SOME WEEKS PRIOR…
Long live the motherfucking Fire Lord.
Several months had passed since she’d murdered every last remaining contestant in Dante’s Abyss, and she still wasn’t out of this godforsaken hospital. She’d about had enough.
Truth be told, the conditions weren’t all that bad. Situated in some state of the art medical facility in one of the most affluent sections of the City of Hope, Azula had been discharged by Hela from the Syntech medbay and immediately transported here via teleporter. The hag’s less savory qualities aside, she’d managed to set the fire princess up in a rather swanky hospital room, with ‘calming’ mint green walls and artwork that trended a bit too cheery for the angsty teenager’s tastes. The attending nurses had been kind, waiting on her hand and foot and essentially turning from medical professionals into glorified servants once she’d recovered enough to graduate from ‘full body cast’ to ‘physical therapy.’ Of course, that probably had something to do with the attitude Azula confronted the orderlies with — and the ever-foreboding presence of her matronly guardian.
See, though, that was the problem. Azula had spent weeks this summer cleaving through zombies and heroic samurai alike, and nonetheless, she’d been dropped right back into the same power structure she’d left. Winner of Dante's Abyss: Conquest Gauntlet? Yes, of course — an achievement, indeed, but apparently one that paled in comparison to being a thousand-year-old witch who dressed like she’d never left her goth phase behind.
The witch hovered, too. Azula had grown tired rather quickly about her blathering on about this old myth and that climactic story about a murderous turtle, but the bitch simply kept going. She talked so much that the teen had started to worry, at one point, that the voice in her head would eventually be replaced by Hela’s own droll misplaced accent.
So when the hospital’s alarms started sounding and all the staff quickly geared up to go solve some crisis or whatever, it seemed as good a time as any to finally get the fuck out of there. The plan was simple: rip out the different cords and sensors they’d plastered to her body, walk right out the front door, and burn alive anyone who tried to stop her. Simple enough.
Out in the hallways of the hospital, though, things were… a bit more complicated. Nurses and doctors rushed this way and that, screaming and shouting about nausea or some such nonsense, and altogether not paying any attention to the escaping patient right in front of them. Any normal person might’ve thought that convenient, but Azula found herself mildly disappointed that none of these civilians wanted to at least sideways glance at her or half-heartedly try to stop her. It had been months since she’d firebended, months since she’d burned anyone to a crisp.
Couldn’t someone do her the service of giving her the opportunity to perform some light murder?
She paused in the middle of the hallway. Maybe the Abyss had made her more unhinged.
“Zuzu?”
Azula’s lips scrunched into a scowl before she even turned around. Hela’s voice was like nails on a chalkboard, and she recognized it even amidst the pathetic screams of the Hopers scrambling about. She turned, smoothing out her hospital gown, to face the hag, lifting an eyebrow impatiently.
Hela stared back innocently, holding a tray of food, ostensibly from the hospital cafeteria, in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other, straw stuck in the side of her mouth. She sucked on it lightly as she spoke. “What are you doing out of bed, dear?”
“Come off it, hag,” she rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. We’re leaving.”
Hela frowned condescendingly. “You still have weeks left of treatment, Zuzu.”
Azula reached out to one side, wrapping her pale and somehow still perfectly manicured fingers around the throat of a sprinting doctor. He screamed as the teenager lifted him up into the air and let loose a swirl of blue flames from her hand, essentially cooking the medical professional alive. He screeched and howled, and for a moment, the other doctors and nurses around the pair of women slowed to a stop. They seemed to be considering… doing something about the teenage murderess suddenly in their midst. Of course, any efforts along that line would be futile; Azula glanced around at them, altogether bored.
“Unless any of you would like to be next, I’d move along,” she sneered, then turned back to Hela. “See. I’m perfectly fine. Let’s go.”
“Suit yourself,” the Goddess of Death shrugged. “Rominia has just been begging to see you, poor dog.”
“I doubt that,” Azula snarked, turning and starting to walk with purpose down the hospital hallway. Hela fell into step beside her, sucking loudly on the straw once again, and Azula felt her skin crawl. Why was she stuck forever with this old bitch again? And why couldn’t she bring herself to leave? Or, perhaps, kill her?!
“Oh,” Hela interjected into her murderous thought process, “your birthday present isn’t done yet. Don’t cause a scene.”
Azula glanced over at the woman. “You don’t even know when my birthday is.”
***
PRESENT DAY…
Thank the gods she’d left the hospital when she had, lest Hela and Rominia been left alone to design this city.
Truth be told, the witch’s instincts for the architecture of the fortress-city that had come to be known as ‘Azgard’ – apparently the name of some forgotten city from Hela’s universe, with an added touch of Azula for flavor – hadn’t been too far off. Tall, black spires rose out of the ocean, a menacing display on the horizon of Opealon’s surface. Metallic, futuristic-looking parapets and docks jutted out everywhere, reminiscent both of Hela’s necro-weapons and Fire Nation designs.
And in the eastern part of the city, a tower that Azula had affectionately named Barad-dûr — after one of her Dante’s Abyss fortifications — rose above the nearby buildings, the home base of the fire princess here in the city. She’d designed it exactly according to the specifications she’d always desired, with gaudy obsidian statues of herself standing outside the front doors and sharp, charcoal-black architectural features stabbing this way and that into the sky. She wanted anyone who looked at it to have fear struck into their hearts the way they should whenever her name was uttered in their presence. She wanted, quite frankly, to be left the fuck alone.
Not that she ever got that wish, of course.
“Who the fuck are you, then?” she hissed, slumping back into her dark, metal throne.
A collection of orcs had wandered into her hallways, gathered now at the foot of her throne and bowing, appropriately. She supposed she couldn’t knock their correct displays of respect, and watched them carefully as they spoke their purpose.
“You don’t remember us, ma’am?” the orc at the head of the pack said, timidly lifting his head up and looking the fire princess in the eye.
“Give me a reason I should and perhaps I will,” she shrugged, laying her cheek on her hand. “For now, I’m bored.”
The orc sputtered a bit, then continued. “We’re, uh… ma’am, we are from the Abyss.”
Azula perked up a bit, leaning forward. Despite the many betrayals she’d experienced and utter incompetence of Mustang and the other Miniskirt generals, she’d decided in recent days – as the walls of Azgard rose around them – that the memory of Dante’s Abyss was, in fact, a fond one, if only because she’d gotten to brutally kill a half dozen people in less than an hour and spend a few weeks away from the droll, annoying presence of Hela and Rominia.
“We were members of the Burning Legion,” he continued, “the last gasp of it, that is. The ones who followed you to the very end, ma’am. To Fortress Babel, where we made our final stand before you took the Gauntlet.”
For perhaps the first time since Dante’s Abyss had ended, Azula smiled. She stood up, practically leaping down the stairs, manically approaching the cluster of five soldiers that had made their way inside. Her face lit up when she saw the bandages plastered over all five of their noses. Still broken, then! That must mean they’d kept it up through all of this time. Good for them.
“Well, then, in that case,” she said with some sense of maniacal glee, “it is good to see a friendly face!”
“Oh, good,” the orc at the front of the pack grinned, shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. “We, uh… we sought you out, when we heard that you’d recovered, ma’am. We’d like to… well, you see, we were so inspired by your fervor… well, we feared recourse if we didn’t try and seek you out–”
“Spit it out, soldier,” Azula lifted an eyebrow curiously, glancing at the group behind him, “before I burn all of you alive for wasting my time.”
The orc’s green skin grew just a little paler, at that. “We’d like to offer our service to you,” he spit out quickly and succinctly, lowering his head respectfully. “There’s two hundred of us strong waiting in boats on the shores of Azgard, and we’d like to join your service, ma’am. Protect your city. Protect you.”
Azula stood still for a second, considering the group.
“Well, I don’t need protection,” she rolled her eyes, “but it would be nice to have some bodies around here that aren’t… well, fucking zombies, I suppose.”
She took another look at the group, then nodded. This would be good for her, she knew. Having soldiers of her own to command had given her a certain sense of purpose back in the death tournament, and extending that to life now – especially if she was growing more and more resigned to the fact that, perhaps, this universe was where she was going to spend the rest of her days – would undoubtedly be good for her development into one of the Crossroads’ most formidable warlords. Yes, she’d hire them, then. She leaned back, crossing her arms and eyeing the leader, ready to give them the good news when another thought perked up in her mind.
“Is Stheno with you, by chance?”
