ATLA: Bonds Within Bending

The Attack

Azula's POV

My eyes flitted from one window to the other, this seemed like a crazy obsession, or some detective gone crazy over a particular case they can't solve. I couldn't quite understand what she was showing me, but it looked awful, the pictures of what seemed like victims and dark symbols, I have an open mind alright but this isn't what I was thinking of.

"It's a lot to take in, I know. I was the same when I first looked into all of this", She sighed and moved away from me, giving the space to take this crazy stuff in. I shook my head in disbelief, she isn't the type of person to look into this kind of thing, what's going on tonight!?

"Just try your best to explain to me, what the hell am I seeing here?", My eyes widened as I clicked on more open tabs, each one progressively getting darker and more intense. I don't wince at the ugliest of sights, but this crap made my stomach join a gymnast team. Yet no matter how gruesome it was, I couldn't look away.

"This is a rebel group from the Earth Kingdom, they obviously aren't super popular but they sure know how to make themselves known", Ty Lee reached across and clicked on another window to open, showing a video recording of a young girl pleading to be set free whilst being branded with the earth symbol, all over her body until she stopped shouting. I turned it off and swallowed hard.

"I know its disgusting but, you need to listen to this", She pressed play so it could continue, where the group of masked and robed people approached the camera and gave some weird speech in those edited super deep voices. It something about making everyone a child of the Earth and destroying all nations hope of survival, before cutting the camera off.

"Well that was lovely, how about we get you some kind of therapy now? Maybe watch a nicer movie too? How does Bratz sound?", I placed both of my hands on my thighs and took in a deep breath, feeling incredibly disturbed about this whole situation I'm now in.

"No, listen again", She frowned, not overjoyed by it either. She played it back to the speech and slowed it down, everything seemed the same, until I realised the deep voice cut out on the last word before the camera cut. They couldn't edit it right? Are they dumb? Am I supposed to call them out on being bad terrorists or something? "Do you hear that?", she asked.

"Yeah pretty crappy editing skills, why?", I continued taking deep breaths to calm myself down, I feel like i'm starting to sweat too. God I never sweat, this is really gross.

She shook her head and opened her phone, showing me a recording of Jet and Katara on their date, she played it for me then the same threatening video then just sat their waiting for me to connect the obvious dots that have already been lined up for me. I sat their in shock. Knowing that someone I actively brought in to my group of friends is an absolute psychopath. A murderer. A terrorist!?

"Okay, so we are dealing with an earth cult? Who now knows who the avatar is, perfect", My anxiety levels were through the roof. Theres no way this is actually happening, you always hear things like this are always secretly going on. But it was never secret, we just chose to ignore it, and now its a massive problem. But who's going to care about a bunch of crazy earth rebels when there's a world war brewing?

"I'm not involved with them in any way, just letting you know incase I was still some kind of suspect. I was only following up on him, I was supposed to meet him tonight but I was afraid to be with him alone. He must've took my cancelation as an invite to the tea shop party. Maybe hoping I was there to deal with me", Ty Lee frowned as she thought that she might have been to blame for what happened tonight. But I think this is beyond us all right now. Who knows what Jet and his cult are planning.

"I never believed you would be involved like that. But this is a shock, you could've told me about this y'know? I thought you were giving up on me a little. But at least now it was for you to play detective", I shrugged and sent her a warm smile, with all of this information, she's done more to help then she thinks.