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.

44. The Plan

"So we're in agreement?" Zhao asked. There were a chorus of affirmations, but not all of them were exuberant. Not surprising, given that he was asking them to commit High Treason. He turned to one of them in particular. "Admiral Yan Rha, how long until the Southern Fleet returns from its tour?"

"Several days at the most," the old admiral said. Yan Rha was not the physical specimen that many of the other admiralty were; he was thin and reedy, but his dark eyes were still sharp, his wits sharper, and his cunning, sharper still. "There are a number of... sympathizers which are currently on furlough in Azul. They won't be a problem."

"Ozai is doing much of our work for us," Zhao pointed out. "It almost seems to easy. What do you think the chances are that he's trying to lure us into a trap, to try to get rid of us?"

Yan Rha gave Zhao a look. "That's a caution I wouldn't have expected from you. I was told that you were a bit more brash and impetuous."

"Given that I'm not Fire Lord yet, I'll forgive that insult," Zhao said. He then turned so that he faced Yan Rha flush, with that glaring left eye and the brand which surrounded it. "I've learned a few harsh lessons, and what those lessons taught me... well. I'm standing here today, am I not?"

Yan Rha rolled his eyes, and then shook his head. "It's a poorly kept secret in the city that Ozai is losing his mind. The servants relate how he rails at the walls, destroying furniture and even whole rooms in his rages. He screams at Princess Azula, even though she hasn't been in the same nation as he is for more than three years."

"Ah, yes. Princess Azula," he nodded. "Fitting she would be the vehicle for his madness. When the dust settles over this affair, I will be bringing her back."

"That is not wise, Zhao," Admiral Chan pointed out.

"Indeed," Lord Kurita cut off his social inferior. "The people would rally behind a member of the royal family, even if it was defunct. There has to be a clean break, from old to new."

"You misunderstand. Princess Azula has a vital part in my plan to..."

"You shall simply have to find another lackey," Kurita said sternly. "Azula simply engenders too much sympathy amongst the mob. If you could contain her, they would see it as a usurpation and imprisonment. And if she ever did decide to attempt to seize the Burning Throne, she would be in exactly the position to do so, with exactly the support she would require. This is folly, Zhao. Set it aside."

Zhao scowled, even as every fiber of his being told him to argue further, to get them to see his point if he had to beat it into them with a sledge-hammer. Her divinations would be absolutely vital to the future of the Fire Nation. But they wouldn't believe that. No, they had set their minds to the notion that Azula was just a crippled moron with a speech impediment. The truth was she was about as far opposite as could be.

He gave a casual shrug, one that took a massive amount of willpower and practice to seem casual. "So be it, but this may be something to revisit in the future," Zhao said. "After all, Ozai started his reign with a brutal slaughter of his political opponents, as his father did before him; what would set me apart from that better than a smoother transition?" that such an arrangement would also allow him access to Azula's unique mystical abilities was a boon he left unsaid, for it would fall unbelieved.

"Take care not to make it too smooth," Yan Rha said, as he adjusted the cuffs of his uniform. "Any man who doesn't give his hull a good scraping from time to time will find it fouled with barnacles."

"Cease with your nautical prattle," Zhao said.

"Prattle? This time last year, you weren't even the rank I now hold," Yan Rha said, his back growing straight, his jaw tensing, and those cruel brows rising in outrage. "Your rise was meteoric, but so can be your downfall. You've put forth a plan to steal the Burning Throne from Ozai, true; why should we give it to you?"

"Because I am the best of your options," Zhao said. Not pleasantly, though. He had too little patience at the moment for that. "You managed to salvage a catastrophe in the south pole, because you were too gutless to kill the children you found there. I have the will to follow through on what I desire."

"My... gutlessness," Yan Rha said, "resulted in me crippling the South's capacity to gain new waterbenders; one teacher from Great Whales, and we'd have been back to a three-front war!"

"You can say whatever it is that assuages your ego, Yan Rha, but the facts are clear. You lack the spine for rule. You lack the fire, and you lack the ambition. How long, Yan Rha, have you stagnated in your current post? How many years? And not once did you demand a new post, a fleet to launch against your enemies. That is why I will be having the Throne, and not... say... you."

Yan Rha's eyebrow twitched, but he didn't lash out as Zhao secretly hoped he would. After all, he'd been dying to have a proper fight for months; the rule of New Bhatti was profitable, but unbelievably dull. Zhao's streak would have to continue. Yan Rha backed down. Zhao turned with a widening smirk to the other of his ilk. "Ladies, gentlemen, Admirals and nobles, the Fire Nation has suffered under the ill-rule of this family long enough."

Zhao walked to the window, which overlooked the deluge outside. Well, less a deluge today and more a steady rain, but still present. He cast an arm out toward that aperture. "By days, it seems that the very land rebels against this befouled line. The storms have come and plagued our nation, robbing us of the sun just as Ozai robs us of victory or a meaningful future, for the last sixty years! Here, and nowhere else in the world; trust me, I have checked. If there is a surer sign that the Fire Nation needs a new direction, it is that! Had we been more perceptive, perhaps we could have nipped this deluge in the bud, and ended Azulon before he had even the first of his idiot offspring!"

"Don't speak ill of the dead, Zhao," Kurita said.

"I speak ill of fools. Azulon was certainly that," Zhao answered his contemporary. "This will require a great deal of organization and precision. I have no doubt that you are capable of both. This will require hard work, and dedication. If the Fire Nation lacks that, then we deserve this hell. This will require fire, in the gut and in the hand. So who has this fire?"

There was a silence in the room for a long moment. Then, with a cleared throat, one of the other Admirals stepped forward. Zhao was honestly surprised by who it was. Admiral Tetsugawa was as hard a woman as Zhao had ever met in his life, and the two had knocked heads frequently, and recently. It was despite her orders that he annexed Kad Deid and crushed the meager forces of those orange-haired heretics to the south. She looked him in the eye, and nodded. "Zhao, you might be a blowhard and in love with the sound of your own voice, but you're not wrong," she said, as couth as ever she was. She extended a hand, and in it, ignited fire. "A clean house. Long live the Fire Lord."

With Tetsugawa at his side, the others began to come forward in increasing number, adding their fire to her own. Those who were not firebenders held a lantern toward that communal blaze. Yan Rha was the last of the admirals to join into the cabal, something that Zhao noted and remembered. That left only Kurita, who stood back from his inferiors, and those nobles which had pledged allegiance to a new leader.

"Are you going to join us, in a new and burning dawn, or are you going to plummet to earth, with the dead weight of Ozai on your back?" Zhao asked. Kurita blinked a few times. He was no doubt doing the maths in his head, what influence he could pull, what strings he could tug which would see him clear of the entire mess. Kurita, for all the House's respectable strength, made a habit of staying out of the fights of the other Houses; this often left Kurita in a prime position to scoop up the prize that the two foes had fought themselves to a stalemate over. But Zhao had made sure to not leave Kurita the luxury of neutrality. "Here and now, Kurita. Make your choice."

A deadline, the arch nemesis of a deep thinker like Kurita. Zhao could see the annoyance, the anger, the outrage, in Kurita's eyes as he stepped to the fire. He had been outmaneuvered, and now had his personal army at the disposal of somebody whom he knew fully well wasn't going to use it for the benefit of Kurita, his House, or his wealth. Half of the joy that Zhao got out of this entire situation was watching that over-cautious man squirm. The other half... was a thought he would entertain later.

"Very well," Kurita said, raising up a lantern and adding it's light to the flame in the center, and the combined lanterns of those few admirals who weren't firebenders, and the relatively many more nobles who were likewise afflicted. He lowered his lantern first, probably a show of defiance that Zhao honestly didn't care about at this point. "When will this happen?"

"Soon. Very soon," Zhao said. "My source tells me that it will only be a short while until the crazy bastard is in a perfect position. Alone, unprotected, and insane."

"I should hope you are right," Yan Rha said, plucking at his sleeves as he did. Agni's blood, did that man ever stop fidgeting?

"You should trust me more. After all, if you cannot trust your Fire Lord, who can you?" he asked. Azula's words would carry Zhao forward, her prophecies would show him a way to defeat the Black Sun Invasion she had foretold, and when the dust settled, his rule over this continent would be complete and unquestioned. And with that, came every perk due it. Like, for example, Akemi. He could see her, waiting outside the room patiently as ever, ears always taking in every word. He didn't doubt that she'd spied on them the entire time. In fact, he'd have been disappointed if she didn't. But she didn't say a word. That smirk came back to Zhao's face, pulling the stiff skin of his burn.

This was going to be ridiculously easy.

---

Chapter 4

The Plan

---

The sun was a welcome change. The clouds had parted at long last as they moved up the hills which overlooked a different stretch of ocean. If one had continued far enough north from there, they'd only miss Allavut by a short distance. Short of the jungle that they'd found Agni herself – and that the spirit identified as female was a shock to every monotheist present – this place was a strip of Azul most notable for a few palace-farms, owned by Embiar who fancied themselves men-of-the-people, and thus graciously allowed farmers to live within eyeshot of them. But only if they grew something pretty.

It was all a terrible waste, but then again, Azula didn't have a lot of say in the matter. The beast she was atop let out another groan, and lurched down a bit more. "If this thing does that again, I am taking my chances jumping over the side," Azula pointed out.

"You're right. We need to land. Appa? Where are we going to land?" the Avatar asked. Ridiculous, but the beast did grumble back at him. "You're right. That place over there looks great."

"You didn't actually converse with that creature, did you?" Azula asked.

"It's not a 'creature', it's Appa," Aang said. He looked back at her. "It's not like you haven't made a fuzzy friend back there."

"That was..." Azula began, but broke off when she realized that she was, at that very moment, petting the sabertoothed moose-lion cub which had curled up in her lap. "Shut up."

Aang only grinned. Azula wanted to punch him. Not hard enough to harm him, but enough to wipe that look off his face. She knew what would come if the Avatar died right now. It wasn't pretty. It was a strange state that Azula occupied. She simultaneously loathed, admired, and was ambivalent to the airbender before her. Different life-times, different reactions. Although, one of her hadn't even met him, so there was understandably little opinion formed of a long dead airbender. The beast dipped lower, distinct from another flight of bison that lazily scudded peacefully out of the way above both in its direction and that it was carrying passengers. The latter would not be easily seen from the ground. "Your pet is exhausted. Unless you want his heart to explode, you'll land quickly," Azula said.

Aang nodded, and heeded her direction without a second word. While it was certainly a useful state of affairs, she had to wonder what had happened so dramatically differently to have him cave to her so quickly. She had a number of possibilities as to why. Some were unpleasant. The beast landed with a thud as it none-too-gently returned to the black soil of Azul. The trees, which were further ahead cut into orchards neat, tidy, and comparatively safe, stood before them in a thin veil. Even with the sun beating down, it seemed darker than it should have been under that canopy. Then again, only fools entered the woods in Azul; that was a good way to end up dead, quickly.

"We're going to need to find a place for Appa to rest," Katara said as she nimbly kipped over the side of the beast and moved to the Avatar's side. "Are there any caves in this part of the Fire Nation?"

"Caves? Auuuuugh," Sokka bemoaned. Nila cuffed him for that.

"Be thankful to even have that. You could drown in your sleep on flat land upon this continent," the Si Wongi girl said sharply.

"Toph?" Zuko asked, turning to the earthbender who was still lazing in the howdah next to Azula.

"Hrm?" she asked. Then, she grumbled. "Yeah, fine. I'll check."

The earthbender heaved herself over the howdah's rail, and promptedly misjudged her distance from the ground, thus face-planting on it. But she didn't mutter or groan over it. She just picked herself up, knocked some of the tacky mud that wedged into her buttons off of her, and made a few experimental taps of the dirt. Azula took this time to reach the ground herself; in all of her many years, she had never spent so much time aboard a bison as she had in the last week or so. Toph began to grumble, and Azula just crossed her arms before her chest and waited. "Yeah, this ground's going to cave in unless I spend every second of every day holding it up. There's no stability here at all. Must be the rain and the volcano," she cast her thumb over her shoulder toward where the sea vanished into the distance.

"...there's no volcano there," Aang said.

"Actually, that's the way to Boiling Rock," Zuko corrected him. Azula let out a laugh which wasn't exactly mirthful. Boiling Rock. The site of Mai's betrayal. And in another lifetime, the death of a different 'friend' who was, frankly, a poor replacement for Ty Lee. Zuko seemed to catch Azula's wistful look. "Is there anything we should know about?"

"We're early," Azula said. She pointed a finger at the two Tribesmen. "Their mother hasn't been imprisoned yet. Nor will she be, since she's apparently dead right now."

"Wait, you sent our mother to Boiling Rock?" Katara asked.

"She had tried on three occasions to kill me. I was not in a forgiving mood," Azula said plainly. She had no need to defend her actions in another life, after all. Which was lucky, because, frankly, she'd made more than a few bad decisions. "But the point that it is a dumping ground for the Fire Lord's enemies will no doubt play into your plan in some degree or another."

"...actually, the plan we've got right now is kinda touch and go," Aang admitted. Azula blinked, and turned to the Tribesman, who was, then and now, the brains of the operation.

"We've got some broad-strokes objectives. We're just not exactly sure about how we're going to meet them," Sokka explained.

"A broad-stroke objective is not a plan. A broad-stroke objective isn't even a goal. How can you expect your little infiltration to take place without popular support? Without the spies blinded and the messenger's muted? You can't," she answered as Katara was about to offer something. She shook her head at the absurdity of this all.

"Gotta say, I never thought you'd turn on your old man so quick," Toph said, before finally shaking her head one final time and throwing up her hands. "Damn it, there's nowhere within miles we can dig in."

"The relationship I have with my father is..." Azula trailed off, trying to find a good word for it. She settled with, "complicated. He is still my father. As he has always been. But I understand what will happen if he enacts his attack during the return of Sozin's Comet. Since there is no way immediately apparent that I can turn this to my favor and leave you in a prison cell, I might as well work with you."

"...that doesn't fill us with confidence," Sokka said flatly.

Azula smirked at that. She then turned and took a few steps toward the path, trying to see through it. The path bent quickly though, so line-of-sight was short. "We should find some place more defensible than this. At any moment some farmer or woodsman could stumble onto us and..."

There was a loud grunt behind her which cut her off. It was notable because Appa, she was taken to believe, was not one to interrupt, especially with loud grunts. Azula glanced to it, and noted that it's head was up, and its ears flicking. It was obviously hearing something that nobody else was. Azula swallowed, dryly, as she retraced in her mind exactly how many steps she'd taken toward an Azuli forest. At least one of her past lives would have kicked herself right now. Azula had to take up the slack in that regard.

"What's going on? Do you hear something, buddy?" Aang asked.

"Shut up a minute, Twinkletoes," Toph said, thrusting a hand up in his face even as she stared roughly in Azula's direction. "I can just hear something... there it is again."

The bison let out another grunt a moment before Toph's pronouncement, so that was lent credence certainly. Azula started to step back from the path, but mostly from the woods which surrounded it. My, how it now seemed to encroach around them, where moments ago it was just a backdrop for a landing. Azula flexed her fists, and blue flames erupted into them, at the ready as they had always been. But those fires flickered slightly, when she heard the words coming from the trees.

"Heeeeere bison bison bison bison bison... Heeeere bison bison bison..."

That voice was unmistakable. Azula simply stared, not truly understanding the how or the why, as the faintest glimpse of pink appeared up in the trees, navigating the limbs as easily as any sugar glider or lemur. The girl wearing bright pink in the trees, she with what looked like an iron-forged bison-whistle dangling 'round her neck, finally rounded a tree-trunk and stood on a limb no wider than perhaps her big-toe, balanced without so much as a waver, as she looked at the whole group of them from on high, with a succulent melon in each hand. Azula blinked. The girl in the trees blinked likewise, looking over the lot of them. But her eyes settled on Azula herself.

"This... can't be," Azula said. "Can it really be you, Ty L– umf."

Azula's question was answered by Ty Lee – and it could only be Ty Lee – bounding down out of those trees with an acrobatic roll and hurling herself into a full-body embrace with the firebender such that even the solidly built princess had to take a step back or be knocked flat by the momentum of it.

"AZULA! You're really alive! And you're really here! And you're really buff!" Ty Lee declared. "Is your brother there oh hi Zuko what about Mai have you seen her I don't see her with you is that your bison?"

Azula could only blink a few times at that tirade.

Aang stepped up. "Yes, there; yes, but she left these guys while I was unconscious; no, that's my bison."

"Ty Lee..." Azula said, amazed that Ty Lee would even recognize her. Then again, it was Ty Lee. Say what you would about the girl, she was a loyal and gentle soul. Azula didn't doubt that the girl, be she crippled woman or Avatar either, wept hard at Azula's death. "...why are you in Azul?"

"Oh! Right! You're not supposed to be here," Ty Lee said, still good-naturedly as she swung back, swaying side to side with Azula's hands in hers. As Azula realized what she was doing, she pulled those hands back, and Ty Lee gave out a mildly put-out look, but it vanished quickly, as such negativity always did with Ty Lee. "The Fire Lord, your dad? He still has you banished, and if he finds you here he's going to be really mad."

"I'm aware," Azula said. She finally turned to the others, who were staring in confusion and alarm with Zuko's sole exception. "This is Ty Lee. She was my oldest friend three times in a row."

"What does that mean?" Ty Lee asked.

"It's complicated," much of the group, Azula included, said as one.

Ty Lee leaned back. "That was creepy. Do it again!"

"Please, focus. Why are you in Azul? You don't live anywhere near here," Zuko broke in. Ty Lee flashed a grin from brother to sister, and pointed up the path and ostensibly to the hill on the far side of this tiny patch of wilderness.

"Mom's got property over there, and she said she wanted to come back to Azul, where she met Daddy, before he died," Ty Lee said. She glanced to her feet, the melons tucked behind her back. "...Mom got really sick. We were really scared for her."

"Your mother is dying?" Azula asked, real concern in her voice and her heart. After all, there were few who struck Azula as deeply as Ty Lee, either for good, or for ill. Ty Lee looked up with a cheerful grin.

"Nope! And nobody knows why at all! It's awesome!" Ty Lee said. "You should meet her! She'd love to have company!"

"Fugitives," Zuko reminded her. Ty Lee gave an off hand dismissal.

"Please. You're friends of the Baihu family! We'd take you in if you were here to usurp the Fire Lord! So that means we'd take you in any-time!"

Firebenders, brother and sister, shared a glance. Azula could only shrug uneasily. How she'd managed to hit that nail on the head with her first swing, Azula wasn't sure. But then again, she had heard stories how being nearby the Avatar made destiny do increasingly insane and uncanny things. "What about Appa?" Aang asked, patting the bison's nose.

"His name's Appa?" Ty Lee asked. She picked up her melons and bounded over to the front of the beast, standing nearly in the center of their number, and displacing the Si Wongi and the other airbender in the process. Both looked at the situation like the world had gone mad. Azula wasn't sure that it hadn't. She held out both melons toward its nostrils. "Hello, Appa! Are you a friendly bison?"

Appa answered Ty Lee as it answered all food-bearers, groomers, and unfortunately nearby objects and people; with a massive tongue slurp which scooped up the melons but also lifted Ty Lee from her feet and dropped her to the ground covered in clear, gooey saliva. Ty Lee let out a mild squeeing sound, even as she got up, wiping the guck from her. "That's the best thing ever!" the acrobat declared.

"You like bison?" Aang asked.

"It shouldn't come as a surprise," Azula said flatly. "In one lifetime, she was a crippled airbender, and in the other, she was the Avatar."

All eyes turned to her, then to Ty Lee. "This feather-headed girl was the Avatar in one of your previous lives?" the Si Wongi girl asked flatly. Azula nodded.

"What? I'm an airbender! Hurray!" she said, and took a massive bound upward, only to land on her face in the dirt. She still picked herself up from that quickly enough.

"...you didn't learn until you were almost twenty, or else were bending fire by now," Azula informed her.

"...she's not very bright is she?" Nila asked. Azula somberly shook her head. Nila blinked a few times, and palmed her face with tattooed hands. "And she was in this one's place," she pointed at Aang. Azula could only nod. "You truly survived a lifetime of horrors, then."

"Hey! I could make a great Avatar!" Ty Lee complained. And then what had been said off hand finally struck her. "Wait a minute. Are you the Avatar?"

Aang was clearly uncomfortable with how Ty Lee was now invading his personal space. One had to get used to that when Ty Lee was around. When she wasn't tying herself into knots, she was hugging somebody. That was her way. He nevertheless nodded.

"THAT'S GREAT!" Ty Lee declared, before bounding back up into the trees in two jumps. "Come on, guys! My place is big and even my sisters can't fill up all the rooms!"

With that, she vanished back into the foliage. Nila turned to Azula. "Is your friend always so annoying?"

"She isn't annoying. She's just energetic," Azula instantly defended her. Oh, how the years had changed her.

"And things like this happen around you all the time, do they not?" Nila asked Sokka. Sokka nodded. "...I am going to die before the end of Summer, am I not?"

"Probably. But we'll all be dead with you, so you'll be in good company," Zuko answered her.

"...Much as I'd like to see Tzu Zi again, am I the only one who isn't extremely suspicious about this?" Malu asked.

"Trust me. If all of them are there, they won't turn us in. One of them likes me," Zuko said smugly. And got punched in the kidney by a blind earthbender for his smugness.

---

"Alright, this plan doesn't seem so good in retrospect," Jet said, as the two of them reconnoitered the iron-foundry. Drinking up the entire supply from a spring northeast of Jang Hui, it used that water to bathe and refine the iron which was dug up from the nearby mines, and dumped the slag-laden slime into the stream beyond it. That stream joined up with the Jang Hui river, and from that point on, the entire flow was contaminated and poisonous. The issue at hand was that the foundry was guarded every hour of the day, and by a force such as Mai and Jet couldn't take down together.

"The plan is still sound. The implementation needs a bit of work," Mai countered him. She nodded briskly toward the lower end of the forest, and the two of the began to ghost back toward the village, which lay almost four miles down that slimy tributary. It was easy to see why the fishermen didn't simply fish past the funk; that branch of the Jang Hui river rose up in a great cataract not far short of where the slime-stream joined with it. "Destroying the factory would only half-solve the problem anyway."

"I think I know what you mean," Jet said. He glanced the length and breadth of the river, and spotted nobody as he expected he wouldn't. With a quick sprint and a spring over a befouled bank, he landed, rocking, atop an outrigger canoe which an old man was now sleeping in. The motion stirred the floppy-hatted man to a snorting alertness. Jet turned just in time to help stabilize Mai as she landed next to him, preventing her from overbalancing and falling into the river. Had she, Jet's life would not have been pleasant for quite a while. "Dock? We can go back now."

"Oh, yes," Dock said distractedly as he began to paddle them out of their nook and into the current once more. A part of Mai wished she'd just chartered this canoe long ago. While there was a steep descent into the river along most of the far bank, she would have taken that chance to get away from here. "Always going back to Jang Hui. Great place. Wouldn't live anywhere else if they payed me."

"Then you're insane," Mai said. She turned to Jet and switched languages, secure in the knowledge that the crazy old fart wouldn't be able to keep up. "If we wanted to 'liberate' this village, we'd need to start a revolution. I don't think that's a realistic expectation."

"You might be surprised," Jet said. He leaned a little closer. "I did a bit of talking with the village elders. A lot of them are chafing under Ozai's rule just as badly as they had under Azulon. Instead of demanding fish in exchange for not burning their houses down, Ozai only has to offer them nothing, for them to come crawling back to the fold. That's got a lot of them angry."

Mai raised her eyebrow. "Why Jet, that almost sounded like proper espionage."

Jet grinned. "I learned from the best."

"Charmer."

"Guilty as charged," Jet said, pulling Mai a bit closer to him.

"Oh, young love. As strong a force as gravity, and as inevitable as rain," Dock commented.

"Just keep paddling," Mai said to him dryly. She rolled her eyes with an exasperated sigh. "The other issue is that of training. These people haven't ever fought another human being in their lives, let alone trained soldiers. It'd be a slaughter."

"But..."

"Jet, untrained masses do not defeat organized resistance. Maybe in stories the oppressed populace can rise up and cast out their oppressors, but that doesn't happen in real life. They just end up being rounded up and slaughtered."

"We have to try something," Jet said.

"The cost is too high. Maybe once the... friend of ours..." she caught herself before letting something slip. Either his name or his title might give the airbender away; Avatar was the same word in every language. Well, except for Whalesh, but they didn't count, "starts what he's going to do, since they'll be distracted by that. But until then, there's nothing we can do."

"I don't accept that," Jet said, his eyes hard and locked onto the growing form of Jang Hui as it appeared around the gentle bend in the river. "There's some way to win this. I just need to find it."

"Well, we're back again," Dock said enthusiastically. "I hope you two enjoyed your little romantic interlude; the soldiers don't tend to like it when people get too close to that smelter of theirs. They're a touch paranoid, I think."

"You don't say," Mai muttered.

The canoe reached the jetty and they all scrabbled up quickly enough. After all, while the stink of the river had more or less died to Mai's nose, it returned in full force as one got close to it. They moved back under their abandoned roof, grateful at least that it wasn't raining right now. It might have been dark as a thunderstorm, but no rain yet fell.

"There's a path we haven't walked yet," Jet said. "We put down the soldiers, steal the medicine, and..."

"And they send their men to steal it back from Jang Hui. If they don't find it, they'll assume that the villagers stole it, and burn them alive. I know how these thugs work, Jet," Mai said, trying to break it to him easily.

"Mercenaries, then," Jet said.

"Paid for in what? Two headed fish?" she asked, lifting up a specimen to make her point.

"If you think about it, you're getting twice as much head per fish," Jet offered. Mai just stared at him. "Fine. What about the other villages?"

"The same problem as before, only with more dead villagers," Mai said.

Jet growled. "This isn't right! I mean, the Dog Rebellion unseated two Earth Kings in a row, and that was fought entirely poor-against-rich!"

"A war started and financed by one rich-woman who didn't want her daughters to get foot-bound," Mai clarified.

"A revolution doesn't care who pays, so long as somebody does," Jet said. He thrust a finger at her. "You said we had to come and make the city ready, well, what else are we doing here? These are your people. They're suffering because of our enemies. That's got to mean something!"

"You think it doesn't?" Mai snapped, heat entering her voice. "You think I don't want to quiver those soldiers with iron, blow that factory, steal that medicine? I'd do it in a heartbeat! But the problem is that it'll just cause more harm than good!"

"Mai, sometimes it's a lot better to do the wrong thing, than to do nothing at all," Jet said, his voice much calmer than hers, which was an odd inversion. He gave a vacant shrug. "Maybe this'll end badly if we get involved. But it will definitely end badly if we do nothing. I had a dozen plans. You needled every one. So tell me. What would you do? If you had to do something, what would you do?"

Mai wasn't happy about having that onus hefted squarely upon her shoulders. Jet's plans were, fundamentally, good ones. But they all had a fatal flaw. They depended on ordinary people doing something extraordinary. That wasn't exactly a dependable state. People tended to fragment and flee when a leader was struck down. They disappeared as soon as the rode became rough. Father had always said 'It's easy to fight when you're winning'. She now understood the full meaning of that.

"These people can't fight for themselves. They're too beaten down. Too demoralized, too sick, to afraid," Mai said.

"Mai..."

"But..." Mai cut him off. She reached into her meager bag of possessions, and extracted the blue parka which the waterbender had granted her before the two of them left for this suicide mission. She'd claimed that it was waterproof and warm enough to help, even in weather this disgusting. It'd been true to her word. She flicked out a knife, and cut all around the hem, turning the bottom of the parka into a long, blue strip of cloth. That cloth, she held up to Jet. "People will fight for a symbol even if it kills them. They'll fight for a symbol, when they're heels are against the precipice. They'll fight for a symbol, because symbols have power. You can kill a leader. You can't kill an idea."

Jet nodded, and took that strip, before binding it above his brow, folding it back and tucking it in. It formed something like a blue turban. Mai quickly created a second, for herself. "So now we've got to give them something worth fighting for. Willing to follow me to almost certain death, Mai?"

"I don't hate almost. It implies no," she answered him. She took his hand, giving it a squeeze, and then leaned in to his warmth, to his embrace.

Somewhere across the village, an angry young man flopped another poor catch onto the jetty. The clams belched out foul mud, and the fish were often two-headed, missing scales, or possessed of three eyes. "I can't believe this," he muttered to himself in his native tongue of Huo Jian. "We're never going to make that quota."

"Maybe we won't have to," Xu said, even as he stooped down to pick up the brace of foul fish.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because the winds are changing, my boy," he said. "You remember those two newcomers? The ones Dock brought over."

"Dock. Sure," the young man said wanly.

"I'm thinkin' one of them's got a plan. A plan that'll shake the Fire Lord right off his throne," he said.

The young man stared at the crazy old one, and then down at the catch by his feet. He had no wife, nor any real chance of finding one here; the women tended to go to other towns or villages to learn trades as soon as their parents would let them. They'd all seen what happened to children of mothers who ate the river's produce. It was not kindly, nor pleasant, and those children as a rule did not last long. Simply put, like most of the people here, that young man had nothing to lose.

"Well, it's about Agni-damned time," he said, taking up his gaff and heading into the center of town.

Xu waved a hand after him. "Oh, and if you see that worthless lout Bushi, tell him to fix the danged barge! That thing's just shameful!"

---

The Fire Sage twitched slightly where he lay on the ground. Honestly, he shouldn't have gotten in Kori's way, and should be thankful that he'd gotten only as much as he did. Sure, it was a strapping youth against a wizened old man, but still. Kori was in no mood to waste time sneaking about. Not with what he needed to learn.

The eel-hound he rode died under him on the way through the city. It made a small commotion, but he continued despite it. He hadn't slept in two days, and it showed on his face. Most notably, it showed in the fervent glow that seemed to ignite inside his dark blue eyes as they zipped along the lines of words in the parchment.

The most recent foray into the lands most southerly have borne fruit; while our holds did indeed burst at the seams with these mewling grubs, two in particular seemed to have some trifling talent as waterbenders. They have been sequestered from the others, with the indoctrination specialists. Your son's notion will doubtless prove a fruitful one, and I have little doubt that he is correct in that starting soon and young will reap great benefits.

It was correspondence between Admiral – then Commander – Yan Rha, and then-Fire Lord Azulon. He'd seen almost a dozen other messages, or rather half of a dozen other messages, outlining Yan Rha's advancing attempts to crush the Water Tribesmen under his heel. It started with cutting down stragglers, near the northern fringes of their land. Hunting them down throughout Great Whales where they came to trade skins and oils for copper and iron. He was a man possessed, and Azulon apparently found great use in that possession. From the sound of Yan Rha's messages, every one was more confident, more sure. More debauched, and more cruel.

The boy cried out for his parents today. He was broken of that habit. His only parents are the Fire Nation now; within a month, that will be as certain as the sunrise. The girl remains quiet. She at least is an easy 'guest', for the time being. I look forward to showcasing your project in person, my Prince.

That one to Ozai himself. There was only one more. Doubtless penned as they were sailing into the Bay of Tenko. For a long moment, Kori considered whether he should even read it. But honestly, that decision had been made weeks ago, when a big, bald man looked him square in the eye and declared that he was Kori's father.

Our tests are complete, my Prince. The only two which were of any use are the girl and the boy. Both appear to be waterbenders, she of more power than he. She lashed out today, screaming and attacking one of the seamen. While she was beaten for that, I cannot help but feel pride; she was showing a rage quite becoming a firebender, even despite her young age and lackluster element. However, if what you claim is true, then the last of those problems will be corrected soon enough. The other objects can be disposed of at your leisure. I recommend taking them half-way into Boiling Rock.

The rest of the message was lost as Kori's fist formed a ball, crushing it in its midst. So, he was not only stolen from his parents, but manipulated into loyalty to a man who would as soon mercilessly slaughter Kori's captured kin as bother to bring them back with him. He wished he could have said he was filled with righteous outrage. That would have been an inspiring thing, something vaulting and grand. A glorious purpose in the face of mindless servitude. But he wasn't. He wasn't even angry. Not really.

"Well," he said to himself. "Now that that's cleared up, I've got something I need to do."

---

"Sooooo this is my home. Well, winter home. We-e-e-ell, 'home that's almost as dry as home if not as cloudy' home," Ty Lee enthusiastically declared. Nila blinked at the whirlwind that spoke, both in her energy and her exuberance. She was obviously Tzu Zi's sister, even had the two of then not shared a face and everything else. There were a number of others who turned away from talking to a maid of some description. Three of them seemed to latch onto Nila with their eyes. From one of them, rose an enthusiastic cry.

"NILA!" Tzu Zi declared as she broke free of her identical siblings and tackled Nila back a step with a hug, putting her out of line with the Tribesman who escorted her in. "It's been so long! Did you find your Mom?"

"To everybody's great dismay," Nila said dryly. Tzu Zi pulled back, but still had Nila held at arm's length.

"You don't ever change, do you?" Tzu Zi asked. "Wait a second. Is that...?"

"It is. I prefer a lack of names, given circumstances," Nila cut in. Tzu Zi glanced back to the gaggle of other girls.

"You are dismissed," a version of Tzu Zi's voice came from the back of the room, which had the maid bow and depart. When she moved, Nila could see yet another Tzu Zi beyond, sitting at a desk barely visible through a doorway. "There. We have privacy."

"Don't mind her. She's just mean," Ty Lee declared.

"Aang? What are you doing here?" Tzu Zi asked, and she stepped away from Nila. The Si Wongi didn't have a chance to give a response to that before another Tzu Zi slammed into her with a hug. Nila gave a glance to Sokka. Sokka just watched everything with a very, very neutral expression. Oh, but if she could see inside his brain. She amended that notion, since she, upon further reflection, didn't really want to know what it was men thought about; they obviously got so little done in a day. Their thoughts had to play some part in it.

"Nila? How have you b-b-b-been?" Rai Lee asked, her smile much more subdued and nervous than those of the acrobat or the firebender.

"Well and terribly, by times," Nila said.

"Um... We had to find some place to go that wasn't going to try to kill us," Aang answered Tzu Zi's earlier questions. Nila was having a hard time keeping track of all the conversations going on around her, but damn it all, she was going to! She had a hard enough time keeping up with conversation even when she knew what was said; when she didn't, it was a hopeless endeavor.

"Then you shouldn't have come to Azul," another Baihu sister told the Avatar.

"What are you doing in Azul anyway?" the actress inquired after giving Nila no more than a passing nod. In a way, Nila was glad that was all she had to contend with.

"D-d-did you come here b-because of the revolts?" Rai Lee asked.

"Revolts? What revolts?" Nila asked.

"Increasing tensions between Azul and Ozai. Some of it's coming to violence. And violence long-overdue," the yet unnamed Baihu sister in the next room answered, even as she continued to scribe something before her with her full attention.

"Hold on a second," Sokka finally cut in. "Why are we even talking to these girls – no offense intended, ladies – considering who we are? I mean, they could..."

"We're safe here," Zuko said. He moved past them all and toward the back room. "Gwen? A word?"

"Of course," the strangely named Baihu said with a nod. Zuko moved in and closed the door behind him, cutting the two of them off. Nila raised a brow at that. She had assumed that the blind earthbender and he were romantically involved. She just shrugged and carried on with her trying to follow conversations.

"So what happened to Ashan? Why isn't he here?" Tzu Zi asked, turning back to Nila.

Nila's eyes drifted to the floor. "He has been slain."

"Oh... Nila, that's terrible," Tzu Zi said with honest grief.

"You're wondering why we're not ratting you out? Well, snitches get stitches around here," the obvious criminal about the sisters informed.

"There is snitching, and then there is treason," the one Baihu who didn't look like Tzu Zi pointed out. She was shorter, a bit plumper, and wore spectacles to see. A cynical person – like Nila – would say that this one was a defective copy of a far finer prototype.

"Hey, if you've got the Avatar under your roof, then you're in for every penny you've got. Treason's just a slap on the wrist at that point," the criminal pointed out. Many eyes turned toward her. "What? Did you honestly think that we wouldn't guess with just a headband? You've got a lot to learn about effective disguise, kid."

"Kid? I'm almost a hundred years older than you!" Aang complained.

"How did Ashan... you know..." Tzu Zi asked Nila. Nila sighed, trying not to dredge up the sensations of the memories. She was deprived her chance to answer, though, as Tzu Zi looked past Nila to the doorway, and went deathly pale.

"Alright, I've managed to fit Appa into the barn, but I don't think those eel-horses are happy about it," Malu said as she struck dust from her kavi.

Tzu Zi launched into a shriek which brought every whit of attention squarely onto her. Her hands twisted down and she pulled back into a fighting form, fire flowing along her hands as she did. "Get back! We can hold it off if..."

"Calm down," Aang said, getting between Tzu Zi and his airbending counterpart. The act caused Tzu Zi to hesitate, which was lucky for all involved. "Malu's not the Host to Imbalance anymore. She's on our side."

"...really?"

"Yes. Strange things happen when that boy is near," Nila said with annoyance, mostly at how often she'd had to repeat that very thing in recent weeks. "Mother was captured by a monster in fine clothing. We rescued her, but too late to prevent his corruption of her mind. Somewhat, anyway."

"She shot Aang in the back," Sokka said, thankfully in his case without judgement. Tzu Zi's eyes went wide at that.

"Really? Why would she do that?"

"Because she was ordered to," Nila said.

"Wow, there's a lot of talking going on, ain't there?" Toph asked the waterbender beside her.

"Everybody seems to know one-another."

"Yeah, I hate it too," Toph answered a question never asked.

"But... why would your Mom hurt the Avatar. I thought she was on his side?"

"As I said, Long Feng corrupted her, bent her to his will. It is not something I can explain more deeply than that."

"Hey! Is it true that you and the cute one are going out?" Ty Lee physically barged into the conversation with Nila. Behind her, Aang and Malu both gave each other a look, shrugged, and moved out of the way of the press of nearly identical girls.

"I am fairly certain that the Avatar has his eye on the princess," Nila said.

"No, not that one," she said with a playful bat to the arm which had Nila raising her eyebrow in warning; sadly, it was a warning which was neither delivered nor understood. "The other one! The Hillman..."

"Tribesman, thank you," Sokka said. Nila gave him a glance.

"Perhaps," Nila answered. Ty Lee instantly looked puzzled.

"I thought it was yes or no," Ty Lee said.

"The yes or the no will depend entirely upon the contents of a long-overdue conversation," Nila said flatly. Ty Lee's eyes widened.

"Oooooh. I get it. You two had a fight, didn't you!"

"No," Nila said.

"Yeah, kinda," Sokka countered at the same time. Nila turned to him. "What? We did!"

"Nevertheless," Nila stressed. "This place will not be safe for any of us, nor for any amount of time."

"We're not going to sell you out," Tzu Zi stressed. "You're our friends. And honestly, you're probably the best chance we've got to keep the Fire Nation from breaking to pieces."

"What?" Azula asked, her attention pulled away from the knot of Baihu sisters which was clamoring for her attention.

"It's a depressingly common rumor that the Fire Lord is going mad," Kah Ri answered Azula's question. "If Montoya decides that the rumor is more fact than fiction, he'll plunge the Fire Nation into outright civil war."

"We have to stop him," Azula declared to Aang.

"What? Why? I thought that stopping the Fire Lord was the second most important thing to stopping Imbalance!"

Azula gesticulated, and then shook her head. "I have my reasons. Even if I'm having trouble articulating them."

"Princess Azula? Inarticulate? Who would have thought," Kah Ri said dismissively.

"Hey! It's not her fault that a spirit almost killed her a long time ago," Aang spoke up.

"I can handle myself in this," Azula cut the Avatar off. Aang looked... hurt, but didn't complain. "Tell me something. If I am so inarticulate, then why is it that of the two of us, I'm the one without the country-rube accent?"

Kah Ri gasped with shock. "How dare you!"

"You might want to pull in that drawl. Your erudition teacher would be ashamed if he heard it," Azula said. Kah Ri pulled her dress in and stormed off in a great huff. Azula just smirked as she left. Nila had to admit, she liked seeing the arrogant Baihu from this angle; her walking away in rage. "I've wanted to do that for years, apparently."

"Won't your Mom be angry if she finds out... who we've got here?" Katara asked. Ty Lee broke off and turned to her.

"Oh, she probably won't mind. She's too happy to be alive right now to care about something like that," Ty Lee said with a wave of her hand. Nila rubbed her head. There was trying to keep track of conversations, then there was trying to herd stimulant infused cats through a burning boat as it sank in a monsoon.

"Good," Azula said. She stared at Ty Lee for a moment. "...it's good to see you again."

Ty Lee beamed, and then hugged Azula again with what was probably a rib-creaking embrace. "I know! It's been forever since we were all together!"

"You have no idea," Azula said, her eyes pressed shut. Nila was sure, for all her limited experience, that Azula couldn't have been happier there.

"Come on, Nila. I'll find you a room. There's plenty to go around, these days," Tzu Zi said, giving Nila's hand a comforting squeeze. Even after that long absence, the firebender could still read Nila like a book, and knew when she was getting overwhelmed.

"It will surely be better then sleeping on rocks and rubble," Nila said. Tzu Zi raised a brow at that odd assertion.

"It's a long story," Sokka said, keeping up with the two of them as they moved off into the house, the gaggle of Baihu girls dispersing throughout as they did. They left only two standing near the door in bemusement.

"...so are we invited in or what?" Toph asked.

"I'm... not really sure," Katara said.

---

Zuko slid the door closed behind him, eliminating the worst of the din of excited Baihus behind him, and turned his attention to the one before him. She sat, turned half way out of the table she was writing on. "You look well," Zuko said.

"And you look like you haven't had a haircut in a year," Gwen said dryly. "Drop the small-talk. We're both terrible at it."

Zuko sighed. As much as Ty Lee's vibrant energy infused everybody around her, it was always this one whom Zuko got along with best. They both shared the same temperament. "You've probably guessed why I came back."

"The Exiled Prince and the Banished Princess, back on Fire Nation soil, without some grand declaration by our ruler on the Burning Throne saying it was permitted? I can only assume it isn't for his best interests," Gwen said dryly.

Zuko smirked. "Oh, you haven't the faintest idea. Do you remember that plan we talked about, back before the Agni Kai, before the banishment?"

"And the two years after it," Gwen prodded. "Of course. Your most recent letter told that you were heading toward the south-pole. I have to assume that's where this insanity with the Avatar began. Since then, you've kept me out of the loop. I don't appreciate that."

"I got busy. Azula needed my help."

"And she doesn't any longer?" Gwen asked with a chuckle. At that, there was a sigh of relief from Zuko, a small smile on his face.

"No... she really doesn't," he said. Gwen's expression was surprise at that, but she didn't press. "I think it's time that we start what we talked about."

"There's a problem," Gwen said.

"Oh, what now?" Zuko asked.

"Opinions of you have... slipped of late. You were permitted back. The mob think that meant you toadied up to your father for the opportunity. That you set it on fire and kicked it back at him is neither well known nor appreciated. You're not a strong symbol these days."

"But Azula would be," Zuko pointed out. "And now, she's capable of doing what's needed."

Gwen stared at him for a long moment, then gave a shrug. "If you say so. But if you're wrong, then this will end in disaster."

"How about we focus on the first part first, and let the other things happen later?" Zuko said.

"Very well. So, Prince Zuko... you want to usurp the Burning Throne," Gwen started to smile, then. It was neither warm nor kind. "Well, you've come to the right Baihu."

---

"You're late for dinner," Bumi's cracking voice sounded across the hall, causing everybody gathered to pause, look at the super-centenarian liege like he'd gone mad – which he had long ago – before turning toward the door, to the newest arrivals. Hakoda glanced around the room, taking in all of the different Earth Kingdom nations which were present in some form or another in this hall.

"I wasn't even aware I was invited," Kuei obliviously answered. Bosco, ever the quiet companion despite his massive size and strange proportions – who had ever heard of a bear before, anyway? – sat down on the stone, placidly gazing around the room.

"Oh, well. There's probably somebody willing to scrape something off his plate for you," Bumi waived his hand toward the foot of the table. "I always try to keep a full table, but you know how these things go."

"King Bumi, we..." Hakoda said.

"Oh, and you brought your friends? Well, that's going to make it difficult to feed everybody..."

"Um... my liege, the chefs haven't brought out the third course yet," a pristine smocked individual at the King of Omashu's side said at a whisper which nevertheless carried across the room.

"Oh, right! And here I was concerned that we were going to go hungry," Bumi said, before launching into cackling, snorting laughter. The others, not used to his... well, madness... glanced amongst themselves, and offered nervous laughter of their own to his braying.

"...as I was saying," Hakoda said. "We hope that you're willing to give a warm fire and a stout roof to weary travelers. We've come a long way to be here."

"Grand-uncle, it's been a long time since we met face to face," Zha Yu said, a smirk on his face as he moved to the fore. Bumi stood up, and gave his considerably younger relative a scrutinous eye.

"You stopped shaving," Bumi declared.

"So have you," Zha Yu answered. Bumi patted his chin as though in shock, and discovered the twisting sprig of beard there.

"My! So I have!" Bumi laughed once more, though far shorter this time.

"Is he always like this?" Piandao asked, leaning in toward the Dragon of the East.

"Short answer? Yes," she said.

"Long answer?" Hakoda asked.

"Yes, and may the gods have mercy on us."

"Earth King Kuei? It is an honor to meet your Eminence in person," Sultan Wahid, who was supposedly Sativa's ruler, offered, standing and bowing toward the much younger liege. He looked every inch of him the resplendent ruler, decked in colorful linens and a headdress which was spun, it was certain, of silver threads. "I have not had the time in my rule to make the journey north; things have been so taxing. I am sure you are aware."

"Of course. I understand completely... king...?" Kuei said.

"He is Sultan, not king," Sativa said flatly at the Earth King's back.

"A discrepancy not to be dwelt upon," Wahid waved the notion away. Hakoda glanced to the Mountain King.

"Who are these people?" he asked the older, strange-eyed man.

"Every King, Chief, Grand Prince, Grand Duke, Primarch and Prelate that lives south of the Great Divide," Badesh answered in his stead. "There is more power, population, and land in this room than you will find anywhere else, even counting all of the Fire Nation under Ozai."

"And what's more, they've all been so long out of useful contact with Ba Sing Se, that the chances of Long Feng's corrupting them are essentially nil," Zha Yu said. "Excuse me. I have something I need to attend to with the King."

"Yes?" Kuei asked.

"Not you. That king," Zha Yu pointed forward. At least a half-dozen other 'kings' all turned toward him querulously before noticing that he was indicating the lord of the manor, as it were.

"May I have your attention?" Kuei asked, raising his meager voice to try to quash the din around him. "Please, can you... Listen to me?"

"QUIET!" Sativa shouted. The royalty in the room fell silent, turning toward her with incredulity, which in some of them, dawned into either alarm or realization. Sativa turned to the Earth King at her side. "As you were?"

"Um... yes. Ah, we are gathered here..." Kuei trailed off. He flicked a glance toward Hakoda. "It's gone right out of my head."

"Long Feng, and the Comet," Hakoda prompted. Kuei swallowed, no-doubt dryly, and turned to face the assembled rulers.

"Ahem. I am standing as a ruler in exile," Kuei began. "My royal palace has been usurped, and many of my leaders have been subverted. A pretender sits on the Earth King's throne," he said. He took a breath, no doubt calming himself as his momentum started to carry him forward. "But I'm not here because of that. There's something much more important than my throne or my city. It's the fate of the entire world which lies in the balance."

There was a murmur which sprung up through the crowd. At the far side of the room, Zha Yu and Bumi were kneeling at far sides of a Pai Sho board, and were oblivious to the goings on around them. "The Earth King is speaking true," Hakoda said. "I have lost a brace of my kinsmen to that monster, but I can not seek revenge. Not today. Not until the World War is ended; if we fail to unseat the Fire Lord, to end the World War by the end of summer, then there will be no point to revenge at all; there won't be much of anything left."

"I don't ask you to fight for me. I ask you to fight for yourselves, and what you will have when the summer turns to autumn," Kuei said with a vigorous nod.

"Not to interrupt," a familiar if extremely surprising voice said at Hakoda's side, quietly enough that Kuei could project further even with his untrained voice. Hakoda turned, and his eyes widened as he beheld the entire corps of his friends, his countrymen who had joined him on this fool's errand. Ogan, in particular spoke for them, "but we're not exactly lost."

"Ogan? How did you get out of Ba Sing Se? And how did you get here?"

"Wasn't easy," Ogan said with a shrug. "Long story."

Hakoda felt a grin pulling his face, as he clasped forearms with the solidly built hunter, his third-in-command, and apparently, the most resourceful member of the Water Tribes since Hakoda himself. "You'll have to tell me how you did it later. I'm sure it's a thrilling story."

"Not really," Ogan shrugged. The Tribesmen behind him gave out a loud laugh at that. "Alright, maybe a little," he glanced to and fro, before leaning in. After a moment, he beckoned Bato to join them as well. After all, this was a meeting of Tribesmen. "Did you find your girl?"

"No," Hakoda said. "I mean, yes, but..."

"Yes or no; can't be both," Ogan didn't sound amused. Then again, he seldom did.

Hakoda sighed, and gave a look to Bato. Bato nodded. "He found Hikaoh, but it's like you said. She's working for the Fire Nation," he said.

"She won't even answer to her own name," Hakoda said sadly. Ogan reached out a broad mitt and clapped it onto Hakoda's shoulder.

"We'll get 'em back. I've got faith," Ogan said.

"I wish I shared it," Hakoda admitted.

"...that the Avatar will be our figure-head; I've heard that the boy died months ago!" one of the Prelates countered some unheard statement of Kuei's, her dark eyes pulled down in disbelief.

"The Avatar is very much alive. Well, he looked somewhat sickly when we left him, but..." Kuei said.

"This would be the time to stop talking," Sativa said flatly. Kuei nodded and shut up. She took a step forward, into the spot he abdicated. "Hello. You know who I am."

"King Bumi, you should remove this demon from your hall! She is an enemy of my country!" the First Citizen of Three Hills demanded.

"Nope!" Bumi said happily, as he and his relative exchanged Pai Sho moves so rapidly it seemed that they weren't even letting the other make his own; not exactly true, since every move they each made was legal.

The First Citizen fumed. Sativa just stared the pompously dressed man down. She then looked up and down the table. "There are some I do not see. Where is the Matriarch of Kyoshi? Where is the Lord Mayor of Chin?"

"Both annexed by the Fire Nation," Wahid answered, nodding grimly. "Along with Merchant's Pier. We've gotten word that they've occupied Senlin as well."

"So you see the dire importance of swift action," Sativa stressed. "We can fight together, or we can die apart. Even bereft of the spiritual calamity that the Earth King speaks of, you must at least see that simple truth."

"And what? We should pledge our armies to your mastery?" the King of Chul asked, suspicious.

"We fight together, or we die apart," Sativa said once again. "Are you so willing to fall into that second category?"

"I am not," a new voice came from behind them all. All turned, and noted a dusty, scarred and armored woman who was moving through the doorway and into the hall. She looked in her middle age, but the harshness of the elements had leathered her somewhat. There was a snarl which Hakoda turned to see came from the aged Sultan, who tore the scimitar from the belt of one of the white-robed Darvesh attending him, and strained toward this newcomer, only to be held back by Piandao. The woman smirked at that, letting herself come to a halt. "I see that the Nemesis still holds me in high regard."

"I should kill you and feed you to the beetles for what you have done to my subjects!" Wahid shouted, straining but not gaining ground past the stalward swordsman. But the barb, which Hakoda could tell was intended to enrage the woman, simply rolled off of her back. Hakoda glanced around her, confused. Sativa in particular looked shocked to see this person here.

"Enough of them already have been," she said. She looked the Dragon of the East in the eye. "And only now do I face the thinking mind of Si Wong in person. Such a pity that you had to be born under such louts. You would have been a splendid Noyan."

"I had heard you crushed by the beast inside a girl's skin," Sativa said. "Khagan Khatun. Or should I simply call you Borte, as you have doubtless lost so much of your clout."

"Less than you would hope," Borte taunted. She glanced to the Sultan. "And as much as I would like to exact a fine retribution for the deaths of near two hundred thousand of my Tunghaut and Darga, I know that this is not the day for revenge. There will be more than enough time for that after the fate of the world is not in such dire jeopardy."

"You cannot believe this madness," one of the other royals, a Grand Duchess from the swordsmen flanking her, said. Borte's dark eyes flashed at the royal.

"Believe it? I have SEEN IT!" she shouted. "I have tasted the ashes of it! I have felt the sting of it! I looked into the heavens and beheld the end of all things there! So if I must align myself with the likes of them," she pointed unkindly to each of Sultan Wahid and Sativa Badesh, "to ensure that my people are not destroyed as thoroughly as my army was, then I will do so, without a moment's compunction. And so should you."

"Oh, gods damn it, where did that come from?" Zha Yu complained at the Pai Sho table. "...I'm going to lose in ten moves."

"Don't start a fight you can't finish, my boy," Bumi chastised with good humor.

Wahid stopped straining against Piandao, and faced down his age-old enemy. "So you would put up your bows from our backs? What benefit is there to Dakong, beyond the obvious, to joining us? Why not simply wait out, and allow others to pay that high price?"

"Because I know that if nobody pays it, then everybody will."

Bumi rose from the Pai Sho board, confident in his imminent victory and addressing the group. He cleared his throat, rubbing a hand down his beard, and waited for silence to fall, which it only did when it became abundantly clear that the mad old king's patience was starting to wear thin. Finally, he raised a ring-bedecked hand into the air, and said, "Dessert will be served in half an hour! Make sure to keep a fork."

"And the army?" Zha Yu asked at the ancient monarch's back, as he still focused on the board before him.

"That? Oh, right. The Dragon of the East can have Omashu's armies. Since she's also got the Dakongese already, that makes a force that can't be sniffed at," Bumi said in a dismissive tone, as though it were of little consequence. Then again, to Bumi, it very well may not have been. Ogan stepped forward.

"We can fight 'em," he said. Hakoda caught his arm, and the stocky man turned back. "Hrm?"

"You can, but you won't," Hakoda said. "We've been away from home too long, and we've lost too much already. The men should return to Chimney Mountain."

"All due respect, Chief," Ogan said, shrugging Hakoda's hand away, "...no."

Bato nodded at Ogan's intractability. "His son is out there, Chief. He's not going to stop now, even to see Sedna and Benell. Would you stop, knowing that it meant you wouldn't see your children? Or find Hikaoh?"

He had to admit, Bato had a point. Hakoda nodded slowly. "Any who wishes to be part of this task-force, volunteer; I won't order you away from your homes after all you've done for so long."

Ogan turned to one, then another of the men under his de facto command. He pointed out two. "You. You. No children to carry out the line if you die," he said to the two youngest of their war-party. The older was only twenty winters old. "Go home. We can carry this."

"But..."

"He won't order you. I will," Ogan stressed. The youngest, those without wives, or if possessing wives, without children began to filter out of the mass, forming a knot independent of the older hands, those who had lost the most of everybody left. Hakoda knew for a fact that every person who wasn't selected for a return to the South Water Tribe had lost somebody the day the Fire Nation stole their children. Some, like pale-eyed Sajuuk, had lost more than most; he lost two sons and a newborn daughter all in one fell swoop. Ogan turned to Hakoda. "There's your men. We'll fight."

"Alright. Chimney Mountain, Alulbitavut, and Rough Lee-Havavut will be part of the Black Sun Invasion," Hakoda declared.

"An army lead by Tribesmen? That's absurd!"

"No, your face is absurd!" Bumi said, before bursting into laughter. The grown men all shared a confused look at the immaturity of Bumi's comment, before that snorting bray died instantly, and his mismatched eyes glared at him. "You're not laughing at my joke. You don't agree with anything that's being said. You're just being difficult. I don't like difficult people in my kingdom."

"Is that a threat?" the pompous princeling demanded. Bumi stared, unblinking, until the arrogant ass fell silent, and then sat back down. Bumi turned to the others, a cheerful smile back on his face.

"Alright! You've heard the plan! It's not like any of the rest of you have anything important planned for the Day of Black Sun. You might as well join with us."

One of the Grand Dukes sighed, shrugged, and stood. "This is madness," he said simply.

"I've done better with madder," Sativa pointed out.

"A lot of people are going to die," the Princess of some land that Hakoda had never visited, notable mostly for the almost South-Si Wongi tattoos which ran up her hands and arms if not the coloration of her skin.

"A lot more will die if you don't," Zha Yu said, before letting out an 'aha', and making to move a Pai Sho piece, before pausing, groaning, and sliding it back.

The Grand Duke glanced to one of the rulers opposite the table from him, then to the Earth King who was standing silently at the foot of the table. Hakoda was just happy that the naïve young man had managed to do so for so long without fidgiting. "I have often heard if you're going to do something crazy, it should at least be bold. You'll have my cavalry."

"If Hu Rudong bids its cavalry, the City of Katapesh offers its marksmen; you shall not find better," the Princess offered. After that, begrudging but sincere offers of support for this crazy, bold plan. Hakoda started doing the numbers in his head. And when he realized the force that they were gathering, it made him smile, just a bit.

There was a pretty good chance that they could pull this off.

---

Azula glanced toward the Avatar as he sidled up closer. Ty Lee had gone off, happily nattering on with the waterbender and the female airbender whom Azula had no recollection of. "You look pretty happy to be here," Aang said.

"I am," Azula said, watching her oldest friend, and feeling as a tension which had been felt for far, far too long bled away from her. "It's good to see she's alright."

Aang nodded. "What happened in that world you lived in?"

"Which one?" Azula asked with something of a dry chuckle. "In one, you're waterbending paramour bested me on the day of Sozin's Comet, while you tore the soul out of my father. In the other, well, Ty Lee was the Avatar, and I don't know what became of my father."

"Where was I in that one?" Aang asked.

"Probably a century dead," Azula shrugged. "Every morning, I wake up and the sun fills me with power, and I know that if I wanted to, I could probably burn you down to soot. But... I don't want to. Because I know that I have to let that go," she said. She leaned back against a wall, and he leaned opposite her. "I've spent a lot of years angry. I'm tired of being angry."

Aang nodded, slowly. "Tell me about your children," he said quietly. Azula glanced up, not expecting that line of conversation from him. But then again, it was probably on his mind the same as she was on Azula's.

"Chiyo was... Everything I wanted in a daughter," Azula said. "I didn't realize it until it was almost too late, but I did. Daichi on the other hand... I made mistakes with him I shouldn't have. Should have known better than to. At least his father was there for him; he grew to be a good man, even if he did have a strange fetish for Eastern women. Maybe it was because he wasn't a firebender, that I couldn't connect with him. Chiyo was almost as strong as I am with her fire. I wager she was even smarter. But... She was stubborn. And when she got it into her head that her mother deserved a degree of vengeance, there was no force in the world which would dissuade her," Azula said. Her eyes drifted toward the floor. "Katara killed her, to keep her away from you. She didn't want to; I know that about her, and I knew it about her then. I was just too full of grief and rage to care. Chiyo didn't give her an option."

"But your daughter..."

"Was thirty years old when she died," Azula finished. Aang gaped at her for a long time. Azula nodded. "And to this day, I still see her as the golden eyed little girl who just wanted her mama to carry her. Motherhood. It's a strange disease. You wanted to know if I blamed Katara for Chiyo's death? Not anymore. Chiyo was her own woman. She made her own decision. It just took me a long time to realize that."

Azula glanced aside as the waterbender in question appeared around a corner. She shot a look somewhere between annoyance and concern toward the Avatar, before showing one which was mostly wariness toward Azula. As well she would. "The sisters are getting a meal ready for us. But we shouldn't stay here too long. We don't know what their mother would say to having you under her roof," Katara said, most likely to Aang. Possibly to Azula as well.

"She always was kind-hearted," Azula noted.

"Which makes me confused as to why she'd ever be friends with you," Katara said bitingly. Azula didn't rise to the challenge, though.

"Nobility have few friends. Royalty, less. I just happened upon Ty Lee one day when Mother and Father weren't paying attention. She was... bright. Happy. She lit up the room by being in it. How could I not be friends with that?" Azula gave a motion toward where Ty Lee was dragging a confounded looking Si Wongi up a hallway, even as she talked at around a thousand words a minute. "But you're not wrong. I've never had what I deserved until I was cast down, and even then, I found ways to mess it up."

Katara tilted her head aside. "Why are you even here, anyway?" Katara asked. "I didn't think you'd fight your father."

"My feelings regarding my father don't factor into this. If I don't side with the Avatar, the world dies. Since I want to live, it's in my best interests to help him."

"That's a poor reason. What would keep you from stabbing him in the back the moment that the world isn't under immediate danger?" Katara asked. Azula sighed, and shook her head lightly.

"You wouldn't believe the answer if I said it," Azula said. The waterbender's look, though, clearly said 'try me'. "Very well. I'm tired of failing. Two times in two lives I've fought against you. Two times in two, I've been crushed like an insect. I don't want to fight for the losing side anymore; I'm tired of failing."

"We're not exactly the winning side, here," Katara said. "We've got no real plan, not many people helping us, and the best ally we have in the Fire Nation is probably you. Which is really sad."

"Give it a month or three. I know how this ends," Azula said. She glanced up at Katara. "For what it's worth, I will not hold a grudge for your humiliating me. Beaten by a waterbender, that often, when I was that powerful?" she shook her head.

"I don't trust your reasons," Katara said plainly.

"You don't have to," Azula said. "Only he does."

Katara turned to Aang, whom Azula was pointing at. "I don't like this."

"You don't have to," Azula repeated, continuing to point at Aang. "Only he does."

Katara fumed for a long moment, then turned to Azula once again. "Did... I really kill your daughter?"

"Yes, you did," Azula said. "But by the time it happened, your reasons were fairly valid."

"If she was thirty when she died, when did you have her?" Aang asked.

"A few months after getting out of imprisonment," Azula said. She shrugged. "It was a simple matter of seducing the guard. A perfect seduction is one where one promises everything, delivers nothing, and receives anything. A failed one is the opposite. I'd call mine a 'qualified success'."

"Hey, Katara. Hey, Aang. Hey Az... Yup, still not used to this dynamic," Sokka said as he appeared 'round the corner that Ty Lee had come from. "Talking strategy? Mind if I butt in?"

"No, she was talking about how she got out of prison," Katara said. "By being a tramp."

"A tramp is a woman who is a slave to her lusts and will entertain them to her own detriment. I used mine like a scalpel," Azula countered. "Besides, I got Chiyo out of it. It was... worth it."

"Do you know who her father was?" Aang asked.

"Oh, yes," Azula said, remembering the memory. It was still fairly vivid, even after all of the intervening years.

"Who was it?" Katara asked, sounding begrudgingly if genuinely curious. Azula shrugged.

"Well, she had my eyes, my fire, my general appearance. She was closer to her father's complexion, though. She had his intellect, his rock-headedness, and his laugh."

"Anybody we know?" Sokka asked.

Azula gave him the most loaded look that she had available of her many, many looks. Katara caught on to it pretty quickly.

"Oh, Sokka! How could you!" the waterbender asked.

"What? How could I what?" Sokka asked.

"With Azula? Really?" Katara demanded.

"I didn't do anything!" Sokka pleaded. There was a clearing of the throat from the corner, and Azula spared a glance to an annoyed Si Wongi standing there. Sokka's expression drooped. "There's no good way out of this, is there?"

"To his defense, he was in his twenties when it happened, and on a rough patch with his paramour. I simply turned it to my advantage. He never knew that he had another daughter, and I was in no hurry to inform him," Azula said casually, while everybody stared either gobsmacked at her, or annoyed at Sokka. "Have fun with your current mistress," Azula said.

"Slim chance of that," Sokka said. The Si Wongi moved closer, giving a dry look to Azula as she grabbed Sokka's arm and pulled him away from he group, while holding her own ground. Azula was fairly certain that the Si Wongi was measuring her up; either for a fight, or for a coffin.

"You," Nila said, "are not his type."

The Tribesman looked positively relieved as the woman started to haul him down the hallway. Azula turned to Katara. "If you want a strategy, talk to my brother. He's speaking with the mistress of the house; from what I recall of Gwen, she always was a shrewd and pragmatic type."

"I think I will," Katara said, backing away from the Avatar and the Fire Princess. She paused, though, before turning, and pointed a finger at them. "Don't you corrupt him, though!"

"Don't corrupt me?" Aang asked, and Katara, likely realizing how idiotic that sounded when put to the air, blanched and darted out of sight. Azula laughed in that quiet, superior way that she preferred to. Aang shook his head, and turned back to her. "So... Are you...

"You're attracted to me, aren't you?" Azula asked.

"What? No! I mean, you're pretty and I'd kiss you if my life was on the line and... Oh monkey-feathers this isn't what I'm trying to say at all! I'd..." Aang stammered and sputtered. Azula smirked.

"Avatar, I am effectively ninety eight years old. Any relationship I had with somebody 'my own age' would be robbing a cradle, and not worth my time."

"...Well, I'm technically a hundred and fifteen, so I'm still older," Aang countered, obviously not going to bend his path.

"I've done this before. Have you?"

"...well..." Aang said.

"I've had children. A husband. A life. Three lives," Azula said. "And honestly, I don't know if this is even the right time for any fledgling romance to begin with. The world might well end in two months. What would be the point?"

"That time is so precious is the point," Aang said, neither desperate nor anxious. Now that the words were out, it seemed, they weren't shackling him. "It's better to have a good thing, even if you aren't sure that you're going to have it tomorrow, than to have nothing forever."

Azula had to admit; the Avatar was not wrong on that. But she didn't answer it. She just let the two of them lapse into silence, punctuated only by a gust of wind that rattled the window-shutters nearby. There were voices in the house, but they were all muffled by walls and more. They might as well have been alone. But for each other.

---

"Alright. Can we talk about what happened back there at the Air Temple?" Sokka asked.

"I have discussed it at length with Malu. Those were Shards of the Imbalance which inhabited her. You have an uncommon resistance to them, which will be invaluable when..." Nila began, but Sokka cut her off the only way he knew how, by clapping a hand over her mouth. She glared at the interruption, but didn't, say, shoot him. He considered it a win.

"I was talking about before that. You know. What we did?" Sokka asked. Nila blinked a few times.

"Oh. That," she said, flatly.

"THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!" Sokka declared, more out of a long-standing need to vent his utter confusion of the meaning of it; he might not have been the most empathetic or insightful, but everything about what he'd learned growing up said that there were ways of doing things. Ways which were... not honored. "I mean, we're barely even going out! I didn't even know you were interested until earlier that evening!"

"So you do not wish to repeat it?" Nila asked, somewhat confused.

"Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves," Sokka reined his tone in.

"I should think you wouldn't," Nila said. "It was less unpleasant than I had been lead to believe."

"Less unpleasant? That's about the cruelest compliment I've ever gotten, and I've gotten a lot," Sokka said dejectedly. Nila sighed, and sat down beside him on the bed, shaking her head.

"And you often wonder why so many people throw bricks at my head," Nila said. "I have misspoken. It was... good?"

"Nope, ego's still deflated," Sokka said. He leaned back, laying on the remarkably comfortable mattress and staring at the ceiling. Nila lounged beside him. "I'm just... Why didn't you stop?"

"I did not wish to. I believed that you would be limiting our progress to your favored pace," Nila said. Sokka turned to stare at her. She seemed to... was she blushing? No. Nila didn't blush. "I was progressing at the rate of innovation."

"...so both of us thought the other was going to blink first," Sokka said. "Well, that explains a few things. Like that thing you did with your..."

"I had heard it described by Gashuin's friends. I wanted to see if it was possible," Nila shrugged. And now Sokka was growing increasingly sure that she was blushing. She seemed a bit darker of complexion, after all, even if her expression didn't match it.

"We're a pair of idiots, aren't we?" Sokka asked.

"So it would seem," Nila said, a very subdued smile on her face. "I assume from your annoyance that you still wish to attempt a relationship?" Sokka gave a look of surprise, as he was about to assume that she'd assume the opposite. She rolled her eyes. "If there is one lesson that I have learned from being around you and your Avatar, it is to presume that my first assumption in social situations is wrong. Does my initial assumption ring true?"

"Yeah, but we should probably take thing a little slower from now on," Sokka said, scooting up and pulling her close. It probably wasn't obvious to see her, but just having contact made her... unwind. The clockspring-tightness of her muscles started to loosen, and she relaxed. "You know. If you don't mind."

"Not in the slightest," Nila said, her voice somewhat distant. She turned up, glancing to him with one bright green eye. "And I do apologize for the bite. I have no idea why I did that."

"I think I've got an idea," Sokka said happily. Well, that was a pleasant development after a lot of unnecessary tension. He even told her that very thing. Nila chuckled.

"Do you think that other 'couples' have to deal with this nonsense?" she asked.

"Probably. And they don't even get to be smart about it," Sokka said. She snorted. "...soooo. Want to do it again?"

"...did you not just say?" Nila began.

"I'm joking, I'm joking," Sokka said. She shook her head, and nestled close. Sokka stared out the window, into the rare blue sky that peeked through the clouds beyond. "Although, I've got to say, you were telling the truth," Sokka said.

"Hrm?"

He glanced down at her, a wide grin on his face. "You really weren't wearing any underwear."

---

As much as the Fire Palace was an architectural marvel – it was built by hand, log by log, lacquered panel by lacquered panel, rather than in a great afternoon of earthbending – there was one thing which could be said about it and those buildings which mimicked it. It was both drafty, and filled with places for somebody to hide. The roofs were a particular nightmare given the weather of the Fire Nation over the last half-century and more. When the Deluge began, they leaked furiously. Once the leaking stopped, they were gusty. Once the gustiness was fixed, the tiles were torn off by wind in an embarrassing fashion. And when that was fixed, there was a lot of room under their peaks.

Enough room for, say, an assassin to skulk.

Yan Rha didn't think himself the kind of person in that kind of threat. Any enemies, he reckoned, would be Tribesmen or those who bore Tribal sympathies. What dug at him, though, was the waiting. As much as he didn't like the idea of rebelling against a sitting Fire Lord, he'd still preferred to have done so immediately. This waiting around was bad for his heart, he was certain. But Zhao had been adamant that they await the perfect moment, when Ozai was at his weakest, his most depressingly demented. Not that it would probably take long. Yan Rha had heard a few rumors in his time in the Capital City.

He poured out a measure of ginseng tea, taking a whiff of its biting aroma, before starting to sip at it. They would probably act tomorrow, likely at mid day when Zhao and his confederates were at their strongest. Yan Rha flared a bolt of flame into his free hand as he paced around. It wasn't as strong as it would have been in his youth; time was seldom kind to firebenders. But he would persevere.

He picked up the instructions, all writ in an encrypted code that Zhao had provided a key for. A key which existed only in Yan Rha's memory. His set of preparations were already complete and in motion. It would fall to the others to do their parts. He continued to sip, and he felt himself fatigued. Soon, he'd have to sleep, unless the ginseng perked him up again. He sat down, wondering what he'd do with a Fire Lord owing him the very throne; at the very least, he could finally be rid of his harpy of a mother who found ways to intrude on his life every moment he wasn't aboard a ship. Zhao would probably smile when he gave the order for her execution. Yan Rha would probably be smiling, too.

He stifled a yawn, drinking the tea faster. When he still felt tired, he sat in the chair, faced away from the desk with the documents on it. Not suspicious in the least; most would simply believe it naval orders. Those had to be encrypted to prevent falling into enemy hands all the time, for most of the orders which came from the Joint Chiefs of War at least. His eyes felt somewhat leaden. Well, what was a moment's sleep?

A flicker of movement caused his eyes to stir, to snap back open. A man had dropped from the ceiling onto the floorboards near where Yan Rha was sitting. His eyes went wide as he recognized the Tribesman. They almost relaxed when he then realized it was likely Ozai's pet waterbender, but the look on that pet waterbender's face didn't allow such relaxation.

"What do you want here, Child?" Yan Rha asked. Or tried to. His words, surprising even to he, came out as a mush.

"You shouldn't have taken children from their parents," the waterbender said darkly. "And more importantly, you shouldn't have lied about it," he said, producing a blade, long, straight, and shining in the light. "I don't appreciate when I'm lied to."

Yan Rha could neither move nor shout for help. His eyes flicked down to the cup, still cradled in his paralyzed hand. Poison! That fiend! The Tribesman pulled his arm back, cocking for a thrust which would end an old firebender's life. As he did, he said something which Yan Rha couldn't understand. Then, the blade flashed forward, and a life ended.

What Kori – or Ked, perhaps – had said? "And this is for my 'mother', you son of a bitch."

---

The smell was getting to General Mung, that was clear. It drove a spike into his brain and tapped on that spike with a ball-peen hammer with the ever rising rhythm of his heartbeat. It wasn't just the river; the diesely stink of the river punt was adding to a melange which would have made him sick to his stomach had he not become used to it. But it didn't prevent the headaches. There was a reason why he came down here as infrequently as he did.

"Jang Hui in sight, General," the pilot said, as he steered the punt through the slime. The lines they cut in the scum closed back on themselves quickly enough, but left a long, black trail heading back up the river to where their river-craft were maintained. That trail would slowly move past the village, in time. "Pulling us in."

"Of course, of course. Let's make this quick," Mung muttered, rubbing at his chin as he often found himself doing. The scar that the Tribesmen gave him was clear, there; they'd almost cut his face off with those cruel, sharp knives, and the stitches which held it together from the field hospital prevented it from healing properly. Thus, Mung had a road-map of twisting scars all over his face. As there was little he could do about it at this juncture, Mung just accepted that it gave him something of a menacing air.

The punt bumped into the floating jetty, and Mung was the first one off of it. The other punt and the soldiers atop both followed soon after, stomping up the ramp toward the center of this so-called fishing village. Mung was aware, though, that the eyes that followed him were more intent than once they had been. As Mung rounded a corner, a young man wearing some sort of blue turban was standing in his way. He turned toward Mung, thunking the butt of his fishing gaff against the floorboards with seeming deliberation and threat. But while the act spoke of malevolence, the youth didn't follow it up with anything of note. He just stared at Mung as the general and his guard fell still. "What are you staring at, boy? Get out of my way," Mung demanded.

The youth did back up, letting the general past him. But the way his gaze lingered on the military men just didn't sit right with Mung. As he tried to keep an eye on the youth with the gaff, going so far as to turn his head after him, he found himself bumped into – hard – by somebody passing in his path. "Watch where you're going!" Mung demanded. The grey-haired man glared at him from under a blue turban, but didn't say a word. He simply waved a hand, a grandiose permission to pass him by. Mung's jaw set. Something wasn't right with Jang Hui.

He continued through the 'streets', such as they were, and the obvious became apparent to him. Every adult he saw, was wearing one of those blue turbans. The women backed away, not out of fear but simply giving the soldiers a wide berth. The men formed a wall with them. And most concerning, the number of them seemed to swell. Last time Mung had been here, less than a tenth of the population had come to their jetty. Now, it seemed like all of them were in attendance. And eerily silent, all.

Mung finally emerged from a bubble of those blue-turbaned, ghoulishly silent hillbillies, to reach the center of the village, where once great stalls had sold some of the finest fish available to the Fire Nation. "I'm here for our promised share," Mung said. Xu, the crazy old bastard in charge of the store, was the only person that Mung had seen who wasn't wearing one of those silly turbans. There must have been a sale on them, or something. Xu gestured to the rack of fish that sat alone on a table. Mung scowled at the old man, then moved to the offering.

"This is... adequate of quality," Mung said. Down-playing, of course; the fish of Jang Hui was, obvious here, the finest one would find in the Fire Nation. This was a shining example of such. But better to keep one's bargaining position clear and wide open. "But we'll need more if you want as much of the medicine as you claim."

Xu nodded, rubbing pensively at his patchy mustache and beard, while another young woman stepped forward. Mung moved back to his quartermaster. "See to it that an appropriate amount of medicine is delivered. A hard week's work is to be commended, after all," Mung said sarcastically. He turned back, just in time to see the woman in the blue turban lash forward with a fist, and hurl a bolt of fire into the crate of fish. Mung's eyes widened as the seafood immediately caught ablaze, and the light that it cast against the grey, dim afternoon was all the more shocking for how quickly it burned. "...what are you doing?" Mung demanded. The girl just stood there, a hard look on her face, under her Agni-damned blue turban. "You realize you've just damned your people to even more hardship? Well? Answer me you idiot bitch!"

Mung made to back-hand her – distasteful as striking a woman was, there was an empire to maintain – but his back-swing was caught by the man who was likely the girl's father. Mung turned his glare to the villager and his odd headwear. "Release me at once, peasant."

"Not today," the man said. Mung glanced to his side, and noted that the crowd had taken one step forward, creating a claustrophobic shell around Mung and his men. As much as Mung's guard were eight of his finest firebending soldiers, the Jang Hui villagers outnumbered them at least a dozen to one. So that was their intention?

"If you value your lives, you'll stop this at once," Mung warned. They didn't heed him. They took another step inward. "This is your last chance! If you don't release me this instant, your treason will be punished, and punished fiercely."

There was a brief silence, while several of those near Mung parted, pulled back, to where a different young man from the first was leaning against the post of a long-vacant stall. Despite his casual posture, his nearly-black eyes were as incisive as daggers, and his wild hair stuck out from around his blue turban. He rolled the sprig of barley in his teeth, before shaking his head. "Maybe?" he said. "But not by you."

Mung almost got a scream off, but the crowd crashed in on the Fire Nation soldiers like a dam breaking, and they were swallowed by the tumult. His soldiers didn't even get a chance to blast more than a single bolt of fire apiece before they were mobbed and dragged down. One, who had struck a young woman in the shoulder, got gutted by a fishing-gaff for his trouble. Mung could feel hands pulling on his face, hands digging over his eyes. Hands pulling him down. Hands beating him to a pulp.

"This is just the beginning," Jet said, over the angry backs of the mob, which was now simply and mercilessly beating their oppressors. "We've got to make sure they never come back again! Let's destroy that factory!"

"For the Blue Turban!" a cry raised from the crowd. It was taken up by most of the others, but not by the youth who, ironically enough, was party to the symbol's invention. Jet turned to Mai, who had vanished into the crowd, yet now reappeared at his side. She gave him a glance, even under her own invented headware.

"Didn't think it'd catch on so quickly," Mai pointed out.

"Don't underestimate the power of a symbol," Jet said with a shrug. He looked out over them, as they ran down for their canoes and their boats. "How far do you think this is going to spread?"

"If we're lucky, all the way to the Burning Throne," Mai answered him.

---

The morning came, and most of the group was up with the sunrise – which due to the thunderstorm howling outside wasn't exactly a nice one – refreshed for having actual beds to sleep on for a change. Aang looked around those who had yet gathered around. Two of the Baihu sisters were in attendance, the acrobat and the one that creeped Aang out a little. She looked exactly like her siblings, but her eyes were as cold as Summavut ice. And that was the one that Zuko had spent much of last night plotting with.

"We've got a plan," Zuko said.

"That's usually my brother's line," Katara joked. And when she looked around, she spotted the obvious. "Where is he, anyway?"

"Heck if I know," Toph said, lounging on her back with her feet up a wall.

"Soka's plan forms the basis," Gwen began, but Katara cut her off.

"Sokka."

"...right. Sokka's plan forms the basis of this; you need allies and a straight path through Azul. We've got a couple of ideas of how to cross the mountains, but that'll come later, assuming you even survive the first few steps," Gwen pressed onward. She unfurled a maritime map and pointed at one of the islands. "This should be your first destination."

"What is it?" Malu asked, leaning over it.

"Boiling Rock," Zuko said flatly. Aang frowned at the solemnity of that. "It's a supremely secure prison, built in the crater of a semi-active volcano. The water which pools in it is heated to a scalding temperature. You wouldn't last ten seconds in it before being boiled to death."

"So why are we going there?" Aang asked. "That sounds like a terrible place to go."

"We aren't going anywhere," Zuko said. "It comes down to those who can infiltrate that prison. Frankly, you'd get picked out in less than a minute."

"So who's going?" Katara asked.

"You are," Zuko said. "Besides you, probably me, Malu here, Sokka and Nila... where are they, anyway?"

Aang could only shrug his ignorance at that.

"The objective is to release the prisoners, and create a full-scale prison break," Gwen said. Everybody, Zuko excluded, shared a look which spoke to how they didn't think that seemed like a good idea. Gwen seemed to have anticipated that. "Everybody in Burning Rock is a political prisoner or a prisoner of war with Summavut. Which is to say, a prison for the one shmuck they captured six years ago, some people who said something stupid, or didn't want to get killed by Tribesmen. Or so I thought," she opened a new scroll, and rolled it out. Aang skimmed down the names, and noticed that quite a few of them sounded Tribal, if a very immature form of it.

"Wait a second. I know that name," Katara said, pointing one out in particular. "Aalo? That's what Bato called his first daughter. The one which was taken!"

"As I'm to understand, that was the dumping ground for them. Shoved into a distant corner of the empire and left to rot," Gwen said with a note of distant distaste. Aang continued to read, but Gwen continued. "While I doubt that a hundred or so terrified teenagers will be of much use to you, I thought you should be prepared for that when you got there. The ones I'm more interested in are these two," she pointed to two that Aang had just reached.

"Whoa! That's the Matriarch of Kyoshi Island," Aang said. "And her daughter, Suki!"

Zuko sighed, hanging his head. "This one is my fault, so it's mine to fix. Although I distinctly recall not sending her to the Boiling Rock..."

"You can thank Zhao for her transfer request," Gwen said idly. Zuko growled something under his breath, then continued.

"...and having another two hundred angry, disenfranchised political enemies wandering the countryside will probably give Ozai a few sleepless nights, if nothing else."

"I should come, too," Aang pressed.

Zuko stared at him for a moment, then gave a nod to Malu. She cuffed him upside the head. "Hey! What was that for?" Aang demanded.

"Look down," Malu said. Aang did as commanded, and saw that his headband had been dislodged smartly by the blow, and sat in a coil at his feet. He clapped a hand over his arrow, which prominently displayed the arrow on his hand. His other hand flew over that first, to much the same issue.

"...I see your point," Aang said quietly.

"You can't fight every battle," Malu said, her tone comforting, even if her subject wasn't. "And you shouldn't have to. We can take this one. You and the others, you can find a way past the mountains."

Aang nodded at that, and looked out the window. "When are we going to leave?" he asked.

"When the storm breaks," Zuko said. "We could use a bit of sunshine, and it'll be cloudy where we're going, we might as well enjoy what we can get."

---

Gwen closed the door behind her, and gave a squawk of alarm when she saw her mother sitting on the edge of the bed. Much like her daughters, the matriarch of the Baihu family was dark haired and chocolate eyed, and her clothes spoke to a buxom physique, but she was... for lack of a better word, a little bit shriveled. While the color had returned to her face, and she was starting to gain back what weight she lost, it was obvious that it'd still be a long time before she was truly mended.

"Mother? Were you up? You know you shouldn't be moving around in your condition."

"I am sick, not dead. Calm yourself, sweetheart," Mother said, the same tone of distracted warmth in her voice that she often had. The woman ran her fingers along a white leaf, which was tucked into a belt. The thing seemed to dim just a tiny little bit when she did. That, or Gwen was imagining things. "You didn't tell me we had guests."

"You needed your rest," Gwen said.

"I know that the Avatar is in this house, Gwen," Mother said, swinging her legs back into the bed, and scooting back so that she could sit up, and start to write a ledger against her knee. Gwen's eyes couldn't have gotten much wider. "And you didn't even call the Ghurkas on him. Not behavior becoming a Fire Nation noble."

"How did you..." Gwen asked. Mother just flicked a look in her direction. Gwen was once again reminded that while she was very good at the tasks of being the heiress to a House run out of sons, her mother was the master. "We..."

"Will give him all the help he needs," Mother interrupted, those dark eyes growing slightly hard. "If nothing else, a measure of revenge is granted through loftier pursuits. And do replace my flowers. They are wilting."

Gwen nodded. Daddy died during the brutal purge of House Loyo Lah, not because he was of it, but because he happened to be in the wrong place at the worst time. Mother had taken it... poorly. Gwen picked up the vase of pale, drooping lotuses and paused at the door. "Is there anything else you need?"

"A sunny day would be nice," Mother said with a small smile tossed to her daughter. Gwen couldn't help but chuckle at that. Agni's blood, but it was good to have her mother back.

---

"The reports from the nurses have just come in," somebody – Zhao didn't much care who – said over his shoulder, handing him another sheaf of hastily writ papers. He buzzed through them quickly.

"Good," Zhao said. "We will probably be in an idea place to strike in less than a week."

The door to the room slammed open on the heels of that statement, and Admiral Chan was standing at the threshold, his chest heaving for breath, and he dribbling a river of rain-water onto the floor. Zhao got to his feet; as much as Chan was a hide-bound traditionalist, he was also a practical one. If he decided something needed running about, it really needed running about.

"What is it?" Zhao asked.

"It's Admiral Yan Rha. He was found dead!" Chan said. Zhao's eye twitched, all the more evident as one was locked of expression. "He was found, stabbed, in his bedroom."

"Ozai is onto us," Zhao summarized. He pointed out the window which was at the moment shuttered. "Are your fleets inside the Gates of Azulon, yet?"

"Yes," Chan answered.

"Good. It's hardly ideal, but we can proceed now," Zhao said. He straightened his back, and stared into the future. "The Fire Lord falls tonight, or we do."

Chan clapped a fist to his heart, and turned away to give the orders that required giving. Zhao turned to the only one he cared to learn the name of currently in the room. She raised a delicate brow toward him. "There is bold, then there is impetuous. See that it is the first, and not the second," Akemi told him, before continuing her calligraphy.

"And are you ready?" Zhao asked. Akemi smiled, a small, practiced smile.

"I was born ready."

---

Sokka stared at the ceiling, almost heedless of the thunder outside. Mostly because of the other sensations which were dominating his attention. First and foremost amongst them was the feel of flesh, which was draped along his chest. He could see with the barest glance down the tattooed hand and arm of his Si Wongi girlfriend.

"...we've got to stop doing this," Sokka said simply. Nila turned toward him, her expression for once no shade of angry or annoyed.

"It is proceeding perhaps too swiftly," she agreed.

"I mean, seriously. We've got to stop doing this, or..."

"I'm not a fool. There are safeguards in place," she said. And then she tucked in close once again. "Do you think we'll be leaving soon?"

"Probably," Sokka answered. "...should we, maybe, separate, take different rooms?"

"Probably," Nila answered him. For obvious reasons, he didn't really want to go through with his own idea. And she probably sensed that. "But not tonight."