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:

iwillgetyou

"You can bring as much stuff as we can carry on the way. You'll have to ask Dedicate Honey about sleeping outside. There might not be anywhere outside for you to sleep; most of Winding Circle is in use somehow or other, even the outdoor parts."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I have a hammock. Can't I put the hammock somewhere?" asks Stormy. "I've been sleeping outside since I was seven!"

From:

iwillgetyou

"If there's somewhere to put your hammock, Dedicate Honey will find it," Mathilde assures her.

From:

cumulonimbus

"I don't want to have to sleep all shut up inside," says Stormy. "It's stuffy."

From:

iwillgetyou

"I'll make sure to tell Honey that."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Good."

From:

iwillgetyou

She smiles.

From:

cumulonimbus

Charlie's eventual return letter accepts Ranae's judgment on their child's education, and the trip to Winding Circle is undertaken.

From:

iwillgetyou

It's a week and a half from Firebird City to Summersea, and only another hour after that to Winding Circle. The temple is surrounded by thick stone walls, but the gates are open and the dedicates are friendly; a woman in Earth green rushes out to embrace Mathilde as they approach.

"Stormy, Ranae, this is Dedicate Honey," laughs Mathilde. "Honey, this is Ranae Swan and her daughter Bella, who likes to be known as Stormy. I wrote ahead about them; did you get my letter?"

"Oh, yes," says Honey, nodding. "I'm so pleased to meet you both. Come inside; I've found just the place to put you."

Edited Date: 2013-06-03 11:31 pm (UTC)

From:

cumulonimbus

"Do I get to sleep outside?" asks Stormy, following the dedicate.

From:

iwillgetyou

"You do!" says the dedicate.

From:

cumulonimbus

"Good. But also I need to have a place for my stuff that isn't outside because books aren't waterproof."

From:

iwillgetyou

"Much to my occasional regret," says Mathilde. Dedicate Honey giggles.

"Don't worry, you will," says the dedicate. "It's this way."

And she leads them to a little cottage, isolated from most of the other buildings and surrounded by gardens. There is a fence, but the corresponding gate is open; Dedicate Honey walks right past it and up the path toward the cottage door.

"Rook! Sedge!" she calls out. "Your new guest has arrived!"

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy bounces on her toes. It would probably be rude to taste the sky she will be living under right now, when there are people to meet.

From:

ignorable

A man in Air yellow emerges from the cottage.

"Glad to hear it," he says. "What's your name, little one? You may call me Sedge."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I'm named Isabella but I'd rather be called Stormy and if you have to call me something that's not Stormy Bella is better than Isabella."

From:

ignorable

"Pleased to meet you, Stormy. Why don't you bring your things inside?"

From:

cumulonimbus

"Okay." She goes and get the first of a few boxes - she has a lot of books, and notebooks.

From:

ignorable

Sedge shows her the room just to the left of the door where a few of the people living in the house keep this and that. There's plenty of space for her boxes.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy takes a few trips, and then she goes to look at the rest of the house.

From:

pythbox

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.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy peeps into that room.

From:

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.