Chapter I: Welcome to Republic City
The first thing Tohra registered was pain.
The second thing was dirt—specifically, the grit of it pressed firmly against his lips.
He groaned, rolling onto his back with the unfortunate grace of a sack of feed dropped from the upper atmosphere. Which, to be entirely fair to his dignity, was more or less what had just happened. His dark skin was dusted grey with pulverized earth, his head throbbed as if someone had taken a boulder to it, and the crater he was lying in spanned roughly the width of a small swimming pool.
He blinked up at an unfamiliar, pale blue sky.
...That's not home.
No, it definitely wasn't. The air smelled entirely different—sharp with sea salt, ozone, and something mechanical, masked underneath the warm, familiar scent of morning bread baking nearby. Strange noises drifted to his ears: the purr of engines, voices, and the distant, rhythmic clanging of metal on metal. He had no idea where he was, yet even through the heavy fog of his rattled skull, a single thought blazed through with the focused clarity of a ki blast:
Winter. I have to find Winter.
He pushed himself up from the crater floor, his arms trembling only slightly—more from surprise than any real weakness—and hauled himself onto a wide street paved with grey stone. Tall, angular buildings flanked him on both sides, their facades decorated with sweeping curves of iron and glass that caught the morning light. Electric lamps lined the walkways. Trolley lines stretched overhead. People bustled past in clothes unlike anything he had ever seen, though the modest crowd that had initially gathered around the odd, dark-skinned boy who had seemingly fallen from the sky had mostly dispersed, chalking it up to another bizarre morning in the metropolis.
Almost everyone had left.
Almost.
"Hey, kid. You alright?"
The man crouched at the crater's rim wore the clothes of a working man: a dark jacket thrown over a green shirt layered beneath a worn tan sweater, beige trousers, and simple black shoes that had clearly seen a thousand deliveries. His expression sat somewhere between genuine concern and the cautious wariness of someone who had learned not to be surprised by strange occurrences in the city. He extended a hand down into the crater, and Tohra, after a moment's consideration, took it.
"...I suppose I am." He brushed himself off and immediately winced, pressing a palm to his temple. "My head is killing me, though."
The man studied him for a second, then reached into a large canvas bag strapped to his shoulder and produced a paper-wrapped pack of ice. He held it out without ceremony.
"Here. Use this, kid."
Tohra blinked at the offering. Then—somewhat awkwardly, because gratitude was never his most practiced skill—he took it and pressed it against his aching skull.
Cold. That actually helps.
"Thank... you, sir."
"No problem." The man straightened up and tilted his head, studying Tohra with the particular look of someone running mental arithmetic. The equation he was likely calculating: this teenager is unusually built, wears what looks like armor, has a tail, and literally just fell out of the sky. What do I do with that? He seemed to land on the safest option: sheer hospitality.
"Hope this ain't too personal," he said, "but uh—where are you from, kid? Haven't seen anyone quite like you around here."
Tohra opened his mouth. Closed it. The instinct to explain himself ran headlong into the very real problem that he had no idea how to explain his origins to someone who had likely never heard of a Saiyan.
"I'm from... pretty far away," he said carefully. "I—" He hesitated, clearing his throat. "—that is to say. I am looking for someone. Perhaps you've seen her?"
The man raised an eyebrow, intrigued despite himself.
"This girl important to ya, kid?"
"Well, yes. Of course." Tohra squared his shoulders. "She's my only sister, after all."
Something in the man's expression softened. He exhaled through his nose—the universal sound of an adult who has decided to help a young person clearly in over their head, because walking away simply wasn't an option.
"Maybe I can help ya find her, uh—?" He paused, realizing he never caught a name.
Realizing the man was waiting, Tohra straightened up and extended his hand the way he'd seen travelers do in the books his mother had collected from distant worlds.
"Tohra. My name is Tohra."
The man smiled and shook it with the practiced warmth of someone who spent his life being decent to strangers on purpose.
"Most people call me Tony Pops. But you can just call me Tony." He let go of Tohra's hand and crossed his arms. "So—this sister of yours. What's she look like? I might be able to help."
Tohra thought for a moment. "Her name is Winter. Silver hair. Eyes like mine. A black tail." He gestured loosely at his own tail, which swayed behind him as if to emphasize the point. "She wears a tiger pelt around her waist and armor similar to what I have on, though she might have taken the top piece off by now."
Tony thought about it, turning the description over in his mind.
"...Sorry, kid. Can't say I've seen anyone matching that."
The quiet that followed carried a heavy weight. Tohra's expression didn't crumble—he wasn't built for crumbling—but something in the lines of his face shifted inward, the brash bravado of a boy trying to sound like he had a foolproof plan receding like a tide.
"Oh," he murmured. "Is that right."
It wasn't a question.
Tony looked at him for a long, quiet moment before speaking up.
"Tell ya what. Since you're not from around here—why don't I drive you into the city proper? You can look around, ask people there. Better odds than standing out here on the highway."
Tohra's head snapped up, his tail flicking with a sudden life of its own.
"Really?!" He caught himself, lowering his voice. "I—you would do that?"
"Course I would." Tony's smile was easy and unhurried. "Besides—" His gaze dropped to Tohra's chest plate with the polite but firm expression of a man pointing out that someone had spinach in their teeth. "—you're gonna want to find yourself some more normal-looking clothes first. No civilian walks around downtown in battle armor like that."
Tohra looked down at himself. At the blue and white chest plate he had worn for as long as he could remember, custom-fitted to his frame by his mother's own hands. It occurred to him, not for the first time in the past thirty minutes, that he had absolute zero grasp of the social norms of this strange world.
"...Ah." He reached up and unclipped the chest plate, revealing the plain black muscle shirt beneath. It clung with perhaps a little too much fidelity to the physique of someone who had spent their entire adolescence training, but at least it wasn't armor. "Guess that'll do."
"Guess that'll do," Tony agreed cheerfully, jerking a thumb toward a delivery truck idling a short distance up the road. "Come on. Hop in the back of the truck. I've got packages to drop off in the city anyway—it's no trouble at all."
Tohra paused. "I don't have any money to pay you."
Tony waved a hand as if brushing away a pesky fly.
"On the house, kid. Looking out for young people like you is kind of a hobby of mine."
Tohra looked at the man—a stranger with kind eyes and a delivery truck, who had offered ice for his headache and a ride into an unfamiliar city without asking for a single thing in return—and found that he didn't quite have the words. Which was fine. Some things didn't need them.
He climbed into the truck bed, settled in amongst the parcels and crates, and watched Republic City slowly rise up around him as Tony Pops navigated the morning streets—a breathtaking maze of steel, glass, and ancient stone woven together into something that shouldn't have worked, and yet somehow did.
I'll find you, Winter, he thought, his dark eyes scanning every face they passed. Just wait a little longer.
Elsewhere in the city, someone else was thinking almost the exact same thing.
She moved like she owned the street, which was generally how Winter moved through most spaces—not with arrogance, exactly, but with the settled certainty of someone who had never particularly needed permission. Her silver hair fell loose around her shoulders, catching the morning light. Her eyes, that same pale silver as her hair, swept every face and alleyway with the practiced precision of someone accustomed to tracking targets across vast, hostile terrain.
This was significantly harder in a city.
The problem with cities, Winter had discovered over the past hour and a half, was that there were simply too many people in them. She could still feel the faint, familiar ember of Tohra's ki signature somewhere out there in the urban sprawl—her brother burned distinct and hot, like a match dropped in a dark room—but with ten thousand other life signatures pressing in from every direction, it was like trying to listen for one specific voice at a crowded concert.
She clicked her tongue.
"Gah. Where could he have gone?"
She had asked, at this point, approximately eleven different people. The answers had ranged from politely unhelpful to aggressively confused. Nobody had seen a large, dark-skinned teenager with a tail and battle armor who had apparently fallen from the sky at some unspecified time this morning.
She was considering her next move when she heard it.
The unmistakable quality of a confrontation—low, swaggering voices, the deliberate menace in heavy footsteps. Her ear turned toward the sound with the automatic attention of someone who had grown up in environments where you learned to identify that threat early.
Around the corner of a produce stall, three young men in matching colors had backed a girl against the facade of a shop. The girl was dark-skinned and blue-eyed, dressed in earth-toned clothes that had the distinct look of somewhere far from here. She held her ground with the steady posture of someone who absolutely knew how to handle herself—but one against three was still one against three.
Winter considered this for approximately half a second.
Then she strolled into the middle of the street, tucked her hands loosely behind her back, and addressed the group with the mild, conversational tone of someone commenting on the afternoon weather.
"Now that's not very nice." She tilted her head at the three men. "Three boys against one girl. How about we even things up a little—two of us against you three?"
One of the thugs—the largest, seated in a vehicle nearby—unfolded himself from his seat with the slow, deliberate theater of someone who relied entirely on his size to intimidate people. He loomed. He did it quite well, actually, stopping when he was close enough that most people would have instinctively taken a step back.
Winter looked up at him with an expression of total, absolute neutrality, the way one might look at a poorly painted sign.
"Perhaps you don't know who we are, girly," the man said, his smirk broad and comfortable. "We're with the Triple Threat Triad. You're on our turf." He leaned closer. "Scram, little girl, before someone gets—"
Crack.
He reeled back instantly, his hand flying to his jaw. Behind him, Winter casually lowered her arm from the whipping backhand she'd delivered mid-monologue, waiting for the shock in his skull to subside enough for him to process what had just happened.
"Move," she said pleasantly, "or I'll do it for you."
The man's face cycled rapidly through pain, confusion, and outrage before landing—unfortunately for him—on pure outrage. He lunged forward and his hand closed around something soft, dark, and attached to her.
The shift in Winter's expression was immediate and total.
Her tail, the exact same liquid black as her brother's, had been seized at its sensitive base.
💢
"THAT'S MY TAIL, YOU JERK—!"
Her knee drove straight into his stomach with the mechanical precision of someone who had practiced that particular motion ten thousand times and had never once needed to think about it since. The air left the man in a single, catastrophic rush. His grip on her tail went slack, and she stepped back, rubbing the base of it with an expression that had moved well past anger into something closer to cold, offended fury.
"Keep your grubby hands off of it," she muttered, almost to herself.
The man straightened slowly, wheezing for breath, and jabbed a trembling finger at her. "You'll pay for that, little—"
She had already closed the distance between them. A lightning-fast backfist caught him across the temple and deposited him directly through the shop window behind him in an explosive eruption of glass and splintered wood.
"That," she said, dusting her hands off and turning back to the remaining two, "is why I told you to move."
From behind the standoff, the blue-eyed girl watched with an expression hovering somewhere between deeply impressed and thoroughly startled. She had expected the strange silver-haired newcomer to maybe offer a distraction. She certainly hadn't expected that.
The second thug—an earthbender, she could tell instantly from his defensive stance—brought both hands down and drove a jagged slab of the road straight toward the silver-haired girl with trained force. Winter's hand came up, fingers flat, and a sphere of pale light bloomed in her palm—then discharged outward in a controlled pulse that shattered the earthen projectile into fine powder.
The girl's eyes widened.
A light bender...?
She had heard of them. Everyone had heard whispered rumors of them. Stories told in the same reverent, uncertain breath as ancient legends—benders of the visible spectrum, rarer than dragons, almost never seen outside their own secluded circles. She had never actually seen one in the flesh. She had half-assumed they were exaggerated myths.
The glowing sphere in Winter's palm suggested otherwise.
There was no time to process it further, however, because Winter had already closed the gap, driven her elbow into the earthbender's solar plexus, caught the snap of her own tail mid-arc, and whipped it sideways with a sharp crack that sent the man crashing through a second storefront window.
Two down.
The blue-eyed girl, deciding she had watched long enough, turned back to the remaining firebender and took the fight into her own hands. The firebender's attack surged forward—and was deftly redirected, amplified, and returned at three times its original force, crashing against the man hard enough to send him skidding through the third and final window with a sound like a small, controlled demolition.
For a moment, the street fell dead silent.
Then Winter turned, brushing a stray shard of glass off her sleeve, and looked at the other girl with something that might—on a less stoic face—have been a grin.
"Not too shabby," she said. "You're pretty good." She extended her hand. "My name's Winter. Yours?"
The girl reached out and shook it, smiling despite the chaotic wreckage surrounding them.
"Korra. Nice to meet you, Winter."
"Likewise."
They might have savored the victory a few moments longer, if the heavy rumble of engines hadn't reached them both at the same exact moment—shortly followed by the distinct, piercing whine of distant sirens cutting through the morning air.
Winter turned her head. The thugs were already stirring in the rubble.
"Wait, Korra—don't be ha—"
She was already gone.
"You're not getting away!"
The earth beneath the fleeing vehicle buckled and heaved, a massive wall of street-stone crashing up underneath it and flipping the car end over end with a spectacular crash that scattered pigeons from three neighboring rooftops simultaneously.
Winter exhaled a long breath. Rubbed her temple. And watched the thugs curl into groaning heaps as Korra efficiently went about tying them up with practiced confidence.
She had a sinking feeling she knew exactly how this part of the scenario was going to play out.
She was right.
The police arrived in force—by road and by air, the latter via a broad, slate-grey airship that moved with ponderous authority over the skyline. Metal benders descended from it swiftly on cables, their silver armor gleaming, and Korra's face lit up with the open delight of someone watching something genuinely extraordinary. Winter watched the airship with a more guarded assessment, the sinking feeling in her chest settling into quiet resignation.
"We caught the bad guys for you, officer!" Korra announced proudly.
The officer in charge looked slowly at the heavy wreckage. The three shattered shop windows. The overturned vehicle. The criminals neatly tied up in the middle of a road that was now missing a significant portion of its asphalt surface.
Then he looked at the two girls responsible.
"You're under arrest," he said flatly. "Both of you."
Korra's expression cycled rapidly through offense, disbelief, and then a very fast calculation, because her polar bear-dog—the enormous, cream-and-grey creature she'd had since childhood, currently being restrained by four increasingly panicked officers—chose that exact moment to break free, bound to her side, and deposit her onto her back with a playful shove before loping away from the scene at full speed.
That left one.
Winter slowly raised both hands.
I saw this coming the moment I heard the sirens.
The police station was, on the whole, exactly as uncomfortable as one might expect.
Lin Beifong had not gotten to where she was by being a patient woman. She stood in the center of the holding area with the bearing of someone who had been personally inconvenienced by other people's poor decisions every single day for twenty years, and had simply grown very efficient at expressing it. Her grey uniform was immaculate. Her expression was not.
She stared at the silver-haired girl sitting across from her with the same look one might aim at a minor structural anomaly in an otherwise sound building—not necessarily dangerous, but intensely irritating.
"You know," she said, "most people resist arrest."
"I know," the girl replied calmly. She had a tail, which Lin had now confirmed with her own eyes three separate times and still didn't quite know how to file under any existing municipal category. "But it wasn't my place. You're the police. Stopping crime within city limits is your jurisdiction, not mine. Acting as a vigilante in your domain, then also running from you when you responded appropriately?" She shook her head with a faint shrug. "I was in the wrong. It didn't seem right to make things worse."
Lin looked at her.
There was a long pause.
It was the kind of pause that happens when an argument you were fully prepared to have simply fails to materialize because the other person refused to show up for it.
Tenzin, who had arrived shortly before to collect Korra, stood quietly nearby. Korra, who had been returned by Naga and was currently hovering in a state of mild residual indignation, also said nothing. They were both, in their separate ways, rapidly doing the mental math on what they had just heard.
A teenager. Brought in by the police for street fighting. Sitting in a holding room. And her absolute first impulse had been to agree with law enforcement.
Lin Beifong had arrested thousands of people over her career.
She had never once arrested someone who opened with that.
The girl—Winter, she'd said her name was—tilted her head slightly. "Would it be possible," she ventured, her voice measured, "to contact someone for me? I know I can't undo the damage outside, but... my brother. We got separated when we arrived in the city. I've been looking for him."
Lin exhaled sharply through her nose. The kind of exhale that wasn't quite a sigh, but was functionally identical to one.
She looked past Winter to Tenzin.
"Take her with you," Lin said, turning on her heel. "She's too honest to keep in here. I'd go soft having her around for a week."
Outside City Hall, later that afternoon, Korra addressed a cluster of journalists with the practiced uncertainty of someone who had prepared a speech, only to find that the questions were entirely about something else. Across the city, radios crackled to life, broadcasting her voice to every corner of the metropolis.
On a rooftop several blocks away, a masked man turned to a hooded figure beside him.
"Sir? Should we proceed with the plan?"
The hooded figure remained completely still. Then, slowly, he turned—just enough for the afternoon sunlight to catch the hard, uncompromising lines of his jaw.
"The Avatar has arrived earlier than anticipated," Amon said. His voice was measured and unhurried, the cadence of a man who had planned for every conceivable contingency long before it became necessary. "We'll simply have to accelerate our timeline."
He turned his gaze back to the sprawling city below, and the scene faded to dark.
Far out over the ocean, in the dying light of dusk, two figures hung suspended in the air with the casual ease of people for whom gravity had always been entirely optional.
"You sense them?" one asked.
The one called Tarro nodded slowly, his brown tail curling at his side in quiet contemplation. He wore a grey gi, cerulean boots, a white-and-blue undershirt, and a purple belt that had seen better days. His dark eyes remained fixed on the distant, glittering glow of Republic City's skyline.
"They're here," he said quietly. "Both of them."
Beside him, Daikon—silver-haired, red-eyed, with a heavy sword sheathed across his back over a jacket as dark as deep water—crossed his arms.
"Do we warn them?"
"Not yet." Tarro's jaw tightened. "It's too soon. If we move now, we risk altering things before we fully understand what needs to change. History is fragile."
"History," Daikon replied with the dry precision of someone who had been having this exact argument for a very long time, "is precisely what Zamigra is planning to break. Isn't that why the Supreme Kai sent us here in the first place?"
Tarro was quiet for a long moment. The ocean wind whipped past them both.
"You're right," he conceded at last. "But we have to be careful. Things could get a great deal worse before they get better—and that's only if we play our cards exactly right."
The two Saiyans exchanged a lingering look. An unspoken agreement passed between cousins, a bond built on years of shared purpose and the heavy understanding of people carrying a burden far greater than themselves.
Then, their ki ignited—twin pillars of brilliant light reflecting off the dark water below—and they shot forward into the darkening night sky, rocketing toward the city and the two signatures burning brightly within it.
What dark fate moves beneath the surface of this world? What does Zamigra truly plan—and what are two Saiyans from across time and space prepared to sacrifice to prevent it?
Whatever comes next, it seems our siblings from beyond the stars have found themselves exactly where the story needs them to be.
For now.
NEXT TIME: Chapter II — Leaf in the Wind
Author's Note — Rosesaiyan2:
Hopefully I didn't do too badly with this chapter! Sorry if the ending feels a little rushed; I wanted to include as much of the canon story as I could while putting my own unique twist on how things might have played out if Saiyans were dropped right into the middle of The Legend of Korra.
And yes, if you couldn't already tell, this is a Tohra x Korra story (my apologies to the Korrasami fans out there—I don't write that dynamic, nothing against those who do, it's just outside my comfort zone). One thing that always disappointed me about the canon story was how Ikki didn't end up with anyone as she grew older, and how Mako ended up alone at the end of the series. With this story, I plan to rectify both of those things!
With that in mind, I'm aging Ikki up a bit compared to her canon counterpart so she's closer in age to the person she'll eventually end up with, which also means Jinora and Meelo will be aged up accordingly. And of course, it wouldn't be a proper time-travel story without members of the Time Patrol making an appearance. Any guesses as to who the main villain is? 😂 (Though that's always subject to change!)
Lastly, since we've got Saiyans running around, I need to bring in antagonists who can actually pose a real threat to them, otherwise things would get stale fast. I already have an idea for the first major threat, but what future villains would you all like to see brought into the mix?
Golden Cell (an under-explored concept!)
Bojack
Janemba
Super Buu (Evil Buu)
Xicor (Dragon Ball AF)
Rigor (Dragon Ball AF)
Akumo (Father of all Saiyans from Mastar Media's fan film)
Turles (Tree of Might)
Lord Slug
An unlisted DBZ movie villain
An Original Character (OC) villain
Feel free to pick your favorite or write in your own idea and message me. I'm always curious to see what you guys come up with!
See you in the next one!