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.

33. The Tales of Ba Sing Se

Long Feng's Tale:

His sleep was, as usual, fitful and restless. Not surprising considering the monumental strain which he found himself under, every single day. And no days more so than the few he'd had recently. He had been flying between the primary offices in the Upper Ring and the ones close to his home on a practically hourly basis, trying to prepare for whatever calamitous event would ride on the tails of the Avatar's covert entry into his city. He'd planned for a thousand outcomes. Had a thousand contingencies. He expected every plot and maneuver under the sun, and planned accordingly, to mitigate the damage that the uneducated boy could do in naïve ignorance. And the Avatar did the one thing which Long Feng had specifically not accounted for. He did absolutely nothing.

The rest of his party were busy as bumblebeevers, managing to slip his noose in three different ways, but the Avatar himself almost never even left the house. For a week and more, just silence and lethargy. That house had become a black-hole in his network, nobody in, nothing out. And with every day, he could feel the tick-tick-ticking of a mechanism outside his control, something slowly pulling into a deadly configuration. A bomb which would undo everything he had worked so hard to maintain. And still, from the Avatar, silence.

It was maddening.

Long Feng pulled off the thin sheet he slept under, rubbing at a headache which made demands of him that his body would not be long capable of permitting. Exhaustion upon awaking, and long hours of work, together conspired to make dead-men of even the healthiest. And Long Feng had partaken of both in reckless measure in the last few weeks. He glanced over his shoulder, but Dun's spot was, as to be expected, vacant. He glanced toward the window, and noted the angle of the daylight. It was entire too steep. Green eyes flashed wide, and he pulled himself to his feet, digging the pocket chronometer from the drawer at the far side of the room. He goggled at the time.

A hasty dressing later, and Long Feng was moving into the dining area of the small house he shared. "Why did you allow me to oversleep so long?" Long Feng asked. It was hard to cut off the demanding tone he would use with his inferiors, which was all of the Dai Li. Dun deserved better than that. Dun glanced toward him from the table.

"You looked like you needed the rest," he said simply. "And just so you know, you're not the only one panicking about your sleeping habits. Your coworker has already popped in," Dun waved toward where Joo Dee was sipping easily at tea. Her eyes spoke a mirth which Long Feng had to restrain himself mightily not to crush. After all, this was the one place in this city where the Grand Secretariat was allowed to be simply Long Feng. He would not destroy that, as surely as he would not destroy Ba Sing Se. Long Feng looked at her, and she stared back.

"So if you're done sleeping, we can head into work together," she said with a professional tone. She turned a smile toward Dun, but it was a hollow one. Joo Dee had never understood nor approved of Long Feng's personal life. And the first thing that Long Feng did upon ascending above her was making it very clear that she would never be able to disparage it again. "Thank you for the tea. It was quite bracing. But I must bring my coworker. The city can't run if nobody works the machinery, no?"

"I know what you mean, but would it kill you to put in a word to his supervisor? Nobody needs to be worked as hard as he is," Dun said, turning away and setting away the tea set. Long Feng waited until Joo Dee finished her cup, then walked out the door. A few seconds later, she was matching his stride.

"I told you not to come to my house anymore, Joo Dee. Do we need to revisit that conversation?" he asked.

"You were two hours late. Some feared that the anarchists had found out who you are," Joo Dee pointed out. "You wished me to report on the Tribesman and the Blind Girl?"

"Have you kept watch on the professor?" Long Feng asked. It was almost insulting how easily that they'd slipped past his means of blockading them. The earthbender girl simply demanded Professor Keung's time, and the man gave it, in his offices. That was the most aggravating part of the Avatar's cadre; they had an uncanny ability to cut through the red tape which was Ba Sing Se's vital bureaucracy as though with a sword. Sooner or later, they would cut something irreplaceable. It was becoming frightening how little he knew about the Avatar's cadre, and what contacts they might have in the City.

"Yes, and we have set him up on a 'research journey' to the Southern Reaches," Joo Dee answered. "I wonder why you keep them grasping at straws. Would not giving them what they want speed them away from the city faster?"

"If only," Long Feng said. He knew that as soon as the Avatar had everything that they were looking for from within the bureaucracy, then they would move against the font of it. After all, the Avatar needed an army, and at the moment, Long Feng was the army. As soon as that was discovered, or revealed, he would be a prime target. He was a skilled enough earthbender, true, but he held no illusions of how he would fare against the Avatar. "What more have you found out about the Avatar and his cadre?"

"Precious little, I fear," Joo Dee reported. "The blind girl is a thug, but an intelligent one, and with surprising connections. The waterbender is quiet, and beneath notice in this. The most worrying of that group are Prince Zuko, who is a protected enemy of the state, and the other Tribesman, who is a complete unknown entity. We know their names, but not much more than that."

Long Feng growled as he walked. If only he had the supreme power he needed. He could crush the Fire Nation Prince without incident or argument. Then again, if he had that kind of power, he could just outright remove the Avatar from his city. "News from Badesh?"

"Catatonic, still," Joo Dee reported. "There is word of the Dragon's Daughter in the city, however."

"Explain," Long Feng said.

"It is shaped like itself. Badesh had children," Joo Dee clarified. Long Feng took a moment to rub at his unshaven chin. Haste made a mockery of his usual prim appearance. That news could be of great value to him. If Badesh had a child, especially within the Walls, then he could use that child against her. Somehow. "I have had al'Jalani issue some sort of decree against young women living alone in the city. Lewd and licentious behavior, no?" she chuckled. "Doubtful al'Jalani even knows she is our mouthpiece, since it is quite in keeping with her other pressed policies."

"That will do little but turn her fellow Si Wongi against her and cause Unrest in the Lower Ring," Long Feng dismissed, but rethought the notion. "Of course, the Si Wongi are primarily contained in the Lower Rings, which will limit the girl's movement. Find her. Discover where she is hiding, and track her down. Bring her in at any cost when you do."

"Of course, Long Feng," Joo Dee said evenly.

"I want you to step up the watch of the Avatar's residence. I need to know what is happening inside those walls!" Long Feng demanded. The two walked in silence for a long moment. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes. General How has been been frequenting his housing in the Middle Ring. We believe that is how the Avatar entered without our permission," Joo Dee informed. So there was a plot afoot between the Avatar and the Five Generals? "It's likely not what you think. He never enters the Avatar's housing. Always the one adjacent to it. Stays briefly, no more than an hour, and then leaves."

"And you are telling me that we cannot enter that building, either?"

"Well, we had somebody get inside, but they were blinded by some sort of incendiary device and then hit with a stick until they were driven out into the street before they could discover anything of note. Whatever defenses How has put up are quite... unusual. And unexpected," Joo Dee said, her lips pulling into consternation. If Long Feng thought he had any kind of good luck, he might have considered that How was simply keeping a mistress there. Long Feng knew better.

He seethed. "They are mocking me. They are taking away a chunk of my city. They are playing me for a fool and I will not dance to that tune."

"Then we'd best prepare for a storm," Joo Dee said. "Whatever the Avatar is doing, he won't be keeping quiet much longer. Airbenders are hardly patient creatures. And especially not young ones," she gave him a glance. "I know that much from family."

Considering her grandfather had been a Nomad who survived the Purge, it held more weight than would most. But she was an expert on the Air Nomads the same way that Long Feng was an expert on firebending. And history had little bearing on this. It was the prize, to be guarded jealously and protected from such fools as the Avatar who might disrupt it. No, this would have to be solved the way that Kyoshi had mandated; with dirty hands and cold hearts.

A very long way away, two young men stared through a lens, through the ruler-straight streets. "So that's the man who usurped the Earth King?" Jet asked.

"The very same," Qujeck answered. "Now that you know the face of the enemy, we should leave before he knows yours."

Jet stared hatred at the man who had the audacity to think himself an agent for the Earth Kingdoms. He was as bad as the Fire Nation. While Jet's long fight against the West had been, momentarily, curtailed, he knew that this was wrong, and it needed to be stopped. Mai would agree with him. He knew that.

Or at least, he hoped she would.

---

Chapter 13

The Tales of Ba Sing Se

---

Katara's Tale:

She opened the earthbender's door, only to find the room empty. While Katara was surprised that so early in the morning she'd already be up – especially considering how much of a layabout she'd been on their trip from Ru Nan to Omashu, she had something of a justification as she shared a room with Zuko, and he was up with the sun. Just thinking about that firebender set her teeth to a grit. Rationally, she knew that she should have had no trouble with him. He was offering to help, despite the massive cost to himself, to somebody who should have been his enemy. But still, every time she thought about him, she couldn't help but label him as 'the enemy', the twisted royal obsessed with his sister's wellbeing. The man who got her exiled from her home. It was irrational, it was illogical, but it didn't matter. Katara still felt as she felt. It was just a miracle that Toph could put up with him as much as she did.

That raised the point of where Toph was going all the time. Yes, it was clearly the university, but according to the blind girl, the library staff was about the most unhelpful bunch of louts this side of Great Whales, and demanded she look up what she wanted herself. That she managed to find as much as she did, given her obvious handicap, was a miracle of good timing and kismet. She returned with less and less good news every day. And paradoxically, in a better and better mood.

She leaned in, looking down the hole which plunged out of sight in the inside corner of the room. She knew that the drop bypassed the sewers of the City, into a space of old ruins and glowing crystals, the outermost fringes of the city which the Monolith had founded thirty centuries ago. Unobserved and untraced, it was the perfect place for the traitorous prince to teach Aang how to firebend. That it was Zuko's idea didn't raise Katara's opinion of him.

She was about to close the door to that room when there was a grinding of stone against stone. Rising up from that hole came the two inhabitants of it, Zuko at a kneel, Aang bending them upward. When he brought their lift to a halt, it was with a huge grin and bright eyes. Katara gave Zuko a mildly venomous glance, then faced Aang more directly. "You look pleased this morning, Aang," Katara said.

"Yeah! Look what I can do!" Aang enthused, before pressing both hands together. Then, with a twist of his fingers and an almost comedic scowl of concentration, he pulled those hands apart, and three little balls of flame ignited between his palms. Then, the scowl became a broad, silly grin, and the fireballs began to spin at a truly remarkable speed, until they blended together in her vision like some sort of fiery ring.

"Wow, that's great, Aang," Katara said genuinely. Zuko, though stalked to the wall and leaned against it, staring ahead of him.

"It's a party trick. Even I was doing better by the time I was eight," Zuko said. Katara put fists to hips.

"He's trying as hard as he can, and learning as fast as you'll teach him. You have no right to belittle him like that!"

He didn't even turn to her. "You've got it backwards. I'm teaching as fast as he'll learn. At this rate, he'll still be trying to get his breathing right by the time you need to face my father."

"Oh, come on! I can hold my breath forever!"

"It's not about breathing in and out, it's about stoking the..." he paused. Like he was trying to scrounge up somebody else's words. "It's about giving fuel to the Pool of Chi, down in the stomach. It's like a furnace, and you have to give it air, otherwise your stomach-fire goes out and you're helpless."

Both stared at him, one with fire still spinning. "That... didn't make a whole lot of sense," Aang pointed out. "And I'd know."

He glanced away from them. In anger or embarrassment, she couldn't say. "It's just the kind of thing Uncle would say all the time. It doesn't matter. Now leave me alone. I'm starving and I can't teach more until you get your head out of the clouds. I'm getting dinner. We'll try again later."

Zuko walked over to the table and began to spoon himself cold jook. Well, if that's what he wanted, he could have it. She moved to the outside world, letting the sun strike her in the face as she opened the door. The weather was certainly becoming nice. Well, as nice as weather in the drought-stricken East could become. She reached for the newsreel where it would be waiting, but her hand closed on nothing. Huh. Maybe they were late in delivering it?

"Tribesman!" a call came, sharp and abrupt from the house next door. The Si Wongi girl was obviously demanding attention for some reason. Katara rolled her eyes and moved to the side of the houses.

"Yes?" Katara asked. The window to what looked like some sort of explosion waiting to happen was thrown open, and the dark young woman was vigorously rasping at a pipe where she stood at the aperture. She turned toward Katara, an expression of mild confusion on her face.

"The other Tribesman," the Si Wongi clarified. The window to Katara's room flew open, and her brother lazed forward, leaning on the window-sill, a smirk on his face.

"Yyyyes?" Sokka asked.

"I thought it prudent to inform you; I'm not wearing any underwear," she said, with a mischievous smirk on her face. Katara's eyebrows rose at that. Was she saying what Katara thought she was saying?

"Oh, that's just fine. I'm not wearing any pants!" Sokka said, standing tall and proud in his underwear. With a smug look, he turned and walked back into the room, proud as any peacock-frog. It was Nila's turn for eyes to be wide and baffled. Then, she slowly palmed her face with a tattooed hand.

"I'm not really sure what I should have expected," she noted to herself, with the Tribesman overhearing it. She then turned, noted Katara and sighed. "As long as you are dropping eaves, you'd might as well come in. Sharif is driving me to insanity."

"Dropping eaves?" Katara asked, but the Si Wongi had already walked away from her window, giving Katara no alternative but to walk into the house to intercept them. While the floor plan for the houses were similar, a roughly 'L' shaped main area, flanked by a bedroom on one side, and the bathroom and a second bedroom on the other, they could scarcely be more different. Namely, all of what should have been in a bedroom was piled into a corner, save the cot, which ran along the wall next to a door. The place also smelled slightly acrid, but with hints of sulfur and mint. The biggest change, though, was the rugs. While Toph demanded that the floor be as uninterrupted as possible, they had apparently gone the other way and made sure that the floor was about as well padded as most beds.

"You have not been into this house, yes?" Nila asked.

"Well, some of us wait to be invited before barging in," she said with a roll of her eyes toward the other building, where her brother had better be putting on pants. "What do you need?"

"A conversation with somebody who does not yammer on about spirit nonsense, lest I lose my very mind," Nila said frankly, before seating herself on the carpets seemingly at random. Katara tucked her legs under her and did the same. Say what you would, having so many rugs did make the place more comfy. "As I understand it, you are a bender of water," she trailed off. "...how's that treating you?"

"Good. Good..." Katara answered. Nila glanced away, and twisted at a button in her shirt. "So... Do you... talk to people very much?"

"No."

That was obvious. "So why talk to me?"

"Because Ashan talks about butchery, about manly things for a manly mind. While I hold no monopoly on its alternative, it grows tiresome," she then grew silent. Then sighed. "I miss Tzu Zi."

"Your friend? The firebender?" Katara asked. Nila nodded. "She must have been a dear friend."

"The first I have had," Nila answered. That actually explained quite a bit. "It is infuriating. I know rationally that she had to do what she did. That family is amongst the most of the important. But why do I wish to hate her, to lash out at her for this? She is my friend, and I wish her ill? What madness is this?"

"It's alright," Katara said. "Sometimes, the brain and the heart don't exactly agree with each other."

"The heart pumps blood. If it and the brain disagree, it is called a heart attack," Nila pointed out humorlessly.

"I think you know what I mean," Katara said. At least, she hoped Nila did, otherwise this conversation was going to be a lot longer and more difficult than it had to be. Nila's shrug and nod loosened a knot of worry in Katara. Explanation was something that Sokka might have delighted in, but Katara just liked... talking. "It's alright to feel these things; it doesn't make you a bad person. I mean, the fact that you worry about it means that you can't be all bad. We all feel betrayed by people we're close to, sometimes. But there comes a point where we just have to forgive what others do to us, or else, we'll spend the rest of our lives alone."

"Sometimes, I wonder if such would not be preferable. It seems every friend I make turns away from me. Tzu Zi, and Malu before her," she shook her head.

"Excuse me, what?" Katara asked. It couldn't be the same one...

"Malu, an airbender we met in our travels," Nila said with a note of bitterness, but causing a gasp of shock from Katara. "She released a demon into my home, and destroyed it. I had to shoot her in the heart, and I very much doubt I did any harm to her."

"You didn't," Katara said. Nila glanced her direction. "We found her, in the Great Divide. She was... trying to eat Aang."

"She has fallen to cannibalism?" Nila turned away, eyes pressed shut, and muttered something in another language. When Katara pressed with a 'what was that?', she faced the Tribesman more squarely, upon wiping away welling tears. They did not become more, though. "She oft complained of ravenous hunger in our time together. To see it has become so dire. I would not have wished it upon her. She by times infuriated me, mocked me constantly, always testing my wits. But when that thing erupted from her, and made a mockery of my home... it hurt. It hurts to remember her."

Katara reached to give the girl a pat on the shoulder, a comfort, but the girl shrugged her away. "I think I understand. You still wish she was here, don't you?"

"I do. It makes no sense, but I do," Nila said quietly. "Have you met any who inspired such... muddy sentiment?"

Before Katara could shut it out, Zuko came to mind. "No... yes," she said. Nila raised a brow. "The Prince..."

"Has he betrayed you?"

"Yes."

"And you desire to destroy him?"

"What? No!" she said. "I mean, I want him to stop being so arrogant, and I know that he's doing this for all the wrong reasons, but... It's like you said. I can't get my instincts to agree with my brain. I know that if it comes down to Aang or his sister, he's going to choose his sister."

"So he is a good brother," Nila summed up.

"What? That's not what I..."

"You complain about him, saying that he is this monster in man's flesh, but his sin is being true to his family? Were he a Si Wongi who offered any less, he would be stripped naked and whipped into the Grit Ocean for his unmanful behavior," Nila said. "Would you do any less with your brother?"

"Aang against Sokka?" Katara said. She really didn't know the answer to that.

"No, not for your Avatar. He is as much a sibling as your brother is. That can be seen at a glance. No, for another person. A person of importance to many others, besides yourself. Some... high-chief of your people, for example."

"My father is High Chief," Katara said. Nila blinked at her.

"So you are royalty?"

"No, not exactly," Katara shook her head. "This is getting too complicated."

"Nothing is less complicated than a love amidst a family, if you were to ask the opinion of one such as Ashan," she said, gesturing to one of the bedrooms. She then shrugged. "I heed Mother because she has done me services, both in shelter and in education, for many years. I cannot say that I love her. Not honestly..."

"But what about Sharif?" Katara asked. "You can't deny you love your brother."

"I did. I do. It's complicated," she sighed. "The brother whom I was most close to vanished with a stroke of a blade. Now, I know that he lives on, buried inside a wounded mind. It is... complicated."

Katara leaned back a bit. "You don't talk about this stuff very much, do you?"

"I have little opportunity," Nila admitted. "Most find me... offputting."

"You are fairly abrasive," Katara said, before her brain caught up with her mouth and told her to shut up before the catty-comment hit the air. But contrary to any reasonable reaction to it, the Si Wongi teenager just nodded, as though she was well aware of her problem. "But I mean, you've got friends. Look at Ashan! He obviously thinks a lot of you, otherwise he wouldn't be here."

"He had no option but to follow us. He said that his home, and thinking of it, is too painful since his mother's demise," Nila dismissed.

"But you're a long way from home now. Why wouldn't he just stop somewhere else?" Katara said. "Do you think that he might be... interested in you?"

"Don't be absurd. As well be attracted to a cactus, for it is both more personable and less spiky."

"I don't know. He does linger his looks in your direction every morning when he leaves," Katara said teasingly. Nila just stared at her flatly, and the teasing sort of died out. "Or not..."

"I need to collect a few things. I was going to ask the Tribesman for aid, but since you are here, I would ask it of you. You can ward my brother, can you not? He sometimes wanders, and without Ashan to keep him within doors, I fear he would vanish. As hard as he was to find in the East, he would be the very devil to find in Ba Sing Se," Nila said. It didn't seem much like a request.

Still, Katara put on a smile. If nothing else, this girl did seem like she needed a friend. "I'll do it. Don't worry about your brother. I've got plenty of experience reining in wayward siblings."

"Excellent," Nila got to her feet, and ducked into that room beside the bed. It was pitch black inside. When she came out, she paused, pointing behind her. "Do not enter that room. Much of everything within can and will kill you if mishandled. Clear?"

Katara nodded.

"I will be back soon enough," Nila said. She then pounded on the door opposite her, and shouted something through it. The only word which Katara could pick out from that brief and seemingly angry tirade was her own name. Nila then turned back to Katara. "He is being stubborn. If you give him an inch of patience, he will waste a mile."

And with that, she left. Katara watched after her, before having a worrying notion, and moving to the boy's door. What were the chances that he wasn't even in here? She didn't like her odds. So she carefully slid the door open. And to her frank surprise and amazement, the scarred, fifteen year old Si Wongi youth was sitting exactly where a reasonable person would expect him to. His back was to the window, sun lighting just barely off of his relatively long black hair. His eyes were very soft, it seemed, as they looked down to the saber-toothed moose-lion cub which had at some point wandered over. "So there it is. I wondered where it'd gotten to," Katara said, stooping to pick up the squirming ball of brown fuzz. Sharif continued to watch it, so she paused from leaving, now that her curiosity had been sated. "Is something wrong?"

"The child misses its mother," Sharif said distantly. Was he talking about the cub, or himself? She sat down across from him, and the cub let out peeping noises.

"That's natural, I guess," Katara said. "But maybe we can help it anyway."

"Some wounds can't heal. Not completely. But..." he gesticulated, trying to find the words and failing, before just shaking his head. Katara glanced to the scar which plunged down toward his eye. "Some hurts are too great."

"Some... but not always," she said. "Sharif... have you ever thought about what you'd do if you had your whole mind back?"

"I don't understand."

"I'm a waterbender. A healer," she clarified. "I could... try to repair some of the damage. Maybe it might make it easier to think."

"Some hurts are too great, too old," Sharif dismissed.

"Please. Let me try," she said. She pulled the water from her flask, and it glowed gently on her hands as she laid a palm to his brow. He pulled back a bit, but more out of seeming reluctance than fear. She felt the energy flowing in and around him, and felt for the wound. But there wasn't one. Or rather, the wound was too old. It was like there was nothing left to heal. "This doesn't make sense. I've helped reattach limbs. This should be the same thing!"

"I can't complete the puzzle. Somebody hid the parts," Sharif said.

She continued to search, to scour, to overturn every metaphorical rock. But it was like trying to pick up wet soap. Every attempt shot out of her fingers the instant she tried to apply purchase. And the more she tried, the more she thought he might have a point. She might have reattached limbs, but that was just restoring something to its rightful state. Everything which was damaged, destroyed, in Sharif was now long gone. There was a gap, a fluid filled bolus between his skull and where his brain now began, a wound so long healed that there was nothing more she could do for him.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I... I guess there really is nothing I can do."

Sharif gently leaned forward, and pressed one finger to her lips, staring with an odd intensity into her eyes. "Shhh. Quiet. I hear something."

"What? What do you..." a blink, and the room changed, "hear...?"

She blinked to herself, and glanced around. Where had Sharif gone? And why had the angle of the sun changed? She glanced back at the door, and saw that the cub was anxiously pawing at it, as if clamoring to be out. She got to her feet, opening the door, and moving beyond. The sun had shifted in the sky, that much was clear. How? What had just happened to her?

---

Azula's Tale:

"Leaves on the vine, falling so slow; like tiny, fragile shells, drifting in the foam," the old man sang quietly, kneeling before a single flag of stone, set into an otherwise uninhabited hill, just within sight of the Great Wall. And Azula felt no desire to mockery. Not now. Just looking at the earnest mourning, the freely shed and uninhibited tears on the old general's face, she could as well insult him now as she could burn off her own face.

She knew that pain. She had lived it.

"Why didn't you move him home?" Azula asked quietly, where she stood at the old man's shoulder.

He didn't answer her, just stared at the burning incense which sat in the soil beside the unmarked headstone. "Sweeeet soldier boy, comes marching home... bra-a-ave soldier boy; comes marching home..."

She didn't know what to say to that. So she just laid a hand onto his shoulder. And as she stared at the nephew she barely knew, at the point where he died, she thought about her own child. She had died much like this, far from home and the people who cared about her. Chiyo's father no doubt laughed about it when he heard. Fitting that the last thing he learned from Azula before she killed him was why exactly he had to die. The look of heartbreak, distraught and destroyed... it slaked a baleful thirst in her to crush that out of him. She inhaled sharply, and wiped at her eyes with her other hand. This was no time to be thinking about Chiyo, about her death. At least, she told herself that. The truth was, she was getting tired. Tired of focusing on her death so much. Tired of hating

Part of her just wanted it to stop.

And at that, she pulled her hand back, and growled silently, only inside her own mind. This is your doing, isn't it, she demanded in her thoughts. You're doing this to me. Making me doubt my purpose! Trying to make me weak! But of course, there was no answer to that. She hadn't seen the child in weeks and weeks. While a part of her wondered if the child had finally vanished completely, the cynicism of Azula knew better. She was just waiting for something, a feint to unleash her fiendish plot. "I'm going back," she said to the old man, as close to a normal, spiteless dialogue as she'd ever had with him. Iroh didn't respond, just kept staring down at the stone. She turned, and she left him, thinking of a different set of eyes, a different smile. A different life.

"You didn't need to come," Iroh said, just as she was moving out of earshot. She turned, but didn't answer him. Yes, she did, but she wouldn't say as much. Bitter as she was, she knew first hand that no parent who'd lost a child should be alone with that grief. It rotted at you. She kept her silence to the tram-station, which was located beside a granary full of wheats and barley. She had to ride in with a load of grain, but she didn't complain. She'd suffered worse. She once slept in a stall with an Ostrich Horse while seven months pregnant. She glanced down at her body, so young and nubile, and so powerful. It bore neither the scars of aging nor childbirth. And it was increasingly feeling more comfortable than the battered frame she had departed.

Soon, this body would simply be hers, not just the body of a girl she'd supplanted. The tram emptied her and its contents into the outermost fringes of Ba Sing Se's Lower Ring, necessitating a longer walk, amidst the teeming poor and destitute. She was as blind to them. She didn't care about them. They didn't matter. Perhaps the girl would have thought differently, but she was not here. They were just a river flowing past her. She cut through it, heading toward the hovel which she and her uncle had taken to living in, a row of flat-houses clustered around a common well.

Doubt was starting to eat at her. What if Iroh was right? What if so much had already changed that she couldn't keep it reined in anymore? What if everything that that stupid girl had done in her ignorance over the last few months had irrevocably altered the flow of events? But that kind of thinking was counterproductive. If things had changed, then she would change also. If events shifted, she would come up with a new plan, to counteract them. After all, the linchpin of her plan lay with the Dai Li and Long Feng. Surely, that could not have changed so much.

And then she heard That Girl.

The careful words in practiced Tianxia froze Azula in her step, as she entered a relatively open bit, a courtyard in the center of a district which was dominated by outsiders and refugees. She almost started moving again, the wrath starting to boil in her, when a knot of Tribesmen pushed into that same courtyard. They spread out quickly, but while the many Tribesmen had their blues and whites alike, there were three which stood out. Well, two, in this company. One of them was a broad-shouldered and beefily muscled Easterner. The other was made up as a Easterner as well, but wore reds and a pair of cracked and crumbling smoked spectacles. The last, the Tribesman, looked much like his ilk, but was picked out in that as the group looked upon Azula, his eyes remained locked on her, while the rest of the Tribesmen continued to try to move past.

There was a pristine moment of silent confusion. Then, a moment of calculation. A word from Azula would see the Tribesmen pouncing on the enemy with their number. But, identically, a word from that firebender, who sounded so much like That Girl, would see those same Tribesmen unite against her. The bruises on her face had faded to a pale yellow, and her knuckles still clacked slightly when she tried painting, lessons that she was neither invulnerable nor proof from defeat, especially against greater numbers. So she drew a card from the deck of subtlety. And she started walking.

Her eyes stayed locked on the trio, who had against all common sense entered the city amidst Tribesmen – Tribesmen! – and were now barring her way passively. She walked, past them. They didn't move to stop her, even though the recognition had to be complete and instant. She gave herself a wide berth, especially from that Tribesman. A touch from him and she'd be weeping for her mother. So she passed between the earthbender and the firebender. She could tell that they'd came to the same conclusions that she had. That they couldn't reveal her without revealing themselves. But what should have caused Azula dire concern, was that as Azula passed the firebender, that falsely pale girl began to smirk.

She frowned as she walked past, confused as to what that meant.

"She stole my purse! Thief!" the firebender turned, pointing at Azula and screaming.

"Get back here you little cutpurse!" the earthbender shouted, instantly moving at a sprint. And Azula wasn't about to be caught by him. She broke off at her utmost, which was probably even faster than he. But while she was restricted from using all talents to protect herself, as an Easterner in face and fashion, he was anything but. She felt rather than saw his stamp of a foot, heard rather than felt the stone leaping toward her. So she paused at just the right second, so that the spear which would have struck her in the back instead erupted blunt under her foot. She tipped her balance to be catapulted forward, somersaulting in the air to give a condescending smirk at the earthbender who had just given her means to escape her, before landing at a roll on a flat rooftop.

She was already running again, when she saw something rise up from the streets, skating on a plane of ice he created as needed. The Tribesman. His hands began to glow horribly as he moved closer. A touch and she was dead. So she instantly halted her advance, causing him to shoot past her, and have to spin back around, a task which required both time and space. Space he was denied by a building rising up just ahead of him. As his eyes were locked on her, he had the misfortune of missing the building, and then turning straight into it, smashing through a second story window. Azula glanced down into the street, and there was no shortage of confused eyes staring up, even as a woman's confused screaming erupted from that room which had seen the sudden ingress of a waterbender.

"Would you like a towel, madam?" the Tribesman's voice said clearly from within, followed by a loud slap. "I suppose I deserved that."

Azula bounded off the roof, landing on a street-tough to cushion her fall. She then pushed herself up, rubbing her chest from the cracking of on ribcage into another. It didn't hurt as much as that time she had to jump out of a fourth story window with a traitor tangled in her grasp and land on that traitor to survive. She had barely got her breathing, and her heart, stabilized when there was another rumble, and she had to duck and weave out of the way of another block of stone, flying out of a wall to try to brain her. She bounded and rolled, coming up just in time to see a knife flashing toward her face. With movements imbued into muscle memory, rather than combat training, she caught that wrist, and twisted. The firebender who'd tried to stab her was levered face-first into a wall, cracking those spectacles even further.

"Yoji!" the earthbender bellowed, and when he turned to see Azula levering her into that wall, his face instantly turned the bright red of utter rage. Azula didn't have time but to twist the knife out of the firebender's hand before she had to run, otherwise face the wrath of somebody who was probably physically stronger than her. She took off at a sprint once again, moving through the warren of alleys, trying to break pursuit, to get some distance. To start hunting, herself. But every time she was about to turn a corner, the earthbender spotted her, or the firebender did.

She finally spotted a door which stood open. She ducked into it without a second thought, and slammed the door shut behind her. There was an odd smell in the air, and when she turned, she could see why. The windows had all been shuttered,which only served to better hem the smell of burning opium. She'd wandered into a drug den. The various partakers were all laying about, their eyes glassy and hollow, breathing shallowly as their vice of choice poisoned them. She glanced about. Nobody was paying her any mind. She doubted they were even aware she was there.

She started to move through their prone and supine forms, but had only crossed half the open space by the time the wall burst open with a rumble of stone falling. She turned. The earthbender and the firebender were standing there. They took in the scene. Then, the firebender smirked. So did Azula.

Because they were unseen, the firebender lashed out with golden flame. Because she had nobody she cared about watching her, Azula answered with azure. It was like trying to dance drunk on a sinking ship, as barely cogent bodies interrupted every bit of footwork, but they moved closer, pounding and deflecting fire with fire, and Azula having to do likewise against stone blocks which the earthbender flicked toward her at every opportunity. Every assault she made was blunted against the outnumbering side. Every defense was hard pressed by the double threat of impact and combustion. But Azula had decades of experience on these two upstarts. Her feet slipped into the gaps between recumbent bodies as easily as walking across a clear dance-floor. Her fists lashed out with flames which bathed the hovel with ghostly blue light. Her opponent answered with flames which bathed the rooms in bloody sunset.

She was losing. While she had the stamina advantage on the girl, the young man could probably fight her into the ground. Literally. And she wasn't about to give over any advantage. Time, as well, was working against her. She could stand against two, but could she, when the rest of the Tribesmen found her, stand against twenty? With firebending, definitely. Without, definitely not. She could see how this fight was going to play out in her current state, and she didn't like it. She could tell, just from the way that the other firebender moved, she could as well. So Azula did something unexpected.

She didn't bother dodging when the earthbender sent a slab in her direction. Tensing her abdomen for the blow, she fought to keep air in her lungs as the momentum imparted sent her catapulting through the the poorly-constructed wall. She was hoping to fly out the window, but that windowframe followed her into the street. She, though, rolled sideways, and got her feet under her, before starting to run once again. The pain in her stomach was tremendous, but she'd suffered worse. She had to get to a point where she could start picking them off. That was her only real option.

She glanced two ways down a street, and realized that she wasn't exactly sure where she was. Somewhere in the southern districts of the Lower Rings, but beyond that, she'd found herself turned-around. She growled, and picked a direction essentially at random. Any direction was vastly superior to staying still. She started to run, trying to cut through the crowds, to break any possible line of sight. But the crowds, they became thick, hampering her every attempt at flight and egress. Obviously, she'd picked the wrong direction, because the sweep of the crowds was trying to carry her back towards where she was trying to escape. She had barely made it a hundred feet from where she'd started, all the back-steps counted in, by the time she felt rather than saw the earthbender approaching. His entrance was marked by a wall exploding into the streets, causing a lot of screaming and people clamoring away. His eyes didn't even sweep past before locking onto Azula, and then without a word, he charged. She could as easily dodge an avalanche.

The earthbender's tackle carried her over the cascading bodies of refugees and the poor, before smashing her into a decorative display holding cheap knock-offs of fancy shoes. The proprietor bounded up from his seat in horror, as they ruined his livelihood, then he paused, gave a shrug, and just moved his seat aside to watch the earthbender start to strangle a woman he didn't know on the floor of his store. Since Azula was still rattled from the take-down, she didn't have the reflexes to block his naked choke, nor was quite strong enough to pry his fingers back.

Why was it that so many people tried to kill her in the last few weeks? That thought seemed to drift through an increasingly underutilized mind before she realized she had her hand on something. Something sharp...ish. She pulled it up, flipped it in her grasp and drove it spike-first into his hands, which caused him to release reflexively, allowing her a much-needed breath. She then twirled the stiletto-heel in her grip again, and smashed it into the side of his head. Sadly, she hadn't nearly the leverage to drive the footwear through his temple, but it was enough to get him rolling to one side.

"Omo! I will kill you!" the firebender's shriek came, giving Azula only a fraction of a second to react before she, too, barreled into the Princess. It was a second well spent. She pulled the girl's own knife from where she'd stowed it in her belt, grasped the incoming fist, and spun the girl shoulder-first into the rail of the shoe-store before pinning it there via a knife driven between the bones of her arm. The firebender let out a hard-stifled growl of pain, but couldn't pull away. After all, if Azula hadn't penetrated an artery with her attack, the extraction of it might. Azula backed off, breathing deeply, trying to get that air back into her lungs.

"You should try bett–" Azula began.

Then, there was a hand on her shoulder. She twisted toward it, to throw it off, but the light of the water-glove shifted from moody white to sickly green and black, causing an overwhelming pain and agony to wrack through every fiber of Azula's being, like she was being torn apart, one cell after another, but all at once. Her scream wasn't even that, it was a howl of a beast in a trap they couldn't escape. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her every weary, battered muscle locking solid. She also was fairly sure she felt her bladder loosen, but she was beyond caring about such minor indignities at this point. Death would have been a sweet gift, at this point.

She dropped to the ground, curled up into a fetal huddle. Her skin felt like it had been stripped off, set on fire, dipped in acid, rubbed with salt, then set on fire again. She could no more control her helpless crying than she could her bladder; both allowed salty water where she would have rather'd not. "You've really got to work on your peripheral vision, girl. Falling for the same trick twice? That's just shameful," the Tribesman said sardonically.

"What happened?" Omo, the earthbender said, as he shook some sense into his head.

"I saved the day. Hooray," the Tribesman offered with a sarcastic flare and flat tone. The water on his hands turned white, and he eased the knife out of the arm of the firebender. Yoji, her name was. Azula could barely see them, just splashes of fuzzy color. She couldn't stop shaking. After a moment's ministration to the impaled firebender from the waterbender, she was tenderly clutching her arm, but didn't seem likely to bleed to death any time soon. The Tribesman addressed the crowd. "This girl tried to steal from and murder us. She's getting what she deserves."

No. No this would not end this way! Azula screamed at her body to obey her, but those screams were quiet. Even her mind seemed dulled against the impenetrable bulwark of overwhelming agony. She could barely think, hardly see, and couldn't move her body more than to flex and unflex her fingertips. Fitting she would die just as much of a failure as she had been before. She couldn't save anybody...

Even as the Tribesman reached down to grab her collar and drag her away, he hitched, rolling his shoulder forward with a shout of alarm and pain. And even Azula's diminished vision could see why. There were almost a half-dozen small quarrels jutting out of his shoulderblade.

They moved like a pack of wolfbats, sweeping forward with precision and unity much the same as the team they were assaulting. They lacked the bending of their opponents, but as Azula had had proven to her, bending did not always trump not-bending. There were many tricks which a person could pull to level that battlefield. Such as the somewhat-pretty Easterner – they called her Bug for some reason – lashing the recoiling waterbender's hands away from Azula, pulling him off his balance. Another, a smaller uglier Easterner girl – Smellerbee – darted through the developing melee, sliding to a stop next to Azula and grabbing Azula's shirt-collar with both hands, her own chipped dagger clutched 'twixt her teeth, and started to drag the stricken firebender away. The earthbender almost took an arrow to the knee, but a quickly raised barricade prevented that infirmity, but he still got a shuriken storm pinning one of his arms to the quickly crumbling frame of the shoe stall. With a heave, he tore the whole sleeve off to free himself.

The owner still watched with a somewhat interested expression on his face from nearby.

Azula was dragged away, and Yoji was having none of it. She lashed forward, trying to gut the barely conscious princess with the knife which had moments before been driven through her arm. She was deflected by a flick of hook-swords, before Jet took his place, striding over Azula's form as she was dragged back. Yoji darted back, then flicked down her other hand, dropping another knife from a holster on her arm into that other hand. She tried to move forward, but Jet... he almost danced. It was a glorious clatter of blade upon blade, one Azula was barely able to comprehend in her current state. She slashed and lunged. He bounded back, sweeping low so she had to retreat or be swept off her footing. Before she could recover, he hooked his two blades together, and twirled, sending the twinned weapons spinning all the farther. The sharpened pommel-end of the hook swords bit into her flesh as she tried to back off, causing red to start to drip out onto her shirt, barely noticeable but for the fact that Yoji tested it with a hand which came back crimson. And those fingers quickly started to darken, as concealing make-up was washed away in blood.

"We got 'er?" Jet said over his shoulder, pulling that second hook-sword back into his hands. He flashed a smirk to her. "We've got to stop meeting like this."

"We should go," Mai's voice was very focused, where she'd reached down under Azula's armpit and dragged her to a slump rather than a drag.

"We've got 'em on the ropes!" Jet contested. But that statement was quickly put to lie. While Jet's group had numbers on Azula's would-be-assassins, they didn't have numbers on a knot of irate and manipulated Tribesmen. "...or not!"

With that, Bug and the big-eared archer Longshot both hurled down flasks into the street. When they shattered, they released a heady billow of grey smoke, obscuring all sight in the equivalent of a pea-soup fog. Azula found herself shifted until she had one shoulder supported by Jet, the other by Mai. "We need to get out of here," Mai said with unusual emotion. Azual didn't remember her being so passionate. Then again, she hadn't really known Mai that well at all, she considered in her battered state of mental fogginess. Better than anybody in her life at that age, and yet not at all. Pathetic.

"You'll get no disagreement from me. Guys! Hit the alleys!" he shouted. That they stayed on the streets afterwords was probably a simple but effective feint. Not that Azula was in any state to appreciate or denigrate it. She just wanted to sleep until her body stopped hurting. "You were lucky we were nearby. That could have gotten ugly. Come on. We'll stash you at our place."

Azula didn't offer so much as a word in response. After all, she still hadn't entirely come to grips with the fact her old friend and band of merry brutes managed to keep saving her life.

Back behind them, as a smoke cleared leaving confused, angry Tribesmen and some people who'd tried to commit murder in broad daylight, an owner of a barely-successful shoe-stall let out a sigh. "Well, I guess show's over, Il," he said to himself. And then with a shudder. "Time to go home to th' wife."

He walked away, bringing only his somewhat comfy chair, as the framework of his shoe-stall finally gave up completely, and collapsed in on itself.

---

Sharif's Tale:

There was life and life here. It flew through two domains, making demands of both. Demands which one side seldom heard. But he heard. He could hear the songs from the Outer Sphere, the ideal spirits hard at work being, feeding off what gave them birth, becoming stronger so that they wouldn't be eaten by another ideal spirit, in a cycle of spiritual cannibalism which eventually resulted in something like Koh or Wan Shi Tong. Greed, given time and proper power, could become a spirit of an entire economy, driving a nation to the loftiest of heights, or else miring it in the most terrible corruption as it whispered greasy promises into heedless ears. It wasn't a historical knowledge which told the shaman this, as he walked through the worst parts of the Lower Rings. To him, it was instinctual. He knew it as he knew that human beings were born with a nose on their face.

He walked without direction, and he sang quietly, without tune, the same song he had been steadily singing since his injury. It was a song which never repeated itself, always inventing itself anew. If he had his mind whole, he would know what that song meant; if he had his mind whole, he would never have been capable of hearing it. He couldn't have said how he got to where he was standing. He knew how to get back; that path still lingered in his mind, and rested beside the path he had walked first out of his house in Sentinel Rock, all the way to Senlin, and back again. It was a strange sensation, knowing every place one had ever been. How to get there. What the landmarks were. But when he stopped, staring at the sign before him, he couldn't figure out what it meant. It was pink, glowing glass with a lantern behind it. The writing didn't make any sense to him, either. What sort of bath house didn't have a bath in it?

"Well, are you going to just stand there, or are you going to come in?" a woman he didn't know asked him. He glanced up and down the street. There were other pink lamps. Other signs he didn't understand. Had he a sense of smell, let alone a complete mind, he would know this place for what it was. As he lacked both, he shrugged and entered the building with blithe and simple innocence. The first thought which occurred to him within that place was 'they shouldn't stoke the stoves so highly, it is obviously disagreeing with the women'. Sights which should have beggared and fixated the mind of a young man of Sharif's age slid over him, as unable to affect him as the taste of food. There were men and women. The women wore less than the men did. Probably because it was so warm in here.

"Well, aren't you a rugged looking man?" another woman asked him. He didn't know her either.

"You are not familiar," Sharif said with a dismissive tone. He started to cock his head, ignoring the scanty attire of the women around him, even to the point where some of the women lounged and chatted in clothes which were as good as nudity.

"Would you like me to become familiar?" she asked with an unusual tone.

"You... aren't the one I'm here for. I hear something," Sharif dismissed again. The woman gave a shrug and a sigh, and moved off to talk with other women and a man. It didn't occur to Sharif that the only reason he was even permitted within was because his broad frame and scarred-brow gave him an illusion of at least five extra years. Much didn't occur to Sharif. He continued to follow his ear, listening to that song, as he sang quietly to himself.

"Well, hello there stranger," another woman he didn't know said.

"We understand you are interested in a different kind," yet another continued. That last one had the familiar inflections and complexion of home. He tilted his head down to her hands. No tattooes. He stared at them for a moment. Why would a Si Wongi be in Ba Sing Se?

"Usually people look a bit higher," the other one coached, tipping Sharif's chin up so that his gaze fell upon the Si Wongi's chest. He blinked without comprehension. Then, he turned up to her eyes.

"Do you miss your parents?" Sharif asked her. She leaned back, her smile starting to curdle.

"W...what do you mean, distant cousin?" the Si Wongi asked.

"You must be very far from home. They must be on your mind," Sharif stressed. She seemed to pale a bit, as though actually thinking of something she found unpleasant. Even painful. "I'm sure you are on their minds as well, distant cousin," he said. He tilted his head at her attire. "You must also be sweltering in this place to be so underdressed. Perhaps you should find a cooler work-place?"

The Si Wongi stared at him, but her eyes welled with tears for a moment, before she started sobbing with shame, and running toward the back of the building. The other stared at her, and back to Sharif, with utter bafflement, and no small amount of blame. "What did you say to her?" the woman demanded angrily.

"I... don't know," Sharif said. "I just..." he trailed off, as his nose, so long bereft of any mortal sensation, caught a whiff of something. "Your friend is in great need of a... a friend. She might need further clothing, as well. This place is too warm for her."

She looked at him, an expression of disbelief and outrage on her face, before scoffing and hurrying after her friend. Sharif blinked mutely after them for a moment, then moved toward a different archway, which moved parallel to the one the Si Wongi had fled down. A large man with a wooden hammer shifted to block that archway, and Sharif came to a stop. "Somebody expecting you, sand-devil?" he asked.

"Yes," Sharif said with confidence and some degree of truth. There was something waiting beyond. Something waiting for somebody like him. The large man tilted his thick, close-cropped head and scrutinized Sharif.

"Then you've already paid?"

"The cost was very great," Sharif admitted, not understanding what the man meant, "but much was required, after all."

"Very well. Don't interrupt the other patrons in their 'fun', or we'll have another talk, savvy?"

Sharif blinked. "Why would I interrupt fun?" he asked.

"Just making sure we have an understanding," he said, and cast a thumb over his shoulder. Sharif walked on by, breathing in deeply. Were his sense of smell intact, they would be assaulted by the stink of old sweat, and other less savory and hygienic bodily fluids. But when that hatchet smote his brain, it left a great void in his sensorum. Had he never been injured, he would have never had that void, nor the instinctive need to fill it with stimulus. He wouldn't have learned how to sniff out spirits where they didn't belong.

He opened a door. The room was dimly lit, the illuminating lantern kept quite hooded. He could hear a woman very close by. Then, he could feel a hand starting to rub up and down his chest. "Well, aren't you a sweet one. Come to sample some of our... fine wares?"

"Who are you?" Sharif asked.

"What's a name, sweetheart?" that woman continued, dragging fingers along his chest. She was fairly average of appearance, strictly speaking. Any but Sharif would have said, though, that she carried herself with the posture and mannerisms of raw lust given human form. He closed his eyes, then opened them again.

The room was filled with lust.

"You don't belong here," Sharif said.

"Oh, don't tell me you want to take me away from this place," the woman said. "It's sweet, but everybody's got their passion. Mine is... well... passion."

"Get out of her," Sharif ordered. The woman, green of eye and paler of flesh than he, stopped, staring at him with confusion.

"What?" she asked.

"You don't belong here. Get out."

"I don't know what you mean," she said. "Security! I have..."

Overwhelming Lust, breaker of chains, insatiable hunger, unslakeable thirst, Queen and Sycophant in Scarlet and Purple;

Gear of the Verdant

Who seeks the rut shall find it amongst beasts, an eternity in the mud.

Who seeks the flesh shall find it amongst the savage, cruel and brutal and bloody.

Who seeks the flame shall find it amongst the bonfire, overpowering and consuming.

Stand before me now, Spirit, and know your measure.

The prayer struck her like an earthbender's brick. She flew backward, away from him, and was pinned to the wall, as the venous spirit rose to the fore, throbbing just under her skin, illuminating it from within. Go away shaman, this one is mine!

"No, she does not belong to you. For what did she agree?" Sharif asked.

A Child! the spirit spat with rancor.

"And have you repayed her?" Sharif asked.

She is barren as the dust! I will take what I want!

Sharif shook his head. "You entered accord with a shaman, then betrayed her. That is not allowed."

Your rules are a thing of humans for humans! I am more!

Sharif shook his head slowly. "No. You broke the rules. That comes with a price."

I will not release her. She is mine! I will take what I want!

Sharif glanced toward the bed, which was damp with unpleasant substances he was unable to truly think about, and the geas upon her less shifted and more teleported the unfortunate Host so that she was lying on her back on a relatively clean part of that mattress. With a motion propelled by instinct, he reached down with both hands to her essentially naked body. One hand, he reached toward her face. A thumb was placed in the center of her brow, his longest finger settling onto the top of her crown through unwashed hair. The other hand moved much lower, saved only by the innocence and chastity of its intent from being molestation, his thumb splaying further up to settle just under her navel.

No! I don't want to go! This place is perfect for me!

"You broke your promise. You lied to this shaman. This is the price of lies," Sharif said calmly. And then, with a puff of breath, he blew down onto her chest, and there was a scream. It was great and terrible and rocked the foundations of the building, as Sharif opened the pathways through the woman's chakras, and the void of the Outer Sphere sucked the spirit out. Sharif moved quickly, plucking the fleeing spirit between two fingers. He stared at it as it struggled, but it could not escape him.

The door slammed open behind him, an the large man with the hammer was looking like he was about to splatter Sharif's head with it. But he hesitated. Mostly because the woman was now sitting up, looking slightly confused, but utterly unhurt, and to his eyes, Sharif was staring at his own fingers. "What's going on in here? You want this one gone, Bu?" he asked gruffly.

"It's... alright Jia," the woman, Bu, said. "It's actually alright. I'm free!"

"Whut?" Jia muttered, and leaned back, his mallet sliding down to the floor when Sharif found himself tackled by a cheerfully weeping woman. "Um... I'm going to talk to the madam."

"Oh, thank you, all the gods in the heavens bless you! The things that thing made me do!" she continued to weep and pull Sharif close. "I thought... I thought I'd never be free of it. Oh, gods, thank you..."

"How long have you been a shaman?" Sharif asked.

"All my life..." she answered, sitting back on the floor.

"You should have known better," Sharif said. He glanced toward his fingers again and made to release the spirit which he no longer really remembered why he was restraining. She gave a sharp, fearful intake of breath. "What?"

"You did all that to get it out and you're just going to let it loose again?" she asked.

"Oh... right, my mind... it wanders sometimes," Sharif said with a guilty laugh. "It is hard to think, sometimes. Things become... difficult," he forcefully snapped the fingers containing the offending spirit, discorporating it and scattering it into pieces. No longer was it the spirit which tried to overwhelm this poor woman. And likely, it never would be again. "It was most unfortunate that you were lied to. It did not tell you it was a spirit of lust, did it?"

"It told me... no, it didn't," Bu shook her head, shuddering. "Gods, I just want to be away from this place," he eyes shot wide. "No! My husband! He'll never take me back!"

"Does he know of your gift, and the dangers it carries?" Sharif asked, confused.

"Yes, but..."

"Will not telling the truth explain things?" Sharif asked.

"Would you tell anybody something like... this?" Bu asked, gesturing around her.

"I don't understand," he said. "Is this about the child?"

"The things I've done can't be forgiven. Not by anything," she said, sadly.

"Have you tried?" Sharif inquired. He then looked aside, seeing something wafting through the walls of the next room. "Ah. There's what I was looking for."

"What?" she asked, as he reached past her ear and pulled something out of the air. It was pale, almost white. He took her hand, and pressed it into her palm, then took that palm and pressed it, in turn, onto her lower belly. She glanced down with alarm, then up at him.

"When you reunite with your husband, he will give you a child," Sharif said, rising to his feet. He smiled, distantly. "There. The song sounds right again."

"I... that was a... how did you even see it?" she asked.

Sharif didn't know how to answer it. And he didn't. She just sat there, crying helplessly and joyfully, as he walked away, heading back the paths he had walked, to where his sister would expect him. An idle thought, flitting only for an instant through his mind, was that he might have just gotten the Tribeswoman into trouble. It didn't last. Such thoughts never did.

After he left, Bu tore her 'room' apart, until she found what she was looking for. A cloak. She threw it over her shoulders, cinching it tight at the waist with a belt. It might not be much, but it was more than she'd worn in more than a month. The door swung open, and the shaman remaining was confronted by an ostentatiously dressed woman who ran these women's lives like slaves, and the burly guardian of their physical corpus. Bu stood tall, squaring her shoulders.

"I understand there's been a bit of a commotion in... why are you wearing that?" the madam asked with disapproval.

That look of disapproval vanished quickly as Bu, shaman and devoted wife, and soldier of Ba Sing Se's famed 466th Corps, broke that bitch's nose.

---

Toph and Zuko's Tale:

Toph entered Zuko's room as she entered every room, without any subtlety or care for what was happening within. Zuko glanced down over the length of his supine body, raising his unruly hair out of the way to make it clearer. "What do you want?"

"You're coming with me," she said with a very brook-no-nonsense tone. Zuko scowled, and levered himself to a sit.

"And why exactly am I doing that?" Zuko asked levelly. It took a lot of effort out of him to do that.

"'Cause you're stewing away in here, and if you stay inside these walls much longer, it's likely to drive you crazy," Toph answered. And then, the smirk on her face started to grow into a grin. "'Sides, today I feel like celebrating!"

"...with me?"

"Well, Brain's off hunting Boomstick's brother with Sugarqueen and Twinkletoes is... probably out building a zoo or something. That leaves you. On your feet, Sparky!" she said, giving the ground a stout kick, which served to launch the melancholy firebender to a stand. He scowled and growled at her, but she took it remarkably in stride. This was going to be harder to be a wrathful outsider than he thought if she wasn't going to let him be miserably alone. "Come on. I'm buyin' dinner."

Zuko glanced back to his bed, and came to the understandable conclusion that he wasn't likely going to be getting any more sleep until the sun went down. He let out a sigh, and started trudging after the earthbender. His mind had been on his sister of late, and that inevitably spiraled him into a bleak mood. So he walked after her, right out of the doors of this tiny shack in the overwhelming vastness of the man-made ocean which was Ba Sing Se. As he walked, he kept his head down, his eyes on the ground. He had a fair degree of certainty that people wouldn't instantly connect golden eyes to Fire Nation nobility, but he wouldn't put it past some wrathful war-orphan to assume he was some sort of spy and call the guards on him.

"Boy, you're being chatty today," Toph said with an elbow in the ribs. Zuko shook his head.

"Wasn't aware you wanted me to speak," he said.

"Come on! Ask me what I'm so damned happy about!" she pressed.

Zuko shrugged. "I don't know. You figured out how to bend metal?" he asked vaguely.

"Good one," she said. "Nah, take a look at this!" she then thrust a piece of paper at Zuko.

"Big-Tim Jung's fried and curried noodles?" Zuko asked.

"Damn it, wrong one," Toph dug through her pockets again. "Paper all sounds about the same to me. This must be it," she held out a new piece of paper toward Zuko. This one caused his eyebrows to rise a bit.

"...doctorate?" he asked. Toph grinned. "Your real name is Tuofu?"

"Damn it!" Toph snatched the scrip back and tried very hard to stare balefully at it. Oh, the trials of blindness. "I told him that it was Toph! I always go by Toph!"

"This requires a moment's explanation," Zuko said flatly. "Why does that say that you're a doctor of history?"

"'Cause I am!" Toph pumped a fist into the air. "I met up with my old tutor from Gaoling at the university, and we got to talking. He thought I should present what I found outside Omashu. We spent a couple days working out a thesis defense, and just like that, I'm the youngest damned doctor the East has ever seen! Doctor at thirteen! Eat that, space-coyote!"

Zuko frowned. "Space-coyote?" he asked.

"Some of the Eastern gods get kinda weird," Toph dismissed. She then started grinning again. "So that's my big news of the day. Unless you've got Twinkletoes able to go 'glowing badass' at will, then I think of the two of us, I'm by far the happier. And that means, celebration! If I could legally drink, I would!"

"Nobody's going to be selling you alcohol for a while," Zuko noted.

"You callin' me short?" Toph demanded.

"A little bit, yeah," Zuko agreed. And then, he waited for the physical counterattack. Strangely, it didn't come.

"Eh, you got me there," she said. The grin didn't diminish much, though. "Still, doctor! Dad's gonna lose his mind when he hears about this! Mom'll be beside herself!"

"I didn't know you thought about your parents that much," Zuko said.

"Everybody does," Toph dismissed. "I mean, for the longest time, I thought they were just a couple of lame rich guys who wouldn't know real fun or responsibility if it walked up and punched 'em. Then I find my mom used to be a heroic badass. Dad's still a drip, but half ain't bad."

"My father's a monster who sent thousands to a pointless death, and my mother loved my sister more than me," Zuko answered that charge.

"If you don't stop being mopey, I'm gonna beat you until your morale improves. Is that clear?" Toph warned. Zuko frowned. How was that supposed to work? He shrugged. "Alright. Noodles. You guys eat curry in the West?"

"We eat things which make curry feel like milk," Zuko said with a rare smirk.

"Is that a challenge, Sparky?"

"I believe it is, Bandit."

"Bandit?"

"It... 'the legend of the Blind Bandit'?" Zuko asked. She looked baffled. "It's a bedtime story where I'm from."

"Oh, hell I like that one," she chuckled. "Bandit. Sweeeet."

---

Nila and Ashan's Tale:

"...and if you try to coat it in talcum and sell it as 'white' then I swear to which ever god you choose that I will, upon putting out the fire you caused, visit a terrible retribution for your laxity. Is that clear?" Nila's voice came ahead of him, as clear and recognizable as anybody's. While Ashan hadn't the first idea what she was talking about – though he well wagered that it had something to do with either General How or that room she'd strictly forbade all from entering – he knew that she was obviously in a tense mood. Ordinarily, to anybody else who knew her, they would take her aside and try to calm her down. Ashan, though, enjoyed when she was angry. In her anger, she was prone to honesty.

"As the blood flows through my veins, who would think that I would find you here?" Ashan asked with a tone of sarcasm, as he moved through the door and into the pharmacy. Strange that she would have to locate substances for weapons in a place intended to heal. It spoke either to her strange methods, or the city's strange priorities. Nila turned back to him, her eyes at a heady glare, before she let out a puff of angry air.

"Has my order been perfectly clear to you, or need I repeat it?" Nila demanded. The clerk nodded vigorously, although, she likely would have done the same regardless simply to have somebody like Nila out of the door. "Good. What are you doing here, Ashan?"

"My respectable employer has decided that since the bison half was finished in record time, that I would have the rest of the day and evening off. I thought it fitting that I should do it in the company of a fine and fair maiden," he said, motioning out the door. Nila stared at him suspiciously, but began to walk out into the streets.

"And where exactly did you intend to find her?" Nila asked dryly.

"You sell yourself too poorly, Nila. Come. I wish to treat you to a culinary delight," he said pleasantly.

She scowled at him. "Why?"

"Because," he began, then trailed off. He nodded to one side, and ducked out of the foot-traffic which filled the middle ring street, into the relative darkness of the alleyway. When he continued, he continued in the language of the land. "Because I feel a cause for celebration, Nila. Recall how you once said that a sandbender is an earthbender with a restricted view?"

"I do not believe I used such pleasant terms," Nila pointed out. "What of it?"

Ashan took a calming breath, then with great precision and power, stomped a foot forward. When it did, he felt that infinitesimal twist in his soul, the almost imperceptible sensation of bending in action. There was likely no sand within miles, and all of that mandated for the creation of glass. But instead, when he exerted his will, his focus, into the ground, it was the stone which answered him, popping up a block of stone roughly a foot from the pavers around it. Ashan beamed proudly. Nila just looked at it, no real impression on her face, and shrugged.

"That's all?" she asked.

"That's all, she asks?" Ashan said, shaking his head. "Nila, I had spent my entire life believing that I would only bend the sands to my will. This is an advancement I could never have foreseen, almost as though bending metal itself! Could you not be more happy for me?"

"You are only doing what I said you could have done all along," she said with a shrug.

"You are impossible to impress," Ashan pointed out.

"Not impossible. Just appropriately difficult," Nila answered, a smirk on her face. She rolled her eyes. "Very well. If it will soothe your prickled pride, I will join you in your wonton celebration. You would take us where? An opera? I have seen enough of those to last a lifetime."

Ashan was not disuaded, though. "Oh, I believe that I have come up with something more suiting your tastes. Please, join me."

"Suiting my tastes? What is it?" she asked.

"Ah, please. I could not spoil the surprise," she glared at him when he didn't answer. And she didn't ask again, as was her particular custom. He offered a hand toward her, and she rolled her eyes, giving his shoulder a shove. "Please, a hand if nothing else. There will be a blindfolding later."

"Blindfolding? Ashan, were you any but you, I would accuse you of banditry and break your legs," Nila pointed out, not amused.

"I beg only that you indulge this, for it will be to your great benefit," Ashan said. She scoffed, but took his hand and began to be led through the streets of Ba Sing Se. Notably, they were heading east, toward the fringes of the Richu District. It had taken a bit of asking amongst the customers of the butchery to locate this place, but as soon as he had heard of it, even third hand, Ashan knew that he would have to bring Nila there, for she would never forgive him had he not. He also had a grin on his face, as he moved through the crowds, just because he was feeling good about his life. He had employment, he had broken bread with the Avatar – itself an event he could never have guessed would be in his future – and now had the hand of a lovely lady in his, on the way to something he did not doubt would delight her. The weight of Latifah, her death, and her life before it, it was a lesser thing today, something not gone, but shifted aside.

Ashan was not built for melancholy. He was built to live well, to be virtuous as the Host would ask, and be kind. He chose to be apt and perceptive as well. For example, he knew that the Avatar, for all his bluster, felt himself trapped in something of a rut. Worse, that he was keeping secrets from his friends. Ashan did not pry, for that was not his way, and he didn't sense that the secrets would be dangerous, but there was a tension there that the airbender didn't seem capable of dispelling. The house felt of it. The Tribesman still looked to the south sometimes with longing, but whether that was for their exiled home or for somebody left behind in that exile, Ashan could not say. The waterbender was an open book, all pages clear to see, and all of those pages spoke wrath towards the firebender. It amazed Ashan that they would not keep that a secret from him. There was little animosity between the Fire Nation and Si Wong – for the two had never been in direct conflict – but they had to believe that he would feel a tug of loyalty to the Earth King. He did not, of course, but that was not something they could have known.

There were secrets, and truths, out in the open where all could see, and much of it made Ashan uncomfortable. But none as uncomfortable as the furtive glances he would get when the subject of the Fire Nation was broached with any but the Avatar's company. The way that people glanced about them when the very words were used. They were being watched. The people knew it, and spoke more softly, and always to get the topic away to somewhere safer as fast as possible. Ashan never inquired as to why. He didn't have to. Somebody was controlling the discourse of the people. He was also fairly sure who.

"This is becoming absurd, Ashan. Tell me where we are going," Nila demanded.

"I would not spoil this surprise," Ashan countered.

"I dislike surprises. They tend to be explosive," Nila said flatly.

"I am certain you will enjoy this one," Ashan pressed. When she stared disbelief at him, he rolled his eyes. "I know, because I am fairly certain that any other young woman would slap me and say unkind things about my lineage were I to bring them there."

"...a brothel?" Nila asked.

"What? No!" Ashan shook his head. He rolled his eyes. For all his ability to suss things out, he swore to the Host that he would never understand the mind of women. Or perhaps, it was more a specific problem, in that Nila alone thought along paths no one could predict. He brought her to a stop and twisted a veil into a blindfold, holding it toward her face. "Please, indulge me with just a sliver of trust. Have I not earned so little?"

She stared at him, one eyebrow raised. "If you do anything disgusting, or reveal that same, I will shoot you," she promised.

Ashan frowned. "I thought your new gun was not complete."

"It is complete enough to shoot you," she clarified. "Very well."

Ashan quickly tied the veil over her eyes, and took her hand in his again. Her hands were much unlike those of women he grew up with. Grandfather had probably had him betrothed behind his back, but Ashan had not been idle in his adolescence. While the girls from Sentinel Rock were, as Nila would have said, vapid and hateful shrews, some of them did have positive qualities, and Ashan had explored them. That brought a sting to him. All of those young women, to the very last, was now dead in the ruin of a lost city. All but Nila, who's hands were scarred and burned and callused, unlike the silky palms of 'normal' women. That was telling. Soft things did not last. But hard, but strong? They endured. The procession of grinning Si Wongi man and scowling Si Wongi woman set a few heads a-pivot, but as Ashan saw it, let them. When he reached his destination, it was just a matter of giving a nod toward the doorman, who had been warned ahead of this endeavor, and they were inside.

"We are off the street," Nila said. "Where are we?"

Ashan answered that question in the most dramatic way possible, with a flick of a blindfold.

Revealing guns. Hundreds of them.

Her eyes were instantly as wide as plates, and her face twitched toward a more rapturous expression than Ashan had ever seen upon her. It was like watching the sun rise. "You..." she stammered. "This is... It can only be Hua Jin Bai!"

Ashan, about to reveal that point, stuttered a bit. "You know of master Bai?"

"He is the foremost collector of firearms in the world. Of course I know of him," she batted his arm, before breaking into a grin and moving forward from the entryway, instantly pressing her face against a glass case holding an ornate device which Ashan could only assume was tasked for ballistic murder. The doorman, observing this, took a few steps inside.

"You are aware, young sir, that Master Bai will be most displeased if your mistress damages anything," he warned.

"Have faith. She could better build a gun than destroy it," Ashan placated. The doorman gave a shrug, then returned to his post. Ashan felt a grin on his own face, upon noting the similar expression on Nila. So rare and precious a thing stood to be enjoyed to its fullest. "Was I correct in believing this would pique your interest?"

"I could kiss you, for this gift," she said, her eyes locked on another piece in a different rack, before darting over to it. She plucked it down, hefting it to her shoulder and sighting down its barrel. "Such a clever sight. I shall have to copy it."

"I thought it would impress," Ashan said with a smile.

"You are not the fool some assume you to be," she answered him. Well, for her, that was praise. He would take it. She set the weapon back in its place, and scanned the rooms, built into the back of Bai's manor, where he kept his weapons. "Come, I wish to show you something."

"I thought I would be the one playing guide in this," Ashan said lightly.

"You forget my areas of expertise," she said with a roll of the eyes. She then went to a relatively plain looking weapon and plucked it down, before clearing a bit of space on a workbench that sat in a dark corner. Then, without any asking of permission, she proceeded to disassemble it. Ashan's eyes went wide. "Do not be so alarmed. Come. See."

Ashan, still concerned, moved forward to observe, as she had separated the barrel from its wooden housing, and held it up so that he could stare down through it toward a lantern. "I am not sure what I am to see."

"Do you see the markings through the innards?" Nila asked. Now that she mentioned it, he did, almost like lines had been etched into the inside of the tube. "They are intended to stabilize the shot by imparting spin, allowing much greater range and accuracy. That was the great failure of my previous design. One I will correct with my next. This one also is sub-standard, but every failure is a brick toward overtopping the wall of success."

"You know these very well," Ashan said. "Not surprising, I must say."

"What was that?" she asked, as she stared down the tube herself.

"Oh, nothing," Ashan said, dropping the subject. After all, he couldn't say how traumatic it had been for the young Nila – barely even called that, at that point – to watch a man die before her. The only answer more unpleasant than 'very' would be his next option of 'not at all'. He just watched her for a moment, smiling to himself. She seemed... joyous. Surrounded by the objects of her passion, unfettered in her examination of them.

She reassembled the gun, if a bit more slowly than she'd taken it apart, muttering something about 'death-trap firing mechanisms' and the like, before her path took her toward a courtyard, itself also roofed over partially and playing host to other racks of weapons, though not all of these, guns. "Whatever impulse brought you to take me here, it was a good one, Ashan," she said.

"I am pleased to be so well thought of," he said with a bit of a bow. She then glanced toward him.

"Are you... no, it cannot be. She is wrong and absurd besides."

Ashan cocked his head to a side. "Who is, Nila?"

"The Tribeswoman. She believes that you harbor some sort of attraction toward me. I told her that she was being ridiculous," Nila waved a tattooed hand dismissively. Ashan shrugged, and Nila heard the silence for exactly what it was. She fell silent, and turned toward him over her shoulder. "It is ridiculous, is it not?"

"Well..." Ashan said with a shrug.

"You are a madman," Nila said with finality. "There can be no other explanation. What madness is within you that you pursue a woman who almost strangled you to death!"

"To my defense, I did deserve that," Ashan said with a shrug.

"That is no defense!" she blurted. "You cannot..."

"I can and I do," Ashan interrupted her, which stopped her dead. "Does this alarm you?"

"No. Confuse yes, but alarm no," she broke off. "What do you want?"

"The presence of beauty and intelligence, kindness and wit?" he answered with a fair degree of smarm, which earned him a glare.

"I can provide one of those four," she said flatly.

"I rather think you exemplify all," Ashan said.

"Then you are blind as well as insane," she assumed.

"Please, do not be so harsh toward yourself," Ashan said. "You..."

"This is idiotic," she said. Ashan leaned back at her vehemence. And then, raised a brow as she revealed she was not talking about him, but rather, something on a rack which she picked up and took into her hand. It looked like a firearm, but it was tiny, only a bit over a foot long, lacking anything to press into the shoulder. "What idiot creates a firearm of these dimensions? This is no weapon. This is a toy!"

"Should you be handling that so roughly?" Ashan asked. She brandished it up into the air idly.

"What idiot would put a gun into his collection loaded?" she asked, pulling the trigger to prove a point. The point, though, announced itself with a terrible 'boom', and an acrid cloud of grey smoke. The two of them looked at each other, then to the weapon, which still had a wisp of smoke drifting up out of its barrel in her hand. "...well..."

"I may be a ridiculous blind fool, but as I was never named deaf, I believe it would be prudent to flee," Ashan prompted.

"No, not until I tell whoever did this that they are being an idiot," Nila said.

"Nila, please, we are in dangerous ground. Let us simply leave!" he said.

"What danger? Since the Fire Nation was pushed off of the walls, we have been seldom safer," Nila answered. Ashan moved close to her, taking the handgun from her and setting it back into its rack.

"Nila, there is a danger in this city which does not speak its own name. It is insidious and omnipresent, and those two combined cause me to fear its power. It cannot be wise to rouse it against you!"

"Oh, that," she shrugged. "I am aware of it."

He stared at her. "You are aware?" he asked.

"Yes. I had words with a conspiracy theorist, and promised to keep an open eye. Thus far, I have seen little."

"Then you have not been looking in the proper directions. Nila, please, if you have trusted me in nothing else, trust me in this. Come, before calamity crashes down upon us!"

She sighed. "Very well. If it will please your superstitions and worries," she said. "But mark my words, I am coming back here and giving Bai a word on the practice of safe gun-keeping!"

"And I am sure that it will be a terrible and frightful one, that I only hope to be witness to. But it shall not be today. Come," Ashan guided her through a gate into a garden, and from that garden, into an alley. Nila looked a little annoyed that she had to abandon all those interesting guns, but otherwise, unbowed. "But I do fear that in our haste, we have turned ourselves about. Do you know where we are?"

"Was I to memorize a map of Ba Sing Se before this outing?" Nila asked flatly.

Ashan clapped himself on the forehead for his lack of foresight. Had he been truly thinking, he would have foreseen that they would in all likelihood have to leave the estate in a much greater hurry than they had entered it. So he flagged down a woman who was walking down the streets. She was well dressed, in her way, the sort of dress which faded into a crowd. Her hair-style was very precise, and suited the middle-aged woman quiet well. Her eyes were disquieting, though. Bright green, they stared as flat as a deadman's. "Can I help you, sir?" she asked, her tones very high and sing-songy. Ashan was no ear for accents, so he couldn't say that they sounded almost rigidly happy.

"Yes, I seem to have gotten us lost in my hurry. Could you tell me how to get back to the Inner Richu?" Ashan asked. No point in putting Nila on the spot. No good came of pointing out that somebody was wrong when that somebody made bombs as a hobby.

"I can see why you would be in a hurry," the woman said with that too-brightness in her voice, her grin not deviating one hair. As the words came, Ashan slowly became a bit more... nervous about her. "You must be eager to return your young lady before the curfew expires."

"Who said I was his young lady?" Nila asked darkly.

"Forgive me if I presume," the delicate-looking woman said with a cheery tone and an apologetic bow. "From the way you spoke, I had assumed that you were dating."

Ashan made a strangled noise in his throat, as he had been making terminating gestures behind Nila's back as he saw which way the woman's phrase was turning, and was unable to cease her in time. Nila did then turn to him.

"Well, if this is going to be any proper courtship, you had best feed me," she said with dry sarcasm, and a look in her eyes which promised dire repercussions.

"I should never have told you of my intentions, should I have?" Ashan bemoaned.

"Not if you expected to live with dignity," Nila answered.

"Splendid!" the guide declared. "I am Joo Dee, and I can be your guide and chaparone if you so desire."

"We do not..." Nila began.

"I know of many fine restaurants catering to many styles. Why, there is a fine establishment overlooking Lake Laogai which I believe would suit the two of you perfectly!" she expounded, and then began to politely usher the two Si Wongi ahead of her, to the east.

Nila stared murder. Ashan couldn't stop shaking his head. And still, Ashan was content with the result.

---

Toph and Zuko's Tale:

"Is everything completely to your liking?" the server asked, which startled Zuko out of a binge-eat. It was a bad habit he'd gotten into since leaving Uncle and Azula; he tended to go for a long time without eating, essentially forgetting how hungry he was. When his hunger moved to the fore, it demanded much to fill. He swallowed another spicy mouthful. The server was an attractive girl, probably around his age. Green eyed and somewhat darker complected. Buxom, also, and possessing the lazy smile of a cat.

"Not really. I thought you said this stuff was supposed to be spicy," Toph said from the other side of the table.

"Well, don't you know what they say? Spice stunts the growth," the server said playfully. "I'm sure your brother here wants you to grow up big and strong."

"She's not my sister," Zuko pointed out neutrally. The girl's eyes widened a bit.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to presume... daughter?" she asked.

Zuko leaned back, crossing his arms and staring under his eyebrows at her. "Exactly how old do I look?"

"Good point," the girl said. That smile came back. "Well, if you want it spicier, we have a sauce in back we can put on it. But it can get a little bit... intense."

"Bring it on!" Toph declared, pumping two fists into the air. The server could only chuckle and walk back toward the back. Zuko allowed himself to follow her egress with a glance, secure in that nobody present would judge. Jin, her name was, was the kind of woman whom you'd hate to see go, but love to watch leave. He turned to face the young doctor in front of him – and that was something he was going to have to ask the Tribesman about at some point, since it seemed unnatural and ill-advised – and cleared his throat.

"You were checking out the waitress, weren't you?" Toph asked, picking at her teeth with her fingernails. He scowled at her. "Duh, of course I noticed. I'm blind, not an idiot."

"What of it?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, her eyes rolling away, but there was just a hint of red in her cheeks. Almost like she'd almost managed to suppress a blush and didn't quite pull it off.

"I didn't know you liked spicy food," Zuko began. "I thought Easterners didn't eat hot."

"Yeah, well, I'm not exactly 'most Easterners', now am I?" she asked. Jin returned swiftly, and set down a bottle which was about the size of Zuko's thumb onto the table. Toph instantly took it, and when her hands closed on it, she scowled. "Wait, what the hell is this? Are you playing me?"

"Just a few drops," Jin warned. Zuko smirked, since he knew what was coming, and saw no need to prevent it. He tapped Jin's arm and mimed drinking, and the girl gave a nod, before heading back into the restaurant's kitchen. Toph, though, stared at the tiny bottle like it had done her personal insult.

"'Just a few drops'," Toph mocked, before dumping roughly half of it onto her noodles and pigken. "I swear, if people don't stop treating me like a little kid soon, I'm going to start doling out beatings, and I won't stop until the OH MY GODS WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE!"

Which is when Zuko finally erupted into laughter, such a basic and normal thing that he had been denied for so long that he actually tipped over and fell out of his chair, his sides aching and his face sore. He didn't stop laughing, watching how Toph's attempt to shovel more noodles into her mouth had turned into wide eyes, then outright panic in the blind girl as the pepper-grease burst into culinary fire. She was in no real danger, though a lot of discomfort; there were people who made weapons out of this condiment but that required some real talent. Zuko had just about gathered himself from his first real burst of laughter in months when Jin reappeared at his side, a pitcher of milk in hand.

"You should probably give that to her," Zuko said, still chuckling. Agni's blood, that was something he'd needed for a long time, to laugh like that. Jin handed the jug to Toph, who upended it and drank it about as fast as it would fall, white streams falling down her neck where her mouth couldn't open wide enough. Jin resisted giggling her own self as she moved back into the restaurant. Zuko sat back down in his chair, the most smug look on his face. Toph, who was now leaning forward on the table, oblivious to the looks she was getting from other patrons, and 'stared' daggers at Zuko.

"You knew that was going to happen, didn't you?"

"I cannot confirm nor deny," Zuko said. He then took that bottle, added the prescribed three drops, stirred it through his noodles, and continued to eat. It did give them a quite pleasant bite, and a burn which reminded him of Fire Nation cuisine. Not the same richness of flavor, but the heat was a pleasant memento.

"You're a sadist," Toph accused, pointing a finger at him.

"I've been called worse," Zuko answered.

"You think I'm real funny, don't you?" she demanded.

"You've got your moments," Zuko said.

She 'glared' at him for a moment longer, then shrugged. "Well, nobody can say that you're treating me like a glass doll. I appreciate that."

"Please," Zuko said around noodles. "I'm well aware that you're probably the toughest one in that house."

"Probably?"

"I survived fighting the Avatar. Have you?" Zuko asked.

"...touche," she said. "Blagh. My mouth feels like fire. Order me s'more milk."

Zuko shrugged and turned, flagging down Jin, calling for another pitcher of milk to help the throat-smote earthbender. And behind his back, with a twist of her hands, Toph turned the entire tabletop, reversing their plates, while holding the mostly empty jug in one hand. He turned back, and prodded into what he assumed were his noodles. "I have to say, I didn't expect to have a whole lot of friends here. I'm glad that at least that I had you at my back in that house. It was... uncomfortable."

"Eh, I know you're not all that bad. A bit of a tool, sometimes, and you've got a bad habit of pissing people off. Then again, lots of people do that. Hell, I do!" she said, flaring her hands. "Folks like us gotta stick together, since the world just isn't ready for us."

Zuko chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind," he then bit into the noodles, and his eyes tightened as his mouth felt like somebody had just firebent inside it. But unlike Toph, he'd had a lifetime's experience with spicy food tempering his reaction. She 'stared' with an expectant grin at him. "That was not funny," Zuko said, swallowing, which made him at least that much more successful than Toph had been. Toph laughed at him.

"That was a little bit funny," she said, and managed to extract one mouthful of proper noodles before Zuko swapped the bowls back to their proper place. Jin reappeared with a fresh jug, which she presented to Toph. Zuko took it, and drank heavily of it, quenching the fire in his maw.

The rest of the dinner, which began with a fresh bowl for Toph, went forth with little conversation, but a lot of Zuko shaking his head in bemusement and a lot of trailing chortles from the earthbender. She paid, as she claimed she would, and they took to the streets. The locale for the curry house was in the courtyards which surrounded both sides of the walls which separated the Lower from the Middle Rings, a rare spot of relative affluence in a deprived place, or else a blight and eyesore amidst a zone of affluence. It all depended on which perspective was being viewed. And all of it made Zuko sick.

"You don't like this, do you?" Toph asked.

"This isn't the way we did things," he said. "If you work harder then those around you, you go further. You get more. You rise higher. But here... it's messed up. There's nowhere to go but down, and everybody knows it. No wonder there's so much crime everywhere."

"Man, you've got some way of ruining a good walk, you know that?" Toph said, slugging him in the arm strongly enough to knock him off of his stride. Of course, what they were passing, as they ambled through the Lower Ring side of things, was not exactly pleasant viewing. There was a well dressed woman, standing at the top of a sort of dais, one which had a rickety look about it. She, and a great deal of the people gathered before her, were all as darkly complected as the Avatar's new neighbors, that Si Wongi couple and her brother. He guessed they all shared the same heritage. And probably the same language, since Zuko hadn't the first clue what was being said.

"Are you getting all this?" Zuko asked.

"Oh, her," Toph said, shrugging. "It's just more of Ambassador al'Jalani's race-baiting."

Zuko glanced at her. "What?"

"She's claiming that the Si Wongi are relegated to a ghetto," Toph said. She listened for a moment longer. "And there's a lot of morality twisting going on in there. The way she's going, makes me glad neither of us is a Tribesman. Some of that crap probably qualifies as hate-crimes. She's got a message, but it's not exactly clear. Altuundili's not exactly an easy language to translate by ear."

"You speak Altuundili?" Zuko asked.

"I speak a lot of languages. Comes with having the best education money could afford," Toph said with a bit of annoyance. Zuko had to see the logic in that. She continued to listen in, as Zuko shifted on his feet. Even without being able to speak the language, he could tell things were getting... dicey. "...uh-oh."

"Uh-oh?" Zuko asked.

"They're starting to gear down into blaming the Fire Nation for all of this," Toph said. "We should probably mosey while the moseying is good."

"That sounds like a good idea," Zuko said. He and Toph then proceeded around the back of the rickety platform she was standing on, intending to give both Khalisa al'Jalani and her followers a wide berth. But there was something which was simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing to both of those taking that ambling path. The good thing was that both had excellent hearing, so that when the whistle of an incoming projectile hit their ears, both instinctively dodged out of the way of it, leaning to different sides each. That definitely saved Zuko's life, and probably Toph's as well. But, there was a downside to their almost super-human dodge.

That downside came in the form of a stage crashing itself apart, a critical support crushed by the momentum of an unseen but not unnoticed bullet. Al'Jalani toppled off onto the pavers, and the entire thing slumped to one side, leaving nothing between an entire horde of keyed-up Si Wongi refugees, and two people standing close to where the platform had failed.

"They're going to assume we did that, aren't they?" Zuko said with a tone of disappointed annoyance.

"They've already made that assumption," Toph agreed. "Run?"

"RUN!" Zuko shouted, grabbing her hand and hauling her behind him as he took off at a sprint. While he didn't know the difference between earthbenders and sandbenders beyond that they considered themselves a different entity, he had to believe that Toph didn't stand and fight meant that she didn't have confidence that she could deal with two hundred at once. The pace might have quickened further, but Zuko had to restrain himself, as Toph couldn't keep the same pace he could. Not without 'cheating' and destroying the streets, anyway.

Zuko began to duck through alleys, moving away from the rough, beige claystone and into red, striated sandstones. That he knew the difference was only due to years traveling where people cared about such things. And that obviously was a cause for concern to the earthbender. "To your left!" Toph shouted. Zuko juked right, bowling over a garbage can, as the left-hand wall exploded down, a black-veiled Si Wongi shouting angrily at him. Toph pulled her hand free, then bent with great power, causing that wall to reestablish itself, hurling the Si Wongi back into the room he'd burst through. "Come on! Keep running! We've gotta get out of the ghetto!"

They moved almost without speech, both understanding the consequences of failure. Mostly to him, he'd considered. She could get out of there with nothing more than some money changing hands. Zuko, though, would be dead as a doornail. The warrens continued, and they pressed through, only one more close-call being interrupted by Zuko thinking fast and upending a garbage pale over the Si Wongi's upper body and kicking his legs out from under him, before taking off at a run again.

They probably operated in silence and sprinting speeds for almost fifteen minutes before the sandstone gave way to granite, and even then, another five before they stopped running, plunking themselves down, side by side, on a bench which overlooked a poorly maintained public park. The grass was mostly weeds. The pond was just wet scum. But the presence of a walled place to sit was almost a blessing from Agni Himself.

"Well. That was interesting," Toph said, sweating but not breathing too deeply.

"We – or rather I – was almost killed back there," Zuko pointed out with annoyance.

"Yeah, well, it's still a lot more interesting than I thought my first date was going to be," Toph said with a smug. Zuko shook his head, glancing away.

Then what she said settled into his brain.

"Your first what?" he asked. And her only answer, at that point, was slowly reddening right back to her ears.

---

Nila and Ashan's Tale:

The sun had cast the sky into oranges and reds by the time the three of them got off the stone-tram, which seemed specifically built to bring people out to the lake. This one landed very close to the restaurant that the pushy woman had specified, but there were other buildings here, as a small community within the Eastern Reaches grew up around the de-facto reservoir of Ba Sing Se. "Ashan, could you tell me why we are still under the thumb of a pushy civil servant?" Nila asked in Altuundili.

Ashan, who had been watching Joo Dee surreptitiously since their introduction, gave a shrug. "I honestly could not. But you demanded food, and this place seems quite a pleasant place for a..."

Nila turned her attention to the guide, who had been grinning her way forward through the beaten paths. "You. Mandarin. You had earlier spoken of a curfew. I had heard nothing of its sort."

"The Earth King magnanimously agreed that for the protection of the Si Wongi peoples living within the walls of the Greatest City on Earth, that they should observe a curfew between the hours marking dusk to dawn. There has been much turmoil and strife in the Lower Ring, and Ambassador al'Jalani can only do so much."

"She is a fool and a bigot," Nila muttered. To Joo Dee; "You are no longer needed. Go away."

"Please, I would be failing as a host if I did not see you safely to your destination," Joo Dee said entirely too happily. Nila and Ashan shared a glance, both for different reasons. Hers was an acknowledging of annoyance. His was a gauging of his companion's suspicion. Sadly, while Nila had a lightning wit for weaponry and explosives, when it came to people, she was repeatedly and utterly oblivious. The restaurant held a bustling clientele, mostly those who wore resplendent silks and linens, clothes edged with mink and ermine; the women in particular wore an odd sort of flaring dress which she had never seen the like of. She certainly hoped she would not have to pay the prices expected of such 'high-class' occupants.

"Welcome to the Lake House. Have you made a reservation, mister...?" the host said with a bow. Ashan glanced to her again, and Nila turned her annoyance upon Joo Dee.

"You brought us a half-hour out of our way to a place which demands a reservation?" she asked, her tones low and angry.

Joo Dee, though, didn't stop grinning. "Surely you can provide a space for a young couple. It is only appropriate."

The host first looked up to her, a calm dismissal clear in his posture even to Nila, but when he actually looked at her, he blanched, and... started sweating a bit? No, that must have been a figment of Nila's imagination. "W-why yes. Of course. I'm sure that there's a... an open table... somewhere..." he said, furiously digging through his register, as Joo Dee stood there. Grinning. Finally, he called over an usher, and whispered something urgently to him. The usher's eyes shot wide, then he scarpered into the building. Less than three minutes later, the usher came back and nodded toward the host. "It seems that a table has just opened. And look at this! There's nobody reserving it! How fortunate that is," he said, with a nervous laugh.

"Splendid!" Joo Dee agreed. "Come. We shall have you fed. But do sign your names on his register. It is only polite."

Ashan still watched her, but quickly scribed his name. Nila did the same, writing her name for the first time on paper for quite a long time. She was much more experienced etching it into wood or metal. Joo Dee, thankfully, remained behind as the two of them moved into the restaurant proper. It was much as she assumed, a place for rich people to eat rich foods. But as the two Si Wongi, both wearing what was not thread-bare but still nonetheless lower clothing then those many, not a single head turned toward them. Not even the casual shifting of glances as conversation continued. Almost like they were being very carefully ignored.

Well, it was no more than Nila was used to enduring when forced into social events. Mother had, thankfully, stopped trying not long after Nila's seventh birthday. Hitting the old sultan's young harem-born son in the face with a carafe did her no social favors. Sharif had thought it hilarious and appropriate. Amjad had always been an insufferable child. Fitting that Wahid, despite the many lines of separation barring him, succeeded instead of he. They sat in a table which rested in something like a balcony, overlooking the substantial Lake Laogai, and noted that there was no menu to peruse nor sign of what cuisine was on offer. A waiter approached them, his stance very stiff. She assumed it was just this establishment's way. It was actually fear.

"Welcome to the Lake House. What will you be having this evening?" he asked.

"What do you serve?" Ashan asked. "I see no menus."

"And more to the point, how can we know what we are paying for. Unlike your usual clientele, money is an object to us," Nila pointed out.

"Our prices are... reasonable and our menu is what is asked of us. So please, ask," he said, his lips pulling into something like a smile. Well, the smile of somebody suffering extreme sea-sickness, but still.

"Oh. Then... I will have çorba and a gözleme of your choosing," Ashan said.

"You come all this way to eat soup and a meat-pie?" Nila chided. "I will have what is most popular here."

"Excellent choices. They will be prepared to your satisfaction," he said, and ducked away before Ashan could get another word in.

"You will have to expand your palate sooner or later, Ashan," Nila said, turning her chair a bit so that she had a more clear view of the waters. The waters were dark, now, since the sun was setting to their backs, and the restaurant threw a long shadow. "I still cannot fathom why you would find me appealing. I have it on good authority that I am a hateful, unattractive shrew."

"And whose authority would that be? Gashuin's?" Ashan asked, his attention being dragged back to her. "You overlook the better parts of yourself, Nila. I have no doubt that Tzu Zi spent no small amount of time relating that same fact."

Nila didn't feel like arguing with him, right now. Especially since her belly was starting to complain. She hadn't eaten lunch, after all. Or breakfast, now that she considered. Some people had such trouble keeping a svelte figure; Nila's trick was to forget meals. That and walking the length of a continent. "Well, if you will not indulge my fantasy that I am a heinous troll, then answer me this; what insanity has infested you to set your gaze upon me? Have you sustained one too many blows to the head? I have heard nothing of this on our journey here."

"Well, there was little time or proper opportunity to say such things," Ashan said with a shrug.

She turned and glared at him. "You pined for me – me! – the entire trip north?"

"I would not be so brash as to call it pining, please," Ashan said with a placating gesture. "I simply wish to court. If you find me lacking in interest or unpleasant to your senses, then it will be the end of things, and I will consider them well explored and lamentably left."

Nila raised an eyebrow. "You are being oddly reasonable in this, Ashan."

"I have no patience for the jockeying and politicking that most 'relationships' from my homeland require. What is learned of a woman in such things? Only how much they are able to resist your influence. Had I wanted that, I would have..." Ashan threw up his hands, unable to come up with a proper metaphor.

"Played suit to an electrical capacitor?" Nila offered.

"Yes! Wait! What?" Ashan asked, too enthusiastic to have another clarify that he didn't notice that the clarification to his ears wasn't. He took a purging breath, and shook his head, flicking a black curl back from his eyes. "I do not wish to crack a whip for a servile, meek, stupid woman. I wish to have a partner, not a slave. Is that so unreasonable?"

"For a Si Wongi?" she asked.

"Your own mother was nobody's slave, nobody's lesser," Ashan pointed out.

"She also lived miserably alone for my entire lifetime," Nila answered. But then she sighed. "But I have fair surety that such things fall more squarely onto her own shoulders than merely onto Mankind as a whole. She was not easy to speak to, for anyone. Even had she not bastards, she doubtless would not have had a husband."

"Such harsh words about your own mother!" Ashan said with shock. She turned a glare to him, and the expression dissolved into a grin, as she had somewhat expected it might. She was slowly – slowly – becoming more capable of gauging when people were trying to tease her, and not react explosively. "But I feel you are not wrong. Say what you would of Sativa Badesh bint Seema din Nassar, she was in many ways her own worst enemy."

"And you would know so much about my mother," Nila said, rolling her eyes.

"More than you might think, Nila," Ashan said. "I have always listened. She is a hubristic woman. Whatever she has come to Ba Sing Se for, I have no doubt that you will discover it, for it will not be a thing in shadows and quiet for long. And I worry what might have come had she already made her attempt."

Nila leaned forward. "How so?"

"Nila, I have been keeping very close attention to... certain parties... since we came into the city. There is a pall of fear which has settled over the streets of Ba Sing Se, and it will allow none escape it. Have you not noticed the way people limit their speech? Did you not observe the strangeness of some of the women in particular? In our 'guide', Joo Dee?"

"I was not blind to it," Nila said testily. But she shrugged. "I simply do not know what it means. I keep a wary eye, not a paranoid one."

"This may well be a situation where paranoia is the order of the day," Ashan pointed out. He broke off, and motioned her to silence, as the waiter returned with two bowls of soup. One was thin and oily, the other yellow and had something brown floating in it. Nila raised an eyebrow. Sea-prune soup? What insanity was there to make such a thing popular in Ba Sing Se? She shrugged, and began to eat, finding it very unusual but not quite distasteful. "What is this?" Ashan asked.

"Your soup, sir," the waiter said.

"I asked for çorba, not whatever this may be," Ashan said. "Are you to say that my main-course will simply be shredded... pig-chicken in a dough-crust?"

"...no, of course not," he said, his smile twitching into fear, then back. "I'm sure it will be more to your liking if this doesn't satisfy."

He turned and practically bolted inside. Nila leaned across the table, a spoon in hand. "You do realize that these people likely have never heard of such a dish, let alone know how to create it."

"Exactly why I asked for it," Ashan noted, his eyes growing uncharacteristically hard. "You were watching the waiter's reactions, yes?"

"I was... why?"

"When I chastised him, he showed not annoyance nor spite, or even boredom. He showed fear. Fear for life and limb. What is there to make of that?"

Nila stared at Ashan for a long moment, as the truth slowly dawned on her. He had seen it all along. "This place is not safe," Nila declared.

"Indeed not. Whatever force casts the shadow upon Ba Sing Se, it is felt strongly here. They fear not my reprisal, but the shade-casters'. And more, they fear it greatly. We should leave." Nila felt no need to argue that. She rose, pushed her seat back, and turned into the restaurant.

There were a dozen men in green robes waiting there. Everybody else pointedly ignored that they existed. Nila flicked her eyes to Ashan. One, as nondescript as any other, stepped forward. "Nila Badesh bint Seema din Nassar, please come with us. It will be... easier, that way."

---

Toph and Zuko's Tale:

"Well, that went well," Zuko deadpanned, as he looked through the shattered window of an abandoned building. Outside, the Si Wongi were out for blood, and sweeping through the streets like a dervish.

"Y'know, I figure they might be dispersed enough that I could cut a hole through 'em," Toph offered. While Toph couldn't see the look on his face, once for the darkness in which the two of them huddled, and twice because she was – after all – blind, his posture spoke reluctance. "What?"

"I don't think that's a good idea," Zuko said, turning his back to the window, slumping under it. She sat at his side. "If we leave a trail, they're going to be able to find it. They're just hunting us for an accident. If we give them a real reason to want to kill us, they'll never stop. As it is, they'll probably get bored and give up... sooner or later."

Toph gave a chuckle at that. "The firebender is the one urging caution. Now I know that I'm pallin' around with the Avatar. This kind of crap just doesn't happen in a sane world," she muttered.

"I learned that caution is important a long time ago. If I wasn't as cautious as I am, the Avatar would probably be dead right now, if not worse, and we'd be in a lot more trouble than... this."

"And how'd that happen?" Toph asked. Zuko shrugged.

"I had a good teacher," his tones had some bitterness in them.

"No, the dead or worse thing," Toph gave him a shove to prove her annoyance. The look he gave her, was, usual, lost on her.

"Zhao captured the Avatar a few months ago. I freed him before Zhao could do worse than uncomfortable imprisonment. Figures. I finally start understanding the things that Uncle kept saying, and when I do, it's too late to help my family with them," he sighed, lightly. "No wonder my family keeps leaving me behind. All I ever do is get in their way."

"Now that isn't remotely true," Toph said.

"And how would you know that?" Zuko demanded, his tone becoming heated and raw.

"Because I remember what your Uncle said about you when we first met. That he trusted that you'd do the right thing. And you know what? Joining the Avatar even if it meant losing your throne, that took a lot of balls," she gave a shrug. "I can't say for how you two left, but I know that if he's the same guy I shared a boat with, then I know he's probably bursting with pride."

Zuko was silent for a long moment, his form still hunched a bit. "Maybe you're right," he admitted.

"Damn straight I'm right!" Toph said, giving him a slug in the arm.

"There is one thing, though..." Zuko said, puzzled.

"What?"

"Where exactly did you get it in your head that we were a couple?" Zuko asked.

"Aaaah," Toph said, tapping fingers together. "Y'see, it was kinda a bit of a surprise for me, too. Mostly 'cause I wanted that crazy wolfbat in Makapu to be wrong, but when things kept lining up..."

"You're not answering my question."

"Fine. I like that you don't treat me like I'm weak and frail and useless, just because I'm little and blind. Pretty much from the start, you treated me like the badass I am, and I've never had that before! So sue me if I don't feel a bit... warmly."

"Warmly," Zuko repeated.

"Oi! Don't push me out of my comfort zone! I'm close enough to the edge as it is," Toph warned. "If you can't handle it, then I'll drop it. But it'll be your loss, Sparky," Toph pointed at him.

"Right now, I'm just not in any kind of good place for a relationship," Zuko said, shaking his head. "Maybe when Father is gone, when Azula is safe and this war is over, and the world is no longer on the edge of annihilation, maybe then I can think about that. But not right now," he said.

Toph let out a breath of relief. Honestly, she wasn't even sure if she was ready to pursue this, but the opportunity seemed right. "Later, then," she said, with a nod. "I can be plenty patient."

"No you can't," Zuko said with a scowl. "You couldn't even wait for a decent age to get a doctorate."

"Don't blame me for being brilliant," Toph chided.

"I'm blaming you for being impetuous," Zuko countered. He then leaned out the window again. She could feel that there were still people moving through the streets, no doubt at least a few of them hoping ill-will upon them. Had she not quickly ducked into this building, bending straight through a brick wall, they'd probably still be out there, running. "But still, it's good to have somebody on this side who doesn't treat me like a rotten fish. Thank you, for that."

"Any time, Sparky," Toph said. "So what'd'ya think our chances of making it back to the Middle Ring are?"

"Tonight, nil," Zuko said. He nodded into the building they were squatting in. "So I recommend picking a cot. They might be enraged, but I doubt they'll resort to breaking and entering to find us."

"And if they do, either one of us'll hear 'em a mile coming," Toph finished his thought. The two of them moved away from the window, each angling toward a separate, tiny, cramped bed room. At the threshold, though, Zuko paused.

"You know... before the bloodthirsty mob..." Zuko said, hesitantly. "...tonight was nice."

"Yeah, it was," Toph agreed. And then, they bunkered down for the night.

For in the morning, there would be a lot of questions that needed answering.

---

...Yup. As soon as I knew what Sharif's character was, what his specific injury entailed, I knew that during the Tales chapter, he was going to stumble into a brothel. Does that make me a bad person? Possibly. Does it make me an entertaining writer? I'd like to think so.

Long Feng in this story is interesting to write, because he's so self-deluded. Despite ruling over all of Ba Sing Se, he sees the Dai Li as a fragile and faltering battle-line against encroaching darkness. He's already won, and he thinks that he's slowly losing ground. That delusion plays first and foremost into why he's the Grand Secretariat; Long Feng honestly believes in himself that if a strong, decisive, and sane Earth King were to arise, that he could set aside the mantel of Grand Secretariat and allow himself to fade back into the darkness. But the truth is, and he can't admit it even to himself, that he is deliberately keeping anybody from rising up to fulfill those criteria. He keeps Kuei ignorant and weak. He keeps the people afraid. He keeps heros of the previous generation locked under a lake. He's telling himself that he will be a benevolent dictator until a better leader can take his place, while at the same time preventing that from ever happening. He can't allow himself to see what he's doing. A man's got to have his rationalizations, after all.

I also have to say that I like the chemistry that developed between Zuko and Toph. While Zuph is still a ways in the offing (age difference, you know) and even Zuko admits that he's in no position to have any kind of relationship with his current mindset, for the first time in a long time, Zuko's managed to make a friend outside his immediate family. The two of them just seem to bounce off each other in amusing ways. It's an underexplored relationship, even in its platonic form.

Leave a Review.