Pain.
Sharp, throbbing pain that split through his skull like lightning as consciousness clawed its way back. He groaned, the sound echoing off cold stone as he tried to piece together what had happened. One moment he had been... what? Falling? Flying? The thought slipped away like smoke, leaving only the brutal ache in his head and the taste of blood in his mouth.
He was sprawled face-down on the floor. Looking up, he could see ancient stone blocks beneath him, each one carved with intricate spiraling patterns that seemed to dance in his blurred vision. Gray granite, worn smooth by countless years but still beautiful in its craftsmanship. The kind of stonework that looked like it took forever to make.
Where the hell am I?
Pushing himself up on shaking arms, he took in his surroundings. Towering walls stretched up into shadows, broken columns reaching toward a sky visible through gaps in what had once been a roof. The architecture was weird—flowing, organic, like someone had convinced the stone to grow instead of carving it.
This definitely wasn't his apartment. That much was obvious, though when he tried to remember what his place actually looked like, the memory just... wasn't there. His head pounded worse when he tried to focus on personal stuff. His name, his age, where he'd come from—all of it hidden behind static that made his temples throb.
The wind whistled through broken walls, carrying that thin, sharp feeling of high altitude air. Mountain air. How did he know that? The recognition came without explanation, and he was definitely struggling to breathe properly.
Where am I—.
The thought stopped dead as a fragment of memory blazed across his consciousness.
A screen. Blue-white glow in his dark room. Questions scrolling past in neat text.
"Where would you like to be transported?"
His cursor hovering over options. Avatar: The Last Airbender had been one of them. He'd clicked it without even thinking—it was his favorite show, after all. The world where people could bend elements, where airbenders lived in cool temples like...
Like this one.
"What abilities would you choose to have?"
More options. Fire, water, earth, air. He'd picked airbending immediately, his mind already racing. Yasuo from League had been his main for years—the way the wind swordsman moved, all fluid and deadly, dancing through fights with nothing but steel and air. If he could have that kind of control...
"What knowledge would you want to have?"
This one had made him pause for like two seconds. He'd typed something specific: "Air breathing techniques of Demon Slayer with chi growth." He'd been obsessed with those breathing forms and how they made characters stronger, plus some cultivation novels where people built internal energy. If he could be an airbender to cosplay Yasuo, might as well go all out, right?
The memory fragment shattered as fresh pain lanced through his skull. He pressed his palms against his temples, trying to make sense of what he'd just remembered. A poll? Some kind of survey? That was insane—people didn't just get transported to fictional worlds because they filled out random internet forms.
But here I am, he thought, looking around at the abandoned temple that matched every detail of Air Nomad architecture from the show. This is actually real. The stone is real, the cold is real, this headache is definitely real.
He struggled to his feet, legs unsteady. His clothes were completely different—loose black pants with white grass patterns and a white jacket thing that wasn't doing much against the mountain cold. Not the sweatpants and hoodie he vaguely remembered wearing... heck, he was even barefoot. When? Before the poll? Everything felt jumbled together.
(its meant to be a black hakama and a white haori, kind of the style of demon slayer upper moon 1)
As he started exploring the temple, trying to figure out where he was, each room told the same story. Beautiful halls turned into ruins, artwork faded and cracked, debris scattered everywhere. But it was still pretty amazing even broken down, and he found himself running his fingers along carved walls.
If this really is the Avatar world, then this place is...
His train of thought completely derailed as he rounded a corner and came face to face with a human skull.
"Oh shit!" He jerked backward, heart hammering. The skull sat on top of a pile of yellowed bones, empty eye sockets staring at nothing. But it wasn't alone—scattered around the room were more remains, dozens of them. Ribs and leg bones and finger bones, all mixed together.
Oh no. Oh fuck.
The memory hit him like a truck. The Fire Nation's attack on the Air Nomads. The genocide. They'd wiped out everyone while Aang was frozen in that iceberg.
He'd watched those episodes, felt bad about it through the screen. But seeing it here, smelling the dust and old death, standing among actual bones—this was completely different from watching anime.
These were real people, he thought, and suddenly his eyes were burning with tears. They lived here, they had lives, and they just... got murdered. All of them.
It hit him in waves. Kids, adults, old people—an entire civilization erased because some psycho decided they needed to be gone to prevent the next Avatar from existing. The bones around him weren't props. They were actual people who died a hundred years ago, probably scared and alone.
He sank down vomiting in front of the scattered remains, completely overwhelmed. The poll, his choice to come here—it hadn't been a game. This was real, and he'd just walked into the aftermath of mass murder like it was some kind of adventure.
"I'm such an idiot," he whispered, wiping his mouth. "I didn't think about this part at all."
When he'd clicked that option, he'd been thinking about cool bending powers and epic adventures. Maybe meeting Aang and the gang, learning airbending, having fun in a world he loved. He hadn't considered that after choosing airbending he'd be dropping into the scene of a genocide, surrounded by the bones of an entire culture.
He tried to console himself, after all what kind of person just picks a world to visit without thinking about the horrible stuff that happened there?
But even as the guilt made his stomach churn, another thought surfaced. These people... they'd been left here for a hundred years. Just scattered across the floors of their own home like trash. That wasn't right.
He looked around at the bones with growing determination. He didn't know much about proper burial rites or religious stuff, but he knew leaving people like this was wrong. And if he was really stuck here now, the least he could do was give them a proper burial.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly to the empty room. "I should have thought this through better. But I'm here now, and you guys deserve better than this."
He spent the rest of the day exploring the temple, mapping out where the bodies were. There were so many. Entire families, by the look of it. Some rooms had just one or two skeletons, others had piles of bones that suggested people had tried to hide together.
The scope of it was overwhelming. How was he supposed to bury dozens of people by himself? He didn't even have proper tools, just his hands and whatever he could find in the ruins.
But I have to try.
The next morning, he woke up famished in the stone floor, turns out he forgot completely to eat and drink after seeing all those corpses, he first looked around the bushes the air nomads use to pick fruit from and got his fill, complimenting it drinking from a nearby stream.
After all he needed to get this place going if he was going to live here, to train before throwing himself to the world, so he then went to the room where he'd first seen the bones. Carefully, gently, he began gathering the scattered remains. He tried to keep individual people together as much as possible, though after a hundred years it was often impossible to tell which bones belonged to whom.
His hands shook as he worked. These had been real people with real lives, and now he was holding their arm bones, their ribs, pieces of their skulls. It felt wrong and necessary at the same time.
He found a spot outside the temple where the ground was softer, easier to dig. Using a broken piece of stone as a makeshift shovel, he began digging graves. His hands blistered quickly, his back ached, but he kept going.
"I don't know your names," he said as he carefully placed the first set of remains in a shallow grave. "I don't know what you believed or how you wanted to be buried. But you were people, and you deserved better than being left on the floor."
It took him three days to bury everyone he could find. Three days of digging, of carefully moving bones, of trying not to think too hard about the lives these people had lived. By the end, his hands were raw and bleeding, his whole body ached, and he was physically and emotionally drained.
I finally finished.
He stood in front of the small cemetery he'd created, dozens of simple graves marked with stones he'd carved basic spiral patterns into—the only Air Nomad symbol he could remember clearly. It wasn't much, but it was something.
"I'm sorry this happened to you," he clapped his hands together and said to the graves. "I'm sorry it took so long for someone to do this. And I'm sorry I came here without thinking about what I'd find."
The wind picked up, whistling through the temple ruins behind him. For a moment, it almost sounded like voices, like whispers of thanks or maybe just the mountain air moving through stone.
He wiped his eyes again and turned back toward the temple. He'd done what he could for the dead. Now he had to figure out how to live.
The temple was still full of useful things once he really looked. Sleeping mats that had somehow survived, some preserved food in sealed jars, basic tools and supplies. The Air Nomads had been prepared for long winters up here.
More importantly, he found books. Scrolls and texts that had been protected in stone containers, including some that looked like they might be about airbending. The writing was in characters he couldn't read, but just holding them felt significant.
If I'm really stuck here, he thought, then I need to learn everything I can. Not just about bending, but about surviving in this world.
That night, as he lay on an ancient sleeping mat in what had probably been a monk's cell, he stared up at the stars through gaps in the roof. They were different stars than he was used to, unfamiliar constellations that reminded him just how far from home he really was.
The wind whistled through the ruins, and for the first time since he'd arrived, it calmed him down, lulling him to sleep.