Chapter 40 – Ba Sing Se
Once inside Ba Sing Se, the group saw monorails that traveled within bridges that take entrants and visitors to the district they are heading to. The trams move due to two earthbender conductors at the front and back of the vehicle.
The flat sides where the trams touch the bridges appear to be made of granite, a durable type of rock. The granite surfaces of the bridges are so smooth from repeated use that they look as though they’ve been shaved flat.
There were hundreds of people going every which way through the trams. Under the bridges that take traders to places where people have enough money to buy products are the slums of the outer ring.
Here there are communities of people that mostly have been displaced by Fire Nation raids and have traveled to Ba Sing Se looking for new jobs or to gin up support to liberate their homelands. Unfortunately, they come and arrive at Ba Sing Se to learn that speaking of the 100 year war is illegal, and if you are poor, there are thousands of others looking for the same job you are. Regardless of that fact, they believe themselves to be safe since the walls of Ba Sing Se are legendary and have a reputation for being impenetrable.
So they formed their own communities in the cramped outer ring slums, which although smelly and impoverished, can still be homely. Little things give a lot of happiness to the simple folk of the slums, like the current situation where Team Avatar Gang are leaving small morsels of food in hard to reach places so that only kids can find and eat them secretly.
Tonight a lot of cheating couples are caught because teens copied the kids sneaking around and ended up peeping on some naughty nightly activities.
Toph feels increasing irritation at the terrible state of affairs in the outer ring. She feels that she doesn’t deserve to own so much wealth if all she wanted to do was fight. The people all around her here are starving and dying. She turns to Nuwa since she always likes to help people, but even Nuwa shrugs. She has no plan for how to help. This level of poverty can only be overcome with industrialization.
Nuwa has no desire to overly increase the pace of industrialization in the Avatar Record, because that would come with its own set of problems that she couldn’t be bothered to solve.
The group stay the night at an outer ring inn and are attacked by a random gang with only a single earthbender among them. The earthbender is not skilled and the rock blasts he sends are easy to dodge.
Toph captures him in rock shackles that he’ll have to put some effort to break out of and sends the rest of them off with some food. She could tell they were only after them for some food or money.
Katara, Aang, and Ty Li are the most affected by the impoverished state of the outer ring and the desperation of the locals. They could also tell that the gang members were not trying to hurt them. They just wanted to push them into a corner and demand some food.
Nuwa grumbles, “How could you be in a gang and still be so innocent? They’re total noobs. It’s like Luffy saying he wants to be a Pirate King without even knowing what the word pirate means. Luffy’s more like a permanent toddler playing hide and go seek. I better not meet that fucking idiot in the future..”
The group goes to sleep.
+10k LEE, Total: 1634k LEE
In the wake of the small chaos of the outer ring that night, a middle-aged lady with a creepy wide smile watches the small fight between Toph and the gang. Her name is Joo Dee and she is a brainwashed agent of the Dai Li who carefully follows any disturbances in the established order of the city.
The Dai Li are a group of secret police established by Avatar Kyoshi, one of the most powerful Avatars of all time, to help the Earth King deal with peasant uprisings. The Dai Li also asserted pressure on the Earth King to serve the people, since the members of the Dai Li are also recruited from peasants.
Avatar Kyoshi taught them a form of martial earthbending developed by a strong enemy of Kyoshi’s past which uses earth in the form of gloves to grapple and interrupt movement of the targets. Once the target’s movement is interrupted, they will not be able to continue their bending stances and can be quickly immobilized.
Two centuries later, the Dai Li have fallen to corruption and seek power for themselves. The Dai Li’s penetration into the city is quite impressive with around 500 active agents. The agents of the Dai Li are trained to follow orders without question, and whichever ones disagree are hypnotized into agreeing.
A name has special significance in the Avatar Record. The Dai Li discovered a woman extremely susceptible to hypnosis named Joo Dee around 50 years ago. Through testing, they found that brainwashing other women into thinking their name is Joo Dee gave them increased susceptibility to hypnosis. Since then, they have brainwashed many women to name themselves Joo Dee and follow their bidding.
The brainwashed individuals would follow orders more readily and their hypnosis would not need to be reapplied as often as others. The Earth King, for example, is a very educated man and has a sharp mind. Hypnosis only lets him forget some things, not rewrite his behaviors.
The head of the corrupt Dai Li in the city is Long Feng, the son of a merchant from the middle district. He’s the one who established the policy that it is illegal to speak of the fact that the Earth Kingdom is at war. The reason he does this is to keep power in the city. He can easily be sent out if the citizens and military demand that the Dai Li assist in the war effort.
The worse the rumors of the war are, the more panic and calls for reform will take place. Currently, he’s cozy as is with careful manipulation of the information that gets to the Earth King and occasionally hypnotising him to forget moments such as war reports.
That’s why he secretly shuts down any talk about the war within the city. If there’s more talk of war, then the Royal Palace would become busy, and the nature of the Earth King as a mere figurehead would be revealed.
Joo Dee reports on the strange group of wealthy kids distributing food to an underground Dai Li stronghold in the outer ring. The officers agreed that it is suspicious, but it’s also just as likely to be some rich kids messing around after sneaking out of the middle or inner rings. They decide to let this Joo Dee initiate contact and send three agents in case the group becomes belligerent to return them to their parents.
~ ~ ~
As one of the cleanest inns in the outer ring, the place was not overly smelly, moldy, or otherwise in ruins. Joo Dee approached the inn with a mechanical gait. Everyone recognizes Joo Dee throughout the city as a universally smiling lady that serves as the public face of the Earth King’s policies. The fact that there’s multiple Joo Dees that have slight differences in facial structure is unnoticed because each Joo Dee serves in a single area and is only known to those inhabitants.
The innkeeper is happy to welcome Joo Dee into the inn and hearing that she wants to speak to the guests that stayed last night, he readily agrees. Joo Dee heads up the stairs and implies to the innkeeper that it will be a private conversation, which he accepts and sits back down. In fact, the innkeeper is relieved because there was an attack last night and thinks Joo Dee came to lecture him about “maintaining proper decorum at all times” and “make Ba Sing Se great again.” Those can get tedious, but he doesn’t mind too much since he can see her smile.
Joo Dee knocks on the door. There is some banging from inside the room and Toph curses wantonly. Toph was sleeping in the same bed as Dan after using him last night and because his new body is bigger than hers, she woke up at the edge of the bed. When the knocks came, she fell.
Joo Dee sees the door open to reveal a small, grumpy looking girl.
Toph says, “Who the fuck are you?”
Joo Dee, with the same wide smile that she always has, replies, “Good morning, my name is Joo Dee. Please mind your language. It is unbecoming of proper decorum within the city. Are you teenagers perhaps lost? You are clearly from rich families. You belong in the middle or inner rings of the city.”
Toph wipes her eye boogers and opens her eyes to stare back incredulously at the woman. “Listen here, bitch. I don’t care who you are. Wipe that stupid grin off your face! Why the FUCK do you care what we do and where we go?”
Toph slams the door on the woman and heads back to bed.
Nuwa has noticed the commotion by now and opens the door of her room just opposite Toph’s room. Joo Dee, still smiling, turns around and sees the airbender tattoos of the Avatar from inside Nuwa’s room. Joo Dee’s pupils shrink, but her wide smile remains unfaltering.
Nuwa turns around to see Aang without any covering on his tattoos and turns back to Joo Dee. “Well, well. What do we have here? A little lamb that does as she’s told. What happens if I set the lamb free?”
Joo Dee smiles wide and sweats as she fails to comprehend how the Avatar showed up on a simple mission to talk to some rich kids. The Avatar’s job is to end the war! He’s clearly here for the Earth King’s support. She hasn’t even started to comprehend Nuwa’s words when she feels an impact on her Crown chakra and her mind goes blank.
Tears stream down Jane’s face as she falls to her knees at the years and years of life that she’s been held against her will in her own mind as it follows orders like a puppet. She can finally stop smiling. She only had small glimpses of lucidity during the time she’s been Joo Dee, but she knows that she’s been involved in some sick stuff like kidnapping children and hypnotizing even more Joo Dees.
A lady undid all of her brainwashing just like that. She looks up at Nuwa in gratitude and panic, “There’s three agents outside!”
Nuwa nods and simply says, “Pretend you’re still brainwashed.”
Jane widens her eyes in horror, “I.. I.. I can’t. Not anymore. I.. I’ve done things.”
Nuwa furrows her brows, “Sigh, this is complicated. Very well, you will follow us and pretend you broke free of hypnosis to bring us to the Earth King.”
Jane widens her eyes in further horror, “N-N-NO. I can’t go back there! They.. they will ‘brainwash’ me again.”
Mai and Ty Li open the door again and the full group is watching in bewilderment at the scene as Nuwa ponders further. Aang feels something off about his arm so he checks and sees an earth glove. “Eh, what’s this?”
Suddenly, Aang is pulled directly through the window by the glove and inadvertently wrapped up in the curtains. Katara shouts, “Aang!”
Toph laughs at the comical sight as she feels her grumpiness largely fade. Nuwa smiles, “Alright guys, get your clothes on. It’s time for a fight. We may be in for a long one.”
Nuwa jumps out the window and slides down a clothesline with her hook as she keeps an eye on Aang’s location. His airbending seems to be flubbing on the curtains and he’s not in a focused enough state to earthbend the glove off of him. Generally, bending becomes weaker the farther the bender is from the element in question, so he should have been able to weaken the glove’s hold on him if he focused.
The Dai Li have modified their style of earthbending such that they can make precision movements on small earth gloves from afar. In this case, they have three people pulling a single earth glove midair with Aang hanging on it.
Toph is a better earthbender than a typical Dai Li agent, but she hasn’t trained in her distance control, since she prefers hitting things head on. Therefore, we have our current situation of Team Avatar Gang in a high speed urban pursuit of Aang.