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A minor celebrity has just arrived in Republic City.
He styles himself Delightful Jun, and if he has a last name, no one's ever managed to find it. Reports of his age vary, but you'll usually find it quoted between thirty-five and forty in recent years. His press interviews are rare, unscripted, occasionally contradictory, and inevitably surprising.
As for what he's famous for: he is a firebender, the producer and performer of a multimedia stage show that defies description. Delightful Jun's Palace of Fiery Delights combines music, lights, dancing, sleight of hand, a certain amount of acrobatics, flamboyant costumes, and of course, creatively applied and exquisitely controlled firebending. The show is never the same twice. Audience members are permitted and even encouraged to bring recording devices, but cautioned that if they do, they might be so busy getting it all on tape that they miss half the fun.
He has been known to remove all his clothes onstage; he has been known to take audience volunteers for various occasionally hazardous tricks; unsubstantiated rumours claim that he might have combined those two things, but no one's ever coughed up a video, so the rumours are generally discredited. He has been known to set off small explosives. He has been known to breathe rolling tongues of flame over the heads of the audience. When he booked an outdoor venue for six weeks in Chin Village, he concluded his final show by setting off a row of fireworks that wrote 'Delightful Jun' in the sky stroke by stroke. The headlines the next morning read, 'Delightful Jun Autographs Sky', and he cheerfully stole the turn of phrase for use in his own posters and advertisements.
One of his best-known signature moves is an elaborate, graceful bow ending in a sweep of his arms that gives him momentary wings of fire. It appears in countless photos, and it's how he ends his show every night for his first week in Republic City.
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fiery-delights
roc_on
"Interesting," says Beila. "You realize in my case there's some risk I will be remembering things - I have to learn most stuff from scratch, but there is a very real sense in which I've learned to toss lightning a few dozen times before, and I've made leaps that surprised past teachers a couple times. I'm not sure you can count on that setup to render me able to do it only when I have all the preliminaries - I don't plan to be irresponsible, but there's not as much built-in constraint on the order in which I learn things as there is with plain firebenders."
fiery-delights
He shrugs.
"And if you remember how to toss lightning before I'm ready to teach it to you, then it's up to you whether or not to try it early. But my advice is don't."
"And if you remember how to toss lightning before I'm ready to teach it to you, then it's up to you whether or not to try it early. But my advice is don't."
roc_on
"I just mean that I can't be like, 'Oh, I could do it now, therefore I must know what I'm doing with it', I'll have to actually talk it over with you first."
fiery-delights
"Yes," he says dryly. "That would be the plan. I don't want to teach you lightning until I'm sure you understand the element well enough to come up with it by yourself and I'm sure your control is good enough to handle it well from the start. That applies regardless of whether or not you come up with the technique independently while we're working on the foundations."
roc_on
Eventually, Jun has to prepare for his show, and Beila goes home to change into a non-scorched shirt, then calls Dao to ask if he has any opinions on clothes at all because she needs to get some snugger-fitting ones for firebending.
thinklikethis
"...I am probably not the person to ask," he says. "But I could try! I guess! Why don't you ask Jun? He makes all his own costumes, did you know that?"
roc_on
"I didn't know that. Anyway, I want to have at least one suitable outfit when I go in tomorrow, and he ended the lesson because he had to get ready for his show. I don't necessarily need help, just, my opinions on clothes are pretty negligible, so if you had any I could just use yours. I can also just use a shopkeeper's."
thinklikethis
"Probably more convenient to use the shopkeeper's," says Dao. "Unless you want your firebending practice clothes to be stuff I think you look hot in. Which, I don't know, maybe you do."
roc_on
"It wouldn't hurt. It's not like the new clothes will be inappropriate for applications that aren't firebending, so I'll probably wind up wearing them a lot once I have them."
roc_on
"Awesome. I can come pick you up, we can grab dinner, we can look for something suitably practical, maybe I can wear colors other than red and yellow and orange for a while."
roc_on
That is the correct way for him to greet her!
Dinner is tasty yet nondescript, and then there is a mall with clothes shops in it.
Dinner is tasty yet nondescript, and then there is a mall with clothes shops in it.
roc_on
Beila enlists a salesperson, who steers her to a section, and she picks out some okay things and tries them on for Dao's inspection.
roc_on
She narrows down the selection based on fit and Dao's opinion, and walks out of the store with two new outfits in a bag. "Maybe I'll even get recognized less for a while," she says optimistically. "I don't mind it all the time, but just going about my business it can get weird."
roc_on
Squeeze! "So apparently the fact that I'm sort of perpetually airbending interacts kinda badly with fire in a way it didn't with water or earth."