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:

nonbird

"That's reasonably common with ambient mages, and craft mages much more so," says Rook. "Because our magic comes from things in the world around us that we might interact with in ordinary ways - and craft mages in particular have magic with processes and activities that aren't magical at all by themselves, that it's possible to learn and do in a completely ordinary way - it can be hard to draw a clear line between doing magic and doing things we just happen to have magic with. That's part of the reason why ambient magic is harder to spot than the academic kind. When an academic mage does magic, it's usually very obvious."

From:

cumulonimbus

"You'd think I'd be obvious. I think my magic-checker might not have been very smart. Then again he did check me in a closed up little room."

From:

nonbird

"Magic-checkers often only know the signs for academic magic, because ambient magic is so rare that it's very possible for a magic-checker to go their entire career without seeing one even if they know how to look. I'm sure he was very good at finding academic mages. You just happen not to be one."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I guess."

From:

nonbird

"Academic and ambient magic are very much different kinds of things. Before people knew a lot about ambient magic - and sometimes even afterward, if no one who knew about it was around, or if it was a rare kind of ambient magic - people used to mistake it, the natural magics especially, for the work of spirits or elementals. And sometimes craft magic just looks like ordinary talent, and craft magic breakouts can look like ordinary accidents. Academic magic has signs almost everyone can see, but ambient magic usually isn't obvious to anyone but ambient mages, and often not even then."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Are there actually spirits around doing things that look like magic?"

From:

nonbird

"Sometimes. Spirits do exist, although we don't know as much about them as we might like. Under most circumstances, it's hard to tell they're there because they just go around doing the same things their natural phenomena were going to do anyway - the tide comes in and goes out, fires burn, winds blow, rain falls. The earth stays still, except when it doesn't. But sometimes a spirit gets attached to or tangled up with a person somehow, and then you get a person who makes natural phenomena behave strangely around them, and that can look similar to ambient magic, especially uncontrolled ambient magic. Fortunately, possession is even rarer, and these days we understand ambient magic well enough to realize that it's not the same thing at all."

From:

cumulonimbus

"And Mathilde made sure I'm not attached to a spirit, that I'm really magic?"

From:

nonbird

"Yes. Mathilde can tell you are really magic, because seeing and understanding magic is one of her many specialties."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Okay. What's a craft magic breakout?"

From:

nonbird

"A magic breakout of any kind is when someone does magic by accident, or without understanding and controlling it. When you saw the magic-checker, he probably asked you or your parents if you ever moved objects without touching them, or saw or drew pictures in fire? Those are two of the most common breakouts of academic magic. Almost all children with that kind of magic do those things. Weather breakouts include raining indoors, sudden winds, lightning striking nearby objects... my magic breakouts tended to make flowering plants bloom whenever I walked by them, which sounds very pretty but can tire out the plants if it keeps happening. Part of the point of teaching magic is to stop the student having breakouts, because they're usually inconvenient and sometimes dangerous."