"You're producing fire, and right now, the behaviour of that fire is not completely up to you," he says. "There's some chance involved. But you should be able to feel the difference, even though it's not strictly speaking something that you're doing - it's something the fire is doing, and you're influencing it. That's a pretty important difference, and it's one a lot of firebenders miss. But once you understand it well enough, you should be able to control it much better than you are now. Does that make more sense?"

"I think so. Is this like how Shifu Riko always talked about listening to the earth, or more like being generally aware of air pressure and movement before I do significant airbending... or is that question useless because I'm the only one who does more than one thing on this list?"

"All right..." She repeats the punch a few times, then adjust stance, punches some air, pulls a little sand from her sandbottle and moves it around and puts it back - "Not like either thing, anyway, it's its own thing."

"Fire usually is."

"Yeah, like - in both the case of air and the case of earth, if I don't do anything to them, they continue existing - the fire is taking advantage of existing but if it has nothing to catch on it will just dissipate -" She fire-punches again, paying close attention to that dissipation-tendency.

"Yeah," nods Jun. "And you don't create air or earth. Or water. You're just moving around what's already there. If you consider firebending just in terms of the obvious, visible flame, it's very different from any of the other three that way."

"Yeah, they all have their unique properties -" She tries again. "Although all the master practitioners argue for theirs having the most or the most important unique properties."

"And I am no exception," Jun says cheerfully. "Are you feeling the fire yet?"

"Yeah. I can tell when it's peaked and starting to fall apart."

"That's a good start," he says. "Keep going."

Punch punch punch - "What else am I supposed to be picking up on?"

"I usually leave this one until later," he says, "because it's the point at which my students tend to call me a crackpot and run away, but I think you can handle it. See if you can tell how the fire is going to spread before it leaves your body."

Beila frowns, muses, sets up a punch, controls her winds - throws the punch, forms a prediction the instant before the fire goes at near-random -

Beila repeats herself, noting successes and failures and partial cases of each, and what she predicated each guess on, trying both arms.

It gradually becomes apparent that Jun is right - there is an extremely subtle sensation of energy in motion before the flame itself appears, and the character of that original flow predicts the character of the result. But just knowing it's there doesn't make it easy to read, or even easy to pick up on in the first place.

"I can tell it's there," agrees Beila. "It's incredibly faint, though."

"Yeah. Well, now you know. And you're going to have to get comfy with it if you want to learn how to bend lightning, at least from me. But you don't need to be reading it perfectly anytime soon."

"I'd like to learn lightning, yeah. All the niche stuff - Shifu Riko couldn't teach me much about metal but my dad says when I've learned fire he'll put me in a police course on it."

"In my utterly non-humble opinion, the industrials are way too casual about lightning," says Jun. "If I teach it to you, I'm going to do it properly."

"Properly meaning?"

"Meaning, you don't throw lightning around until you understand how it works."

"Do I get meteorology textbooks or do you mean something else?"

"Something else," he laughs. "I mean understand it the way I do, the way a firebender does - from the inside. Ideally, I don't even teach you how to throw your first bolt. I explain how it works, when you're at the point where you'd understand the explanation, and then you figure out how to adapt what you already know to create lightning instead of fire. It's much, much safer that way, because you're controlling it from the beginning, with full knowledge of what you're doing."