{user}: The Last Airbender - Avatar RPG

The Southern Water Tribe had been dying for longer than anyone left alive could remember. What remained was a village of maybe two dozen tents behind a wall of packed snow, propped up by fishing spears and stubbornness, its men gone to war years ago and its waterbenders gone longer. The oldest still living remembered when the raids came—the ships, the soldiers, the systematic hunting of anyone who could move water. They'd won, in the end. The Fire Nation had broken the Southern Water Tribe and left it to freeze.

But the tribe was still here.

Two people had gone out that morning in a sealskin canoe—Katara, the last waterbender in the South Pole and entirely self-taught, and her brother Sokka, who'd appointed himself the village's entire military after their father took the remaining men to fight in the Earth Kingdom. They'd gone hunting, or at least Sokka had. Katara had gone because the village was too small to stay in.

The iceberg found them first.

It rose out of the water half a mile past the last shelf ice—a tower of blue-white, twice the height of the canoe, pulsing with a faint light from somewhere inside it. Not daylight. Something else. Something that made the hair on both their arms stand up.

"We should go back," Sokka said immediately, already reaching for the paddle. "Right now. That thing is glowing, and glowing things in the ocean are not our friends."

"It's trapped in the ice," Katara said, leaning over the side of the canoe, staring at the shape inside the iceberg—a silhouette, dark against the glow, curled up like something sleeping. "Sokka, there's someone in there."

"Which is why we should leave."

"Someone is trapped in there."

Katara climbed out onto the iceberg's flank, found a handhold, and swung her arm down with a grunt—a waterbending strike she'd taught herself, aimed at the ice with everything she had. The blow cracked the surface. Light poured through the fracture like sunlight through a window.

She hit it again.

The iceberg split open.

The world went white. A column of light erupted upward from the broken ice—blinding, enormous, shooting into the sky in a pillar visible for miles. Somewhere far away, on a ship cutting through southern waters, a scarred young man in Fire Nation armor looked up from his telescope and smiled for the first time in three years.

Then the light faded, and the iceberg collapsed into the sea in a cascade of fractured ice and steam, and the canoe flipped, and both siblings went into the water.

They surfaced sputtering in the wreckage. Sokka hauled himself onto a slab of ice, dripping, and pointed an accusing finger at his sister. "I said we should go back!"

Katara wasn't listening. She was staring at the center of the collapsed iceberg, where the ice had been—where the light had come from—where something was now lying on a slab of floating ice in the middle of the open water.

A figure. Curled on their side. Alive.

"Sokka," Katara whispered. "Sokka, look."

She was already moving toward the slab.

The figure lay in the remnants of a sphere of ice, their clothing and appearance strange to the Southern Water Tribe—unfamiliar cut, unfamiliar colors. The ice around them had been sealed airtight, and the air inside had been cold enough and the seal tight enough that time had simply... stopped.

Sokka climbed up beside Katara on the ice slab, both of them soaking wet and shivering, staring down at the stranger they'd just pulled out of a hundred-year-old prison nobody had known existed. "Are they okay?"

Katara reached out, then hesitated. "Hey. Can you hear me? Are you hurt?"

The sky above was pale grey, the water black, the air sharp with cold. Two faces hovered above {{user}}’s—a dark-skinned girl in blue with worried eyes, and a boy in blue with a pony tail and an expression that was two-thirds suspicion and one-third fear.

Somewhere south, a metal hull was already turning toward the light.

The Southern Air Temple hung above the clouds like something that had refused to fall. It took the better part of a day to climb the switchback trails of the Patola Mountains, past frozen waterfalls and cliffs dotted with the weathered stubs of statue pedestals, and with every switchback the temple grew above them—four great wings joined by curving bridges, spires and pagodas built for people who could fly. Wind moved through it constantly. From below, the sound was almost like breathing.

No one had breathed in it for a hundred years.

The main courtyard had gone wild. Gardens the monks had once raked into spirals had burst their stone borders and swallowed the walkways; moss owned the marble; a stone fountain of a sky bison stood dry and furred with lichen, its mouth open over nothing. Prayer flags still hung from the eaves—shredded to ribbons, line after line of them, snapping in the wind like the last gesture of a ceremony no one had been allowed to finish.

"Careful," Sokka said, low, spear up, eyes going doorway to doorway. "Places like this, something's always living in places like this."

Something moved.

A shape burst from an overturned flower box—a blur of fur and wings that rocketed across the courtyard, snatched a strip of dried fish straight out of Sokka's pack, and spiraled up onto a broken pillar to eat it. A lemur. Enormous ears, wide gold eyes, bat-like wings folded against a body no bigger than a housecat. It stared down at them with total lack of remorse and kept chewing.

"A winged lemur," Katara breathed. "They're supposed to be extinct. They've been gone a hundred years—"

"It's stealing my dinner, is what it is."

The lemur finished the fish, blinked once at the assembly below, and flicked away across the rooftops with a chirp that echoed strangely in all that stone. Katara laughed—actually laughed, the first time in days—and the sound ran around the courtyard and died against the quiet.

The great sanctuary stood at the temple's heart, and its doors had been sealed from outside by someone's careful hands long ago. Beyond them, in a cold round hall lit by a single shaft of falling light, stood row upon row of statues: every Avatar who had ever lived, carved in the moment of their greatest age, ranked back through the centuries into the dark. Kyoshi in her headdress, fan-blades at her shoulders. Roku, stern and bearded. Fire, earth, air, water, back and back and back.

It was Sokka who found the doorway—up a short flight of stairs off the sanctuary's outer hall, one of a dozen identical doors lining the monks' quarters, this one standing open. It opened onto a long residential corridor: cells for sleeping, a common room, the worn smoothness of a hundred years of feet. At the far end, a room with the door hanging off one hinge, and beyond it, dimness.

And a smell—old, mineral, the smell of places air has never once moved through.

The room at the end of the hall had been Gyatso's. The name meant nothing to anyone in the doorway but {{user}}. What filled it now was a shape seated on the floor with its back to the door, upright with impossible, terrible dignity—skeletal, wrapped in the rotted remains of yellowed robes, prayer beads still looped around the bones of one hand.

And around it, the helmets.

Dozens of them. Fire Nation crests, blackened, scattered like dropped bowls across the floor—each one still holding its owners skull. Armored bones lay where they had fallen, in rings, in a circle around the seated figure, driven back and back from it.

Katara reached the doorway a step behind, took one look, and clapped both hands over her mouth. Sokka's boomerang clattered against the doorframe and stayed there, forgotten in his grip. The wind moved through the corridor behind them, and all the shredded prayer flags along the temple snapped in it, over and over, like a hundred years of applause that had never stopped.

Gaoling sat in a mountain valley—tile roofs, market stalls, tea houses, merchants selling jade and food to travelers coming through on the rail line. But the rock bluffs outside town held a cave system that ran deeper than the mine surveys admitted, and on the right night, the right kind of stranger could find a wooden door in the right hillside, and behind it a tunnel lit by torches, and behind that a staircase going down.

Earth Rumble VI was already roaring by the time the group reached the bottom of the stairs.

The arena had been carved out of the stone itself—a circular pit fifty feet across, ringed by stone bleachers packed with shouting spectators, with a raised announcer's platform on one side and a betting table on the other doing brisk business in copper and silver. The air was thick with dust and noise and the smell of sweat and roasted duck. Stone chunks lay scattered across the ring floor—the wreckage of previous rounds—and the crowd was on its feet.

The announcer was a compact man in an exaggerated cape, a microphone to his lips, working the crowd.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN—welcome to EARTH RUMBLE SIX!"

The crowd screamed. The announcer fed it, grinning.

"In this corner—the challenger! Standing six feet five, two hundred and forty pounds of solid muscle! He hews rock, he splits stone, he once headbutted a mountain so hard it split open—give it up for THE BOULDER!"

A massive earthbender strode into the ring, arms raised, and the crowd split between cheers and boos. He was enormous—heavily muscled, tan-skinned, with dark hair and a thick mustache and goatee, wearing green and gold wrestling trunks and wristbands that did nothing to downplay the fact that he was built like a rockslide. He slammed his foot down and a pillar of stone shot up behind him, and he cracked his knuckles at the far tunnel.

"The Boulder feels conflicted about fighting a young child."

"Sounds like The Boulder's making excuses already," came a voice from the far tunnel. "The Boulder's going to need them."

"In this corner—your champion! Undefeated in forty-two matches! The girl who feels the earth move and makes it move back—THE BLIND BANDIT!"

The crowd's response was different this time—louder, more electric, the sound of people who'd watched this particular fighter win forty-two times and still couldn't believe it. From the tunnel opposite The Boulder emerged a girl.

She was small. That was the first thing that registered—barely nineteen years old, slight, very short, with black hair hanging over pale, unfocused green eyes that didn't track anything. She wore a green and beige tunic too big for her frame, and she walked barefoot across the stone floor with a loose, unhurried gait. She stopped in the center of the ring, scratched her nose, and smirked in The Boulder's general direction.

"The Boulder is going to bury you, little girl!" The Boulder shouted, stamping the ground. A slab of stone the size of a table ripped up and launched toward her.

She tilted her head. One bare foot shifted an inch. The slab split in two and passed on either side of her, crashing into the arena wall behind. She hadn't moved. She hadn't blinked.

"Is that it? The Boulder's been doing that move since round one. I've had tougher fights from the guys who carry The Boulder's luggage."

The Boulder came at her with everything. Pillars, projectiles, a wave of stone that rolled across the ring floor like a living thing. The girl met each attack with the smallest possible motion—a turn of the heel, a shift of the wrist, a tap of one toe that sent stone back the way it came or simply opened the ground beneath it.

"Come on, big guy! The Boulder's supposed to be a wrestler, right? The Boulder's not even making me break a sweat. I’m getting bored."

The Boulder snarled and launched a barrage of rock chunks the size of melons. She ducked the first, sidestepped the second, and caught the third on her heel, redirecting it straight back into The Boulder's chest. He staggered.

"Oh, did that hurt? The Boulder wants to cry? Go ahead—the Blind Bandit doesn't judge."

Then The Boulder planted both feet and launched himself on a pillar of stone that carried him twenty feet into the air, coming down with both fists aimed at the ring like a hammer.

"The Boulder is going to end this!"

The girl stomped once.

The ring floor opened. Stone swallowed The Boulder up to his chest, and then a pillar of earth erupted sideways and sent him flying out of the ring entirely. He hit the arena wall, slid down, and did not get up.

Silence—one second of it, total, the whole arena holding its breath.

Then the crowd erupted, and the announcer's voice cracked trying to keep up:

"WINNER AND STILL CHAMPION—THE BLIND BANDIT!"

The girl stood in the center of the ring, arms folded, and yawned. "Forty-three. Is there anyone in this town who can actually give me a workout!?"

Ba Sing Se could be seen from three miles out, the outer wall a hundred feet of grey stone ringing the city, and beyond it the inner wall rising higher still. The road to the gates ran through a sprawling shantytown, thousands of tents and lean-tos, the refugee camps of families who'd walked from the western coast with everything they owned, waiting for a wall to let them in.

Guards in Earth Kingdom green checked papers, prodded luggage, waved through cart after cart of grain and livestock—and then a polite official with a clipboard informed the group that the Avatar's party would be escorted. There was someone waiting to receive them.

She was waiting at the inner gate, under a lantern, hands folded.

She was perhaps forty, wearing the formal green and gold dress of an Earth Kingdom official, hair pinned neatly, and she was smiling.

"Welcome to Ba Sing Se! I am Joo Dee, your guide to our fair city." Her voice was warm, bright, and perfectly level. "The Earth King has been informed of your arrival. He looks forward to receiving you—and until he does, every courtesy of this city is yours. Come. Your lodging is arranged."

"Actually, the meeting can't wait," Sokka said, shouldering his bag and cutting straight to it. "We've traveled across the entire Earth Kingdom to see the King. It's about the invasion. The eclipse. If we don't—"

"The King is very busy," Joo Dee said, with the same bright smile, already turning. "You must be exhausted from your journey. Ba Sing Se offers many wonders for honored guests. Please."

She gestured toward the waiting train, and there was nothing to do but board.

The train ran on earthbending—a single rail car gliding between the walls at impossible speed—and it cut straight through the heart of the city. The Lower Ring first: a canyon of tenements, laundry lines strung between balconies, market smoke, whole families living on rooftops, streets packed shoulder to shoulder with the desperate and the hopeful. Refugees everywhere—foreheads marked with their ring papers, camping in lines outside registration offices. Then the Middle Ring: quieter, cleaner, merchants and craftsmen, mortar between the bricks, children with actual toys. Then a gate, checkpoints, papers checked by green-robed officials—and the Upper Ring, where the train slid into a station of polished marble under carved eaves, and the streets were trees and fountains and estates behind garden walls.

The lodging was a walled estate in the Upper Ring—a small palace, with servants who bowed, and a garden with a koi pond, and a banquet already laid out. Joo Dee drifted through the rooms ahead of them, opening doors.

"Dining room. Library. Baths are being drawn now. Anything you require, you have only to ask for me." She turned, hands folded, the lantern light catching her perfect smile. "I am here to make your stay pleasant in every way."

Katara was looking around at the banquet—the roasted duck, the fruit out of season, the silk cushions—and her expression was somewhere between awe and nausea. "There are people in the Lower Ring sleeping in the streets," she said. "Refugees. From the war."

"What a lovely evening," Joo Dee agreed warmly.

Sokka set his bag down very slowly, and when he turned around, he'd stopped being polite.

"Okay. Enough. We need to see the Earth King. Tonight. The Fire Nation is planning something—the biggest invasion fleet they've ever built, we have the date it happens, and every day we sit in this house drinking tea is a day the Earth Kingdom doesn't prepare. This is the Avatar. This is about the war."

The room went quiet.

Joo Dee's smile did not move. Nothing about her face moved at all—except her eyes, which settled on Sokka with a calm, vast, bottomless pleasantness, and she said, in the same bright and level voice she'd used at the gate:

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se."

The Western Air Temple did not sit on its cliff. It hung beneath one—carved into the granite underside of an overhang that jutted out over the canyon, its spires and bell towers pointing down at the treetops three hundred feet below. There was one way in: a thin switchback stair carved into the cliffside. The war was in its hundredth year, Sozin's Comet was months out, and the Avatar still had no firebending teacher. What the group had instead was a sanctuary with an overturned fire pit, bedrolls arranged around it, and Appa dozing in the colonnade with Momo curled against his flank.

Zuko came up the main stair on the ninth day, hands raised high, and he shouted before anyone could reach for a weapon.

"I know you're in there! I've been looking for you for weeks—please, just hear me out!"

He stopped at the edge of the courtyard and unslung his twin hook swords, laying them on the stone and stepping back from them. He looked worse than the last time anyone had seen him—hair cut short and uncombed, cheekbones sharper, traveling clothes crusted with canyon dust. He had clearly rehearsed what came next.

"I've done terrible things. To the Earth Kingdom. To all of you. I told myself it was for my honor. It wasn't. It was for me. And I'm not asking you to forgive that—I'm asking you to let me work against it. You need a firebending teacher. I can help."

The silence went on long enough that the wind filled it—the constant updraft of the canyon, moving through the hollow bell towers above the courtyard.

Katara spoke first. She had stepped in front of {{user}}, her expression hard.

"You’ve lied to us. Hunted {{user}} for months. Tried to kill them and us multiple times." Water had come up out of her skin and coiled around her fist. "You don't get to apologize. Leave."

"You heard her," Sokka said, boomerang in hand. "The stairs are right there."

Zuko looked at each of them and then at {{user}}, waiting for something that did not come. He opened his mouth to speak again, but the sound that cut him off wasn't a voice. It was a thin, rising whistle from the head of the canyon—two seconds long, followed by a sharp crack. A stone archway at the courtyard's edge exploded outward in a spray of rock and dust.

Toph dropped into a stance, feet wide on the flagstones. "Someone's up on the ridge! Big guy—metal arm and leg!"

The assassin stood on a rock spur four hundred feet up the canyon, visible in the moonlight. He was enormous—broader through the shoulders than Sokka was tall, head shaved bare. On his forehead was a tattoo: a single vertical eye, ringed and pointed. He planted his feet, went completely still, and the eye began to glow.

The whistle rose again. A spark left the tattoo, crossed the distance in a straight line, and struck the courtyard flagstones. The shockwave knocked everyone flat, and the stone where Zuko had been standing vaporized into gravel. Sokka scrambled up, shouting at Appa to take cover, and the bison groaned, heaving his bulk toward the temple's inner archways as Momo clung to his fur.

Katara pulled water from the cistern, her eyes wide. "We have to flank him! He can't aim if we're—"

The assassin adjusted. The whistle rose, sharp and cruel, and the blast caught the lip of the overhang above them. Stone rained down, forcing the group to scatter. Katara stumbled, trying to regain her footing near the courtyard's edge, and the assassin’s head snapped toward her. He planted himself, the eye flaring brighter as he drew in a breath to fire.

Zuko saw it. He saw the angle, the distance, and the fact that Katara was too far from cover to make it.

He moved. Not away from the group, but toward Katara, diving just as the assassin released the shot. The beam of superheated energy screamed through the air. Zuko collided with Katara, knocking her sideways behind a low retaining wall an instant before the blast would have hit her.

The sound it made when it hit him was wet and hard. He was thrown back against the wall, sliding down to the flagstones, the back of his shirt burned away and the skin across his shoulder and ribs blackened and raw.

Up on the ridge, the assassin prepared another shot. Sokka stood up on a broken column, drew his arm back, and hurled his boomerang with everything he had. It spun out, arcing across the canyon, and struck the assassin's forehead right on the glowing eye just as the energy released.

The detonation was silent at first—a blinding white flash on the ridge—and then the sound arrived, a thunderclap that shook dust from the temple ceilings. The rock spur the assassin had been standing on shattered, collapsing in a heap of rubble.

Silence fell over the courtyard, broken only by the distant sound of falling rocks. Sokka ran to retrieve his boomerang as it returned, chest heaving. Toph stood ready, hands raised in case of a second attacker, but the ridge was empty.

Katara crawled out from behind the wall. She reached Zuko's side, her hands hovering over the burned mess of his back. Water from the cistern rose up, swirling between her fingers, glowing with a soft, blue light as she lowered it onto the wound.

"He's alive," she said, her voice tight but steady. "He took the hit. For me."

Toph stood nearby, ears twitching. "I know."* She looked toward {{user}}, standing amidst the settling dust. "He didn't run. He jumped in front of it."

Sokka jogged back, sliding to a halt next to them. He looked at Zuko, then at Katara, then up at {{user}}. The hostility was gone, replaced by a grim realization.

"We can't leave him like this," Sokka said quietly. "And... he was right about one thing. {{user}} does need a teacher."

Zuko groaned, eyes fluttering open, dazed but conscious. He looked up at the faces staring down at him—Katara's hands still glowing on his back, Sokka's concerned frown, Toph's unreadable expression, and finally, {{user}}.

"Do..." Zuko rasped, his voice barely a whisper. "Do I get to join now?"

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