Quoted By:
There’s no time to buy time, so you take a deep breath, center yourself, and slap your cheeks a couple of times to make sure you’re focused. Shooting a look back at your bedroom door to make it’s still shut, you smooth out your top, let out that deep breath, take in another, deeper breath, and slip out the door like a cat owl squeezing into a picken coop.
You shut the door, firmly grasping the handle, and give the cop on the other side your biggest grin. Well, not your biggest grin, but one that seems sincere and innocent. It seems sincere at least. You hope. “Yes?” You say, taking in the visitor. You almost flutter your eyebrows, but dial it back when you see the decidedly unimpressed expression on the police officer’s face.
Said officer is a middle-aged woman with jaw-length gray hair swept behind her ears, a pair of long scars running from her right cheekbone to the underside of her chin, and piercingly green eyes. She’s dressed in what looks like the armor of the elite Metalbending Police, though instead of being dark silver accented in steel, it’s black accented in gold, with the police force’s badge embossed on the left side of the breast in gold. Her uniform underneath appears to be the standard slate one. When her neutral-bordering-on-judgemental expression turns into a full-on sneer, you keep talking.
“Um, yeah, I’m Ainu,” you tap lightly on the door, your smile faltering, “what seems to be the—” you wisely stop yourself before saying ‘problem’. “What brings you here, officer…”
“Chief,” the older woman corrects, and you feel your mouth dry up. “Chief Beifong,” <span class="mu-i">Lin</span> Beifong, you know. The first police chief (and first metalbender)’s daughter, she’s somewhat famous, both by virtue of that, by being the head of Union City’s entire police force, as well as one of the world’s preeminent metalbenders, and being deeply connected to the United Federation’s military. “I would have sent someone else regarding this, but,” she exhales sharply through her nose, “honestly, I wanted to see you for myself.”
“You? You wanted to see… me?” You might be even more confused than when Itiqqa first wrapped her hand around yours yesterday, “why?”
“That’s not important,” Chief Beifong’s nonanswer comes in a much harsher tone than her already almost-hostile initial interaction with you. “Here,” she draws an envelope, manila chased with gold, from under her cuirass, “you were wired a substantial amount from Kyoshi Island yesterday. You never picked it up at the District Bank.”
>(1/2)
