And the bone immediately put her words to lie by crackling and twisting, a lacing of cracks racing over its surface, and with it, came an upswelling of the fire, blooming up as though somebody had hurled sawdust onto it. She blinked for a moment, obviously confused. Then, she took a pair of tongs and extracted it, before leaning close. "This is... extraordinary. I have never seen this before in my life."

"What is it?" Aang asked.

She ignored him, walking away form the room, setting the tongs and their cargo aside for a moment, as she moved into the back of the house. Aang glanced around, feeling like there was an odd weight in the air, a heavy sensation that he wasn't alone here. It was probably because Sokka and Katara were right outside. That had to be it. Finally, she returned, and was carrying another sliver of bone. She took the tongs and set the one Aang picked down beside it. He noted that both of them had the same mark on them... and then that the pattern of cracks was utterly identical. "How did that happen?" Aang asked.

"There are many things which I have seen in my life," Aunt Wu said, laying down a third sliver from out her pocket. It was identical to the first two. Then a fourth. "But four lots of sortilege? One of them cast a month later, from bones of a different hanged man?"

"The bones were from...?" Aang began, but she cut him off with a look.

"This should not be. You are the Avatar, and you are going to be fighting in a battle which will decide the..."

"Fate of the whole world itself? Not news to me," Aang said idly.

"No, far more than that. I believe the destiny of reality itself is on your shoulders."

"...I fail to see the difference," Aang said. He leaned a bit closer. "Does it say anything about my romantic future in there?"

"Don't you understand? There will be a life and death battle between the forces of balance and imbalance, good and evil, order and chaos, and you want to know about girls?"

"Yes please," Aang said eagerly. Because there was something he wanted to know.

"I'm... sorry, but I didn't see anything," Wu admitted. Aang let out a sigh at that, and she looked down with a flick of her eyes. "I... promised I would not lie. There will be hardships and struggle, and hatreds. I don't see its end, and that concerns me. I often do, these days. Happiness or heartbreak, life or death, I cannot say. But you can. Lightning knows the path, but it will take more to..." Wu seemed to squint for a moment, as though she wasn't sure what she was saying, "bring forth the fourth? Does that mean anything to you?"

"I really don't know," Aang admitted. He let out a sigh. "This didn't make me feel much better."

"That is my duty and my obligation these days," Wu said solemnly. "My news is seldom enough good, but when it is, it shines all the brighter. Take heart, young Avatar. The heart is sometimes all it takes to make things better. I know this from experience."

Aang rose and gave the old woman a bow. "Thank you," Aang said, before walking away. Not much lighter of mind, actually, but compared to how he was before, he was no worse.

As he left, though, he didn't hear her say, "...He deserved so much better."

---

Toph kept squinting at the ground as she walked. There was something distinctly funky about the ground here, and it was really starting to get on her nerves. The relief she'd gotten upon jumping down from that wagon was swiftly beginning to grate, and Toph wasn't the kind of person who was good at being grated. "Thank the gods, that ordeal is over with," Dad complained. Come to think of it, he'd been doing a lot of complaining as Makapu came into 'view'. Luckily for everybody involved – with Dad's possible exception – Mom had made sure to chastise him into doing it quietly. It was one of the great tropes of theatre that you never piss of people who serve your food, cut your hair, or drive your wagon.

"I'm going to take Toph and get some food and a place to stay for the night," Mom said, reaching over to pat Dad on the cheek. "Would you be a dear and help him unload his produce?"

Dad sputtered in a fashion which Toph had to bite her tongue to avoid bursting into laughter at. Finally, he slumped, possibly playing host to a 'hang dog expression', and uttered "Yes, dear," before listlessly moving to help the driver, if while moving at about a third the driver's pace. Mom guided Toph away, a hand at her back, until they were out of Lao's line of sight, at which point she stopped, and stretched her arms and back, like a cat which had waken up after sleeping for a year.

"I'd forgotten how good it feels to be on the road," Mom said.

"Good?" Toph asked. "I was sure you'd be the one pestering Dad into finding a hotel the first night!"

"I didn't hear any complaints out of you," Mom said lightly.

"You wouldn't be able to, over Dad's belly-aching," Toph said, before her brain caught up to her. She then froze for a moment. That wasn't the sort of thing you were supposed to tell your mother about your father. But the rebuke which she fully expected didn't materialize. Instead, Mom giggled a bit. No, not giggled. She'd heard Mom giggle. This was more of a chuckle.

"He's... used to a certain style of living," Mom said. There was a long silence. "Well? Aren't you going to see what's going on?"

"I'm not going to see anything," Toph said dryly.

"Toph," Mom said, in that warning tone she got. "I may not know how, but I know you're not nearly as blind as Lao thinks you are. Are you really going to turn down a chance to run loose in a city where nobody knows who you are by a 'careless and distracted' mother?"

"When you put it that way," Toph said, and then broke out into a grin, as she quickly pelted away down the well furnished streets of Makapu. If she had eyes to see with, she would have noted Poppy Beifong smiling proudly at her back. That was a few minutes ago, and the euphoria of being free – totally and utterly FREE – was beginning to dull next to the sensation that there was something wrong with the ground.

"I don't care what that woman says. There's no way she can tell the future!" an argumentative young man declared nearby. He held the slouch of somebody whom the world decided to randomly be cruel to for comedic effect.

"Just because she said that you're going to get shacked up with a female version of you isn't any reason to despair," a younger, brighter voice offered. This one seemed scarcely tethered to the ground, like a tiny waft of breeze would see him float away.

"Well, we are talking about a female Sokka, here. I'd despair a bit," a girl, who seemed to have much in common with the first boy, said snarkily.

"Katara! You shouldn't say things like..." the younger boy began.

"Good one, sis," Sokka answered, which caused the lad to sputter. "Come on, Aang. You've gotta see that this is just hokum! A bunch of stupid, stupid hokum!"

"Stop saying hokum," Katara said.

"I don't know. I've seen some pretty wild stuff," that Aang said.

"You," Sokka broke off, pointing at Toph. "I bet she told you the boy you're going to marry is rich and beautiful."

"First of all, I haven't seen this fortune teller of yours," Toph said, fists on hips. "Second, I'm richer than your entire extended family put together. Third, beauty would be a little bit wasted on me."

"What?" Sokka asked. She waved a hand in front of useless eyes. He blanched at that.

"Way to go, Sokka. You insulted a blind girl."

Sokka sighed. "You know, sometimes I think my life is destined to be full of hardship and anguish. Most of it self inflicted."

"You do have that tendency," Aang noted.

Toph shook her head and started walking away. Of course she'd blabbed the one thing she shouldn't have at the first opportunity. People treated her differently when they learned she was blind, and that was usually the first thing they did learn of her. The second was that they'd treat her differently because of her family's wealth, and they learned of that before even her blindness. She'd had a chance to talk to somebody near her own age who knew about neither, and she'd managed to toss that away in a fit of pique.

Apparently, this Sokka here wasn't the only one with a tendency to say the wrong thing. Sokka did perk up at that point, though, and pointed at another person standing off to one side. She could 'see' that he had some ridiculous looking footwear on, but nothing more than that. "You. Aunt Wu probably told you to wear those red shoes, didn't she?"

"Yeah," the guy answered gleefully. "She told me I'd meet the love of my life while wearing red shoes."

"And how often have you worn shoes since that fortune got told?" Sokka prompted.

"Every single day!" the man eagerly answered. There was a twitch from Sokka, as she could 'see' something breaking inside his brain.

"THEN OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO COME TRUE!" Sokka shrieked wrathfully in the man's face. But the man didn't seem in the slightest bit perturbed at that.

"Really? That's great!" he said.

Sokka smacked himself very hard on the forehead, grumbling something in a language that Toph didn't speak. She just shook her head and walked into the heart of town. While she did, she could 'see' somebody ghosting the first three through the town. And while those she followed were oblivious to her, she was not utterly unnoticed. Toph raised an eyebrow, not even turning to face her, mostly because that was unnecessary. A grown woman nearby seemed to look between this spy and the three who were now either haranguing a man so filthy that Toph could probably bend him, or else watching Sokka do same. She then leaned down to the spy. "Meng, is that the big eared boy Wu said you'd marry?"

"Shush!" Meng said, shoving the grown woman aside with an off-handed shove. Toph sniggered at that, but kept walking. Let the little stalker stalk. Truth be told, she was a little bit interested in this whole 'fortune teller' business. Dad firmly disbelieved in them. But then again, between his lip-service to the gods and his desire for the most secular education imaginable for his daughter, she was starting to believe that Dad was an outright atheist, with all that such entailed. But while that was no problem of hers, it did leave a curiosity which she now felt pecking at her.

"What's the worst that could happen?" Toph said, picking up her pace. When she heard somebody shouting her voice – specifically, Dad shouting her name – she hastened herself that little bit more, so that she could get out of the street before Dad found her and deprived her of her freedom. He was her father, and she had to respect that, but Gods, how she wanted to just run away to a circus or something, some days.

She ducked into the largest building, which was more marked by the man kneeling lotus in meditation just inside its door than any sign which Toph could have read. Being blind did go hand in hand with illiteracy, after all. "Is this Aunt Wu's... fortune-tellery?"

"She is expecting you," the man said, motioning onward. Toph tapped a toe on the stone floor. It was all good, solid, stone walls and floors and ceilings; Earth Kingdom construction at its finest. And almost identical to Keung's house, from the layout. She took three confident steps, and then her toe caught on something she couldn't 'see', and she pitched face first through a door, breaking delicate wood and tearing paper as she flopped into a wood floored waiting area.

"Wh...what? Wood? Why is there wood?" Toph asked. She swung her head back, but her senses were deadened. Without the stone or dirt under her, she really was blind, and was forced to crawl on hands and knees like an infant. "Could I get some help here? Where is the exit to this place? Or a stone wall! That might help!"

"Are you alright, little girl?" a well meaning question came down to her. It made Toph grind her teeth.

"Listen here! I wouldn't be in this position if there weren't all this wood for me to trip over, and..."

"Oh, yes," the woman's voice became weary. "I was warned about you."

"What?" Toph asked. She felt a hand grasp at her wrist, not to yank her about, but to guide her back to her feet. When she had her footing again, the older woman guided Toph to a spot with a cushion, which Toph nearly tripped over into another wall after finding with her toes. "This place is a hazard," Toph complained.

"The daughter of the flying boar," the woman said. "I must admit, it was a story which I found hard to stomach."

"Wait, how do you know who I am? We haven't even said our..."

"I'm a fortune teller. What good is a fortune if you don't know who you're telling it to?" Aunt Wu said with a chuckle. "Now, little girl..."

"Don't call me that," Toph snapped. "I'm not a little girl."

"Are you a boy?"

"No, but..."

"And are you taller than I am?"

"Well..."

"Then you are a little girl," Wu said. "There are worse things to be. Why have you come to my house?"

The way she asked that seemed to indicate she was afraid that Toph might smash it down for fun. Toph wasn't that hard up for fun. Yet, anyway. "I just wanted to get my fortune told," Toph said evenly. "Seemed like a bit of a gas."

"You might not like what you hear," Wu said. "I do not lie about what I find, and the knowledge sometimes brings little comfort."

"Just spill it, old lady."

"Very well," Wu said, and there was a rustling which Toph was unable to follow. "Since you are an earthbender – you are, aren't you? Good. – lithomancy will give the most clear fortunes. Please refrain from influencing the dirt."

"Influencing? What are you talking about?" Toph asked, but Wu didn't answer, simply shaking something. Toph crossed her arms before her chest, her milky eyes glaring with a distinct lack of humor at the turn this day had taken. That same shaking and clicking continued for a while, and Toph's teeth had set so hard that there was a chance they might crack. "Well? What's my glorious future?"

"Oh my," she said. "Big romance. Didn't see that coming."

"Romance? Really?" Toph asked. "You must be joking?"

"It's right here," Wu said. "A powerful bender, and a man you will come to respect, and be respected in turn. But there's more. I see that... the impossible child will do the impossible, and change the way the world sees itself," Toph opened her mouth. "Vague, I know. Sometimes the messages are not clear. I see... The Green Nightmare. Trials and forfeits. A great defeat, and a great defeat, a family left behind."

Well, that was... ominous. "So I get away from my parents? That's the best news I heard all day!"

"Have you been listening to a word I've been saying?" Wu asked. "You face adversity and misfortune, and the best of all possible paths is by far the most painful. And," another long pause, some shuffling noises rising into the air, "your mother. You should be very, very cautious around her. She bears chains that even she does not know."

"Mom? Seriously?" Toph asked. "That guy was right. This is kinda screwy."

"Beifong, you will be part of the greatest adventure of this age," Wu said. "You will live in interesting times. And may the gods have mercy upon you."

"Whatever," Toph said, taking a whiff of the air. "Wait a second... are you cooking curd puffs?"

"Yes, but..."

"Awesome. I'm starving. You wouldn't mind giving a blind girl some food, would you?" she asked, putting forth the most innocent and helpless expression she had, which was a bit absurd because a moment before, she had been picking at her teeth with her fingernails.

Wu rose to her feet with a sigh. "I almost pity the poor man who ends up with you."

"So do I," Toph added mildly and quietly. Whoever it was had better be ready to live in her shadow, because there was no damned way she was living in his.

---

While it was a pensive look which graced Sharif's face, it wasn't because he was being thoughtful. His thousand yard gaze didn't rest on his sister or her friend, but it kept sliding toward that thing before he pulled it back. It wasn't her fault, he kept trying to tell himself. She didn't ask for that thing to burrow under her skin. But in that assumption, even Sharif knew that something was wrong. While spirits could slip in, in order to do what she'd done back there, one would normally have to be invited.

He would have wondered what it took to make somebody like Malu invite that thing into her, but the thoughts always slipped away before he could pin them down, give them scrutiny. So he stared, and waited. There was bubbling and cracking of fat on a hare which Tzu Zi had fetched. It should have been skinned better, but nobody trusted Sharif with a knife. Not after what he did to protect his sister from that thing. So they were left with Nila's butchery. Sharif idly hoped that she found a good cook for a husband, because otherwise, they would be eating dross every day for the rest of her life. As Sharif couldn't smell the meat – or in fact anything, ever – he kept reaching toward it, and having his hand slapped away by either his sister or the other girl. This time, since neither was handy, he restrained himself. They'd tell him when it was done.

He heard a grumbling sound coming from nearby, and turned to face Patriarch. "I told you before, everything's under control," Sharif said. The bird gave him a wary glance, and then flicked one over to Nila's friend's steed. "She'll be fine. She's young. You're always the one complaining about being old; she doesn't have any of that..." a long pause. "Well, that's probably not going to happen. Trust me."

The bird let out a snort and settled itself down on the ground, tucking its neck against itself.

"Why do you keep talking to that bird?" Malu asked. Sharif noticed the twitch in the closed eyes of Patriarch before he turned to face the girl.

"He has a hard time dealing with new things. He'll be happy once we're back into Dakong," Sharif answered, his gaze swinging away again. It was impolite to stare. Mother kept telling him that, and things pressed into even his current state of mind managed to stick, sometimes. "He's old. Set in his ways."

"He's just an Ostrich Horse," Malu said.

"He's an old Ostrich Horse. He's seen a lot of things," Sharif answered the charge.

"Really?" Malu asked, cocking an eyebrow. "How old?"

"How old are you, Patriarch?" Sharif answered. The bird grunted for a moment, then fell silent. "He says..."

"He doesn't say anything. He's a bird," Malu pointed out.

"So?" There was a long silence. "He says that the dance of the moon has passed two thousand times since his hatching."

"Now I know you're messing with me. Two thousand months is about... forty years. Wild Ostrich Horses don't live past fifteen," Malu put her fists on her hips. "Are you really as bad as Nila complains, or is this just a smoke screen?"

"There's too much wind for smoke to stick around," Sharif said.

"Wow. I'm starting to have sympathy for Nila. Never saw that coming," Malu said. Then, she let out a laugh. "I don't know what your game is. I really don't. But I promise you, if you put a needle in my eye again, there will be dire ramifications!"

"A game? Isn't it a bit dark out?"

"You can't wheedle out of this. I swear, I will be paying very close attention to you."

"What does that mean?" Sharif asked.

"Bad stuff will happen."

"Yeah," Sharif nodded. "If that thing wakes up, bad stuff will happen."

"If... What?" Malu asked. "I'm trying to warn you against being all crazy!"

"Why would there be smoke?" Sharif asked. "You can't sew smoke."

"What?"

"I don't play with fire. That's Nila's thing," Sharif said, shaking his head. "Is dinner done yet?"

"What would I know about meat? I'm a vegetarian," Malu said. She stared at him, but gave up with a grumble and a shake of her head, leaving Sharif to slide his gaze past his sister and her friend, where they were cozied up before the fire. Well, one was cozied up, the other was cooking.

"I can't believe I'm going home," Nila said, for what was probably the eighth time today. Not that Sharif would have counted them. "It feels like I just got out here, and now I'm going back."

"Well, isn't that a good thing?" Malu broke in from beyond. Nila shot her a glance, then leaned a bit closer to Tzu Zi.

"I feel a bit ashamed to say it... but I actually wish I hadn't found Sharif in Senlin. I don't think I want to go back," she intimated. If there was one sense of Sharif's which hadn't been damaged by his tomahawk lobotomy, it was his hearing.

"I think I know what you mean," Tzu Zi said warmly. "When I first came out here, I was scared and alone, too. But I figured out how much there is to see and do. How many people there are to meet. I met some of the best friends I ever had because I had the guts to follow in Ty Lee's footsteps. And I got to meet you, Nila."

Nila shivered at that. "I'm feeling a bit cold," Nila said, an odd quiver in her voice. She must have felt the chill much more intensely than Sharif did. But then again, she did have that mildly ridiculous get-up on, and what hair she'd bothered to grow was still far shorter than Sharif's, let alone Malu's, who was the next shortest of the group. "You don't mind if I...?"

"Tuck in," Tzu Zi said, opening up the blanket she was wrapped in. Nila slid in perhaps a bit too quickly, and then leaned away as though still trying to give Tzu Zi room under her own blanket for some raeson. "You know, just because you bring back your brother doesn't mean you have to stay home."

"You do remember my mother, don't you?"

"Maybe I can convince her?" Tzu Zi said. "To see the world for a little bit. I know I wouldn't mind having you along. And you've just got to meet Kah Ri! You'll love her."

"You'd do that for me?" Nila asked. She blushed a bit, only noticeable because Sharif, of all those present, knew what it looked like when a Si Wongi blushed. "Thank you. Really."

Tzu Zi smiled that warm, tight lipped smile she often did, and looked over the meat again. "Almost done," she said. She then turned to Nila, only avoiding bumping noses by the way Nila leaned back. "Did you ever find out what happened to that bag of hard tack I bought?"

Sharif noticed, but didn't understand the why-for, that Malu flinched when that topic came up.

"Nah. The wildlife must have dragged it off when we were sleeping," She cracked a smirk as Tzu Zi turned back, and she relaxed a bit. "Maybe some Platypus Bear out there tried his luck on them, and ended up with a bill empty of teeth!"

"Heh, that'd be about the funniest thing ever," Tzu Zi said, spreading her arm wide, as though showcasing something. "Behold! The oldest Platypus Bear in the world! So old he's lost all of his teeth!"

Sharif looked where Tzu Zi was indicating, but there was no bear.

Nila giggled. It was a strange enough sound that it brought Sharif's attention away from the not-a-bear-where-she-said-there-was and caused him to gape. Nila didn't giggle. Well, she didn't giggle very effectively, to be sure. It was more like she was trying to giggle and only half getting it right. Even Sharif could tell that. Just not why, of course. "That's a good one. You know what, I think the hare's cooked enough."

"But it's not done crackling," Tzu Zi said.

"Not everybody eats their meat blackened and tough," Nila said, using a small knife to peel off a sliver of meat. "Just Mother. She said 'it gave character', and that 'it would put hair on the chest'. Like I need a hairy chest!" she blew on the meat, then turned to Malu. "I'd offer you some, but you're obsessed with eating green things."

"Yeah. I don't eat anything that used to have a pulse," Malu said, but her eyes lingered on that crackling, sizzling hare, dripping with fat and juices. Sharif dug right in, of course, slightly burning his mouth for his hunger and impatience. Pity he couldn't taste anything, either. But when his gaze slid toward that thing again, her eyes were still locked on that meat, and they echoed down into a deeper, darker hunger than Sharif was able to describe. And even so, it slipped his mind quickly, and the disturbing visage of a vegetarian salivating over cooked hare vanished completely from his memory.

---

"I don't care what Aunt Wu says! YOU HAVE TO TAKE A BATH SOME TIME!" Sokka shouted. But the disgustingly filthy old fellow just let out a snigger and walked away, practically leaving footstep-shaped stains of sweat and grease behind him as he departed. Sokka stared after him, then turned to where a Ducken was pecking idly at the ground. It honked at him sarcastically, before hopping away. "Oh, you're all just rubbing it in, aren't you?" Sokka muttered.

He turned, and saw that Katara had broken away and was drifting back toward Wu's home. While the news of the Avatar's arrival in Makapu had taken about as long to spread as Sokka expected – which was to say, it was practically in every house by the time they crossed the bridge – they gave very little of the usual pomp and circumstance associated with that event. Sokka had refrained from asking, since the answer would have probably been that they backformed 'the Avatar is coming' out of something vague and ambiguous like 'an important visitor will arrive soon', which could have been delivered last year and still been considered 'right'.

This was the stupidest town of all stupid towns which Sokka had ever had the displeasure of going to.

"Um, Sokka," Aang's voice cut in through Sokka's doldrums. "You know stuff about women, don't you?"

"I could write a book," Sokka said. "And I'd call it 'A Man's Guide to Women, and the Weird Stuff They Do Sometimes'. What can I do for ya?"

"Well, I've kinda got this thing with..." Aang trailed off, and Sokka looked behind them both, noticing how a wild-haired girl ducked behind a basket to stay out of sight. He smiled at that.

"I think I know who you're talking about," Sokka said maturely.

"You do? And you're not... angry about it?" Aang asked.

"Why would I be?" Sokka asked, clapping the young Avatar on the back. "And besides, I'm pretty sure that she's sending a positive vibe your way, even now."

"Really?" Aang asked, brightening like a sunrise.

"Of course. She's probably crazy about you, and trying to figure out the right way to put it," Sokka said with a somewhat undue amount of confidence. "Now the trick of it at this point is to not screw it up. And you know the biggest pitfall of nice guys like you? Being too nice. Girls can't stand that."

"I'm thirteen, not an idiot," Aang said evenly. "I saw somebody fart around being 'aloof' for months trying to get a girl to like him. And he ended up completely alone at the end of it."

"Well, I stand by maximum aloofness," Sokka said defensively.

"And how many girls have you gotten with that?" he asked, twisting the knife. Not in a mean-spirited way, but obviously intending to prove his point. Sokka sputtered for a moment, that he'd gotten a kiss out of... what was her name again? That Kyoshi Warrior. Oh, right, Suki. And then she got captured and imprisoned by the Fire Nation, if not executed. "I think I'll just try to find my own way. But thanks for the insight."

Meng, who had been quietly sidling up with all of the stealth and silence of a snow panther, finally came to a halt next to Aang, gave a nervous smile, and said "Hey, Aang, I was wondering if –"

"I'm going to see what Katara's looking into," Aang cut her off and sauntered away, leaving Meng to wilt like a dying flower.

"Wow. For a kid saying he wasn't doing aloof, that was pretty aloof," he muttered in his own language.

"Come again?" a voice very similar to Meng's piped up. Sokka turned opposite to where the dejectived suitor sulked away, and beheld a half-way familiar sight, of the pale, dark haired girl with an casual slump to her posture, green eyes seemingly covered with a milky film such that the pupil was more a suggestion than a bodily certainty. Her clothes, like those which Sokka had been relegated by simple circumstance into wearing, were all obviously expensive, but like his, dirty and a bit tattered and torn. "Stop staring, Big Guy."

"I was just saying that Aang's more of a player than I give him credit," Sokka said, motioning toward the now vanished Avatar. She didn't follow his hand. Or even look at him when he spoke to her. That was about when he remembered her declaration of blindness. "So... Do you hate Makapu too?"

"Hate's a strong word," the girl said. "I'm kinda in a bit of a bind, here. You probably got some grim, hellish forecast?"

"Not really. Just that I'm going to find somebody just like me for a wife," Sokka said. "I really don't see the problem with that."

"You wouldn't," the girl laughed, a deep, belly laugh quite odd coming from somebody who looked like her. "Mine was mostly that I'm going to lose a lot of stuff, and I don't like losing. There's no way she's accurate. She's gotta be full of something."

"Are you pondering what I'm pondering?" Sokka asked. The girl smirked, a wide and toothy smirk.

"Probably, but Dad would be furious if I dragged a Tribesman home after the first date."

Sokka stared at her for a second, agape. She then punched him in the shoulder with a guffaw. "Oh man, I wish I could see the look on your face," she said, taking a few steps away. "Well? You gonna debunk a charlatan or not?"

Only in that moment did it occur to Sokka that finding his equal might be a more arduous task than he'd given credit. For all her professed and admitted blindness, she managed to move through the town without any of the usual accouterments. She even managed to skirt around people who bustled around the obviously long-dry fountain which sat in the middle of the town's square. The bustle had a different feeling than the usual wanderings about town that Sokka had gotten used to on this journey north. It was more a tense expectation, people holding their breath and bracing for the worst. Sokka's eyes widened a bit when he spotted Aang, who was tossing an apple to himself and staring upward.

"What's up with the people watching the sky?" Sokka asked. Aang shrugged, and bit the apple, which he then immediately spat out in disgust. Momo, though, who had been making a terror of himself, alighted off of the vendor's booth and took the apple quite contently.

"As soon as Aunt Wu does her cloud reading, we will know if the volcano is going to erupt," the fruit vendor answered, staring daggers at the lemur.

"Volcano?" the girl repeated. It was like something was dawning to her. "Of course! That must be why the ground is all bubbly." Sokka raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't press. She was blind after all. She couldn't know that the ground was not, in fact, bubbly.

"Indeed," the cool-as-icecream wanderer from before said, sidling up to the three of them. "We used to have a tradition of every year sending somebody to the crest of Mount Makapu to see if the volcano had become active. But since Aunt Wu came to the town decades ago, we have a new tradition," he said. Both waited for him to continue until even he got that he was being prompted. "A new tradition of not going to the crest of the mountain."

"I can't believe you're hinging the lives of everybody in this town on your stupid superstition!" Sokka said, a hot anger pressing out through his voice. This was intellectual blasphemy! Sokka felt himself being hushed, though, and turned to see his sister returning, a dejected look on her face.

"I hate papaya," she muttered sadly. Sokka didn't even bother trying to figure out what led to that statement, and instead turned as the people began to clamor, a ripple running through them as Aunt Wu moved through the clouds and turned her gaze to the sky, and the clouds drifting through it. Meng, ever the cunning little monkey, slipped close to Aang when he was distracted, only prompting a chirp from Momo.

"Hey, Aang. Doesn't that cloud look like a flower?" she asked.

Aang gave her an askance glance. "Sure... I guess," he said. Then he turned, utterly ignoring her with admirable levels of aloofness, and addressed Katara. "Hey, Katara. Doesn't that cloud look like a flower?"

"You'd better hope it doesn't," the traveler said, alarm in his voice. "A flower cloud in the the winter predicts windstorms and tornadoes."

Sokka glared at the man. "Do you even hear yourself?" he asked flatly.

"High, wispy broom," Aunt Wu said, consulting some sort of booklet. She let out a sigh. "The drought will continue. Keep up the irrigation, especially to the east."

There were a few disappointed moans from the crowd. One farmer in particular kicked the ground in a fit of pique. Comforting words started to slip out, though, as Wu continued.

"Hmm. Ring cloud... at the horizon to the north," she flipped a few pages, and then stared off into the distance. "Technological advance. Hm. Not really relevant," she then turned to the south. "Wavy moon shaped cloud. Gonna be a good year for twins."

A pair of them, identical in every physical way, let out a shout of glee.

"Thunder head with a twisted nub," she read further. She let out a sigh, and the people leaned forward in grim anticipation. "The village will not be destroyed this year," she said, in plain voice, but in the expectant silence, it might as well have been screamed. And the cry of joy from the townsfolk buffeted Sokka to the point where he felt himself drifting back, just to get out of the sea of crazies. It obviously wasn't his idea alone, because soon it was just the three of them, plus the blind girl, standing outside a cheering group of saps.

"And this is how dumb most of the world is," the blind girl said flatly.

"Hey," Katara interjected. "It's not dumb to believe in things which give you hope!"

"It is if it makes you blind to what's going on around you," she said. "A couple months ago, I was livin' the high life. Boring as hell, sure, but I had a comfy bed and decent food to eat. Now, I sleep under a wagon. Hell, now that we're here, we ain't even got that! Hope's overrated, Sugarqueen."

"Heh, good one," Sokka said.

"Sugarqueen?" Katara said, her back right up. "Why you... little..."

"Come on, big guy," the girl said, beckoning Sokka. "There's gotta be some way to show that Wu is full of it and not look like an ass doing it."

Sokka looked between his terminally annoyed sister and the blind girl, and then back to Aang and the happily munching Momo. "Sorry, guys. I gotta follow my brain."

"Doesn't your brain kinda go with you?" Aang asked innocently.

"Yeah, but... It's a thing," Sokka said, with a dismissive wave.

"All I know is that certain things are going to turn out just fine for me," Katara said. "Except for that stupid papaya. Why did it have to be papaya?"

Sokka just rolled his eyes and headed out after the blind girl. After he'd caught up to her, which was easy because she was quite a bit shorter than he was, he opened his mouth to ask her something. "You didn't ask my name. It's Toph," she said. "And it's great having somebody who's as sick of stupidity as I am. I gotta tell ya', it gets right under my skin."

"Any idea how we're going to prove Aunt Wu wrong?" Sokka asked. "You know, without having to spend weeks talking to these people?"

"I've got a pretty good idea where to start," Toph said, standing with her fists on her hips. Sokka stared at her. She then let out a sigh. "Let me guess, the volcano isn't directly behind me, is it?"

"Oh, right, the volcano," Sokka said, turning a bit so that it came into view. There was an odd haze near its peak, and it looked like a hard climb. "Tui La, it'll take days to get up that thing."

"Days? Pff. I could be up and down that thing in a couple hours," she scoffed.

"No offense, but how? You're blind."

"None taken, and only in my eyes," she answered. She then gave a stomp, and Sokka felt himself being pitched forward onto his chest, right at her feet. A glance back showed there was now an angled block of earth which had launched him. "And when it comes to this, and most things, I cheat."

Sokka nodded at that. "Good. Get going, then?"

"Ladies first," she said, waving him onward. While he gave her a disamused glance at that, a part of his mind pondered if this was Wu's prediction. But it couldn't be for two very simple reasons. One, this girl was wearing green, red, and gold, not blue, and two, he utterly refused to have her be right about ANYTHING!

---

Zhao was smirking. Things seldom went well for people who weren't him when he was smirking. The mid-day sun pressed down in lovely warmth, which radiated through the hull of the ship and turned it into an oven. Nobody would have raised a word of complaint for a moment, though. It was warmer even than back home. Fire Nationals lived for the heat. It was a little unsettling that they could only really get it abroad.

It couldn't be said that Zhao was ever an easy smiler. In fact, his usual expression was a dire glower, which was now frozen into a quarter of his face. But today, he was smirking, because his notion to go back and re-decrypt the first journals of Azula's that he'd managed to locate was paying high dividends. While he hadn't unlocked the whole of its narrative, not yet, it was only a matter of time at this point. The only thing he wished was that he had their source, so that he could remain up-to-date on what new prophecy she created. One part in particular caught his eye, and he had made a note to tell the navigator to set a course north, and get the skiffs ready to power up a particular river. In fact, that was what he was heading toward at this very moment.

"The Fire Lord has a task for you," a voice snapped Zhao's smirk away. It was a girl, probably teenaged, but she had the no-nonsense and cold tones of a veteran soldier, a survivor of brutal campaigns and the deaths of many, on both sides. Zhao half turned to see her. She was ghastly pale, and hid her eyes behind smoked lenses, just like the rest of Ozai's frankly unsettling child bodyguards. Zhao could see the logic in it. Grown men would hesitate to attack children, while the children would hold no such compunction. It wasn't a tactic the Fire Nation would ever use, of course. Fire Nationals were too valuable to squander in their childhoods... but the Water Tribes? They were a different story.

"How did you get onto my ship?" Zhao demanded.

"It is the Fire Lord's ship, you simply direct it," the girl answered sharply. Zhao faced her, glaring down at her. The intended effect – intimidation – obviously hit a stumbling block when she refused to do more than tap a foot in impatience at his display. "And he has given direction."

"You didn't answer my question."

"I have no need to, not to you," she answered.

"The gulf between us is vaster than you think," Zhao warned.

"You assume that the gulf is vertical. I assure you, it isn't. I am Fire Nation. I answer to the Fire Lord. Nobody else," she said. "Now are you going to accept your task, or are you a traitor?"

"I don't appreciate having a child besmirch my integrity."

"You've done a fair enough job of that on your own," the girl said with a smirk of her own, pulling at bright red lips. They were the most incongruous part of her entire facade. Why take so little care as to appear so ghastly, and yet apply lipstick? "But your humiliations, your follies, and your mistakes are going to be your advantage, I think."

"Speak plainly, girl."

"You conquered the waterbenders of the south with a pittance of the power the Fire Nation can bring to bear. Granted, it was against the Whalesh. I could probably conquer them with just Omo and Kori. But Ozai considers that something worth expanding upon. You are to gather the rendezvous with the reserve fleet and bring down the gates of Summavut."

"We've been breaking our teeth against that wall for six years," Zhao said carefully, a scowl pulling at his burnt amber eye. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were sending me there to die."

"Not to die," she said. "Ozai has faith that you will succeed at Summavut where others failed. He spoke of a particular plan of which only you and he have discussed. He says that the time has come to put it into action."

The wheels turned in Zhao's mind. Freedom to bring down not just the North, but waterbending itself? He would be legendary. His name would outlive his progeny, for ten thousand years. A smile began to stretch across his burnt face, a wicked and terrible thing. But even as it did, a hollow, droning voice crawled up in his memory. Another girl, perhaps a few years younger than this one, telling him that he would die in the north. Die of his own arrogance. Die of his own avarice. That smile wilted.

"I thought you'd be more pleased about this," the girl said.

"I am pleased, but I also have much on my mind," Zhao said. "Return to your master. Tell him I will rendezvous soon, and that we will strike before the season ends."

"You should leave now."

"Do not think you direct me, girl," Zhao said, off handedly. "There are other factors which need to be dealt with, for the good of the Fire Nation. I don't expect somebody like you to understand that."

"Be very careful what you say around her," a youth's voice said, walking past Zhao. He gave a glance to the Easterner with the dark spectacles. They didn't have the armor this time, but the glasses marked them Children just as the armor would. "She might surprise you."

"Omo, don't threaten the little lord," the girl said. "And Kori, stop making faces at him."

Zhao turned, and saw that there was a third which was now circling around him, munching on an apple as he did so. That one would infiltrate under broad daylight was troublesome. That three could was unforgivable. Somebody was getting the lash for this. "Get off my ship."

"About damned time," the last said. Uncouth, as all of his Tribal ilk were. Why the Fire Lord ever gave so much access to one of his race was unfathomable. But without even a superior smirk behind them, all three slipped down the corridors and vanished around a corner. Zhao didn't doubt that if he ran to that corner and peeked around it, they wouldn't be there anymore. It was an odd sensation he had in his mind. Joy and triumph, mixed with trepidation and concern. If he slew the gods, he would die. It was sure as the words which lined Azula's journals. But there had to be another way. It would just fall to him to find it.

That smirk returned, though, only slightly dampered. "I might as well deal with old problems before considering new ones," Zhao noted, before heading for the helm, and setting a course to a particular port, and up a particular river.

---

A young Tribesman and a little girl went rocketing up the side of a volcano, on a platform of earthbent rock. There was a girlish scream coming from that platform. A sound deduction would be that the scream was coming from the little girl, but as was Sokka's Corollary, when the obvious didn't work, start accepting the absurd – in this case, that it was a fifteen year old Tribesman who was screaming high enough to shatter glass. In his defense, though, Toph could have chosen a method of reaching the top which wasn't so pants-fillingly terrifying. "We're going to dieeeeeeee!"

"No we ain't," the girl said, finally relaxing out of her stance, the momentum dying swiftly, grinding to a halt past the sheer cliffs and crags. It would have been an exhausting climb to get up there. Physically exhausting. This had been emotionally and spiritually exhausting, since terror had a way of taking it out of you. All told, though, Sokka – intensely lazy being that he was – probably would have done the earthbending-thing again rather than an old-fashioned climb. Not because he couldn't climb a grade like this. Simply because he was, as noted, intensely lazy. "See? Like liquor and snot, up the hill in a couple of minutes."

"You... are... INSANE!"

"You know you love it," she said, slugging Sokka in the arm hard enough to knock him over. Her open smile curdled a bit, though, as she leaned down and ran a hand over the rocks which rose near the top of Mount Makapu. "Something's not right here. I've never felt stone that was like this."

Sokka looked up, and blinked. "I have seen air that looked like that, though."

"What are you talking about?" Toph asked. He stared at her a moment, and then she waved her hand in front of her face again. Oh, right. Blind. "You know what, I'm going in for a closer look."

"Toph, don't do it," Sokka began, but she set off at a jog toward where the rocks fell away from what ought have been a peak. Sokka sighed, then forced himself to run after her. If there was one advantage of being gangly, it was that his legs made it easy to cover distance. He reached her just in time to grab the back of her dress and arrest her before she stepped forward into an updraft of air so hot that it distorted light passing through it. "Not one more step!"

"What's the big idea?" Toph asked. Sokka could have explained that she didn't feel the massive heat because of the way the air flowed, trying to replace that which was forced upward. He could have done a lot of things, but that took time, and she obviously was going to shrug him off and walk into a convection current in a moment, so he opted to take a rock and throw it ahead of them.

It flew through the air as rocks do so well, before falling down and hitting the surface. But it didn't land with a clack of hard things banging together. Instead, it landed with the plorp of something concrete striking something which... wasn't quite. The stone sunk through the tender black skin of hard stone, revealing the pulsing red magma just below it. It bubbled up out of the wound, and started to eat a larger hole, now that the delicate equilibrium had been destroyed. On Crescent Island, he'd gotten a good look at what lava looked like when only a thin skin of it was cold enough to be solid, but the blood of the earth underneath it raged hot and wild. The similarity between the crater of Makapu Mountain and Crescent Island was absolute. "That didn't sound right," Toph said. She slowly moved a hand forward, before yanking it back with a curse and dancing out of his grip, waving the pain out of her slightly singed extremity around a string of profanity which Sokka found quite enlightening. "What the hell was that?"

"The volcano is alive. That... thing... you've been feeling is lava. Molten rock."

"I know what lava is," Toph said sharply, blowing on her hand. It was slightly reddened for its momentary exposure to the convected heat, but no worse for wear. She frowned, staring down at the rock under her feet, then slammed her other fist down into it. She tilted her head, as though feeling for something, or listening for something. Then, her useless eyes shot open wide. "Oh, hell no. Sokka, we've got a problem."

"What kind of problem?"

"There you are," Aang's voice came, which made Sokka start a bit. He glanced first to the Avatar, then past him, to where Appa was rubbing his belly on a rock. "You just ran off. Katara was worried."

"We had to check something," Sokka said.

"Who is this guy?" Toph asked.

"He's the Avatar," Sokka said simply. "What kind of problem?"

"The Avatar? Him?" Toph asked, before snorting derisively. "Give me a break. Twinkletoes here wouldn't stand two minutes set against my Mom!"

"Why would I fight your mother?" Aang asked, scratching his bald head.

"Don't answer to Twinkletoes," Sokka chastised. "It's unmanly. Now what is the problem?"

"The volcano is going to go off in a big way," Toph said, extracting her hand from the dirt. She turned so that she now stared between the two of them. "And when it does, I'm pretty sure it's going to erase Makapu from the map."

"Oh, man. This is bad," Aang said. "We need to get back and warn them!"

"Why?" Toph asked.

"That's what we do," Sokka explained wearily. "Bad things happen to good people, and then we make them right."

"Sounds exhausting," Toph noted.

"Tell me about it," Sokka laughed. But with that, all three were mounting Appa, and screaming down the hill. And once again, there was a girlish scream heading down the mountain, but this time, it didn't come from the Tribesman. Sokka would have laughed at Toph's wide-eyed terror, but that would have been mean. And besides, he was distracted by the stupid which was arrayed before him. As soon as the beast landed, Sokka bounded off, and raised his hands above him at the still teeming masses.

"Got a plan, Sokka?" Aang asked.

"Kinda," Sokka said, then raised his voice to carry. "Everybody! That volcano is going to blow any minute! Aunt Wu was wrong!"

"We all know about your silly superstitions," the fruit vendor noted. "You're just desperate to prove your ill advised little perspective, aren't you?"

"What's going on?" Katara asked.

"We're all going to die," Toph said casually, picking at her fingernails with a splinter. Katara sputtered at that.

"Listen to me! I saw it with my own eyes!" Aang said, bounding up and balancing on the rigging of the fruit stand. "The volcano is active, and it's only becoming more volatile! We need to flee before it's too late!"

The all-too-calm person shrugged at that pronouncement, amidst a sea of dead-eyed observers. "Well, I heard Aunt Wu's prediction with my own ears, and she says we have nothing to worry about."

"Twinkletoes, if you've got something to say, you'd better say it quick," Toph said, before sticking her fingers into her ears. Sokka gave her an askance look, then turned back to Mount Makapu. The heatwaves in the air had given way to obvious smoking.

"Please, listen to me, I –" Aang was cut off by a tremendous blast which tore through the air and buffeted the clothes of those gathered, leaving a ringing sensation in Sokka's head. Toph unstoppered her ears smugly.

"Told ya'."

Aang blinked for a moment, before turning back to the crowds. "If you don't do something soon, it'll be too late! Please, I can't save you from this if you don't help me!"

"If you're not going to listen to him, at least listen to that ringing sound in your ears," Sokka shouted. He thrust a finger back up the mountain. "Can your half-baked shenanigans explain why the volcano is smoking?"

"Can your science explain why it rains?" the red-shoed man asked smugly. Sokka just about blew a gasket. And since Sokka hadn't even realized he had a gasket, it was a hell of a feat.

"YES! YES IT CAN!" Sokka shrieked, but the man tutted and walked away.

"I can't believe it," Aang said, hopping down. "They all believe so strongly in Wu that they won't do anything to save themselves."

"I always knew that faith was the problem," Toph said with a shrug. Then she blanched a bit. "Oh, damn it all..."

"Toph? Toph! There you are!" a grown man came running in and grabbed Toph up like she was a doll. "Do you have any idea how worried we were? We need to get out of here. This place is... crazy!"

"Dad, I..."

"No. We're leaving. Any place is better than this," the man said, and bodily carried Toph away. She had the most bone-weary expression on her face as she was excised. Sokka couldn't help but feel sorry for her.

"How are we going to push past all of this faith?" Katara asked. "If we don't we'll never get them to listen."

And like that, the idea was in Sokka's head. "Maybe we don't have to," he said. "They believe in Wu, right?"

"Yeah, that's the problem!" Aang noted in despair.

Sokka smirked. "Well, it's about to become the solution. Clouds are just water in the air, right? Feel up for some atmospheric vandalism?"

---

Step one in Sokka's plan was, as with many of Sokka's plans, a felony. It had come to drawing lots between Katara – who had pestered the woman enough to have understandable access – and the Avatar, who was in all intents and purposes immune to the law when it came to trifles. Aang didn't see it that way, but Sokka had stressed that of all of them, Aang stood to get into the least trouble. It was a notion which struck Aang as deeply, deeply wrong about the whole Avatar thing. But since he'd drawn the short straw, it was he who snuck through the building, carefully upending things and digging through shelves. "Come on, you stupid book. Where are you?"

So engrossed was Aang with the search that he'd completely missed the creeping up of small footsteps behind him. Thus, when fingers tapped him on the shoulder, his bones nearly jumped out of his skin. Silently, though. He turned, strangling the gasp like it had done him wrong, and spun about, to see a wilted looking Meng standing behind him. "You don't like me, do you?" she asked.

Aang glanced toward the door, but the urge to flee was bettered by his urge to be kind. "Of course I do," he said.

"But... not the way I like you," Meng said. Aang then twigged that Katara might have been a bit more on the ball than he had given credit.

"I guess not," he said. "Not that it's your fault, though. You seem like a sweet girl."

"I hear that a lot," Meng said, leaning on the wall next to him. "It's hard to think of somebody like that, when you know they don't feel the same way back."

"I know all about that," Aang slumped next to her.

"I can see why you like her," Meng offered. "She's sweet, she's a bender, and her hair seems so... manageable."

Aang raised a brow at this. "What? When did you ever meet her?"

"Katara. The Water Tribe girl," Meng said. Aang leaned away, slightly aghast.

"What? No! She's... like the big sister I never had. That's just gross!" he said.

"Then who?" Meng asked.

"It's... complicated," Aang said. He hated when the older kids would describe their relationships like that, and now, here he was, doing exactly the same thing. Of course, in Aang's defense, Azula was the lovely girl who had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of a war. Domo and Jai were just indecisive and foolish. "She's a good person. But I don't think anybody lets her see that in herself. She deserves better than she's gotten."

"I guess you're right," Meng said.

"I wouldn't worry. Just give it some time, and you'll find somebody who falls for you like a brick off a mountain," Aang said. He pushed off the wall, and started walking toward the window. He had obviously been made, there was no point keeping looking.

"Wait, don't you want this?" Meng asked, producing Aunt Wu's cloud reference. Aang took it, but the expression on his face clearly said 'how did you even know?'. "Yeah... I overheard Sokka's plan... because I've been kinda stalking you since you first arrived."

"Thats... I'm going to go now," Aang said, giving her a flat look as he departed the fortune teller's home with a great deal more haste than he'd entered. A few more moments, and he was atop Appa, and pulling the beast up into the air.

"Alright," Aang called back to Katara, who had awaited him in the howdah. "We just need to find the cloud which stands for volcanic doom and bend something into that shape," he called back. Considering the sparseness of the clouds over the Earth Kingdoms, it would probably be a tricky task. "So what do we need it to look like?"

Katara flipped the pages for a moment, then laughed a bit. "Sokka's going to have a field day with this one," she said.

---

She dropped the basket of food with a thump. The meager gold was holding up fairly well, all things considered, but her annoyance trumped her desire not to bruise the apples at the bottom, and she crossed her arms before her chest, glaring with bright green eyes at her husband. "And why, exactly, did you have to embarrass Toph in front of the locals?"

"She'd gotten lost, and the volcano was..." Lao began.

"Lost? Really?" she asked. She turned to her daughter, who looked like she wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and die. "Toph, were you lost?"

"No, I was..."

"She didn't come when I called to her!" Lao interjected.

"And what is she? A hound?" Poppy demanded. "Your daughter was probably busy having fun."

"This isn't the time for fun," Lao said, his eyes constantly flicking back toward the smoking stack of Mount Makapu. "We need to get very far away from this place as soon as possible."

"And what about the village? Just leave it to burn?" Poppy asked. Toph gave her the strangest look when she asked that.

"I don't see how it's any of our problem," Lao said. Poppy groaned, tweezing her brow.

"I forget that you aren't... one of my old friends, sometimes. Lao, this place is going to burn. These people are going to die. And that doesn't bother you?"

"Well, it does, but..."

Poppy was about to press her point when a hubbub began to sound, as a young Tribesman seemed to be dragging this 'Aunt Wu' into the center of town again. She turned to them, as the Tribesman pointed up into the sky. "Well, if you're so sure of your predictions, explain that!" the Tribesman said, pointing at a cloud which looked rather like a bunny. The fortune teller gave a gasp, and then nodded.

"The day has not finished; he's right. The volcano is going to erupt."

"See? I told you! Didn't I tell you?" Sokka laughed at an inordinately calm man standing near by. He seemed not in the slightest bit off-put by this. She caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, an that flicker turned into a bison. A saddled, domesticated bison. And the child bounding off the beasts brow... could it be? Could Zha Yu be right? Could they all be right?

She took a step forward, pulling Toph with her, toward the Avatar.

"We can still save the village, but we need to act fast," the Avatar said, his sentence punctuated by an enormous blast pushing out of the top of the mountain. About a second later, the din of that blast reached the village and sent some staggering back. The Tribesman, on the other hand, had braced against it, and stood resolute even where the Avatar stumbled.

"I've seen the mountain. From the shape of the crater, that lava's got only one way down, and it's this way," he declared, less bravado and more exasperated and desperately hoping to not have to beat somebody with the clue stick. In that instant, the teenage boy reminded Beifong rather a lot of the woman who created her. He thrust a finger straight down. "The lava's going to flow down hill to this village, which means we have to find a way to divert it. That means we're going to need to get every earthbender in the village to dig a trench, and anybody strong enough to sling a shovel to help them."

"I'm an earthbender!" one of a pair of twins piped up.

"I'm not!" the other said with equal enthusiasm.

"Good. Everybody else, grab shovels, and start moving earth!" the Tribesman said. Beifong found herself smiling, at old memories. Odd, how the stereotype of the illiterate, savage, ignorant brute of the 'Tribesman' so vastly differed from its reality. That smile still on her face, she started walking to where he started grouping people to create the trench. Lao gave a strangled noise in his throat.

"What are you doing?" he asked in a hiss. "People will see you!"

"I'm not leaving these people to die, not when I can help," she said, pointedly, and made sure that Toph could hear it. "And if you think about it, neither would you. You're good at organizing things, love; organize an evacuation."

"But..." Lao blustered. A hero he was not, not by any stretch, but she could see that he wasn't going to fight her on this. Mostly because she knew he knew she was right. "Alright. Alright, I'll get these people across the river."

"That's why I love you," she said, giving him a brief peck. "You are capable of being a good person... when dragged kicking and screaming into it."

"I don't remember you being this sarcastic before," Lao said sullenly.

"You should have met me when I was a teenager," she said. When she took her second step away, she felt something grab her hand. That something turned out to be Beifong's daughter. "What is it?"

"Excuse me? My mom turns out to be a hidden badass and you expect me to just let it slide away unmentioned?" Toph asked. "I'm going to help."

"No, that's absolutely out of..." Beifong just leveled a flat glare at her husband. He trailed off. "I miss the old you."

"This is the old me," Beifong said. She turned to her daughter. "Do as much as you can, but remember that you don't need to do everything."

Toph let out a quite ungirlish scoff at that. "I just wanna see you with a shovel."

"Shovel?" she answered. She turned, and thrust out a fist toward the edge of town, past where the buildings faded into the woods. It was an old and ill-practiced discipline, one she hadn't done extensively for... oh, about fourteen years. But once a person was an earthbender, the stone was in the bones, the soil worked into the skin, and it would obey her. It started in a precise line, peeling and rolling back like a bedsheet, and the topsoil shifted away to show the stone underneath. "Why would I need a shovel?"

Toph pointed at her. "I knew it! I knew I had to get my mojo from somewhere!"

"Mojo?" she asked. She shook her head. "Bending isn't hereditary, it's..."

Toph beat her to the punch by taking a similar motion, a thrust of the fists in the same direction. But where Beifong had rolled back the soil down to the rocks, Toph's thrust slammed the rocks away in a great wave. Just as precise. Quite a bit stronger. "Like I said. I had to get it from somewhere," Toph said smugly.

Poppy Beifong couldn't have been prouder.

The task was hard, arduous even, and moved with a huge amount of haste, because every minute or so, there was another blast from the peak. Toph had personally done the last great bending to open the trench to the river, and had to scramble up the banks as the water began to flood in. Beifong was exhausted, her muscles cramped and arguing against her task. To say she was rusty was understatement refined to an artform. But as the lava began to spill down the mountain, the trench was in place. She turned to tell Toph to head for the bridge, to her father, but the girl was staring not at her, but up to the center of that trench, where it peaked near the highest edge of that village. "Toph, it's time to go."

"Not yet, Mom," Toph said, her head tilted slightly, useless eyes focused away and her ears guiding her. "This is going to get worse."

"Toph, we have to go!" Beifong shouted to her. The girl gave a half-glance to her, more an impression that she heard, and she pointedly wasn't listening.

"You have to go. The trench isn't deep enough. There's a lot more lava then they thought they were going to have to deal with. It's going to overflow."

"How could you possibly know that?" Beifong asked, turning her daughter to face her. "Toph, please! Don't make me have to..."

"Do you think I'm helpless?" Toph demanded.

"No, but..."

"Am I weak?"

"No."

"Am I frail?" Toph asked. Considering in how much better shape Toph looked than Beifong felt, the question was obviously rigged. "I'm blind. Alright, my eyes don't work. But I'm not helpless. I can make a difference here. I know it!"

There were two impulses in Poppy Beifong's mind. The first was the mother. Wanting Toph protected from harm, shielded from adversity. The second... the second was the eighteen year old woman, born fully grown, bleeding and bruised and bound to a chair in Ba Sing Se. The girl born with nothing, only a name which wasn't really a name. The girl who demanded... purpose. Meaning. And her 'mother' had given it to her.

If she kept Toph back, she was succeeding as a mother.

If she let Toph help, she was honoring her own 'mother'.

"Go," Beifong said. "Help the Avatar. Show that volcano who's boss."

Toph smiled at that, not the practiced and beautific smile society demanded of her. This grin was toothy, uneven, and so wonderfully genuine. "I'll make you proud," Toph said, giving Beifong the briefest of hugs, before running headlong toward the glowing, flowing stone. Beifong rose, and backed toward the bridge, a wistful smile on her own face.

"You already do," Poppy Beifong whispered.

---

The heat was murderous. Aang knew from the bridge on Crescent Island that the sheer amount of it radiating away from the flowing rock would have set his skin to spontaneously combust if he hadn't surrounded himself with a bubble of relatively glacial air – glacial in this case being an uncomfortable hot wind compared to the lethal convection without. The magma kept flowing, running down not in a rivulet or a stream, but in a relentless and unending surge, which only mounted higher with every passing minute. It had eaten through the gate which lead into the forest, before eating the forest from the roots up. The stone fetishes, marked with the names of spirits of the mountain and the volcano, of the forest and the river, all succumbed to that torrent. And more kept coming.

It slid down into the trench almost mockingly. Had it the eyes, he would have accused that magma of smirking at him, of whispering 'aren't we confident with this little ditch'? up to him. Aang turned back, at the pair of Tribesmen who stood as close as the killing heat would allow. "You have to run!" Aang screamed over the hissing, the popping, the cracking of rock exploding under the heat it suddenly found itself under.

"We're not going to leave you!" Katara shouted back, or something like it, because against the din of the wildfire which had spread through the forest, there was very little useful communication for somebody who didn't stand right next to Aang, and they couldn't. Sokka, though, took one look at the expression on Aang's face, the slow shake of the Avatar's head, and grasped his sister.

"We can't do anything else here!" Sokka said. Katara looked on the verge of tears, though whatever tears she shed would quickly evaporate. Aang, though, turned to the stone, angry and wrathful red. Consuming and destroying whatever it touched. The steam exploded up where the water met the lava, but the lava advanced all the same. And it mounted, higher and higher up the wall of that trench. It would not stay contained long. Aang pulled back, gathering the winds which roared past him, feeding the wildfire in the forest, and slammed them against the stone, but it only served to force the mass backward slightly. He could almost hear it laughing.

What could he do now?

The question was answered when a foot stomped into the ground near him, and he beheld singed sleeves slamming forward. As they did, the molten rock bucked away as though in mortal terror. Aang turned, and gave a yelp of something between surprise and protective terror. That blind girl, Toph, she was here. And she was earthbending magma. "You know, Mom says you're the Avatar, but y'ain't doing a good job of it," the girl shouted over the wind. She advanced another step, and thrust out again. The magma once again retreated from her as she shoved it back up the hill, and away from the trench which it was honestly spilling over at this point. There was an entire volcano bleeding down onto them, and it was not the Avatar, but a single blind girl who stood against it.

She wasn't winning. But she was slowing it down.

"I can't cool it off fast enough!" Aang shouted at her. She took another step forward, almost at his side. He could see her skin was already blistering from the heat, and she must have been in outstanding pain, but none if it showed on her face. Her eyes, milky and sightless, were focused as though staring into the guts of the volcano. "Any water I'd use just evaporates instantly! I can't stop it!"

"The Smart One said that the lava's flowing down hill here because –" Toph broke off to retreat a step, swinging her arms as a moment of pain overtook her focus. The instant it did, the lava seemed eager to regain lost territory. "... Because the path to the village is the easiest path. We've got to give it an easier one!"

"I don't know how!"

"You're the Avatar! Earthbend one!" Toph screamed at him, pushing the lava back as it bubbled within ten yards of Aang, and the heat in his bubble went from unbearable to painful. He danced back to her side again.

"I don't know how to earthbend!" Aang admitted at high volume.

"It's simple," Toph said, rooting herself. "Stand your ground, and be tougher than anything the stone can throw at ya'."

Aang quickly mimicked her stance, but when they both lashed forward, her bending hurled the magma back, whereas his just let out a gust of air which did practically nothing. "I can't do it!" Aang said. "There's gotta be another way!"

"We don't have time to find another way!" Toph roared, her voice much bigger than she was.

"There MUST BE!" Aang said, looking about wildly. There was always another way. He just had to find it.

"If you don't earthbend, the village is gonna burn!" Toph shouted, pounding the magma again. It was massing higher and higher, but each time she regrouped to surge again, it surged closer and closer to the village. To them. Aang didn't know what to do. "IF YOU DON'T EARTHBEND, I BURN!" she roared, an edge of pain clear in her tone.

A thousand lifetimes of earth.

And with that, Aang knew he couldn't run away. He couldn't find another solution. He just had to face this, no matter what it cost him. His body moved even before his mind did, taking up her stance exactly, not so much mimicking it. Where before, their movements were synchronized somewhat, this time, when they both struck forward, it was in perfect unity. Toph sent the magma rolling back, away from them. And then, Aang's earthbending, his very first earthbending, and the most basic of it, slammed into hers.

To move a rock. The most basic of earthbending techniques.

It was so foreign. So unthinkably different from anything he'd ever done before. And it showed. Aang's bending slammed through Toph's, sending that great blob exploding away from the village, covering the burnt trees and the dead landscape outside, but no longer massing in a great dollop. And then, it traveled beyond, tearing apart the flow of magma as it went up the mountain. He wasn't even controlling it at this point. It was a force of nature, like a fault line. A fault line which ran right up the center of Mount Makapu, and tore the mountain in half. Not by much, only a few yards, but almost instantly, the deluge slowed to a trickle, as the magma began to drain down the other side of the volcano. The trench didn't refill again, not to the top as it had before.

Aang looked at his hands, at the tattoos, which had glowed like the sun, now returning to their natural blue. Aang felt a little unsteady on his feet, having to stagger back a few paces to catch himself. Toph, though, remained rooted. She wiped the sweat from her brow, and looked at her hands. She prodded at a blister tenderly, then turned with a smug grin. "Well, that wasn't half bad, Twinkletoes."

"You weren't either," Aang admitted. Toph grinned, and then she pointed at a spot of dirt not far away.

"I'm just gonna go pass out for a second," she said, and wandered over to that corner of the building, and slumped against it. Aang stumbled back, and quickly found two pairs of arms supporting him.

"Aang! You did it!" Sokka said.

"I didn't do it alone," Aang replied, nodding toward Toph. Katara's eyes widened at that, and she released Aang onto Sokka's support and ran over to her.

"Are you alright?"

"Buzz off, Sugarqueen, I feel better than you look," Toph muttered, but weakly, and her dismissing gesture was more exhaustion than exile.

"She was braver than anybody I've ever seen," Aang said.

"Hey!" Sokka complained.

"She faced down a volcano, Sokka," Katara pointed out. Sokka had to grunt his admission of remarkable toughness to pull something like that. But he had a completely different kind of noise coming from his mouth when she pulled water from a skin and formed glowing gloves of it and pressed them to the lightly seared skin of the earthbender.

"Katara! You promised you wouldn't..."

"No!" Katara snapped. "I will not turn away from people I can help."

"Urgh. My skin feels all tingly," Toph muttered, before letting out a squawk and pushing away from Katara. "Get your hands off me! Gods, that felt weird. What did you do?"

"She healed your burns," Sokka said. "And yeah, they do feel pretty tingly, don't they?"

Toph seemed much renewed after that momentary 'healing', and took a moment to crick her neck, tear off a mostly singed sleeve, and then spit on the ground. "Gotta say, Twinkletoes, you're one hell of a powerful bender."

"And you're a very skilled earthbender," Aang said. Toph seemed quite pleased with herself for a moment, before she went rigid for a moment, glanced at a building standing nearby, and then wilted slightly. "What is it?"

"Aw crap," she muttered.

"Is something wr...?" Katara began, but Toph cut her off with a shake of the head and a cutting gesture.

"None of your concern," Toph sighed. "And here comes Mom. So much for being a hero."

Several of the villagers who had refused to leave, namely Wu and that entirely too calm man, approached then. There was another with them, one Aang didn't recognize from before, who had her attention locked firmly on Toph and not him, so he had to assume that was Toph's mother. Wu stood before him, and held out her hand, as though expecting something. After a long moment, Aang shrugged at her. "You messed with the clouds, didn't you?" she asked.

Aang fell inward, sheepishly, and produced the book so he could return it to her. "Yes, ma'am." he said.

"Very clever," Wu said. She leaned in a little closer. "Sometimes, they amaze me how little they think about their own lives."

"See?" Sokka piped up. "If it hadn't been for somebody thinking rationally and living in the world as it was, everything would have been destroyed. I hope this is a lesson to not depend so damned much on fortune telling!"

"But Aunt Wu predicted the village would not be destroyed, and it wasn't!" the calm man said pleasantly.

Sokka glared at him for a very, very angry moment. "I. Hate. You." he said simply, before gathering up his slightly weakened sister and the very weakened Avatar and bore them both toward where an entirely-okay bison would be waiting. As they passed Toph's mother, though, she bumped up against Aang, and he felt something pressed into his hand. He gave a glance back, and she favored him with just a flicker of bright green eyes before kneeling down before her daughter, as peace returned to the village of Makapu.

Aang allowed himself to be lead, but he wondered. He wondered right up until Sokka loaded his sister and Aang into the Howdah, where Katara very quickly went to sleep out of her healing-derived exhaustion. Aang, though, finally opened up that hand, and saw it had a scrap of paper.

You will find a friend off the river from Bomei.

Tell him 'the Dragon of the East demands'.

It wasn't signed, which was understandable, since he knew who it came from, but bore a tiny mark at its end, like a flower done in black and white. He would have to talk to Sokka about this, and Katara. But they were all tired. They were tired, and they were running out of food. If nothing else, they would have to stop for supplies soon.

"Sokka, you know maps," Aang said over the edge of the howdah. "What's the nearest place to get food and stuff?"

"There's a port town not far from here. A pretty big one, too," Sokka said. "But it did seem a bit... shady."

It would have to do.

---

"I'm..." Mom began.

"I know. I was reckless and hasty and if the Avatar hadn't done his glowing badass thing I'd probably be dead," Toph interrupted, her face toward the ground. "I'm sorry, Mom."

"Don't be sorry," Mom said, pulling Toph into a hug. "I am so... so very proud of you. I've almost never seen somebody that brave."

"It wasn't much. Just a volcano," Toph said.

"Just a volcano," Mom repeated with a laugh, a very distant one. "Gods, you remind me of my 'mother'."

Toph could hear the sarc-marks around mother.

"Wait? I've got a grandma?" Toph asked.

"Not really," Mom said. She seemed to turn away, tracking something which Toph couldn't 'see'. "That boy is really something. I can see why they were all so excited about him."

"Eh. He could use some work," Toph said.

"I'm glad you finally let me in," Mom said. Toph raised a brow at that. "Before the fire... you just didn't talk to me at all."

"Hey, 'cause of that fire, I learned my Mom is awesome. I also learned Dad's a dink, but that wasn't news to me."

"You shouldn't talk about your father that way," Mom scolded, but Toph could feel that she wasn't even the slightest bit annoyed. The older woman sighed a bit. "You want to go with him, don't you?"

"Him? He'd drive me out of my mind! He's so flighty and naïve and callow and..." Toph ranted, before realizing that wasn't what Mom was asking. "And he's probably going to save the world."

Mom sat on the dirt beside Toph, and hung her head for a moment. "I've spent so much time trying to be this... perfect wife, that I've overlooked my own daughter. I'm so sorry, Toph. I should have listened to you. You're strong. You're tough, and your resilient and your capable, and you can make it out there; I'm sure of it."

"But Dad won't let me," Toph pointed out.

"Your father doesn't need to know," she said quietly. "As far as he would know, the Avatar's taken you ahead to Ru Nan, just out of the goodness of his heart. That you'll meet us there. He'll believe it."

"No he won't. He's not that much of an idiot."

Mom chuckled at that. "I can be very persuasive," she said slyly.

"Ugh, Mom! I don't need to hear this!" Toph said. She stood, flexing her hands. They felt good. A bit tingly, sure, but nothing like they'd just been subjected to the heat of an exploding mountain. "But... yeah. Thank you. I'll make you p..."

"You already do," Mom interrupted. She rose, bending down to plant a kiss on Toph's brow, which Toph wiped away with an 'aww, Mom!', before turning back to the streets of Makapu, walking toward the bridge where Dad would probably be waiting. "He's going north. To Bomei," Mom said, before she finally moved out of where Toph could 'see' clearly, into the fuzzier resolutions, growing more and more indistinct, until she was just a moving blob against the background. Toph nodded, smiling, and started walking. As she walked, she grabbed a couple of apples from the unattended fruit vendor, and munched on one as she walked. So the Avatar was a crappy earthbender, eh? Well, Toph would see to that in a hurry.

---

I enjoyed writing Poppy Beifong here, because she was one of the characters whom I have an entire backstory to despite a strong possibility that it will never be thoroughly plumbed. But the truth is that nobody (except me) knows how old she is, who her biological parents were, or what her name is. It would come as an amusing surprise to those who know her that she's actually two years younger than she thinks she is. Like I said, there's a lot of complicated stuff going on in the background with these characters. When you meet the person she considers her father, you'll understand her personality quite a bit better.

One of the things which I have to keep in mind with Toph, on the other hand, is remembering that while she talks like a dock-worker, she's probably the best educated out of anybody in the Gaang... well, liberal education for what it's worth. Whereas Aang and the siblings (and you) all are absolutely in the dark about certain things in 3F-verse, to her, they're old news and not that interesting. This all adds to the fact that she thinks that she's off to take part in some grand adventure, and thinks her genre savvy will play into her hand. Pity nobody told her what genre she's working with.

All told, I'm surprised there hasn't been more rampant speculation about the future of this fic, especially given the cues which are scattered throughout the work so far. You've just gotten a whole deluge more of them. So let's see those epileptic trees shake, darn it!

Oh, and in answer to the question I levied above: the Azuli would invent them. And they got very, very good with them.

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