Long wait? Er... Look, a distraction!

Okay, I just got too wrapped up in Volume 4 to write for a while, not to mention Christmas and whatnot. We'll be exploring Volume 4 in future Books, but for now we're still mostly concerned with earlier material. In this first scene's case, much earlier...

The drone of the Bullhead's engines doubled in volume as Torchwick swung the door open and sauntered out onto what remained of the pavement. The men - or mongrel facsimiles thereof - followed, except for the pilot: in effect, a getaway driver, though no cop would dare to tread out here.

Throwing his arms and cane wide to address the Fang grunts around him, he said, "Alright, you - beautiful creatures, you. Aerial recon's a bust, so -" he pulled a stick of dynamite from his pocket and twirled it in his fingers - "fan out and string these babies together. That underground city isn't gonna find itself."

As they began to do just that, one approached Torchwick and addressed him meekly.

"Hey, uh, if it is under us, won't the ground, like, collapse, and we fall down, or something?"

"That's why we have the airship, Perry?" Torchwick explained with what little patience he could manage.

"Actually, Perry's over there," the goon corrected, pointing.

"Great," said Torchwick, and he tossed the dynamite stick at not-Perry, who fumbled with it before gaining hold. "Then go help him out, huh?"

The beastie slunk off, and Torchwick inhaled slowly through his nose to combat his headache.

Even by his standards, the boss could have kept cleaner company. But hey, she needed pack mules and attack dogs, and Taurus's boys fit the bill. She was nuts anyway if her plan was any indication, but if Vale was going up in flames, better to be the lighter than the kindling. Speaking of which . . .

Torchwick extracted his lighter and a cigar, and made use of them while he watched the animals work.

He always got a rush from seeing the pieces of a plan fall into place - or maybe it was the cigar, but still, he had to admire the grandeur of the boss's vision. Blowing up a few, albeit long-abandoned, city blocks was trivial to her, and it was a riot operating on that level. Even factoring in some potential future "code red hood" situations, they stood a real chance of bringing the entirety of Remnant to its knees. But, while she never said it in so many words, Roman had no illusions about the true end goal, and it made him a little uncomfortable. Where was the fun to be had in a world with no more suckers to swindle?

And what did a man do when he knew he was the sucker being swindled?

At least I'll go out in style, Torchwick mused, and he frowned. There are some bets you just don't take.

Before long, the mutts started filing back into the Bullhead, and Perry - probably Perry - handed Torchwick the string.

This was where the magic happened. They were saving the hi-tech stuff for the train, so this was old school: a single fuse that branched off to ignite each pile of explosives in sequence. As Roman carefully positioned his hands, he began to sing to himself.

" 'L' . . . is for the way I Light -" he flicked his lighter - "the fuse . . ."

As usual, it took a moment for the material to catch fire, but when it did it produced a satisfying burst of sparks. Torchwick dropped the line and continued, " 'O' . . . is Oh-so-many lives . . . they'll lose . . ."

Perry or whoever waved urgently at him from the ship, but he took his time, swinging his arms in a mild dance as he boarded. " 'V' . . . is Very, Very . . . incendiary; 'E' . . ."

The aircraft revved up and rose above the tops of the highest ruined buildings. Staring down at their handiwork, Torchwick concluded, "Is Even more, Explosions than I've seen before, and . . ."

Since the ship had no proper windows, he pushed his way into the cockpit to gaze down upon the spectacle. As he waited, however, the moment slowly turned from anticipatory to awkward to frustrating. Finally, rubbing out his cigar against the glass, Torchwick asked, "What's going on? Where's the bang?"

The Fangs fell into uncertain mumbling over the obligatory "That's what she said." Useless.

Torchwick rounded on the pilot and commanded him to bring them back down.

When he stepped out the doorway for the second time, the nature of the problem was immediately apparent, but it only raised more questions.

Some little . . . creature had the end of the fuse in its mouth. Well, "mouth," in that it was roughly in that spot on its face and was making suckling motions, but the mouth, as well as the eyes, appeared to be nothing but black circles. The rest of its body was white and similarly amorphous, with only vague hints of a head and limb shapes, like it was made of bread dough or something. It spun its head fully around to "look" at them without bothering to rotate its body, but kept chewing away at the fuse.

"What is it?" asked one of the Perries.

"It's in the way," Torchwick answered, and he strode up to the critter and poked it with his cane. It responded by spitting out the fuse, wrapping its appendages around the cane, shimmying up it, and continuing onto Torchwick's arm. Nestling just below his shoulder, it "closed" its eyes (which was to say they went from circles to lines), appearing to fall asleep.

Perry snickered.

"Hey!" Torchwick prodded its forehead with his other hand. There was no reaction. He tried to pry it off, but its grip was surprisingly tight. "Hey. Thing. I'm secure enough in my masculinity to admit you're cute, but I've drowned cuter things than you." He pushed at its face. "Get. Off."

Just as he dropped his hand to catch his breath, the being's eyes snapped open and it hopped up onto his shoulder, looking around warily. Only a second later came Perry's warning of, "Boss! We got Grimm!"

Before Torchwick could complete a sigh, the previously-overly-affectionate creature recaptured his attention: rising from his shoulder and hovering next to his head, its body began undulating at an increasing speed, and its color darkened to a deep blue, though random pinpricks of white remained unchanged, resembling stars in a night sky. Bits of its rubbery form protruded and formed sharp-looking spikes. And before Torchwick could properly process this unusual event, the floating critter's legs merged into a single tail which proceeded to slap him across the cheek.

The con artist retaliated with a vertical swing of his cane, but the weapon passed right through the thing's body, which visibly split through the middle, streaking upward on both sides like a liquid, but promptly fused back together again. The little gremlin then opened its mouth, now a jagged series of pseudo-fangs, and silently screamed at him, before flying away at the speed of a shooting star.

Torchwick had not reached his position in the criminal underworld by requiring great swaths of time to react to an urgent situation. Quickly, he stamped his cane on top of the fuse still at his feet and pulled the trigger; the shot sent the cane rocketing skyward, but neatly set the string ablaze again. Lowering his gaze from the weird thing's departure point to the White Fang agents and the Grimm they were combating, he briefly assessed the severity of the threat before catching the falling cane, firing it at a Creep, and calling out, "Anyone who doesn't want an immediate illicit burial, back in the ship!"

Apparently nobody was keen on it. And he was no exception.

He also had no desire to be beheaded by Taurus, so he gave all of the flea-bitten footsoldiers a fair chance to make it aboard before turning to the pilot and commanding, "Get us outta here, Perry!"

"I'm not Perry."

"You're all Perry! Just GO!"

Miraculously, the pilot did his job. More importantly, there turned out to be no wings amongst this particular pack of Grimm. After a few minutes, the monsters' gasconade of howls and barks was cut short by the first of the explosions, and the rest of the dominoes fell in glorious, annihilative beauty.

Shame they revealed no underground cave.

At that moment, Torchwick's scroll let out a pair of soft beeps. Inhaling deeply again, he retrieved it and was greeted by a message from Neo.

C wants update

Roman let out the breath in a defeated "Pwuh," his eyes locked on the tiny screen. "C" had many strange powers, but his least favorite was her supernatural knack for timing.

Putting on his best fake smile, he spun around, clapped his hands together, and asked the ship's occupants, "Okay, which one of you is actually Perry?"

A hand extended reluctantly over the herd's heads.

"Perry, my good friend!" said Torchwick, pushing his way through to the hand's owner. "I've got great news: I'm promoting you to Vizier of Negotiations and Planning! And for your first task -" He pulled up Cinder's number on his scroll, pressed "Send," and shoved it into Perry's aforementioned hand. "Give the boss's boss a progress report."

"But, uh . . . we haven't really made any -"

"Hello," came Cinder's sultry voice through the scroll.

The interior of the airship much resembled that of a tour boat, with rows of comfortable green seats and large windows in the main cabin. The windows were strung with triangular red flags - now a haunting reminder of the festive atmosphere that had been shattered only minutes earlier.

They were far enough from the colosseum and the ground that the sounds of whatever horrors were happening there did not reach them, although every so often something black and menacing would screech by one side of the ship, skirting its four flapping metallic wings.

Along the walls below the windows was a continuous bench of green cushions, and Ty Lee knelt on part of this with her face and palms pressed to the glass while Mai stood behind her, gazing over her shoulder. Occasionally Mai turned her head to glance back at the rest of the passengers - usually when the mohawk guy walked past her, as he was pacing laps around the room while wringing his hands and muttering expletives. Of his three armored teammates, the tall guy with the bird emblem stood at the front of the room, while the other two occupied the bench on the opposite side of the ship from Mai and Ty Lee.

The sound of an explosion rattled the windows - they had not been hit, but something else had.

"No!" said the blue-haired guy, jumping up. "No no no no no - that was Ironwood's ship! They took out Ironwood's ship!"

"But dude," said his companion, "nothing even hit it! The explosion came from inside!"

"Like there was a bomb inside?"

"Is there a bomb in this ship?!"

That sent the crowd into a panicked murmur. The tall guy had to shout "Quiet!" several times to calm them back down.

"There's no bomb on this ship!" he said. "Everything's fine! I mean, everything's not fine, obviously, but we'll get to a safe zone, and -"

Something rushed past the window with a fiery roar, causing Ty Lee to fall backward; Mai caught her head in her hands.

The mohawk guy, in contrast, dashed over to the window. "Was that - Rose? Riding a locker?"

"I was not ready for today," said Blue-Hair.

The four questionably-qualified authority figures devolved into bickering again, but as Mai spotted something out the window, her world went mute. More distant than the previous object, but headed right at them, the flames that propelled it were a ghostly shade of blue.

All was darkness, then came a light. But the darkness was swaddling; the light harsh. As the sensation of speeding down a perpetual tunnel gave way to that of flying over an open field, the one white point of light split into two halves, one orange and one blue. The halves began dancing, and spreading further out in opposite directions even as they still drew nearer.

Once close enough, two people were visible standing between the two expanses of dancing light, each facing one.

The light was fire, and Azula faced the blue half.

The woman standing back-to-back with her was almost her twin, but perhaps a few years older and wearing a revealing red dress instead of padded armor.

Tongues of the blue and orange flames began sprouting limbs and dancing in a more literal manner. Despite their apparent mirth, distant screams and cries for help were woven throughout the melody of their crackling hum.

Above Azula and her counterpart, another light blossomed. This morphed into the form of a crystalline dragonfly with large butterfly-like wings; the colors of the flames glimmered inside its translucent body.

"Follow me," it said in a calm, feminine voice. A voice that, while new, sounded somehow familiar.

The creature led the way through a complex maze of identical nothingness, leaving the embers behind. Time wobbled indecisively.

Then the insect seemed to fly into a panic before being consumed by a wave of shadow, leaving just the darkness again.

Out of nothing leaned the front of Koh, wearing his Noh mask and a neutral expression. His membranes closed, and a new mask flicked out. White as well, it had vein-like cracks reaching in from the sides and a black diamond adorning the forehead. The whites of its eyes were black, and its irises a glowing red.

"Aang," it said in Katara's voice.

The world fled like a runaway train.

"Aang."

Aang's eyes snapped open. Katara, looking normal, smiled down at him.

He closed his eyes again and rubbed them, this time seeing nothing until they were reopened. Katara offered him a hand, and he took it and allowed her to pull him to his feet.

They were still in Appa's saddle, but he was no longer airborne, instead floating in the ocean with no land in sight. Across from them, Sokka was conversing with the present three quarters of Team RWBY.

"So it's kinda like Toph's school?"

"I mean, it's bigger," answered Yang. "And . . . everybody uses a different weapon." She idly examined one of her bracelets, the compact form of her explosive gauntlets.

"And they're all crazy transformy ones like yours?"

Ruby giggled and said dreamily, "Yeah."

Sokka shook his head. "Why is everything in Remnant so - extreme?"

"Hey, don't feel bad," Ruby chirped. "You have a pretty extreme . . ." Her eyes darted about for a while before she finally blurted, "Uh, ponytail."

Sokka angrily jabbed a finger toward the back of his head and said, "For your information, this is a warrior's wolftail. In Southern Water Tribe culture, it's very manly!"

Ruby shot a questioning glance at Katara, who shrugged and made a "so-so" gesture with one hand.

Aang was still gripping the other.

Turning back to her, he asked, "So uh, why'd we stop flying?"

From behind them, Zuko's voice replied, "Because of that."

Aang turned around fully to find Zuko - standing down on the lowest part of Appa's tail that was not submerged - pointing at something a few yards away, and a few yards above the surface of the water.

It was a door.

A framed wooden door, hanging in midair with no building or airship attached. No balloon, no anything - just a flying door.

". . . Huh."

Ruby appeared at Aang's side and chittered, "It's probably another portal, right? I mean, come on, it totally has to be! If we're lucky, it might even take us right where we're going, the Royal National Fire Palace or whatever?"

"The chances of that are infinitesimal," Blake's voice shot down from behind.

"See?" Ruby persisted. "It's guaranteed! Want me to open it?"

"We should be careful," said Katara. Assuming a bending form, she executed a series of balletic motions that transformed the shifting waves underneath the door into an icy islet with sets of stairs leading up to both of the door's sides. The ice anchored to the bottom of the doorframe, which, bizarrely enough, seemed to hold it in place against the push of the sea.

Aang looked down at Zuko. "We'll just check where it goes real quick and then get back on track."

Zuko nodded, eying the door warily.

Aang made an air-assisted jump onto the stairway and climbed the last few steps slowly, as though approaching a sleeping platypus bear. He could feel everyone else's eyes upon his back. Trembling slightly, his hand reached toward the door, barely outspeeding a growing plant.

The metallic doorknob was slightly warmer than the surrounding salty air. Aang turned it, and heard the mechanism click. He paused to take a deep breath.

He pulled the door open . . . and stared through the empty doorframe at the ocean beyond.

No portal. Nothing.

Aang blinked twice.

Turning around, he said, "Well, that was -"

He registered the tugging sensation on the back of his robes only an instant before the sight of everybody else being suddenly yanked through the air toward him. They all flew through the doorway in quick succession, and the door slammed behind them.

Appa was the only one unaffected, and he lazily turned himself around in the water, only to be further perplexed by the absence of his passengers. After he examined the ice floe for several seconds, Momo's head popped out of the water next to it, followed shortly by his hands, which brought a pair of small kelpquats into his mouth. As he chewed, he looked at Appa curiously.

Appa let out a sigh, blowing bubbles in the seawater.

Under the light of the shattered moon, Mai's dress and Ty Lee's braid whipped in the wind - the ship was still fleeing, after all. The tall guy - Cardin - had accompanied them to the rooftop, repeatedly ordering them back inside; Mai spared him not even an iota of attention. Cupping both hands around her mouth, she cried out into the Grimm-filled night sky.

"Azula!"

More surprising than her presence was that she was apparently not there for them: though she had been flying in their direction, only after hearing her name did she take notice of them standing atop the airship. In hindsight, it probably made more sense that she had found herself in this world as unexpectedly as they had.

Mai did not let it show, but at least a tiny part of her, in post-hindsight, wanted to take back her shout.

She felt both of Ty Lee's hands clutch her upper arm tightly - whether a gesture toward one or the other's protection or simply an acknowledgement of companionship, Mai took internal solace in it while keeping her eyes locked on the approaching princess.

Blue fire met the roof's surface and splayed out before extinguishing, the sound muffling that of Azula's steel-toed boots tapping against the hull. She folded her arms behind her back primly, but seemed unable to hold back her hungry smile.

Her eyes were a little too wide, wrinkling the skin underneath.

No one spoke for a few heartbeats as Cardin looked from Mai to Azula and back several times. He extracted his mace and held it at the ready, but had evidently lost his faith in verbal communication.

Azula, it turned out, was still devout.

"Well, well, well. Today's just full of gifts. It must be my birthday." Without dropping the smirk, she glanced upward in mock contemplation and said, "Honestly, with all the jumping between worlds and times, for all I know it could be." She looked back at Mai, whose needlepoint gaze had not shifted. "On that note, remind me, Mai, when was the last time we saw each other?"

Mai narrowed her eyes and waited a second before responding. Her voice was as level as ever. "As I recall, you were busy putting the 'kid' back in 'kidnapping.' "

"Ah, good," said Azula, "we're on the same page then."

In her periphery, Mai caught movement on top of the next, identical escape ship following them - Grimm had moved in on it and what were presumably tournament contenders were defending it from them. When she returned her eyes to Azula, Azula's eyes had moved to Ty Lee.

Beside her, Ty Lee swallowed and asked, "So, uh, you can fly now, huh?"

Azula's grin widened. "I can do so much more than that."

Cardin finally decided to join in, stepping between them and saying, "Look, I don't know what your guys's problem is, but if you haven't noticed, this isn't the best time or place t -"

Azula made a sweeping motion with her hand, and at the same time a gust of wind swept under Cardin's feet, cutting him off, toppling him over, and brushing him off of the ship.

Mai could feel her mouth hanging open stupidly, but was too flabbergasted to remember how to close it.

Azula replaced her hands behind her back. "To answer your question, no, I'm not an airbender. I'm not even an Avatar." Once again, her eyes bulged a little as she announced, "I'm something even more than that! I've finally received the full extent of my divine birthright!"

"Received?" Mai pondered. And "gifts" . . . What's going on here?

"I should thank you two, I suppose," Azula continued. "It was your betrayal a few years ago that sent me down this path, wasn't it? And just look at where I've ended up." She spread her arms in what should have been a welcoming gesture. In one hand, her typical blue fire ignited, but the other produced what appeared to be a miniature tornado full of snowflakes. Additionally, a procession of dead leaves rose up from behind her feet and spiraled around her torso.

Her smirk twitched.

"So. It's only fair that I repay you . . ." She extinguished the whole of her elemental display and folded her arms again. "With the same favor."

Azula closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, blue flames poured out, enigmatically doing her skin no harm. Fixing her burning glare on Mai, she stood motionless as, before her, with a sound like a hissing rat viper, blue-white sticks of electricity slowly, deliberately tore themselves into existence. Though Azula's hands remained behind her back, the lightning followed the typical firebending pattern, arcing down and back up and then repeating back the other way, building all the while.

It was not that Mai observed the degree of control in the attack and judged it to be undodgeable. It was simply that she recognized that she was thinking through molasses and that her body would likely move no faster. The words What could possibly flap my most unflappable friend? drifted through her mind in search of irony, but everything else had shut down. Ty Lee must have been going through something similar, because she stayed anchored to Mai's arm.

The lightning bolt lashed forward - and something crashed down onto the ship in front of them and intercepted it.

Vague notions of Zuko and his redirection technique were quickly dispelled; tiny blue sparks scrambled all over the surface of the - quite small and female - figure, causing her short orange hair to stand up straight like bamboo.

"Stop!" Nora shouted.

What happened next was too fast for Mai to follow; there was an explosion of blue fire, but when it cleared, it was Nora who was standing where Azula had been, following through on a swing of her huge hammer, and something that was probably Azula had been sent rocketing directly upward, leaving a slight trail of wispy smoke. In a blink, she had traveled much too far to be visible anymore.

Planting the hammer on her shoulder, Nora declared, "Hammertime!" and started to dance.

A few moves in she had rotated enough to face Mai and Ty Lee, and she immediately forgot what she was doing and said, "Oh hey, it's you guys!" Turning toward the other ship, she yelled out, "Hey Ren, look, it's those two girls from the fairgrounds!"

Several of those sharp sounds that Mai had gathered were called "gunshots" rang out, and she turned to watch three people being flung through the air in their direction. The green-clad Ren and a red-haired girl - as she neared, Mai recognized her from the tournament match - landed on the roof, while the blonde guy accompanying them caught the ship's horizontal tailfin directly in his stomach, letting out an appropriately comedic noise in response.

"What's going on over here?" inquired Ren.

Ty Lee recovered more quickly than Mai and gesticulated upward. "It's - Azula, she's - um, this is hard to explain, but I think we're, like, from a different world or something - and . . ."

"Different world?" asked the girl with the spear. Then realization flashed across her face, and she turned and said, "Jaune, the mirror!"

The blonde guy had just finished pulling himself on top of the tailfin, and from his sitting position he looked down at her and said, "The who?" Then his head jerked upward, and he pointed and warned, "Look out!"

Nora rolled out of the way as Azula returned, her impact jolting the airship. This time her entire body seemed to be on fire - blue, of course - but still undamaged, and between this and her enraged expression, she looked more like a dark spirit now than she ever had in her Kemurikage uniform.

The flames disappeared from the bottom up, leaving just the eye effect.

"Aura users, hmm?" Azula snarled. "You know, it's rude to interrupt people in the middle of a conversation."

The Jaune guy leaped from the tailfin and landed between Azula and everyone else, where he drew his sword and somehow caused the scabbard to expand into a shield.

"I didn't know shooting lightning at people qualified as a conversation."

"You don't know Azula," Mai quipped automatically, and only subsequently did she realize that she had snapped out of her stupor.

Azula grinned again. "You're right, Mai. Proper introductions are in order."

Before she could do whatever horrible thing she had in mind, a clanging sound came from one side of the ship, causing her and everyone else to look in its direction. A moment later, Mai caught movement and glanced back just in time to see Cardin swing up over the front of the ship and plant his feet in Azula's back, knocking her over forward and standing on top of her.

In the hand devoid of his mace was one severed end of the rope of flags that had hung around the ship. He tossed it aside.

After a moment of silence - save for the ship's engines and the screams of airborne Grimm - Cardin said, looking at Jaune, "What? I got your back, Jauney-boy."

It was only because she was so attuned to Azula's voice that Mai heard her mutter, seemingly more to herself than Cardin, "Fine. They're all yours."

A burst of air threw Cardin off and Azula to her feet, and a second reached out and pulled Mai and Ty Lee in between the others and straight toward Azula. The Fire Nation Princess clamped an arm around each of them and whispered intimately, "This is between us, after all."

One blast of fire later, they were off the ship.

And then Mai's stomach lurched as Azula took no further action to prevent them from plummeting.

"Azula!" Ty Lee shouted, her voice choppy against the increasing wind. "What are you doing?!"

If Azula replied, Mai tuned it out as her brain raced to find something, anything, that could be done. Chi blocking would only make Azula unable to halt their fall, and there was some chance that she was faking them out and would do so - but her unhinged expression at the moment made that doubtful, and for the same reason persuasion lacked a certain viability in the given time frame. The only other option seemed to be breaking away and trying to land on one of the winged Grimm, which would be an only marginally preferable position.

They had twisted into a headfirst drop, so down was now up as Mai tilted her chin toward her chest and saw Grimm moving in on the ship above her feet.

In spite of her budding relationship with the ground being a more pressing issue, she found herself more interested in why it seemed as though the monsters had waited for Azula to leave before attacking.

As everyone tumbled out of the door and landed in a heap, it was clear from the presence of something not so icy on which to land that they were no longer in the same location.

But as they disentangled from one another, it became clear that their new location was not only different, but different.

It seemed to be earth that was beneath their feet, if rather redder than average, but what had appeared to be bright orange pine trees sprouting from it were, upon Aang's reorientation, revealed to be orange mushrooms growing one on top of the other in decreasing order of width. The sky was a murky brown and displayed no sun or moon or stars, so the light by which he saw seemed simply to lie in the air like a fog, blurring things at the edges. What was in the sky was a solid gold alligator with baleen instead of teeth, which galloped along at such a height that its size could not be distinguished beyond "very big."

Aang turned back to his companions, who were all looking around in wonder. Katara was the first to speak, asking him breathlessly, "Is this the . . . ?"

"The Spirit World." He completed her sentence with a smile.

Sokka threw up his arms and announced, "Alright, listen up, if anyone has to go to the bathroom, you'd better duck back through the door, because -"

Before he could finish, the door in question glowed brashly and then exploded into particles of white light, which drifted down around them.

Sokka dropped his arms and sighed, but then the light specks perked back up and swirled into a gnat-like cloud, which situated itself in front of Aang - where it congealed into a single, insectoid form.

"Hey!" Aang said brightly. "You're the butterdragon spirit from my dream!"

If the crystalline bug could speak, it refused to do so, merely fluttering in place for a moment before taking off over Aang's head.

"Come on, guys!" he said with an encouraging wave. "We have to follow it!"

And he did so.

Katara and Sokka set off after him without fuss, and Ruby followed suit with an elated cry of, "This is really weeeiiird!" Yang hesitated, so Zuko told her, if somewhat exasperatedly, "Just go with it," and set an example. After exchanging glances with Blake, she joined him, and Blake herself silently brought up the rear, moving so as not to touch anything other than the ground, and keeping her eyes narrowed suspiciously regardless of where they fell.

In this eldritch realm, the passage of time was difficult to gauge, but at some point the group approached a waterfall and skirted around it. On the other side, the ground took on a dark hue and the rough texture of lava rock. Rising from it were stalagmites with smaller earth spikes poking out from their sides, and even smaller ones growing from those, and so on - once again posing as a forest of pines. There was a ceiling of some sort overhead - as Aang squinted up at it, he discerned it to be a meadow of yellowish grass, hanging upside-down in the air above them. Indeed, the waterfall came from a stream that traversed the length of the meadow, content to remain suspended until it reached the edge. After spilling down to their level, the water flowed through the stalagmite thicket - only to ultimately fall back up to meet its other end in the inverted meadow, creating a full loop.

The meadow was otherwise empty save for three person-sized tulips with green petals and red stems. The nearest of these opened to reveal a single, huge eyeball in the center, which stared down at them intently.

Aang and the others weaved between the stone trees, still on the trail of the butterdragon. As they entered a small clearing, several chinchilla spirits already occupying it turned toward them in alarm.

"Humans?" one squeaked.

"Humans?" The others repeated the first's cry one at a time; the last to speak had an inexplicably deep voice. Then the lot of them hopped into the air and merged into a purple manta ray, which sailed off beyond the meadow and into the sky.

While Yang mumbled something about "lots and lots of drugs," Ruby asked Aang, "Do - spirits not like humans?"

"Pretty much," Sokka interjected.

Aang elaborated, "The spirits are very in tune with nature and emotions. As long as you're respectful, there's nothing to be afraid of." He frowned and added, "Mostly."

A few moments later, the butterdragon suddenly began darting back and forth in a panic. Aang said, "Huh? What's wrong?" as, above, the other two eye flowers folded open and looked this way and that expectantly. The butterdragon ducked behind one of the tree-like pillars, and when Aang tried to follow, he found that the spirit had vanished completely.

"So . . ." said Yang uncertainly, "if they're 'in tune' with stuff . . . does that mean . . ."

Blake drew her sword. "Something bad's coming."

"Why are you doing this?!" Ty Lee sobbed. Her tears were being ripped away from her by the wind as the city below roared ever closer.

"An eye for an eye!" said Azula manically. "Technically, I'm taking two eyes, but you know me - always the overachiever!"

Mai was conflicted. The only move she had thought up was apologizing, but quite apart from weighing her genuine guilt for inflicting this kind of madness on someone against the reality of who that someone had been even beforehand, she was not at all sure that Azula's reaction would be anything positive.

Feeling morbid, Mai glanced down.

Not far above the ground, something happened. It looked as though a section of thin air had been slit open and pulled to one side, with the images beneath that side appearing scrunched up - space itself was behaving like literal fabric. Inside the hole left in its place, meanwhile, was pitch blackness.

"What?!" Azula was distinctly displeased, suggesting that the space hole was not her doing. She flipped the three of them around in midair and blasted blue fire from her feet in an attempt to stop before they met the strange abyss, but it was too late.

On the other side of the small clearing in the stalagmite forest, not far above the ground, something happened.

The first thing that the something did after happening was to belch blue fire, causing most of the group to jump backwards.

The second thing that it did was to expel three girls.

The three girls popped upward slightly, then fell the short distance to the stony floor.

There was silence as the three girls got to their feet.

It was Zuko who spoke.

"Azula?"

Azula's eyes moved to inspect every person present before returning to meet her brother's.

Then she smiled.

"Yes. Of course."

So I don't have any of the next chapter written, and this fight will be very complicated to choreograph, so that might take a while too. After that, though, the last few chapters should come pretty quickly. And then, well, there will definitely be a Book 3, but that's a long way off. Like Volume 5 long way off. Probably longer.

Regarding the idea of Aang's golem fighting the Geist golem from the beginning of Volume 4: the Geist golem was made of rock, i.e. earth, so it could be earthbent, making it not much of a challenge. If it went with wood, I think it would splinter pretty quickly under Aang's golem's punches. The only really challenging thing would be if it made a golem out of metal too refined for Toph to bend, and even then I think its face would still be a weak point that would be much more reachable by another golem. I'll probably use Geists somewhere eventually, but for now I'm glad I went with a Goliath instead. (And we still haven't seen Goliaths fight in the actual show! Am I the only one bugged by that?)

Anyway... No, the Torchwick scene isn't really relevant to anything. Much like most of this story, I just picked a character whom I wanted to write for and wrote a random scene. Be happy that I've ended up with as much plot as I have.

Oh, and uh... I know a lot of people ship Tyzula. While I don't see it happening without some serious development first, keep in mind that the Azula in my story is... not well. So while Tyzula won't happen in this series, I do at least concede that Azula is not behaving normally here.