In my first two lives, it would have been August. The day seemed peaceful enough at first, but something seemed off. I was only able to put my finger on it around ten in the morning, when I saw a column of red marching up the path towards the Eastern Air Temple. I hurriedly smushed together a pair of air-balls under my feet to use as skates, and rushed off to find an adult.
As it so happened, the first adult I encountered was Monk Pava.
"Monk Pava, are we expecting any visits from the Fire Nation today? There are at least a thousand uniformed fire nation soldiers headed our way, right now. And they're almost here!"
Monk Pava's face went pale with fear.
"No, that's not supposed to be happening at all. Tell as many people as you can!"
That...
Something in me went snap at the realization we were under attack. All the Air Nomad teachings of pacifism and respect for life fell into the background, and in its place was the Imperial Officer I'd once been.
The first order I had been given was simple: sound a general alarm that we were under attack. Fortunately, I'd long-since figured out how to amplify my voice with airbending. I jumped up out of any enclosed spaces, cupped both hands around my mouth, and bellowed as loud as I could while hovering for a brief moment:
"ATTENTION! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY FIRE NATION SOLDIERS APPROACHING FROM THE SOUTH! I REPEAT, WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY FIRE NATION SOLDIERS APPROACHING FROM THE SOUTH!"
Given how everyone started rushing around in a panic, I had clearly been heard. Unfortunately, the approaching Fire Nation soldiers had evidently heard it too, judging by the fact that they just about doubled the pace of their advance.
Even more unfortunately, the others here at the Eastern Air Temple were nowhere near organized enough to put up serious resistance. Yes the monks were trying to direct the children to various refuge points, but judging by my estimates of the Fire Nations' combat strength, it would definitely be inadequate.
Suddenly, an excessively powerful fire blast burned open the main gate of the air temple, and I had to revise my estimate of the enemy strength up by an order of magnitude or so. Several more excessively powerful fire blasts lit off several other parts of the temple. Then, from my elevated position near the monks' quarters, I I noticed the fire around the Bison stables abruptly go out.
Avi.
Just like that, I had a plan. First order of business, collect the only other person I knew could selectively bend different gasses. Second order of business, suffocate these fires.
Courtesy of the glider staff I'd been trained to use, getting down to Avi only took ten seconds or so, though I needed to dodge quite a few streams of fire on my way there.
As soon as I landed, I shouted "Avi, come with me! I have a plan!"
My friend whirled around to see me, panic evident on her face "Tanya, I'm glad you're alright!"
"Avi, we have a very short time before the firebenders here kill all of us! With our air-separation, we can instantly extinguish fires and suffocate the firebenders causing them, and we're the only two people here who know how to do it!"
Avi froze up for a second, and I thought I would need to more directly order her into combat, but she reluctantly agreed.
"Alright, Tanya. I'll do what you tell me."
And like that, we were off. The first group of Fire Nation soldiers we encountered only saw us twenty seconds after I'd put them in a pure Nitrogen atmosphere. One of them tried to shoot a blast of fire at me, looked rather confused when nothing happened, and then the thirty of them abruptly fell over. Avi and I returned breathable air to head level, leaving the unconscious firebenders to their inert gas as we continued on.
For the next thirty minutes, The two of us went on a near-silent rampage around the air temple, snuffing out firebenders by the hundreds. Meanwhile, we quickly accumulated a gaggle of terrified airbenders following in our wake for the simple reason that anywhere we'd been, the fire nation soldiers weren't.
Eventually, it came to a point where there weren't anymore living fire nation soldiers in the air temple. After a bit, one of the airbending children following Avi and I asked a simple question.
"Well now what?"
I thought about the situation for a moment, before ordering "Form into three groups, organized by physical maturity."
The children following me promptly did as ordered, either trusting my judgement, or just being too scared of me to do otherwise.
First, I pointed to the youngest group. "Find everyone in the temple who's still alive. We need to know how many people we lost, who survived, that sort of thing."
Then I pointed to the oldest group. "You're on corpse disposal duty. If all the dead bodies here are simply left to rot, they will get us sick. At the very least get them out of the temple."
Lastly, I pointed to the group in the middle, "Make sure any remaining fires are safely extinguished, so that what's left of the temple doesn't burn down. Forcing the air around a fire to hold still for a while should lead to it suffocating itself in fairly short order."
All three groups promptly got to their assigned tasks. As soon as they were out of earshot, Avi asked me another question.
"Tanya, do you have a plan? For longer than the immediate tasks you assigned the other survivors of the attack?"
In all honesty, I didn't have a plan. I had an industrialized empire that would soon learn their attempt to kill all of us had failed, a bunch of traumatized survivors of an attempted genocide, and a very tenuous grasp on command of what personnel I did have. On the other hand...
"We can't have been the only people the Fire Nation attacked. We need to get allies against their aggression, we need to get them fast, and we need to neutralize as many of the Fire Nation's advantages as possible."
Avi looked a bit confused at that last part, so I rephrased it.
"The Fire Nation has machines that let them make a lot of weapons and tools very very quickly, to very high standards. We need to steal those machines and put them to our own use."
"Ah, now I understand. Tanya, I think that's an excellent idea."