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Early Design - Katara — Description
First designs for Katara. Originally posted 09/17/08.

The mini-fic centered around Katara had a few elements regarding Aang's role that I didn't keep, but one thing that I did want to keep was having Katara be a hacker. Gave her a set of GUI glasses and an unregistered mini-computer at her waist that it's liked to.

Hey, stealing is okay if it's from pirates. That can apply to code, nowadays.

Original Posts: [link]
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Katara would later remember that night as one long explosion of sound and heat and light. The night of her fifteenth birthday. The night she first met Aang.

She had been out walking the Maul, eyes masked by blue wraparound shades, hands deep in the pockets of her camo windbreaker. It was always cold in the Maul. The southern aurora burned overhead, just visible through the orange haze of city lights.

The Maul was a leftover from the last century, a warren of dark, rotting brick apartments and warehouses on the edge of Bingdao City, home to petty criminals, retired hookers and social exiles from the city proper. Katara had been born there. She would probaly die there too.

Most people she knew jacked in to cyberspace as soon as night fell, seeking escape from their surroundings in cheap VR entertainments, obsolete state documentaries and the arms of porn stars ten years dead. But Katara found her own kind of oblivion walking the Maul's half-deserted streets at night. It brought her closer to the city's dead soul.

Of course she was never far from cyberspace. No one was. Everyone was wired in from birth. She could go online any time she wanted. She just chose not to.

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She was at the intersection of old 2nd and 3rd when rhe program hit. It came out of nowhere, alien and unbidden, shattering street-bought ICE and jacknifing into her forebrain. Cold blue light licked along her spine. Her vision blurred and she lost her balance. The street came up to meet her...

She recalled only sense impressions thereafter. She had run, first aimlessly, then with a definite purpose, while all around her the Maul had flickered in and out of existence. In its place she had seen a Water Tribe village, the kind featured in old cyberspace documentaries. It had all seemed very familiar, somehow... But by then she had reached what she--it--*the program*--was looking for.

The program had brought her to a hill on the outskirts of Bindgao City. From her she could look north clear across the city skyline to one building in particular. It stood on the near horizon, an immense, pagoda-like skyscraper. The Ozai company logo stood forth from its south-facing facade in a blaze of flickering orange and red, hellish under the night sky.

And a boy's voice said: "How long have I been gone?"

I still hadn't even picked up my handle yet, gosh. Time flies by.