Zuko stared around the room cautiously. The Enterprise's sickbays made the battle dressing station on the Redemption, his command from almost a year earlier from when he was still hunting the Avatar in the name of the Fire Nation, and before it was destroyed completely in a bombing by unknown parties, look like a lowly piece of un-evolved crap by comparison.
Which, in retrospect, it was, Zuko thought to himself, staring around the room.
For starters, the room was circular, and much more spacious, compared to the small squat room that served the crew of the Redemption. The room was brightly lit by lights emanating from about a dozen rectangular panels that ringed the ceiling of the room, which put the dark room on his old girl, lit, barely, by the light of flickering torches, to shame. The room was full of advanced medical technology that the people of his world hadn’t even begun to conceive of, let alone build. In the center of the room, for example, resting on a small metal platform was a black examination table. It was attached to a rail that, once activated, would carry whoever was on it into a small metal chamber and close a small steel-gray door behind him or her.
That chamber is for physicians to look into the bodies of their patients to obtain diagnoses, Zuko thought to himself, anger and shame at his actions filtering through him. Though I didn’t know that at the time….
Zuko was running at speed down the corridor, following the blue-uniformed Starfleet medical team as it wheeled the insensate Toph down a long metal corridor with somewhat low-hanging metal beams that he had to repeatedly duck to avoid getting hit by. After a few moments of running past small cylinders that emitted bright lights and avoiding small metal beams, they were approaching a set of double- doors that appeared to be made of frosted glass with a curious symbol in the tops of each double door. A white image of a small metal cylinder with a bulb on top, winged with two snakes entwined running up the length of the bulb. The team stopped, and it’s leader, a young woman with brown hair pressed a small white button on the control panels next to the door. Zuko was stunned when the door slid open on command, revealing a brightly lit, spacious, circular room with half a dozen additional people: four people in white smocks which Zuko assumed were physicians and attendants as well as a young man and woman who were roughly his age, both were dark-skinned, had enlisted crewman’s insignia over their left breasts, and were in the dark reds of either security or engineering personnel.
Which means they’re from security and are here to make sure I don’t do something stupid, Zuko thought. Then he turned his attention on the physician and realized, with a shock like a punch to the gut, that the physician wasn’t human. There were segmented, curved ridges running up either side of the portly physicians face as he directed his human-seeming attendants to lift the insensate Toph onto a black examination table set on a platform attached to a metal rail. The alien physician took one look at the teenaged young human woman lying on his examination table and turned to look at a young human male manning some sort of gray control console next to the entrance to a large metal chamber attached to the railing.
“Get her in the imaging chamber,” the physician ordered in a deep almost gravelly voice.
“Yes, Doctor,” the young crewmember said, pressing a few buttons. With a plaintive whining sound, the chamber began to move.”
All at once Zuko realized what was happening, and blinding fear surged through his body and into his legs causing him to surge forward and grab at the examination table, straining against the force pulling it into the chamber as he shouted to them, “What are you doing!” He wasn’t fighting the examination table long, as he felt a surge of pain in his backside and he blacked out.
He shook the errant memories out of his head, I woke up an hour later with the doctor telling me that one of the security officer’s stunned me.
He sighed and turned his attention back to Toph. She was wearing a formless blue gown from the Enterprise’s own stores. Her skin was pale, but he was relieved beyond words to notice, noticeably darker from when they’d wheeled her in on that metal bed. There was a clear bag made out of the strange material that the humans from Terra called plastic attached to a metal rack above her head. It was filled with dark red human blood that was draining into a plastic tube and slowly, very slowly, into Toph, replacing the blood that she had lost in battle and surgery. He couldn’t help but remember what had passed between them back on the Fearless two weeks ago, Toph had passed Sokka and Suki kissing in Suki’s quarters (he still wasn’t at all sure if that meant they were just kissing or doing more intimate things in Suki’s bed), and Toph had entered a spiraling depression, predicated on the, in retrospect, hideously likely possibility, that she may die in the next couple weeks. Toph had become distraught that she may reach the end of her life without even so much as a kiss from a boy, and Zuko had disabused her of that notion personally, out of sympathy for her.
And now, Zuko thought, shaking his head as he watched the young woman hovering on the edge of death in her bed. I just hope time didn’t prove her wise. If she dies, at least she got a kiss before her end.
He heard the sound of footfalls on metal behind him and he turned around to view the ship’s doctor behind him, a look of utter sadness on his face. Zuko still felt a surge of shock at the doctor’s appearance. The fair skin, combed-back wavy brown hair and eyes, and corpulent build were nothing unusual on his planet. However, what shocked him still were the bony ridges surrounding his eyes and the small ridges above his forehead.
Kelby wasn’t kidding when he mentioned other species beyond humanity, he thought for the umpteenth Phlox saved his friend’s life, and his apparently genuine care for the welfare of others had gained him Zuko’s trust rather quickly. He knew Toph was in good hands.
“No one should be in one of my recovery beds at her age,” he said sadly, watching the meters above his patient’s head. “It’s especially a shame because she was shot in an arrow on the battlefield, such a waste of a young life. What I want to know now, is why? Why was she there? And what is this war about?”
Zuko sighed. “That’s a question with a long and complex answer. Could we perhaps sit down and I will fill you in the best I can?”
He pointed to two small leather chairs at workstations on the other side of the room behind the examination table. As they walked over, Phlox said, “You still haven’t told me your name, sir. I prefer to know the names of the people who try to physically stop me from putting my patient in the examination chamber.”
Zuko cringed at the shameful and embarrassing behavior he’d displayed earlier when Toph was just wheeled into sickbay. “Could you blame me? I’ve never seen anything remotely like the technology on this ship until Commander Kelby and his party literally crashed the ruin we were hiding out in. I come in, my friend’s dying and you’re shoving her into a metal chamber built into the bulkhead and shutting the door.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t understand, I just wanted to know your name,” Phlox said, a trace of annoyance in his voice. “You know mine.”
“Sorry,” Zuko said. “The name’s Zuko.”
Phlox processed that information without a word and they sat down at the workstations. Zuko sighed. Then thinking about it, he decided to start at the beginning.
“The world we live on is divided into Four Nations, unlike United Earth, which, according to Commander Kelby is divided into one hundred and ninety-six...”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“It’s good to see you Captain,” Commander Asha Naidu said in a lilting accent, a grateful look in her brown eyes as she walked with Captain Jonathan Archer. The young Indian woman, barely thirty years old, walked with Captain Archer through the ramshackle collection of olive-drab tents. Archer stared around at the ruined city surrounding the Starfleet-MACO camp. The explorer that was still extant in him was fascinated despite himself and the current situation at the broken stone ruins of the city they were standing in. The granite ruins, various shrubs and other grasses growing in the battle-induced cracks and rubble, extended for miles in every direction as far as the eye could see. The streets were paved, as far as he could tell, throughout the city, and the city’s construction extended well up the slope of the central mountain in the range that was right above their head. Tearing himself away from thinking of the effort that had gone into building this city over however long it had existed, he refocused his mental efforts on seeing to the needs of the United Earth people who lived here now. Commander Naidu, like every other Starfleet and MACO officer, noncom, and enlisted man and woman in the camp, was in a dirty and torn uniform of their respective service, half of the men and women wandering the camp had uniforms that had blue fading very rapidly into brown, or, alternatively, dark gray fading into black. “We’re running low on everything around here. The rations we took off the ASRVs are almost gone; we have no way to charge our equipment except for solar power, and that takes too long to suit our needs.”
“What about medical supplies?” Archer asked, curious as to why she hadn’t brought it up in the long report that he’d requested from her as soon as he arrived in the city and had an ensign drag her down from whatever task she was overseeing.
“We have about half of them left, sir,” Naidu said immediately, sighing in frustration. “There is a local herbalist who’s been helping out best she can, but she doesn’t have the resources to handle this many people. She’s eighty years old and she and her cat are the only two permanent residents in the area. She’s maintaining the old medical institute she used to run, which shut down after all of her medical students left to join the various military medical corps of the local nation-state.”
“The Earth Kingdom,” Archer said. “The local woman who brought Commander Kelby to the area filled me in on the local problems after the battle we just fought.”
“Yes, sir,” Naidu said, sighing and staring around at the view of the destroyed city. “I received the same briefing from the slightly insane herbalist who lives in the mountains a couple kilometers to the west. This city was one of the first to be taken out when their war swung into full swing around 2055. It was taken out to cripple the economy of a third of the continent. It was used to distribute imports from cargo vessels throughout the Earth Kingdom. It was destroyed completely. All the soldiers and most of the men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-seven were slaughtered. Most of the rest of the population, mostly the elderly, and young men under the age of fifteen, and every woman between the age of thirteen and thirty-seven were enslaved and deported to work camps and forced brothels throughout the Fire Nation and occupied sectors of the Earth Kingdom.”
Humanity seems to move in step when it decides to try to destroy itself, Archer thought to himself, shuddering as he thought back to what he learned in history classes in high school and college about that year in human history. Whenever one human world decides to destroy itself, the other follows suit in short order. In 2055 on Earth, the Third World War was barely over for two years. Virtually all governments had collapsed; every continent was covered in refugee camps that had formed from the people who’d wandered the world after fleeing their homes to avoid fallout. The refugee camps were horrid, squalid settlements full of starving and diseased people, murders and thefts were common and no one between the age of eight and eighty was safe from being horribly victimized by people who thought the destruction of civilization meant they were no longer bound by the rules of that society prior to it’s destruction.
Which, Archer thought to himself with a sigh, with no one around to bring them to justice, and the very concept of justice being about as popular as a fart in Sunday school, they were all too often right.
After clearing from his mind the graphic images he’d seen in a history textbook at Stanford in his freshman year, Captain Archer asked the question that had been residing in the back of his brain ever since he’d been contacted by Starfleet Command. “What happened to Captain Hernandez?”
Commander Naidu looked him dead in the eye, a look of anger, hurt, and sadness in her chocolate-brown eyes. “I don’t know, sir,” she said, regret suffusing her voice. Flicking an errant strand of hair out of her eyes, she said, “The Romulans had just unleashed a major fusillade at Engineering, several disruptor blasts impacted the hull at once. The blast caused the ship to rock hard to the right, throwing everyone out of their chairs and rendering several bridge personnel unconscious, including the Captain and the senior flight controller. I assumed command of the bridge, and was ready to return fire when Commander Kelby informed us that the warp core had suffered a breach. I gave the order to abandon ship, as the Romulan, apparently detecting that our warp core had gone critical, decided not to waste energy finishing us off and instead flew away and left us to our fate. I ordered two officers to carry Captain Hernandez and Ensign Zhao to the escape pods, and oversaw getting all the surviving personnel onto the escape pods before getting onboard myself. While we managed to get off the ship, some of the ASRV’s didn’t clear Columbia airspace before the warp core went, and the force of the explosion knocked them off their preprogrammed course, which would’ve taken them to Taku along with the rest of them.”
Archer felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his gut, and, dreading the answer, he asked, “Where did they land?”
She gave him a look that mirrored the sensation in the pit of his stomach, and said, “As far as I could tell, they landed in the western island chain.”
Archer knew the location they were talking about from the impromptu briefing Katara had given him between the battle and before her departure for the ship on the shuttlepods.
“The Fire Nation.”
--------------------------------------
Toph Bei Fong was floating. She didn’t know what she was floating in, where this place she was floating in was, or how she got here in the first place. All she knew was that she was floating, just floating. The amazing thing is, I just don’t care, she thought to herself, a heavy tiredness flooding from her head down into her toes. Here no one depended on her or judged her. I am at peace, she thought. Such peace as I have ever known. Her entire young life had been one monumental battle after another. For the first seven years since she'd learned to walk and talk it had been a battle against her own family for her right to be treated as everyone else, for her right not to be kept secret and under perpetual house arrest. A battle that had been finally, if not won, at least been brought to a close when she severed relations with her parents and left to join the Avatar in his quest to defeat the Fire Nation and become the salvation of the human species. That of course had initiated an entirely different battle to stay physically alive, and to defeat her enemies, a battle she relished. Normally she thrived on the clash of men, reveled in the sounds of clashing arms and benders engaging each other, but lately she’d grown tired grew tired. But she couldn't rest forever, she knew, so she resolved to take this rest now, while she could.
So she rested. She rested for a long time
Toph, a feminine voice said, cutting through the blackness. Toph whipped her head around on instinct, looking for the source of the voice, but stopped herself. There was no point. It’s not like I can use my eyes for this, she thought, and there’s no solid ground.
“Who are you?” Toph asked, curious.
“That is not for you to know right now,” the other voice said. “What matters is that you must leave this place.”
No, Toph said, anger and desperate fear seizing her, fighting the certainty that this was the absolute right course that flowed from the mysterious voice, this cannot be. Please.
“Relax, Toph, the voice said softly. “You can relax, just not at this moment. But you are needed in the outside world.”
Why, she thought, desperate and scared. Why must I leave?
The night is coming, the voice said. And if there is any hope of keeping it from swallowing everything you're long-sundered human brothers and sisters have built in the century since they found peace with themselves from being consumed in fire and blood you must be there. Fail, or our Emissary will never be born.
Why should I care if your Emissary is born?
Because without him, worlds will burn for all eternity.
Abruptly, she felt herself traveling upward, and she knew this was coming to an end. It looks like I have a new purpose, she thought.
A/N: Please read and review!
Which, in retrospect, it was, Zuko thought to himself, staring around the room.
For starters, the room was circular, and much more spacious, compared to the small squat room that served the crew of the Redemption. The room was brightly lit by lights emanating from about a dozen rectangular panels that ringed the ceiling of the room, which put the dark room on his old girl, lit, barely, by the light of flickering torches, to shame. The room was full of advanced medical technology that the people of his world hadn’t even begun to conceive of, let alone build. In the center of the room, for example, resting on a small metal platform was a black examination table. It was attached to a rail that, once activated, would carry whoever was on it into a small metal chamber and close a small steel-gray door behind him or her.
That chamber is for physicians to look into the bodies of their patients to obtain diagnoses, Zuko thought to himself, anger and shame at his actions filtering through him. Though I didn’t know that at the time….
Zuko was running at speed down the corridor, following the blue-uniformed Starfleet medical team as it wheeled the insensate Toph down a long metal corridor with somewhat low-hanging metal beams that he had to repeatedly duck to avoid getting hit by. After a few moments of running past small cylinders that emitted bright lights and avoiding small metal beams, they were approaching a set of double- doors that appeared to be made of frosted glass with a curious symbol in the tops of each double door. A white image of a small metal cylinder with a bulb on top, winged with two snakes entwined running up the length of the bulb. The team stopped, and it’s leader, a young woman with brown hair pressed a small white button on the control panels next to the door. Zuko was stunned when the door slid open on command, revealing a brightly lit, spacious, circular room with half a dozen additional people: four people in white smocks which Zuko assumed were physicians and attendants as well as a young man and woman who were roughly his age, both were dark-skinned, had enlisted crewman’s insignia over their left breasts, and were in the dark reds of either security or engineering personnel.
Which means they’re from security and are here to make sure I don’t do something stupid, Zuko thought. Then he turned his attention on the physician and realized, with a shock like a punch to the gut, that the physician wasn’t human. There were segmented, curved ridges running up either side of the portly physicians face as he directed his human-seeming attendants to lift the insensate Toph onto a black examination table set on a platform attached to a metal rail. The alien physician took one look at the teenaged young human woman lying on his examination table and turned to look at a young human male manning some sort of gray control console next to the entrance to a large metal chamber attached to the railing.
“Get her in the imaging chamber,” the physician ordered in a deep almost gravelly voice.
“Yes, Doctor,” the young crewmember said, pressing a few buttons. With a plaintive whining sound, the chamber began to move.”
All at once Zuko realized what was happening, and blinding fear surged through his body and into his legs causing him to surge forward and grab at the examination table, straining against the force pulling it into the chamber as he shouted to them, “What are you doing!” He wasn’t fighting the examination table long, as he felt a surge of pain in his backside and he blacked out.
He shook the errant memories out of his head, I woke up an hour later with the doctor telling me that one of the security officer’s stunned me.
He sighed and turned his attention back to Toph. She was wearing a formless blue gown from the Enterprise’s own stores. Her skin was pale, but he was relieved beyond words to notice, noticeably darker from when they’d wheeled her in on that metal bed. There was a clear bag made out of the strange material that the humans from Terra called plastic attached to a metal rack above her head. It was filled with dark red human blood that was draining into a plastic tube and slowly, very slowly, into Toph, replacing the blood that she had lost in battle and surgery. He couldn’t help but remember what had passed between them back on the Fearless two weeks ago, Toph had passed Sokka and Suki kissing in Suki’s quarters (he still wasn’t at all sure if that meant they were just kissing or doing more intimate things in Suki’s bed), and Toph had entered a spiraling depression, predicated on the, in retrospect, hideously likely possibility, that she may die in the next couple weeks. Toph had become distraught that she may reach the end of her life without even so much as a kiss from a boy, and Zuko had disabused her of that notion personally, out of sympathy for her.
And now, Zuko thought, shaking his head as he watched the young woman hovering on the edge of death in her bed. I just hope time didn’t prove her wise. If she dies, at least she got a kiss before her end.
He heard the sound of footfalls on metal behind him and he turned around to view the ship’s doctor behind him, a look of utter sadness on his face. Zuko still felt a surge of shock at the doctor’s appearance. The fair skin, combed-back wavy brown hair and eyes, and corpulent build were nothing unusual on his planet. However, what shocked him still were the bony ridges surrounding his eyes and the small ridges above his forehead.
Kelby wasn’t kidding when he mentioned other species beyond humanity, he thought for the umpteenth Phlox saved his friend’s life, and his apparently genuine care for the welfare of others had gained him Zuko’s trust rather quickly. He knew Toph was in good hands.
“No one should be in one of my recovery beds at her age,” he said sadly, watching the meters above his patient’s head. “It’s especially a shame because she was shot in an arrow on the battlefield, such a waste of a young life. What I want to know now, is why? Why was she there? And what is this war about?”
Zuko sighed. “That’s a question with a long and complex answer. Could we perhaps sit down and I will fill you in the best I can?”
He pointed to two small leather chairs at workstations on the other side of the room behind the examination table. As they walked over, Phlox said, “You still haven’t told me your name, sir. I prefer to know the names of the people who try to physically stop me from putting my patient in the examination chamber.”
Zuko cringed at the shameful and embarrassing behavior he’d displayed earlier when Toph was just wheeled into sickbay. “Could you blame me? I’ve never seen anything remotely like the technology on this ship until Commander Kelby and his party literally crashed the ruin we were hiding out in. I come in, my friend’s dying and you’re shoving her into a metal chamber built into the bulkhead and shutting the door.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t understand, I just wanted to know your name,” Phlox said, a trace of annoyance in his voice. “You know mine.”
“Sorry,” Zuko said. “The name’s Zuko.”
Phlox processed that information without a word and they sat down at the workstations. Zuko sighed. Then thinking about it, he decided to start at the beginning.
“The world we live on is divided into Four Nations, unlike United Earth, which, according to Commander Kelby is divided into one hundred and ninety-six...”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“It’s good to see you Captain,” Commander Asha Naidu said in a lilting accent, a grateful look in her brown eyes as she walked with Captain Jonathan Archer. The young Indian woman, barely thirty years old, walked with Captain Archer through the ramshackle collection of olive-drab tents. Archer stared around at the ruined city surrounding the Starfleet-MACO camp. The explorer that was still extant in him was fascinated despite himself and the current situation at the broken stone ruins of the city they were standing in. The granite ruins, various shrubs and other grasses growing in the battle-induced cracks and rubble, extended for miles in every direction as far as the eye could see. The streets were paved, as far as he could tell, throughout the city, and the city’s construction extended well up the slope of the central mountain in the range that was right above their head. Tearing himself away from thinking of the effort that had gone into building this city over however long it had existed, he refocused his mental efforts on seeing to the needs of the United Earth people who lived here now. Commander Naidu, like every other Starfleet and MACO officer, noncom, and enlisted man and woman in the camp, was in a dirty and torn uniform of their respective service, half of the men and women wandering the camp had uniforms that had blue fading very rapidly into brown, or, alternatively, dark gray fading into black. “We’re running low on everything around here. The rations we took off the ASRVs are almost gone; we have no way to charge our equipment except for solar power, and that takes too long to suit our needs.”
“What about medical supplies?” Archer asked, curious as to why she hadn’t brought it up in the long report that he’d requested from her as soon as he arrived in the city and had an ensign drag her down from whatever task she was overseeing.
“We have about half of them left, sir,” Naidu said immediately, sighing in frustration. “There is a local herbalist who’s been helping out best she can, but she doesn’t have the resources to handle this many people. She’s eighty years old and she and her cat are the only two permanent residents in the area. She’s maintaining the old medical institute she used to run, which shut down after all of her medical students left to join the various military medical corps of the local nation-state.”
“The Earth Kingdom,” Archer said. “The local woman who brought Commander Kelby to the area filled me in on the local problems after the battle we just fought.”
“Yes, sir,” Naidu said, sighing and staring around at the view of the destroyed city. “I received the same briefing from the slightly insane herbalist who lives in the mountains a couple kilometers to the west. This city was one of the first to be taken out when their war swung into full swing around 2055. It was taken out to cripple the economy of a third of the continent. It was used to distribute imports from cargo vessels throughout the Earth Kingdom. It was destroyed completely. All the soldiers and most of the men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-seven were slaughtered. Most of the rest of the population, mostly the elderly, and young men under the age of fifteen, and every woman between the age of thirteen and thirty-seven were enslaved and deported to work camps and forced brothels throughout the Fire Nation and occupied sectors of the Earth Kingdom.”
Humanity seems to move in step when it decides to try to destroy itself, Archer thought to himself, shuddering as he thought back to what he learned in history classes in high school and college about that year in human history. Whenever one human world decides to destroy itself, the other follows suit in short order. In 2055 on Earth, the Third World War was barely over for two years. Virtually all governments had collapsed; every continent was covered in refugee camps that had formed from the people who’d wandered the world after fleeing their homes to avoid fallout. The refugee camps were horrid, squalid settlements full of starving and diseased people, murders and thefts were common and no one between the age of eight and eighty was safe from being horribly victimized by people who thought the destruction of civilization meant they were no longer bound by the rules of that society prior to it’s destruction.
Which, Archer thought to himself with a sigh, with no one around to bring them to justice, and the very concept of justice being about as popular as a fart in Sunday school, they were all too often right.
After clearing from his mind the graphic images he’d seen in a history textbook at Stanford in his freshman year, Captain Archer asked the question that had been residing in the back of his brain ever since he’d been contacted by Starfleet Command. “What happened to Captain Hernandez?”
Commander Naidu looked him dead in the eye, a look of anger, hurt, and sadness in her chocolate-brown eyes. “I don’t know, sir,” she said, regret suffusing her voice. Flicking an errant strand of hair out of her eyes, she said, “The Romulans had just unleashed a major fusillade at Engineering, several disruptor blasts impacted the hull at once. The blast caused the ship to rock hard to the right, throwing everyone out of their chairs and rendering several bridge personnel unconscious, including the Captain and the senior flight controller. I assumed command of the bridge, and was ready to return fire when Commander Kelby informed us that the warp core had suffered a breach. I gave the order to abandon ship, as the Romulan, apparently detecting that our warp core had gone critical, decided not to waste energy finishing us off and instead flew away and left us to our fate. I ordered two officers to carry Captain Hernandez and Ensign Zhao to the escape pods, and oversaw getting all the surviving personnel onto the escape pods before getting onboard myself. While we managed to get off the ship, some of the ASRV’s didn’t clear Columbia airspace before the warp core went, and the force of the explosion knocked them off their preprogrammed course, which would’ve taken them to Taku along with the rest of them.”
Archer felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his gut, and, dreading the answer, he asked, “Where did they land?”
She gave him a look that mirrored the sensation in the pit of his stomach, and said, “As far as I could tell, they landed in the western island chain.”
Archer knew the location they were talking about from the impromptu briefing Katara had given him between the battle and before her departure for the ship on the shuttlepods.
“The Fire Nation.”
--------------------------------------
Toph Bei Fong was floating. She didn’t know what she was floating in, where this place she was floating in was, or how she got here in the first place. All she knew was that she was floating, just floating. The amazing thing is, I just don’t care, she thought to herself, a heavy tiredness flooding from her head down into her toes. Here no one depended on her or judged her. I am at peace, she thought. Such peace as I have ever known. Her entire young life had been one monumental battle after another. For the first seven years since she'd learned to walk and talk it had been a battle against her own family for her right to be treated as everyone else, for her right not to be kept secret and under perpetual house arrest. A battle that had been finally, if not won, at least been brought to a close when she severed relations with her parents and left to join the Avatar in his quest to defeat the Fire Nation and become the salvation of the human species. That of course had initiated an entirely different battle to stay physically alive, and to defeat her enemies, a battle she relished. Normally she thrived on the clash of men, reveled in the sounds of clashing arms and benders engaging each other, but lately she’d grown tired grew tired. But she couldn't rest forever, she knew, so she resolved to take this rest now, while she could.
So she rested. She rested for a long time
Toph, a feminine voice said, cutting through the blackness. Toph whipped her head around on instinct, looking for the source of the voice, but stopped herself. There was no point. It’s not like I can use my eyes for this, she thought, and there’s no solid ground.
“Who are you?” Toph asked, curious.
“That is not for you to know right now,” the other voice said. “What matters is that you must leave this place.”
No, Toph said, anger and desperate fear seizing her, fighting the certainty that this was the absolute right course that flowed from the mysterious voice, this cannot be. Please.
“Relax, Toph, the voice said softly. “You can relax, just not at this moment. But you are needed in the outside world.”
Why, she thought, desperate and scared. Why must I leave?
The night is coming, the voice said. And if there is any hope of keeping it from swallowing everything you're long-sundered human brothers and sisters have built in the century since they found peace with themselves from being consumed in fire and blood you must be there. Fail, or our Emissary will never be born.
Why should I care if your Emissary is born?
Because without him, worlds will burn for all eternity.
Abruptly, she felt herself traveling upward, and she knew this was coming to an end. It looks like I have a new purpose, she thought.
A/N: Please read and review!
