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Perhaps Petch should have been born an Air Nomad - he certainly seemed incapable of staying in the same place for very long. But then he would have been the most foul-mouthed, ill-tempered Air Nomad the world had ever seen. He had only been back in Ba Sing Se a short while, having spent the past few months getting into tea house brawls and occasionally getting jailed on his way to Omashu. He had abruptly turned back though, when he heard word that his mother was in the Omashu area.

Stable work was not easy to find for Petch and so he had taken a job doing back alley lifting to one of the main street vendors. Why Earth Kingdom people always felt the need to make their boxes out of rock was beyond him. But it sure was a pain in the a** to lug around.

He nearly didn't see Avani over the boxes he was carrying, but stopped short of hitting her when he glanced a bit of dress from around his boxes. Turning slightly to get a better look at her, he frowned, thinking she possibly looked familiar.

"You look lost," he grunted as he stood before her.

Petch tilted his head, trying to get a better look at the teen in front of him. She knew his name somehow. Sort of. He squinted at her, as if that would somehow help place who she was.

"Petch," he corrected gruffly. "Who're you?"

Petch was not the sort to be bossed around. He was terribly stubborn and dug in his feet at the first hint that someone was trying to tell him what to do. He wasn't bossy himself; he just liked to do things his way, dammit. He readjusted his grip on the boxes, as if that would somehow tell her that he was fine and to keep her nose out of it.

"Yeah, right, I remember now," he grunted, "Where's your sister? Her cough still bad?"

"That's good," Petch said and meant it. Lei had been nice. It was too bad she wasn't here. He would have liked to have seen her again.

He grunted when Avani assisted with the boxes, but didn't tell her to mind her own business. The help was appreciated, even if he didn't act like it. He wasn't sure what to say to Avani. The last time they had met, things hadn't gone terribly well. Lei seemed to be the more charming of the siblings, though a bit on the extremely young side for Petch's tastes.

Petch brushed his hands together, cleaning the dust off of them. There was still more left to be moved, but he figured there was no harm in taking a quick break.

"I do. Just got back, recently. Working now, obviously," he said, nodding his head toward the boxes. "I could ask you the same thing. Seem to remember you didn't like it much here."

Petch made a face. "Why'd you wanna go to the Fire Nation?" He'd never been outside of the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation was his last choice of vacation locales. He could rarely recall a positive encounter with a Fire Nation traveler.

He shrugged at her questions, "Never had somewhere to leave. Been moving around my whole life. Doesn't feel like anything special." He frowned slightly as he looked down at her. "Is Lei coming along?"

Petch grunted slightly. What was it with mothers and Omashu. He'd been there plenty of times and that whole mail system thing got unimpressive real fast. Especially when you had 'friends' who thought it was funny to try to push the non-Earthbender into the mail chute when a load was passing through.

"Guess you've got everything worked out," he said. It certainly wasn't his place to chide about not leaving family behind. "So you think this whole Fire Nation thing could become permanent, huh?"