Chapter 60 – Travels
Team Avatar was wandering around the Fire Nation colonies trying to avoid a chick called June who had taken a fancy to Kristen. Nuwa had sworn she made these faces plain and nondescript. What could possibly have attracted that bounty hunter to a pregnant, apathetic looking girl that is clearly already in a relationship?!
Twilight references aside, Team Avatar had to be called over to Toph’s location to pick her up and drop her off at Ba Sing Se so that she could get here before the drill made its way here. June would manage to follow them over eventually, because she has a shirshu, a beast companion that can track smells over extremely long distances.
Nuwa already plans to make June a bodyguard for Mai and Katara. They have plenty of money to hire her if needed. Her shirshu, Nyla, would make for an excellent counterintelligence asset.
~ ~ ~
Azula is bored in the Palace whenever Nuwa goes out for training in Lake Laogai. She can still train her body, but she still can’t firebend without leaking from her Heart chakra. With an excess of time, she decides to try out meditation and Spirit Realm exploration.
Because the Spirit Realm is merely a mindscape of the World’s Will, wandering within it can teleport her to dangerous or fortuitous encounters depending on her fate. Azula learns of this from her Uncle and decides to give it a shot. Worst case scenario is that she’ll teleport away or use firebending if she runs into danger. She wanders aimlessly in a random direction from Xai Bau’s grove.
The scenery changes and she finds herself in a swampy area looking at a mud house. Azula curiously knocks on the door. It opens after a minute to reveal a frog clothed as a man. He’s wearing pants made of various plant matter, which makes them look like Hawaiian shorts. He says with a clear voice, “Eh? A human? What brings you to these parts?”
Azula is also slightly dumbfounded at meeting a strange talking frog who reaches just above her waist in height. She says, “Uhh, that is.. Err.. I’m lost.”
A woman’s voice rings from inside, “Dearie, let the poor girl in. Can’t you see she’s our first guest since the remodel?”
Azula sees another frog come into her line of view. This one looks exactly the same as the first one, but is clothed as a woman. They seem to be a married couple.
The male frog clears his throat and apologizes, “Oh my, where are my manners? Please come in and make yourself comfortable. We just expanded this house for our growing son, so it’s good luck that we met a guest.”
Walking in and feeling strange at how she’s somehow been dragged into purposeless interactions with strangers, Azula looks around. The house has been expanded recently as all the mud walls on the top 40% of the house are in a different color than the rest. The female frog is busy setting plates for four, so Azula interjects, “Thank you for the kindness, but I am not hungry.”
The female frog turns to her and says, “Very well, but you’ll have to have at least one bite. On our table, this is the custom.”
Azula gulps nervously staring at the strange insect matter that is on the plate. Suddenly, she hears barking. A huge dog bursts in through the door looking like a feral mutt. The dog’s head reaches to Azula’s neck and from it’s head to the base of its tail, it should be at least 3 meters long.
Azula immediately adopts a defensive position in front of the kind hearted frog family. She readies herself to use firebending to protect them from the invader. Or she does until she hears from behind her, “Son! You made it. Come meet our guest. Remember, no slobbering or licking.”
Fully dumbfounded by now, Azula deflates and sits defeatedly at the table. The dog stops drooling saliva and lowers his excitement, then raises a paw up next to Azula. Shaking his paw, Azula continues feeling incredibly awkward. ‘I should have expected bizarre encounters like these when I made the decision to explore.’
Azula sits down and they all eat while making small talk. The dog has no seat, but all he has to do is bend his head down to stick his mouth in a big plate of insect grub. Azula manages to barely squeeze one spoonful of the grub down her throat.
Frogman says politely, “Now that we’ve settled down, let me ask again. We don’t get many humans around here, you see. It was more than 10,000 years ago that a human was spotted around these parts by our ancestors. Do you need any help getting somewhere?”
Too proud to ask for help directly, Azula stammers for a bit, “Not quite. Well.. you see, I have a chakra injury. The Spirit Realm brought me here.”
Frogman seems mildly stunned, “Well that explains just about nothing, haha. Anyway, you’re free to stay as long as you like. Our son will enjoy the company. He gets terribly bored.”
Frogwoman glances at Frogman with exasperation and says to Azula, “Why don’t you help me clean up the dishes?”
Azula nods with an “OK.” Despite the fact that she’s never done dishes in her life, she feels awkward about accepting so much hospitality and kindness from strangers without paying some of it back. Heading into the kitchen, Frogwoman twists a wood implement that seems to divert some creekwater into a basin. The water is dirty, but that’s the best they can do in a swamp. Azula watches Frogwoman scrub the dishes and attempts to copy the form. She’s quite a bit slower and less dextrous, but she gets the hang of it.
Frogwoman does her half and lets Azula take care of the rest. She looks at Azula and asks, “You must be wondering about why our son looks so different from us?”
Azula puts on a wry smile thinking, ‘I’m wondering about a lot of things! I have no clue what’s going on here at all, lady!’
Frogwoman continues, “The neighbors think the same. They say that we should send Buster away and that he doesn’t belong in the swamp. But even though we didn’t give birth to him, we still raised him with our own two hands, you know? We’d rather leave the swamp with him than send him out. He’s such a lovely child.”
Azula freezes up like she’s been struck by lightning.
‘Is that why I’m here? My Heart can’t accept that Nuwa’s child isn’t mine?’
Azula looks at Frogman and Buster horsing around with joy. She looks at Frogwoman staring at them with hands over her heart. Azula smiles, “You’re right. He belongs here with his family.”
Frogwoman starts tearing up and holds Azula’s hands. Azula doesn’t quite know how to read a frog’s facial expressions, but she gathers that she’s touched. The emotional frog says, “Thank you. Thank you for your words. They mean the world to us. What’s your name, dear guest? Mine is Kappa and my husband’s is Kappo.”
“I am Azula, and I hope we can be friends.”
“Of course!”
~ ~ ~
+40k LEE, Total: 3133k LEE
Several days pass and Toph, Haru, and Dan are picked up by Team Avatar onto Appa and are currently on their way to Ba Sing Se. The bison’s path coincidentally passes over the slow, but relentlessly moving Drill.
Aang says, “Woah! That’s one big hunk of metal!”
Katara and Mai are thinking the same thing, but they don’t say it out loud because they know better. After all, Toph can’t see the Drill with her sonar vision or seismic sense from this high up. Toph stands up with bravado saying, “Oh? The Drill is below?! Land us right now and I’ll go take care of it. Metal is my specialty!”
Everyone’s eyes twitch with annoyance at Toph’s newfound narcissism. She’s gotten it in her head that she’s invincible after the ubiquitous flattery and admiration of the military grunts. It’d be a miracle if the Fire Nation troops aboard that Drill let them do whatever they want when they can clearly see Appa. Nuwa’s plan is to wait for the Drill to reach Ba Sing Se and begin drilling into the wall so that Toph can enter while they’re distracted. With how loud the Drill will be, even Toph’s unnecessarily loud bending should be drowned out.
Dan immediately rejects her, “No way, we’re going with Stella’s plan. Wait until it starts drilling the wall.”
Toph groans and sits down grumbling. Dan is the only one that can reign Toph in, because she doesn’t have any counter to bloodbending, plus he has a big dick that she uses regularly. She finds it a pity that Dan belongs to Nuwa.
Haru is only around because he feels gratitude towards Toph and Dan for freeing his father from a prison camp. They also freed his village from Fire Nation control as well. He knows he and Toph are just fuckbuddies.
As far as his feelings, sometimes, he feels exasperation at Toph’s behavior and other times he feels that it’s cute. The biggest factor is that she’s too petite, while he’s more attracted to figures like Katara’s with nice and large D cups. He’s too much of a gentleman to stare at a pregnant woman’s boobs though.
Another factor is that he’s often emasculated by Toph’s brazen behavior and massive strength. He still blushes in embarrassment and indignity at how Toph ‘captured’ him publicly and took him directly into a tent to fuck during their very first meeting. Then again, he did enjoy the jealous glares of his friends after that and it’s not like Toph’s a high-maintenance girl. She barely pays attention to him other than the occasional lewd gropes at his face and butt. His thinking eventually comes around to, ‘Maybe, I could stick around and we could get married?’
Unfortunately, Haru’s thinking is slightly overambitious, because Toph has plans to start a collection of men. Haru’s the first in her collection. He’s got a very handsome face. She wants to add a super muscular short guy and a thin tall guy as well. Oh and a guy with a HUGE beard. They should all be in their lower 20s at most! She doesn’t care about the dick size all that much. The only reason that Dan’s large penis doesn’t hurt her is because he has the healing factor.
Dan shakes his head remembering how much he has to babysit Toph from fucking things up. Crippling and killing the rotten eggs without anyone noticing was not that hard. The problem was keeping a tight leash on Toph and making sure she isn’t near any alcohol. He’s had to sneakily bloodbend her mouth shut on several occasions where she almost revealed Nuwa’s entire plan to random military personnel.
She’s gotten more subtle lately too. Dan caught her last week building slabs of rock into training dummies for recruits with the exact same faces as some of the people they killed. Most people found it to be a joke, but in Dan’s perspective it was like she couldn’t handle holding secrets at all! Dan didn’t dare to go too far with his disapproval of Toph though, because bloodbending Toph took too much chi. It was like attempting to find blood in a rock!
~ ~ ~
Azula, Nuwa, and Aiwei sit in a circle with their knees touching. They have become friends with all the time they spend together. Aiwei was surprised and slightly depressed when he learned that Nuwa and Azula are lovers and Nuwa was pregnant from someone else.
He liked her a lot, but also felt relief that he wouldn’t be too close to her devilish temptations. Moreover, he wasn’t sure if he could live such a scary life with his ability firing off the charts around Nuwa occasionally. Knowing that he’s not a freak or an outcast of humanity helped him a lot with his mental health. He doesn’t feel mindlessly attracted to whoever shows goodwill to him anymore.
Azula is absentminded today. She is thinking about the ‘family atmosphere’ of the froggy household that she has visited several times over the past few days. She wonders if she can love the baby inside Nuwa. It never had a choice in the matter of who its being born to, and yet she hopes that it will be as happy as Buster in the future.
Azula puts her hand on Nuwa’s knee and looks into her eyes, “Will you love the baby?”
Nuwa, not expecting such an intense question all of a sudden from Azula, freezes up in worry over what sort of answer Azula wants. Then she realizes how calm Azula looks and why Azula asked her here next to Aiwei. She wants the truth. Nuwa is used to automatically telling the truth to Azula, but not regarding sensitive topics, because she’s too worried about if Azula will get angry and worsen her injury.
Nuwa slowly opens her mouth and says, “I don’t know. It’s Heza’s baby and she will. I.. I just don’t know.”
Azula nods, goes back into thought, and after a minute of silence she says, “Let’s raise the baby as our own. I’ll try to be a loving parent.”