#@muffinlance

Sokka’s on his way back from college when he makes a wrong turn and ends up at what looks like an abandoned amusement park.  

There’s a weird sign by the entryway warning passers-by not to enter because of ‘Strange Energies.’

And because he’s Sokka and inquisitive to a fault (especially when confronted with clearly-bullshit keep-out signs), he parks his car, grabs his jacket, and gets out to have a look around.

The entryway is built in a distinctly Japanese style; A curving tiled roof rising in tiers above the entry arch and capping the high stucco-covered wall that stretches out into the low underbrush in either direction.  He can’t see any signs of rides or other attractions beyond it.

It doesn’t look like the sort of amusement park that belongs in Alaska.  Probably why it’s abandoned.

He wanders down the entry tunnel, peering ahead in the darkness to try and figure out what’s at the other end.  Weird, it didn’t seem this long when he started walking…

It’s getting warmer, too.  Warm enough that he’s unzipping his jacket.  

Finally, he gets to the end of the end, and blinks up a sky that’s WAY bluer than the watery-spring-blue sky he remembers from just a few minutes ago.  The cutting breeze and shreds of low cloud are conspicuously absent as well.

There are the ruins of carnival stalls and a few eateries scattered around the entry-building, the smooth-worn paving stones interrupted by weeds and grass that look a little too green for Alaska, even in June.

It’s eerily quiet.   No songbirds or bugs or the ever-present arguing of the sea-birds.  Sokka can see wind-chimes and bells hanging from the corners of a few of the surrounding pavilions, but the air is too still to move them.

Strange.

He walks a little further away from the entrance, picking up speed when he realizes that the rows of little stalls aren’t actually that deep.  He turns a corner and stops, staring.

The paving stones become a set of shallow steps a few yards away, leading down to what looks like it used to be a water feature of some sort, but now is full of beautifully-lush green grass.  Across the green expanse, maybe a hundred yards away, is the rest of the park; rising up the slope of a low hill in tiers of red-gold-green buildings, with a grand, castle-like building with faded red walls and a green-tiled roof at the top.  

Strangely enough, the tall, rusty smokestack that stands next to the castle-building is putting out drifting clouds of black-grey smoke.

Maybe this place isn’t as abandoned as he thought.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket to text a picture of the place to Aang, only to discover that there’s no signal.  He snaps the picture anyway, then turns his phone off to save the battery.

Go back to the car, or see if there’s still part of this place that’s open for business?

Sokka looks back towards where he remembers the entrance being, but the maze of carnival booths and abandoned noodle stalls block his view of it.  He steps out onto the strip of clear pavement between said stalls and the grass and looks down it to see how far it is to the wall, but he can’t see that either.  In either direction.  

“Must be painted to look like the horizon,” Sokka mutters to himself, shading his eyes with one hand and squinting at where the wall should be.  He can’t see the mountains that should be visible to the east, so there’s definitely something in the way.

“Weird.”

He looks around again, but the entry gate is still obscured, and the mystery of that maybe-still-open castle-building is way more appealing than the three hours of driving he’s still got to do before he gets home.

Onward it is, then.

The grass is soft and dotted with patches of clover and wildflowers when he gets to the bottom of the steps.  A little way down the bank Sokka sees the wooden skeleton of what was probably a gondola of some sort, now overgrown with tall blue flowers and moss.  Something metallic clinks against his boot, and when he looks down he realizes that the grass near the bottom of the stairs is full of coins and little things people must have dropped while getting in and out of the boats that must have ferried people across.  

He crunches down to get a better look.  Most of the coins aren’t the American and Canadian ones he recognizes.  Instead, they’re much bigger, with blank faces and a gold-metallic coloring.  Carnival tokens of some kind, maybe?  There are a few pieces of jewelry too, but nothing interesting enough to bother taking with him.

“Wonder how long this place’s been here?”  Sokka tosses the ring he’s been inspecting away into the grass and starts walking again.  The coins and other junk peter out a few yards away from the bank, leaving nothing but the grass underfoot.  “Can’t have closed that long ago if all that stuff’s still there.”

The further he walks, the warmer the air gets.  Sokka pauses about halfway across the gap to shrug out of his jacket and tie it around his waist, just to keep himself from sweating through it. 

“Weird weather today,” he mutters, casting a glance up at the still-too-blue sky and starting to wish he’d brought a hat.  He turns a slow circle in place, hoping that the distance will make it easier to pick out the entrance gate’s tower or where the walls are, but he can’t see either.  In fact, standing where he is, the only real landmarks he has to orient himself are the dry riverbed itself and the castle in the distance.

It’s maybe making him feel the tiniest bit uneasy.

Still, he didn’t come all this way just to chicken out.  Sokka squares his shoulders and keeps walking.

A breeze picks up as he nears the other bank, ruffling the flowers and the grass gently and finally doing something to break the weird silence of the place.  Sokka can hear the distant sound of the chimes and bells that must be hung from the eaves of the roofs the same way they had been around the entrance as he gets closer.  

There are more boat-skeletons on this side.  Way more boat skeletons.  Enough that Sokka has to pick his way between their ribs and the long poles and oars that must have been used to propel them across the channel.  There’s also a notable lack of any of the junk he’d seen in the grass on the gate-side, like everything that might have been dropped has been meticulously removed.

There’s still no sign that anyone’s been here recently other than the smoke coming from the stack, though.  The booths and pavilions, while much less of a mess than they had been on the other side, are still clearly abandoned and weather-worn.  There are still weeds growing between the paving stones, but there’s no trash or animal nests or actual damage to anything, as far as he can tell.  

“How does a place like this even happen?”

The hill’s steeper than it looks from a distance, although not so steep that there are steps anywhere.  Every once in a while Sokka stops to look back toward the park entrance, trying to get a feel for how far he’s come, and how wide the park is, but he can’t seem to pick out the gatehouse OR figure out where the walls are.

The closer he gets to the castle, the less it looks like one.  What he’d thought were battlements at a distance actually turn out to be large, many-paned windows and balconies.  There’s a cheerfully-waving flag at one corner emblazoned with a symbol he doesn’t recognize, and no signs of an outer wall to speak of.  But if it isn’t a castle, what is it?

Sokka’s been following a wide, winding path between the pavilions and restaurants on the hillside, so it’s hard to judge exactly how close he is to reaching his destination until he rounds a corner and realizes he’s arrived.

The place is enormous up close.  It looms over the other structures of the park like the giant cruise ships loom over small seaside ports.  

“Sweet Tui and La, what the fuck?”  Sokka stares in disbelief.  Instead of an ornamental moat or a ditch of some kind, there’s a sheer fucking four-hundred-foot drop down to what looks like a flat flood-plain that separates the castle-like building from the rest of the park; the cliff face extending off for miles in either direction until it gets lost in the haze.  The castle itself stands on a completely-physics-and-geology-defying pillar of rock that stands straight up from the muddy plain below, with plumbing pipes and occasional structures built out of it.  The smokestack stands off to one side on an even more logic-defying stone spire, connected to the main building by an arch of stone and a tangle of rusting pipes.

There’s a delicately-ornamented arched wooden bridge spanning the thirty-foot gap from the cliff edge to the building’s entrance.  Unlike the rest of the park’s structures, this one shows no signs of wear whatsoever.

Sokka stares at everything for a minute, then reaches automatically into his pocket for his phone.

It’s dead.

“Well, shit,” he sighs as he shoves it back in the pocket of his jeans.  He’ll have to charge it in his car enough to put a map pin down for this place before he gets back on the road.

“What are you doing here?”

The voice comes from right the fuck over his shoulder.  Way too close for comfort.  Sokka may or may not scream like a six-year old as he flails and tries to get a bit of distance from the asshole who’s snuck up on him.

It’s a guy, maybe a few years older than Sokka.  He’s got a nasty burn scar splayed over one side of his face, bright-bright-bright gold eyes that are kind of impossible not to notice, and a Defcon-2 level scowl.

“Dude!”  Sokka feels like his fucking heart’s about to give out. “What the fuck, man?  Have you been following me this whole time?”

With a bit of distance, Scar-Face-McCreeper turns out to be dressed to match the rest of the park in an old-fashioned red-and-black yukata and a pair of geta.  Sokka has no fucking clue how the guy managed to move so silently in what is essentially a pair of wooden flip-flops, but here they are.  

“Only since you crossed the channel,” Scar-Face-McCreeper answers, like that somehow makes things any better.  “Most people are smart enough to turn around before they get that far.”

Wonderful.  Now he’s being insulted.  “Dude, if you didn’t want people coming in here to see what’s up, you’re gonna need to do better than a cheap-looking poster covered in nonsense about ‘bad energies,’ Sokka retorts.  “What even is this place, anyway?”

“It’s a bathhouse,” Scar-face is still looking at him like he’s an idiot.  “And it’s private.  By invitation only.”

The guy takes a step toward him as he says that last bit, and Sokka subconsciously finds himself taking a step back.  There’s something weirdly dangerous about the way the other guy’s looking at him.  He suddenly seems… bigger, somehow, his shadow lengthening toward Sokka strangely, even though it can’t be more than half-past noon and the sun won’t set for almost another eleven hours…

Something, Sokka has no idea what, causes the sudden tension to snap like an overstretched rubber-band.  Scar-Face’s head snaps around toward the horizon, and Sokka feels like his eyes are about to bug out of his head when he looks in the same direction and realizes the sun’s somehow more than halfway set already.

“What-”

One of the lightpoles at the end of the bridge flickers on.

There’s a hot-hot hand around his wrist, nearly jerking him off balance as he’s hauled bodily back across the bridge away from the bathhouse.

“Run.  Now!”  Scar-Face shoves him back toward the street leading down the hill.  He sounds almost… Scared?  Worried?  “Get back across the channel before the sun sets!  Go!”

Definitely scared.  

Scar-Face turns on his heel to face the bathhouse, striking a strange pose, like some sort of predatory snake poised to strike.

“Run, you moron.  Before you can’t.  Go!”

Sokka’s not normally the sort of dude to let stunts like this get him, but something tells him this guy isn’t fucking around.  He takes one look back at the lone figure on the bridge and fucking books it down the street.  

When the fuck did it get so dark?  Sokka wonders as he sprints past shops and stalls and pavilions.  More and more lights are coming on the longer he runs; illuminating walls and pillars and roofs that don’t look nearly as dilapidated as he remembers them being just a few minutes ago.  He doesn’t stop to take a closer look, but he’s pretty sure the grass that was growing between the paving stones earlier is gone too.  

A breeze blows down the street after him, and Sokka yelps when a hand grabs him by the wrist and drags him bodily in the direction of a narrow alley.

“You’re never going to make it if you go the longest way, numbskull,” Scar-Face hisses as he nearly pulls Sokka right off his feet with his speed.  “Faster!”

Sokka nearly trips on the suddenly-steeper slope of the alley, but manages not to faceplant as he pushes himself to try and match the guy’s speed.  The hand on his wrist feels like an iron band, like he could fall flat and the guy would just pull him along the ground without slowing down.

The next minute or so is a blur of dark alleyways and bright flashes across the main thoroughfare as the two of them sprint down the hill.  The sky above is getting darker and darker, but the slope is getting shallower, which must mean they’re close to the bottom.  Nearly there-

One minute Sokka’s running like his life depends on it, and the next Zuko’s twisting them both into a narrow doorway and flattening Sokka against it.  Sokka’s breath wheezes out of him with the force of the impact, but before he can draw a fresh breath to complain there’s a hand clamped over his mouth.

“Quiet.”  Scar-Face is so close, his lips brush against Sokka’s ear.  “Listen.  We’re too late.”

Sure enough, Sokka can hear voices chattering a few yards away.  Footsteps and clinking jewelry and somehow the sound of water slapping against stone.  A loud hiss comes from the other side of the door, and a cloud of steam issues from a window just a few feet away, carrying the smell of soy sauce and spices and frying meat with it.

What the fuck is this place?