For decades of Fire Lord Azulon's long reign, the Hino family held the royal warrant to produce fireworks for the celebrations of the royal family. However, after tragedy strikes at the new fireworks factory in Caldera City and ruins plans for the Fire Lord's golden jubilee celebration in 70 AG, the surviving members of the Hino family and their retainers decide to make a new life for themselves in the Fire Nation colonies rather than face scorn and persecution in the capital. What they find there, though, will challenge their beliefs about the Fire Nation and their own family history...

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HINO Arisa, a thirty-two year old woman, now the ''de facto'' leader of the Hino family with the death of her older brother Fumiro and her husband in the factory explosion.
Arisa decided to bring the family to the Fire Nation colony rather than face continued mischief by rivals in Caldera City and threats of legal prosecution.
Arisa is a strong firebender, but her effectiveness was diminished by injuries suffered in the explosion - she broke her leg and, imprisoned for a time by the Fire Lord, she did not have access to proper medical care while it healed.

HINO Emiko, a seventeen year old young woman, a niece of Arisa. Though she has no firebending skill, she has proven to be a pyrotechnic prodigy, and dreamed of studying chemistry at one of the Fire Nation's universities until her family's fall from grace precluded it. She has given some thought to the potential military applications of pyrotechnics, though such ideas are currently taboo in the Fire Nation, and anathema to the firebending establishment. She hopes that she may be able to have more freedom to investigate her ideas in the colonies. She is something of a loner.

WADA (Hino) Kimio
A twenty-four year old woman, a cousin of Arisa from a branch of the family who had fallen on hard financial times, who came to work at the fireworks enterprise in Caldera City when it opened, along with her newly-married husband. Sadly, he was killed in the explosion. Kimio was pregnant at the time, and how has a toddler to take care of. Faced with limited prospects in Caldera City, she decided to join her relatives in moving to Yu Dao. While waiting to make the journey, she supported herself as a painter, having previously been in charge of making promotional illustrations of the fireworks.

WADA Mariko
Kimio's twenty-one year old sister-in-law, formerly an employee of the fireworks factory. She worked assembling rockets and shells. Prior to this, she was an artisanal sulfur miner in a rural district of the Fire Nation. She is very handy with a pickaxe, but is not a firebender. She has never been married.

NIOHURU Miho
The  twenty-nine year old fiance of Hino Junji, Miho is of mixed Earth and Fire Nation ancestry. Her paternal house traces itself to the Niohuru imperial family of the Nara clan of the Yonggan people, who ruled the Earth Kingdom as the Ri Dynasty centuries ago. Her ancestor was an imperial prince who was sent as the plenipotentiary ambassador of the Earth Kingdom during the final years of the Ri Dynasty. Well-liked at court, he decided to stay in the Fire Nation when the Great Ri fell to the Hao Ting; his descendants intermingled with Fire Nation nobility and preserved some of their family traditions even as rising xenophobia at court has hampered their prospects. Miho is an earthbender, and like many of her family so endowed, Miho supported herself as a civil earthbender, one of only a few in the Fire Nation. However, because of xenophobia, the government has increasingly prohibited the use of civil earthbenders in its construction works and attempted to develop earth-moving machinery instead.

LI Wenhao
The son of a trader from the Earth Kingdom, a twenty-four year old man who is fully bicultural and spent much of his youth on his father's ship, sailing between the Fire Nation, its colonies, and the outlying Sultanate of Manwe. He was hired by the Hino family as a guide, interpreter and agent, and is helping to arrange their move. He is also familiar with astral navigation. He loves to cook and his specialty are the "Flaming Fire Flakes," made with a particularly-spicy pepper grown on Manwe.

HINO Junji
The younger brother of Hino Arisa, a thirty-year-old man who is eager to make a better life for himself with his fiance, Niohuru Miho. Having studied medicine in Caldera City, he was on track to a promising career at the Fire Lord Sozin Free Hospital, before his family's abrupt expulsion from Court and royal favor ruined things. Though he has heard of a great need for physicians in the colonies - where medicine is still dominated by traditional folkways - he is apprehensive about giving up his life in the comfortable capital for a more rugged existence.

HINO Masaji
The fifty-four year old older brother of Hino Arisa, he has never been inclined toward leadership despite being the eldest child of his parents. He is a decent firebender, though lacking in raw power. He has a contemplative personality and, as a youth, often expressed a desire to become a monk in the order of the Fire Sages, but his parents forbade it. He had a brief and unhappy marriage that ended in divorce and produced no children. Since then, he has given himself over to the artistic aspects of the family's work in pyrotechnics. He escaped death in the factory explosion only by virtue of having been meeting with Prince Ozai, the teenage brother of Crown Prince Iroh, concerning preparations for Fire Lord Azulon's jubilee. Through tireless experimentation, Masaji has introduced many innovations to the pyrotechnic craft.

ABE Genji
A twenty-two year old swordsman, he is a retainer of the Hino family and comes from an aristocratic, though not wealthy, background. Estranged from his own family after an acrimonious rivalry with his brother, Genji decided to follow his employers to the colonies rather than look for new work in the Fire Nation.