Escapee

Kaminari Mura had done it again. Her adoptive parents had been busy (her father with work and her mother with trying to persuade a noble that the rumours were not true and Kaminari would make a lovely bride), and she had taken full advantage of it. Slipping her new bodyguard a sleeping draught in his cup of tea, she had dressed in fairly anonymous clothes, scaled the wall of the mansion and run off for a few hours of freedom.

It wasn't that Kaminari didn't love her adopted parents. She did, and she appreciated how lucky she was to have been chosen, a poor motherless girl whose father was in prison, to have a new family. But sometimes they could be too suppressing, too stubborn, too set on what they believed was good for her to realise that she didn't fit the ideal.

"Free at last," she whispered to Jin. The brown and white ferret was balancing on her shoulder, looking around excitedly. He was a energetic animal, strangely so for his species, and the noise and bustle of life outside the mansion was his idea of fun. And Kaminari's for that matter.

She walked around for a while, breathing in the sights, sounds, smells. She was in such an oblivious happy daze that she failed to noticed the man tracking her until he was right on top of her. He grabbed her arm roughly, pulling her forcefully out of the main street into a side alley. Kaminari tried to scream but found a large hand pressed over her nose and mouth, blocking her airways. The man's other hands were holding hers behind her back as she struggled wildly, trying to get free so she could fire bend.

She couldn't breathe around the hand ...