| abstract | - In late 99 AG, Avatar Aang and his friends visited Omashu in order to slide down the slides in the Omashu delivery system. During the process, however, the group caused a lot of damage and was sent to King Bumi in the Omashu Royal Palace. The king decided that before punishing them, he would throw them a feast, and when he did so he tricked Aang into revealing that he was the Avatar. Shortly afterward, Bumi sent them to a prison cell that had once looked bad, but was now refurbished. The team was surprised at the comfort of it, but still attempted to look for an escape as they were locked in. Finding none, the group soon went to sleep. In the middle of the night, however, Sokka and Katara were kidnapped and held hostage, only to be freed upon Aang's completion of three tasks. The first task that Aang had to complete was retrieving a key from inside a waterfall in a room full of rock spikes. Aang retrieved the key by a more unusual method, using his airbending to propel a spiked rock forward and drive the keychain to the king. For the second task, Aang entered a room and was told to receive Bumi's pet, Flopsie. At first, Aang saw a lop-eared rabbit, and assumed it was Flopsie. After chasing the small creature, a goat gorilla appeared, and after chasing Aang appeared, he realized that this large animal, not the lop-eared rabbit, was Flopsie. As Aang's final task, he was presented with two dangerous looking men, and Bumi told the young Avatar he had to choose who to fight. Aang said that he chose Bumi, assuming that he was a fragile elderly king. However, Aang was proven wrong as Bumi revealed himself to be "the most powerful earthbender [he will] ever see." Aang attempted to beat Bumi in a fight, and by performing some new techniques he managed to make the king surrender. However, Bumi said that to free his friends, Aang had to guess his name. After Aang thought about all of the challenges, he realized that Bumi was an old childhood friend of his by recalling that in their younger days, Bumi had always told him to think outside the box, something which the king had taught him through the challenges. Bumi subsequently told Aang that he had to restore balance to the world by defeating the Fire Nation, and that it was his destiny to master all four elements. He freed Katara and Sokka, and sent Team Avatar on their way. Following the successful Surrender of Omashu, the palace was destroyed by the Fire Nation government and replaced by a statue of Fire Lord Ozai, in commemoration of the renaming of the city to "New Ozai" by Princess Azula.
|
