In Isolation

163AG Spring

It was an ordinary night when the Captain of the guard sounded the alarm notifying the entire Estate of an attack. Lin leaped out of bed in her black shorts and white tank top and rushed immediately to her children's rooms. The night staff were already there. Hungjian, Huifan, and Jinkun were already out of bed. They followed their mother to Jiexue's room first, meeting Peng and a couple of guards along the way. "Get them to the safe house," Lin ordered Peng, sprinting to her oldest airbending daughter's room.

"Mamaaaa!" the still seven year old little girl screamed as some masked man tried to escape through the window with her.

Without a second thought, Lin leaped out of the broken window after them, cutting her foot in the process and breaking a crater in the ground of the courtyard upon her landing. She rolled onto her feet and raised the wall of the estate up an extra twenty feet. The kidnapper, another earth bender, simply bent a hole in it and continued on as Jiexue screamed.

"No you don't!" Lin yelled feeling out her surroundings for the nearest piece of metal, the most versatile form of earth that she could bend. Lin morphed a garden rake into a free whip, wrapping it around the man's eyes and neck. He fell over, dropping Jiexue in shock. The seven year old pushed him off of her legs and ran back to her mother.

Lin grabbed her tightly and hastily planted a kiss on her forehead. After a quick inspection, she let go to bend a tunnel into the ground that lead to the arena.

"Follow it! Huifan will find you at the other end!" Lin ordered pushing the shaken airbender inside closing up that end and praying that there would not be a cave-in.

Where were the other two? While several metalbending guards fought other assailants, Lin closed her eyes and located the heartbeats of the two remaining missing children.

"Peng, you're back! Get Kang! He's on the south side!" Lin ordered her captain of the guard as she opened a tunnel to go after Xiaoyu.

"Come on, come on!" she said to herself tunnelling as fast as she could to get into the deep maze of tunnels in the mountain side that spanned the entire range as well as the underground of the city. She emerged in the tunnel to find a car leaving.

Lin collapsed the length tunnel ahead and the car screeched to a halt. Lin jumped on the trunk of the car and peeled the roof off with her metalbending only to be met with a blaze of fire. She clenched her chest as she heard her five year old's terrified cries fill the echoing tunnel.

Lin flipped backwards to avoid a second blast of fire and went on the defensive. In the first opening she could find, she did a roundhouse kick, sandwiching the firebender between the wall of the cave and a slab of eaerth she bent out of the opposite wall. She rolled onto her back and kicked up again sending the other firebender into the ceiling. She encased her body in rock armor and sent a rock hand at the man holding her daughter, punching him in the face.

The five-year-old girl jumped out of the car just as two more kidnappers appeared out of two freshly dug tunnels. Xiaoyu ducked to avoid the flurry of rocks. Lin rolled to get nearer her, but was kicked into the ceiling by an earth pillar before she could untuck and root herself again.

"Maaa!" Xiaoyu screamed as she saw her mother fall with a grunt.

Lin rolled onto her knees weakly. She could feel at least two ribs were cracked, and possibly a few vertibrae. She couldn't move immediately. She lifted her head weakly and watched her little girl look up at four large masked men approaching.

"No-" Lin croaked.

"Xiaoyu, come with us and we can give you a real airbending teacher," one of the men said extending a hand to the petrified little girl crouched on the ground.