First 2 chapters edited for those who got the early versions.

Mr. Cake looked up from his mopping as he heard a rapid knocking on the front door of the bakery. Spitting out the mop and balancing it against a table, he called out "Coming!" as he made his way over to unlatch the door.

Standing on his porch, dancing excitably in place, was a green unicorn mare. "Good evening Lyra, I'm afraid we've already closed up for the day. Was there something urgent you needed?"

"Is he here, Mr. Cake? Is he here?" Lyra craned her neck to peer over and behind the baker.

Mr. Cake tilted his head to the side in confusion. "Is who here?"

"The human!" Lyra exclaimed. "He's somepony new in town, and I know Pinkie always throws a party for somepony new in town."

"Not today, she's not." The old baker grinned, "Pinkie left yesterday to go on some errand she was needed for up North. Truth be told, I've heard some of my customers talking about it all afternoon, but I haven't seen it for myself yet."

The mare's ears drooped at hearing this. "Oh, ok. Thanks anyway, I'll try someplace else then."

Lyra turned and walked away, her nose scrunched in thought as she tried to think of another place that the human could have gone.

She perked up and exclaimed "of course! Fluttershy takes care of all the animals and creatures in the area, maybe he went there!" With a spring in her step, she broke into a canter, angling towards the path out of town and towards the cottage on its far outskirts, summoning a small hovering ball of light with her horn to help light the way.

After several minutes of pounding at the door of the cottage on the edge of the Everfree Forest, the bottom half of the door opens to reveal an irritated white bunny.

"Oh hello, is Fluttershy in? I really, really need to see her right away." Lyra was once again shuffling excitedly from hoof to hoof like a young filly.

Angel glared at her, chattering and waving his furry little paw at her as he pointed first to the moon climbing higher into the sky and then to the note pinned to the top half of the door. Finishing his unintelligible rant, he turned and slammed the door in Lyra's face, knocking her back slightly.

Sitting back on her haunches and rubbing her slightly bruised nose with both hooves, Lyra raised her eyes to the note pinned to the top half of the door which she hadn't even noticed before.

Gone on an important trip. Back again soon.

Fluttershy

P.S. Scootaloo, please be nice to Elizabeak if you are here to visit her.

Lyra sat there for a few moments just processing the message. Pinkie Pie was gone, so was Fluttershy. It would be a fair bet that the entire group of their circle of friends would be gone as well. How to test that? The Apple family farm was too far away, and besides, they would all be asleep at this time of night. Twilight Sparkle was known to stay up late into the night studying one subject or another and Lyra doubted she could resist studying something as amazing as a human.

'To the library it is!' she thought to herself, climbing wearily to her feet, her antics finally starting to catch up with her.

Trotting back down the path from Fluttershy's home, she leaned to the side every once in a while to snag a flower from the edge of the fields so that she could keep her energy up.

Lyra was dragging her feet slightly as she walked through the darkened streets of Ponyville. Her eyes were drawn to an electric blue glow approaching from the opposite direction, marking another unicorn walking the streets in the late evening.

The glow changed directions to angle towards her, moments later revealing its owner to be Vinyl Scratch, a fellow musician she had had very little interaction with, mostly due to their differing genres of performance.

Vinyl halted in front of her, her ever present glasses perched on top of her head instead of over her red eyes and her headphones missing from around her neck. "Come with me." Her voice was quiet and commanding, so out of character for the usually exuberant unicorn that Lyra was momentarily taken aback and fell into step with the DJ out of instinct alone.

"Bonny came by tonight looking for you, ya know?" This got Lyra's attention. "She's been lookin' for ya for hours. She heard there was a human in town, and she was afraid you were gonna do something stupid. Octy got her to rest at my place while I took a look around town for you."

"So Bonbon knows about the human? That's great! I've been trying to find proof that they exist for years and"

"Are you even listening to yourself?!" Vinyl sounded genuinely angry. "Celestia knows I don't do the whole responsibility gig too well but come on! Your friend is partied out and worried about you, and all you care about is proving something we already got proof of?"

"You got proof of the human?!" Lyra's single-mindedness in the face of the browbeating proved to be greater than her guilt.

"Duh! Octy hauled the human to the hospital by herself, no thanks... to..." The DJ trailed off and face hoofed as she realized she had goofed up and Lyra was now a swiftly retreating cloud of dust in the darkness.

"At least I can tell Bonny and Octy where the hay she's goin' now." Shaking her head in annoyance at both herself and the obsessive lyrist, Vinyl turned the last corner to approach her home, and a conversation she was not going to enjoy.

The sounds of a shouting voice woke Iroh in the middle of the night. Coming instantly awake, he sat up in bed, a sphere of fire flaring to life in the palm of his hand.

Looking around and seeing no one in the immediate area, but hearing what sounded to him like the desperate screams of a woman, Iroh took stock of the situation.

He was naked but for bandages that seemed to cover his body from his shoulders to his belt line, spots of blood visible through some of the dressings. His neck and shoulder ached abominably, 'feels like I got hit with a boulder. We were probably ambushed... damn!'

The next thing he noticed was the lack of shackles or other bindings. 'Not captured though. Zuko must have fought them off, the boy is learning at least something by now. Good.'

Noting his bag and clothes laid out below and above a table respectively in a corner of the room, he got up with as quiet a groan as he could manage and shrugged into his wrappings and robes as quietly as he could.

The screams were suddenly getting louder as if the woman had broken through whatever or whoever had been restraining her and was headed in his direction, whoever he noted as several voices called out for her to stop.

'I hope this is not some widow coming for me...' he thought ominously. Opening the window he looked outside only to have second thoughts and instead glided over to beside the door into the room.

The door glowed amber and flung open less than fifteen seconds later, something walking into the room with footsteps that sounded for all the world to him like those of a small pig-deer. His curiosity piqued, he cautiously leaned to the side to peer around the edge of the door.

The creature looked very similar to a pig-deer but was entirely the wrong color, it also had only a single horn on top of its head rather than two. It was looking rapidly between his recently vacated bed and the open window, confusion apparent in its demeanor.

It started to approach the window only to be pounced on by a multicolored trio of similar creatures that raced into the room after it. The struggle was brief and entirely futile for the first creature as one of the three produced a tube with a spike on the end and jammed it into the first one's flank.

With a wailing cry of "No", the same voice he had heard earlier the first struggled weakly for a few moments more before slumping to the floor.

"You two take her to another room and let her sleep it off," the voice of another female ordered the other two, "I'll make sure she didn't hurt the human."

"Damn fool," she growled, her voice only barely audible as the others two dragged the unconscious one back through the very door which Iroh was hiding behind.

"Oh sweet Celestia's Bulbous Buttocks! The human's not here!" Came her startled exclamation as she realized the bed had been empty the entire time she had been in the room. "His saddlebag isn't here either. At least that means that he wasn't woken up by young Lyra."

With a tired sigh, she trotted over and closed the window using her teeth on the small knobs situated on the lower inside of the frames for just such a purpose.

As she did so, Iroh did his best to shuffle himself closer into the junction between the open door and the wall, trying not to make any noise.

"Huh?" Iroh winced, hoping he hadn't been spotted.

"How did his bag get over there? I put it by the table." Iroh cursed internally at his carelessness, hoping he didn't have to fight his way out of here, seeing what that spike had done to the other creature.

The pink muzzle of Nurse Sweetheart appeared around the edge of the door, followed shortly by the rest of her head. Her eyes widened as she realized that standing next to the bag was a sandal clad foot, along with requisite attached leg. Her pupils constricted as she started to back up and raise her head at the same time.

Iroh, knowing the game was up, and that he had been discovered used his left arm to close the door, revealing his full form and his grim countenance to the suddenly intensely nervous mare.

Leaning forward slightly to loom over her, Iroh's years as a general came to the fore with a vengeance. "I have four questions for you. Answer them and you will not be harmed." He spoke quietly and clearly. "Who are you, what are you, where am I and how did I get here?"

"M-m-my name is Sweetheart," the intimidated pink nurse stammered, "I'm a nurse here at Ponyville hospital. Y-you were brought in here this afternoon with injuries."

"And my nephew? The young man that was with me, where is he?"

"I-I-I don't know," the nurse cried, "I only heard of one human coming here, and that was you!"

Iroh ruminated on this for a moment, hoping that his nephew had survived whatever ambush they must have been caught in, "That reminds me, you did not answer, what are you?"

The nurse cowered with her head under her hooves as she blurted out her answer. "An earth pony! I'm an earth pony!"

She trembled as she heard the human curse before stepping around her and stalking to the window. With one leg over the sash, Iroh turned back to her for a moment, "I thank you for treating me as you have, however, I cannot stay to enjoy your hospitality any longer."

Dropping down to the ground just below the window of his ground floor room, Iroh settled the pack on his back, glanced of his shoulder at the still cowering nurse in the room and jogged away, turning down a random path in towards the town in order to find somewhere to hide out and rest up until morning.

Vinyl quietly closes the door behind her as she steps into her home, her head hung low. In the lounge room, Bonbon looks up from her spot on the couch next to a sleeping Octavia. "Did you find her?" The candy maker asks quietly on spotting Vinyl.

"Yeah, I found her alright," the unicorn sulks as she heads towards the fridge for some juice, "she was running all over looking for the human Octy found, just like you thought she might be."

Chugging her orange juice with relish she turned her head slightly towards Bonbon who was now entering the kitchen to join her. Filling another two glasses, she levitates one down onto the table near Bonbon as she takes up her second. "That was the weirdest feeling I have ever had, chewing out Lyra, it was almost like I was a mom telling off my filly."

Vinyl shuddered theatrically at the thought. "Never having foals!" She moaned to Bonbon, "Responsibility sucks!"

Bonbon giggled appreciatively as she sipped her juice, somewhat cheered by Vinyl's theatrics, 'I could seriously be friends with this mare,' she thought to herself, 'even if she is as loud as Octavia tells me she is.'

"So did you get her to go home?" Bonbon asked hopefully.

"Nah," Vinyl was frowning once again, "I put my hoof in my mouth and mentioned that Octy took the human to the hospital. Crazy filly hoofed it so hard I'm amazed she didn't plow a furrow in the street behind her."

"You didn't," Bonbon gasped.

"Eeeyup, I did. I'd lay bits on it that right now she's either drooling over the human like the creepiest fanfilly you have ever seen or getting her rump handed to her by one of those hunky orderlies up there." Bonbon laughed out loud at the descriptions and settled down in her seat for the conversation. Something told her tonight might not be such a bad night after all.

Author's Notes:

Human obsessed Lyra taken (temporarily) to eleven and getting called out on it, Iroh showing some of his old steel, and Vinyl Scratch showing some reluctant responsibility.

Writing Vinyl Scratch this way mirrors an encounter I have had with a DJ acquaintance of my own; usually he was the life of the party, but when he saw something not right, he stepped up and assisted our mutual friend in getting away from a very bad crowd.

A quick note before I get someone poking at me for Iroh's animal references.
The Avatar: The Last Airbender world is populated by animals which are almost universally hybrids of two real world animals, there are also only two animals that I could find that even vaguely resemble a pony, and neither of them are used in a way analogous to horses/ponies in the real world.

Again, thanks to Stitchentyme for the proofreading.

Also, a little nod in there to The Chicken Goddess, an awesome little Scootaloo fic.