The rustling sound of feathered wings woke Korra up. She opened her eyes and saw a spirit that looked something like a white crane preening its feathers beside her.

Korra blinked and sat up, pulling the blanket up to cover herself, but was careful not to expose too much of Asami, still sleeping beside her, bare as she herself was.

"Can I help you, Spirit?" Korra asked, feeling groggy.

"Oh, don't mind me," said the bird-like spirit cheerfully. "I've just finished the delivery. Just give me a couple moments to wash up and I'll be on my way."

The grogginess dissipated.

Korra blinked again. "Delivery? What delivery?"

The crane cocked its head to the side. "Oh, you know. The soul for the baby! You two have only been summoning for it non-stop the last few hours! Sheesh! Okay, okay! I got the message!" The bird gave a squawk that felt like it was meant to be a friendly laugh. "Honestly, Avatar, next time, you really should take more care to dot every I and cross every T in your signals. King Enma can be a real stickler sometimes, and if the signal isn't complete, the message just won't get passed onto us storks. And yours was missing some pretty basic things! You're lucky I noticed you two here since this place is on my flight path home!"

Korra could only continue to stare at the crane - the stork - as a very worrisome sinking feeling stirred in her stomach.

Then the spirit hopped to the edge of the alcove and took off. "I hope you like them! I picked them out myself!"

"Wait!" Korra cried as she reached out for the stork frantically, but the spirit had already left, and she was unable to ask the torrid of questions on her lips, starting with, 'exactly which one of us did you make this *delivery* to?!'

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

Theory: The Spirit World is kinda like the afterlife, and that's where people go when they die until they are reborn. There is a class of spirit that function like shinigami and are responsible for ferrying people to and from the mortal coil.

I'm not quite sure where I wanna go with this yet, but I thought I'd just put this here for now and let it stew for a while. ^_^

TBC

(Edit: This scene was originally written in present tense, and it's really bugging me so I've edited it to be past tense. Thank you for your patience.)