Chapter 35.6- And so the Dragons Danced

With that, the meeting came to an end and I ushered the rest of them to begin their journey back to the surface. Using the Lake Laogai base as my headquarters had come with more than a few advantages. First of all. It meant that no one was suspicious of the time I spent here. That would have been a much more difficult thing to achieve if I stayed topside and would have had to sneak down here as needed.

I walked out of the room with toji on my tail and after a few turns and doubling back twice to make sure we were not being followed, we arrived at a wall that looked just like any other. I knocked at the wall for a second, and the wall became a door as it shifted aside to permit us entry into the large room. The large room that presently had five occupants; An unconscious Azula, a bound Long Feng, and an alert Maki, Toph, and a focused Amara. With the exception of Amara, the people in this room were what I considered my inner circle. As for the healer, well… She would not be betraying me with Toph on the lookout for it.

“So how’s the progress?” I asked.

“I haven’t managed to get a peep off of him about how the brainwashing stuff works. I’ve had Amara look into it and she says it reminds her of some healing stuff that her mother had told her, but nothing concrete. Our best guess is that the brainwashing itself is older than this generation of Dai Li and they’ve just been using it to their advantage but didn’t actually develop the method themselves” Maki said and I nodded, walking deeper into the room, towards Long Feng.

“Not a peep, huh? I guess we’ll see what happens by the time I’m done with him” I said, and the old bastard had the audacity to chuckle.

“The Dai LI train to resist all sorts of torture, boy. You won’t get anything from me” He said instead and I just chuckled. I wondered why people always felt the need to brag about their resistance to torture. Surely, that did not make them any less likely to get tortured. Like no one goes, ‘Welp, I guess since you say so..’ and just gives up on trying. Maybe it was some sort of affirmation thing. Still stupid.

“Torture? No, I would never torture you. Let’s call this an enhanced interrogation.” I said to him, telling a joke he would never get to understand, before finally turning away.

“Toph? Please come over here. I need you to help me make sure he isn’t lying.” I said to my apprentice first. And it might have been the inner psycho in me, but there was something cute about the way she hurried on over to help.

“Toji, I need you to help me place him on this board and tie him down. You secured the supplies, right?” I turned to my best friend next, and he jut smiled while pointing over at another end of the room.

“Good. Let’s work on it” Toji picked him up and moved him towards an elevated wooden platform. Wood, not stone because I did not want Toph to feel his heart rate for what was going to come next. “Turn him around, his head must be lower than his body” I said next as the arrangement went wrong the first time.

“Toji, if you would pass me the rag” I said, taking a hold of the cloth and covering his face with it. His hands and legs were already bound with chains but we went the extra step of binding him to the platform.

I held out my hand, accepting the pitcher. “So what is going to happen is that I will begin. When you have had enough, you will scream the words, “Hail Ozai” and I will release you if I believe you.” I accepted the pitcher from Toji and took a deep breath before I began to pour.

In the end, he lasted two minutes before he sang like a canary, and only needed to go under the rag four more times. One for trying to lie, two for trying to obscure some information from me, and the last for calling Toph a bitch when she pointed out the lie.

A/N: Waterboarding? How fun! This is a bit of a feat for Long Feng here. Three minutes of waterboarding is a lot!!!