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.

16. The Mountain King

The Clash is big. What? You want a good story, well, that takes time.

---

"Many years ago, there was a woman who wandered the world. She fought demons and bandits, and fought in mighty battles. And wherever she went, her friends came with her. Nobody knew then that she was really a dragon in disguise, but she swore she would never reveal her true nature to anybody, not until the time was right. One day, as she walked a path, she heard a man calling for help in a gully, and went out to see if she could help him."

"But the man was lying to her. His calls for help were to draw her and her friends into a trap. She was outnumbered by so many bad men that she had no choice but accept surrender. But as usual, the dragon was just waiting for the proper time. Days passed as she was marched across the hills of Ru Nan, and she patiently waited. But as she waited, the bad men grew more numerous, as word of their success spread. Until one day, when another group brought another prisoner with them. He was covered in mud, drunk as a bumbleskunk, and barely coherent, but the dragon knew that he was just what she was waiting for."

"One night, after the bad men had gone to sleep, she whispered to him in the dark, asking him if he was ready to escape. The man turned to her with a glint in his eye and told her that he'd been waiting all afternoon, and that his drunkedness was a sham. He called himself the Mountain King, and told her that he wanted to find all of the bad men at once, so that none could get away from him. The dragon and the Mountain King, working together, broke free of their iron cages, and freed the dragon's friends. Then, they turned upon the bad men and made them pay for the horrible things that they'd done to the people of the countryside."

"When it was done, the dragon turned to the Mountain King and asked if he was willing to join her, since there were other bad men out there in the world, and she was on a quest to right the world's wrongs. He pondered for a night and a day, before returning to her and accepting her offer, and together, the rode south to the coast, and crossed the great sea into the lands of the setting sun. But that's another story, and you've been up long enough as it is."

"Awww," the little girl whined. "I wanna hear a 'nother one!"

Takeshi sighed, turning to Riku. Riku rolled her eyes and shrugged. "I can't keep her up all night," Takeshi said, switching to his native tongue. "It's bad for little girls to be up too late."

Riku rubbed her brow with the gauntleted hand. Unlike Takeshi, who had doffed his own Imperial firebender armor so that the girl would have a comfortable place to nestle in his lap, she remained in full suit. "She's not our child, Takeshi. No matter how adorable she is."

"That doesn't mean we shouldn't treat her right," Takeshi said, and he gave Riku his earnest-eyes. She groaned. It was by cunning use of his big, clear amber eyes that he managed to win Riku's heart years ago. It was just a matter of waiting until their deployment was up before they could settle down in the Fire Nation. Or maybe, better yet, one of the colonies here in the East. If nothing else, it was dry out here. "Sorry, honey-bun, we can't keep you up. It's what your mommy would have wanted."

The girl pouted a bit at that. Takeshi wasn't just being a prospective father when he called her adorable. She had hair like he'd never seen before, almost the color of honey, and big green eyes. If any children of he and Riku's were a quarter as cute as that, they'd be spoiled rotten for their entire childhoods. "Oh, don't be sad. Just because we can't tell you another story," Riku began. Of course, of the two of them, Takeshi was always the one who had to be the light touch. She was just a lot... tougher... than he was.

"When am I going to get to see mommy again?" the girl asked.

"I don't know, honey-bun," Takeshi said quietly, and sadly. "But don't worry. You'll see her. I promise."

"Really?" the girl asked.

"Why would I lie to somebody as cute as you?" Takeshi asked, booping her nose. She let out a giggle at that, and hugged him around the waist. A warm feeling flowed through him as he patted her back, then he hoisted her up off of him and set her on her bed. It was supposed to be just a cot on the dirt, but between the two of them, Takeshi and Riku had gotten enough blankets to turn that cot into a respectable mattress for her. Takeshi turned to Riku, who lit a lamp which hung near the flap of the tent, and then started to walk out, collecting his armor as he went. "Sweet dreams, honey-bun," he said.

"Bye bye," she said, pulling blankets over her in the dim light of the tent. As the two firebenders walked, their footfalls clanged against the great metal plates upon which the camp was constructed. Earthbenders could, supposedly, travel through the very stone. But there was not anybody on this Earth who could bend metal. Takeshi gave a nod to the guard who remained outside the tent, and the man silently took a place before the flap, facing outward. Not like the girl had anywhere to run. They were practically at the heart of the camp.

"This isn't right," Takeshi said quietly.

"Enough of that. Qin might hear you," Riku said, her dark eyes scanning around as she spoke.

"Tell me that you don't agree with me, though," Takeshi asked. Riku remained silent. "It's not right to take somebody's child."

"You know whose child that is," Riku pointed out.

"All the more reason not to take her," Takeshi said. "Come on. We've just got to make it five more weeks. First day of spring, and our tour of duty is complete. I don't feel like getting killed by a vengeful father with the end so close."

Riku let out a snort at that. "I don't think the Mountain King would kill you," she said. After a moment, she shrugged. "Make you wish you were dead, definitely, but kill you? I haven't heard him to be a killing sort."

"Then you've been basing your opinion of him on the stories I tell his daughter."

"Do you have a better source of information?" Riku asked. He rolled his eyes. Besides the stories told of the Mountain King, there was very little information on him in the West at all. Only that he was brilliant, and mad, and dangerous.

Takeshi sighed, ducking into the tent that they, in direct violation of quite a few army regulations, shared. He started to pull his armor back on, boots first and working up. "But this whole thing doesn't feel right. Even if we don't get dead, will we be able to live with ourselves if this goes wrong?" The consequences of that man's disobedience would harm far more than he. The longer the two of them looked to the little girl, the more he at least became sure that he wasn't capable of following Qin's directive.

Takeshi could never hurt a child.

He found his face being cupped by calloused, firebender's hands, and Riku leaned down, pressing their foreheads together. She wasn't one for obvious statements of sentimentality, not by a long shot. But the tension on her face was obvious even to a man as unobservant as Takeshi. "We'll find a way," she said quietly, intimately. "The madness has to end sometime, doesn't it?"

For all he wanted to answer her question, Takeshi had no answers to give.

---

Chapter 16

The Mountain King

---

It was an odd Thursday. Usually, Thursday was the day that people started checking out. A hard Friday lay ahead of them, and any boss worth his placard over the door would know to crack his whip just a little harder, to get the work out of them before they departed for days of leisure and religious contemplation. That just made the workers check out all the sooner, gone in spirit if not in body. It was a day for dreamers and layabouts, a day where a woman would look to the birds in the sky and her envy would drive her to join them. A day where a madman retired a little bit early from his secret lair, letting his burdens weigh him down a little bit more than usual. A day where a boy can wonder at a future without fear and death and doubt.

It was not, however, a day for legends. However, as it usually turned out, the world didn't much care for Teo's expectation of it. Never was, these days. So the boy could be forgiven his bafflement when one of the biggest names of his age came sauntering through his door. Not surprise. The man on the mountain had been saying that this day would come eventually.

Teo just never figured it'd be on a Thursday.

"You look like hell," Teo's adoptive father said, slumped in his chair like his bones had turned to pulp.

"As do you," The Dragon of the East said, drinking the tea Teo's mother had handed her. "In fact, I dare say that the years have not treated you well at all."

The madman from the mountains leaned forward, scrutinizing the Pai Sho board as he was wont to do when he was pondering something else entirely. "No, they haven't," he answered her. "What do you want, Sativa?"

"You should guard your tone," the Tribesman said quietly. He was a pine of a man, tall and slender, but hard as old wood but supple enough not to break when he needed to bend. The other was like him, dark pallored from exposure and spreading equal fury in his eyes between the man at the Pai Sho board and the Tribesman at his side. That was another thing about Thursdays. It was the day when tension got to its highest, before the blowout on Friday. If there was one thing Teo knew about those to, it was that he didn't want to be anywhere near them when that resentment blossomed into outright violence. He had at least that much sense.

"You should remember you're a guest in my house," came the answer. He turned, letting his eyes, green and brown respectively, fall upon the guests. Some people said that Zha Yu's eyes showed the world that he was mad. The truth was that his eyes were strange, and that he was mad, and that the two weren't connected in the slightest. "You want something from me. What is it?"

"You have heard that the Avatar has returned," the Dragon said. Her words were like revelation. You didn't have a choice not to listen to them. That was her way. Prophets and generals had much the same talent for demanding attention. The question that came to Teo's mind was, which was she going to be today? After all, it was an odd Thursday. He had to be ready for anything. "We have information which is vital to him. Which means we need to track him down before he gets himself killed or captured by the Fire Nation. And failing that, release him from their clutches before too much harm has befallen."

The Mountain King leaned back, taking a pipe and puffing smoke. For a moment, he looked just like the mechanical curios he cobbled together in his workshop. Busted, barely functional, but somehow, despite all common sense saying nay, still running. He was dead tired. They wall were. "And what does this have to do with me?"

"I told you he was a coward," Bato said, exhaustion more in his words than malice. He rubbed at an arm which obviously still ought be in a sling. "We shouldn't have come here."

"This has everything to do with you," Piandao ignored Bato. "The world is coming apart at the seams and you're content to just sit here and play with your toys?"

"Things are more complicated than that," came the answer.

"Zha Yu, you owe me a better explanation than that," the Dragon said simply. He turned to her, and shook his head.

"I don't owe you anything. The rest of you may have forgotten, but I was the one who brought you in, not the other way around. Our partnership was just that. I was never your lackey, Sativa. They might have been your inferiors, but I never was."

"Are you trying to pull rank?" the Dragon asked, raising a brow.

"Like rank matters anymore," Zha Yu muttered. "You're welcome as guests in my house, but don't push my patience. Not today."

"What happened to you?" Piandao asked. "Why did you leave us to die?"

"I saw how things were shaping up," Zha Yu answered, pointing at him with a pipe-stem. "Situations like that, people end up dead. I did the math, and the most likely candidate for getting bumped off was me. Besides, you did alright without my help."

"Llewenydd died," Sativa said.

Teo's adoptive father sighed, slumping. "There wasn't anything I could have done to prevent that, there or gone. I mourn him, but I don't blame myself for him. There was nothing any of us could have done."

"You goddamned coward..."

"Piandao, stop," Sativa said. He contented himself to glare at the tired earthbender in the chair. "Things may be more dire than that. Do you know of Sozin's Comet?"

His look would have shamed a historian into ritual suicide. She rolled her eyes. "What about it? Wait," he said, leaning forward. "Let me guess. It's coming back. And when it does, they're going to use it to wipe out the rest of us."

"Soon," the Dragon confirmed. "By the end of summer. And we need your mind on our side."

"I can't help you," he said, head shaking slowly like a wounded Platypus Bear.

"Can't or won't?" Bato asked.

"The last few years haven't been kind to me, alright?" Zha Yu snapped. He cast a finger at Teo. "I try and make an honest living working as an engineer with his father, but then comes the flood back a decade past, and then he's dead. The only reason Teo's walking now and his mother's alive is because I just happened to be in the right place to save them. And the hits just keep on coming. I joined you, Sati, because I wanted to do some good in this world. The world promptly told me that it didn't care. So forgive me for trying to earn a bit of solace instead of valiantly marching to my death," he said, turning back toward the Pai Sho board. He shook his head. "I can't say what would have happened if I stayed with you that day. Nobody can. Maybe Llawenydd would have survived. And then Teo and his mother might have died. Was Llawenydd worth two lives?"

"Tell me you aren't trying to reduce this to utility," Piandao said with annoyance.

"I just told you, I'm not," he said, glancing back at the swordsman. "I told you I cannot say what would have happened. Neither can you. The past is gone, and there is no reclaiming it. I wouldn't want to if I could."

"Personally, I cannot believe you'd sit by as injustice plagued the countryside," the Dragon of the East said calmly, sipping at tea.

"Maybe you didn't know me as well as you thought you did," he said bitterly. "Dinner should be done in half an hour. Teo, find your mother and tell her..."

The door swung open with a crack, and a windblown woman stepped inside, letting out a whistle to her mate. Teo's mother was many things. She was bright, she was strong, and most importantly, she never let the Mountain King slide into a funk. Some said matrimony was just a set of chains one wore willingly, but that set of chains in their case often took the form of a block-and-tackle; for all Zha Yu's notorious manic energy, his melancholy could be just as disruptive, and doubly so, when the sun couldn't shine in his house. The patriarch of their unconventional family rose like a shot when she appeared.

"Nevermind," he said, his disposition lightening even from the moment of her presence. "What's going on out there?"

"More strangers in the pass," she said, as usual in her own native tongue. She spoke Tianxia, but held an understandable embarrassment about her accent. She would rather not be understood at all than have somebody ask her again 'what was that you said?'. "Two of them, but one of them was a man in dark robes. Could it be him? I thought we had time!"

"Calm down," Zha Yu said, gently taking her hands in his. It was an odd look, the two of them together. From the legend of the Mountain King, hell, from the very name, one would expect him to be of monstrous stature. But the truth was, she was three inches taller than he was. They did grow them taller down south. And it probably meant that Teo would reach a fine height himself. He gave a glance to the company, and to Teo. "He hasn't gone back on his word yet. We have time. We must. I'm close to a breakthrough. I know it."

"I'm worried too," Teo admitted in his mother's language. "How do we even know she's still alright?"

"We hope, and we pray, and failing that, we prepare for war," Zha Yu said quietly. He then turned to the others. "You'll forgive me. My wife has something that needs seeing to. Teo, you can watch dinner, right?"

"Yeah, dad."

"Good," he said. He turned back to his wife, and beckoned her out. "I'll deal with these interlopers personally. No more distractions today."

The two of them ducked back out into the wailing wind, leaving Teo to press through the pack of legendary visitors and into the kitchen which was set off from the main room. This house, for all its dinky size, housed four rooms. The kitchen doubled as Teo's bedroom, something he didn't mind, because it was both always warm, and frequently smelled quite pleasant. His mother and stepfather shared the bedroom, which both flanked the living room. Barred, though, was his workshop. The bells hadn't rung yet today, but that just meant it could come at any time. Not the safest place, that workshop.

The stew, which had been put on for three, then heartied up for six, now went about finishing its rendering. It wouldn't be long. Teo considered the people out there before the fire. He knew a lot of the stories about the Mountain King were dramatizations of real events. It was an odd feeling having a legend for a father, even a stepfather. But seeing the Dragon of the East in their parlor, drinking tea with her equally famous cohort? Those sorts of things just didn't happen. At least, not in stories which had happy endings. And right now, Teo was desperately hoping for a happy ending. He heard the door creak a bit, and he was pulled out of his thoughts. Bato was standing by the door, arms crossed before his chest, watching the teenager mind the pot. Teo looked back to him.

"What?" Teo asked.

"You do realize I speak Whalesh?" Bato answered. Teo swallowed past a boulder in his throat. "What exactly were you talking about?"

"It's a family concern," Teo said by rote, turning back to the stew.

"Really? Then what did Zha Yu mean when he said..."

"It's a family concern, and the family will deal with it," Teo snapped. Oh, boy. That probably wasn't the right thing to do in front of a massive Tribesman. But then again, in this family, the hits just kept on coming.

---

"I am never going to forgive you guys for this," Toph said with a scowl and her arms crossed before her chest.

"We're doing the right thing," the Avatar said from the brow of the bison. Sokka though shook his head. What Aang thought was the right thing and what actually was were probably about a year apart if one traveled at the speed of light. A light-year, if you would. "You said they were living in Ru Nan, right?"

"No. They've moved to their estate in Burning Rock. Or was it Ba Sing Se?" Toph said, sarcasm dripping from her voice. "Oh, wait; now I remember, they're living in Summavut. That's where you're headed, ain't it? Well, ain't that just a wonderful coincidence?"

"He's not going to fall for it," Katara said passively as she carefully sewed their mother's necklace, which had popped a stitch at some point. Momo chirruped pleasantly from where he was curled in her lap. "Believe it or not."

"Enough people around me have gotten hurt," Aang said.

"Not your fault, Aang," Sokka said. "Just because one scar-faced brute comes along doesn't mean you have to take responsibility for all the pain he leaves in his wake. That's just hopeless martyrdom."

"See? Legs here gets it," Toph said, giving Sokka a shove.

"Legs?" he asked.

"I'm still deciding on a more permanent nickname."

"Why do you get to pick nicknames?" Katara asked.

"Because I'm better than you at it," she said. There was a moment of silence. Then she leaned on the front of the howdah. "Come ooooon! You know you don't want to get rid of me! You need me!"

"Sorry, not happening," Aang said. Toph pouted.

"Gods. I'd be better off with Cranky, Suave, and Cool Old Guy," she muttered to herself shaking her head and recrossing her arms. The sound of the wind began to rise as they moved to the west, crossing the latitudes until they were nearly as far as the easternmost islands of the Fire Nation, if a great deal more northerly. So it was that despite twelve hours in the air, despite the lateness of the winter season, the sun was still in the air. They had been chasing it for hours.

"Where are we anyway?" Katara asked.

"We're close to Duoluo Maozi," Aang said. "And that means we're also pretty close to the Northern Air Temple."

"Oh, that's nice," Katara said. "Are you going to visit it?"

"I'm not sure if I should," Aang said. "What if there's more... you know... Storm King stuff there?"

"In the North Air Temple?" Toph asked, face scrunched up in confusion. "Are you high or something? The North Air Temple wasn't built until years after the Fire Nation wiped out the Storm Kings."

"You know about the Storm Kings?" Aang asked, so quickly perching above the other teenagers on the rail of the howdah that it seemed that he'd teleported. "How!"

She stared near him like he was a dunce. "Be...cause I actually paid attention to my history lessons?" she asked. "I mean, come on, I can understand why these two wouldn't know about the Storm Kings, but it's pretty common history just about everywhere else. Hell, the Fire Nation teaches it as a point of national pride!"

"Is it just me, or do the Fire Nation seem to keep going after airbenders?" Sokka asked.

"Same story, different context," Toph dismissed.

"What else do you know?" Aang asked.

"Depends."

"On what?" Aang's brow rose.

"On how long I stay part of this little troupe," she said, smugly. Aang stared at her, obviously not impressed.

"That's not fair," Aang said.

"Life ain't," Toph responded.

"Look, we can talk about this later," Sokka said. "We've been airborne forever. We need dinner and... well, I'm starting to understand why those kids needed potty breaks every ten minutes."

Aang stared at Toph, who in turn stared smugly through Aang's shoulder. "Fine," Aang said. "I'll land. But don't get any ideas. You're going back to your parents."

"Yeah, I don't think that's likely," Toph said with a degree of confidence. Aang rolled his eyes but returned to Appa's brow, and started bringing the great beast down into the cleft which ran between the two peaks. On better days, Sokka could imagine that one would be able to see the peak, and upon it, the North Air Temple, but today was overcast, and the wind drove the clouds hard into that gap, to the tune of a mournful wail. Sokka was shamed to admit that his knowledge of geography, particularly in this region, was sadly lacking. He never thought he'd be up here, not this far west anyway.

The beast landed with a cheery thud, as Appa obviously found itself in some place it vaguely remembered, and immediately set about munching on whole berry bushes with the sort of glee usually seen in Momo, who rode Katara's shoulder as contently as it had curled in her lap. Toph hopped around, with angry mutterings about the cold of the snow under her bare feet, until Aang prepared a dry, warmish spot for her to stand. Sokka, on the other hand, had pressing business to attend to, and promptly exited the company of his family, almost-family, and a particularly abrasive earthbender. He took a minute or so to get some distance, because he hadn't the first real clue about how far Toph's odd form of 'vision' could 'see'. Then, he did as nature desired, to his great relief and happiness.

As the pressure started to abate, he thought of home. As they moved further and further north, the pines returned, and with them, the cold. It was pines which greeted them on De-Aer Island, and on Kyoshi. And the snow, which was covering the ground in a fluffy mat and giving him a not-overlooked opportunity to leave his mark on the landscape, brought him two thoughts. One, was that they were almost there. They had almost reached the North Pole, completing half of a polar circumnavigation of the planet. Two, was that he wondered what they were going to face there. He had heard stories about the North Tribe, how it glistened in the moonlight, its carefully sculpted ice reflecting like the diamonds that they mined. How they spread across islands toward the Northern Earth Kingdoms, bastions of their culture and splendor. And at the same time, he wondered at the great injustice that they could remain so majestic and lofty while letting their southern neighbors fall into utter squalor.

And that thought made him think of home, the village which, barring a miracle, he could never return to.

He shook his head, shaking out and preparing to recompose himself. And then he turned to his left, and saw that there was a middle aged couple standing there, looking just about as surprised as he was. Sokka then let out a cry of alarm and threw himself back from them, trying to ensure that his pants didn't fall down as he did so. Damn those Easterners and their infernal reliance on belts! "Who are you!" Sokka shouted.

"Who are you!" the man shouted back, cowering against his wife. His wife, though, rolled her eyes and shook her head.

"Calm down, my love. It's just a Tribesman."

"What? Are we about to get ambushed?" the man said, glancing about. Sokka stared at him aghast. The woman sighed.

"Forgive my husband. He is... unaccustomed to traveling afoot. The road weighs wearily on him," she said.

"Oh... I see... I guess," Sokka said.

"Sokka, are you alright? I heard you screaming," Katara said, and trailed off when she saw that there were two others in the same small space between the conifers. "Oh... Sokka, who are these people?"

"Travelers," Both Sokka and the woman said in unison.

"Well... Surely they can rest a while in our camp," she said, forcing a sweet smile on her face. Sokka couldn't help but roll his eyes. Ever since Crescent Island, she put way too much effort into it, at times. "We'd be happy to have you."

"We're being invited to stay at a camp full of wild children?" the man asked.

"I swear to the gods, Lao, if you don't stop that..." the woman said with a weary tone.

"Hey, Sugarqueen, are you sure you should be out here on..." Toph's voice came through the woods, bouncing and mocking, and she seemed to be approaching far slower than she usually would. And when she came into view, Sokka could see why. She must have relented and pulled on Katara's spare set of boots to shield her feet. "Wait... I must be seein' things."

"Toph? What are you doing here?" Lao asked.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Toph muttered. And right about then was when Sokka recognized the two of them. He'd seen them separately, back in Makapu – which was probably why he had such difficulty. He was actively trying to forget everything about that infuriating place – but never together, and he therefore lacked the necessary context. These were Toph's parents. "Mom, what are you doing here?"

"You said that the Avatar took her to our estate!" Lao turned to Toph's mother.

"Well then he obviously brought her back here for some reason," she said, the paragon of matrimonial annoyance. She then turned to her daughter. "How are you feeling, Toph?"

"Annoyed," Toph said. "They've got me wearing boots. BOOTS!"

"You asked for them," Sokka pointed out.

"Guys, we've got a bit of a problem," Aang's voice came through the pines.

"Calm down, we're not here to start a fight," another man's voice placated, as Aang retreated into the rapidly filling opening between trees. Upon hearing that voice, Toph's mother's brow furrowed.

"Oh, that just can't be possible," she muttered to herself.

"What is it, Dear?" Lao asked. The conversation ground to a halt as the Avatar finally joined the group, but was staring over a leveled staff at a man who came to a halt just in sight. The first thing which struck Sokka was how he looked kinda like what would happen if King Bumi were mixed with that badass uncle of Zuko's. Next was that his eyes were two drastically different colors. And third was that he was staring at Aang like he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"By the gods old and new," the man said. And then he cast his hands out. "Well, it's about bloody time! Where the hell were you?"

"Why do people keep saying that like it's my fault!" Aang asked. But then, Sokka could see that the man wasn't staring at Aang, but rather past him. At the woman at the other side of the clearing. The man rushed forward, causing Aang to have to bound aside or else be bullrushed, because he was clearly on a tackling course with the woman. Only that tackle turned out to be a laughing embrace.

"By gods, Joo Dee! How many years?" he asked.

"Too many, Papa," the woman answered.

"Joo Dee?" both Lao and his daughter asked at the same time.

"Oh, I forgot. What are you going by now?" the man asked. He turned to the other gathered nearby. "Like she'd ever stop being the Iron Poppy, though. I take it this is your husband?"

"Yes, I am Lao Beifong, architect of the Beifong Trade Association, and..." Lao began with a confused bow.

"He's a lot spindlier than I imagined him," the odd fellow remarked, taking to physically examining Lao like he was an Ostrich Horse for sale. "Pretty fits, if a little tattered from travel. Soft hands, obviously a moneyed individual. He's got the back that's crooked from bowing and not labor; all rich and lily-white, pasty and..."

"Please stop describing me," Lao said with obvious discomfort, slapping the man's hands away from him.

"I've got to say, I thought you had better taste, Yingsue" he answered.

"Papa, I love him, even if he is a bit of a wimp sometimes," she answered with rolled eyes and an impatient tone. "I thought you'd be happy for me."

"Oh, I am, I am," he waved aside. Then he paused looking him up and down again. "Although... seriously?"

"You are Poppy's father?" Lao asked. "How could that be? You don't appear that much older than she is..."

"I've aged gracefully," the man said with a note of scandal.

"Zha Yu is... technically my father. He and Sati were both the first people I ever saw in my life," she made at explaining.

"Mom, your life's weird," Toph pointed out.

"Yeah," Zha Yu answered. "I could tell you about her eighteenth birthday. I think I've still got the scar from it. But where is my hospitality! You must meet my family. And I've got some old friends up in my shack."

"Thank... you?" Lao said to the invitation.

"We'll just be on our way," Aang said.

"No, no, I'm pretty sure the Dragon of the East is going to want to meet you," he said.

"The what?" Katara asked, but at the same time, both mother and daughter Beifong both asked a different if respectively identical question over top of her.

"Sativa Badesh is here?"

"Yeah, I'm terrible at surprises," Zha Yu said. "Come on. I hope you've already eaten, though. We've got enough for six, but not for twelve. That's just unreasonable expectation on a host."

Sokka thus found himself bundled along with the others down a path which a goat-cougar would have a hard time balancing on. Of course, of the lot of them, only Katara and Lao had any difficulty navigating it, because the others obviously had very good balance, or else used earthbending to cheat and keep the trail. As they traveled, there was a sound of something whooshing past, and Aang was the one to raise the question.

"What was that? Are there Bison around here?" he asked. Zha Yu glanced up, and then nodded.

"Oh, that's just my wife," he said. "She's up top, keeping an eye on things. We've had... trouble for the last little while."

"Up there? There's nothing but treetops and mountains. That was way closer than..." Aang trailed off. "Is your wife an airbender?"

"What? No!" Zha Yu answered, and then paused for a moment. "Well, she does have an obsession with flight which I think borders on unhealthy, but that's just keeping a hobby. As far as I know, you're the last airbender alive," he said, pointing at Aang.

"I'm pretty sure there's at least one more out there somewhere," Aang said, and Sokka nodded. In truth, Sokka was pleasantly pleased that the kid didn't spirit off on a wild turkey-goose chase after that thing the moment the word of it hit his ear. Zha Yu just let out a grunt and continued walking. The building that the strange man brought them to seemed utterly dinky, but the moment it came close, Toph started to stumble a bit, and Sokka found that he had to keep her from listing onto her but a few times.

"What's wrong?" he asked quietly.

"Man... everything's all messed up," Toph answered just as quietly, if only because Sokka knew that asking loudly would piss her off, and she knew answering loudly would bring down the attention of her parents. Both of those were effects that neither wanted to be the cause of. "It's like nothing can agree on how big it is," she batted Sokka away. "I'm better. It's just... disorienting."

Sokka looked at the shack and back to Toph, but continued walking without comment. At least, until the door opened, and they all filed into the shack. Sokka looked around a bit, then quickly leaned back out the door, and took stock, before ducking back in again. Unless his eye for dimension was completely faulty, he could have sworn... Nah, it couldn't be.

Buildings couldn't be bigger on the inside then they were on the outside.

"Is that who I think it is?" a gravely woman's voice asked. Sokka saw its source. She was probably into middle age, but she was bearing it very well. There was also a familiarity to her that Sokka couldn't quite place. She was staring at Toph's mother, and a smile came to her face, obviously an unpracticed expression, because it didn't look very smooth. "Hello, Joo Dee. I take it this is your daughter and husband?"

"Oh my god! Uncle Bato!" Katara's voice dragged Sokka's attention to where it actually needed to go. Namely, on a family friend who managed to show up out of the wild blue yonder, at the strangest possible time. And with that, Sokka was grinning like an idiot, and running past most of the other inhabitants of this impossible shack in the middle of nowhere and embracing his father's oldest friend along with his sister.

"Sokka! Katara! This is incredible!" Bato said, "How did you get this far on your own?"

"We weren't on our own," Katara said. "We're with the Avatar! He's actually taking us to the North Pole so I can find a waterbending master and learn my art!"

"That's wonderful, Katara," he said. "And I assume that... why are you with her?" Sokka pulled back. "Forgive my presumption, but I thought you two couldn't stand each other."

Sokka smiled easily at that. "A lot's happened in the last couple of months. Come on, we've gotta hear all about the war up here, and how the others are doing. What has been happening up here?"

"Come on, I'll fill you in over in the kitchen," Bato said, shepherding the teenagers before him. "There's been a lot of goings on."

That left Aang with the impressively named Dragon of the East, a National seated next to her. There was a silence which reigned between them, Aang, the owner of the shack, and a confused looking youth who was forced into egress from the kitchen.

"So you are the Avatar," the Dragon said.

"Yeah... I guess," he answered her, rubbing the back of his head.

"I hadn't thought I would meet you yet. But the sooner, the better," the woman rose to her full height... which was about the equal of Aang's, which struck him as a bit odd. Either she was really short, or he was growing faster than he thought possible. "There are events which you must be made aware of, and your participation is absolutely vital. At the end of the coming summer..."

"Sozin's Comet returns and I have to stop the Fire Nation before it happens or the world goes poof," Aang said with singsong tones, making it clear the old-news nature of the quest. "Is there anything else I haven't heard yet?"

"I... See," she said. "Piandao, a word."

Aang then was left utterly to himself in the spacious room.

"...Huh," Aang said, summing up his opinion of the oddity of the last few hours.

---

The days were stretching on interminably. That was the word for that sort of slow, plodding time passing. It was unbearable because there was no escape. Nila had tried, quite strenuously, to find a way out of the Iron Horde. But the Arban were everywhere, and getting past all of them would require some form of miracle. It was unbearable because the end was close at hand, however little she actually wanted this to end. Something about this trip, from the east to the west and back again, it changed her. She had no friends when she left Sentinel Rock. Now, she had two of them. Yes, even Malu earned the patent of friendship, if with some sort of excusatory notice next to it; there were many things about that airbender which Nila found outright annoying, but still, Malu was valued. Not in the same way or as much as dear Tzu Zi was, but valued nonetheless.

What made it very, very unbearable was that she had nothing to occupy her time.

"She's got that caged wolf-bat look on her face again," Malu pointed out from next to the cook-pot, where she was boiling the noodles at this unlikely hour. It was just after breakfast, and she was already cooking another meal? Honestly, the way that girl ate, it was a miracle she didn't weigh eight times as much as she did.

"She's bored," Sharif said, continuing to stitch at something. Gershom and Adalai had unwittingly managed to get their hands on free labor in Sharif. He was always fixing something or other. Honestly, Nila didn't know why Mother didn't loan him to the seamstresses so he could earn a wage. "She gets angry when she's bored."

"I'm not bored," Nila said. And then felt the cognitive slap in the face she got for not only lying, but doing it badly. "Alright, I'm bored. There's nothing to do here! I don't have any of my equipment! If I had just an alembic and a pair of tongs, I could occupy myself for months, but this place is utterly savage!"

"You know," Tzu Zi said from where she was laying on her back, with her legs running up the yurt's lattice wall, "I think you should try doing something... girly."

"Girly?" Nila asked.

"You know, I think you're right," Malu said, grinning crookedly. "If Tzu Zi didn't swear she'd seen you naked, I would have thought you were a boy."

Nila turned to Tzu Zi. "You said I wasn't naked!" she snapped.

"It was a long time ago, let it go," Tzu Zi said, rolling to a squat. She was smiling again, and Nila had a very hard time staying angry at a smiling Tzu Zi. "Come on, we'll do girl stuff... like talk about boys, or..."

"She got along well with Sokka," Sharif said as she took a moment to conjure the next item in a worrying litany.

"Who's Sokka?" Malu asked.

"Nobody's Sokka," Nila answered.

"I'm pretty sure there was a Sokka at some point," Sharif said, his brow drawing down.

"There is no Sokka!"

"There was a Sokka, Nila," Tzu Zi said. Malu started grinning.

"Ooooh. Dish!"

"Water Tribe boy. He and Nila were flirting up a storm!" Tzu Zi exclaimed happily.

"We were not flirting!" Nila shouted. All eyes, including those of their Adamite hosts, turned to her. It was lucky that Sharif alone kept his eyes on his stitching, because of the lot of them, only he would recognize what it looked like when a Si Wongi blushed with embarrassment. "I was testing him. He actually had a worthwhile mind."

"Totally flirting," Tzu Zi intimated. Malu laughed at that. Nila took the opportunity to seethe. "Look, you've had all this running around, trying to find your brother –" Sharif popped his head up with a vacant 'I'm right here', but they all ignored him, "– and bring him back safe, but when was the last time you did something for yourself?"

"I..." Nila began, finger raised to prove a point. And then it occurred to her, that she had no point to make. "I don't really understand what you mean."

"Nila, you're wearing Malu's cloak as a shirt, a pirate's sleeve as underwear, and his pants as... well, pants. Don't you think you should have some better clothes?" Tzu Zi asked.

"Shopping?" Malu asked, a glint in her eye.

"Shopping!" Tzu Zi confirmed with a grin and an exultant gesture.

"No. I forbid it," Nila declared.

"Oh, it won't be like last time, I promise. This time I'll get you stuff!" Tzu Zi swore.

"Shopping," Nila said grimly, shaking her head.

"What? What's wrong with shopping?" Malu asked.

"Do you see this?" Nila pointed at the side of her head, near the crown, at a small scar which was now just barely visible through her regrowing hair. "Last time I went shopping back home, some of the boys threw a brick at my head."

"Oh, Nila, that's terrible," Tzu Zi said. Malu seemed a bit taken aback by that.

"Why would they throw a brick at your head?" the airbender asked.

"It's a very long story, and the one who could tell it better isn't here," Nila dismissed. She'd wanted to strangle Ashan after she figured out his part in all of that.

"Well, you can't let things like that make shopping a bad experience for you," Tzu Zi began.

"And then there was the ceaseless mockery and derision I faced from everybody in the town, both before and after Sharif's maiming. The gouging at the stores, the contempt in the other shoppers, the guards 'having better things to do' than track down the muggers..." Nila continued in a very casual tone, more a symptom of how she'd come to expect that behavior than that she was actually alright with it.

"Wow," Malu said.

"And you want to go back there?" Adalai weighed in. "What did you do, anyway?"

"I am a bastard," Nila said, as that was all the answer that was needed.

"No kidding," Malu said, obviously unable to let that joke slide past. Nila fixed her with a glare, and then clarified.

"I am a bastard daughter," she amended. Tzu Zi sighed, but nodded. The others looked at her like her entire culture was insane.

Not that Nila would disagree with them.

"Anyway," Tzu Zi said forcefully. "This place isn't like that. Isn't that right, Gershom?"

"As long as you don't wander outside of the enclave, I'm fairly certain you won't have any bricks thrown at your head," Gershom promised.

"Fairly sure?" Malu asked.

Gershom glanced between the Si Wongi and the airbender. "Well, if she deserves it, then..."

Malu burst out laughing at that, but Nila had a good glower on, and it would be a shame to waste it. Still, she felt her hand being taken by Tzu Zi, and was thus hauled out of the yurt into the morning light. They would probably start moving again soon. While the Enclave didn't keep the same schedule as the rest of the Iron Horde, as it went, so did they. They probably wouldn't break this camp until tomorrow, but then would move doubletime, coming to a halt right at the edge of the soldier's encampments on the front. Questions of why were met with ambiguous shrugs. Just another weird part of living in the Horde, it seemed.

"See? Some fresh air will do you good," Nila said. If there was one downside to the increasing heat, it was that Tzu Zi had resumed wearing her own dark robes, concealing her spectacular figure. Nila, lacking both robes and a spectacular figure, was not so impeded. "Come on, the day is young! I bet you'd look really nice in yellow. Or pink!"

"Pink?" Nila said incredulously, but Tzu Zi had her mind set on something, and once she did, trying to get her to change her mind was like angering an airbender or bringing down the storm.

---

"So you're basically saying that you've walked more than half way across the East Continent in a desperate bid to teach me about and help me understand the importance of mastering the Avatar State and ending the war between the Fire Nation and the rest of the world before the end of summer, which turned out to be information I'd already known for months?" Aang asked.

"Essentially," the impressive woman said. Not that she was much to look at. While she would have been taller than Aang a year ago, her stature was puny, her voice wasn't very pleasant, and he didn't find her particularly attractive. Still, Bato and the swordsman Piandao seemed to treat her like she was some sort of manifested god. Even Zha Yu, who seemed to favor everybody equally, as lackeys in some elaborate prank, treated her with a respect akin to a meeting of equals. It was all rather confusing. "I do have to wonder, though, where you got this information."

"I had a conversation with Avatar Roku."

"The Avatar who died more than a century ago," she said flatly.

"Yeah, and then the Fire Lord tried to kill me, and I had to break his daughter out of prison, and..." Aang said, beginning to recount the oddities which occurred in the last month and a half. All told, it was rather remarkable they were all still alive.

"Azula? The artist?" she asked.

"I... wouldn't know."

"I've heard some stories about that girl," Piandao said, breaking his silence. He seemed a lot less tense, now that Bato had been out of his presence for a while. "They say she took sick early in her childhood, and ever since then, Ozai has been pushing her out of the line of inheritance."

Aang grunted at that. It certainly explained why she was so adamant she capture Aang. It wasn't just duty to her nation, she was fighting to maintain her very identity. And that was deeply, deeply sad that she had to. "That explains a lot, actually."

"Cruel what he did to her," Piandao shook his head. "It may be that she was a holy terror before the sickness, but no child should ever be abandoned by her parents," there was a heavy silence, then, centralized between the monumentally named Dragon of the East and the swordsman who followed her. "You know, I have a notion."

"Later," Badesh dismissed. "What else happened? You've covered the broad strokes, but I need more. Be very, very specific. What you tell me may well save lives."

"Starting when?"

"Who told you you were the Avatar?" she demanded. That was the thing about her. She didn't ask. She demanded. And every time she did, Aang felt an instinctive desire to obey. She certainly had charisma, this woman.

"Nobody did," Aang said. "I had to learn by accidentally destroying the Southern Air Temple and almost killing my friends."

"They didn't tell you?" Toph's mother asked. "Why wouldn't they tell you?"

"Are you sure we should be..." her husband edged in uncomfortably.

"Sh," Sativa snapped at him, and he fell silent. "They didn't tell him. Leave it to fate to know why. Where are you going?"

"I need to reach the North Pole to find a waterbending master," Aang repeated.

"You won't find one up there," Badesh shook her head. "None with the time to teach anyway."

"Why not?"

"The Siege of the North still burns hot. Any waterbenders are likely fighting for their lives," Piandao answered.

"What about that Water Tribe girl?" Beifong asked.

"Honey, we should..." Lao said again. This time, both women shushed him harshly. "Never mind..."

"She needs a teacher, too," Aang said. "Why do you need to know this stuff?"

"Knowledge is a currency, and I intend to be wealthy today," Badesh said. "What other allies have you garnered as Avatar to stand against the Fire Nation?"

"Allies?" Aang asked. "I don't know... I mean, I think Bumi would help out if he could."

"Bumi?" Piandao asked.

"Zha Yu's great-great-grandfather's adopted brother," Beifong answered. Several people turned to her. "What? Genealogy is interesting."

"You have an alliance with the most powerful, if insane, king in the Southern Earth Kingdoms?" Sativa asked.

"I wouldn't call it an alliance," Aang said. "We're just old friends."

"Call it what you would. Who else?"

"Well," Aang racked his brain. "There was that shaman from Senlin, but... Oh, he's probably on his way back home with his sister by now."

"Shaman?" Badesh asked.

"Yeah his name was..." And then Aang felt like an idiot for not putting it together faster. "...you have children don't you, miss Badesh?"

"Yes," she then tweezed her brow. "And I assume the shaman you speak of is my son. I hope you would forgive him his oddities. His brain was badly injured years ago. I am pleasantly surprised he made it as far as he did. What of the girl?"

"Angry."

"That sounds like Nila," Piandao said, to which he received a withering glare from the girl in question's mother. Aang scratched his head.

"Wait... they said they were going back home. If you're here, who's waiting for them?" Aang asked.

"They..." Badesh began, and then she stared off into space. "Well... I seem to have overlooked something."

"You're letting them go back to an empty house?" Beifong asked.

Piandao chuckled a bit at that. "You see, there's a bit of a funny story about that..."

"Not. Now," Sativa said, her humor obviously not in line with the swordsman's. "So. If I have this properly. You have played witness to the annexation of Kyoshi Island and Gaoling, alienated some guerrilla fighters in a swamp, stubbed the nose of the Fire Lord himself, and have a frighteningly effective commander after your head, who himself seems like he's perpetually a step ahead of you."

"That about sums it up," Aang said, displeased about how failure-prone that summation made them all seem.

"Hm," she said. "I think we may have more work ahead of us than I feared."

---

"So pretty!" Tzu Zi squealed in delight as she held a bolt of cloth against Nila, who stared at her friend with a sort of utter disbelief and confusion which the Si Wongi girl never before knew herself capable of. "Sleek and smooth and it doesn't even need any frills on it!"

"I think you're enjoying this entirely too much," Nila said, but she couldn't help but feel some of that enthusiasm leaching into her from the firebender. "After all, it's not like I'll be able to wear them where I'm going."

"Why not?"

"Some moronic taboo about women showing color in Sentinel Rock," Nila shook her head, tugging at the dress which the National managed to shoe-horn her into. It ran from shoulders to ankles, and was quite, quite tight. She couldn't even take a proper stride in it, and it was a scandalous shade of violet. "I don't ask. Only mother was brazen enough to flout it, and even then, it was because she was who she was."

"What's wrong with showing a little color? You should see the Fire Days festivals we hold back home. It's like being awash in a sea of colors," she then trailed off. "But your people also got a thing against showing skin, don't they?"

"That's somewhat more practical," Nila admitted. "The sun can't bake what it can't hit."

"And if a woman just so happened to fall out a window in her underwear?" Tzu Zi asked. Nila goggled at the mental image, that one of those miserable crones would find herself in that situation, and had to swallow a laugh.

"I imagine they'd have rocks thrown at them until they went back inside," Nila said. Possibly a lie. She didn't have the first clue, but it sounded like something they'd be capable of. "It's not like they could treat them any worse than Latifa. If I remember, she's still in prison for being some prince's victim. If there is any place more unjust than the East, than I shudder to think of it."

"Nila, you shouldn't talk like that," Tzu Zi said quietly.

"Why not? I have the right."

"It's not that. It makes you angry. I don't like when you get angry," she said, hugging that bright yellow cloth to herself. "It's like every time you see something bad, you take it and you press it against your skin until it leaves a mark there, like everything bad in the world was going to happen to you anyway so you might as well have the scar. I don't like when the people I care about are hurting. And it's frustrating because you seem so determined to do it to yourself!"

"I do not seek frustration and failure. I'm not some sort of masochist," Nila said. "Damn this so-called dress! How am I supposed to move in this thing?"

"I don't think you do it on purpose," Tzu Zi said. "And stop tugging at it. It looks perfect just the way it is. Besides, you have a nice back and it shows it off."

Nila glanced around behind her at her back, which was indeed exposed from her collar to just above her hips. If there wasn't enough reason for her to be uncomfortable in this, that would be it. Nila was not an attractive girl. It had been made plentifully obvious by her peers that was so. And Mother had not even attempted to restate the obvious. Nila could remember one such time she came home from the merciless teasing of the other children, in tears from their abuses, and Mother turned to her...

"And why are you weeping?" she asked in that distant year.

"The other children make fun of me and call me ugly," Nila had said between sobs.

"And why should their opinion matter?" Mother asked. Nila was confused, back then. "Their opinions are worth less than dirt, because they are stupid. Are you stupid, Nila?"

"...no?" Nila asked.

"Then you should know better than to let them bully you," Mother turned back to talking with somebody, whom Nila couldn't recall, but the girl from that memory tugged at the woman's sleeve. "Gods above and below, what is it?"

"Am I pretty?" Nila asked hopefully.

"Beauty fades," Mother said. "Aspire to something more permanent. Now leave me be. I have work to do."

"You don't need to lie to me," Nila said. "I'm aware that this dress would look better on a Shig."

"What?" Tzu Zi. "Why would you say that?"

"Because it's simple truth," Nila said, wanting to worm out of the dress and leave it for somebody more capable of properly displaying it. Somebody with curves instead of Nila's lithe, wiry flatness. Someone with hair to spill down that entirely too open back. But worming out of the dress would have left her in quite a state of disrobement. So she retreated behind a screen before starting to push the thing down her like a snake skin.

"No, that isn't true, Nila," Tzu Zi stressed. "You know, I thought you just had picky tastes, but you've turned down every dress I've offered. You can't possibly think you're that hideous."

"Appearance fades and that's probably for the best, because I don't have much to work with in that regard," Nila said, then she looked around. "Where are my clothes?"

"We had the pants burned. They were covered in black mold," the seamstress of the tailor's yurt explained. Nila peeked above the screen to deliver an angry if disbelieving glare. "You might have had no harm from it, but too many people fall to strange illnesses from the outside. Don't worry, I'm not going to run you out half-naked. Just pick what suits you best, gratis."

"Then I require some black robes," Nila said forcefully.

"Anything... but that," the seamstress amended.

"Nila, you should have nice things," Tzu Zi said, coming up to the screen and leaning around it. Nila let out a squawk and covered herself. "Oh stop that. I've got six sisters. Not like I haven't seen all of that before."

"If you don't mind, I'd like some privacy!" Nila said, her tone rising quite out of her capacity to regulate it. But Tzu Zi shook her head and clasped her hands on Nila's dark shoulders.

"You deserve nice things. You're a good person. You're a beautiful person. I don't care what anybody else says, or said to you back when. You're pretty. You should have a pretty dress."

Nila felt an odd warmth in her, staring at those melting brown eyes, and the tension started to sluice away. "Really?" she asked, her voice small, unsure of itself as the rest of her was. "I... don't know much about dresses."

"See, that's why you need me around," the firebender broke into that wide, sunny smile. "Otherwise you'd miss out on all the great things in life, like chocolate, pretty dresses, fun parties..." She trailed off. "Alright, parties might not be my expertise," she leaned a little closer. "I might have accidentally burned one boy's house down 'cause he was being mean to an old friend."

"Really?" Nila said with a sarcastic smirk, putting a fist on her hip, before realizing it was flesh upon flesh and that she was naked and flaunting it. Hands instantly snapped back to more decent positions, if such a thing existed for this situation. Tzu Zi laughed at her. She then leaned in closer, that smile still on her face, and was close enough that Nila could feel the girl's breath on her face. When she spoke, it was very low, in an intimate whisper.

"You know, I bet you'd be a whole lot of fun if you stopped taking yourself so seriously all the time. Try the yellow dress. I bet it'd look good."

With that, she sauntered away, leaving Nila feeling a bit light-headed and unbalanced. Apprehensive, excited, confused. Yes, there was a lot of confusion. But the girl might well be right. Still, that didn't mean Nila had to be civil about pulling on that frilly, pleated, yellow abomination of a dress. It was lucky that Ashan or Gashuin or the others wouldn't see her in this frippery. She might have opted to just crawl under a rock and die, were it so.

But as it came into place, she looked down at herself, and had to admit, there was something a bit more flattering about this than there was to shapeless, formless black bags with holes for arms and a head. "This... actually... isn't so bad," Nila forced herself to admit. She then scowled. "Yellow isn't my color."

"Come on out, I want to see!" the firebender said. When Nila stepped out from behind the screen, the seamstress and all three of her aides were all watching, and Nila silently blushed dark and covert. "Wow. You were right. But I like the cut. Do you have that in red?"

"Red?" Nila asked.

"I think I have just the thing you're looking for," the seamstress said, and moved forward, leaving the aides to nod knowingly, as Nila found herself bustled back into a secluded, cardoned off corner of the yurt, and made to play clothes-horse to the whims of an excited firebender and an obvious madwoman with shears and needles. After the first five minutes, Nila was considering praying to any god who would listen to free her.

After the first hour, she actually started to enjoy herself.

Nobody could be more surprised than she.

---

With Sativa and Joo Dee deep in conversation, Piandao took his opportunity to split away from them and try to run down Zha Yu. His stern features had fixed in their most disapproving expression, but they had no target with which to release themselves. Whatever that crazy bastard was doing, it was with the Avatar, and thus, out of Piandao's hands. There were a lot of things which Piandao was comfortable dealing with. Elemental martial arts was no problem at all. It wasn't until the supernatural got involved that he really, really stepped out of his element. Because of that twist of timing, Piandao instead found himself being drawn aside by Joo Dee's foppish looking husband.

"I understand you knew my wife when she was younger," Beifong said. The pseudo-wealthy man looked just as out of his respective element as Piandao had been in Wan Shi Tong's library. "She's fairly tight lipped about that time. Tell me... what was she like?"

"She was... a bit of a blank slate," Piandao said, his eyes scanning the room for a break to confront Zha Yu, but between the Avatar and Sativa, Piandao couldn't get his opening.

"What do you mean?"

"She tried to kill us, for one," Piandao said. Beifong stared at him.

"That isn't funny," the man said.

"No, it wasn't," Piandao agreed. "She was our guide when we went to Ba Sing Se twenty years ago. Things got out of hand, and in the end, we were left fleeing into the night, with our once-guide in tow. I never had a problem with her, but I never trusted her, either."

"Wh... what are you talking about? Are you talking about Poppy?" Beifong asked.

"Really? You call her Poppy?"

"That's her name, isn't it?" Lao asked.

"I couldn't tell you," Piandao said. And then, he had his moment. "Excuse me. I have something I need to attend to."

Piandao left Lao stammering as he pushed through the crowds of that impossible house and toward the back, which consisted of two great, wooden doors which were barred on this side. Zha Yu was unbarring the door, and the other children with the Avatar had exited the kitchen with a pleased seeming Bato. That just made Piandao scowl all the harder. There were some violations that Piandao simply would not forgive. "Zha Yu, a word," Piandao said.

"Can it wait? I promised I'd show the boy my workshop," the Mountain King said. Piandao stared at him. "It won't take long."

"If you try to run off..."

"Why would I?" he asked. Piandao stepped aside as the man's wife came up and said something to him in Whalesh, to which Zha Yu nodded. But Piandao, much like young Sokka, couldn't turn away from her. It was the boy who had the audacity to say what both of them were thinking.

"Her hair is yellow," the boy said in disbelief.

"Sokka!"

"It's yellow!" he repeated. "Can hair even get that color?"

Zha Yu rolled his eyes. "Yes, it can. It's bloody rare, but it happens," he broke off when she said something which sounded sarcastic to him. "And she says that her hair color is 'melyn', not 'yellow'."

"That's... remarkable," Sokka said, then gave Zha Yu an elbow nudge. "Man, that's gotta be a delight, eh? Finding somebody who's hair looks like gold? Must scare the more superstitious of the neighbors, am I right?"

"What neighbors?" the Mountain King's alleged son asked. It was doubtful that the boy was really that man's issue; the timing just didn't support it.

"Come on. It's right through here," Zha Yu said, throwing open the doors of that tiny shack, and showcasing a warehouse almost the same dimensions as The Factory in Azul City. Despite being a free-standing shack on a hill, there was somehow a room big enough to house three Fire Navy Cruisers at one time. Piandao stared at it with extreme confusion. "Go ahead, say it."

"It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!" the milky-eyed girl who had, until recently, been corralled by her father, blurted out. "That's why everything was all insane-y! Man, I've gotta tell ya', your house is awesome."

"An unintended side effect, I assure you," Zha Yu said, stepping through first. The others followed after, with the Avatar just ahead of Piandao. As the boy stepped through the threshold, though, a chime sounded, and Zha Yu turned to him. "Alright, let me see it," the man said. The boy looked baffled. "You've got something from the Spirit world on you. Let me see it."

The Avatar's eyes widened, and then he rummaged through his pocket until he pulled up a chunk of greenish stone tied in a leather thong. Zha Yu nodded at that, as the other of the teenagers began to rummage through the vast collection of half-completed projects, from the small and innocuous, to the large and intimidating. "Now this is familiar, isn't it, Piandao?" Zha Yu said, holding up the Jade Toe.

"I remember those things," he said neutrally.

"Yeah, you never liked having them around," Zha Yu said. "Have you used it yet?"

"What do you mean?" the Avatar asked.

"The Jade Toe has one very specific use. It gives you a way out. Don't know how it works, just that it does. Have you used it?"

"I... think... so?" he said, more a question than an answer.

"Well, then it'll be useless to you. Best to give it to somebody else," Zha Yu said. He started walking, and the Avatar followed. Piandao, still trying to get his own grievances aired, was forced to tag along. "I've found tonnes of these things over the years. Jade Toe," he waved past a similar lumpy bit of green rock in a nook of a stone wall – bearing in mind the shack was made of wood, "Battery," the next nook over, holding a glowing white leaf, "Dirak," to a ball which seemed to be made of crossing black and white lines. "They all have their uses. None of them intuitive."

"Is that a fireball?" the Avatar asked.

"Yes. It heals injuries, but at the cost of making you noisily ill," Zha Yu said. "I've found almost a dozen of these things that I never got identified. Do you know anything about Spirit Artifacts?"

"I didn't know I was a Shaman until the beginning of this winter," the Avatar said uncomfortably. Zha Yu shrugged, and handed the boy his Jade Toe back.

"These things are a lot more common nowadays than they used to be. Still, that thing will probably be worth a hundred times its weight in gold to the right buyer. If you've already used it, than that means its already paid for itself. I won't ask what you had to give up to get it."

"It was just..." the boy began.

"I'm not going to ask," Zha Yu repeated. "Now, from the death-glare which Piandao is giving me, he wants to speak. Go have a look around. But if you hear bells in the distance, get back here and through those doors with the others as fast as you can. Drop whatever you're doing and get out, even if it means something breaks. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I do," the Avatar said, serious tones taking great odds with his usual demeanor. Zha Yu nodded solemnly.

"Good. Now to out there and play with something. Who knows, you might get one of my old bulks working."

The boy looked far too excited with that prospect for Piandao's comfort. The gentleman of weapons stepped to Zha Yu, determined that nothing else was going to turn him aside.

"Zha Yu, I..."

"I forgive you," Zha Yu said, turning back to a box near the only obvious corner of this impossible warehouse. Piandao trailed off.

"What?"

"Nothing. I just wanted to see that look on your face," Zha Yu said.

"You are still like a child," Piandao said dourly.

"And you're still an old man in a young man's body," Zha Yu answered, turning and leaning against a wall. "You're angry that I left you all. I understand that. I'm not going to say you're wrong. But let's face facts. There was no good way out of that. But the point is, I've moved on in my life. I'm not going to let the guilt of what I did or didn't do destroy me, or hold me back to a time a decade and a half ago. I can't let myself fixate. You shouldn't have to either."

"You still did a terrible thing," Piandao stressed. "You abandoned your comrades in a time of need."

"Yes, I did," he said, his humor gone. "But that's the past. We have to fight the current war, not the old one. You can't walk backwards into the future, I always say."

"Since when?"

"Well, I said it right now, so that's gotta count," he said with a sudden grin. When Piandao didn't return it, Zha Yu sighed. "I've gotta say, you've become fairly humorless in your old age."

"The last few years have been... difficult," Piandao said. Zha Yu nodded, sighing deeply, age seeming to settle onto his features.

"I know about that. I dare say I know it better than anybody," he said, so quietly, so painfully. He turned to Piandao, and pointed toward the sword at the man's hip. "I see you've got a new blade. May I?"

Piandao rolled his eyes, but drew out that midnight black blade and handed it over. Zha Yu did a few test swings, and inspected it very closely. "This is an incredible piece. I assume you crafted it yourself?"

"Out of the metal of a fallen meteor," Piandao explained. "It holds an edge beyond any material I've ever seen. It is a remarkable blade."

Zha Yu nodded for a moment, then swiftly turned and struck that blade at one of his anvils, cleaving straight through it in a stroke. He then let out an impressed chuckle, and handed it back. A quick glance at the edge revealed not so much as a chip from its use. "I found it, you know?" Zha Yu said quietly. Piandao raised a brow at that statement. "After everything was said and done. I went back years later, and found it. It was right where they got you. There were poppies growing there. You must have lost a lot of blood."

"I have been close to death before, but never as close as I was then," Piandao agreed. Zha Yu reached behind a table, and pulled out something long, cylindrical, and covered in cloth. Piandao glanced from it to its bearer. "Is it..."

"When I found it, I knew that I couldn't leave it like that," Zha Yu said. Piandao took the bundle and unwrapped it, slowly revealing a blade which seemed to radiate white light from its perfect, pristine edge. "I reforged your sword. Well... the workshop did most of the work. It's been here for a long time. I knew I should send it back to you, and I was going to... but then you got cast out, and I couldn't find you. And then... well, my life became complicated, and I didn't have the time to lark off anymore. But the blade is yours. I made it whole as best I could. I hope this is, well, something."

Piandao felt an urge to grin like a child as he hefted that blade again. While the black blade held no equal on this world, this sword, his white blade, held no equal in history. He had forged it for his hand, and his hand alone. And returned to him, it held that same temper, that same heft, that same balance. He flicked it out, relishing in the sound of it cutting the air. So much went perfectly, perfectly right when Piandao had forged this blade, that he knew in his heart he would never surpass it. He doubted anybody ever would.

"I don't know if I can forgive you," Piandao said, settling that white blade back into its scabbard and hanging it along side its ebony sister. "I don't know if I should. And even then, I can't forgive you for what you did to the others. But you restored my arm. If nothing else, you have my thanks for that."

"That makes this next bit a bit tricky, then," Zha Yu said quietly.

"Why?"

"Because I need help. And for the first time in months, I feel I might actually have it."

"Explain."

"In a moment," Zha Yu waved him aside. "I think Sokka's poking around where he shouldn't be. Don't worry. We'll talk later."

And if there was one trait which Piandao should have remembered, it was that it was practically impossible to stay angry at that mad tinker once you stared him in the face.

---

She had the kind of eyes that reached across the room and kicked you in the face. The kind of eyes which nailed a guy's feet to the floor and threw away the hammer. It didn't take much to get Teo glued to her side like one of his father's more unfortunate and ill-conceived experiments. She had such brightness in her, a brightness that Teo had only ever seen in his own mother. But the clouds had come, and even the sun couldn't shine through the thunder. Katara, she was raw, spirited, and determined. Just standing close to her was like standing in the sunshine.

"This place is incredible," the Avatar said, looking around like a more hyperactive version of the lemur on his shoulder. He paused. "I'm surprised you never tried putting this stuff up in the Air Temple."

Teo shook his head. "There's no rebuilding up there. It's too dangerous."

"What's dangerous about it?" the bare-footed earthbender girl asked. She was cute, but it was a sparkle of a gemstone against the majesty of the sun.

"The place is basically one huge cloud of natural gas," Teo explained. "One spark, and the entire mountain could explode. And even if that doesn't happen, there's no air to breathe up there anymore," He shook his head. "It's almost like the world has something against airbenders. No offense."

If the Avatar had offense, he kept it to himself as he plunged deeper into the vast edifice, all sided in red, oddly natural looking bricks, under pointed arches which grew down from the cavernous ceiling. The blind girl went unsteadily back into the house, muttering about 'Spirit world breaking the rules', and other unpleasantnesses, leaving Teo with the two siblings, one of them holding his attention much better than the other.

"You know, this place is weird," she said, her voice singing against the darkness. There was always darkness in the workshop. It pressed against the torches and the candles that the Mountain King tried to use. It was like the shadows were alive, angry, and covetous.

"It's not really here," Teo said. She turned to him, confusion clear on her face. "Dad says that the workshop is in the Spirit World."

"Why would anybody build something like this in a place so dangerous?" her brother asked. There was a kinship of intellectuals with him, since even Teo knew that the Tribesman had a keen eye and a keener mind. That there was so much more that the guy was capable of, if only he had time, access, and will. It was a feeling with Teo had far too often.

"He didn't build the workshop," Teo said. "He put up the walls of the shack, and the house was bigger inside. And this place," Teo waved his arms to the clamor, the fire and the darkness, the music of industry hammering blind and dumb, "was already there, whole and finished. He just made it start working for him instead of doing nothing."

"He took over a chunk of the Spirit world? Is that even half way smart?" Sokka asked.

Teo couldn't help but chuckle at that. "I don't think he's ever cared about 'smart'," he said. The two siblings moved on, and Sokka's eyebrows shot up. "Yeah, that's one of the old prototypes for Mom's glider."

"Yeah, we saw her up there on our way in," Katara said. "Is your mother an airbender? Or maybe an airbender's child?"

Teo shook his head. "She's just somebody who always wanted to fly. And because of Dad, she finally got her wish," he looked at the wooden frame, so weary, so cracked and battered. This thing was resting, now, it's purpose fulfilled. It was good that she finally got into the sky, even if Teo's father didn't live to see it. He couldn't imagine what would have happened if that dream had died with her.

Who would have the sky, if not her?

"Your father... Your real father," Sokka said, playing with a bit of a dynamo. "Do you miss him?"

"I do," Teo said. "He was... kinda like Zha Yu. Crazy, brilliant, dedicated to pushing technology as far as it would go," Teo looked at the things which they all had been working on, so desperately, for so long. "Maybe not the same way, though. As I understand, Dad was obsessed with creating some sort of more efficient fuel. Maybe that's what caused the explosion. I don't know."

"What's all of this, then?" Katara asked.

"Stepdad, he's got the idea that the future is electrical," he said, setting the dynamo down. "We've harnessed fire, earth, water... even the air. But the lightning bolt? That's the future, or so he says. But you know something? I think he's right."

"Electrical what?" Sokka asked. "It's not like you can heat your house with lightning, or steer a ship with it, or cook your food."

Teo shrugged. "Well, maybe you should just keep an open mind."

"Guys," the Avatar's voice came from the corner of the room. It held a tone of despair and concern. It was one Teo had heard often. "You've gotta see this."

And as Teo followed them, he knew exactly what the Avatar had stumbled onto. He even had a fairly good idea how. It was weird how they said that a life was a lot like a broken mirror. You could pick up the pieces, but it was never whole, and you only managed to hurt yourself trying. And that's what this was. A testament to them trying. And all the blood that went with it.

"What is this?" the Avatar demanded, his voice gaining a timbre of a man at rage. Teo looked past him, through the panel which he'd slid aside. Of course he'd found it. In this family, the hits just kept coming. Through that aperture, Teo could see the red and the black, the machines of war and death. Battletanks, boarding skiffs. And at the heart of that chaos, a half-completed construct which stood as a pinnacle of treachery, draped over with the tri-point flame of the Fire Nation. "You're working for them?" he demanded.

"Did you know about this?" Katara asked, hurt in her voice like a pulled tooth. For a second, there, Teo considered the beautiful lie. The lie which would have turned her to his side, held her close. Let him feel the sun shine. But that was the thing. He couldn't make the sunshine a lie. He turned as footfalls landed beside him, and a broad hand landed on his shoulder. The old man on the mountain, his heresy revealed to the world.

"Yes," Teo said.

"We all did," the Mountain King said. There was a silence. The silence between when you pull the trigger and when the string begins to snap forward, sending a quarrel into the air.

"How could you do this?" Katara asked, betrayal in her voice. And the sun started to go away.

"I didn't have a choice," the old man said. He looked older now. He'd been scrabbling at those mirror shards harder and longer than any of them. His voice was dejected, desperate. He pointed at the walls. "Everything I did was because it bought me a little bit more time. Convection dynamos bought me a couple of weeks. Using rubber to insulate cabling bought me a few more. But there's no more buying time with a future which the Fire Nation was probably going to end up with anyway."

"What are you talking about?" Sokka demanded, hand on a machete on his hip.

A sigh. The fisher king's wound plain to the world.

"They have my daughter," he said.

"We've been doing everything we could to free her, but they've got every advantage," Teo said. "We can't get close to them without them seeing us. Stepdad can't sneak in because they've covered the ground with iron plates. Mom can't get close enough because of the foul air, and even if she did, she'd be outnumbered five hundred to one."

"You're betraying your people for your family," Sokka said, his hand dropping from his weapon. "That's... terrible."

The old man nodded. "There's no more buying time," he repeated. He reached up to the central edifice, and his fist tightened on the Fire Nation standard, crumpling it. But that wound which festered in him weakened him in spirit as the fisher-king's did his body. "A few months ago, the Fire Nation stormed my shack. They found out about the workshop. I don't know how they did. And then Qin showed up," there was bile in that name. It was as hated in this family as all the devils of Adamite lore. "He had this idea that I knew about how to restore the technologies of the Storm Kings. And when I told him no... he took Cho'e as collateral."

"Storm King technology?" the Avatar asked.

"Back at the end, they lost their bison, and tried to take to the sky in machines. It was a resounding success which came too late to save them," Teo explained.

"Think of it," the Mountain King said, staring at that machine, half constructed even as it was. "A machine which can rise into the heavens. Technology which will give all peoples the freedom which only the airbenders once enjoyed," he then shook his head. "But I'm not the man for this. I'm an earthbender. I think in density and stability. I don't know how to make things fly. And I'm running out of time. If I can't get this thing off the ground..."

"You're going to lose your daughter," Katara said.

He nodded, sadly, painfully. "So yes. I'm a traitor. Because I had to be."

The Avatar stared at that machine, stillborn and waiting. Then, he turned to the Mountain King. "I don't know about the machine... but I can't let this stand. Nobody should have their children taken from them."

"So this is your problem?" the Dragon of the East's voice caused Teo to squawk with alarm. Not the most manly sound, but she'd appeared without any warning at all. "I'm surprised you kept this from me. You of all people would have known I could help."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because that's what we do," she said. "Avatar, what say you to returning a stolen child?"

"Let's do it," the boy said with a nod.

Even if the hits kept coming, even these days, sometimes, just sometimes, you could hit back.

---

Iroh hesitated outside that door, watching and listening. His face was fixed with a concentrated grimace, as his mind whirled, keeping track of the things he saw in that room. Azula's room always gave a lot of food for thought, and today, the most unsettling bit of all came about. He could hear voices in the next room, but his attention was, for the moment, centered here.

Specifically, on Azula's latest painting.

It portrayed the Avatar, obviously enough. He was kneeling on grass, with an arch behind him, his tattooes glowing blue. Iroh could never admit aloud, since the consequences for doing so would be severe, but he also recognized where the Avatar was. It was the Spirit Oasis in Summavut. What lay behind the Avatar was what gave Iroh concern, though. It was the two charges, those children he thought of as his children. Azula stood behind the Avatar, facing left. Her hands were focused into two-fingered lances, which seemed to waft blue flames. Opposite her stood Zuko, facing right, and his own hands bore scarlet fire. But there were things which Iroh couldn't account for. Like the bizarre pony-tail on Zuko's otherwise shaved head. Or the fact that they didn't seem to be focusing on the Avatar, but rather, were preparing to enter mortal combat with each other.

Iroh knew that Azula couldn't help but create these works. Unlike his brother, he actually listened to her. It was a means of getting images out of her head, before they tormented her into insanity. Sometimes, those images which she produced disturbed her. One in particular, which showed her bound hand and foot with iron chains, slumped in defeat, seemed to eat at her even as she was making it; even though she couldn't stop weeping at the process, she could no more stop painting this horrifying scene than she could stop breathing and continue to live. Qiao had taken that and set it aside, so it wouldn't torment Azula with its disturbing imagery. As far as Iroh knew, it was still in his room, somewhere.

So it was that while he didn't understand where from those images came, he could understand their effect. And that was why he understood why Azula was next door, with her brother. Iroh shook his head. What curse had befallen this family to bear it so low? Iroh took a couple of steps to the next door in the hallway.

"It's going to be alright," Zuko said, his voice calm despite the substantial amount of hurt he was still aching from. Having an explosion go off next to one's spine was never a pleasant experience.

"No, no it isn't," Azula said. "Why can't we ever seem to do it? What is wrong with me?"

"It wasn't your fault," Zuko placated. A peek through this door showed that Azula had curled herself up on the floor next to his bed, and he was sitting, trying to comfort her. This despite him being essentially one massive bruise. "Zhao got lucky. He won't be lucky next time."

"Yeah, well, what'll happen next time?" she asked. "Something's coming, dum-dum. I think that girl is trying to..."

"Katara is a non-issue," Zuko said. Iroh raised an eyebrow at that. The young prince was seldom one to let a pretty girl pass unremarked, or at least he was when Qiao was still aboard. The practice seemed to have fallen off when the boy had to suddenly hold the odd little family they'd grown into together. And from his tone, it wasn't just setting something aside because it wasn't the right time. It was as though he had shunted her firmly and inextricably into the 'never as long as the stars burn in the sky' category. A bit of a shame. Zuko could really use somebody in his life, someone who wasn't absolutely dependent on him. And a powerful, strong-willed bender like her was something that Iroh could see matching well with someone of Zuko's temperament. "What's got you so rattled?"

"I'm not going to fight you," Azula said, quietly, as though trying to convince herself.

"Really? That'd be a change," Zuko said with a pained chuckle.

"I'm serious. Whatever comes at the North... at Summavut, we're going to bring down the Avatar together, alright?" she said, her voice becoming a bit more strong toward the end.

There was a different kind of pain in his eyes when he chuckled again. "I wouldn't have it any other way," he said. She nodded, rising up and walking toward the door as though a strong showing now could erase the momentary vulnerability she had shown before. Iroh stepped back, and then took a step forward as the door opened more completely, and Azula stepped out.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Dinner is almost ready, and nobody has set a course," Iroh said, laying out the events in order of importance.

"We're steaming north to Summavut," she said. "And I couldn't care less about dinner."

"You don't mean that. A growing girl needs nutrition," Iroh pointed out.

"Just set the course," Azula snapped. Iroh rolled his eyes as she moved past. Before she ducked back into her own room, Iroh took the time as it presented itself.

"Azula," he asked.

"What?" she responded.

"How old are you?"

There was just a moment of hesitation. A moment too long.

"I'll be... fifteen on the first day of summer," Azula said. She scoffed. "And you claim to be a good uncle. Don't even remember how old I am..."

"I'm sorry. Sometimes things slip my mind," Iroh said innocently. She rolled her eyes and closed the door to her room. As Iroh walked away, though, he had a fairly good idea what was going on.

And he didn't like it one bit.

---

Aang stared at the miniature dirigible which rose and fell from the heat of a candle within. Aang stared at it with honest appreciation. Flight was a tricky thing. "This problem had you gnashing your teeth for months, and Sokka solves it in two hours?" Aang asked.

"I never said I understood flight," the Mountain King said uncomfortably.

"You see, the biggest problem with his balloon design was that once it was filled with hot air, it would become unstable. It needed somewhere to go," Sokka said, entirely too enthusiastic for the early hour. "A hole helped stabilize the craft, but caused it to plummet. So how do you keep a lid on hot air?"

"The whole world wants to know," Toph said, nudging the hulking Tribesman beside her. Bato rolled his eyes.

"Ha ha," Sokka said sarcastically. "The answer is actually really simple; a lid! The lid can regulate the air so that you can keep stability and buoyancy, and adjust them as needed. With a proper engine, I imagine these things could even power against the winds!"

"That's remarkable," Zha Yu said.

"That's some impressive lateral thinking," the swordsman beside him acknowledged. "A very elegant solution."

"They want this craft, right?" Sokka asked. "Well, they're going to get it. But what they don't know is that there's going to be a rescue team inside it. You'd agree there's a pretty good chance that this Qin guy is going to renege on your deal?"

"I'm almost certain of it," Zha Yu said direly. "Qin is a sycophant, and he's driven by his fear of Ozai more than any loyalty to his nation."

"I can understand that," Aang said with a nervous shrug. "So once we're there, what is our plan?"

"That's going to be the messy part," Sativa said. She was about to continue, but broke off as a deep, resounding tone reverberated through the workshop. In an instant, Zha Yu's head snapped toward the farther of the two doors.

"Everybody out of the workshop," he said.

"Why?" Piandao asked.

"If I was trying something, wouldn't I do it before you found out my dark secret? Just go!"

Aang had to see the logic in that, and was the first to help him usher them back through the wide gates and into the relatively cramped but nevertheless impossibly spacious living area in the shack. Zha Yu, though, swung the doors closed and slid a bar into place, affixing them closed.

"What was that?" Sokka asked.

"The Cloister Bell," Zha Yu said. "It's about a three minute warning before a Blowout hits."

"...Blowout?" Katara asked.

"You'll understand when it gets here," Zha Yu said.

"What does it do?" Sokka then followed up.

"Supposedly, it kills you in every way that's possible and quite a few which actually aren't," Zha Yu said. Everybody stared at him. "What? My best source of information about this stuff died sixteen years ago."

Sokka stared at him. "Soooo... why do you have a super-lethal death workshop?"

"Convenience?" he offered. Even his wife rolled her eyes at that one. Aang suddenly had an odd impulse, and a strange memory which paired up with it.

"Lotus to intercept three?" Aang said.

"Really?" Zha Yu asked. Then he went a bit pale, turned to a Pai Sho board near the fireplace, and began to curse vehemently. Sokka and Katara exchanged a glance, as did Sativa and her companions. Toph just stared at a nearby corner, and her mother shook her head with a small smile, while Toph's father looked a little bit aghast.

"...what?" Aang asked, a little concerned.

"Damn that old man! He's going to have my Bastions cornered in seven moves!" he shouted. He then started to scratch at his beard. "At the going rate, I'll have only two and a half years to think my way out of it."

"Can we return to the task at hand?" Badesh asked. "Entering the camp will be, all things considered, easy. Getting out might require an act of divine intervention."

It was Aang's turn to grin there. "I'm pretty sure I've got a way out, once we're in there," he said, pulling out his bison whistle. The grin withered slightly. "How are we going to find her, though?"

"We find Qin," Zha Yu said. "He won't be far from her. He'll be keeping a close eye on her," he turned to Sokka. "You'll have everything you need. How long do you think it'll take to make the adjustments?"

"In the deadly room of death?" Sokka asked. Zha Yu's wife chuckled at that.

"It'll pass in about four minutes," he said, as everybody took one step away from the doors, which began to rattle ominously.

"About an hour," Sokka said.

"Good. My wife will help you. She's got a head for these sorts of things," Zha Yu said.

"You never did tell me your name," Sokka said to the yellow-haired woman.

"That's because she knows you won't be able to pronounce it," Teo said with a smirk.

"Try me," Sokka challenged. She then glanced between her son and her coworker, and rattled off at least eleven difficult and foreign syllables which Aang wouldn't be able to spell if he heard it a thousand times. At least one of those phonemes was one Aang wasn't entirely sure how to pronounce! Everybody stood baffled except for the bearer of that name, her husband, her child, and Katara, who gave a shrug.

"I guess that's why you keep calling her 'Sul'," Katara admitted. "It's a lot easier to say."

Coming from her, that said a lot. The conversation broke down into various other discussions which went on on things which Aang really didn't know how to weigh in on. Engineering, or battle psychology, or tactics. None of these were his slice of cake. But one set of blue eyes met his grey above the din and a flick of a nod out the exterior doors saw Aang following out the oldest of the assembled Tribesmen. "What is it, Bato?" Aang asked when he was outside, and the tall, dark man closed the door behind them."

"I've told Katara and Sokka many things, but there is one I could not. One I dared not, and for simple reason of selfishness. We needed you... but it turned out, you don't need us. Not yet, anyway. There's something they need to know, and it's vital that somebody be there to carry it, in case the day sees me among the stars."

"What do you mean?"

"You must swear to not reveal this to Sokka or Katara until whatever comes today has come, can you do that?" Bato asked intensely.

"I swear," Aang said with a bit of trepidation.

"This cannot reach their ears. Not yet. This is important."

"I've sworn my oath, Bato," Aang said. "What is it?"

Bato sighed, and looked to the east. "It's about their father..."

---

"I now officially have more clothes than I have ever had in my life," Nila said, a little bewildered at the backpack full of them which Tzu Zi carried not only without prompting but without complaint. Her current attire was in dark purples and reds and ochers, and a pair of odd, resilient pants from some sort of specially made cotton. For all she'd considered women in pants to be about as fitting as men in dresses, she could see why Tzu Zi, Malu, and a significant fraction of these Dakongese partook of the style; it was comfortable and it didn't get in her way even as much as her robes had. "You really don't have to carry those, you know..."

"Oh, don't be silly. It's my pleasure," Tzu Zi said with a smile. "It's been too long since I got to go out and have a big shopping trip. Far too long," a wistful expression on her face. "Besides, you had to pay for it all. The least I can do is bring it back to where we're staying."

"I paid for it because for whatever reason I now have the most money of anybody here," Nila said simply, but Tzu Zi tutted, and Nila fell silent. It was an odd experience living with a people whom she had been raised to fear and revile. Not by her mother, of course. Mother held only a passing attention for the Dakongese, but for the rest of the Si Wongi, these people were The Enemy, just as in situations reversed, the Si Wongi served as Nemesis. Centuries of conflict and strife, predicated on the belief that the other side was unnatural, immoral, and wrong. The truth was that it could scarcely be farther from the truth.

Yes, the Dakongese had earthbenders where her people had sand. Yes, they worshiped the Ostrich Horse where hers did the Celestial Hosts. But when their children wept, their mothers were no less swift to gather them up and sing them to peace. When their stomachs rumbled, it was to fill with not-so-inconceivable food. When one needed help, another offered. Far be it for she to say these people were the Si Wongi's inferiors, from her experience, they were equal in every way except for how they treated her personally, at which point the Dakongese were far and away ahead. Well, the Adamite ones were, anyway. She withheld her opinion about the Animists.

"I've been giving a lot of thought to your offer," Nila said as they walked past the refugees from a continent on the continent and across the seas. "And I think I'm going to take you up on it. When I deliver Sharif to Mother, I'm not going to stay there."

"You're going to come with me to Ba Sing Se?" she asked.

Nila nodded. "I will convince Mother. And if I cannot, then to hell with her and I'll go anyway."

"I'd hug you if you hadn't just insulted your mom," Tzu Zi said. "And if I wasn't overbalanced by your new clothes. Aw, what the heck?"

And then Nila found herself being hugged by a cheery firebender. An uneven smile came to Nila's face at the feeling. She had direction and purpose. She had seen too much of life outside of the sweltering confines of that house to effortlessly slip back into it. "Thank you," Nila said.

"What for?"

"For being a friend," she said. Tzu Zi gave her a second squeeze and then parted. That warm feeling in Nila continued for a while after, though, so it wasn't so bad. "Although, I do worry. When was the last time you saw the airbender?"

"About five seconds ago," Tzu Zi said, a worried edge entering her voice.

"What?" Nila asked, confounded. And her answer came in the form of a 'whoop' as something screamed past her at just above head-level, causing her to flinch and drop. She actually had her bow out and nocked before she even realized what had caused that little reaction. When she did, her tattooed hands dumbly slid her begrudgingly accepted weapon back into its place. Namely, because she was watching a woman fly through the air. "Is she... Of course she is. I'm not blind and stupid. How is she flying?"

"Malu!" Tzu Zi shouted, waving her hand above her. The figure banked around and came down, landing before them with a rush of wind but not so much as a patter, her feet returning to the ground with the delicacy of a feather landing in a cup of water. Malu, like Tzu Zi was grinning so broadly that it seemed likely her head might fall right off. "That's amazing! How did you do it?"

"It probably has something to do with that device she's holding," Nila said, managing to hold onto her scientific mindset even around her understandable impressedness. It as one thing to know that one's companion was an airbender. It was another to see that airbending in such visceral action. Malu nodded, holding up the glider.

"I know! I just talked to some of those Whalesh people, and they said they learned how to make these things from artifacts that were handed down in their families!" Malu said. "I figure some of them must have had brothers or cousins or something that went to Da-Aer and our South Air Temple," she said, her voice moving faster and faster as she continued with her excitement. "I mean, yeah, the overwhelming majority of kids of Air Nomads end up Air Nomads themselves but this just goes to show that even now there's bits that managed to get spread all the way across the world and..."

"You've been spending too much time around her," Nila said, pointing her thumb at Tzu Zi. Malu trailed off with a mouthed 'what?', to which Nila smirked. "You're gaining her proficiency in run-on sentences."

"Oh, don't be like that," Tzu Zi said, but it was around laughter, so Nila considered it her first successful friendly 'burn'. Malu scoffed, and shook her glider. It gave a hearty clack and the wings, which were spanned with what looked like the same kind of tough, blue cloth as her pants, folded in on themselves and the glider as a whole took on a look of a simple staff.

"The mechanism's a little rough, but a little bit of elbow grease and love will get it smoothed out plenty," Malu finished. She started smiling again, obviously not allowing herself to be put off. "So tell me, how was shopping?"

"She's pretty when she's not wearing a shapeless robe!"

"And you'd be the one to notice," Malu said with an elbow nudge. Tzu Zi looked a bit baffled at that, but shrugged and continued on at a grin.

"And she's coming with us up to Ba Sing Se once Sharif is back home," Tzu Zi continued. Malu chuckled at that, too.

"I guess I'm going to have to get used to you after all, am I?" she said. Nila let out some sarcastic laughter. "Which brings us to a somewhat relevant point. How do we get out of here? You may not be able to tell from the ground, but from the sky, I can tell that the edges of this enclave are pretty well guarded. They're not going to just let you saunter on out."

"I think I have a way to escape," Nila said. All eyes turned to her.

"You do? Why didn't you say so?" Malu asked.

"Because I hoped I would find a better one. Since I haven't, I must default to my original plan. And sadly, my original plan is not exactly big on dignity."

"Oh, I can't wait to hear this," Malu said, grinning.

"You're good at withstanding stench, aren't you?" Nila asked. Malu's grin began to fall away.

"No."

"I'm afraid so," Nila said. "It's the one place they won't look."

"Because it's insane and disgusting!"

"And it will work," Nila said. Tzu Zi glanced between the two of them.

"What's the plan, Nila?" she asked.

"Get my brother, and meet us at the edge of the midden heap," Nila said. Tzu Zi just stared at her, before taking a moment to adjust her hair and palm her forehead.

"What."

"I told you, this isn't going to be big on dignity, and it will be a long way 'round to reach Sentinel Rock, since we're going to have to circle the entire Horde from the back. But we will be free," Nila said.

"By burying ourselves in garbage!" Tzu Zi stressed.

"It's hardly the worst thing you'll ever smell. Trust me on that," Nila said honestly and simply, before walking toward her onerous but necessary destination. Behind her, Malu stared at the Si Wongi's back for a long moment. Then, the airbender and the firebender shared a glance.

"You know, there are times that girl really alarms me," Malu noted.

"...yeah," Tzu Zi had to agree.

---

"How is she?" Riku asked, betraying her usual stoicism for a moment of motherly concern. While its target wasn't a proper one, all things considered, Takeshi considered it a very good sign that she felt it at all. She had been a very, very hard woman when they'd first met. It had taken no end of effort to get her to soften even as much as she had. He accounted it his greatest victory. After all, like his grandfather, he was a lover, not a fighter. Only Grandfather was a fighter, too. Things got complicated in his family. Politics always were. It made him glad that his relation to that mire of a family was so distant that he was for all intents and purposes nobody.

"She's fine. Misses her parents, as usual," Takeshi said. He paused for a moment, looking toward the tent where their commander stayed. Not even their commander, really. Qin was a politician, not a soldier. And while Takeshi had no love of authoritarian soldiers, he had even less for politicians, since they had no place in the picture at all. In whole, he would just be very, very glad when he mustered out. All this stress was starting to thin his hair. "What about Qin?"

"He's complaining again. Louder this time," Riku stated. "He wants somebody sent to the Shack."

"Do you think he'd actually do it?"

"Kill her?" Riku asked. Then she shook her head. "Not at first. But he'd make that poor bastard hurt by proxy a hundred times what he does to her. And that'll serve to piss him off, which means he'll probably show up and kill us all."

"You're a very up person, you know that?" Takeshi noted sardonically. Riku feigned cuffing him upside the head. He took a step further down the barricade as though to avoid her, then leaned against the metal work which looked down over the slop and the precipice beyond it.

"Still, I'm worried," she repeated. "Qin's in a bad mood. It's been a long time since he went to the Shack. I don't like this."

"I don't like it either. But what can we do?"

"Hope that nobody does anything stupid?" she attempted.

Takeshi couldn't help but snort at that. He looked down at the ceiling of the clouds. It had taken him a long time to get used to being this far up a mountain, unlike Riku, who was born in the Ibuki Mountains back home. He still wasn't used to seeing clouds from the other direction. But it was still something to behold, the great masses of them pressing up against the mountains, but never reaching through to spill their rain onto the parched inland.

"Quite the view," he said.

"It's just clouds," Riku said. Ever the romantic, she was.

"Or... is it?" Takeshi said, moving along the wall they were both standing on until he passed a corner, and got a clearer line of sight on something that was moving in that vast and obscuring fluff. "You don't think she's back up here, do you?"

"Qin'll be even more pissed if she is," Riku noted. But that eddying in the clouds grew even larger, far too large for a woman on a glider. Then, it began to swell up, like an eel rushing to the surface, pressing out a bulge of water before it finally broke the tension and erupted from the deeps. But what erupted was not something which Takeshi ever thought he would see. It was large, an oval of red cloth, belching smoke and rising clear of the clouds with no supports beneath it at all. Takeshi spared a glance to his side, and Riku was watching it with equal rapt attention, but very little of that same wonder that was in his. "Oh."

"Oh?" Takeshi asked, waving a hand toward the machine that steamed toward the camp. "You see a piece of Storm King technology come to life and that's the only thing you can say? Not 'wow', or even 'that's incredible'?"

"More like 'oh, this is probably going to go very, very wrong somehow'," Riku countered, glaring at him.

"...oh," Takeshi said. "We should..."

"Yes, we should," she confirmed, and with that, both of them were vaulting off of the wall and deep into camp. He wasn't much of a soldier. He'd made it his entire tour without harming a single living soul. But Riku had instincts, and he knew to trust them out here. And if her instincts said things were going to go bad, then he had to believe them.

And the coldness of her eyes told him that if this was going wrong, it was in a big way.

---

Qin had a headache. Not that that was any different from any other day he spent up this high on this cold, Agni forsaken continent with these people. He woke up with a headache, and after hearing about what the insubordinate cretins under his command did throughout the day, he went to sleep with an even bigger headache. He oft considered screaming his rage into the heavens at what foul curse had befallen him to end him in this place. He was a man of science! Not some mountain climber, nor was he a prison warden, nor a babysitter. Leave the first to the Gorks, the second to some nobody noble, and the third to his wife, since each was best suited for the respective task.

The whole situation seemed to smack of punishment. And that confused the hell out of Qin because he was fairly sure he'd never done anything requiring punishment. He'd served Azulon with vigor and loyalty, and pledged fealty to his son and successor without hesitation. Then, everything started going right to hell. And so he sat on an uncomfortable chair, trying to personally understand the schematics which had been stolen from another man of science from another nation. Intellectual theft didn't bother him. What did bother him was that Ozai didn't consider Qin intelligent enough to come up with these things on his own. This might be a different path from what Qin would have chosen for himself, but it certainly wasn't beyond his capacity for comprehension.

"Minister Qin," a voice came from the door to his own shack, itself the only solid structure on this horrible little camp. Qin turned to him.

"What? What is so important?" he asked, testy.

"There's something rising from the clouds."

"Keep the guards around the hostage's tent. If she tries another 'rescue mission', cut off the girl's hand and send it down the hill to the Mountain King," Qin said with boredom and irritation. Ordinarily, harming children wasn't something he'd condone, but considering the pressure he was under, it was lucky he didn't return the girl to that insane earthbender two pounds at a time. Zha Yu had certainly jerked Qin around enough in the year he'd had to endure this madness.

"It's not the woman," the soldier said. "Well... it is, but Zha Yu is with her. You must see this!"

"And why is that?" Qin asked, rubbing at the bags under his eyes.

"Because they're riding with the Storm Kings!"

That got Qin's attention. He rose, pushing past the soldier to observe that it was not just a slip of the tongue nor insipid error. There was a machine in the air, flying by mechanical power. It slowly descended, the great balloon above it sagging slightly as the base of it hit the ground. It was an ugly thing, all unpainted metal and undyed cloth, and reeked of 'prototype'. There was one thing to be said for prototypes; you never had to endure the same sloppy design again once the concept was proven. Not so much standing on the edge of the basket as leaning over and supporting himself on the edge by a rope to the balloon, was the madman himself. Qin stood before him, staring down at him as he dropped from the basket to the iron plates that floored this encampment.

"I've held my end of the deal," Zha Yu spat, helpfully in Qin's own language. "Now release my daughter."

"I think you should know better than that by now," Qin said. "How many other 'prototypes' have you pawned off on us, only to have us bring them home and find them unreproduceable? She is going to stay right here, until we prove we can build this thing ourselves."

"You son of a bitch..."

"You brought this on yourself," Qin said with superiority. "Now, you are going to hand over the schematics, then toddle off to that little shack of yours until I decide your work can be trusted."

"Trusted?" Zha Yu snapped. He cast a hand back to where his nearly-albino wife was standing, looking steadily more and more angry within the structure of the dirigible. "We flew this damned thing in here? What else is there to trust!"

"How do I know there isn't a bison in that canvas sack?" Qin asked. Zha Yu leaned back with confusion. It was telling to Qin's state of mind that he had to predict such legerdemain. Doubly so, because he was now capable of it. Qin leaned down to Zha Yu's level. "I don't trust you. You're an enemy of this nation, and I wouldn't put it past you to sabotage everything you touch."

"I want my daughter back," Zha Yu said darkly.

"Then for her sake, you'd better be acting in good faith," Qin responded. "Now get out of my outpost, profligate."

Zha Yu wilted for a moment, then turned back to his spouse. He let out a whistle, and nodded away from the vessel. That woman looked about ready to chew nails and spit arrowheads, but she disembarked.

"Good to see that you have a modicum of sense, 'Mountain King'," Qin said. "It'd be such a shame if something were to happen to your daugh–"

He was interrupted when two teenagers also disembarked, but with a great deal of speed and vigor. One of them was dark skinned and blue eyed, a girl. The other was bald, and bore the blue arrow mark of the Fire Nation's greatest single enemy besides the Dragon of the East.

"The... Avatar?" Qin managed to say, backing away from the two of them, even as, together, they began to move through a motion which caused water from the dirigible to surge and slam into the edge between two of the great metal plates which formed the floor. A great heave from both, and the water flared up, freezing, and turning the floor into something of a ramp. Within half a second of that panel being lifted from the ground, a burst of stone exploded from under it, covering the rest of the area in earthen detritus. The woman bounded back into the dirigible, but Zha Yu began to bend, which caused Qin to stagger back, and the two hundred or so firebenders and soldiers to race forward. "You can't win this, Zha Yu!"

"Not without help," he admitted, then heaved once more. This time, the entire plate was tossed aside by another vomit of stone. This time, though, it opened as a snake's egg, and exposed a plethora of others in its heart. Teenagers and adults, boys and girls, men and women. And a small black-and-white lemur, which Qin's stunned state added to the tally as 'other'. But when Qin's eyes fell upon one particular woman, far shorter than any but the milky eyed girl near the center of the pack, his heart practically stopped in his chest.

The Dragon of the East was here.

"Kill them! Kill them all now!" Qin shrieked. And the world turned into fire and clashing of iron, it turned into screams. One of them was his own.

"He's getting away!" the younger of two Tribesmen shouted.

"Not if I have anything to say about it," that mad tinker's son noted, and Qin heard a twang in the air. About a fraction of a second later, there was a great impact in his chest, and he staggered to one knee before drawing himself back up again. But this time, every step he took was utter agony. A glance down showed why. There was a crossbow bolt in his back, lancing him through. He stifled a growl, but kept moving. He was not going to die here. Not today.

---

"I've lost track of him," Sokka said, before ducking under a spear-thrust, twisting and clipping the soldier in the side of the helmet with his club. The two teenagers turned to the swordsman who flowed through the masses, absorbing most of the attention of the non-benders amongst their enemies at the cost of being utterly locked down himself.

"Don't let him get away," Piandao said from his web of steel. Teo nodded, and started running.

Qin was running scared. Of course he could run, but with a crossbow bolt in his stomach like a broken bottle of wasabi, he was quickly running out of time. He knew where Teo's sister was, and Teo was not going to leave here without making sure his family was safe from assholes like him. Qin would be running fast. Truth be told, Teo didn't know about Angels, as he'd never really ascribed to his mother's beliefs, but he knew for a fact that it was fear that gave men wings.

Following the man through the maelstrom was easier done than said. Teo had thought that he'd be doing it alone, but the Tribesman was right beside him as the followed the blood. Behind them, the Dragon filled the skies with death, and her allies past and present turned that death into pandemonium by means of flying stone and lancing spear. Seeing two generations of Beifong women earthbending in war was truly a sight to behold.

The Avatar was a bit disappointing, but Teo didn't have either the time nor the death wish to see what Sokka had entitled 'Glowing Badass' while his sister's life was on the line. So he followed the blood, and the Tribesman matched him step for step. From the swirling canvas of a disrupted town of tents, flashing blades seared toward Teo. The Tribesman moved faster. A machete parrying them away, then somehow grabbing 'hold of one of those snapping lines, and dragging it around both soldiers, binding them up even as they fought, until they lost the battle against the wind, their own stances, and their weight, and fell hard onto the iron. Teo had to admit, Sokka did know how to fight with his environment.

"There's too many of them to fight, come on!" Sokka urged. Teo though flinched for a moment, then brought up his crossbow, and the twang of the bolt flying through the air screamed past Sokka's face, tearing through the air only to crash headlong into the skull mask of a firebender, sending him flat on his back, even as the quarrel broke and deflected away. Obviously a blow to the head was a blow to the head, however it was delivered. Lucky Teo had noticed, because the man was preparing to barbeque the Tribesman, and from the stories the lad told, it wouldn't have been the first time. Sokka glanced behind him, noted the groaning firebender, then nodded. "See what I mean?"

"Then stop jawing and start running!" Teo noted. The cold air pressed against the the heat of his body, forbidden and fundamentally wrong lovers engaged in a tryst both knew would destroy each other. There was something about something being wrong which made it all the more fun, though. Not today. Today, the only heat was from the blood in his veins, and the cooling blood on the ground. The blood marked a trail, a road toward something which had to be better than this. Pound of feet drove him forward. Fear drove him forward. Fear gave him wings and made him fly. He wished he could say he was operating in rage, but that wasn't true. Teo's body was terror, from his hair to his toenails, and he expressed it with every twitch of muscle.

They crossed the great melee, almost ignored by the influx of soldiers. Hundreds of them. How they even got the food up here, Teo couldn't imagine. Why was another question he couldn't cotton. But the blood drew him on, like a wild beast. Drew him onward, and he knew he wasn't going to win. For all he had youth and working legs, Qin's terror would drive him faster than any save the Dragon could match. And she was occupied. So they ran, and Teo watched as the blood drew colder, and his hopes followed.

"I think we're catching up!" Sokka said.

"No, we're not," Teo said, when they finally reached past the warren of once neat and orderly tents all caught in the Avatar's wind. One building stood out, built of solid iron and bolted to the floor. And the blood went right inside it. "That's gotta be where they're keeping her."

Sokka patted Teo on the shoulder and ran before him, kicking the door open. Well, the door opened, but only by a hair, and thus sent Sokka straight down to the plating for his troubles. Teo didn't even slow. He just bounded over the Tribesman and leveled his reloaded crossbow into that room, where Qin would doubtless be awaiting them.

"Get away from her, Qin, or I swear to the gods, I'll..." Teo began, but the scene before him wasn't what he expected. Cho'e wasn't anywhere in here, nor did it look like she was intended to be. Instead, there was Qin, ushering a hawk out the window of the iron building. He turned back, pale and bleeding, but smirking.

"You've lost," Qin said, his voice weak. "The Gurkhas have been called. They'll be here in a matter of minutes."

"The what?" Sokka asked from Teo's back. But Teo was already retreating.

"Where's my sister?" Teo demanded.

"There's a question... Can you find her before the Gurkhas arrive?" He laughed, seemingly quite painfully. "I'm anxious to see what happens. Aren't you?"

Teo wanted to shoot this man. But he was no murderer. He wanted to beat his sister's location out of him, but he was no torturer either. And even if he was, the simple truth was, if the Gurkhas were coming, then he simply didn't have time.

"What are the Gurkhas?" Sokka asked.

"You notice how you're able to take out grown men in red armor?" Teo asked. Sokka nodded as they slammed the door, leaving Qin within. "If you tried that against a Gurkha, you'd be dead before you started. They're indefatigable, strong, never give up, they're smart, and unbelievably deadly. If you face a Gurkha and want to live, run."

A simplification, but not a lie in the slightest. The Fire Nation was outnumbered by the East for almost a century, and yet they kept winning, and it was not because of East Continent incompetence. "What do we do now?" Sokka asked.

"I don't know!" Teo shouted. Then, he turned on simple instinct and pointed his crossbow at the face of a man standing about ten paces away. "Where is she?"

"Are you the Mountain King's boy?" the man asked, his hands in the air, and since his helmet was discarded, Teo could see there was a nervousness to the man's face which didn't have anything to do with having a projectile weapon aimed at him.

"Who's asking?"

The man swallowed, eyes flicking between the well armed teenagers, and the trail of blood leading into Qin's shack. "I know where the little girl is."

"And what d'ya want for it?" Sokka demanded.

"What? Nothing! She's safe for now, but you've got to move quickly," he said. Just as Teo couldn't speak for Adamite angels, so too could he not speak of their devils. Maybe in the endless pits of a hell he didn't really believe in, there was a place for a devil who could keep his word, who knew the value of good works.

Maybe there was more to a man than the color of his armor.

Well, he'd be proving it today. One way or the other.

---

"I have to admit, I actually admire that young man," Piandao said, whilst spinning through the hell of spears which surrounded him. He wagered that at a sneeze, he would either lose his beard or his head. Sati, who was stuck to his back as though bound by chains, let out a confused grunt.

"Which one? We've found no shortage of them today," she pointed out, before flicking one of her blades around in her hand and sending it into an unwilling but unmourned National who was trying to kill them. Piandao took a moment to shear through a spear coming toward him lengthwise before answering her. No point in getting distracted, after all.

"The Tribesman," Piandao clarified. "He's got a good mind and almost suicidal bravery. You should keep an eye on him."

"Maybe you should keep an eye on the idiots trying to kill us all!" Joo Dee's daughter shouted, before flattening a couple of them with a wave of dirt. It wasn't as powerful as it could have been, because she was moving earth over iron, rather than the entire contents of the ground. Joo Dee herself was doing as any mother should, and was keeping her daughter safe... well, as safe as the situation would allow, anyway. The little girl was probably causing more havoc than any two of the others combined.

Piandao took a moment to flash a smirk to Sativa. "Oh, the seriousness of youth. Do you remember when we took ourselves so seriously?"

"I still do. Only you've bothered to regress toward childhood," Sativa countered.

"Why not? It's fun," Bato said around a laugh, which earned a glare from Piandao. And also a clip in the back of his legs which staggered him a few steps and broke his rhythm. But the gentleman of weapons knew his trade very well, and quickly used his stagger to punch one of his former countrymen in the face around a sword hilt, and drop back into defense.

"You people are incorrigible," Joo Dee noted.

"You people are INSANE!" the young waterbender countered, before flicking off a whip of water strong enough to snap somebody off of the wall before he could let fly an arrow into the melee. Piandao simply rolled his eyes. As Zha Yu often said, if you couldn't have fun, then you were doing it wrong, no matter what whatsoever you were doing.

"There's so many of them!" The young Avatar said, flicking whole groups aside with blasts of air from his staff. Of course, the reason why there were still so many of them was because these ones were prepared for Sati, so her arrows couldn't find unarmored flesh, and they'd managed to pin Piandao into full defense within seconds. Added to that fact that Joo Dee and her child, the waterbender, and the Avatar all seemed reluctant to finish their stunned opponents more permanently, meant that they just kept coming back for more.

"Where are they?" Piandao asked.

"I'll check," the Avatar asked, before bounding straight up. As he did, he had to create some sort of airbending trickery about him, because a few archers were obviously waiting for him to do so, and he needed to deflect those missiles. He landed with a twist and a slam, which heaved a head of the omnipresent snow from outside the wall onto the iron and baffled the firebenders momentarily, which the waterbender took as license to start freezing them into place. "They're on their way back," the Avatar said.

"That's good, right?" Zha Yu asked, from where he held a firebender in a headlock. Piandao always wondered if the man simply forgot he was an earthbender sometimes. His question was answered when his son came running back through that melee to Bato, who was relatively unimpeded. Bato nodded, then ran to the flying machine and shouted something into it. "What's going on?"

"We need to disarm the bomb," Bato shouted back. Zha Yu scowled, favoring the firebender with one final punch in the face which left him leveled. "The Gurkhas are coming!"

"The Gurkhas!" Zha Yu said with real alarm, alarm which was shared by everybody over the age of sixteen.

"What are the Gurkhas?" the waterbender asked.

"More trouble than we can handle, child," Sati said. "We must flee immediately."

"But what about Appa?" the Avatar asked.

"We will rendezvous with him over the pass or else not at all," she said. "The Gurkhas will be upon us shortly, and with them comes great death."

Zha Yu had, of course, taken a moment to tear out the booby-trap which he'd rigged into the dirigible which would have destroyed it about a minute after it was set. After all, it wasn't like Zha Yu wanted this thing falling into Fire Nation hands. But since they were apparently going to be flying this thing out of here...

The fight began to shift, as the gentleman of weapons and the Dragon of the East began to press their opponents in the direction of the flying machine, a direction which they were denied by the presence of everybody else. Sokka, the insanely brave boy from the South, came sprinting through that fight, cradling a honey-haired girl and leaping off of the disoriented firebender Zha Yu slugged. This had the dual effect of giving Sokka enough height to just make it into the hull of the craft, and also sent that firebender's head into an unforgiving reintroduction with a dirty iron plate. Many of the others likewise piled into the flying vessel, leaving only Joo Dee and her daughter isolated.

"Get inside!" the Avatar shouted.

"I think we'll take the direct route," young Beifong said smugly, and took her mother's hand, before stomping on where the dirt was still exposed from the dislocated floor plate. The ground dropped out from under them, and they sunk into the blackness of the mountain. That just left Piandao and Sati to get into the airship.

Piandao raised his hands, each with a blade, black or white, toward the approaching hordes. "Do you really want to stand between me and my way off of this mountain? Are you really that dense?"

The soldiers looked amongst themselves, to the weapons he'd sundered as easily as breathing, and then back to him. Then, they gave one more look, far more terrified, at the short, dark woman behind him. And with that, they obediently parted a path which both middle aged warriors obligingly took and bounded over the rail and into the hold of the dirigible. It was terribly cramped, with so many inside, but time was against them, and they needed to move.

"How does this thing work?" Teo asked. Sokka, who had handed over the girl to a gratefully weeping mother and father, moved the boy aside and started manipulating things, until the engines flared and the whole craft gave a shake, before rising from the plating. As they moved, Zha Yu seemed to remember something, and broke off from his embracing his daughter to idly toss something over the edge of the ship.

"I'm guessing that was..." Sokka began, and was cut off by a detonation amidst the snow, which set off a minor avalanche. He nodded. "Good contingency."

Piandao, though, noticed in the momentary lull that the Avatar was staring past the encampment, to the ruins of the North Air Temple. Piandao felt moved to lay a hand on the boy's shoulder. "I can only imagine what you're feeling right now," he said.

"It's so close," the Avatar said. "I remember it so clearly... At least it'll still be there, like it was, as long as it needs to."

"I don't doubt that there'll be a next time for you and that place," Piandao said. The Avatar nodded, a small smile on his face. While Piandao had missed 'his children's infancy, he had a bit of experience of they being the Avatar's age. He knew what lessons to impart.

More or less.

"So we're pretty much safe," the waterbender noted. "It's not like the Gurkhas can reach us up here."

Her brother, her countryman, the Avatar, and the Dragon of the East all slapped their foreheads in unison. Piandao settled for a facepalm.

"What?" she asked.

"You know nothing of the Gurkhas, and be grateful for that," Sativa said. "Otherwise, you'd be dead, and we wouldn't be having this unpleasant conversation."

"We have too much weight, I can't maintain altitude," Sokka noted.

"Well, that's alright. We're going down, aren't we?" the Avatar asked.

"Better we flew a hundred miles first," Sativa said. "The Gurkhas are below us, and they know what to attack. If you have a plan for escaping this device, enact it now."

Aang nodded, and began to blow on some apparently broken whistle. The waterbender seemed much confused by this, though.

"What's wrong? We're obviously too high for any attack from below to reach us."

And as she finished saying that, an attack from below reached them. It burst along the bottom of the hull, spraying sparks and popping the odd rivet from the plates. Piandao leaned over the edge to see its source. And true to form, the red and purple armor of the Gurkhas was just barely visible, clinging to the nearly vertical walls of the cliff. A few of them let go, sliding down like that cliff was some sort of festival slide, and began to level great volleys of flame toward the descending craft. The Avatar jumped to action, his airbending helping to batter away that flying fire, but there was a lot of it. It spoke to either the Fire Lord's caution or his fear of Zha Yu that he'd sent not only a battalion of soldiers to pacify him, but also a company of those unstoppable warriors from the Far West.

In a way, they fought like an art. They descended and attacked. They landed and attacked. They moved through almost impassable terrain as though it were a clear hallway, and attacked. They never relented, never ceased, and never wavered in their fiery bombardment. But for all their attack was withering and, were they not levied against the Avatar, unstoppable, it was not those Gurkhas which held Piandao's attention. It was a group of four of them, perched on a chip of stone barely big enough to hold them, rapidly assembling something. Piandao's eyes widened.

"Mortar!" he shouted.

"What?" Sati asked. She was answered when one of those Gurkhas activated that weapon, and sent a shell flying toward them. He had a fairly good notion of their target. Piandao was already moving as the flash of it leaving the broad barrel started. He tackled both Sokka and Teo away from the engine, flattening both against the floor. Less than a second later, there was a great crash, and a loud, ear-splitting bang, and he felt horrible pain in his legs. He didn't need to look back to know that there was burning shrapnel in them. He did look back to the engine, though. And it was now emitting black, stifling smoke in all directions where it ought be belching fire straight up into its balloon.

"The engine's busted, we're going down," Sokka declared at a glance. "Aang!"

The response was a bass growl. The two teenagers pushed Piandao aside, and when he rolled onto his side, he could see something white and fuzzy hovering beside the dirigible. "Everybody get on!" the Avatar ordered, and people began to en masse bail from the crashing airship. All but he and Sati.

"Go on, I can't walk," Piandao said.

"Nonsense. Stop whining and get up," she said, limping over to him. Of the lot of them, it seemed that much of the shrapnel had been absorbed by the two. Quite a bit of blood was coming from her blouse even as she determinedly dragged Piandao upright. "I am not going to leave you here. You are going to survive this. Is this clear?"

"Yes ma'am," Piandao had no choice but to say. And so it was that he was heaved into the equally crowded howdah of the bison, which descended down a different path, actively dodging around the assaults of the Gurkhas which did not relent in the slightest. At least with the bison, it could avoid the shelling. Piandao finally allowed himself to let the pain escaped as a groan as he actually looked at his lacerated legs. Zha Yu was himself comforting a crying little girl, who was understandably afraid. Finally, the bison began to descend through the clouds, and the attacks became wild and unaimed, for even the Gurkhas couldn't fire blind with any chance of accuracy.

"Miss Badesh, you're bleeding," Sokka pointed out. She looked down under her arm.

"So I am," she admitted, and licked her fingers before prying out the shard of metal from her ribs. It wasn't very long, but she tossed it aside quickly. It was still quite hot. "You sister is a healer, yes? Then she should deal with the injured when by the time we land. We will have need of great haste."

"Where are we going?" the Avatar shouted from the beast's brow. The girl actually saw to Piandao first, if only because to reach Sati, she would have had to crawl over him. The instant that glowing water touched his wounded legs, the pain ebbed sharply.

"Back to the Shack," Zha Yu shouted. He shook his head. "Pity I have to bury that place. But we've got to hit the wind."

"Do you think we'll make it?" Bato asked.

"Certainly," Zha Yu said. He shook his daughter lightly, to bring her attention back up to him. "Hey, Cho'e? Do you want to see a city some fool founded by dropping a hat?"

"O...okay," she said. She turned to her mother. "Are we okay now?" Whatever her mother said was lost on Piandao, since he couldn't speak Whalesh, but Bato nodded at it. She then turned back to her father. "Am I gonna see Unkie Taka and Auntie Riku again?"

"Who?"

"They were nice to me," the girl said. Behind them, the airship began its final descent into the unforgiving valley below.

"Firebenders," Sokka explained hastily. "They kept her safe when everything hit the wind."

Zha Yu nodded acknowledgement, then turned to his daughter. "I don't know, sunshine. Maybe. Maybe."

---

The stink was atrocious. It was atrocious now as it had been ten hours before, when they'd entered this pit. But the atrociousness of it all faded very quickly when the mound of leavings was practically exploded from below, and a grim looking airbender, firebender, and two Si Wongi emerged from the garbage heap.

"That was a terrible idea," Malu said. "Everything smells like... yuck!"

"It worked," Nila said, swiping aside a banana peel of all things. Where in Dakong would anybody get a banana, she wondered? She then cast that thought away. Sharif crawled up out of the burrow that they'd made like nothing was wrong, and began to walk toward a hillock.

"Can we use my plan next time?" Tzu Zi asked.

"If you make one, then yes," Nila admitted. She weathered the glare of the airbender with a shrug. "I did warn you that it was not going to be big on dignity. But we are clear of the Arban and all of the Khagan's soldiers. We might be taking the long way, but I don't doubt we can still make better time than their entire people."

"But poor Aki," Tzu Zi lamented. "I'm going to have to find some way to get her back. She's my friend."

"Oh, she's fine," Sharif said with an aside wave as he mounted that hill. Nila flicked a glance at him.

"Are you mad? Get down from there. They might look back and spot you against the horizon!" Nila shouted.

"But they're waiting for us," Sharif said, pointing to what lie on the other side. Nila's eyes went wide, and she was quickly sprinting up that hill herself, her bow in hand, only to find that Sharif was smiling, and that there were a flock of Ostrich Horses down in that valley. Nila shook her head for a moment.

"...what?"

Of course, at its closest edge was an ancient, mangy bird who stared up at them like it expected them to be impressed, which made Nila all the more confused. After a moment of that compounded bewilderment, the other two girls reached the pinnacle and shared her same view. Tzu Zi started grinning.

"Agni's flame, that's Aki!" she said, pointing enthusiastically to one of the smaller specimens. Sharif nodded with a pleased if distant look.

"Patriarch said they weren't happy. So he kicked down a fence and they made a run for it."

"The bird," Nila said.

"Patriarch is a bird," Sharif confirmed, as though that were her question.

"You're saying that a bird masterminded a prison break for its kind?" Malu asked. "It's just an animal."

"Patriarch's... different," Sharif said.

"How?"

"He's..." her brother trailed off. "How do I explain this?" he muttered in their native tongue, before shrugging, "Patriarch."

The bird in question gave a squawk, and the great mass of birds all turned and started to run toward the south and the east, with only two of them remaining, staring at the humans who considered themselves the fowls' owners. Nila gave a glance toward Sharif, who watched with blissful ignorance of the world, to Malu, who was confused and a little bit annoyed that nobody was explaining anything. Tzu Zi just looked pleased as anything to have her faithful mount back.

If Nila didn't know any better, she could have sworn that old stallion's expression was smug. But she discarded that thought as it occurred. Because it was absurd. "Come on," Nila said, waving aside. "There's a stream nearby where we can have a much needed bath, and then we can head into Si Wong. With these, we'll make far better time," the others just stared at the impossible scene for a moment longer. "If and when I find out what happened here, I swear I'll educate you all. Now can we please get moving? The stink is terrible and I desperately need to clean myself. As do the rest of you."

Malu rolled her eyes. "You got that right, sister."

"She's not your sister," Sharif said, confused, but Nila just walked toward the water in the distance. Not far now. Sharif was almost home.

Nila's duty was almost complete.

---

"What happens now?" Aang asked the collection of tired, bloodied, and battered friends and associates who'd gathered in the shack so briefly. Katara had already more-or-less healed the shredded legs of the swordsman. The Mountain King, though, was in a flurry of packing, while the Beifong Patriarch, who had taken no part in the fight, contented himself to sit in a corner, looking stunned.

"We leave," Zha Yu said. "I should have known I couldn't stay in this place forever," he paused for a moment. "Why is it that I can never seem to get a proper house set up?"

His wife gave a mild shrug, before ushering the little girl and the teenaged brother toward the door to the outside world. "Well, I believe this is where you and I part ways for now, Avatar," the Dragon of the East said, cutting in front of Aang and making him take a nervous step backward. She seemed to have that effect on most people. "Since you understand the situation, I cannot do any more. I would urge you to make more direct assault on the Fire Lord, but perhaps now is too soon a time."

"Where will you go?" Aang asked.

"When the time is right, you will need allies," she said. "And flay me with sand for saying, but the greatest source of them will be in Ba Sing Se."

"We've also made a few enemies there," Bato pointed out.

"And we have somebody who knows her way around," Toph's mother piped up. Lao looked a bit aghast at that.

"What? You can't be thinking about going with this madwoman?" Lao said, before flinching. "I mean... not mad, obviously. Just..."

"My love, you have your tasks in life. I have mine. I honestly didn't believe when we were wed that it'd last, but it has so far," she gave a sweet smile to the man. "Can't you trust me for one little errand?"

"But... what about..." Lao trailed off.

"Awesome," Toph said neutrally. "Goin' to Ba Sing Se."

"No, you're not," both of her parents managed to say in unison. Toph looked a bit surprised at that. It was her mother who continued. "Ba Sing Se can be a dangerous place, especially to somebody with your... attitude."

"What attitude?" Lao asked. He found himself shushed.

"So I'll head north with the Avatar," Toph said.

"Who said you were coming north?" Sokka asked. "I thought you were blind with your boots on."

"Yeah, but..." Toph began.

"Trust me," Sativa said to the girl. "You must not go to the north. That the Avatar heads that direction is a matter which I cannot stop. But the daughter of an old friend? I can put my foot down there."

"So I'm going to be stuck with my lame father, locked in a boring-ass room in a city founded by idiots?" Toph asked, crossing her arms angrily.

"Don't be so sad. We're probably going to be locked in a boring-ass room next door," the Mountain King pointed out.

"Damn it, I'm trying to get in on the adventure here!" Toph complained.

"Sometimes, the call to adventure comes a bit later than we'd like," Piandao said. "Have a bit of patience."

"Yeah," Aang said. "Whenever we're done learning waterbending in the north, I'd be honored to have you with us," he let out a chuckle. "Besides, I'm pretty sure I've got a friend who'd love to meet you down in the south."

Toph ground her teeth loudly enough for others to hear it, and finally threw her hands up in the air. "Fine. Fine! I'll wait in the city," she said. She then cast a warning finger at Aang. "But if you try to run off and leave me behind, I swear to the gods..."

"Going with the Avatar? I forbid it," Lao said. All three of the grown women cleared their throats at that, and he wilted slightly. "I mean... it's for her own good."

"How do I drink my tea, Dad?" Toph asked. When Lao didn't answer, she pointed at him. "See, if you don't know how I take my tea, how can you possibly say you know my best good?"

"She's got you there," Bato pointed out.

"She's my daughter. She will obey me."

"Obviously you don't have experience with daughters in reality," Sativa said with a chuckle. She turned to Toph. "Be patient, and you'll find your place. Despite what some fools would say to that," she said, leveling a look at her father. "I have no doubts you will be as invaluable to the Avatar as your mother has been to me."

"Touching," Beifong said with rolled eyes.

"We should leave quickly," Zha Yu said. "The Gurkhas won't take long to reach us here, and they won't be gentle when they do." With that, they all bombed out of the house, and Zha Yu turned back. With a sigh, he reached high, and tugged down as though tearing down a curtain. A slide of stone descended from the cliff face behind the shack, and smashed the shack flat. He shook his head for a moment, then pointed west. "Come on, Beifong. We've got a bit of a trip ahead of us, and we're going to need to move fast."

"But what about my wife?" Lao asked.

"Were you not listening, man?" Badesh asked. "She is coming with us to Ba Sing Se. You should pay better attention. It would befit your business to do so."

"But..."

"Come on, Dad," Toph said, starting to drag her father down the path. She half turned, though, toward Aang. "I'll be waiting for y'all to get back. And if you don't, I'm going to come looking for you. And you won't like that. I promise it."

"Should you be threatening the Avatar, Tuofu?" Lao asked.

"Don't call me that!"

With that, Aang turned to his traveling companions, who were stocking Appa for a long flight. "Come on," Sokka said. "Henhiavut is only a day or so north of here."

"We're so close," Katara said optimistically. But Aang had a weight in his stomach. He didn't look toward Bato, but he could feel the things the Tribesman said grinding at him.

"Actually," Aang said, taking the reins and turning the bison easterly, "there's one more place we have to go before we head north."

"What's that?" Katara asked.

"Well, we can't fly north without supplies, can we?" Aang said, his tone obvious to him that he was lying, and his nervous chuckle and head-scratching only made it worse. Sokka raised a brow, but didn't say anything, which made Aang quite grateful. "Come on, buddy. Yip-yip."

Appa started to paddle through the air, letting out a grumble into the sky which was returned by its feral brethren who drifted lazily near the mountain. Aang knew he should have told Katara and Sokka the moment that Bato told him. But he didn't have the heart, and he didn't have the courage. And the longer he delayed from telling them, the worse it would be... and he just couldn't bring himself to say the words.

He flew east in a cold sweat.

---

"They're gone, Minister Qin, and the shack is buried," the Azuli said, after a peremptory bow. Qin ignored the lack of decorum and walked slowly, and painfully down the cleft between the peaks. The Gurkhas might have been Azuli, and thus deserving of intense suspicion, but it was part of their esprit de-corps that they were loyal not to their land but to the chain of command. Since the chain ended with the Fire Lord, they could be trusted. Every step he took pulled at the wound in his guts, but he had to see this for himself.

"And it was found intact?" Qin asked.

"More or less, Minister," the Gurkha said, as they rounded a scree of stone, and showed the device in question. It looked a little crumpled, from its no-doubt ungentle landing. But most of it still held itself together. And when the balloon started to flare out, filled with hot air by the firebenders under it, it showed that it still had buoyancy. Qin sighed in utter relief. "Shall we ship this back to the Fire Nation?"

"Of course," Qin said. While he had indeed lost control of the Mountain King, this would expiate his failure handily. Or at least, so he hoped. "This defeat shall be the seed of a hundred victories."

The Storm Kings rose again, and this time, it was the Fire Nation who held their leash. How history had an odd way of inverting itself.

---

The boat steamed away as though afraid she might change her mind and try to reboard it. Not that she would, and not that she didn't find it funny that that stodgy old captain did. She didn't bother trying to be a decent passenger on that vessel. It took too much effort, and didn't have enough reward. Besides, people were terrified of Nyla. And rightfully so. Jun scratched behind the great beast's ears and took a moment to look around.

They were still on the Hekawa river, a few days past Bomei, and not even all the way into Chameleon Bay. But there was only so far that the old bugger would take her. She glanced to the north, and in the distance, over the horizon and far away, the purportedly impenetrable city of Ba Sing Se. She then turned south, where over the horizon and the Great Divide stood the rest of the continent. "I guess this is your choice, Nyla," she said, pulling out both samples and presenting both to the Shirshu. "Do we go north where all the people are, or do we strike south?"

The eyeless creature sniffed deeply at the glove and the shoe, then began to circle, sniffing about. It paused briefly, considering north, then turned and started sniffing south. It started to growl, lips skinning back from needle teeth. Jun smiled. "South it is," she said, patting the beast. "Who's a good girl?"

Nyla was. Jun pulled herself up on to the great monster's back, and gave a crack of her whip. With a heave, Nyla began to sprint south, toward the rocky expanse of the Divide, and then, to whichever of the girls would be her next paycheck.

All in all, this was a very profitable year for her. She wondered how she was going to fritter away all that money. It was a pleasant thing to hold in her mind, considering the doldrums of the Divide which waited for her.

---

If you hated the idea of Fire Nationals with mortars, you're going to despise the end of The Clash and the second season. Verisimilitude is important, and getting it right is a chief concern when building a world. If instead you simply accept it as part of a story, then it'll pass by with a nod and a smirk. This chapter, much like The Clash, took a long time to write, and bloated pretty badly for it. All told, I'm not happy with the pacing of this one, either. Still, this was a story which needed to be told for later ones to make sense. And it amused me to keep Toph out of the party for understandable but personally annoying reasons. And yes, Toph considers frostbite of the foot an 'annoying' reason to exclude her.

An interesting point about 'power levels' in 3F is that they aren't just raised, they're thrown completely amok. Zhao always has the impulse to go too far, to go wild, but he has a controlling factor, which makes him more dangerous. Ozai, on the other hand, has all the physical power he had, but much, much less political clout, so that to compete, he has to take an active hand. Those who have control, competence, and power do very well, because the entire system demands they must. Wait until you see my Long Feng, for example.

Teo was a rough case for me. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with him when I started writing this chapter. While I eventually figured him out (Film-noir Mad Scientist), it was too late to do significant revision, and would have only bloated the chapter more. That's one of the pitfalls of world-overhauls, gentle readers; sometimes, you can't see where the butterflies of chaos fly, and you have to come up with something straight out of your ass. And that doesn't work nearly as well as I'd like. Ah, well. And regarding Hakoda's fate? Well... you'll see some time soon in the new year.

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