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Spoilers!!!!!! For fantasy high !!!!!!!

Thinking about Riz and Kristen at the end of junior year past Kipperlily and the bullshit and everyone is chilling the fuck out.

Maybe they have a party. They call it a "party" but it's just a little get together and there's some alcohol sure but nothing too crazy. Riz is in his feelings and a lotta alcohol. He's drinking a lil stupid but hey he's earned it.

Kristen and Riz are on the roof looking at the stars. Kinda dumb considering Kristen's -4 dex but what's life without the risk? Anyway they are up there and it's kinda chilli. A soft breeze and Riz looks at Kristen but he can't ask the question.

She knows what he's looking for.

".....I can try-no I'd like to try. For you I'd try."

"It's been years..."

"yeah... I know it's been awhile. I can still try right? What's the worst that happens? Nothing happens"

"we don't have a body."

"it'll make things harder for sure....no bones? Nothing?"

"nothing....although....maybe we shouldn't? He's doing work up there. Or down there? Somewhere he's working on stuff."

"why not just ask him? You have that wrist thing right?"

"I don't have the coins for it."

"Fabian does. "

"...I don't want to bother him for stuff like that-"

"Hey can I be serious for a second? Like for five minutes I just wanna be real with you. If it wasn't for you I wouldn't have been class president. We wouldn't have had a chance against Kipperlilly and her bullshit if you weren't painting the prettiest of pictures about me and my campaign. By rights you should have been class president you're so much smarter than I'll ever be. You believed in me when the teacher didn't and you helped me study on top of attending so much shit. I feel like you've done way more for me than whatever stupid amount of coins it is. We'll get the coins. Promise. And I *want* to try. Okay? It's the least I can do."

They pass out on the roof.

Kristen does want to try and bring Pok back to life but she doesn't want to get Riz's hopes up so she doesn't tell him about it. She does have the other bad kids with her. Fabian for coins and Fig for moral support.

The first attempt fails. Of course it does. Fig says something about "oh it's like a knock at the door from an uninvited guest right? He don't know us." Which kinda makes sense.

Kristen introduces herself. All the bad kids do, to Pok's grave. Her grandmaster plan is to try and bring him back to life in time for graduation but that only leaves so much time. They spend so much time on this, tweaking little things and studying up on how to do a true resurrection. Good news, Pok hasn't been dead for 200+ plus years and there doesn't seem to be any force controlling or hell bent on keeping his soul so it should work. Cassandra and Ankarna are absolutely willing and able to lend a hand.

Riz is invested in his clue board because he's got another case, something less intense than murder but he's shuffling pictures and yarn around while he tries to figure out who has the better motive to steal the deed to some outdated historical building in Bastion city. The door to the apartment jiggles but Riz doesn't pay it any mind. It's Fig or Kristen or maybe mom came home early. Anyway he's just hyper focused on his board, eager to solve this low stakes case.

Pok comes into the apartment. It's different and yet so familiar. It's nicer now than he remembers it and there are so many more pictures on the walls. He says something to Riz who probably responds with something dismissive but not super rude. He's busy with his work. Pok comes close enough to see how his son goes about putting the pieces together. Focused and entirely calculating.

"I don't suppose you'd like a hand?"

"I think....that I've got....this one almost figured out. Petty theft. Family heirloom."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. The family is insufferable."

"Oh? That's a shame. It's safe to assume then they are a wealthy lot?"

"Loaded....the guy here sells engagement rings-well all sorts of rings but he's known for engagement and wedding rings."

They chat loosely back and forth but it's Pok just asking questions about his son's current project until Riz realizes who he's been talking to. It's a little silly to see how long it takes Riz to pull himself away from his clue board but when he dies there's a moment of solid, unbreakable silence as he realizes his father is right there. Completely corporal. They embrace and they both go to tears. He's fucking here! And he's home!

Kristen did it!

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Just made myself so so sad thinking about Aang's marble trick because from a physics perspective, keeping dense spherical objects afloat on an airstream is not trivial, and he's doing it in a tiny little space without moving his hands. Bending is usually very gestural. So. Everyone in the era of the show is, at best, impressed THAT it is airbending. But Aang's an incredibly young master airbender. He wouldn't be acting like this was the bestest trick ever if it didn't take at least some skill; he's a goofy kid but he's also a prodigy. I bet other airbenders were absolutely blown away (pun fully intended) at the level of precision and force and minimalism of movement on display and now there's no one who understands at all why he expects accolades.

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I have a small but growing list of potential future dnd characters I've dubbed "DnD Characters a DM Might Love or Might Shoot me for"

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At this point the theme is: I drew this in ink. xD

Some more Kyoda, this time with a lil Sokka. He was totally that kid. #momsaregross

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I’m struggling with keeping up with inktober due to illness and therefore a complete lack of…energy. 

In any case. Have some. Young Kya/Hakoda drawings. Because I’ve abandoned attempting to stick to a theme. HAHAHA *thumbs up* *draws what she wants*

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Some spirit manages to get the gaang and zuko a link that connects their minds. They can share thoughts and their past with each other.

Tweaking this to “and they share dreams” because that’s how I started writing it.

---

“Okay,” Sokka says, wrapping his sleeping bag around himself, and grabbing a comfort Momo, too. “Who’s dream was that?”

No one ‘fesses up. But it was kind of a rude question, and also a little rhetorical, anyway.

They all have nightmares with fire.

Having the Fire Lord himself looming over them, while they were on their knees? Not exactly a stretch.

---

“Okay,” Sokka says, “how does Prince Jerkface keep finding us?”

---

“Okay,” Sokka says, “how did he know that seal jerky seasoned just right with honey—not too much, just enough to add a sparkle of sweetness to the depths of savoriness, a perfect balance for the distinguished tongue to relish—was the perfect bait for his Sokka and Sokka-affliated-parties trap?”

“Maybe if you stop dreaming about it, Sokka,” Katara snaps.

...And they all stop.

---

“I’m going to think really really hard about being friends,” Aang says.

“I’m going to think really really hard about that time my boomerang hit him,” says Sokka.

---

Snatching the boomerang out of midair? Impressive.

Ignoring the Avatar to go hit Sokka with it? Repeatedly? Uncalled for.

---

“Sokka. The city is under attack. Right now.”

“Okay,” Sokka says. “But this is a strategic nap, Katara. We need to know what evil things our Evil Other is up to.”

It’s not like the evil fleet part was a surprise, at least. They’ve been dreaming of it for weeks.

---

“Okay,” Sokka says, looking down. “So the ship-blowing-up-thing. Not a nightmare?”

“No,” says Zuko, glaring up with his glare-face all glare-ful but his thoughts mostly full of bruises so deep they’re making Sokka’s ribs ache, and also his legs are going numb.

“Going to get out of the turtle-seal tunnel now?” Sokka asks, still standing over the opening. With his boomerang.

“...No,” the Prince of the Fire Nation says, as he clings onto the edge of the hole, his legs still very much in freezing water.

---

“Okay,” Sokka says, when they have a Fire Prince all tied up in Blankets of Imprisonment. “So. What actually was your plan here? Do not,” he interrupts, before the teenage-shaped bloodhound-leech can do more than open his mouth, “say ‘capture the Avatar.’”

The prince closes his mouth. Glares. And kind of fuzzes at the edges, in the way all of them do when they’re about to fall asleep.

BOOMERANG, Sokka thinks, and Prince Largely Ineffective As An Enemy jerks back upright. His Momo hat chitters a complaint.

“Since we both know your answer is ‘I had no plan, Sokka, ‘plan’ starts with ‘p’ and there’s no ‘p’ in ‘Avatar’’, we’re going to play a game instead. It’s called ‘sleepy prince free association interrogation time.’”

“...What?”

“Battle plans,” Sokka says. “Attack. Fire Navy fleet. Ship numbers.”

Alas, “Fire Nation intelligence” is not something with which the prince’s brain is overly burdened.

“...Are you insulting me?”

“Are you proving my point?”

Elsewhere, Yue laughs in all their heads. Zuko flinches. The prince has a very marked reaction to the laughter of princesses.

---

“Okay,” says Sokka. “So that just happened.”

Commander Mutton Chops is groaning. Kind of flopping. Much like the bag he tried to fireball. Yue picks it up, and gently wrangles a fish back into water. Sokka is still not clear on what the fish-napping was about.

“It’s the Moon,” Aang says. “Or maybe the Ocean?”

Aang’s thoughts are full of a FACE STEALING EVIL CENTIPEDE MONSTER THAT IS JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE THIN VEIL OF REALITY and that is NOT helping Sokka think.

“Okay,” he says again. “So. At least we can all agree on one thing.”

This is a very diplomatic way of saying they all wanted to dropkick Zhao. But some of them wanted to do it more than others.

The prince of the Fire Nation is even paler than normal, and staring across the clearing at his uncle.

“I can explain,” the prince says, while he’s thinking, oh shit treason oh crap uncle wouldn’t hurt me thought that about father too

Sokka wordlessly plucks Momo from the edge of the pond, where he’s been swiping at the spirit-fish, and drops him on the prince’s head.

Everyone needs a comfort Momo, now and again.

---

“A raft, Zuko?” Sokka says. Outloud. Because it makes things louder when you say it and think it. “A raft?”

Aang is bouncing on his toes. “We should go get him.”

The Avatar is grinning. And thinking, really hard and deliberately, as behind them the Water Tribe ship finishes packing, We should capture the Fire Prince,

“Okay,” Sokka says, with a grin.

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Consider: Post-canon Zuko wakes up in the body of his childhood self, the morning of That War Meeting. Would he still speak against the plans, knowing his fate? What do you think he would do differently the second time around?

"Turned away at the doors, Zuzu?"

"Shut up, Azula," her brother sulked. But sulked weirdly, after staring at her too long and too wide-eyed, not like she'd surprised him but--

But like he hadn't expected her to be there. At all.

He turned away. ...He turned back. "Hey, Lala? Do you think you could help me practice that one set?"

He didn't meet her eyes.

She narrowed hers. "Which set?"

"The one I'm bad at."

She scoffed. Pushed away from the wall she'd been leaning against. "That's all of them, Dum-Dum."

He didn't shout or stomp or yell about the nickname. His lips twitched.

"It's okay," he said. "If you're afraid you won't be a better teacher that my instructor..."

It was the most obvious manipulation ever.

Perhaps if he proved an adequate firebending student, she'd work on his courtly survival skills next. Honestly, it was good that not even Uncle Gets-Cousins-Killed had been fool enough to take Zuko into that war meeting. She could only imagine how terribly that could have gone.

"Keep up," she said, and turned her steps towards the training grounds.

He did. There, and during the katas she ran him through.

Azula kept her eyes narrowed.

"Hey," he asked, "do you know how to bend lightning yet?"

As if he could have missed it, if she'd been able to get more than sparks. "I will soon," she said.

"You will," he agreed, and flowed through his next set. The one she'd only just mastered.

Father didn't notice how weird Zuzu was being. Uncle never noticed anything. Zuko ate dinner and asked a servant for seconds and didn't stutter or flinch or lose his appetite when father asked, coolly, what he'd done with his day. Azula's shoulders tensed, because one mention of how she'd squandered her own training time teaching him--

"Azula hogged the training grounds. For hours," Zuzu scowled, exactly like a petulant thirteen year old.

Exactly like he hadn't been acting all day.

By the time Father was looking her way, Azula had her usual smirk in place. "I'm sure there would be room for both of us," she said, "you're not afraid of a little friendly fire, are you, brother?"

Zuko sulked. And ate his seconds, like he was enjoying each bite. There was something in his eyes, like a joke no one else was getting.

---

Father died that night. A heart attack. There were the faintest of burns to either side of the treacherous organ; the royal physician hypothesized that he'd grabbed at his chest, fingers burning hot in his final moments; so hot they'd only exacerbated the problem.

The royal physician would never have been brought any victims of lighting strikes. Those that occurred in the capital did not generally require a doctor in the aftermath.

Zuzu ate a hearty breakfast.

He didn't order seconds. Azula gave him points, at least, for not being tacky.

---

The sages named Iroh as regent.

They named Zuko as Fire Lord.

"No," the tiny Fire Lord in his perfectly miniaturized Fire Lord robes said, sitting at the head of his war council. "We're not doing that. And I'll be reviewing all recent battle plans, as well. What's this I hear about a division of new recruits being deployed to the front?"

He did not mention how he'd heard of the 41st Division. No one asked.

"Prince Iroh, surely--" one of the generals tried to appeal.

The young Fire Lord's regent was looking as startled as the rest of them, for a moment. Then he sipped his tea, and smiled.

"Your Fire Lord is correct, of course. A change in our leadership--a change the other nations may mistakenly view as weakness--will necessitate a change in our strategy."

"Now," said their lord, "what, exactly, is our overall objective in this war?"

War, the new Fire Lord decreed, was not an end unto itself.

---

The new Fire Lord continued to have time, to pretend to be trained by her. Azula watched him. Adjusted her footwork. Did not tolerate, and was not offered, any commentary on who was teaching who.

"What did you do with my brother?" she asked, as they flowed from one set to the next. As her hands, poised to throw fire, just so happened to be pointed his way.

He missed a step. It didn't look like an act.

"I'm, uh. Right here?"

She didn't bother to dignify that.

He didn't bother to look worried about her hands, one movement off from a true attack.

He looked around, then grabbed her sleeve, and tugged her further from any walls that may hide ears. The royal family's private training grounds were wonderfully large, and wonderfully open.

"It's me," he said. "It's still me. Just. More of me? Longer of me?"

She narrowed her eyes. A familiar expression, by this point. "Explain."

"...I found the Avatar," he said. "And this is definitely his fault, but--but I guess it started at a war meeting, when I was thirteen."

Azula listened. It was a very Dum-Dum story.

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Related Work: The Price of War by talespin

After escaping from the Western Air Temple, Hakoda is lost in a forest with three Earth Kingdom kids.

Thirsty, tired, and struggling to cope with the effects of his prison stay, the last thing he needs is getting kidnapped by an ancient secret society.

But Iroh’s plans to have the Avatar kill the Fire Lord are outrageous, and Hakoda takes issue. Now he has to put up with his mother’s ex and a gloomy firebender while parenting three wayward children, rescuing his crew from prison, and defeating Ozai. Which would be enough to deal with even if the wounds of the past didn’t have a habit of bleeding into the present.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/64180591/chapters/164702323

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i just know that the ethics classes in magical fantasy realms would be off the rails

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i watched one (1) video on how to draw hands that changed my life forever. like. i can suddenly draw hands again

these were all drawn without reference btw. i can just. Understand Hands now (for the most part, im sure theres definitely inaccuracies). im a little baffled

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Send me a version #, a prompt #, and a ship and I’ll doodle something u-u

The OG Post of drawing prompts: x

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So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

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"old friends" is an underrated relationship dynamic because it's such an innocent boring sounding term for what is usually some of the wildest shit imaginable. it's always like 'oh yeah we go way back, we have history' and then you find out that history includes sex, drugs, murder, divorce, war crimes and The Incident

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one of my favorite things to do in limited perspective is write sentences about the things someone doesn't do. he doesn't open his eyes. he doesn't reach out. i LOVE sentences like that. if it's describing the narrator, it's a reflection of their desires, something they're holding themselves back from. there's a tension between urge and action. it makes you ask why they wanted or felt compelled to do that, and also why they ultimately didn't. and if it's describing someone else, it tells you about the narrator's expectations. how they perceive that other person or their relationship. what they thought the other person was going to do, or thought the other person should have done, but failed to. negative action sentences are everything.

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Some of the biggest fantasy worldbuilding fails that I see, in no particular order

Gods without religion. The Gods are real and a known historical fact, but virtually nobody is religious.

Cultural racism/discrimination without structural racism/discrimination. Discrimination that exists only in microagressions or mean comments, without existing in any sort of structural way.

Secret history with no clear reason for it to be secret and no clear method for maintaining that secrecy. Major parts of the world's history are kept entirely secret, even though there's not an obvious reason to do so and even when history has shown this is virtually impossible to enforce (especially in a world with any movement or communication across borders).

Large, homogeneous countries. Even without immigration, virtually no country larger than the Vatican will be fully homogeneous in terms of culture, dialect, beliefs, traditions, etc., much less a large one with limited communication technology as is often seen in fantasy. The Planet of Hats problem.

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It’s always kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

Iroh spends decades as the crown prince, gaining all the necessary knowledge and training to inherit the throne. He spends years with the new crown Prince, his nephew, teaching lessons that don’t make sense and overall being a drag to his nephews goals, then when Zuko finally sees the light, the war ends, Zuko becomes firelord, and Iroh just. Leaves him.

Zuko is the sovereign ruler of a nation, barely 17 years old, having basically no training in being firelord compared to Iroh, who stays in Ba Sing Se, living peacefully in a city he nearly destroyed. Sure, Zuko insisted he have a peaceful life, to make up for his betrayal of his uncle. But when has that ever stopped Iroh? Why does he hesitate now?

Of all the times Zuko has ever needed Irohs guidance, would now not be the best time?

Of course Zuko turned to Ozai for help, cause the only other person in the world who knows how to be firelord is a continent away, expecting Zuko to come to him for help when Zuko barely has enough time to sleep, let alone travel.

I love Iroh, but he pisses me off sometimes. I wish, I hope, that in any future atla content, Iroh does more.