Chapter 84 – Moira, Casual Morning
Iroh keeps a low profile these days. Without having to run around and do therapy, he’s focusing most of his attention on training Aang and working out himself, getting himself in top shape for the upcoming battle. Bumi slams open the door to Iroh’s room and sits down on a nearby chair. Iroh’s jacked form drips with sweat. He drops down from a pull-up bar he placed 3 meters high on the wall.
He grabs his towel and dabs his face deliberately before turning around with utmost seriousness. Iroh knows Bumi isn’t one to act like this unless something major happens. They’ve been allies for the past decade and they’ve been enemies for the past two decades prior to that. Needless to say, they knew each other very well. Iroh picks up a cup of water and pulls up a chair just a few feet from Bumi and sits in front of him. He pulls out his tea spark, dips it in the water, which transforms the water into hot tea, then offers it to Bumi. Iroh starts the conversation with, “Tea?”
Bumi takes the tea and empties the hot cup into his throat in one go. Despite being hot, it’s paradoxically calming, and he’s glad that it can dull his sorrow and agitation. Bumi shakily unveils a floating solid rock from his sleeve and places it on the table. Iroh gets a bad feeling about this. It’s a warning from the Spirit Realm to prepare himself. Bumi lowers the rock onto the small table in between them and the rock disassembles to reveal the blood diamond.
Iroh stands up and recoils in horror upon sensing and seeing it. “What.. what is this.. a cursed artifact?” Iroh tries to interpret what his intuition is telling him about the vile object before him, until he gets a better look at it and feels that something about it is familiar. “No. It can’t be.. Moira?”
Bumi looks down, unable to bear looking at his old friend’s tears. Iroh tears up silently while mumbling and firebends a small spark to get a better look at it. He finally sees the distilled blood essence within and turns around to pound his flat rock bed with his fists. Cracks form and tears drip down through the cracks. He mourns the loss of his dragon companion, which had been with him throughout his life.
Iroh grew up in a time where dragons were not endangered. His father, Sozin, encouraged that dragons ought to be hunted as trophies for sport and glory. For his fifth birthday, Iroh received a dragon egg that was about to hatch. A silver-white female dragon was born a month later and Iroh raised her himself. They grew close and were inseparable. Although Iroh had a reputation for being a fearsome hunter of dragons, this was a lie he allowed to spread. He always befriended and hid the dragons that he encountered in the hunting grounds of the Fire Nation.
Bumi and Iroh fought many battles with Bumi upon his badgermole friends and Iroh flying atop Moira. This is why Bumi had also grown close to Moira. She was always a gentle and kind soul, unlike the war-like Iroh when he was young. She tried to convince him not to fight in the war. Moira, of course, didn’t say “I told you so” when Iroh lost his wife and son. She merely accompanied him and comforted him until his spiritual recovery, upon which she went off to form a family of her own, which she had been putting off for the sake of his well-being.
Iroh knew she would be in danger by herself, but they had gotten quite adept at avoiding Fire Nation patrols since they had smuggled so many dragons out of Fire Nation territory in the past. Dragons are the original firebenders, so Moira was a powerful firebender in her own right. Not as powerful as him, but more than powerful enough to deal with a group of soldiers when her flames were combined with her aerial prowess and heavy body blows.
He could tell from the blood diamond that all of her heartblood was poured out, evaporated, and condensed repeatedly until all of it was distilled into a single drop of blood essence, because this drop contains all of Moira’s firebending power, and therefore it functions as a passive battery of fire chi. Iroh chuckles morbidly to himself with tears still streaming down his face, ‘So they killed her to make a chi reservoir.. It’s not even that good. It can help a normal soldier recover chi 20% faster. How is that supposed to be worth forcing a species to extinction?’
‘Father.. Why did you always resort to killing? What does killing accomplish besides spreading hatred, fear, and desolation?.. In two months, little brother, I will show you that Father was wrong about everything.’
Iroh takes a deep breath and wipes his tears away. He accurately speculates, “Omashu was supposed to be attacked with the dispatch of Azula and Zuko half a year ago, but they never went through with it. I initially thought that they were holding off for either the Prince or Princess to return to launch the attack, or they had diverted forces to finding them, but it seems they were truly busy on other matters: hunting the remaining dragons to study these gems. It must be very lucrative for them to keep the matter under such tight wraps that none of our spies got word of it.”
Bumi reaches over the small table with his long arm and puts his hand on Iroh’s shoulder. He says, “You’ll get through this, old friend. You still have us, your niece, and your nephew. Moira would have been proud to see the man you are today.”
Iroh tears up again and offers a small smile as he pats Bumi’s hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, old friend. Want to play a game?”
“Let’s go! I can definitely beat you now that you’re down in the dumps!” Bumi immediately pulls out a Pai Sho board from his robes and starts setting up.
Iroh chuckles mildly but his mind isn’t fully on the game. He’s wondering what to do with Moira’s blood diamond. He’ll have to find a method to take it into the Spirit Realm. Nuwa should have some way, he’s seen her smuggle stuff into the Spirit Realm easily through some strange means.
~ ~ ~
+15k LEE, Total: 1141k LEE
Nuwa gets up off the bed properly and decides to make a quick run to check one everyone. It’s still early so no one has left. She finds Dan next door with Ty Li. He’s built a makeshift workstation of the same low-res Mario game with furries that she first saw him playing when they first met in the North Pole.
She only now realizes that there's no electricity for it to work with. He uses a joystick with wires that seems to work with waterbending to push columns of magnetic dust in specific configurations to make Mario move. Imagine a jacked up version of Etch-a-Sketch. The enemies and environment are hooked up to an automatically moving conveyor that he has to move by pressing his foot on a pedal. It looks very repetitive since there’s no feasible way to downsize the moving conveyor of magnetic dust involved in the enemies and conveyor in order to create large, unique environments.
Ty Li is playing as Mario this time around, by moving Dan’s hand and letting him waterbend. She’s having a jolly old time. Nuwa comes over and hugs her, but she shrugs her off and says, “Go away, Sis! You’re going to make me die.”
Nuwa looks like she’s about to give Ty Li a ‘Z-snap oh-no-you-didn’t’ gesture but then she looks at Dan and gives him a big hug instead. Dan isn’t used to random displays of affection from Nuwa. She only gives these to Azula, Ty Li, and Aiwei. Otherwise, she’s just perving on everyone. He gets a gut feeling that she’s either in the middle of a pregnancy mood swing or planning something.
“Danny baby, Sis is ignoring me for her game. That game’s nowhere near as hard as your dick! What if she neglects you because your difficulty settings are too high?”Nuwa brings her hand down to cup his balls and says in a voice audible to Ty Li, “We’re identical twins, so I can take her place right?”
Ty Li throws her controller down and turns her head. Nuwa quickly gives a parting kiss to Dan’s cheek and backs off from him. Then she says, “Hehehe, Sis you know I’m just teasing. So, how do you like Dan’s game?”
Ty Li looks back at the game and whines, “Too addicting..”
Chuckling, Nuwa grabs a fruit from Dan’s plate and offers it to Ty Li. Then Nuwa says, “At this rate, you’ll be an Otaku just like Dan.”
Ty Li’s eyes light up at the idea of getting closer to Dan and Nuwa mutters inwardly, ‘Pretty sure not even Dan likes this game considering he called this place a ‘shithole world’.’
Nuwa says, “Little Sis, you know you can use that Smartphone the Peaknights got you to play games?”Ty Li sighs and says, “I know. I liked that birdie game so much, but it stopped working yesterday.”
Nuwa looks incredulously at Dan and asks him, “You don’t know how to recharge it?”
Dan shrugs his shoulders as if it’s obvious that there’s no electricity for them to recharge it with. Nuwa lectures, “It works off chi, you dolt! There’s a battery inside that you can recharge by waterbending the negative charge back to the anode. All you have to do is make the water move and it’ll recharge on its own.”
Dan scratches his head and awkwardly smiles, “Ahem.. I forgot I could do that.” He picks up Ty Li’s phone from a table and starts charging it. Ty Li looks eagerly at Dan and her Smartphone as if the charging process will be done immediately so she can go back to playing her Angry Birds.
Nuwa sighs, “Hahhh.. Noobs.” and leaves. She then goes to visit Katara and Mai, who are sitting together sewing baby clothes. Yep, big nope for Nuwa there. Nuwa holds a distaste for menial labor of any kind. It’s one of the bad habits she has remaining from her first life as a middle-class American.
She’s fine with working in an office, making schemes, and fighting, but when it comes to washing dishes, doing chores, and cooking, she’s no good. She always imagined getting a househusband, but now that she has Azula, so she has to figure something out. Maybe a maid or a butler?
Next, she sees June and Aiwei chatting at the public breakfast table. Toph and Gunner are farther down the table chewing through rock hard pieces of bread with crack-crack-grind sounds that look like they can easily crack her teeth. She sits down next to Aiwei and puts her arm around his shoulder. “How’s it going, guys?”
June says, “Good. Bored. When do I get my thing?”
Nuwa reaches into her pocket and buys a vibranium whip for June from her [Shop].
-15k LEE, Total: 1126k LEE
“Here you go. Make sure you protect them well. Aiwei too. My poor baby got beat up.”
Aiwei soon finds himself with his face blissfully smothered in Nuwa’s cleavage. June coughs uncomfortably, looks away from the mildly lewd display, and says, “Can I be in the fighter group this time? The Dai Li never talk and the people in this city are weird. I prefer traveling alone than with awkward company.”
Nuwa readily agrees due to her and Azula’s recent power-ups. “Sure, you can go with Aang, Zuko, Gunner, and Haru today.” It’s easy to tell that June is excited to test out her new whip. Nuwa says, “You’re coming with us today, Aiwei. We need to figure out intel on surrounding military movements instead of these small-time mercs.”
Aiwei nods with his face resting sideways on Nuwa’s boobies. Nuwa suspects that Aiwei’s [Truth-Seer] ability is even stronger than she postulated earlier. If he can sense the truth based on a variety of rumors like he did during the interrogation of the vice-commander, what’s to stop Aiwei from figuring out intel despite having no background knowledge of the topic at all? She has to test it.
Nuwa writes down a list of known large military bases in this manner, “X base north of Omashu has airships. Y base northwest of Omashu has airships. Z base west of Omashu has airships.” She shows this to Aiwei and asks, “Can you tell the truth?” Aiwei immediately understands what Nuwa is trying to test, but shakes his head and says, “I have to be hearing it from someone with genuine knowledge on the topic.”
Nuwa ponders and comes to a realization. She had wishful thinking for a moment there. Innate abilities are related to the soul, therefore he could intuit what the soul of the vice-commander believed to be true, which should be far more accurate than the vice-commander’s memories. In fact, if even the soul could be fooled, Aiwei’s innate ability might lead him to believe in a lie.
It’s exceedingly hard for this to be the case though, because even Nuwa’s other half of her Dao Core, which is Heza, doesn't have a soul to be able to fool Aiwei. Heza is simply a simulated identity built inside her soul which has so many memories and experiences that it developed its own interpretation of the Dao of Sex. Heza would be recognized as fake by Aiwei’s [Truth-Seer] eventually, if not immediately.
‘Aiwei’s innate ability doesn’t have a direct connection with the Objective Truth of the World. Maybe in the future, it might, but not now for sure. How silly of me to think it did.’
Nuwa finishes up her breakfast and grabs some food to-go for Azula. She asks Aiwei, “Ready to go?”
(A/N: Moira means fate, which is a subtle nod by me at Iroh’s pitiful fate of losing those he loves.)
(A/N: Then we have Nuwa having a lazy morning. At this rate she’ll be a terrible mom lol.)