Adventures of a Metalworker

Shun Yi

One Year Earlier...

A group of nomads, known as the Aditi, were traveling together from one Earth Kingdom city to another. The Aditi were a diverse people who didn't consider themselves citizens of any one country. They believed everyone and everything was connected.

But the war with the Fire Nation was testing this belief. Since they intermarried a lot with people from different countries, they had a few members who were descended from the Fire Nation and could bend fire. With the animosity many Earth Kingdom citizens felt toward the Fire Nation, they began to hide their true heritage when they were in a town or city to avoid persecution. The rest of the tribe was accused of being traitors for sheltering the firebenders if they were discovered. Even though they had nothing to do with the war, they would still become a target for the hate and frustration of those around them and were treated like enemies.

But like the rest of the world, the Aditi, including the Fire Nation descendants, had fallen out of harmony with the Fire Nation. They could understand the Earth Kingdom's reaction, because the Aditi were targeted by the Fire Nation as well. They lived in fear of the next raid, when the Fire Nation would catch up to them and take away anyone who could bend as well as their best metalworkers. The people they took were never seen or heard from again.

"Shun!" a woman with dark skin, blue eyes, and reddish-brown hair called.

"Yes?" said a girl with golden skin, green eyes, and black hair and a girl with tan skin, brown eyes and brown hair.

"I meant Shun Yi," the woman said. The brown-eyed girl shrugged and walked ahead.

"What is it, Aunt Arushi?" the girl with green eyes asked. She called Mrs. Arushi 'aunt', but they weren't related. The girl with green eyes was twelve and had a mole just under the corner of her left eye. She was dressed in a colorful langa voni (or half sari) with a green and orange short-sleeve top, orange and gold skirt, gold belt, and a hot-pink cloth draped around her waist and over her shoulder. She had two steel wrist cuffs, silver anklets with tiny bells, a gold necklace with a small red gem and two small white gems, and silver bell-shaped earrings. Everyone around her was dressed in equally colorful clothing and jewelry.

"You dropped this," Mrs. Arushi said kindly, holding up a jade hair stick with the design of a stylized dragon.

Shun recognized it immediately and instinctively reached up and felt her hair. It was still half up in a bun wrapped in braids that were secured with gold bands at the ends, and the purple flowers were still in her hair. But her hair stick was definitely gone and in Mrs. Arushi's hand.

Mrs. Arushi returned it to her.

"Oh, thank you!" Shun said, scared that she had almost lost it without realizing and relieved to have it back. It was the only thing she had to remember her mother by, not that she really had any memories of her. Her mother had died the night she was born. As the story went, her mother had stumbled across the Aditi, badly burned and going into labor. The Aditi had tried their best to help her, but the combined shock of the burns and childbirth were too much for her mother. The Aditi didn't know anything about her mother or her father, so they took her in and raised her themselves.

It wasn't an unusual story. With the war, the Aditi were always picking up orphans here and there. They gave all the orphans like Shun, who came to them as infants, the surname "Yi", and encouraged the children to form their own family unit and help take care of each other.

"Lucky Mom found it, huh?" a girl who looked just like a younger version of Mrs. Arushi said. She was Shun's best friend, Aruna. Aruna wore her hair in braided pigtails with a large pink flower on the side of her head.