barometric pressure

[cumulonimbus]

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.

Comments

[cumulonimbus]

This is not one of the rainy days, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to see (and it means that Stormy can have a book with her, when she takes breaks from being the sky, without it getting ruined). She's sitting on the roof - she can get to a shallowly sloped part of it from her window without much danger of falling - and she's being clouds. Her teachers say that clouds aren't really puffy like pillows, but that they're more like fog. They're right, but even fog feels soft to her. She sinks into the clouds, she is the clouds, the clouds are her, the bit of her on the roof is of negligible importance.

[iwillgetyou]

The bit of her on the roof has company.

[cumulonimbus]

Stormy doesn't notice. She's clouds. She's big, soft white clouds, sculling lazily across the sky. She drops them in the east when they're too far away, and picks them up in the west when they glide within range.

[iwillgetyou]

That's all right. Her company can wait.

[cumulonimbus]

Now here is a nice cloud. It is a particularly lovely shape for Stormy to bury herself in.

It's flying east, of course - that's the way the wind is blowing - and eventually it's far, far away, and Stormy likes that cloud and wants to keep it. She follows it. She can be bigger. She can be so big.

So very big.

Maybe she can be the whole sky and follow all the clouds from when they're born to when they die.

[iwillgetyou]

Back here on the roof, the result is that Bella's body is increasingly cold and motionless.

Now that's a little worrying.

Mathilde waits. It's still possible the girl might find her own way back. She's not in much danger, yet.

[cumulonimbus]

Sky sky sky sky.

Her favorite cloud is piling up with some others over there. They're going to be a storm. It's far away, but Stormy's so big now.

She seeps into the storm with her cloud. This is a nicer one than she's ever been able to find directly over the city.

[iwillgetyou]

"You need to come back," says the stranger sitting by her body. "You're too stretched out."

But she doesn't expect to be heard. Hope, yes. Expect, no.

[cumulonimbus]

There are so many winds in Stormy now; the tiny one that means words is less interesting than any one of a billion raindrops.

Sky, sky, sky.

[iwillgetyou]

Fine.

Mathilde takes a tiny, tiny bottle out of her mage's kit, uncorks it, and waves it under the child's nose.

[cumulonimbus]

"EUGH!"

Stormy is a body again, coughing, tears streaming down her face. "Eugh, eugh - eugh -"

[iwillgetyou]

The bottle goes back where it came from. Mathilde waits.

[cumulonimbus]

Stormy is finished hacking and rubbing tears from her streaming eyes after a couple minutes, and then she fixes her attention on Mathilde.

"Did you do that?"

[iwillgetyou]

"Yes I did," says Mathilde.

[cumulonimbus]

"You made me lose my storm. I don't think I can find it again."

[iwillgetyou]

"I'm sorry about your storm," she says, "but keeping on that way could've killed you, so I'm not that sorry."

[cumulonimbus]

"I've never died being a storm before," Stormy points out.

[iwillgetyou]

"Have you been tested for magic?"

[cumulonimbus]

"Yes. I didn't have any. Ranae says me and the sky's just one of those things."

[iwillgetyou]

"Whoever told you that you don't have magic was wrong. You have plenty," says Mathilde. "What you're doing when you be storms is magic, and magic is dangerous, especially when you don't understand it properly. You went farther out than usual this time, didn't you?"

[cumulonimbus]

"...Yeah. I was chasing a cloud I liked, and then it went to join up with a storm, way over that way." She waves a hand.

[iwillgetyou]

Mathilde nods.

"If you go far enough, or get carried away enough, or stay away for long enough, you can lose your way back to your body. It'll die without you, and when your body dies, your mind dies too. That's the way you were headed just now, if I hadn't brought you back."

[cumulonimbus]

"...That makes it sound like I can't just. Be the sky forever."

[iwillgetyou]

"You can't," Mathilde agrees. "If you tried, you'd die."

[cumulonimbus]

"Oh. I keep being able to do it for longer and longer, though."