The clock struck eight over the Avatar Aang Stupa in downtown Republic City. An elevated railcar drummed past, cutting a silhouette into the morning Sun. Long shadows scurried against abandoned apartment buildings and power lines mangled. Then, a great shadow passed over everything.

It was called Sky Castle Bravo: a floating airship as large as a mountain looming over Republic City. It was oblong and irregular, with many parapets and ramparts, like a potato-turnip. United Forces troops manned it, patrolled it, suffused it. Turrets stuck out like nails along its side, but their cool metal gleamed in the Sun. Smaller airships routinely rose up from the city carrying supplies and staff. At Sky Castle Bravo's apex, the façade — riddled with roaring upward facing turbines that kept the behemoth structure aloft day and night — lead into a testing facility like a crater, and, rising like a marble tower in the center, concealed in a cloudy thicket, stood a rocket; a spaceship intended for going to the Moon.

Commuters dressed in suits, of red, blue, brown, and green, read newspapers in one hand as their other hands grasped onto straps on the elevated train. Their bodies lurched left and right. The train's momentum as it went forward along the rails, possessed their bodies utterly. The rails were made decades before, during the roaring times of the United Council. A newspaper headline on a newspaper waxed futuristic on replace the aging system with a maglev.

One young man looked out onto the neighborhood through his black rim glasses — his mind darting between the four elements, magnets, classic movers, and scientific innovation. He balanced a brown paper bag filled with groceries on his knee: cabbages, potato-turnips, and a platypus-bear egg. On his wrist he had a watch, and bent into the strap were the words: For Shokku.

The front car's rear door opened as a passenger with a red headband went forward between straphangers.

Suddenly the car came unhinged and passengers stumbled over and the red headband was dropped; and the other cars receded away. With the train's emergency brakes overridden, an alarm sounded at the Police Force Headquarters. Interns and staffers scrambled to find the cause, and sifted through paper and readouts produced from a massive new machine that consisted of hoses and wires what seemed like whirling mover reels. It filled an adjacent warehouse.

"They call this thing a figurer." said one seated employee idly to another while deciphering the readout in his hands, "When they pitched it to us, the ad agency wanted to call this thing a computer."

"Now that's just silly." said the other over his shoulder, while placing his readout in a vacuum tube.

Not a minute later, Commissioner Mako put down his morning coffee in as measured a manner as he could. The read out flung out from a chute and slid along the surface of his desk, with hole punches indicating a proprietary police code. Scooping it from the stately desk, he read what it said and put it in a drawer, into an empty folder marked "Hijacking". Then, with his left hand he picked up the phone receiver to his face and bushy mustache.

"Zhu Li," directed Mako, "We have a Code H-R46."

Registering the aitch as 'Hijacking' and 'R46' to be the train line, Director of Police Force Operations, Zhu Li, said "Understood, sir." and hung up her receiver. Suddenly, sirens blared and cars painted in black with white hoods roared into the streets; and with all cars called the Police force was now on full alert.

With his right, he lifted up a glass casing and pressed a fresh red button on his desk. He then took a coffee swig, as another assistant entered carrying a freshly dry cleaned uniform intended for press conferences.

In a wide plane hangar shielded from the high altitude winds, a red light on the back of Korra's new gauntlets began to blink with a polite clicking noise. Korra lifted it up and looked at it quizzically.

"Well, looks like the new alert system works after all!" said Asami, examining the blinking light. But she paused, looked to Korra and to the Sky Castle Bravo hangar opening that hovered high above the city, and nodded.

"I have to go." said Korra firmly, looking back to Asami. Korra liked Asami's new hair: she wore it short, a single lock of hair curled on her forehead. —Business and sophistication. Korra thought.

"You've got this." said Asami, gripping Korra's shoulder. "Those gloves are a prototype for flight purposes, but I'm certain that I've worked out the bugs." Asami paused, and noted with unfortunate recall of a previous incident, "If they give you trouble, do try and pocket them so I don't have to start from scratch again."

"I'll try!" said Korra, with a laugh.

Korra bowed her head, and Asami put a helmet upon it with a tinted glass front to keep out the wind. Smiling through a glass screen, Korra adjusted her long braided ponytail, that went down to her belt, so that it could blow freely in the wind. Korra turned, got a running start to the hangar's lip, went to the edge, and dove.

"Good luck." said Asami to herself, her arms folded.

United Forces Soldiers were playing cards in rooms with porthole windows. Korra's shadow arched over Sky Castle Bravo's contours. Her long ponytail whipped like a flag in a gale. Sweeping her arms back in a modified blue paraglider suit, firebending from her hands, jet heat roared forth and rippled in the air; Avatar Korra descended.

§

The young man, Shokku, felt his heart pulsing in his neck.

"Excuse me ladies and gentleman!" shouted the combustion bender gruffly in sing-song, as the lone rail car whizzed past a crowded station. "May I have your attention please! If you listen to me, I will not blow up this train." he paused, and looked around at the straphangers who were varying degrees of terrified, annoyed, and unphased. The man walked up and down the aisle, and began to speak again. "I am a Combustion Bender. I am here to tell you that the Fire Nation is oppressing us! The Fire Nation does not think we matter! Fire Minister Zhoza is a tyrant!" he continued, pointing his finger proudly at the sky, "Fire Lord Izumi abdicated because Zhoza wants to take over the Fire Nation and create a New World Order! The White Lotus is real!"

"That doesn't even make sense." said Shokku to himself.

The combustion bender shot him a baleful glance.

Suddenly there was a loud thud on the roof. Shokku looked up. Then, there were a few loud clangs on the roof and then it burst open. Straphangers gasped in surprise and confusion as Korra dropped down from a hole she had metal bent and she jabbed an air bolt at the combustion bender, who ducked mid-sentence and grabbed Shokku's collar and yanked him up. Shokku stumbled to his feet. His glasses fell off. His grocery bag tore open. The platypus-bear egg splattered. The cabbage fell to the subway floor.

— my cabbages!

The man's thick arms wrapped firmly around his neck and a finger pointed to his temple daring to firebend.

Shokku's heart sank into a bubbling blackness as his struggled to breathe and see.

Korra lowered her arms, and looked calmly to the combustion bender.

The combustion bender sucked his teeth.

Shokku through his foggy vision thought he saw Korra's legs moving ever so slowly.

A thin metal coil began to snake its way silently around the combustion bender's leg. He was unaware.

Then, many things happened at once. Korra suddenly swept her arms together in a chopping motion.

The combustion bender tensed, ready to strike Shokku, then winced. A metal coil culled from the subway floor yanked him to his knees.

Korra grabbed Shokku, who gasped. She pulled him out from the combustion bender's grip.

Shokku was tossed to the ground into the smeared platypus bear yoke. He coughed.

Korra touched a point in the man's chest with her left thumb. With her right, she reached for a metal strap hanging, twisted it into a makeshift handcuff, and tossed it onto the man's arms. Clink. Thump. She metal bent his hands to the floor.

Shokku looked up to see Avatar Korra — his hero and his icon and his inspiration.

With the man arched backwards and immobilized, Korra put her thumb to the man's forehead.

She's going to energybend him. Shokku marveled to himself.

But then Korra paused. Everyone's body was rocking back and forth to the train speeding along the tracks, passing an empty station.

"I'm not feeling anything!" she shouted, confused.

"What do you mean?!" shouted an irate straphanger, who was now almost an hour late for work.

Korra lifted her right thumb that was on the man's combustion bending tattoo, which was now smudged. Korra's gauntleted finger had paint on it.

"You're not even a bender?!" shouted Korra, her eyebrows furrowing.

"No." said the hostage taker meekly.

"WHAT?!" Korra bellowed.

Korra growled, but then the train lurched forward, its wheels screeching, and it quickly slowed down to a complete stop. The train car was quiet for a moment.

"They—" Shokku coughed, "They must have cut power to the third rail!" Shokku finally said, shaking yoke from his fingers. Sirens wailed as a ladder truck and a police car panoply approached.

§

The next hour involved Korra having to fend off an angry straphanger mob from tearing apart the harmless hostage-taker, Commissioner Mako talking to the press along with Avatar Korra, the man being led into a paddy-wagon, camera bulbs bursting in bright flashes, and the crowds ultimately resuming their set paths of daily living.

"Well, there's a first time for everything." said Mako, tilting his head up and putting a hand to his forehead.

"You're telling me!" said Korra, grimacing and gripping the air like two ripe melons. She turned to Mako and threw her gauntleted hands up. "How does something like that even happen?"

Mako, now holding his hands behind his back and raising his brow said, "The suspect appears to have been a Fire Nation emigree. And news reports do suggest that Fire Minister Zhoza has been discriminating against combustion benders and sun warriors." Mako paused and furrowed to the side, seemingly distracted by a spec of dust. "Why this suspect would choose a Republic City target is beyond me. Perhaps to garner media attention?"

Korra patted Mako's shoulder and grinned.

"Mako." Korra said, "You make a great police chief. I can see why Lin Beifong recommended you as her replacement."

Mako looked surprised, and then smiled too. But then noticed smoke rising from where her gauntlets met his uniform.

"Um, Korra —"

"Yikes! Sorry!" said Korra yanking her arms back like from a hot stove.

"Hum, I just had this dry cleaned." said Mako in disappointment, noticing where his uniform had been singed.

Korra took off the gauntlets and put them along her belt. But they started to beep once again.

"How many things do those gauntlets do?" Mako asked, furrowing his eyebrows as he look down to the gauntlet on Korra's belt. He paused, "And can I have a pair?"

"What?" said Korra to herself, distracted and feeling the gauntlet. Then she closed her eyes and sighed. "Oh, now I remember. I'm supposed to meet with Bolin —"

"—You mean the President?"

"— Yeah! for a mover night! And then I'm going to the Spirit World. Iroh asked me to meet him for tea, he came to me in a vision last night. He said it was important, but he had one more thing to attend to before I arrived. I haven't seen him since before we fought the Red Lotus. It's been eleven years."

"Eleven years." said Mako.

Sky Castle Bravo's underside loomed over the city like a thundercloud.

§

Shokku put his broken glasses on his face. He looked to see Korra standing outside that train station, with Commissioner Mako there too.

He looked for a long time.

Then he turned away, looked back again, and finally headed off to a coffee shop.

He passed Avatar Aang Stupa again, in its afternoon time shade. He often noted, its four sides that corresponding with the four elements, and the dome's peak, representing the energy element that bound them all together.

Wing Beifong looked out the coffee shop's window, a cup in his hands.

Shokku sat down across from Wing, looking up to him through his own broken glasses.

Wing's eyes widened and he put out his hand to Shokku's face.

Shokku put his hands out to his side to explain.

Wing Beifong kissed Shokku on the lips. He bent the glasses fixed.

They went home together, as they had for the past five years. The sun set behind the mountains painted pink and blue.

That night, Shokku was wide awake. Wing snored in bed, the sheets tucked under his head. Shokku stared out the window. He saw the spirit portal's light rising as a pillar in the distance amidst the urban forest. Sky Castle Bravo, to where he would commute to work tomorrow, boded behind it.

The yellow light that streamed through the windows consumed him.