bones are important / advisable to keep them / also, stay alive

[roc_on]

The news is grim today. A self-driving software glitch caused the first Republic City car accident in the last four years, uptown; someone has a concussion and someone else has whiplash from their own car swerving to avoid. The company is swearing to have the software patched as soon as possible. There was a food poisoning incident at the Flame Festival in one suburb, and a fireworks accident out in earth country, but these have resulted in no deaths. Death has resulted from what appears to be a murderer - it's hard to explain natural causes leaving a corpse with most of its bones missing.

The news doesn't speculate. Chali, however, does; Beila brings it up with him once he's home, and he says that out in a little town called Hirakyo there was a graverobbing incident - missing bones. They don't have hard evidence on it yet, but they think the same person may have escalated to taking his trophies from living victims, that this could be a serial.

Disquieting. To say the least. But Chali has no reason to believe that it's Avatar business - no spirits, no geopolitics, no heavy-duty bending. So Beila reads another chapter in the autobiography of Avatar Meixing and goes to her firebending lesson.

Comments

[fiery_delights]

"I wouldn't recommend it to start with," he says. "I'm pretty confident that you can make it work once you've got the wings part going, but we've already seen that combining air and fire can lead to unpredictable results. If you want to pick a movement that's flying-compatible, though, go for it."

[roc_on]

"Yeah, I was thinking -" She spreads her arms wide, like she's just let go of her glider or jumped off her roc.

[fiery_delights]

"Looks good to me," he says. "So practice that a few times, don't try to firebend with it, but pay attention like you're trying to read the energy flow in a strike you're throwing. See if you pick anything up, fire-wise - any sense of how the element reacts to what you're doing. You might not, for a while, and if you get frustrated I have a few tricks to try to get at that skill a different way, but first let's see if you need them or not."

[roc_on]

Arm spread. Arm spread. ...Flap. Flap.

[fiery_delights]

Jun waits. He seems charmed by the flapping.

[roc_on]

"There does not seem to be any fire to react to me flapping my arms," Beila observes.

[fiery_delights]

"Yeah, that's the tricky part," he agrees.

"In theory - and being the Avatar might interfere with this for you, sorry about that - you can learn how to read what fire thinks of any movement you make, and from there learn how to create fire with any movement. Limited only by your imagination and how many hours of practice you're willing to put in. But making the leap from reading fire energy in an actual fire strike to reading it in whatever else you happen to be doing is tough. Practicing with a similar movement over and over makes it a little easier, and means you can start figuring out how to add fire to it as soon as you've got the perception part down; another way to bridge the gap is to first practice throwing classical fire strikes without the fire, and keep doing that until you can feel what the fire would be doing if you were using it even though you aren't."

[roc_on]

"I've heard of people doing all kinds of bending with any movement. I wonder if I could learn what any element thinks of all the ways I can move. ...I wonder if Shifu Riko has anything to say about that, come to think of it, she likes to talk about listening to the earth. Anyway. Let's give this another few flaps..." Flap flap flap flap flap.

[fiery_delights]

"I encourage you to go talk to her and see if she has anything to contribute. In my experience with firebending, any-movement bending can come from either an intuitive or a conscious understanding of what you're doing with the element, and the conscious kind is easier to explain and easier to design deliberately. I've never talked to benders from other disciplines to see if they've noticed the same thing. Come to think of it, you seem to do intuitive any-movement airbending pretty much constantly. That's... probably going to either help or hinder you learning the conscious kind with fire, but I'm not sure which."

[roc_on]

"The air isn't forming its own opinions. It's supporting me," Beila says. "My body sort of does what I tell it, but with a lot of noise added. The air cancels the noise."

[fiery_delights]

Jun shrugs. "I like to talk about fire as though it has opinions, but you might find you understand it better a different way. Or maybe you just don't have a conscious sense of the way air's energy reacts to how you move, or maybe air and fire work differently in that sense. I could tell you if I was an airbender, but unfortunately nobody seems to have invented a magic charm to grant dual bending. Anyway, if I could have my pick of second elements I'd want water. Healing."

[roc_on]

"Healing's great. Hmmm. Fire can't support my movements - I mean, that would be a disaster if it tried - but do you think I could get anything out of having it follow them? Trailing off my arm like a fringe?"

[fiery_delights]

"Interesting idea," he says. "Coming at it from the production angle first instead of the sensing angle. I could definitely see that being easier than trying to get arbitrary fire out of arbitrary movements. It might help, it might get you nowhere, it probably won't actively set you back. Try it and see."

[roc_on]

Beila sets her arms at her sides, closes her eyes thoughtfully, then sticks an arm out and sweeps it. Nothing happens except a little flame near her fingertips; she frowns, shakes her hand like it's fallen asleep, tries again, and gets a sillhouette of fire about an inch away from her skin, following the arc. When her arm stops moving, it dissipates.

"Eee."

[fiery_delights]

Jun applauds.

"I might have to steal that trick for a show. Okay. Can you sense fire energy while you're doing that? Although if you're more interested in achieving the wings than learning the underlying theory, you might be able to just twist what you've got into a wing shape with practice."

[roc_on]

"I think I can sense it while it's following me, yeah," she nods, waving her arm again and getting fluttery streamers of fire chasing it. "What with it being there." She flaps her arms as she was doing before, trailing fire from each.

[fiery_delights]

"Sensing it while it isn't there is how you get the generally applicable ability to decide you want to make a certain kind of fire with a certain movement and then immediately figure out how to do it," he says. "Otherwise known as how I invented half my repertoire. But the silhouette trick is a clever way around the hard part, and I bet you can get pretty far with it. Try seeing how the fire follows you naturally, and seeing how you can vary the shape, and pay attention to how the energy feels both ways."

[roc_on]

Flap. The trail lengthens. Flap. It shortens. Flap. It's ragged-edged, long in places and short in others. Flap. It smears, lengthening as she moves her arm rather than moving wholesale.

[fiery_delights]

Jun watches this progression thoughtfully and with a certain amount of pride. Beila is such a great student. He's glad Shifu Riko introduced them.

[roc_on]

Flap. She lets it hug her arm a little closer, not touching, and extends her fingers; she forms a wide wing shape, with featherlike protrusions extending from her hand.

[fiery_delights]

"Nice," says Jun.

[roc_on]

"Wheeeee," she says, twirling; the wings follow her like she's wearing them attached to invisible sleeves.

[fiery_delights]

Jun laughs and applauds again.

[roc_on]

"What next?"

[fiery_delights]

"Well, you've accomplished wings," he says. "But if you want to take them flying with you, I'm thinking you'd better be able to shape them very accurately and consistently. So, practice. And I still recommend asking your earthbending instructor if she has any thoughts on bending with arbitrary movements and the difference between conscious and intuitive understanding of how to do it, and I'll get a big mirror put in hopefully before our next lesson so you can see your wings properly and don't have to guess how well they live up to what you're going for."

He smiles.

"If you want to do extra practice between lessons, I recommend the fire-following trick to practice reading energy flows, and I recommend not getting too big or fancy with it until you've had a chance to practice the wings in front of a mirror. It doesn't take much uncertainty about where exactly your fire is going to produce some pretty spectacular accidents, and the thing about these fancy fire-shaping tricks is that unlike conventional fire blasts, a lot of it is happening outside your field of view."