...

Ayika was always the school employee who got sent out on troublesome errands and today was no different, shouting mob outside or not. In fact, the continued presence of Professor Wen's detractors meant Mrs Jiangsu had a particularly wicked smirk when she ordered Ayika on this latest mission.

There were still quite a number of protesters milling around even this late in the afternoon. They clearly wanted to show that they were having some secret conversations in the hope that others might try to overhear so they could pointedly stop talking until they were alone again. Ayika drew herself up as she passed, as far up as she could be drawn, and watched the milling figures out of the corner of her eye. After Ma'er's visit everything took on a more sinister aspect.

Most of these protesters were cut of the same dingy cloth that formed the bulk of any disturbance in the city; hard working 'pillars of the community' who mysteriously had nothing better to do all day. Those were supplemented by angry-eyed youths who'd regretfully discovered that being able to make little Tsuran hit himself in the face every morning for four years did not coalesce into later job opportunities. There were also a few of the rich university boys who had probably organized this bit of nationalist uproar, but behind them were men who looked well-off enough to have better places to be. And there were quite a few women in this angry mix, women who to judge by their expressions were twice as dangerous as any of the other suspects.

It was all too organized. Angry crowds were practically the primary employer of the Impenetrable Citizenry, but here there was an atmosphere of patience, of waiting for orders. It made Ayika's skin crawl. She wondered what the Ma'er's connection to this was.

She made her way across the local square, trying to settle the shivers running up her spine. The young nationalists had been rounding up a small crowd of discontents once a week since Professor Lizhen joined the school, but Ayika would have placed money on them losing interest a while ago. Had the Ambassador's funeral stirred them up this much? Then her thoughts turned to the Islander girl with copper in her hair and Ayika began to think that there could be another explanation, when a sound slid in her hears and grabbed her brain.

"A quick light! Magic in your pocket! Improve your daily efficiency by adding a bit of modern thinking to your repetitive domestic duties and exploit the inherent alchemical power potentials in common dirts! Also works for pipes!"

Ayika turned with a groan, knowing exactly who must have set up shop here. It was not that Xinfei Bao was a bad businessman, in fact frequently the "sure-fire hit products" he identified soon become rather popular. The problem lay in the execution. The boy managed to combine in one gangly frame both unsettling optimism and an off-putting aura of desperation. If a man was dying in the desert Xinfei would show up with a jug of water priced at exactly what his target had in his pockets, but the man would end up crawling away to investigate his other options.

"Xinfei! What are you doing here!?" Ayika hissed furiously as she sprang around the street corner.

The young man jerked in surprise, losing his grip on the small red box he'd been waving over his head, and failed to make the subsequent flailings result in its recapture. The wax-paper box popped open against the flagstones and sent a stream of little sticks rolling across the street. When he turned to see her, Xinfei erupted into a grin. He ran a hand through his rumpled black hair.

"Ayika! Ah...uh, hey! I was hoping I'd see you."

Smiling wearily, Ayika bent down to help him gather up his merchandise, taking care to not let her uniform skirt trail in the dirt. Xinfei was clearly related to his elder brother Xiaobao who despite his best efforts left a trail of swooning girls behind him, but adolescence had so far not been kind to Xinfei. At seventeen, in the last year he'd added almost a head of height but apparently not a gram of weight. The stretched look was accompanied with the youthful clumsiness of someone who continually found his fingers and toes a few centimeters away from where he left them. Ayika smiled as she scraped up a handful of the smelly paint-dipped sticks. It was kind of nice to have a friend who never seemed to see anything she did as a mistake, even if he did currently smell faintly like rotten eggs.

"Um, actually..." said Xinfei, wincing as he watched her grabbing the little sticks. "I kind of wouldn't try to let them scrape the stones like that. Or each other, really." Ayika now noticed white cloth strips wound tightly around his palm and several of his fingers. Adding that to his fixed grin watching the little capped sticks in her hand like they might bite and the number of black scorch marks one the stones around her, Ayika very quickly tossed the demon twigs to her friend.

"What are you doing with these!" she hissed.. "Why are you messing around with foreign magic? Keeping fire sorcery in a...paper box!"

Xinfei waved an unconcerned though quite bandaged hand. "Nah, they aren't magic and they aren't dangerous. Well not really, those guys in the Islander capital really know what they're doing. It's just special types of dirt mixed together and then painted on a bit of wood. Although..." He glanced up at the sky. "...it might be a good idea to get these in their box and out of direct sunlight."

Ayika groaned and returned to her original question. "Xinfei, what are you doing here?"

He shrugged. "Well, I was thinking about those who'd be the most fed up with the flint and steel. Then I remembered seeing those fancy style tea houses up here where they light that little bit of oil under each pot to keep them warm on the table, and there's lots of smoke bars and big houses with a ton of lamps to light every night. And of course I'd get to see you too when you got off work!"

It was hard to get frustrated with Xinfei no matter what he did. His mind would just race off down the street without checking to see if there was a pit in it first. And besides, that grin was so hopeful.

So instead Ayika said, "For the...that's not what I meant. What are you doing selling Islander products right across from a bunch of people protesting foreigners? Did you even notice them?"

Xinfei raised his eyebrow, managing to look slightly hurt. "Of course I noticed them, and I've been keeping an eye on that. I even sold a pack to one place 'round here just because the cook was sick of that lot and wanted to spite them. Not everyone thinks Fire Nation is a dirty word. Some even notice it's two words. And besides, if the mob wants to light torches tonight I can probably sell some boxes once it gets dark enough that they can't read the labels."

Ayika grabbed Xinfei by the collar and pulled him in close to her.

"Don't help people burn down my school."

She poked him firmly in the forehead and let go.

Leaning back against the wall, Ayika looked over at the peaked eaves of the school rising behind the buildings that lined this square. The crowd in that street was still growing. "I don't get it. Are they angry about the professor or about the girl? She was creeping around but she just got here today. And why does it all look, well, organized? Those 'Student Movement' goofs from the university couldn't organize a trip to the bathroom."

Tightening the cords around his bundle of little paper boxes, Xinfei spoke up. "It's got to be the funeral of the ambassador, right? People don't like the idea of a foreign god being set up in the city. And organized? Yeah, other people 'round here have noticed. A lot of people are saying that someone is spending money, you know, food and drink and stuff to make sure the crowd doesn't drift off."

He caught Ayika's surprised look. "Like I said, keeping an eye. Tsao said it's the Society behind it, but of course it's probably just Public Safety agents wanting an excuse to round up a whole lot of people at once. Yeah, sponsor a riot and then arrest everyone in it, that's like them."

Ayika felt a faint trill of fear somewhere deep inside her, but she tried to ignore it. "Spare your paranoia for a bit, what society? I thought it was just those university kids running this."

Xinfei waved his hand vaguely. "You know, the Mask Society or the Society of Masks or whatever."

"What?"

"Yeah, some guy who supposedly got secret lessons from some guru in the mountains or whatever and now can thump benders around like it's nothing, you know? Sure. There's always someone supposedly out there who has the secret to normal people beating benders. Didn't we used to hear about, who was it? The Yellow Sage or whatever, over in the tanner quarter?"

"Didn't they arrest a lot of those guys?" Ayika mumbled.

"Yeah, exactly. Didn't hear about any secret tricks helping against benders who can smash a brick wall with a flick of their wrist."

Ayika shook her head, shaking free of her circular thoughts. "Look, I've still got to get to the shops. You need to go try and sell your stuff somewhere else. I don't want those guys deciding that some harbor boy needs a pounding for hawking Islander merch."

She took off, angling towards a small alley shortcut. Behind her, Xinfei hoisted his awkward merchandise bundle to his shoulders as he followed.

"I'll be fine. Don't worry 'bout me." But he saw her concerned look and gave a toothy smile. "Come on, those guys have already chosen what to get angry about today. And if they were going to pick fights over selling stuff from the Exclusion then half the ritzy shops here would be in line. Everything from the East's in fashion up here, and right now I'm very fashionable!"

"Oh are you, really? Then I think we have a problem," said a deep and threatening voice.

Ayika groaned, recognizing that kind of tone from excessive experience. It was the sound of men frustrated with society making them feel weak and powerless, but satisfied that at least could make those around them feel quite a bit weaker. Thug voices. Any protest had some.

Cursing her friend's almost supernaturally bad luck, Ayika looked to see two large figures filling the narrow alley and doing their level best to get this looming thing down right. Xinfei's face smoothly fell from optimism to resigned anxiety. Ayika quickly threw a smile on her face, noting the mass of bundled alcohol jugs the two men had sitting beside them, some already open. A sniff confirmed that these two had gotten pretty far into at least one of the bottles.

Ayika began to motion to Xinfei behind her, surreptitiously gesturing back the way they'd come. She was thinking fast: don't reply to anything they say, just slowly walk away and make them remember that their bottle is more interesting than bothering you.

One of them beckoned with a nasty smile. "Hey, slow down, boy! We might just want to purchase some of your product! Then you might be able to afford that cut-rate mud-girl you've got there. Ha!"

The bigger of the two men was moving, angling to block Ayika in the alley. She made an indecipherable shrug and kept a pleasantly neutral expression on her face. She'd grown up a girl on the docks and knew how to deal with surly drunks holding more muscles than sense. The key was not to push them too far.

"Hey! Don't you dare talk about her like that! I'll..." Xinfei trailed off, belatedly realizing his mistake.

Ayika silently groaned, cursing the collective male delusion that women couldn't tell the difference between heroics and stupidity. The thugs now grinned like sharks with blood in the water. By the unwritten rules of street life, the two kids were now fair game as they had shown, to wit, 'bloody stupidity'.

The men loomed, having now perfected that technique, and closed the distance. The nearest spread his hands across the alley and said, "Hey, now. We're just looking for a little...product demonstration." He grinned at Ayika and put his hand on her shoulder. "And after we might even want to see what the little race traitor has in his boxes! Hah!"

Ayika breathed out, trying to calm her racing heart. Grandma Aka had taught her that idiots were tricky to manage, but also much more vulnerable to certain flavors of persuasion. If the fools think you're all mystical savages, then you might as well play into it, she'd said. Use that head of yours, and make your skin a weapon.

The thug frowned when Ayika pushed his arm away, but then she waved her hand in front of her in a complex series of signs and his eyes widened from confusion to a touch of fear.

"I wouldn't do that. You're looking at the granddaughter of Aka the Witch."

"Who?"

Ok, Ayika thought to herself. Maybe that line worked better down in the harbor than up here in the rings. But the principle was still sound.

She focused on playing up an accent. "The spirits of the city, they hear my call. Ikallag. "

The man was getting worried now. "Hey, what's she saying? Stop that."

Ayika continued with her chant in the foreign language, "Tuutangayag, arwer, makarua." Of course, those words were mostly just the names of food dishes. Ayika barely spoke the language of her parents' tribe, but to most people any foreign words said in a spooky voice sounded like witchcraft. As always, most of magic was about the intent. The nearest thug was starting to look at the hand that had touched her shoulder with a good bit of dread.

Unfortunately the other man was less educated in the stereotypes of her people. "Shut the hell up, Tribal. That's all bull and you know it."

His friend was not as convinced. "No, seriously. I heard that during the war them out north got up to all sorts of creepy things. That's how those primitives survived. Dao said their witches can stick the Nine-Step-Shadow on you or get the Moon Spirit to steal your soul. Their kind can't read but they've got that big magic."

However, he wasn't successful in dissuading the other who just pushed past him. Now that Ayika thought of it, Grandma Aka might have been joking about some of those principles of magic. In the corner of her eyes, Ayika could sense Xinfei tensing to do something that would get his skull pounded against the bricks. It was time to transition from the metaphysical to more mundane solutions.

Breathing quickly, Ayika took a half step towards the man who thought he was holding her in place. The thing about being short is is that it made some sensitive parts of tall men particularly accessible. Ayika made a quick sharp motion between his legs and watched his lecherous smile turn into a rictus. Her next motion implanted another sharp elbow in a kidney, and a heavy leather heel to the back of his knee. Grandma Aka had taught her about a lot more than spirits.

Fortunately, Xinfei had the sense to be running the instant he saw her elbow draw back. It was always the same with these alley fights, once you escaped back onto the public streets, different rules applied and you were safe. Usually. Of course, escape depended on there not being a third man standing quite firmly in the exit.

This new obstacle was cut of a different cloth from the two thugs. He wasn't dressed like a back-street brawler, but instead had on the kind of clothes that someone might actually care about if they got dirty and his latched shoulder bag was embroidered. He was plain faced, with a mole over one eye, and he held himself rigidly, but to Ayika there was a growling tension beneath his surface.

Some people felt like that. They were the ones who would sit quietly in the corner of the drinking house taking mockery or abuse all night, right up until they slashed two men's throats with a carving knife and had to be hauled off, still snapping like a chained beast. And yet for reasons that perpetually eluded Ayika, people would always trust them and say things like, "Oh, that can't be the whole story. He was so quiet. He could never cause a bit of trouble like that." It was as if they couldn't smell the rot behind their eyes.

This man's eyes had bags under them like he hadn't gotten enough sleep last night but that seemed to have made him angry rather than weary. Behind her, Ayika heard the thugs. One unwisely called out, "All right, sir! Ya got em!"

The man with the mole's gaze never flickered, but the snarling presences was now projected at the unfortunate thug and their cargo of jugs. "And what exactly have I got? Are you referring to the...diminished... supplies I sent you for hours ago, or to the unwanted attention these things in front of me might have brought?"

The thug's hobbled friend, judging that he could now probably talk without squeaking, decided to speak up. "That little street rat there's been selling foreign stuff all morning. Going on about..." Here he spat, partially from disgust but mostly to disguise the shooting pains still dominating his lower abdomen. "...Eastern quality. And the tribal girl tried to spook us with some weird witchcraft. We were going to teach them a little lesson about patriotism and honoring our city's spirits."

Those hard eyes still had not moved. "Get out."

Not needing to be told twice, the thugs made a hasty exit, sliding past their leader like he was on fire. Ayika made a motion to follow them, but an arm like steel blocked her way.

Keeping her face servilely lowered, she turned back towards the man and said, "Thank you for being so gracious, sir. I was just saying something in my tribe's language and those men must have gotten spooked. My foolish friend was just leaving now and has mentioned that he's never going to be tricked into selling a foreign product again. See, he couldn't read the labels. We don't want to trouble you anymore."

She thought to herself, alright, we're sufficiently terrorized, now let us go.

The arm blocking her way didn't budge. "My associates were idiots. But not because they decided to teach a lesson about capitulation to foreigners. Because they were failing at it."

The man stepped closer, using his size and height to intrude on Ayika's space. He glared at her with such disgusted focus that he didn't seem to notice Xinfei slipping around behind him.

So much for demure. Back to the alley wall, Ayika straightened up to look the man in the eye as well she could. Her voice changed. "Look guy, my friend's heading out already. You don't want to make some commotion and get the guards' attention before your crowd outside the school gets fully organized. And hey, a beaten harbor girl might not count for much, but an employee of the school that's already lodged complaints? Just let us go and everything's still fine."

Her heart was pounding in her ears and she could feel her hands shaking as she pointed to the front of her uniform. She just hoped he could see the school emblem and not the tremors. Then she smelled smoke. Odd.

The man seemed to draw inward and upward. One hand twitched towards the bag that hung at his side. He began to smile but that expression would look more appropriate with snarling fangs.

"Oh, I think you might overestimate just how much commotion there would be. And everyone does need to be informed how...dangerous, foreign influence can be. I think you'll see that..." Then he noticed the smoke as well. The back of your robe being on fire can be quite attention grabbing.

The man spun around in a panic, accidentally fanning the flames that raced up from multiple ignition points across the back of his clothes. Ayika's eyes went wide as she realized Xinfei was holding a handful of lit matches. The man made to grab at Xinfei but then had to throw up an arm to block the shower of fire tossed his way. The last sight Ayika had as Xinfei tugged her out of the alley was the man frantically rubbing his back against a wall while holding his satchel as far out in front of him as possible.

They'd gone four blocks before they stopped running, or in Xinfei's case switching between rapid dashing and smooth speed-walking every few meters as the match box bundle on his back rattled alarmingly. The first to catch her breath, Ayika looked at her friend in disbelief.

"You set him on fire."

Still panting, Xinfei shrugged. "Well... just...his tabard...really." His speech was punctuated with gasps as he struggled for breath.

"You set him on fire," she repeated flatly.

He waved a red paper box. "I told you I'd find a market for these."

That smile was too much, and laughing just hurt her sides, but they both couldn't stop for a full minute. Finally managing to resist laughing and laughing about laughing, Ayika regained composure.

"Damn it man, that guy could be trouble but...nice one. You really should make yourself scarce though. Most of those anti-foreign types are idiots but that guy meant business. There's too many of that sort around today."

Xinfei looked around at the clean and cobbled streets with a kind of hunger. He was weighing his very light purse against an intact skin and having difficulty deciding the balance. "This district actually is the best sales territory, and I haven't really sold enough yet. I was kind of hoping to get enough for a proper meal to bring home."

"Well, if you'd just gone to work with your brother then you'd've been fine. My mom made you guys lunches."

"Really?" he said with a new grin. It seemed he'd skipped a meal today.

"Yeah, I expect Xiaobao's eaten yours already." Xinfei's face fell. Ayika punched at his arm. "I didn't know where you were, idiot. I wasn't going to go tracking across the city looking to bring you lunch."

She then watched his skinny face mournfully regarding his still rather empty coin purse. She groaned inwardly, it was impossible to watch those cracks in his perpetual act of self assurance. Ayika shrugged in defeat, knowing she was lost. "Look, just save your coins. Come by the back kitchen entrance of the school after it gets dark. The place always has extra food, and I haven't cashed in on my leftovers rights for a while. I'm sure I can stuff you full of something."

"Hey, you don't need to-"

"Come on Xinfei, my mom would have my hide if I let you starve to death. And for you that looks to be a couple hours away." She laughed, hitting him lightly on the arm. Xinfei looked incredibly embarrassed but he did not seem ready to bring up any new objections.

Ayika straightened up and cracked her neck. "All right, I still need to run and grab the stuff for Jiangsu. You just be careful, alright? The city air's too tense for my taste."

"Yeah. You watch out too. I mean those protesters are right outside your work. You'll have to go by them on your way in and out. You could..., I mean, just take care."

She was already turning with an absent nod, not noticing the look of honest concern and something more on Xinfei's face. Ayika's brow furrowed and her lips pursed to the side in thought. How far were these protesters willing to go, just because Lizhen wanted people to be kind? And what was that Mizumi girl's part in this? Ayika walked off, waving vaguely at Xinfei as she left her friend staring at her retreating back. He shifted his awkward bundle of matchboxes and made his own way off down the dusty street.

Xinfei knew that Ayika was capable of handling herself. But the tensions that were boiling in the city now were more than anyone could handle. He gripped onto the loops of twine that served him as shoulder straps for his makeshift pack. There was another reason he'd risked crossing all of the Lower Ring and two walls. He would do what he could to help her. Besides, he was really looking forward to those leftovers now.

...