The Lost City of the South
Chapter 6 - The Road to the South
They had been travelling for almost two weeks; a sickly mixture of driving, walking and sitting with Asami taking it upon herself to lead the way for the rest of the team for most of it. It had only been recently that she had grown tired of sitting alone in the skeletal truck and piled in with Zaheer and Kuvira to direct the convoy through the tunnel that seemed to never end. The levels were fluctuating, the light scare and the conditions varying for every one of the fourteen days since the Leviathan had ripped through the magnificent submarine and three hundred brave men and women. After that Miss Sato refused to let anyone else fall while she held the book, and key, that would see them through to the city and her dreams fulfilled. Gone were the days of wearing the tightly fitted, crimson hinted blouse and the containing little waistcoat with her sleeves rolled up like she was still in her basement dungeon of the museum. Gone were the days where she could let her hair down majestically or tying it up only loosely, allowing to either escape and threaten to flood down again like a redly coloured souffle. She had now gone for the woolen jumper, much like the rest of them, over a raggy shirt and prudent vest or tank top with the baggy yet insulated slacks. It was beginning to get much colder with each passing day.
The first of the fourteen days underground was simply getting further away from the gateway. The large gateway that contained a whole other world on the other side. From the patterns and such along the walls for miles of winding and improvised driveways Asami could tell with mild correlation with the Fisherman's Account that they were beginning to enter what had been the outskirts of the Southern Water Tribe. The blue hue contained in the hallowed walls was beautiful, reflecting and jumping away whenever light from the headlights of the convoy would shoot out at it. Bolin had on several occasions wanted, asked, demanded he take samples of the walls to return to the surface with. On the least of his requests Kuvira had become so annoyed she recalled that his entire collection that had been sitting on Asami's bed would be either ash or less on the ocean floor from when the unearthly spirit beast shredded through what remained of the submarine. He tossed himself to the floor and burst out in a faux spat of crying until P'Li gave him a good slap across the back of his rather large head to make him stop.
It was one of the perks of travelling with a primary team made up of mostly women, Asami would find herself thinking most nights when she was either eating or not alone, sifting through the pages of the Account. Once she reached the end of it she simply started again from the beginning, skip the stage they had already passed through, spend more hours on the section they were at and then continue; she had already repeated the process thrice in the fourteen days. It was strange really, so many women in key roles, Suyin arguably holding the most important on the team behind Zaheer and Asami herself. And she had been so nice to Asami too, stopping to her help her up a ledge when the rest of them, even Opal would have and did leave her to traverse it herself. There were many a times when the aged and caring doctor Suyin Beifong had come over in the middle of their night to check on the young archaeologist, forcing her to put the book down and go to sleep.
There was one night, one of the most recent when Asami simply refused to put down the Account, fixated on the page just before the Fisherman described the architecture and aesthetic of the city. She was transfixed on it, the way the road led to a hallway shining in blue and white just before a huge and almost blinding light would break as one would come out of the tunnel to see the city alone and solitary on an island in the middle of a lake of the purest water imaginable. It was just like the way she had imagined it, just like the way her father had told her.
Suyin found her with a tear running down her face, two mugs of some of the least of the tea in her hands, steaming and smelling like pure bliss. "You look like you could use a mug," the doctor told her, face full of compassion and a small and tender smile to boot, "Doctor's recommendation" she finished, laughing a little with closed eyes.
She pulled up a spare crate and sat down, handing the mug in her left hand to Asami, who in turn slouched a little in more complex chair, taking the glasses from her nose and folding them inside her jumper pocket. Before she drank she dragged over her blanket, a thick and amalgamated thing make from several others she had owned and worn to death. It was one of the only things she had brought on the trip out of comfortable habit and less out of practicality and rescuing it from the sub had been a moment that may have made her heart skip a bit. She took a long sip of the tea, warm and soothing in her mouth and the way down, forcing to her to release a content and rather loud sigh as she melted into the chair with the warm blanket surrounding her. Suyin giggled a little again, taking a stout sip of her own, no sighs or show of pleasure just a quenched thirst.
"What is that?" Asami asked, the tiredness being held back by the imagery of the corridor before the city melting by the tea and starting to show in her eyes. "I don't think I've ever had tea like this before." She took another sip, forcing another sight from her.
Suyin set hers on the crudely made desk from two small barrels and a large plank of wood. "I grew up for a while around my mother's friends" she began to tell, remembering some good memories of family that Asami never had. "One friend, Zuko, had this uncle who made the best tea in the whole world. I learned a couple things back then."
"You sound like a fairly contained teen Suyin" Asamo remarked, taking another sip before completely retreating into the blanket, leaving only her head and half her neck above, the cold coming in from the rocky walls. It was severely cold some nights underground, closer to the center of the world but so much closer to the South Pole it was still one of the coldest places Asami had ever been, and she had taken many trips to the North and such.
Laughter escaped Suyin, loud and very feminine, almost upper class and noble in tone and pitch as if it were fake only her facial expression told the Phd that the Doctor was genuinely amused by her assumption. She had to take another drink just to silence her chuckle.
"I was probably the most rebellious teenager you would have met and my mother will attest to that" she said, slightly choking on her tea having forced it down her throat too fast before talking again. It made Asami laugh too, her sweet mouth convulsing and her eyes fluttering in their tiredness. Again she wondered if it would be the same if the group was filled with mostly men, although P'Li to her was neither or, she simply existed, existed rather madly and did her job, sex or gender to contribute to P'Li.
Still Suyin silenced herself in her sudden hushed bout of coughing from the tea going down wrong. She could see Asami was beyond tired. Finishing her tea she glanced at the other mug, empty too and thus she took both handles in one hand and leaned over to the small oil lamp, turning it down all the way to allow it to extinguish itself.
"Night Sato" Suyin remarked before returning to the main camp where Asami hardly ever ventured, allowing her to sleep.
Asami countered Suyin's farewell with her own and made herself extremely comfortable in the chair with the blanket, pulling her pillow from the duffle underneath and drifting off before the lamp had even died on the desk.
The doctor was her favourite by far, she was the only person in the team who would spare a second word to the archaeologist when she made herself present. Mrs Beifong simply hardly talked to anyone and Opal kept to P'Li and Bolin, whenever he injected with some utterly disgusting comment or behaviour, as was his was strange creature and yet he was more welcome with the rest of them than Asami was. She knew it was the bond of comradery yet that hardly made her feel any less of an outsider.
One encounter had made her completely ruined by P'Li and Bolin; it left her feeling more of an idiot that when she was giving her presentation on the submarine.
She was aimlessly walking about the vehicle convoy one afternoon while the crew stopped and checked over all of the rigs and machines, P'Li looking for one of her many explosive devices to remove a small obstacle in their pathway. There lay a small circular canteen on the explosives truck just sitting there while Asami remained thirsty, not wanting to disturb anyone for some water of her own.
In one quick chug she absorbed the entire contents of the canteen, the taste feeling a tad off, like a single drop of contaminant had fallen in while someone was filling it. She closed the lid and placed it carefully back on the truck when P'Li came over with a detonator box in her hand.
"You didn't just drink that did you?" She asked incredulously, more like as if Asami had murdered someone before her eyes and placed the body not some simple canteen on the back of the truck. Nervously Asami shook her head slowly, P'Li shaking hers rather fast as she did.
"That's not good," she said, still shaking her head, the long pony tail at the back shaking as she did and even the third eye popping with the other two. "That's nitroglycerin!" She exclaimed.
You genius Sato. You damn genius.
She held her breath, beginning to panic internally at the thought of whatever nitroglycerin was worming its way down her throat and into her stomach where it would react with the acid and most surely murder her the way P'Li was reacting to it. She held her throat, hoping to stop the process.
P'Li looked a little calmer now, the hint of a smile behind her smokey eyes. "Don't move and don't breathe. Don't do anything except pray" she was telling Asami whilst slowly dragging her feet away from under her, as if beginning to walk away or something. Still Asami held her throat and breath, refusing to die to a simple mistake such as drinking something bad. It couldn't be so bad surely? Although there was that slightly peppery taste on the tip of her tongue remaining. No, no not now. It was fine. She was fine. It was completely fine.
There was a sound from behind her. A large crescendo of noise that scared her to death practically, making her jump in the air and then out of her skin. Once she landed she found the shape and size of the source of the bang. A smaller thing with slicked back hair and a five o'clock shadow in a silly parka jacket that made him look ridiculous every day he wore it. Bolin.
They were both laughing maniacally, the cackle cracking around for everyone to hear while P'Li simply grabbed two sticks of dynamite from a crate in the back of the truck and walked off to the obstacle she intended to obliterate the only way she liked. She high-fived Bolin as the two walked off together, leaving Asami to stand in her pool of embarrassment and non-existent self confidence.
That wasn't even the full extent of her practical stupidity with P'Li. The very next day they came across a colossal pillar of hard stone that had blocked the path for as long as the South had been lost underground.
Asami was stunned before it. The size and the accent of it, how it was carved by the ancient dwellers of the South and made from stone, standing like a giant before her and P'Li, who was rigging a large stockpile of different kinds of dynamite at the base to send it tumbling down before them. It was then that the alarm bells rang in Asami's mind. She really doesn't have a concern for historical or cultural artifacts.
"Would you look at the size of this thing?" Asami yelled, waving her arms high above her to grasp at an understanding of just how big the pillar was. P'Li was simply ignoring her while she stacked more and more explosives, sticking in the wiring mechanisms to the fuses and then wrapping the wires to the detonator box clutched in her arm. Unbelievable. The arm flailing continued. "It must've taken hundreds if not thousands of years to carve this thing" Asami deduced, exaggerating a little most probably.
Once the wiring was completed and the explosives were stacked P'Li let out an unamused sigh and grabbed Asami by the her collar, dragging her from the explosion site with the box in her other hand. She took her behind a pile of rocks blear of the blast radius and, seeing her argument to leave the pillar preserved was lost, Asami plugged her ears with her fingers, not that it did anything to drown out the huge bang from the dynamite ripping through the bottom of the pillar and subsequent falling of said pillar.
P'Li looked at her handiwork rather proudly, relishing the magnificent explosion and what she had created. the Pillar had fallen perfectly according to her calculations based on the positioning and stockpile of dynamite, falling to be recreated into a perfect bridge for the convoy to drive over to the next portion of the road to the South.
"Hey, look I made a bridge" she smiled to Asami, who was still sore about the whole ordeal and nevertheless looking rather silly in the first place for protesting. "It only took me what? Ten seconds?" You're ridiculous. Asami could not see how she could get along with the woman. She was so brash and practically thinking with no regard for anything else so long as the job was completed quickly and preferably straightly. Still the convoy ploughed on along the road, When they stopped Asami would retreat to her portable office and when they continued she either seized her own truck or piled in with Zaheer and Kuvira. She certainly did when they hit snow and her teeth were chattering like a wind up toy. she was not equipped for snow in the slightest.
Sooner or later they were bound to hit a solid wall that P'Li could not blast her way through. That was where they were at. A solid slab of stone that must have been some colossal building of importance in the original layout of the tribe. It just stopped the road dead and seemed like an impenetrable fortress they way it was straight and alone, a faint accent of the tribe marking in a circular motion. Thus far what they had seen was relatively similar markings to that of the Northern Tribe.
Zaheer stood in front of it, looking like he may just punch his way through; Asami would hardly doubt that could. Kuvira and P'Li joined at either side of him with Asami choosing to remain her truck, Bolin doing the same with his precious digger at the forefront of the convoy as he had been when Asami hadn't.
"Looks like we've got a little roadblock" Zaheer observed. Little? He did enjoy to state the obvious as Asami had found out in the two weeks travelling together. She new how this would end and thus braced herself for either another large explosion or hours of laboriously waiting for Bolin to tunnel his way through like the badgermole he resembled. Still Zaheer leaned into closer earshot of his demolition woman. "P'Li what do you got?" He asked, knowing full well she had a device for almost every occasion. She'd even brought her bag of tricks with her.
She quickly sifted through what explosives she had left, which was not much considering she had the stacked up trolley load before they set off. She pulled out a single stick of dynamite. "I could maybe help if I have two hundred of these" she stated, somewhat defeated in her admission that she would miss out on this explosion. "Thing I've only got like ten," she continued to sift through the bag, finding nothing that jumped out at her. "Plus, you know, five of my own." And heaven knows what that even means P'LI. She lifted out her hand again, three small grey balls in her large palm. "Couple of cherry bombs," next came out a stick looking like dynamite at first glance, the Asami saw the white tips. "Road flare" P'Li finished.
Then she turned to Asami in the truck, bored from waiting. At this point she just wanted to see the city as she new more than anyone that they were getting very close to the entrance. They had been travelling for so long and she was beginning to grow a little stir crazy at the wait elongated by every passing hour that she was stuck in the damn tunnel before it. Her dreams so close to reality. It had kept her up for the past couple of nights, wishing for more of Suyin's tea and certainly not Bumi's cooking, which had nearly killed her plenty of times.
"Too bad we don't have any nitroglycerin, eh Asami?" P'Li asked rhetorically, calling for another round of laughter due to her basic and therefore stupid mistake. To her own disappointment only Bolin burst out into a fit of laughter in his digging rig, which was basically the same as no one laughing at all.
Zaheer turned to the rig with Bolin at the helm. "Looks like we're going to have to dig" he stated, triggering a new kind of reaction in the small creature at the controls of the driller. He had had hardly any opportunity to dig at all thus far, which had perplexed Asami considering the path to the South was thousands of years old. Considering how raring he was to dig absolutely anything back on the sub and then the very little they actually had to dig thus far she was wondering how Bolin had not yet blown a gasket in that hollow head of his. Still she made him laugh this time the way he acted like he was about to explode before looking at Zaheer with wide eyes of excitement and a large, tooth filled smile.
"It will be my pleasure" he confirmed with his thumb up and extended outward and in a devilish voice that told everyone he would gain more pleasure from digging through the wall than he would from anything else in life.
He put the rig in drive, forcing to the two smaller trucks from the front of the convoy, at which point Opal left the oiler and stood to the side with Zaheer, Kuvira, P'Li and now Asami, who wished to stretch her legs as opposed to remaining in her truck with dead legs. The drill began to spin anticlockwise, gradually picking up speed until it reach its terminal velocity and Bolin began to charge at the solid wall with a slow pace, save cracking the drill and dooming them all. He was giddy, more than such, exhilarated at such an experience. He really is crazy.
The drill bit penetrated about five inches into the stone before the whole cockpit chugged with a thick black smoke, sending a shockwave of failure throughout the rig and shooting flames from the exhaust. The engines wheezed and failed. Bolin was coughing his guts up in spats of smoke from his lungs. He furiously fiddled with the clutch and the gearstick, then the wheel and both pedals. Absolutely nothing. He pounded the horn with his forehead, defeated by technical difficulties just when it was getting good for him. He was furious.
Opal pulled the back hatch to take a look inside at the engine, no gloves and grease and fluid spitting right in her face, making her attractively dirty instantly to the curious archaeologist who had wandered with her, just in case she may know what was wrong. Asami had always been an aspiring mechanic, it came with being the daughter of Hiroshi Sato, the father of the motor industry and the connoisseur of so many different types of vehicle. She instantly saw the problem, not even needing to look around as soon as she saw the engraved 'Humac Model P54/813' on the side of the boiler. Typical piece of crap Humac.
"I don't understand this, I just tuned this thing this morning" Opal was wittering on, inside the beast tossing out spare gears and shunts that had been left in from when they were inspecting it at an earlier date. Asami attempted pathetically to grab the engineer's attention and draw it to the problematic boiler that was wheezing like a cancer patient. "It looks like the rotor's shot!" Opal yelled back to the rest of her rather small engineering team. She leapt out of the inner workings, Asami still trying to grab her attention by waving her fingers around awkwardly. She felt a little nervous around Opal, the fact that the engineer was rather cute in her own way and that she was completely unapproachable to Asami because of her cuteness and lethality. "Looks like I'll have pull a spare from one of the trucks" she finished rationalising and looked to walk away.
"Uuhh" Asami mumbled in her completely non coherence of syllables and noises.
The engineer slammed her finger to Asami's chest, right in the middle, making her even more nervous. "Don't touch anything.I'll be right back" she warned her.
But Asami could hardly stand by and waste time and resources unnecessarily when she knew the problem like the back of her hand. She grabbed the wrench that Opal had left unknowingly and began to work her magic just as she had done thousands of times during her time in the museum dungeon. She twisted and turned valves clockwise and counterclockwise before giving the stupid boiler and rather violent whack with the wrench.
The rig jolted to life again, starting precisely where she stopped in her flail of death and failure. Bolin gasped in joy. "She lives!" He exclaimed while sounding the horn in approval. Asami clicked her neck smugly, turning around as Opal reproached with nothing in her hands and a rather annoyed yet pleased look.
"What did you do?" She asked vacantly, not knowing how or what Asami had done at all.
The archaeologist leaned on the rig even more smugly, a wide beaming smile on her beautiful face and her slender hands dangling as she leaned. She was proud, so proud, she had finally done something good and well, worthy of respect. She twisted, clicking a joint in her back.
"The boiler in this baby, it's the Humac Model P54/813, we have the old 814 in the museum," she began to tell, proud the entire way while that famous strand of dark crimson hair escaping to draw attention to its lusciousness and then to her sweetly emerald eyes, the glasses on the tip of her nose before she pushed them up again. "The heating cores on the whole Humac line, have always been a bit temperamental so sometimes you gotta" she punched her palm with the other fist, "persuade them" she chuckled to herself afterward in faux state to impress the engineer.
Opal pushed her away. "Yeah yeah thank you very much." Asami flinched as a result while Opal shut the hatch to let Bolin continue with the dig. "Two for flinching" she shot at her before a swift one two to her left arm, hard and full of playful spite. Asami smiled as Opal left but then rubbed her arm furiously once she wasn't looking. So much for acting cool.
Two hours later they were through the wall and somewhere completely different. It was a large chasm with a long stretched bridge leading off and above a large glowing chandelier of rock with a blue hue. Asami checked the Fisherman's Account, referring to the section she believed them to be at. "This is it. It's got to be" she muttered, finding the same image of the rocky ceiling light. It was right before the view of the solitary island of the South Pole. They were so close, so very close to tasting Southern Tribal water and seeing the remains of the buildings and feeling the Southern air. But it was late and Zaheer called for camp to be made. Asami sighed. She would need to wait another eight hours to find out if the South was truly reality or actually a fairy tale. Not long now dad. I'll find it. The one thought that would keep her up all eight of those hours. She decided she would study the Account from start to finish once more before they headed off, just to be sure of what to expect or not.
P'Li looked to the blue glow from the ceiling, the same blue that had followed them for fourteen days, sometimes in plain sight and others in the shadows. "That thing is going to keep me up all night" she muttered more to herself than to the group.