Prologue: Departure

General Summary

Overview

On-board the outbound train from Ba Sing Se to the Waystation, our unwitting protagonists were taken hostage in a kidnapping attempt of an ostensibly wealthy person. Little is known about these captors other than a few names - Mawe and Chen.
Through none other than their wits and their bending, these unlikely heroes fought a couple of captors and removed their bindings, having just narrowly escaped their makeshift earth prison into an unknown expanse. Freeing two other survivors from the train, Nok and gang now seek a way out of their predicament, and to find their way home.

Narrative

At the end of a particularly ordinary day, four strangers shuffled through the crowded monorail station past litter, vandalism, and a few more sentries than usual.
As they weaved through the throng onto the passenger car, they heard the overhead announcer begin, "Now boarding outbound to the Outer Wall. Boarding the Middle Ring, outbound to the Outer Wall." The four strangers packed themselves into the compartment like sardines, most of them opting to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other passengers.
With the train in motion, Jí Shan gazed out the window to the city below. The evening sky painted its few wispy clouds with a vibrant pink and orange palette. Her eyes glimpsed the lives of the citizens below, like ants marching through Ba Sing Se's Lower Ring; the slums' crowded and tight multistory tenements accentuated by the sporadic smokey pillars of industry and the quixotic fixtures of electric lights dotting the commercial districts. Shan sighed in reflection of her long day.
Gang Gaun had only come into Ba Sing Se for the occasion -- the Earth Queen was dead and he wanted to pay his respects, something he found increasingly hard to do in a city surrounded by heretics and anti-monarchists. The experience of seeing the decimated Upper and Middle Rings left Gaun with a lump in his throat. As he held the overhand bar, averting his eyes from making contact with anyone, he spotted a poster in the likeness of the late Queen Hou-Ting. His throat swelled with anxiety as he poured over the disrespectful mustache and ironic 'Long Live the Queen' graffiti overlaying the once-proud portrait. Gaun swallowed his anger and focused on his breathing.
A bumbling Nok moseyed onto the passenger car without much thought for where he was going. Although he had never been to the city, he managed to feel confident in the fact that he could identify the type of work people appeared inclined to perform. On the train, he watched people with a curiosity of a child at the zoo noting only the peculiar dress of a gentleman in fancier garb, checking what appeared to be a pocket watch.
Tui, not wanting to draw any attention to himself, stood quietly near one of the doors of the train. Tui had come to Ba Sing Se looking for someone in particular and had met with her that afternoon to pick up something he needed. With the item in tow, Tui needed to meet another contact at the Waystation beyond the Outer Wall.
What began as an ordinary day immediately - without warning or notice - erupted into a nightmare when an explosion rocked the passenger car, knocking track debris onto the slums below, leaving damage and destruction in its wake. The car itself careened off the broken track and plummeted toward the ground below. For the passengers on the train, everything was a quick flash and then an immediate darkness.
Jí Shan was the first to wake, her patterned and rhythmic breathing habits bringing her back to consciousness. As a waterbender, she was beginning to feel very grateful for the training she had begun with her grandmother, minimal as it was. It helped that she could sense the presence of water nearby, though she couldn't be sure whether this was just moisture in the damp, cool air or a small body of water. As she tried to stand, Shan realized her wrists and ankles had been bound.
Even with his eyes open, nothing but darkness surrounded Tui and he could also feel his wrists and ankles were bound. He scoffed lightly to himself when he realized his assailants had left his arms in front of him. A life of piracy had taught him to know better than to make such a rookie mistake. What Tui carried as confidence in his skulduggery, he lacked in skill for firebending; still, he wanted to see where he was. He took a deep breath and -- FWOOM! a fireball the size of his head went flying out in front of him. Not exactly the small and controlled flame I was looking for Tui thought. Still, his ball of flame had illuminated the room long enough for him to notice six other bodies in the room. His focus was on the last person whose face lit up at the approaching fireball.
Gang Gaun avoided the oncoming flames singing only a few of his beard hairs. Startled, Gaun tried to lunge away from the fireball only to bump into another body, a large and lumpy passenger with a broadleaf cap covering his face. Nok let out a soft grunt and reflexively twitched his foot, kicking Gaun lightly in the process. Across the floor, Gaun could see the source of the fire clearly through the small and continuous flame between the man's shackled hands. Looking around he spotted a young girl off to the right nearby a small child, elderly woman and a finely-dressed man.
Though no door or windows were in sight, the captives heard the familiar sound of approaching voices. “I know they weren’t supposed to be brought down here…we only needed Dr. Dao, but they were injured and we couldn’t just leave—”
“They’re a liability, Chen. You heard what the boss said; we need clean up this mess!”
Shan, cool and collected, searched herself for her waterskins—but they were gone. "Drat!" she muttered under her breath. Before anyone could do anything else, the far wall to Gaun's left opened up, letting a soft green light creep into the holding area. Tui's small flame became drowned by the glow of the green source of light and it became apparently to everyone that they were not alone in this place.
Two guards appeared in the newly-opened threshold, and one of them motioned toward the bespectacled man in the fine white linens. The larger guard approached him and aggressively ripped him up off the ground, pushing and shoving him as he whimpered toward the exit. Sauntering on by the other captives, the large man scowled, "the rest of you can stay here until further notice."
"W-wait," interrupted the guard in the doorway, the concern in his voice mirroring who the larger man had called Chen, "what if one of them is a bender?"
"Who cares?" the larger guard gruffed, "those cuffs are platinum!"
Turning his back on the passengers, Tui seized a moment of brilliance—and stupidity.
"I'm about to act the fool," he whispered to himself, shocked by his own disbelief. Another ball of fire blasted from his palms, this time toward the back of the larger guard. The hit was direct, and the flame dispersed in all directions as the man turned around.
"Which one of you morons just did that?" he sneered. Tui nodded and smirked in his direction. The large man shifted his stance, spreading his legs and feet wide and bringing his massive weight closer to his core, and the ground.
"You want to try that again, little man?" he taunted Tui, who happily obliged the guard with another, weaker fireball. But the man was ready, and deflected the blast with the swipe of his wrist just moments before it met his face. Though he barely broke a sweat, the dispersed flame once again fell upon Gang Gaun.
Gaun, still reeling from Tui's first inadvertent beard barbecue, scuttled to his feet and embraced the intense heat of Tui's blast. The ends of his beard glowing a dim orange as he pat the sparks to suffocate them. Taking a stance similar to the large guard, Gaun made an attempt to grapple the man but his efforts were fruitless, and his bindings left him vulnerable and without grace.
Seizing the opportunity, the guard put Gaun in a chokehold and shouted, "Chen! Alert the boss now! The captives are awake!" The other guard, still dumfounded in the doorway, motioned to someone not inside the room. Their footsteps quickly faded into the distance.
Keeping her cool, Shan worked patiently to manifest a small volume of water under her control. Whether roused by the noise or simply well-rested, Nok finally woke up. Without saying anything, his eyes shifted around the room from Tui to Shan, to the two large men—one shackled—currently engaged with one another. Seeing the waterbender's progress, Nok instinctively pulled on the patches of moist earth near where Shan had found the water. With his mud and mechanical knowledge, Nok stuffed the mud into the keyhole of his wrist shackles. A few moments of concentration later, and the shackles clattered to the ground. He quickly got to work doing this for everyone in the room.
Sensing the danger his companion was in, Chen the guard ran into the room and planted his feet firmly in the ground. He thrust his arms upward and, as if he were lifting an invisible set of heavy chains, he pulled a small slab of earth from the ground to form a knee-high wall. Chen stepped forward on one foot, shifting his weight and pushing the wall in the same direction, putting a barrier between Tui and Mawe, the larger guard.
Tui threw another jab into the air toward Mawe, but the flame was misdirected by Chen's newly-erected barrier. Mawe, in response, thrust a powerful fist into Gaun's chest, knocking the man backward into the rocky wall behind him and Chen quickly followed up by erecting yet-another wall and pushing against Gaun—truly trapping him between a rock and a hard place.
Meanwhile, Shan had managed to gather enough water which she carefully snaked, low to the ground, toward Chen's feet. When the small stream of water was in place, wrapped around Chen's ankles, she motioned a quick tug in the opposite direction and pulled Chen to the ground. Struggling to catch his breath and his balance, Chen fell to the ground and watched as Tui launched another barrage of fireballs at his friend. This was a bad idea Chen thought. Mawe was outnumbered, 3-to-1, even with the other man pressed against the wall, that earthbender had just pelleted Mawe's face with mud. He was swinging wildly to deflect the assault of fire and earth, and thus was not expected the final blow—delivered by a waterbender whose precision seemed more like luck than skill. With only seconds to make his choice, Chen bounced to his feet and retreated from the room. He hurriedly bent the earth around the walls to close the passage he had originally opened.
By the time they had removed their bindings, and the earthbenders had time to figure out where to open up a new threshold, Chen and the nicely-dressed gentleman were gone. Tui searched Mawe's unconscious body and found the shackle key as well as the source of the green light—glowing earth crystals. With the key in hand, Tui and Nok made quick work of everyone's cuffs, including those of the old woman and young boy, who identified himself as Ryu. Ryu thanked Tui and the others for fighting off the guards, but was visibly terrified from the encounter. Shan, in her calm and collected way, reassured the others and offered to accompany them as they all looked for a way out of their current predicament.

Rewards Granted

• +5xp to all for encounters
• +5xp to Nok and Ji Shan for ingenuity
• +5xp to Tui and Gang Gaun

Character(s) interacted with

• Chen
• Mawe
• Ryu

Notes

Overworld

• Start Date: 12 Yushui (Rain Water, Spring) 171 AG
• Moon Phase: Waning Gibbous (will be half moon in a couple days)

Campaign

The Second Age

Protagonists

Nok

Jí Shan

Tui

Gang Gaun

Report Date

24 Feb 2019

Primary Location

Ba Sing Se