Chapter 73 – Gunner, Ty La
Nuwa finally buys herself a Nanotube Maternity Guard to wear, but she’s quite upset.
-250k LEE, Total: 1269k LEE
‘It’s been 3 days and I haven’t had sex even once! What a nightmare! I saw Katara sneak out with Aang last night, but I couldn’t find Azula at that time. She’s doing this intentionally knowing that I will be pent up! I bet she’s happily training away with a smug grin too!’
Nuwa slips her hand in her pants and inserts her fingers into her pussy. ‘Fucking hell.. This is so depressing. I, an aspiring sex goddess, am forced to the point of masterbation. We always had sex on Appa before, but now these girls are too pregnant for aerial sex, and they won’t let me get any action if they can’t have some. I was hoping to make some progress on my multi-elemental formation!’
Mai breaks the relative silence, besides the loud windstream, to say, “Bandits! From the southeast!”
With practiced ease, Zuko throws three fireballs downwards to the southeast in rapid succession. That’s the signal to the ground that there’s bandits in that direction. A few children make it a game to be “designated watchers of Appa” to be the first to tell Toph where the bandits are coming from. All they have to do after that is watch her speed off and beat them down.
There are lots of bandit groups on their path, but most can’t match the eelhounds' mobility, so they can ignore them, in which case Zuko would throw three slow fireballs in the direction they are being chased from. For merchant caravans, Zuko throws two fast and one slow fireball in their direction. That means to be cautious, but not openly aggressive.
Although there was one mishap where only one kid saw the signal and pranked everybody by saying it was bandits, which ended up with a poor merchant getting the scare of his life. Thankfully, Toph was having a bathroom break or else he wouldn’t have just been tied up by the Dai Li. He would have broken a few bones.
This instance of bandit interception is by far the most organized that Mai has seen. All of them are standing in an orderly line, blocking a mountain pass. The eelhounds cannot climb either mountain. They are too steep. Detouring around or earthbending a tunnel through the mountains would lengthen their journey too much. They have to go through the mountain pass.
A short, very burly man steps up as the eelhounds slow down in front of the bandit group. He’s got an eyepatch, an axe on his shoulder, and a huge beard. All of his hair is braided. Nuwa looks at him with intrigue trying to decide if he’s a viking or a dwarf. Maybe both? It’s also impossible to tell his age because of his thick facial hair.
Toph jumps in front of the group and shouts, “What are you blocking us for, bastards!?”
The viking dwarf reveals an infatuated look in his eyes as he looks at Toph, ‘Oh my. What a woman. She’s a fiery lass that’s for sure!’
He coughs and says, “Aye, halt landlubbers. We be pirates. The gud kind. Surrenderin 5% of yer fud and moneys fur safe passej.”
Toph blanks and says, “Speak english you damned moron!”
Azula walks up and holds back Toph with a hand on her shoulder. “That’s actually a surprisingly reasonable deal. But why do you call yourselves pirates and not mercenaries or bandits?”
The viking dwarf emanates a depressed vibe, “ERm, humm.”
A random bandit to his side says, “Look what you’ve done now. You made the captain sad!”
Another random bandit explains, “We were pirates before we had our ship destroyed by the accursed Fire Nation. That ship had been passed down in the captain’s family for generations! The young master had never even gotten a chance to sail it!”
The ‘captain’ looked down in shame and swung his axe on the ground in frustration causing waves of earthbender chi to crack the dry ground leaving several meter long cracks. Appa had lowered himself enough for Team Avatar to listen to the conversation. Nuwa feels odd that a bunch of earthbenders would dream of being pirates.
‘The sea and air are the absolute worst possible places for an earthbender to exercise their power. There’s no earth anywhere around them, unless they bring it from land, but even then it would be an extremely limited resource. This viking dwarf’s parents probably got rekt casually by the Fire Nation along with their ship. Somehow the crew escaped, or maybe this is the remnants of their crew. Oh well, it’s not like there’s any shortage of crazy people.’
Thinking of crazy people, she instinctively glances at Toph, but does a double take when she notices Toph looking at the viking dwarf with a weird look in her eye. The kind of look a child would get when they see a toy they like.
Toph shouts, “Oi, midget! Want to be my boyfriend?”
The viking dwarf coughs and blushes in surprise. In reality, he had been charging 25% tax for allowing passage, and only reduced it to 5% because of the hot chick. He was racking his brains on how to get laid while speaking as little as possible, since she couldn’t understand him. Now his problems were solved! He composes himself and replies, “Aye, butt uh, the name be Gunnrur.”
Then he leaves his crew to run off with some floozy without a single glance back. The crew is devastated! Some fall to their knees in despair. Some cry and shrink into fetal position. They see this as the end of their dream! The end of the pirate era!
One of them, who is hideously disfigured with a huge tumor on entire left face, is less serious about the pirate’s life among the motley crew. He looks proudly at their captain for choosing hoes over bros. He believes this to be the correct way of life. Another one follows their captain doggedly as if he doesn’t understand the context of the situation with all his other crewmates staying behind.
The disfigured one rushes forward and holds him back, “You numbskull! You’ll only be a third wheel if you stick around the captain. Are you trying to ruin the captain’s one chance at a happy life?!”
When the crew sees this, a few creative crewmates get some ideas. They silently go up to Azula and ask if they can tag along or be hired. After a short long-distance discussion with Nuwa that involved some funny faces and makeshift sign language, Azula gave them enough food for them to make their own way to Omashu. It’d be too much of a burden on the eelhounds to bring them all along with their luggage.
Haru looks somewhat dumbfoundedly at the short figure of Toph wrapping her arm around the arm of the even shorter Gunner. He looks up at the sky and screams internally, ‘What have I done to deserve this, Ancient Spirits!?’
He’s not even that mad at Toph’s frivolous ways. He’s used to it since she hops on Dan’s dick all the time. He’s mad at the fact that she picked up someone with such a maddeningly unintelligible accent! ‘How the fuck am I going to get along with this guy?!’
Gunner seems as oblivious as Toph when it comes to logistics, so he doesn’t bring anything with him other than his axe as he hops onto the eelhound with Toph with a silly smile on his face. Or he could just be too ecstatic at getting picked up by a cute lady to bother about his luggage.
The gang also facepalm, sharing Haru’s thoughts. As Appa glides upwards, Nuwa sees smoke rising from the place where Gunner cracked the ground with his axe. ‘Wait! Smoke from the earth? Could it be that he’s actually a lavabender?! Fucking hell, we would have had some serious casualties if we had come to blows. Maybe Toph actually noticed he could lavabend?’
Toph had realized that there was something strange about his earthbending, but that’s not what interested her about him. She liked how he was shorter than her! She doesn’t have to be the shortest adult around anymore. Also he had a huge beard! That’s two of the criteria in her Reverse Harem Collection met! Buy 1 get 1 free. Now she only has to find an extra tall man.
Azula jumps back onto her eelhound and leads the group into the mountain pass. Toph says, “Hey Midget, how old are you?”
Gunner says, “Venty-fo” then noticing that neither Toph nor Haru understood him, he counts up to 24 with his fingers. After Toph senses the fingers make a 24, she nods before saying, “Good, I would have had to throw you off the ride if you were some creepy old man under all that hair.”
Gunner grunts confusedly in disbelief that the tiny girl could dislodge his frame in the least. He’s short, but built like a tank with huge horizontal musculature. Toph has at least 4 times less volume and 3 times less weight than he does.
Toph suppresses her urge to beat him down for later. Even she understands the need for speed to get to Omashu. If they make it to the city and it’s already surrendered, then it’ll be much harder to fend off a holed up invasion force. She does grumble freely under her breath, “How can this midget not have heard of me, the great Toph Beifong, Drill-buster extraordinaire, first metalbender of all time, and Supreme Commander of the Earth Kingdom’s military?”
Haru looks halfway between facepalming and crying.
~ ~ ~
Ty La, the eldest of the Pea sisters, files away some documents in the Fire Nation Capital for her superior officer, an upstart young master named Mord who took over the commander post after the Northern Water Tribe inflicted heavy losses onto Admiral Zhao’s invasion fleet.
Ty La doesn’t have any opinion on whether the war is right or wrong. It’s kind of like how most people don’t consider topics outside of their immediate social circle or think about the Rohingya genocide. Entirely natural behavior. Ty La is the most dutiful of the sextuplets. Following instructions is what she’s best at and she always delivers impeccable results expressionlessly. Many think it’s quite a shame for her beautiful smile to be locked behind a flat demeanor.
However, Mord has made it his mission to break her stoic demeanor. Every chance he gets he invites her out for drinks and to his home so they can ‘get to know each other’ and ‘improve their coordination’. The worst part of it is that she’s heard from her sister, Ty Ly, that he’s a player who regularly preys on naive young nobles of both genders.
So far, Ty La has always expressionlessly refused him. Perhaps it started as a dare or a game for him to see the different kinds of pick-up lines and methods that he can try to use to crack the cool beauty, but he appears to be losing patience. Neither does he fear the Pea family, because he hails from the Zata noble family, which develops airship technology, builds the most crucial components, and exerts huge influence over the airship fleet.
It’s not enough to threaten Ozai, but their heads have grown quite big because they are new to the highest level of the noble structure and have experienced such a rapid growth in power. Mord is a Zata reject that was placed in the Navy, but regardless, Ty La doesn’t want to draw the fury of the Zata family on the slightly lower in rank Pea family.
Ty La sighs and rubs her brows as she finishes her filing. Lately, she’s seen some discrepancies in the number of boats that are reported to be docking in the wide port of the Fire Nation. There’s a downward pattern in the smaller boats that few people pay attention to, but are required to report whenever they dock anyway. These small boats are where most smuggled goods come in and out of the Fire Nation, so the Navy is supposed to pay close attention to them. Mord, however, doesn’t give a flying fuck.
As she ponders the reason why smuggling activities would be on the decline, Ty La hears a knock on the door to the Mord’s office. She adjusts her clothes and maintains her least friendly demeanor possible, thinking that it’s Mord, as she says, “Come in. It’s open.”
The door opens and from her side glance, Ty La recognizes the familiar man. She exclaims in a markedly less monotonous tone, “Uncle Piandao! What are you doing here?”
Uncle Piandao appreciates Ty La’s face for a moment before laughing and clapping a hand on her shoulder, “Hahah, can’t I visit just to see if you’re doing well?”
Ty La is momentarily flustered since she never took personal time during work. Piandao smiles and says, “You’re just as hard-working to a fault as you were when you were a little girl. Your mother called in a favor. I’ve come to get you out of the sticky situation that you’re in. You’ll be reassigned as a prison warden. It’s technically a demotion since you’ll be sent away from the Capitol and be making less money, but it’s better than nothing, right?”
Ty La feels warm inside as she thinks of her dear mother. She nods and can understand the reasoning. The Pea family must not want to make a big deal out of this and be the one the Zata family uses for the saying, ‘kill the chicken to scare the monkeys’.
Basically, the Zata family is looking to flex their might and show off their prestige so that people will take them seriously. With Ty La’s demotion following her rebuffs of Mord’s advances, the Pea Family’s figurative confrontation with the Zata family will be mostly neutral, with both sides getting what they want. The Zata family gets to save its honor, and the Pea family gets to avoid confrontation.
Noble houses in the Fire Nation aren’t allowed to fight openly. Their main battlegrounds are the economy and military. Political power is less significant due to the concentration of power in the military during wartime, but it is still relevant for attracting followers. Each house employs spies, mercenaries, and assassins to lurk in the houses of others. The Pea family are an old family, so they are taught the ins and outs of high-class warfare from a young age.
Even their side branches are well educated on noble warfare and either maintain unity with the main branch or move away from the Capitol to the peace of the countryside. Over the past 20 years, the Pea family has avoided all confrontation with other noble houses mainly because of the chi-blockers they have in the military and the vast wealth they have built with their network of traders in the Fire Nation colonies. The Pea family trade is mostly in fish, silk, and coal.
Needless to say, other major families also trade these goods because they are vital to the economy, but they’ve split up their network within the Fire Nation colonies such that each major family is allotted a certain area to collect goods from. In this manner, they maintain a sort of balance and peace between each other.
However, Lord Pea suspects that one of the other major families within their circle of fish/silk/coal traders has allied with the Zata! He doesn’t know which one, but some of their intermediaries in the colonies have gone missing in a targeted manner.
This is rather worrisome because the moment they lose their economic power is when their family will be pounced upon by hungry jackals from all around! This is why Lady Pea will go to such lengths to avoid confrontation with the Zata, at least until the Day of the Black Sun.
Lady Pea curses the damned family that broke the peace and betrayed their trade deal for the Zata, despite her being totally fine with betraying the Fire Nation. Lady Pea flicks the fan in her hand shut as she settles down at her desk to pen a letter for Piandao to relay to Nuwa through the Spirit Realm. ‘Just because you got some fancy airships, you think you can take on our chi-blockers? Humph! What arrogance..’
(A/N: THEY HAVE EYE BUT FAIL TO SEE MOUNT TY.)