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Her name's Isabella, and she prefers Bella, and she's called Stormy.
She has never slept through a stormy night since she was a baby. Till she was seven her mother thought she was scared; her mother reassured her that the thunder couldn't get her, her mother told her over and over that it was just a sound and she should try to sleep. Bella told her she was wrong, but Ranae thought she was just putting on a brave face, denying fear so she wouldn't look babyish.
When she is seven she drags her mattress out the back door in the middle of a stormy night, flops onto it in the rain, and sleeps like a log in the pouring storm, and after that her mother realizes what is really going on in her head when she tells them storms don't scare her.
The mattress is ruined. Ranae replaces it. That one is destroyed the next time Bella is left unsupervised during rough nighttime weather.
Ranae gets her a hammock.
When Bella is eight she learns to really touch the weather, not just with her skin but with her self. It's delicious. She can't do it all day, so she still plays and goes to school and sleeps and eats and writes and reads books - but she does it a lot. Stolen moments, here and there, where she can feel the raindrops and the air - she can reach farther and touch the clouds - she can skim the tops of the clouds and the dry rarefied winds above them - she can reach farther and farther, grab shards of sunlight -
Sometimes it is a little hard to come back, but she gets tired if she stays out too long.
She can change stuff she touches. She can "breathe", and the wind will swirl this way or that. She feels like she is the sky, sometimes, when she's in deep, and the sky-self is even clumsier and harder to control than her regular body, but she can move it if she tries. (This is also tiring, but she gets better and better with practice.)
By the time she is nine, weather happens around her all the time. It's mostly humidity, and temperature - the air is dry when she's happy, wet when she's sad, hot when she's angry, cold when she's calm. But sometimes rain comes to comfort her - even indoors - sometimes winds kick up and break Ranae's good china, sometimes there are tiny playful bolts of lightning, and they seem to like Bella, but just as though they were badly trained puppies that doesn't mean they won't bite other people.
Of course Ranae takes her to a magic-checker. But the magic-checker insists on doing his tests indoors, in a nasty stuffy room, and no weather to touch at all (there's barely oxygen), and Bella is unhappy and nothing happens because the air is behaving in a very unskylike way. The tests all turn up negative. Bella goes home. Ranae writes it off as "just one of those things", though when prompted for a list of those things, she cannot produce one.
Bella plays with the sky. Work small, be big. Feel small, think big. She makes tiny little breaths, because they're easier to control; but she inhabits the biggest storms that she can, stretching miles across and miles high, a billion drops of rain. She sinks deep into the tiniest snowflake crystals and puffs of air and beams of sun to feel how they work; but she imagines being the whole sky, over the whole world, and dancing.
By the time Bella is ten, she no longer makes indoor weather unless she chooses to. (It is always very dry where she keeps her notebooks.) It rains in the vicinity of Firebird City exactly twice weekly, as more would harm local flora, but when it does rain it's usually a doozy, intense thunder that shakes the windows, lightning that crackles between the clouds. Sometimes she calls down just a little bit of lightning, when Ranae's not looking, and it touches her outstretched hand, and she feels all aglow and invigorated, like instead of being the sky the sky is being her.
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cumulonimbus
The ground floor has the storage room, another room with a closed door, a combined kitchen and sitting area, a pantry under the stairs, and stairs leading up to the next floor.
Upstairs is a little open area with a little table under a little window, and three more rooms, all with closed doors.
Well - one of them is merely ajar.
Upstairs is a little open area with a little table under a little window, and three more rooms, all with closed doors.
Well - one of them is merely ajar.
calendarofcrime
It contains a bed, a wardrobe, a chair, and a girl. It's easy to miss the girl, because she is tucked into the small space between the bed and the wardrobe and is not moving any more than either.
cumulonimbus
"Hi!" says Stormy, when she spots the girl. "I'm Stormy. I'm moving here. Do you live here?"
cumulonimbus
Stormy goes and closes the door behind her properly, so no one else will be confused, and continues poking around.
ignorable
The extent of the upstairs is as she's seen. The view out the little window is primarily of a garden, moderately pretty and extremely organized.
Back downstairs, Mathilde and Honey have left, but Sedge is there.
"Hello again," he says. "Do you want me to show you where to set up your hammock?"
Back downstairs, Mathilde and Honey have left, but Sedge is there.
"Hello again," he says. "Do you want me to show you where to set up your hammock?"
ignorable
Outside they go. There is a place to put Stormy's hammock! He shows her it.
cumulonimbus
And there her hammock goes.
"Can I check out the sky? I won't go too far away."
"Can I check out the sky? I won't go too far away."
cumulonimbus
Stormy flops into the hammock, and closes her eyes, and flings up.
The sky is different here; the winds carve different roads and there's more salt and moisture and the sunshine's angle is just slightly different. It's a fine sky, though. She likes it. She doesn't go more than about a mile away, plenty to get the feel for the area immediately around Winding Circle but not enough to endanger her.
She comes back to her body about an hour later and gets out of the hammock and goes inside to see if anything is being interesting.
The sky is different here; the winds carve different roads and there's more salt and moisture and the sunshine's angle is just slightly different. It's a fine sky, though. She likes it. She doesn't go more than about a mile away, plenty to get the feel for the area immediately around Winding Circle but not enough to endanger her.
She comes back to her body about an hour later and gets out of the hammock and goes inside to see if anything is being interesting.
nonbird
In descending order of apparent age, the people in the cottage are:
1. A tall pale man with straight dark hair and a lot of nose, wearing Earth green, who might be the 'Rook' Mathilde was calling out to earlier. He looks like the sort of person who might be called Rook.
1. A tall pale man with straight dark hair and a lot of nose, wearing Earth green, who might be the 'Rook' Mathilde was calling out to earlier. He looks like the sort of person who might be called Rook.
whipstitch
2. A boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen, with a bright smile and quick hands, who is in the kitchen part of the kitchen-and-sitting-area making food of some kind.
calendarofcrime
3. Serahila, or someone very likely to be Serahila, sitting quiet and motionless at the table with her hands folded in her lap—
allthebrightest
—and an identical-looking but better-dressed and much happier girl sitting next to her, who seems very likely to be her twin sister.
neverbeatme
4. or 5., depending how you count, a girl sitting across the table from Serahila with her nose in a book. She looks closest to Stormy's own age; maybe a year older, maybe somewhat less.