Winding Legacies: A 'The Legend of Korra' Rewrite

Episode 4: Civil Wars Part 2 Part 2

Korra pressed her ear against the stone wall to her right and narrowed in on the sharp clicks of the prison guard's heels. Hearing them near, Korra struck the wall with a fist and pulled the stone wall downward to create a tunnel. As the soldier finished their lap, they slipped down the newly created obstruction and fumbled before Korra. Lemaya immediately leapt down to grab the soldier's arm while Asami lifted her palm to zap him with her electric glove. The soldier slumped over and Mako helped Lemaya gently drag the soldier to the back of the maintenance tunnels they had snuck through, then they jogged back to the tunnel and hurled themselves out of the hole in the floor to meet Asami and Korra in the empty hallway.

"Where to?" Mako asked, lowering his voice as he edged around a nearby corner to check for unwanted visitors.

"Uh, not sure where we are at the moment. Give me a minute," Korra whispered back.

"We should've brought Bolin. He knows how to echolocate," Mako said as he leaned back into the room.

"Well he had to guard Varrick for whatever reason so it's left to us to just...wander around, I guess," Asami mumbled.

"How do we do that without being seen? Soldiers are crawling around the place. Guys!" Mako ducked under a window in the wall as a flashlight streamed into the small hideout they had worked themselves into. The girls quickly slid to the ground and Korra yanked the hole in the floor closed, the light turning away after a few painstaking moments.

While waiting for the guard to disappear, Lemaya raised her eyes to the ceiling and smiled as the others let out a breath. "What about that?" Lemaya pointed upward at a vent above them and looked directly to Korra. "Could you tell where you are if you were looking down on it?" Korra grinned and nodded furiously, jumping to her feet.

"I absolutely can. Spirits, you're a genius," Korra gushed. Lemaya chuckled and stood up, getting down on one knee and folding her hands over her leg. Korra instinctively lifted her foot into Lemaya's hands and reached her arms up to carefully pull down the vent cover and haul herself into the tight squeeze.

"You two next," Lemaya said, gesturing Mako and Asami over.

"Have you guys done this before?" Asami asked wearily as she found her foot a comfortable spot in Lemaya's cupped hands.

Lemaya's short-lived laugh was cut off by her concentration in lifting Asami close enough to the vent for her to pull herself in, which took considerably long since Asami didn't want to push her foot off of Lemaya until she was well into the vent. "Many, many times," Lemaya breathed, catching her breath.

As Mako stepped up to get into the vent, he said, "How are you-?"

"Waterbending," Lemaya said simply, trying to rush Mako by forcefully grabbing his right ankle. Mako gasped and waved his arms behind him to catch his balance. After lightly kicking Lemaya with the toe of his boot for doing that, He raised his arms to grab onto the lip of the vent and climb into it behind Asami.

Lemaya got back to her feet and slapped her hands together. She reached for a thick canister at her belt and poured it on the ground, a pleased smile lining her lips as she, for the first time, got to make her sneaking a lot easier. She pointed her hands and precisely twirled the water into an icy ladder, grasping tightly onto each ring as she neared the vent. Once in, she pulled the water back into her canister, using its tail end to slowly pull the vent cover closed. She crawled after the others, following down stretches upon stretches of vents until Korra stopped them in front of another opening.

"My Dad's in there," she said quietly, pointing to something the rest of them couldn't even see. Korra opened the vent from below her, leaning her headfirst out of the vent and letting her body elegantly slide out of the hole until she was hanging right-side-up on the ceiling. She dropped to the ground to let Asami out, and Asami shook her head roughly and kicked Mako to make him back up.