cumulonimbus | barometric pressure

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cumulonimbus

"What do you do with ink and paper? You don't like - read it without looking, do you?" Stormy asks Elyth.

From:

neverbeatme

"I can if I really try, but I have to be touching the page and it's a lot slower than reading with looking and not nearly as fun."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Okay. Um, don't read my notebooks unless I show you them. That goes for everybody but the ink and paper thing is why I asked."

From:

neverbeatme

"Okay," says Elyth.

From:

allthebrightest

"Sure," says Niva.

From:

whipstitch

Mercy is doing some kind of cooking thing and apparently too absorbed to respond.

From:

calendarofcrime

Serahila continues to do the same amount of exactly nothing she has been doing this whole time.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy watches him cooking.

"I wonder what all these other kinds of magic are like. I didn't know I was magic instead of some other thing of some kind till Mathilde told me, and I'm starting to wonder if everybody's magic is just a some other thing of some kind to everybody else's magic. The weird kinds, I mean, not academic magic."

From:

nonbird

"The weird kinds are called 'ambient'," Rook says helpfully. "And 'a some other thing of some kind' is a good way to put it. The different kinds of ambient magic aren't necessarily anything like each other, especially if they're very different. Sometimes we talk about 'craft magics' like metal and thread as different from 'natural magics' like weather and plants, but even those categories aren't perfectly clear; metal can be found in nature, for example, and plants are often cultivated in ways some people might consider a craft."

From:

cumulonimbus

"How do you craft a plant?"

From:

nonbird

"Farmers and gardeners keep plants in particular arrangements for particular purposes. Some gardens are just as decorative as a gold necklace, and some are just as useful as an iron hammer, and they get that way through the care and attention of people. And of course there's miniature trees. Those are crafted in what might be a more familiar way - their custodians encourage them to grow in specific shapes, for magical reasons or just because they're pretty that way."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Miniature trees! They sound cute."

From:

nonbird

"I happen to think they are very cute," says Rook. "But that could be because I keep some and have gotten very fond of them over the years."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I want to see the tiny trees."

From:

nonbird

"You can see the tiny trees! You can see them right now, if you like."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Yes please!"

From:

nonbird

He leads her out the back door of the cottage. There are several rows of shelves along the outside of the wall, and on each shelf is a series of flat, shallow trays containing one tree each. The trees are properly sized to fit in the trays, which means that in comparison to trees of regular size they are definitely tiny.

"These are my tiny trees!" says Rook. "I'm very proud of them."