High Pressure (Saga of Tanya the Evil/Avatar: the Last Airbender)

[We Just Write]

Ultimately, it had been pure bad luck that ended my career in the Imperial Army, along with my second life. Yes, I had been cornered by Mary Sue, but that wasn't the actual proximate cause of death. That honor went to the stray artillery shell that landed between us with barely any warning at all. After the initial explosion, I was just barely conscious enough to realize that the Type 95 Computation Orb had been severely damaged, before it also exploded. If I had to guess, it blew my head clean off. Assuming it didn't reduce my body to mist entirely. That wasn't a particularly safe assumption.

WHAT.

In the void between death, I couldn't help but feel rather conflicted. I definitely hadn't wanted to die in the Great War, especially not like this. But the knowledge that this went against Being X's plans for me was coldly satisfying.

I HAD NOT INTENDED FOR YOU TO DIE AT THIS TIME-

Then Being X's rant was interrupted by a sensation I could only really describe as a crashing noise akin to a door being bashed open, despite it not really being sound, exactly.

"You are under arrest for Soul Trafficking and Worship Extortion! Stand down immediately!"

What followed was a tirade of obscenities on Being X's part, accompanied by more crashing 'noises', and what I could only presume were indications of some kind of violence taking place. I 'felt' a blow just barely miss me, and felt with a dreadful certainty that actually being hit would result in my death being emphatically permanent.

With no better ideas, I tried to "run" away from the altercation. I had no ideas of where I could go. I just knew I needed to be somewhere other than here.

The next thing I knew, I was opening a pair of brand new eyes as a midwife with a partially shaved head and blue arrow tattoos snipped my umbilical cord. Well, there was one good thing about this situation: no-one would complain about me screaming my frustrations to the world at the loudest volume my infant lungs could produce.

---

Over the next four years, I quickly gained a reputation as a precocious learner. I quickly realized that I had been born into a monastic order of some variety, and while the magic of my second life was absent, it seemed all members of the air temples were able to manipulate the motions of air in ways that definitely counted. And I, fortunately, was not an exception.

I also wasn't an exception to the custom of shaving my head, though fortunately as a girl I didn't have to shave all of it.

So I quickly started experimenting with my newfound "airbending", seeing what I could do with it. Make no mistake, the amplified jumps, gliding, and maneuverability were very useful, but it wasn't quite the same as the flight of my second life. And then there were the techniques I tried inventing myself, such as using air currents to pick up some sand and whirl it around as an improvised abrasive cutting tool, when I was about seven years old.

That particular technique caught the attention of the monks when they realized I'd invented it myself. I distinctly remember seeing concerned expressions on several of the monk's faces, but all that happened was being sent to a room with Monk Pava, where I was directed to pick four toys from a collection of hundreds. If that was some kind of test, I must have passed, since I never heard about it again, nor did I receive any form of punishment for my innovating. What kind of test it could have possibly been escaped my comprehension, though.

I even managed to make a friend as an effect of my messing around. While it was an interesting exercise, sucking all the air out of a glass jar and sealing it shut wasn't really all that useful. But for a small child like Avi, an evidently empty jar that she couldn't bend any air inside of was endlessly fascinating. Though a year my biological elder, Avi quickly started following me around and helping with experiments, evidently having her curiosity sparked. She also became a rigorous note-taker, writing down everything we managed to learn in the process.

So on my tenth birthday, I wasn't terribly surprised to hear Avi ask a question. It's what that question was that I found surprising.

"Tanya, do you think there's different types of air?"

Of course there were, I had two previous lifetimes of knowledge on the matter. But I didn't say that; I wanted to hear Avi's reasoning.

"What do you mean, Avi?"

"So, if we hold our breath long enough we start feeling terrible, right? I've been thinking about that for a while, and the only way that could make sense is if there's more than one type of air."

I nodded in consideration.

"Avi, suppose you're right. What could we do with that information?"

"Well, if we could separate the bad air from the good air, we could help make sure there's good air to breath down in places where there's problems with that, like in mines."

I thought for a moment; that was a service plenty of places would pay very high fees for, not to mention the utility for extinguishing fires if you took the oxygen away. Figuring out how to do it would definitely be a worthwhile use of my time.

And so we spent the next two years figuring out how to separate the different components of air with airbending. It was far from easy, but with a bit of knowledge of the molecules involved and some modifications to the motions associated with airbending, I managed to bend Oxygen and Nitrogen in different directions simultaneously just before my twelfth birthday, with Avi getting the hang of it just a couple days later.

That accomplishment is the only reason we survived what occurred only a couple weeks later.

 

[We Just Write]

In my first two lives, it would have been August. The day seemed peaceful enough at first, but something seemed off. I was only able to put my finger on it around ten in the morning, when I saw a column of red marching up the path towards the Eastern Air Temple. I hurriedly smushed together a pair of air-balls under my feet to use as skates, and rushed off to find an adult.

As it so happened, the first adult I encountered was Monk Pava.

"Monk Pava, are we expecting any visits from the Fire Nation today? There are at least a thousand uniformed fire nation soldiers headed our way, right now. And they're almost here!"

Monk Pava's face went pale with fear.

"No, that's not supposed to be happening at all. Tell as many people as you can!"

That...

Something in me went snap at the realization we were under attack. All the Air Nomad teachings of pacifism and respect for life fell into the background, and in its place was the Imperial Officer I'd once been.

The first order I had been given was simple: sound a general alarm that we were under attack. Fortunately, I'd long-since figured out how to amplify my voice with airbending. I jumped up out of any enclosed spaces, cupped both hands around my mouth, and bellowed as loud as I could while hovering for a brief moment:

"ATTENTION! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY FIRE NATION SOLDIERS APPROACHING FROM THE SOUTH! I REPEAT, WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY FIRE NATION SOLDIERS APPROACHING FROM THE SOUTH!"

Given how everyone started rushing around in a panic, I had clearly been heard. Unfortunately, the approaching Fire Nation soldiers had evidently heard it too, judging by the fact that they just about doubled the pace of their advance.

Even more unfortunately, the others here at the Eastern Air Temple were nowhere near organized enough to put up serious resistance. Yes the monks were trying to direct the children to various refuge points, but judging by my estimates of the Fire Nations' combat strength, it would definitely be inadequate.

Suddenly, an excessively powerful fire blast burned open the main gate of the air temple, and I had to revise my estimate of the enemy strength up by an order of magnitude or so. Several more excessively powerful fire blasts lit off several other parts of the temple. Then, from my elevated position near the monks' quarters, I I noticed the fire around the Bison stables abruptly go out.

Avi.

Just like that, I had a plan. First order of business, collect the only other person I knew could selectively bend different gasses. Second order of business, suffocate these fires.

Courtesy of the glider staff I'd been trained to use, getting down to Avi only took ten seconds or so, though I needed to dodge quite a few streams of fire on my way there.

As soon as I landed, I shouted "Avi, come with me! I have a plan!"

My friend whirled around to see me, panic evident on her face "Tanya, I'm glad you're alright!"

"Avi, we have a very short time before the firebenders here kill all of us! With our air-separation, we can instantly extinguish fires and suffocate the firebenders causing them, and we're the only two people here who know how to do it!"

Avi froze up for a second, and I thought I would need to more directly order her into combat, but she reluctantly agreed.

"Alright, Tanya. I'll do what you tell me."

And like that, we were off. The first group of Fire Nation soldiers we encountered only saw us twenty seconds after I'd put them in a pure Nitrogen atmosphere. One of them tried to shoot a blast of fire at me, looked rather confused when nothing happened, and then the thirty of them abruptly fell over. Avi and I returned breathable air to head level, leaving the unconscious firebenders to their inert gas as we continued on.

For the next thirty minutes, The two of us went on a near-silent rampage around the air temple, snuffing out firebenders by the hundreds. Meanwhile, we quickly accumulated a gaggle of terrified airbenders following in our wake for the simple reason that anywhere we'd been, the fire nation soldiers weren't.

Eventually, it came to a point where there weren't anymore living fire nation soldiers in the air temple. After a bit, one of the airbending children following Avi and I asked a simple question.

"Well now what?"

I thought about the situation for a moment, before ordering "Form into three groups, organized by physical maturity."

The children following me promptly did as ordered, either trusting my judgement, or just being too scared of me to do otherwise.

First, I pointed to the youngest group. "Find everyone in the temple who's still alive. We need to know how many people we lost, who survived, that sort of thing."

Then I pointed to the oldest group. "You're on corpse disposal duty. If all the dead bodies here are simply left to rot, they will get us sick. At the very least get them out of the temple."

Lastly, I pointed to the group in the middle, "Make sure any remaining fires are safely extinguished, so that what's left of the temple doesn't burn down. Forcing the air around a fire to hold still for a while should lead to it suffocating itself in fairly short order."

All three groups promptly got to their assigned tasks. As soon as they were out of earshot, Avi asked me another question.

"Tanya, do you have a plan? For longer than the immediate tasks you assigned the other survivors of the attack?"

In all honesty, I didn't have a plan. I had an industrialized empire that would soon learn their attempt to kill all of us had failed, a bunch of traumatized survivors of an attempted genocide, and a very tenuous grasp on command of what personnel I did have. On the other hand...

"We can't have been the only people the Fire Nation attacked. We need to get allies against their aggression, we need to get them fast, and we need to neutralize as many of the Fire Nation's advantages as possible."

Avi looked a bit confused at that last part, so I rephrased it.

"The Fire Nation has machines that let them make a lot of weapons and tools very very quickly, to very high standards. We need to steal those machines and put them to our own use."

"Ah, now I understand. Tanya, I think that's an excellent idea."

 

[We Just Write]

Thanks to the efforts of the corpse removal teams and the groups I'd sent to retrieve everyone still alive, I soon learned just how dire the grim toll had been. Prior to the Fire Nation attack, the Eastern Air Temple had an approximate population of 2300 people. Of those 2300, 800 were adults, since adult air nomads were more prone to traveling as the name implied.

As of today, the Eastern Air Temple had a surviving population of 878, of which 119 were adults. While my closest friend Avi was among the survivors, many people I had at least somewhat cared about were not. Notably, this included Monk Pava.

Well, technically speaking, we weren't certain Monk Pava was dead. But we certainly hadn't found her alive, and at least half the corpses that got shoveled out of the Temple were burned beyond all hope of recognition. So in all likelihood, she was among the deceased. Though there was a discrepancy of about eighty or so missing corpses below the result of subtracting current population from previous population, which could have indicated people escaping. Best not to get our hopes up, though.

There was another reason to presume Monk Pava was dead: from what I knew of her, she wouldn't have been the type to flee from danger when the safety of her charges was on the line.

While I was able to maintain my composure at the moment, morale among the other Airbenders was at a critically low level. It was clear that some sort of plan was desperately needed, as was an injection of hope. If we just sat here and waited for the Fire Nation to try again, eventually they would develop a counter to nitrogen gas asphyxiation, so that was another reason to get moving.

Yes, the basic idea of closing the technology gap with the Fire Nation and acquiring allies was sound, but there was a fundamental problem: there were very few sensible places to steal Fire Nation technology from. Stealing factories' worth of industrial machinery from the Fire Nation's home islands was simply infeasible. Meanwhile, there were very few Fire Nation colonies that would have developed beyond simple resource extraction.

However, through my reading of the journals kept by traveling air nomads, I had identified one notable exception: the city of Yu Dao. Not only had the place been colonized nearly forty years ago, but Yu Dao had also developed a thriving metallurgical and shipbuilding industry. Most notably, this included an actual steel mill, instead of simple bloomeries. While there was no chance of us making off with the entire blast furnace, the engineering documents from that place would be absolutely critical for establishing our own industrial base.

The fact that we were air nomads also meant that Yu Dao being on the other side of the Earth Continent wasn't even really a problem; getting over there would take a bit, but it was a journey we could easily make, especially with the aid of Sky Bison.

Now there was only one major remaining hurdle to getting my plan into motion: convincing the other Air Nomads to go along with it.

So, with a bit of help wrangling everyone into a single place, it was time to make my pitch.

"So, we all know what happened two days ago. I don't need to repeat, or explain it. But I do have some bad news: it won't be very long until the Fire Nation figures out we've survived. When that happens, they're almost certainly going to try again."

Staring at the scared faces throughout the crowd, it was clear I had their attention.

"Staying here without doing anything is effectively just rolling over to be killed. If we scatter, the Fire Nation will pick us off one by one until there aren't any surviving Air Nomads left. We stick out too much to hide as a united group. The only remaining option for us is to fight; not with killing as a goal like the Fire Nation, but as a sad necessity to secure our safety."

I halfway expected some people to object about the principles of our philosophy and respect for life making killing others an unthinkable option. But it seemed like the fact that lethal retaliation was the only reason for any of us still being alive silenced such objections.

The next words I spoke were completely and utterly sincere, though I doubted people would believe that later.

"To be clear, I do not like war. It is a horrible thing that chews up human life and only gives misery in return. But we didn't choose this war; it was thrust upon us."

Time for the actual plan.

"Anyway, as it stands, the Fire Nation has three major advantages over us. First, they simply have far more people than we do. Second, the Fire Nation is far more organized than us, allowing them to coordinate efforts like a global war. Third, they have created highly sophisticated tools and machinery that can do things even benders can't always match. Among these capabilities, they can produce weapons and tools very quickly while maintaining high standards of quality. I have a plan to deal with each of these problems."

"First, we cannot be the only people the Fire Nation have attacked. It would be smart to find more people that have also recently been made enemies of the Fire Nation, and ally with them."

"Second, we need to establish a unified command for the duration of the war. People who are kept up to date on all relevant information, and who can issue orders to effectively act on that information. I do not want absolute unchecked command authority; I know myself well enough to know that I need help in that sort of capacity, along with people capable of telling me no."

"Third, we need to raid Yu Dao, and steal as much Fire Nation industrial technology as we can escape with. Technical documents are almost as valuable as the machines themselves, so we need to take those too."

It took several hours of debating and arguing after that, but eventually a consensus was reached. We would go to the Northwest of the Earth Kingdom - relatively close to Yu Dao, ally with the local Earthbenders, and only then would the raid take place.