Riding on the back of a sky cow, though comfortable, was incredibly boring. Once I got over the initial excitement of being so high in the sky, boredom set in pretty quickly once I realized that I wouldn't be able to go through my katas or train my chi manipulation without pissing off the sky cow, and while I wasn't too opposed to that idea, it felt cheap to annoy him when he was in a position where he couldn't fight back.

Thankfully, it only took me a few hours for me to think of a way that I could train without being obnoxious, and although it started to get stale after our first day of travelling, it still beat just sitting around and listening to Aang and Sokka playing I spy.

"You still hanging in there, Ty Lung?"

"Hah," Sokka said. "Nice one."

There was a brief moment of silence, where I could imagine Katara giving her brother a flat stare before I heard her talking again.

"You can come back up if you ever get tired," she said, ignoring her brother's comment entirely.

"I'm aware," I said. "I'm fine, you don't need to worry about me."

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"I'm sure," I said.

"Come on, Katara," Sokka said. "The guy said that he's fine, so why bother him about it?"

"Yeah," Aang chimed in. "Besides, it's not like Appa would let anything bad happen to him."

The sky cow grumbled, as if to deny the claim.

Since it seemed like nobody was interested in talking directly to me anymore, I tensed my arms and started doing pull ups again, hanging from the sky cow's fingers a few hundred feet up in the air.

"I'm just worried," Katara said. "Maybe we should go closer to the water, just so he doesn't get too hurt if he falls."

"We need to stick to the clouds, Katara," Sokka said. "We're not sure if we've lost the Fire Nation's trail yet. Besides, you heard him. He knows he can just climb up whenever he wants."

"We're close to our next stop anyways," Aang said. "The Earth Kingdom city of Omashu. I used to always go there with my friend Bumi."

The name tickled my memory, but being in the middle of a pull-up, I didn't want to lose focus and accidentally prove Katara's fears right. I tried my best to ignore Aang's description of the Earth Kingdom city, and focused on my exercises.

I wondered if there was anything in the city that I could buy to augment my exercise in any way. Though pull-ups were nice, I needed some variety, and though I entertained the idea of doing hanging crunches, I wasn't confident that the sky cow would want to keep a firm grip on my legs. Maybe I could buy some rope to tie myself to his legs, but while the Kyoshi Warriors had left us with an adequate amount of money for us to support ourselves on, I personally didn't have a single coin to my name and refused to mooch off another's coffers.

Though I immediately started to think of strategies to goad the local earthbender population into fighting me so I could take their money once I beat them, I grimaced when I realized that for once in my life, I was travelling with a group. While I didn't mind any sort of trouble that would come from a result of my own actions, I doubted that the rest of the group would be okay with it, and if I wanted to continue to tag along with them, I would have to play along.

Though I suppose they had never implicitly stated that I wasn't allowed to fight and rob anyone. I filed away the mental note to ask them, along with the older mental note I had to find a healer about my chest condition, but the new note took priority, since I needed money to visit a healer in the first place.

I wondered for a moment, whether it was okay for me to be doing such intense exercise when I was apparently prone to random chest pains, but I felt in top shape. I was in the middle of a set of leg raises, before I felt the sky cow start to descend.

"Ty Lung, we're going to land now," Katara called from over the side. "Can you climb up so Appa can land without crushing you?"

I grunted in affirmation, too tired to care about forming proper words, and pulled myself up. The sky cow let out grunts of annoyance as I yanked at his fur to climb onto his back, but I knew he could handle it.

"Geez, you're soaked," Sokka said.

"I'm aware," I panted out, before using my hands to wipe the sweat off my face as best as I could. Katara held out a small rag for me, and I mumbled a thanks before using it to wipe the rest of my body down as best as I could.

Katara blushed and averted her eyes from me, hiding them behind her hand, while Sokka gave me an unimpressed stare. Aang didn't seem to notice, as he guided Appa through the sky, searching for somewhere that we could land without being seen.

"So are you planning to put on your clothes anytime soon, or do you just plan to walk into a city completely naked?" Sokka asked.

I was still wearing a loincloth, but I didn't feel the need to be unnecessarily pedantic.

"I think I'd be turned away at the gates if I tried," I said, with a shrug. "I'll put on my clothes once I dry off a bit. I don't want them to get any dirtier than I need to. Actually washing my clothes is a pretty novel experience for me, and I still haven't quite gotten the hang of it."

"You've never washed your clothes before?" Sokka asked, his face curling into an expression of shock.

From his reaction, I could only assume that he thought I meant that I'd never worn clean clothes before.

"The servants always washed my clothes for me when I was younger," I said, with a shrug. "And in recent years, I never bothered to wash my clothes properly. I just dunked them in the river whenever I had the opportunity to wash myself, but didn't actually put any care into maintaining them."

"Servants?" Sokka asked, dumbfounded as if he'd never heard the word before.

"Paid help," I clarified.

"I know what servants are," Sokka said, he opened his mouth, as if to continue, but he turned away with a huff.

I don't know why he didn't ask the obvious question but I didn't have any burning desire to share my history, so I let it remain unasked.

"I usually do the laundry for Sokka and Aang," Katara said, still keeping her eyes respectfully averted from me. "I don't mind if you want me to do yours too, if you don't mind."

"I don't," I said, even if I was surprised by the offer. "That would be very helpful. Thanks, Katara."

"Don't mention it," Katara said, glancing towards me to give me a smile, but looking away again when she saw that I was still wiping my abs of sweat. "It helps me practise my waterbending anyways."

"I didn't know you were a waterbender," I said.

"Really?" Katara asked. "I could've sworn I mentioned it at some point."

"Nah," I said. "I would've remembered if you did."

Katara didn't seem too confident in my claim, but didn't seem to be invested enough to argue against it. "Well, now you know," she said. "Part of the reason why we're heading to the North Pole is actually because I want a waterbending teacher too, it's not just for Aang."

"I see," I said, curious about how strong Katara might be with this new information, though I wasn't too hopeful about the possibility of getting a good fight from her. Even though she was apparently a waterbender, she didn't seem too confident in her abilities, and after a quick scan of her thin body, I grew more confident in my assumptions. While I had underestimated Suki in a similar fashion, Suki's body had been muscular and tight at the very least, while Katara looked much too soft to be someone that was used to combat.

"Hey," Sokka said, breaking me out of my analysis. "You see something interesting there, pal?"

I turned to Sokka and was surprised to see him scowling at me, but before I answered him, I couldn't help but wonder if he was hiding any surprises as well. He certainly had the confidence of someone who thought they could fight, and just because he had been manhandled by Suki, didn't necessarily mean that he wasn't a decent fighter.

When I scanned his body, I was surprised to see that he sported more muscle definition than I had expected. While he didn't look overly muscular, he looked like he had spent a decent part of his life with a consistent training schedule. His body type was closer to Suki's than it was to mine, and though Suki's body had been more "tight" with clearer muscle definition that wasn't hidden behind extraneous fat, Sokka looked slightly bulkier than she had been, though I wasn't sure if that was due to his training, or simply because he was a man.

"Maybe," I said, answering Sokka's question after a short pause. "Do you have any hidden talents that you haven't revealed to me too?"

Sokka seemed flustered for some reason, but scowled at me when he finally processed my question.

"No," he grumbled, and turned away to stare out into the distance.

I waited for him to say anything, but when he didn't, I shrugged and finished wiping the sweat from my body. With the rag being soaked completely, I walked over to the edge of the saddle and wrung it out, leaning far enough over the edge that it wouldn't hit the sky cow.

It took a few more minutes for Aang to find a suitable spot to land that wasn't too far away from the city, but far enough that we wouldn't be spotted as we flew down. After I put on my clothes, and Katara gave me some string to tie my hair up in a ponytail so I wouldn't immediately be kicked out for looking like a bum, and fashioned a fake beard for Aang made of Appa's fur so he wouldn't be recognized as the avatar, we didn't have too much trouble making it past the gates of Omashu.

Though I had initially wanted to use the opportunity to try and find someone to diagnose my strange chest pains since we were in a big city, Aang's comment about how he wanted to ride the Omashu mail delivery systems one time, swearing that we would leave right after, made me assume that I wouldn't have the time to consult a healer, especially since I didn't have any money.

So I tagged along as Aang dragged us to a secluded spot near the top of the city, taking two delivery carts, since I was too big to fit comfortably in the same cart as the rest of the three, and raced down the city of Omashu.

I had to admit, it was a lot more fun than I expected. Though the ride had been smooth for the first three seconds, I quickly had to destroy the bottom of my cart so I could kick off the rails to hop over a shipment of poorly packaged spears that nearly impaled me, with Aang having to manipulate his cart with his airbending in similar fashion to avoid them. The four of us nearly died a couple more times as we flew down the rail system, and as I failed the last jump, sending my cart crashing into the side of a building, and me flying onto the ground in a bruise and battered heap, I couldn't help but understand Aang's obsession for riding things a little more.

Though Aang's cart had crashed in a similar manner to mine, they managed to break their fall with a cart of cabbages rather than the stone wall of an Earthbender-made building, and were able to hobble over to me to check if I was okay.

When I sat up to reassure them that I hadn't broken anything, my eyes narrowed when I noticed a large group of guards surrounding us.

To my disappointment, my travel companions were quick to surrender, and not wanting to create a rift between us so early, I dutifully let myself be escorted along with them.

We were eventually led to the King of Omashu, and when I saw King Bumi narrowing his eyes at Aang a sudden bolt of clarity hit me. Though Bumi wasn't an entirely uncommon Earthbender name, I hadn't made the connection between the Bumi in Aang's stories, and King Bumi of Omashu until now. As if he read my thoughts, King Bumi's eyes suddenly darted to mine, widening for some reason before he coughed violently into his fist.

"Umm, are you okay, sir?" Katara asked.

"Oh, I assure you I'm quite fine, young lady," Bumi said, pounding his chest and clearing his throat, though he kept his eyes locked on mine. "Anyways, what were you saying again, Captain Oro?" he asked, as he picked at his ear.

I didn't understand why Bumi insisted on acting like an infirm old man when he was one of the most feared men in the Fire Nation's military, and from the confused expression on the guards' faces, they didn't seem to understand what their king was doing either, but they seemed to roll with it pretty easily.

"Your majesty," one of the guards said. "These juveniles were arrested for vandalism, travelling under false pretences, and malicious destruction of cabbages."

"Off with their heads! One for each head of cabbage they destroyed!"

Even if Aang's cart had destroyed a cabbage cart, I didn't quite understand why this cabbage merchant was here, and from the way that the guards barked at him to shut up, I don't think they knew either. Regardless, he was quickly ignored as Bumi continued to glare at me.

"Throw them," he said, pausing for dramatic effect. "A feast!"

Though Sokka immediately seemed enthused by the idea, Aang and Katara reacted to the idea with a little more suspicion.

"I'm confused," Aang whispered.

"Yeah, me too," Katara said. "I thought we'd get in trouble for sure. Why do you think he's treating us to a feast?"

"I'm not sure," Aang said. "Maybe he's crazy? He seems a little crazy."

I raised an eyebrow.

"I might be assuming wrong, but isn't King B-"

Bumi let out another loud hacking cough, sending out a spray of spittle so violent that it almost reached where we were standing. Aang and Katara recoiled in disgust, completely forgetting that I was about to say something, but I paid no attention to them, raising an eyebrow towards Bumi instead. He glared at me for a split second, before his eyes softened as he gave me a genial smile.

"Excuse me, young man," he said to me. "You look like you have a good sense of fashion. Would you be able to give me an opinion on my outfit?"

As Aang and Katara recoiled further, muttering something about insane ramblings. I stared at Bumi for a moment before shrugging.

"Well-"

"Oh no, not so publicly," Bumi said, quickly interrupting me. "I'm rather shy, you see. Why don't you come whisper it into my ear?"

I shrugged and walked up towards him, but rather than waiting for me on his throne, he stood up and wandered away, muttering something under his breath as he motioned for me to follow him through a small door to the side of the throne room.

Once I closed the door behind me, Bumi quickly stomped down and raised his fist, summoning a thick slab of stone to block the door.

"Ah, there," he said, with a wide smile. "Can't risk my old friend overhearing us and ruining the surprise."

"So you are Aang's friend," I said.

"I am," Bumi said, nodding excitedly. "And so are you, it seems. A strange one, too. I've never met a male Kyoshi Warrior before. Aren't you too young to leave your island?"

"Honorary Kyoshi Warrior," I said, patting my robes.

"Stranger, yet," Bumi said, with a hacking laugh. "So, what'll it be, Kyoshi-boy? Will you keep my little prank under wraps until I can punish my old friend for leaving me for a hundred years without even a goodbye?"

While I didn't really care either way, I narrowed my eyes and smiled, not willing to let go of the opportunity to have the strongest earthbender in the world owe me something.

"What's in it for me?"

Bumi grinned, exposing his crooked teeth. "The opportunity for the act of charity to warm up your cold little warrior heart?" he asked.

"Not likely, old timer," I said, grinning back. "If you're going to ask me to let you pull off a prank a hundred years in the making, you'll have to offer something better than that."

"Well what do you want, then?" Bumi asked, tilting his head and cackling. "I am the King of Omashu, you know. There isn't much I can't offer."

"I want you to teach me something," I said immediately, before I could even think about the question.

Bumi's eyebrows arched upwards, as his grin fell into a look of surprise.

"Really?" he asked. "I expected you to ask for a fight."

"Yeah, me too," I said, with some surprise in my own voice.

"So what about it, then?" Bumi asked. "I was hoping to get a warm-up before I beat the crap out of my old friend. Offer still stands if you want me to beat you up too."

"As exciting as that sounds, I'll still have to say no," I said, not entirely sure of what was coming out of my mouth before I said it. "I'm on a journey to becoming the strongest being in the mortal realm. Maybe if I'd met you a few weeks ago, I might've thought that fighting you would help me achieve that, but recently I've met a few good teachers that helped me grow more in a few days of training than I did in a few years of constant fighting. I thought that maybe you could help me do the same."

Though I hadn't been confident in my answer when I first spoke, I slowly started to realise that everything I said had been true. Suki, the old lady, and Iroh had all taught me to be stronger, and though Suki and Iroh had definitely destroyed me in my fights with them, that hadn't been the main reason for my growth.

I looked up at Bumi to see him giving me a gentle smile, but I almost flinched back at how quickly it morphed into a malicious grin.

"So you want me to teach you something, eh?" he asked.

"Maybe," I said, suddenly feeling a lot less confident about my answer. "Can I change my mind?"

"Nope!" Bumi said, with a cackle. "I already gave you one chance. No take-backsies."

"Yes take-backsies," I said, raising my fist with the obvious intent to start a fight whether he wanted one or not.

Bumi raised an eyebrow at the sight and cackled.

"No," Bumi said, clapping his hands together.

My eyes widened and I leaned back to dodge the pillar of stone that shot directly towards my head. Spinning to the side, I regained my footing and focused a burst of chi into my feet to lunge towards Bumi, but he simply grinned at me, waving before he stomped his feet and a wall of stone rose in front of me, blocking me off completely. I tried to back up, to give me enough space to try to kick the stone wall down, but the wall behind me closed in quickly. With no way to dodge in the narrow hallway, I found myself enclosed in a tomb of stone, engulfing me in complete darkness. Though I had no way to see it, I felt gravity take hold and the stone tomb I was encased in plunged deep into the earth as Bumi's laughter echoed around me.

"Lesson one!" he cackled. "Old people can be absolute bastards!"

I screamed incoherently in rage as I plunged deeper into the earth, but before I could tell Bumi about how I intended to tear off his head and shit on his corpse, I found myself being spit out of the earth, landing hard on my back.

Once I took a moment to wheeze out in pain and catch my breath, I sat up and shouted at the ceiling.

"I changed my mind, you old fuck!" I shouted. "I'll fucking kill you!"

I heard Bumi's cackle echo around the caves, so I knew the old bastard could hear me somehow, but I didn't shout any further, knowing that it would just waste any energy that I could put toward killing him instead. I looked around, at where Bumi had deposited me.

I was in a large cavern, and though the entirety of it was lit up with the dull glow of glowing purple rocks that lined the floors, it wasn't bright enough for me to see where the cavern started and ended, or how tall it was. I scanned the area, looking for any hint of how I could leave this place, when I saw a spot of green light, shining out against the purple glow that covered the rest of the room.

My rage dropped for a moment as it was quickly replaced with confusion at what I saw. I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes, before I glared at the words that were written out with glowing green crystals that were embedded in the walls.

"I'm sorry about your pudding. I figure this will give me enough of a headstart before you come and rip my head off."

Below that message, there was a large hole in the wall, and below it, a bunch of shattered crystals that had been ground down so fine that it was almost dust. From the few crystals that were still attached to the wall, I assumed that whoever Bumi had trapped down here had been annoyed enough at him that they felt the need to crush his signature to dust. With a few remnants of his name still visible, I decided to finish the job that my predecessor had started, and kicked at the remainder of Bumi's name that was still attached to the wall. It took several solid chi-empowered kicks to erase any hint of Bumi's name, but without the old man himself to strangle, it filled the void in my heart at least temporarily.

The only thing that I learned from Bumi's old message, was that he expected his previous prisoner to be able to escape this place eventually, if his mention of a head start was to be believed and the air tasted too fresh to be completely cut off from the outside world. I looked around for any hint of an exit, and narrowed my eyes when I saw the barest hint of pale white light coming out from the ceiling.

There was a slight pinprick of light, and I couldn't tell if the opening that it came from was small, or if it was just far away. With there being too little information about whether that was the actual exit or not, I wandered around the cavern looking for any more hints of where I should go.

It only took me about ten minutes of wandering for me to find my next hint. Though I had missed it on my first walk around the edges of the cavern, there was a spot on the wall that had a series of small holes leading up towards the ceiling like a series of hand and footholds. They seemed entirely too rough to be intentionally designed, and the similarity to the hole that had been punched out of Bumi's name made me think my predecessor had been the one to make them, but I pushed the idea aside, not finding the small detail too important for my escape.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

With no other leads to follow, I put my hands inside the holes and used them to climb.

It didn't take me long to reach a height where I had gotten high enough to see that the hole in the ceiling more clearly, and recognize that it was big enough that I would be able to climb through it if I got to it. There was still the problem that the hole was located in the centre of the ceiling, while I was climbing on the walls, far away from it, but as I climbed higher, I quickly realised that the entire cavern was shaped like a dome. I reached a point where the holes in the wall weren't deep enough for me to find purchase at the steeper angles that I started to climb at, and I lost my grip.

I managed to land on my feet, rolling to reduce the impact against the stone floor, and went back to attempt a second climb.

After trying and failing to climb three more times, I wondered if my failures had been due to the fact that I was using my predecessor's climbing holes. While they were useful for the initial climb, it seemed that my predecessor had been a smaller person than I was, and the relatively short distance between each foothold made it awkward for me to climb on them, especially when the cavern started to slope inwards.

Standing at the base of my predecessor's climbing holds, I kicked a few footholds for myself, with a few chi-empowered kicks, but quickly realized that I would need to use my fists to make more handholds for myself, unless I intended to climb the entire wall while I was upside down.

Rather than punching the wall immediately, I took some time to try and empower my punches with chi, punching the air experimentally as I let my chi flow through me, trying to get comfortable with the way it flowed through my body, and focused it in my hands as I thrusted them forwards. I don't know how long I repeated the motions in my own improvised kata, but when I felt confident enough, I moved on to the wall.

My first punches against the wall didn't do enough damage to crack them, but I had empowered them with enough chi that I didn't immediately break my bones upon impact. I tried a few more times, and once I gained enough confidence in my punches to know that even if I cut my skin and bruised my flesh, that my bones wouldn't break, I punched harder and harder until finally, I punched a hole in the wall, with a sharp cracking sound that echoed throughout the entire cavern.

I grinned at my success, but didn't waste any time in making more climbing holds for myself. It was slow work, but I eventually got to the point where I'd been consistently falling, but with more secure climbing holds for myself, I managed to stay on, even if I had to strain my entire body to stay hanging.

It didn't take long after that for my path up the wall to go flat, until I was hanging upside down completely. I lost my grip a few times as I punched more handholds into the ceiling, breaking them at a slant so I could afford more purchase for myself. I fell a few more times during the process, but persisted in my attempts to create a path towards the hole in the ceiling.

I had managed to create a series of climbing holds that led me towards the hole, and was only a few more feet away from being able to reach it, but as I climbed up from the bottom of the wall once more, I noticed something strange.

After learning that I could simply forge my own set of climbing holds, I had mostly ignored the path that my predecessor had carved out of the rock wall before me, but I managed to notice out of the corner of my eye, that after I got past a certain point in the wall my predecessor's path simply stopped short.

I frowned at the strange sight and stopped in my climb to inspect it further. As I hung down, I gauged the distance between the last of my predecessor's climbing holds and the hole in the ceiling, wondering if they had simply jumped across the remainder of the distance, but I quickly dismissed the idea. It was too far, and the jump would need to be made at an awkward angle.

I toyed with the idea that maybe my predecessor hadn't actually made it out of this hole on their own power, and either had to wait to be rescued by someone else, or they had simply died down here, but I had trouble believing my own theory. I couldn't help but think that they had found some other method of climbing out of this cavern, either out of necessity or because they had discovered a better method than punching holes in the wall at some point.

I stared at the last of my footholds, and acknowledged that if they had used some other method out of necessity, the same requirement probably didn't apply to me. I knew for certain that I could just punch about eight more footholds and climb out of the cavern.

I frowned and I hopped down. Though I knew that it was possible for me to just leave and beat Bumi's decrepit ass for what he did to me, I had a new foe now, in the shape of a mystery that had been left behind by an unknown predecesor of mine. I didn't want to leave now and give up the fight with my conceptual foe without even trying to solve it, so I sat on the floor and stared up at the wall.

After a moment of thought, I stood up and started to walk around, wondering if the sudden stop on my predecessor's path had just been a red herring, that maybe they discovered an entirely different way to escape, or if they simply restarted for some unknown reason, and that there was another set of completed climbing holds somewhere else along the wall. I stood up, and aside from a few spots on the floor where it seemed like my predecessor had stomped against the floor in frustration, creating small spiderwebs of cracks around the area that they had been climbing in, I didn't find any hints that my predecessor had even explored the rest of the cavern at all.

I frowned, but didn't give up on the idea that the climbing holds were a red herring of sorts. I smacked my legs and wondered if the solution to this whole puzzle was just an application of my chi manipulation that I'd been using ever since I learned about it.

Smacking my legs to wake them up, I summoned as much power as I could, before launching myself into the air with a chi-empowered jump.

Though I had already used my chi to maneuver around the battlefield during my fights with Iroh, Zuko, and the fire nation soldiers, I had never used it to jump vertically during those fights, and was surprised by how high I managed to launch myself into the air, but regardless of how impressive my jump had been, I was still nowhere close to reaching the top of the cavern, barely reaching a third of the way to the top. I frowned as I landed, wondering how much chi I could pour into my legs before my body couldn't take it, but I couldn't help but think that this wasn't the way that my predecessor had done it. Looking down, I noticed that I had created a tiny crack in the ground with my jump, and could only imagine that a chi-empowered jump powerful enough to reach the top of the cavern would leave a gaping hole in the ground that would be impossible to miss.

So I thought some more. I still couldn't abandon the idea that the climbing holds were a red herring though, so I inspected the wall, wondering if there was any possibility that my predecessor had used speed to run up the wall. I'd seen Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors running up small trees before, so the idea wasn't too ridiculous, but this cavern was much higher than the trees on Kyoshi Island, and was sloped inwards.

Still, I didn't want to discard the idea without at least trying it.

Walking away from the wall, I waited until I managed to get a respectable distance to build up speed and sprinted full force at the wall.

Though my run up the wall wasn't as graceful as Suki's had been, I managed to get a similar distance that she might have, before my feet started to leave the wall, but again, it wasn't nearly enough. I frowned as I kicked off the wall and flipped around so I wouldn't land directly on my back, and when I landed, I decided I couldn't have made it much higher than I had gotten with my jump.

I looked up at the wall, as if it would tell me what I was missing, but it stayed silent no matter how long I stared at it.

I ended up trying a few more things, like trying my previously dismissed ideas of launching myself from the same height that the last of my predecessor's climbing holds ended at, and even climbing up the wall backwards, using my feet to kick out new climbing holds instead of my hands.

Nothing seemed to work as I launched myself at the wall over and over, and eventually, after one particularly bad fall where I had been to tired to right myself, I ended up falling on the floor from a significant height, directly on my back.

I coughed violently as I landed, feeling the wind getting knocked out of me, and realized that I had tired myself out to the point where I wasn't sure if I could escape the hole even if I wanted to use my method, not knowing if I actually had the strength left to punch any more holes in the walls.

I stared up at the hole in the ceiling as it taunted me with its light, but even though I was panting with exertion, I was surprised by how little frustration I felt. While I might have been more upset to lose to another mortal being, it felt a lot less damaging to my ego to lose to a cavern, as strange as it was. As I laid down on the smooth stone floor, I wondered if it wouldn't be so bad to simply stay there and accept that I had been defeated by the earth itself, swallowed up to be slowly digested in its inanimate stomach. How could I win against the earth, after all?

I frowned and shook my head, trying to shake myself free of the exhaustion that had come over me, but I failed to summon the strength to sit up. I stayed there laying on the floor, detesting my previous thoughts.

How could I win against the earth?

I asked myself the same question once more, but this time I tried to think of an actual answer, instead of accepting my defeat to easily. My thoughts were muddled from exhaustion, and I wasn't sure how long it took me to even begin trying to think of an answer, but I wasn't very happy when I eventually did think of an answer.

Earthbend.

I scowled at the idea, hating the idea that I could covet an ability that I didn't have. Even if it was an impossibility for me to earthbend in the first place, I felt a wave of distaste at the very idea that I would use the ability even if I spontaneously developed it. Even if I recognised how strong earthbending was as an ability, an easy feat since the cavern I was lying in was something that an earthbender had created in the first place, I couldn't imagine myself using it, and when I did, the image of an earthbending Ty Lung felt wrong, and somehow weaker than who I was now.

No. I would never covet an earthbender's ability.

But no matter how much I tried to ignore the thought, I simply couldn't shake it from my mind.

How did earthbending even work? How did earthbenders, mere mortal beings, shape the earth that formed the world itself. Every living being was born on the earth, fueled by the earth, and died in the earth, and yet, a handful of the humans that inhabited it were so arrogant as to suggest that they could control it?

I frowned, wondering if that was really the case. I wondered for a moment, whether earthbenders were simply a superior breed of humanity before I dismissed the thought. Ultimately, it didn't matter whether earthbenders were superior or not, since I knew I stood above them on the peak regardless, but I still had to wonder how they could possibly claim to control the earth.

But they didn't actually claim that, did they? They were earthbenders, not earthcontrollers.

A small part of me told me that the minor difference was negligible, that they meant the same thing, but the thought buried itself deep into my head, refusing to let me go. I had to wonder why, and for a long time, I came up with nothing until I thought of the badger moles, the original earthbenders.

Theirs was the purest form of earthbending, and yet, it was difficult to think that they had complete mastery over the earth that they lived in. If anything, it could be said that the earth controlled them, rather than the other way around. They lived deep in the depths of the earth, and it was questionable as to whether they needed to come to the surface at all. They ate, drank, slept, and bred deep underground, apparently traveling through the earth so fast that it would be more accurate to say that the swam through the earth, rather than dug.

Earth was a backdrop to life, not just for the badger moles, but for every living thing in the mortal realm. In that case, wouldn't living be considered earthbending, in a sense?

I felt my entire body relaxing as I stared up at the cavern that I was in, wondering how much of my thoughts were being influenced by exhaustive delirium or if I was actually crazy like so many people believed I was, and considering whether the answer to that question actually mattered or not.

"I am Ty Lung," I said.

My voice echoed back, as if the cavern itself was speaking to me.

"I am Ty Lung," it said.

And I couldn't help but wonder if it actually was. I let my chi, my life force flow through me, and whether it was due to my exhaustion or something else, I found it suddenly difficult to control where it went. My chi flowed loosely, expanding out from my bones, to my muscles, to my skin, to the stone that I rested on, flowing like blood through my body and outside of it. I had trouble deciding where my sense of self started and ended. I knew for sure that my body was a part of me, but I couldn't help but think of the earth as being a part of me too.

I don't know how long I stayed there for, letting my chi circulate between me and the ground, but I didn't find myself wanting to rush. The earth wasn't going anywhere, and neither was I.

I stood up when I was ready, and walked towards the wall. I placed my foot on it, and felt my chi circulating through the smooth surface of the wall. I stepped up onto the wall, and walked up it because why would I fall from it? It was a part of me.

I walked up the wall, ignoring the climbing holds I'd made previously and casually climbed up out of the hole. I found myself crawling out of what looked suspiciously like a repurposed latrine. I tried not to think about it as I glanced at the crystal writing on the wall.

"It took you long enough that I managed to buy some replacement pudding for you. Hope this makes us even!"

I glanced down to see a fresh pudding cup placed on the floor, but from how the floor below it was completely pulverized, I had to assume that my predecessor hadn't accepted the their peace offering so easily when they had climbed out of the hole.

Glancing to the side, I saw another message written on a different wall.

"Lesson #2. Don't steal food."

The sight of food made me realize how long it had been since I'd last eaten, and though pudding was hardly a meal, I wasn't about to turn down the offering of a sugary snack to replenish at least some of my energy. I upended the pudding into my mouth, and threw the hopefully expensive cup into the not-latrine, savouring the sound of it shattering against the stone, before stomping off to find Bumi.

Though the palace layout was confusing, it took me a surprisingly short time for me to locate Bumi once I heard his obnoxiously loud cackling.

"Your final test is a duel!" Bumi shouted as I pushed open a door. "And as a special treat, you may choose your opponent."

"You bastard!" I shouted, as I burst into the room. "You throw me in a fucking toilet, but offer duels to other people like they're fucking candy?!"

"Ty Lung!"

The sound of my name, being shouted by three familiar voices drew my attention towards my travel companions, two of whom were encased in shells of green crystal.

I stared at Katara and Sokka, who seemed as surprised by my arrival as I was of the situation that I had found them in. For some reason, whether it was tired delirium born from my lack of sleep and food or simply because I really hadn't expected either of the siblings to be encased in green crystal, I couldn't figure out what was going on until a gust of wind drew my attention to the boy standing in the center of the room.

"You said you didn't hurt him," Aang said, his voice straining as he struggled to hold back a shout.

Bumi glanced in my direction, and winced when he saw me, though it took me a bit of time to figure out why. Looking down to glance quickly at my hands, I remembered how badly I had bloodied them by punching holes into the walls, and had to wonder what the rest of me looked like. I was caked in a layer of dust, and my ponytail had come loose sometime during my struggle, and I scowled when I realized that I might've torn up my uniform in my failed attempts to climb the hole, but at the very least, I had an easy outlet to dump my anger into.

"Well, to be fair," Bumi said, giving Aang a nervous grin. "He pretty much did all that to himself."

"Don't lie to me!" Aang shouted.

While I might've been more interested in why Aang's tattoo was starting to glow with a dim blue light on a regular day, if I was being honest with myself, I couldn't find it in myself to care too much about the kid at the moment. With my vision growing red as I glared death towards my future victim of elder abuse, the wind that whipped around the room only served to blow sand into my open wounds.

"Stop it, Aang," I said. "He's telling the truth."

"What? Seriously?" Sokka asked from across the room.

I didn't bother to answer him.

"I choose you!" I said, pointing my finger towards Bumi. "Duel me!"

"Well," Bumi said, scratching his cheek awkwardly. "The offer wasn't really for you, I'm afraid."

"Then in that case, I choose you," Aang said, as he landed beside me. "And I choose Ty Lung to help me beat you up."

Bumi narrowed his eyes at Aang.

"I didn't say you could have someone help you," Bumi said, even if he didn't seem too upset by it.

"You didn't say I couldn't have someone to help me either," Aang said, wearing only half of the smug smile that I expected from him, apparently still in the process of staving off the anger that he'd felt on my behalf.

I glared down at the Avatar as he brandished his staff towards his old friend, and though the concept of fighting alongside someone else was a foreign one to me, one glance at Bumi’s smug face was all it took to remind me that I was willing to go through any means necessary to cave his face in. But before we started, some things needed to be changed.

“Alright,” I said, taking a low stance myself. “You wanted me to teach you life things, right Aang?”

“Yeah?” Aang said, taking his eyes off of Bumi way too easily for how dangerous I knew the old man was despite his hunched and wizened appearance. “Is this really the time for that, though?”

I didn’t take my eyes off Bumi, knowing that the old man was the exact sort of bastard who would launch a sneak attack given the opportunity, not because he needed the advantage to win, but because he would think it was funny. Even so, in the corner of my vision, I could see Aang panicking, frantically glancing back at Katara as he made a discreet chopping motion over his neck.

I tried not to sigh at the kid’s infatuation.

“Aang,” I said, ignoring his panic as I kept my eyes locked on Bumi. “You asked me to teach you about life lessons, so let me tell you this one. Old people can be absolutely unfair bastards.”

I couldn’t help but smirk as I watched Bumi’s own smug grin turn downwards, his brow furrowing as he seemed to struggle to remember why that sounded so familiar.

“Hey!” he shouted, throwing off his robe to reveal an impossibly muscular figure that he had been somehow hiding underneath it. “That was my lesson, you thief!”

“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.

With Aang still being too confused about the quick sequence of events that occurred, I felt the need to grab his collar and tug him along with me as I dodged to the side to avoid the massive pillar of earth that Bumi shot directly towards us. I was pleasantly surprised to find that he barely needed any dragging beyond the initial tug, and was quick to catch his footing to run alongside me.

“So he wasn’t just some weak old man, I guess,” Aang said with a nervous chuckle, as he just barely ducked under a rock aimed at his head. “How do we beat him?”

“Easy,” I said confidently, regardless of how true it was or was not. “We kick his ass.”

Aang immediately frowned. “That’s not a plan, Ty Lung,” he said.

“What do you need a plan for?” I asked, almost getting knocked out by a flying rock in my moment of confusion. “It’s a fight.”

Aang stared at me for a moment, an emotion looking something like regret flitting through his eyes, but with my relative unfamiliarity with the concept, it was difficult to tell for sure. But regardless, we didn’t have much time for me to try and decipher it, with how Bumi was backing us into a corner with his flying rocks.

“You can’t run forever, you little mosquitos!” Bumi cackled, as he tore a flat slab of rock from the floor beneath him, and sent it flying towards us.

Turning around, running towards the flying object instead of away, I hopped over it, kicking over the slab to clear it before I hit the ground in a dead sprint.

“Just follow my lead!” I shouted back to Aang, as I ran towards Bumi, weaving from side to side to dodge his attacks.

“What lead?” Aang shouted back, from somewhere high in the air it seemed, not that I had the time or leisure to check.

I had made too much distance for me to reach Bumi in a single burst, but even as I ducked and weaved through the barrage of rocks that Bumi sent towards me, I had the sense that he wasn’t trying very hard to keep me away from him. Yawning into his hand, while he lazily sent a few rocks flying in my direction with another, he sighed and shook his head.

“You close-combat fighters are always so predictable,” he said. “You know it’s very easy to deal with someone who does that, if you can just keep them from combatting you close.”

And with that, he reached down, sinking his fingers into the earth below him, with an ease that made it look like he was dipping his fingers into a pond, and heaved with a grunt of exertion, flipping an entire wall of earth up.

I couldn’t help but think it felt a little similar to my fight with Prince Zuko, but unlike the Prince’s wall of fire, there wasn’t anything stopping me from just breaking through this one.

“Oh yeah?!” I shouted, barely hesitating in my step, as I empowered my legs with chi. Leaping up into the air, I kicked forward with both legs, crashing through the wall with a loud crash and landing right next to Bumi, who looked down at me with a look of mock concern on his face.

“Oh dearie me,” he said. “It looks like you’ve made it past my wall, Kyoshi-boy. So what’ll it be next?”

I answered him with a chi-empowered punch, aimed directly at his head.

Bumi grinned, and when he caught my punch in his palm, the impact was tougher than I expected. I heard the loud crack of what I assumed to be bones at first, and from the dull pain in my hand, my first assumption was that they were mine, but when I looked again through the small cloud of debris that had erupted from where my fist hit Bumi’s palm, I saw that he had coated his entire arm in a gauntlet of earth while he had been hidden by his wall.

Despite the slight wince on Bumi’s face, I hadn’t caused nearly enough damage as I’d hoped. I tried to pull my fist away, but despite the spiderweb of cracks that bloomed out from the spot where he had caught my fist, I felt the stone shards of Bumi’s gauntlet compressing around me, as Bumi’s wince slowly turned into a grin.

“I caught you,” he sang. “Didn’t even need a flyswatter.”

I responded by sending another chi-empowered punch towards his smug face with my free hand.

Another crack echoed in the air, as he caught my fist again.

“I would suggest-”

I didn’t let him finish his sentence, as I sent another chi-empowered kick directly between his legs. Bumi’s eyes widened, but though I could see him wincing slightly, when I didn’t see nearly enough pain as I had wanted, I looked down to see my leg trapped in what looked vaguely like a jockstrap made of earth.

“I’m impressed you had the foresight for that,” I said.

“I’m not!” Bumi shouted. “What’s wrong with you, boy?!”

I shrugged in response, not wanting to dedicate the time that might be necessary to answer that question in full.

“Heads up!”

I looked up to see Aang diving down towards us from the air, and Bumi’s eyes widened before letting me go and jumping back as Aang swung his staff down in the spot where the king had just been in.

“Hey! Watch it with that, Aang!” Bumi shouted, with a bit too much familiarity for someone who was trying to keep his identity a secret.

“Huh?” Aang said, lowering his staff slightly. “We’re in the middle of a fight, aren’t we?”

I didn’t give Bumi the chance to respond, as I dashed forward to make up the slight distance he’d made. With his eyes widening, he dug his fingers into the floor, flipping up the entire floor that Aang and I were standing on. Though Aang let out a yelp of surprise and launched himself backwards to avoid being crushed underneath the stone slab, I continued onwards, running up the surface of the now vertical stone until I climbed over the lip and ran down the other side, empowering my body with chi to stick to the wall and run faster than gravity could take me.

Lifting his hands into the air, Bumi grabbed chunks of rock with his earthbending and wrapped them around his limbs and his crotch haphazardly, just in time for me to land in front of him again.

“Please don’t try it again,” Bumi asked.

“If I feel like it,” I said, right before lunging at him with both hands.

Bumi caught both my hands, like he had before, but despite how warily he watched my feet, I had no intention of kicking him this time. Digging my feet into the earth, I pushed my palms deeper into Bumi's, grabbing his hands and tried to wrench them downwards, to send him to the floor.

“A contest of strength?” Bumi asked, once he realised what I was trying to do.

“Something like that,” I said, right before I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Closing my eyes was not something I usually did in the middle of a fight, assuming I wanted to win it, which I always did. Even if it was only for an instant, I knew that giving an opportunity like this to a seasoned fighter like Bumi would lead to my immediate loss, but I could tell that, like with Iroh, Bumi wasn’t interested in besting me in combat.

We weren’t even fighting in the first place. I had asked him to teach me something, and he was just obliging.

In most cases, I would call this a lose-lose situation. Bumi wanted to teach me something and I knew that he would consider it his win if I came out of our engagement as a stronger person, but unfortunately, while I might achieve a petty “victory” either by simply refusing to learn anything, I knew that in my heart I would consider it a loss as well.

But I wasn’t about to give up my victory so easily. Every single time I requested a duel with someone, it was on their terms, and that wasn’t because I wanted to give myself an excuse to fall back on if I lost, but because I wanted to give myself a challenge to surmount.

Thankfully, the solution to this particular problem wasn’t particularly difficult. If both of us would lose by failing to learn anything, and Bumi would win if I successfully learned what he wanted to teach, my win condition was obvious.

I would surpass his lessons, and learn something that he hadn’t intended to teach.

Taking another deep breath, I let my chi circulate within me, letting it circulate through my bones, my muscles, to the floor beneath my feet and the earth in my hands, for they were a part of me. Unlike my chi-empowered strikes, where I had learned to expel it in large bursts, I kept my chi contained, rising, but refusing to let it boil over, keeping the fire within my body, hot and fierce.

Strengthening myself with my chi-empowered body, with my eyes still closed, I pressed down on Bumi’s hands, pushing him down with the very strength of the world. He may have been an earthbender, but once more, I was the earth.

Bumi strained against me, just as I strained against him, but despite the power in my newfound technique, the old man proved to be resilient in the strength that he had cultivated over a century. He may have been holding back, in both his strength and technique, and I knew that if we were in a straight combat, he would likely best me, but when I opened my eyes to see his level with mine, wide in shock, I knew I had won this bout as the student to his teachings.

“Aang!” I shouted.

From the gust of ambient wind pushing against my back, I realised that I hadn’t needed to call for him in the first place, with him already in motion. Landing beside us, with Bumi to incapacitated to react, Aang stuck his staff directly underneath Bumi’s chin.

“Nice job, Ty Lung,” Aang said. “You really are strong, huh?”

“The strongest in the mortal realm,” I grunted, as Bumi continued to strain against me. “But the fight’s not over Aang. Kick him in the dick.”

Bumi’s eyes widened, and before Aang had the time to decide if he wanted to follow my advice or not, I felt my grip around Bumi’s hands grow slack as the old king sunk into the floor and reemerged halfway across the stadium.

“He got away!” Aang said, raising his staff, but lowering it once Bumi raised his hands in surrender.

“Well done, Avatar,” Bumi said, though he still kept his distance and stood with his thighs squeezed awkwardly close together in anticipation of a sudden attack. “You do well to remember that while it is your destiny to bring balance to this world, you always have allies to aid you on your way. You’ve passed all my tests, and now you must answer one final question.”

“That's not fair! You said you would release my friends if I finished your tests,” Aang shouted.

“Oh, but what's the point of tests if you don't learn anything?” Bumi asked.

“Oh come on!” Sokka screamed from across the room.

Aang frowned as he looked back to see his friends almost completely encased in the green crystal that had been growing around them, but I could only sigh at Bumi’s empty threat.

“Aang, there’s an easy solution to all of this,” I said, shaking my head. “Just threaten to kick him in the dick if he’s annoying you.”

“Do NOT,” Bumi shouted, still a fair distance away from us. “There’s no need for that now. It’s just one simple question, really. What’s my name?”

Though Bumi eyed me carefully, as if afraid that I would spoil the answer for Aang, but I wasn’t petty nor cruel enough to stop Bumi from teaching something to Aang right after I had gotten my own lesson. I rolled my eyes and let myself fall to the floor, laying down with my hands behind my head.

“I’m taking a break while you figure this out,” I said. “That took a lot out of me.”

“Are you being serious?!” Sokka shouted. “We’re about to be buried alive at any moment here!”

“Eh, you’ll be fine,” I said. “Aang’s got this.”

I shrugged, not wanting to give away any more clues than necessary.

Quicker than I expected, Aang realised the truth, that the old man who had been tormenting all day was none other than his old friend Bumi, and after they shared a hug and Bumi released Sokka and Katara from their tombs with a quick application of earthbending, Bumi put a gentle hand on Aang’s shoulder.

“Aang,” he said. “While I hope you’ve learned today that nothing is truly as it seems, and sometimes you need to think outside the box, there is such a thing as taking things too far.”

“What do you mean?” Aang asked, tilting his head in confusion.

“Just… don’t listen to the Kyoshi boy too much,” Bumi said, shuddering as he looked in my direction. “A man’s stones are sacred, and even in the most dire circumstances, they are to be left alone.”

I let out a loud laugh, and though Aang didn’t seem to fully understand what his old friend was talking about, I saw Sokka and all the guards surrounding us nod their heads solemnly.