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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.
roc_on
fiery-delights
Jun compliments her progress as usual.
"Yeah, your control's coming along nicely. So the first step toward wings is to throw a standard fire blast and make it spread out flat instead of the usual bolt, cone, or fireball shapes. Let's see you try it."
"Yeah, your control's coming along nicely. So the first step toward wings is to throw a standard fire blast and make it spread out flat instead of the usual bolt, cone, or fireball shapes. Let's see you try it."
fiery-delights
It is noticeably flattish in shape!
"Good for a first try, but I think you can do better," says Jun. "Give it another go."
"Good for a first try, but I think you can do better," says Jun. "Give it another go."
fiery-delights
Seeing from the side, it is so thin!
"Nice!" says Jun. "Practice that a few more times, get a feel for the shape, try to keep it an even thickness. Fire doesn't do 'neat and tidy' very naturally, but we're firebenders, we don't have to follow all the rules."
"Nice!" says Jun. "Practice that a few more times, get a feel for the shape, try to keep it an even thickness. Fire doesn't do 'neat and tidy' very naturally, but we're firebenders, we don't have to follow all the rules."
roc_on
Beila's tempted to mix it up and try to do a sine wave, but she sticks to the curriculum for the time being. Flat! Flat! Flat!
fiery-delights
"Very nice. Okay. Now you get to play with it. I'll demonstrate."
He throws a flat fire blast that comes out to an impressively precise triangle given the medium; then several more in rapid succession, each a different shape. One that forks into two flat streamers; another that curves up from horizontal to nearly vertical at the end; and finally a thin spiraling ribbon.
"You don't necessarily have to get that fancy, but pick a shape, keep trying it until you're satisfied with how it comes out, then try a different one. Expect to screw it up a few times at first if you try something complicated, but don't let that stop you if you're feeling ambitious. Curves like the last two are harder than anything that stays flat."
He throws a flat fire blast that comes out to an impressively precise triangle given the medium; then several more in rapid succession, each a different shape. One that forks into two flat streamers; another that curves up from horizontal to nearly vertical at the end; and finally a thin spiraling ribbon.
"You don't necessarily have to get that fancy, but pick a shape, keep trying it until you're satisfied with how it comes out, then try a different one. Expect to screw it up a few times at first if you try something complicated, but don't let that stop you if you're feeling ambitious. Curves like the last two are harder than anything that stays flat."
roc_on
Ha. Sine wave time.
But she keeps it flat at first and just scallops the edge.
But she keeps it flat at first and just scallops the edge.
roc_on
She makes a fork, and then a three-pronged fork, and then a four-pronged one, three-dimensional.
Then she makes all four points converge a few feet away from their origin point into a sort of curvy-pointy-box shape.
Then she makes all four points converge a few feet away from their origin point into a sort of curvy-pointy-box shape.
fiery-delights
"Okay, good shaping," he says. "You're picking it up quicker than I did, although that's less impressive than it sounds because I was inventing a lot of it from scratch and didn't have a teacher handy. Unfortunately, that was the easy part. The hard part is placement. You could shape wings just fine right now, but you'd still be throwing them as classical fire strikes, and not a lot of flying creatures have giant wings coming out of their hands and feet. So. Pick a movement, something that feels appropriate to producing wings with, something you won't mind practicing a lot in different variations. Don't try actually throwing wings with it yet, but try it, see how it feels, think about how you'd shape the wings to fit in the space around you. I do my wings like this," he gives his signature sweeping bow with flaring wings of flame, "but almost purely for showmanship, there's nothing inherent in the movement that makes fire like to do wings with it, and you might feel like picking something else."
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
"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."
"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."