The World of Avatar
BOOK THREE:
FIRE
CHAPTER TEN:
THE DAY OF BLACK SUN, PART 1:
THE INVASION
The last thing Mel wanted to do tonight was go back on patrol. Two nests of lurks and a couple of pus demons were quite enough for the day, thank you.
However when she returned home, the spider-demon-monkey had completely different ideas.
"No. No way am I going out again," she declared as she flopped on the broken couch. "I'm covered in slime and gunk and I just want a rutting shower."
And she was going to stay there until the spider-demon-monkey grabbed her scythe and jumped out the hole in her wall to race across the rooftops.
"Fuck my life," she growled as she leaped through the hole and started after him. The chase lasted for hours and went across the city and back before she finally found him sitting peacefully on top of a nondescript roof in the middle of old Haddyn.
"I'm going to rip half your arms off," she growled. "And then use them to beat your head in."
The demon monkey didn't seem to afraid of the threat. In fact it handed back the scythe to her quite readily.
"Even better," she said yanking it back. "I'll use it to cut your rutting head off."
The monkey shook his head. "Av-a-tarrrr" he grunted out. "Poor-taall."
Mel paused for a second. "Av-a-what?"
"Sooo-ka," he said with a tired sigh. Sometimes slayers could be so dense.
"Sokka?" she asked now fully alert. "What? What's going on with Sokka? Is he okay? Did he fall down a well? Is he-"
And just then the wind began to pick up as a small hole opened up in reality, and grew steadily larger.
Mel looked at the portal that was beginning to appear in front of her and then back at the many-armed-monkey. "I need to go help Sokka," she said finally understanding.
The monkey's response was to roll his eyes and shove the slayer through the portal. Hadn't he made his point already?
The next thing Mel knew it was the middle of the day and she was in another world. And as it happened she was also thirty feet in the air and falling to the ground at a very high speed.
"I'm so going to kill that monkey when I get-"
It was at that point that Mel's rant was interrupted by her falling through a tent and then hitting the ground. Hard. On her face. Again.
"Why does it always have to be my face?" she groaned as she peeled herself off the ground.
Sokka had been up since dawn, for once in his life, looking over maps and charts and things. He was nervous, and worried this wasn't going to work, and worried he'd done the wrong thing by canceling the full invasion, and trying to get every single last detail just right, and... Aang was screaming. Sokka grabbed his sword and ran for the tents as fast as he could, with Katara close at his heels. When he saw the ragged holes in two of the tents, he managed to run even faster.
He burst into Aang's tent and took in the scene -- Aang, who had been asleep, had been woken up by being ALMOST impaled by something sharp and pointy. Something bright red. That Sokka recognized. He dashed back out of the tent, nearly knocking Katara over and leaving her and Aang to blink at each other in confusion.
Next door, Sokka burst into the OTHER tent with a hole in its roof and rushed over to the figure on the ground. "MEL!!! Are you all right?
"No! I landed on my face!" she shouted before taking a second to realize who she was talking to. "SOKKA!"
And that would be the part where a certain slayer drops all pretense of being a badass and glomps onto the guy she hadn't seen in months. "Oh rutting hell, you have no idea how good it is to see you."
"By the way, I'm fine over here," Toph grumbled on the ground where Mel had landed on her. "Yep. Blind girl is a-okay. Don't mind me."
Sokka clung to Mel and kissed her. "No, I think I have a pretty good idea. DAMN, I've missed you so m... why are you all slimy?"
Behind Sokka, Katara and Aang tried to crowd into the tent, which was DEFINITELY not meant to hold that many people. "Does anyone want to explain what's going on?" Katara asked.
"Sure," Toph scowled. "I was fast asleep when this person crashed into the tent. On my head! And now they're making out. Great. You see, this is why I don't sleep in tents!"
"There was a pus demon I had to deal with and then I got pushed through a portal before I could shower," Mel said trying to wipe off some of the slime she got on Sokka's clothes and... well really just making the whole slime situation worse. "Next thing I know I was falling and I landed on cranky butt over there."
"The name is Toph," she snarked back at Mel. "Only my friends get to call me cranky butt."
"Everyone, this is Mel," Sokka announced. "Mel, this is Aang, the Avatar and the guy who's gonna save the world, a different Katara from the one you knew, and Cranky Butt." There was a chitter as a wide-eyed face peered in the hole from above. "Oh, and Momo Not-Junior."
Katara looked Mel over critically, not sure what to make of her, but Aang broke into a wide smile and tried to bow cheerfully in the cramped quarters. "Pleased to meet you! We've heard all about you! Welcome!"
It wasn't until Sokka said something that Mel remembered that the Katara here wasn't the one she knew from Fandom. Otherwise she would have understood why she was getting "so this is the girl banging my brother" look.
"Um, thanks," she said trying wipe some of the slime from her hair. "Sorry to drop in like this. I don't suppose anyone knows why a spider-demon-monkey would think it was important for me to be here?"
"Maybe it was to take a shower," Toph said wrinkling her nose at the smell. "Ugh. I don't think even Appa would want to hang with you."
Sokka turned to Aang. "What IS it with monkey spirits?"
Aang shrugged.
"Actually, you've got great timing," Sokka told her. "We're just about to embark on a big, dangerous mission to rescue-slash-kidnap your ex." He frowned. "A shower's a good idea, though -- we're not going to be all stealthy with you smelling like that. Plus, my dad'll be here soon."
"Great," Mel said with a wry grin. "First time time I come to visit and I'm already wrapped up in a battle and meeting your friends and family for the first time. And if this isn't the same Zuko then I get dibs on smacking sense into him."
"Hey!" Toph protested "What makes you think you can just barge in here and get all the fun jobs!"
"Hey!" Mel snarked back. "I've got experience! Have any of you here ever slept with Zuko? I mean besides Katara."
Katara's face went pale in shock. "What?!"
"Oh. Sorry. Wrong Katara. My bad."
Katara turned and scowled at her brother. "I slept with ZUKO?!" she yelled.
"Not YOU, the OTHER Katara!" Sokka replied. "And the other Zuko, too! I don't know how it happened! ...Zuko gets better when you get to know him, though!" He sighed. "Okay, look. We ALL get to smack sense in him -- I mean, he NEEDS it -- but we have to GET him first. Zuko -- I mean, the other Zuko, the Fandom Zuko -- said that right now was when he decided to definitely join our side. We can worry about who slept with who LATER."
Aang raised a hand tentatively. "When you say 'slept with', you really mean..."
"DON'T even THINK about it!" Sokka told him.
"Totally bumping the ugly bits," Mel informed Aang as she ignored Sokka. "Not that Zuko and I ever did the deed but yeah Katara and Zuko were totally shacking up."
"You know what? I think I like her," Toph said with a smirk. "We can keep her."
The light suddenly dimmed as a large, shaggy head loomed in the hole in the tent's roof. "I better not have heard what I think I just heard," Hakoda announced.
"I DIDN'T!" Katara insisted.
"Not OUR Katara, the OTHER Katara," Sokka clarified. "The one at Fandom. But that's not important right now. Dad, Hi! There's someone I'd like you to meet."
Hakoda wrinkled his nose. "I hope she's not the one that AWFUL smell's coming from."
"You're Sokka's dad?" Mel asked with a grin. "Rocketship. I'm Mel. I beat on Sokka to keep him in line. Sorry about the smell. Pus demon. Anyplace around here where a girl can get a rutting shower?"
Aang kind of stared at Mel with a look of confusion on his face. "Am I the only one who's not understanding half of what she's saying?"
"She's from a different world," Sokka reminded him. "In the future. They have wacked-out slang there. It's the bomb-diggety."
"Pus demon, eh?" Hakoda asked. "It smells like like the stinkweed I used in those mines I made to use against the Fire Nation navy." He looked at Sokka with a gleam in his eye. "I called them 'The Stink and Sink'." While Sokka had a good chuckle over that (and everyone else groaned), he looked Mel over. "So you're the famous Mel, huh? You're not quite what I imagined." Granted, she did, in fact, fit Sokka's detailed description of "hot like burning" and "made of awesome", but that did leave a little room for interpretation. "Why don't you all come out of the tent? I'm sure we have a lot of talking to do."
"Plus, the rest of us won't fit," Bato called from somewhere back in the distance.
"Ugh," Toph said leading the way out of the tent. "Someone's going to need to burn that tent now."
"Whatever," Mel said rolling her eyes. "So. What's the big plan for the battle? Might be a nice change to fight something other than the living dead?"
"If we're lucky," Sokka told her, "there won't be any fighting all." He shrugged. "We're not going to be lucky." He led the way over to where he had the maps laid out. "Okay, look. THIS is the Fire Lord's palace. Tomorrow there's going to be a solar eclipse -- Dad, did you get the Mechanist to make that chronometer?"
"It's on the boat," Hakoda answered.
"So are we!" a voice called out. From the stolen Fire Nation boat, Pipsqueak and The Duke, the huge and tiny revolutionaries, and Haru, the Earthbender they'd helped months ago, came over to join the crew. "I still think we need more people," The Duke harrumphed.
"No, look, okay, I have a plan," Sokka insisted. "And we can't take any more people than Appa can carry. Okay. The Fire Lord knows about our invasion plan, so they'll be expecting a large army to make a head-on assault. If I were them, I'd put the bulk of the army facing out, defending the palace, which means fewer guards patrolling inside the walls. We will sneak in disguised as a cloud, and get past most of the defenses without trouble."
Grinning, he pointed at the map. "Here is our target -- the royal living quarters. If we find Ozai and kill him, hey, bonus, but this mission is about Zuko. We'll have plenty of time for Ozai later, when Aang is ready. Here is the secondary target -- the prison. That's where they're holding General Iroh, who's been convicted of treason. If we can't get Zuko, he can teach Aang. ...And, really, we should probably bust him out, anyway, because he's kind of a nice guy."
"Wow. That's actually kind of smart," Mel said looking at the map. "Did you really come up with this idea?"
"Trust me. We're all amazed," Toph snarked.
"Oh, come on!" Sokka insisted. "I'm the planny guy! That's what I do -- I make plans! All strategic-like! I was good before I went to Fandom, and thanks to Kerrigan and Deadpool, now I'm damn good. Don't you all go pretending I'm not! Come on!"
Katara shrugged. "He... did come up with the other plan, too -- the one we didn't use. He comes up with a lot of plans. I guess he's useful, sometimes."
"SOMETIMES!?!??!?"
Hakoda chuckled and laid a hand on Sokka's shoulder. "You'll be a great leader someday, Sokka, but you need to learn to control that temper. They're just trying to say that they like your plan."
Sokka sputtered. "No, Dad, they're trying to say that I'm--"
"--too much like your father," Bato cut in. He gave the kids -- and Mel especially -- a supportive smile and a shrug. "Trust me, I feel your pain."
Mel rolled her eyes and smacked Sokka lightly on the back of his head. "Ease up Sokka," she smirked. "Don't you know we're just giving you crap?"
Sokka crossed his arms and pouted. "Yeah, but I don't like it."
"I think it's a great plan, Sokka," Aang offered.
"Umm... I hate to break up the ego-stroking," Haru broke in, "but... how long do we have until the eclipse?"
Sokka looked up at the sun and made a rough guesstimate of the time. "Not long enough," he answered. "Mel and I need to get cleaned up. Everyone else, get ready. Bato, Pipsqueak, you're staying with the boat -- if something happens to us, you're in charge of the resistance." He looked to his father for approval, and Hakoda gave a slight nod. "Okay. Break. Meet back here in twenty minutes."
"And if any of you water benders can whip me up a hot shower, I will kiss you with tongue for at least five of those minutes," Mel added.
"Uh... Thank you for the offer," Katara stammered, not sure how to react, "but I think I'll decline..."
Aang looked at Mel with wide-eyed awe. "Well, I could... OW!!!" He glared at Katara, who was squeezing his arm. "What was that for?!?"
"Come on," Sokka told Mel. "We've got a cold stream and a bucket. It's not a hot shower, but it'll have to do for now. I'll help wash your hair."
Mel gave Sokka a wicked grin. "In that case we might need more than twenty minutes."
Sokka grinned back. "Okay, forty minutes." Before anyone could object, he announced, "But I want to see this camp broken down and packed up by the time we get back, you hear?"
Aang watched the two race off towards the river with his trademarked confused expression on his face. "Why would you need forty minutes to wash your hair?"
Katara sputtered for a moment or two before Toph finally mercifully stepped forward. "What? You didn't smell that slime?" she said smoothly take Aang by the arm and heading toward Appa. "Do you want to deal with that during the invasion?"
"I guess not," Aang replied hesitantly turning toward Appa. "But I feel like I'm missing something."
"Just... let it be, Aang," Katara said rubbing her temples in frustration. "Just let it be."
[Vaguely reminiscent of episode 310 of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not much, though. Preplayed with the hot like burning and made of awesome cantjossme.]
FIRE
CHAPTER TEN:
THE DAY OF BLACK SUN, PART 1:
THE INVASION
The last thing Mel wanted to do tonight was go back on patrol. Two nests of lurks and a couple of pus demons were quite enough for the day, thank you.
However when she returned home, the spider-demon-monkey had completely different ideas.
"No. No way am I going out again," she declared as she flopped on the broken couch. "I'm covered in slime and gunk and I just want a rutting shower."
And she was going to stay there until the spider-demon-monkey grabbed her scythe and jumped out the hole in her wall to race across the rooftops.
"Fuck my life," she growled as she leaped through the hole and started after him. The chase lasted for hours and went across the city and back before she finally found him sitting peacefully on top of a nondescript roof in the middle of old Haddyn.
"I'm going to rip half your arms off," she growled. "And then use them to beat your head in."
The demon monkey didn't seem to afraid of the threat. In fact it handed back the scythe to her quite readily.
"Even better," she said yanking it back. "I'll use it to cut your rutting head off."
The monkey shook his head. "Av-a-tarrrr" he grunted out. "Poor-taall."
Mel paused for a second. "Av-a-what?"
"Sooo-ka," he said with a tired sigh. Sometimes slayers could be so dense.
"Sokka?" she asked now fully alert. "What? What's going on with Sokka? Is he okay? Did he fall down a well? Is he-"
And just then the wind began to pick up as a small hole opened up in reality, and grew steadily larger.
Mel looked at the portal that was beginning to appear in front of her and then back at the many-armed-monkey. "I need to go help Sokka," she said finally understanding.
The monkey's response was to roll his eyes and shove the slayer through the portal. Hadn't he made his point already?
The next thing Mel knew it was the middle of the day and she was in another world. And as it happened she was also thirty feet in the air and falling to the ground at a very high speed.
"I'm so going to kill that monkey when I get-"
It was at that point that Mel's rant was interrupted by her falling through a tent and then hitting the ground. Hard. On her face. Again.
"Why does it always have to be my face?" she groaned as she peeled herself off the ground.
Sokka had been up since dawn, for once in his life, looking over maps and charts and things. He was nervous, and worried this wasn't going to work, and worried he'd done the wrong thing by canceling the full invasion, and trying to get every single last detail just right, and... Aang was screaming. Sokka grabbed his sword and ran for the tents as fast as he could, with Katara close at his heels. When he saw the ragged holes in two of the tents, he managed to run even faster.
He burst into Aang's tent and took in the scene -- Aang, who had been asleep, had been woken up by being ALMOST impaled by something sharp and pointy. Something bright red. That Sokka recognized. He dashed back out of the tent, nearly knocking Katara over and leaving her and Aang to blink at each other in confusion.
Next door, Sokka burst into the OTHER tent with a hole in its roof and rushed over to the figure on the ground. "MEL!!! Are you all right?
"No! I landed on my face!" she shouted before taking a second to realize who she was talking to. "SOKKA!"
And that would be the part where a certain slayer drops all pretense of being a badass and glomps onto the guy she hadn't seen in months. "Oh rutting hell, you have no idea how good it is to see you."
"By the way, I'm fine over here," Toph grumbled on the ground where Mel had landed on her. "Yep. Blind girl is a-okay. Don't mind me."
Sokka clung to Mel and kissed her. "No, I think I have a pretty good idea. DAMN, I've missed you so m... why are you all slimy?"
Behind Sokka, Katara and Aang tried to crowd into the tent, which was DEFINITELY not meant to hold that many people. "Does anyone want to explain what's going on?" Katara asked.
"Sure," Toph scowled. "I was fast asleep when this person crashed into the tent. On my head! And now they're making out. Great. You see, this is why I don't sleep in tents!"
"There was a pus demon I had to deal with and then I got pushed through a portal before I could shower," Mel said trying to wipe off some of the slime she got on Sokka's clothes and... well really just making the whole slime situation worse. "Next thing I know I was falling and I landed on cranky butt over there."
"The name is Toph," she snarked back at Mel. "Only my friends get to call me cranky butt."
"Everyone, this is Mel," Sokka announced. "Mel, this is Aang, the Avatar and the guy who's gonna save the world, a different Katara from the one you knew, and Cranky Butt." There was a chitter as a wide-eyed face peered in the hole from above. "Oh, and Momo Not-Junior."
Katara looked Mel over critically, not sure what to make of her, but Aang broke into a wide smile and tried to bow cheerfully in the cramped quarters. "Pleased to meet you! We've heard all about you! Welcome!"
It wasn't until Sokka said something that Mel remembered that the Katara here wasn't the one she knew from Fandom. Otherwise she would have understood why she was getting "so this is the girl banging my brother" look.
"Um, thanks," she said trying wipe some of the slime from her hair. "Sorry to drop in like this. I don't suppose anyone knows why a spider-demon-monkey would think it was important for me to be here?"
"Maybe it was to take a shower," Toph said wrinkling her nose at the smell. "Ugh. I don't think even Appa would want to hang with you."
Sokka turned to Aang. "What IS it with monkey spirits?"
Aang shrugged.
"Actually, you've got great timing," Sokka told her. "We're just about to embark on a big, dangerous mission to rescue-slash-kidnap your ex." He frowned. "A shower's a good idea, though -- we're not going to be all stealthy with you smelling like that. Plus, my dad'll be here soon."
"Great," Mel said with a wry grin. "First time time I come to visit and I'm already wrapped up in a battle and meeting your friends and family for the first time. And if this isn't the same Zuko then I get dibs on smacking sense into him."
"Hey!" Toph protested "What makes you think you can just barge in here and get all the fun jobs!"
"Hey!" Mel snarked back. "I've got experience! Have any of you here ever slept with Zuko? I mean besides Katara."
Katara's face went pale in shock. "What?!"
"Oh. Sorry. Wrong Katara. My bad."
Katara turned and scowled at her brother. "I slept with ZUKO?!" she yelled.
"Not YOU, the OTHER Katara!" Sokka replied. "And the other Zuko, too! I don't know how it happened! ...Zuko gets better when you get to know him, though!" He sighed. "Okay, look. We ALL get to smack sense in him -- I mean, he NEEDS it -- but we have to GET him first. Zuko -- I mean, the other Zuko, the Fandom Zuko -- said that right now was when he decided to definitely join our side. We can worry about who slept with who LATER."
Aang raised a hand tentatively. "When you say 'slept with', you really mean..."
"DON'T even THINK about it!" Sokka told him.
"Totally bumping the ugly bits," Mel informed Aang as she ignored Sokka. "Not that Zuko and I ever did the deed but yeah Katara and Zuko were totally shacking up."
"You know what? I think I like her," Toph said with a smirk. "We can keep her."
The light suddenly dimmed as a large, shaggy head loomed in the hole in the tent's roof. "I better not have heard what I think I just heard," Hakoda announced.
"I DIDN'T!" Katara insisted.
"Not OUR Katara, the OTHER Katara," Sokka clarified. "The one at Fandom. But that's not important right now. Dad, Hi! There's someone I'd like you to meet."
Hakoda wrinkled his nose. "I hope she's not the one that AWFUL smell's coming from."
"You're Sokka's dad?" Mel asked with a grin. "Rocketship. I'm Mel. I beat on Sokka to keep him in line. Sorry about the smell. Pus demon. Anyplace around here where a girl can get a rutting shower?"
Aang kind of stared at Mel with a look of confusion on his face. "Am I the only one who's not understanding half of what she's saying?"
"She's from a different world," Sokka reminded him. "In the future. They have wacked-out slang there. It's the bomb-diggety."
"Pus demon, eh?" Hakoda asked. "It smells like like the stinkweed I used in those mines I made to use against the Fire Nation navy." He looked at Sokka with a gleam in his eye. "I called them 'The Stink and Sink'." While Sokka had a good chuckle over that (and everyone else groaned), he looked Mel over. "So you're the famous Mel, huh? You're not quite what I imagined." Granted, she did, in fact, fit Sokka's detailed description of "hot like burning" and "made of awesome", but that did leave a little room for interpretation. "Why don't you all come out of the tent? I'm sure we have a lot of talking to do."
"Plus, the rest of us won't fit," Bato called from somewhere back in the distance.
"Ugh," Toph said leading the way out of the tent. "Someone's going to need to burn that tent now."
"Whatever," Mel said rolling her eyes. "So. What's the big plan for the battle? Might be a nice change to fight something other than the living dead?"
"If we're lucky," Sokka told her, "there won't be any fighting all." He shrugged. "We're not going to be lucky." He led the way over to where he had the maps laid out. "Okay, look. THIS is the Fire Lord's palace. Tomorrow there's going to be a solar eclipse -- Dad, did you get the Mechanist to make that chronometer?"
"It's on the boat," Hakoda answered.
"So are we!" a voice called out. From the stolen Fire Nation boat, Pipsqueak and The Duke, the huge and tiny revolutionaries, and Haru, the Earthbender they'd helped months ago, came over to join the crew. "I still think we need more people," The Duke harrumphed.
"No, look, okay, I have a plan," Sokka insisted. "And we can't take any more people than Appa can carry. Okay. The Fire Lord knows about our invasion plan, so they'll be expecting a large army to make a head-on assault. If I were them, I'd put the bulk of the army facing out, defending the palace, which means fewer guards patrolling inside the walls. We will sneak in disguised as a cloud, and get past most of the defenses without trouble."
Grinning, he pointed at the map. "Here is our target -- the royal living quarters. If we find Ozai and kill him, hey, bonus, but this mission is about Zuko. We'll have plenty of time for Ozai later, when Aang is ready. Here is the secondary target -- the prison. That's where they're holding General Iroh, who's been convicted of treason. If we can't get Zuko, he can teach Aang. ...And, really, we should probably bust him out, anyway, because he's kind of a nice guy."
"Wow. That's actually kind of smart," Mel said looking at the map. "Did you really come up with this idea?"
"Trust me. We're all amazed," Toph snarked.
"Oh, come on!" Sokka insisted. "I'm the planny guy! That's what I do -- I make plans! All strategic-like! I was good before I went to Fandom, and thanks to Kerrigan and Deadpool, now I'm damn good. Don't you all go pretending I'm not! Come on!"
Katara shrugged. "He... did come up with the other plan, too -- the one we didn't use. He comes up with a lot of plans. I guess he's useful, sometimes."
"SOMETIMES!?!??!?"
Hakoda chuckled and laid a hand on Sokka's shoulder. "You'll be a great leader someday, Sokka, but you need to learn to control that temper. They're just trying to say that they like your plan."
Sokka sputtered. "No, Dad, they're trying to say that I'm--"
"--too much like your father," Bato cut in. He gave the kids -- and Mel especially -- a supportive smile and a shrug. "Trust me, I feel your pain."
Mel rolled her eyes and smacked Sokka lightly on the back of his head. "Ease up Sokka," she smirked. "Don't you know we're just giving you crap?"
Sokka crossed his arms and pouted. "Yeah, but I don't like it."
"I think it's a great plan, Sokka," Aang offered.
"Umm... I hate to break up the ego-stroking," Haru broke in, "but... how long do we have until the eclipse?"
Sokka looked up at the sun and made a rough guesstimate of the time. "Not long enough," he answered. "Mel and I need to get cleaned up. Everyone else, get ready. Bato, Pipsqueak, you're staying with the boat -- if something happens to us, you're in charge of the resistance." He looked to his father for approval, and Hakoda gave a slight nod. "Okay. Break. Meet back here in twenty minutes."
"And if any of you water benders can whip me up a hot shower, I will kiss you with tongue for at least five of those minutes," Mel added.
"Uh... Thank you for the offer," Katara stammered, not sure how to react, "but I think I'll decline..."
Aang looked at Mel with wide-eyed awe. "Well, I could... OW!!!" He glared at Katara, who was squeezing his arm. "What was that for?!?"
"Come on," Sokka told Mel. "We've got a cold stream and a bucket. It's not a hot shower, but it'll have to do for now. I'll help wash your hair."
Mel gave Sokka a wicked grin. "In that case we might need more than twenty minutes."
Sokka grinned back. "Okay, forty minutes." Before anyone could object, he announced, "But I want to see this camp broken down and packed up by the time we get back, you hear?"
Aang watched the two race off towards the river with his trademarked confused expression on his face. "Why would you need forty minutes to wash your hair?"
Katara sputtered for a moment or two before Toph finally mercifully stepped forward. "What? You didn't smell that slime?" she said smoothly take Aang by the arm and heading toward Appa. "Do you want to deal with that during the invasion?"
"I guess not," Aang replied hesitantly turning toward Appa. "But I feel like I'm missing something."
"Just... let it be, Aang," Katara said rubbing her temples in frustration. "Just let it be."
[Vaguely reminiscent of episode 310 of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not much, though. Preplayed with the hot like burning and made of awesome cantjossme.]