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"Why do I have to be Air Nation?"
Mai doesn't know why she sits next to Zuko. Not only does she have to put up with his whining; she also gets to hear all the muttering under his breath about how girls are stupid and crazy and mean. It never occurs to him that he's sitting next to a girl with knives in her sleeves. Or that he's only talking about one girl in particular.
"Because you're the weakest, dum-dum." Azula is setting up rows of toy soldiers on General Iroh's Pai Sho board, which she probably took without asking. She probably hasn't asked to use his deck of cards, either, but Mai has those. It's a good thing, too, because Azula would find a way to give herself all the good ones. As Mai shuffles, Ty Lee says: "You know what would be fun? If we rolled dice or something to see what kind of weapons we got."
"That," says Azula in an I-made-up-this-game-and-just-let-you-people-play-it voice, "would not be realistic."
"No," says Zuko, "but it would be fair. You always get to be Fire Nation, and you always win."
"Oh, please. If you'd all just learn to manage your resources, you could win, too. Ty Lee has three times the troops I do--she still loses."
"It's true!" Ty Lee says.
"I have one guy."
"Who's the Avatar." Mai deals Zuko a card. "And at least you have a fort. I don't even have that." Stupid Water Tribe and their stupid, flammable igloos.
"You can have one of mine. Ba Sing Se alone has three."
"I don't think it works that way, Ty Lee." A card for Azula now.
"Mai's right," Azula says, taking it. "You can't just go around giving people forts. It's--"
"--Not realistic," they chorus.
Soon all the hands are dealt, and Mai puts the rest of the deck in the middle of the Pai Sho board. She looks at her cards. From left to right are how many ship fleets, war balloons, trebuchets, ballistas and airships you have. If your nation doesn't have one of those in real life, you skip it. According to Azula, the only weapon the Air Nation has is gliders; after enough complaining, she finally let Zuko count them as war balloons.
("But what's one person going to do with five gliders?"
"Shut up, Zuko," Mai had said.)
She has four fleets--not so many that she has to suffer through Azula wiping the floor with her for an hour. But now comes the hard, boring part: the part that's more like school than a game. Every turn, you draw one card for how many spaces you can move much food and stuff you have. If you end up near someone else's forces, you draw another card; this one is your base military might. But it's not how strong you are; for that, you have to multiply both numbers together, then multiply that by the value of your soldiers, fleets or whatever. (Each weapon has its own number, and some are higher than others). If that number is higher than your opponent's, you win the fight. But then you have to carry the number of remaining forces you have over to the next turn, multiplying numbers on top of numbers, and soon you need an abacus just to play this stupid game. Not that Azula would let her have one.
Right now, Azula's facing off against a group of Ty Lee's Dai Li agents. "Thirty," she says.
There's a dimple of puzzlement in Ty Lee's forehead. "I got negative twelve."
"I think you did your math wrong," Mai offers.
"No do-overs. All math final." Azula swipes Ty Lee's soldiers away with a hand.
"Seven," says Mai. "Beat that, Avatar."
"I got four. But wait. Shouldn't that be a special number for me? I can bend all four elements: shouldn't I, oh, I don't know, make my eyes glow and take out all Mai's ships?"
"No," Azula says. "You're an airbender Avatar, not Fire Nation."
"But couldn't I make a huge gust of wind and--?"
"No, Zuzu."
"Stupid girls and their stupid game," he mutters, loud enough for only Mai to hear. Thank you, Azula, she thinks, taking his one guy.
It's her turn to ask something now. "Since I just killed the Avatar, isn't the war" and this game "over?"
"The Fire Nation is now unstoppable," Azula says, "but the war isn't over. Sixteen."
"Three. Nice job, Azula."
As Azula takes and takes Ty Lee's Earth Kingdom forces, Mai wonders what she'll do with five Water Tribe soldiers and four fleets of ships. Stupid game. Stupid lucky Zuko, who doesn't have to play anymore. She wishes Azula would hurry up and take her out. On her turn, she draws two cards with the Fire Nation symbol on them.
Oh, monkeyfeathers. Since fire is water's opposite, all her soldiers are now girls. What is she going to do with a bunch of healers?
"You took ten of my forces. Congratulations!"
Azula would never have this problem. Yeah, there's the whole "Fire Nation women can be soldiers" thing, but Mai doesn't mean that, not really. For all her talk about "managing resources," Azula really doesn't. She just attacks with her navy and her war balloons and her trebuchets and her ballistas and her airships, banging away at them all until she wins. She can afford to; she has all the stuff.
And once, just once, Mai would like to see what would happen if she didn't.
Azula has fifty units, and has finally surrounded Ty Lee's remaining twenty with them all. (Since Ty Lee started out with over two hundred, this is an amazing feat of losing). Mai's strength is ten; her five healers can revive fifty units, if she had fifty units to revive. Monkeyf--
She looks at Ty Lee's forts (one in Ba Sing Se now), and her Dai Li agents (may they rest in peace) and her ships (sunk to the bottom of the ocean), and tries to push the treasonous thought out of her head. If she does what she is thinking, Azula will surely aim fire at her. And she won't be nice enough to put an apple on her head first.
But Mai wants Azula to lose. She suddenly wants it more than she's wanted anything ever.
"I defect," she says, almost before she can stop herself. Azula looks at her as if she's an interesting new subspecies of elephant-rat. "The Water Tribe joins the Earth Kingdom in battle." Mai licks her lips, places the last two cards she's drawn face-up on the table. "I revive fifty of Ty Lee's forces."
Azula smiles, in that weird way she has. "How generous. If only Ty Lee draws well, and remembers how to do arithmetic. Seven hundred and fifty."
"Um, I think I got fourteen hundred," Ty Lee says.
Azula's smile is gone. "Did you actually get fourteen hundred, or do you just think you did?"
"I did. I did get fourteen hundred, I'm sure." She doesn't sound sure at all. The problem isn't the math, Mai thinks, but the fact that Azula just lost at a game she made up, that she's never lost at before.
Azula narrows her eyes. "Do-over," she says.