𝕍𝕖𝕟𝕦𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕂𝕪𝕠𝕤𝕙𝕚 𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕚𝕠𝕣: 𝕊𝕠𝕜𝕜𝕒 𝕩 𝕆𝕔

Chapter 20- The Swamp

Sokka patted my back, helping me choke out the water that was lodged in my lungs. "You okay?"

I let out a few more coughs. "That was disgusting."

Aang curiously looks around the swamp and at us. "Where's Appa and Momo?" He jumps up to the top of the trees, looking for his animal friends as he uses the height to search for them. "Appa! Momo!"

While Aang was looking for his animals, the siblings and I were still in the swamp water.

"Sokka, you've got an elbow leech." Katara points, blandly.

He spins around, panicking, trying to find it. "Where? Where?"

I looked over at Sokka's elbow, noticing the long leech.

Katara crossed her arms and sarcastically said. "Where do you think?"

Ripping off the elbow leech and throwing it behind to Katara. Sokka cries out angrily. "Why do things keep attaching to me?!"

Aang swings over the muddied water on a vine, waiting for it to stop moving so he can land.

"You couldn't find them?" I ask the airbender.

Aang jumps down into the muddy water. "No, and the tornado... it just disappeared."

Sokka, Katara and I turn to face the darkness in the swamp.

Sokka immediately takes out his machete and starts cutting the vines with it. "We better speed things up."

I observe the older boy swinging his machete around. "Maybe you should be a little nicer to the swamp."

Sokka continues to cut the vines. "V, these are just plants. Do you want me to say please and thank you as I swing my machete back and forth?"

I roll my eyes at him.

"M-Maybe you should listen to Venus." Katara hesitatingly says. "Something about this place feels... alive."

Sokka stops swinging for a second. "I'm sure there are lots of things that are alive here and if we don't wanna wind up getting eaten by them, we need to find Appa as fast as we can."

Sokka continues to slice through the vines. We simply let him cut through them because we had no other plan.

The day was slowly getting darker, we were now walking through a foggier area of the swamp.

"Appa! Momo!" Katara had been yelling for the past five hours.

"There's no way they can hear us and no way we can see them. We'll have to make camp for the night."

Several flies surround Sokka. He swings his machete at them, trying to shoo them away.

At that moment, I watched as a huge bubble of swamp gas rise from the muddy water below us. The gas grows closer to Aang, Katara, Sokka and I.

"What was that?" Katara lightly panicked.

"It was nothing," I say observing the swamp below. "It's just swamp gas."

Sokka extends his hand out looking over the swamp. "Look, there's nothing supernatural going on here."

The four of us groan as the smell reaches us, with Sokka waving his hand in front of his nose as Katara clamps hers shut.

Suddenly, the quiet is shattered by a terrifying scream, causing us all to scream and huddle together, looking around wide-eyed for the source.

"Sokka, I'm scared."

"I think I just peed myself," he whispers.

We all finally spot a small, grumpy-looking white bird. It opens its beak extremely wide, emitting the terrifying scream, and flutters off.