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Toph and Penance are back at their campsite. Sokka has to admit he isn't quite sure where this Metropolis is any more, or if they're even driving in the right direction -- but nobody really minds. There's plenty of food and water around, they've still got heaps of spare fuel, and all four teens are having the time of their lives racketing around the countryside.

Currently Claire is teaching Sokka a few more of the finer points of driving. Or at least, that's their excuse. There's a lot of laughing and the occasional squeal -- WHICH IS TOTALLY NOT FROM SOKKA, NUH UH -- as they rattle along the road and occasionally come to a screeching halt.

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"OK, that time I think you actually gave me whiplash," Claire accuses.

She's laughing, though. It's easy to do when you never hurt for more than a second.

Sokka grins at her, rubbing his own neck, and remembers to put the handbrake on before jumping out of the car. "But did I stop before we hit the marker?"

Emergency brakes testing: fun.

He leans down to inspect the line drawn across the road, and then bounces up, pumping his fist in the air.

"Yesssssss!"

Claire jumps out of the passenger side to check his braking for herself, and is disappointed when he's proven right.

"You started early though."

She's being deliberately argumentative.

Sokka grins at her, irrepressibly cheerful. "Nu-uh. No way. I tolja the brakes would do it." He waves a hand that's dirty from checking the dirt line, happily.

"Just 'cos you didn't."

"You cheated," Claire objects. "You distracted me. I'm calling rematch."

"Oh, c'moooon," Sokka pleads, laughing. "I totally won fair and square."

Claire sighs dramatically and shakes her head. "So you're going to want to collect your winnings, aren't you?"

Sokka looks very smug. "You know you secretly want to go along with my plans anyway," he informs her, jumping back into the car. "West is way more interesting than your idea. There's mountains!"

"My idea would have had football stadiums," Claire objects, even as she climbs back in her side. "You don't know what you're missing."

"Football stadiums?" Sokka asks, and smirks happily. "Boooo-ring. My way might have food!"

"So might mine!" Claire points out.

"For a given value of 'food'."

"I am not," Sokka informs her gravely, "a big fan of eating grass. Or pigchickenskin balls that men kick around."

"Sometimes they throw them," Claire repeats for the bazillionth time.

She's almost tired of explaining to Sokka what football actually involves. But not yet.

"But I bet stadium hotdogs never go stale."

Sokka looks away from the road to grin at her. "Hot dogs. Your world is so weird."

Claire's world is weird.

She's not looking at the road either.

"Pigchickens," she reminds him.

"Pigchickens are totally normal."

He jerks his attention back to the road in time to avoid a particularly large pothole.

"They're not even closely related," points out Claire the evolutionary biologist. "There was just some weirdass hybrid experiments in your past."

"We wouldn't even know how to do that stuff," Sokka points out, laughing. "Except by ... putting a chicken-nothing and a nothing-pig in a field together and poking them at each other. We don't have technology like here."

He revs the car happily.

Beat.

Then Claire places her head on the dashboard.

"I did not need to think of a pig and a chicken doing it."

"They'd probably have to have some kind of support for the chicken half," Sokka says thoughtfully, although the mischief in his eyes gives him away. "And I guess the pig could be blindfolded ... and made to think it was a female pig ..."

Claire doesn't even move her head, she just hits out at shoulder level with her left hand.

Sokka's laughing, even when he leans over to avoid her and swerves accidentally until the car's wheels spin on dirt.

Brakes! Although not quickly enough for whiplash this time. Even if it's only for a second, he doesn't want to hurt her.

They come to a slow, sliding halt, perfectly safely, halfway into the ditch.

Claire is smirking when she finally looks up.

"You are so lucky they don't have driver's ed in this world anymore."

Sokka looks Super Totally Innocent and taps on the horn a couple of times.

"I meant to do that."

Claire shakes her head. Then nods it.

"Oh yeah, of course you did. There was probably a very good reason for it, too."