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:

neverbeatme

"Okay."

Elyth finds a wicker chair just inside the cottage's little gate, in the sun, and sits in it with her book.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy decides to leave her be and go looking for whichever of Rook or Sedge is easiest to find.

From:

ignorable

Sedge is in the kitchen with Mercy, having apparently finished washing the dishes. They are talking, in some language or combination of languages that isn't Imperial.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy tilts her head and listens curiously, waiting to be acknowledged.

From:

ignorable

"Hello, Stormy," says Sedge, as soon as he sees her.

From:

whipstitch

Mercy waves.

From:

cumulonimbus

"Hi. Uum, something Elyth said made me think maybe you didn't realize it's probably magic when I check out a sky? Apparently you're supposed to do magic circles for some kinds of things?"

From:

ignorable

"We do magic circles when it's important to keep magic contained. Sometimes that's because someone's doing magic and they might leak some. Rook can see magic; if you show him what you do when you check out a sky, he'll know if it's leaky or not."

From:

cumulonimbus

"Okay, I can go show him. Where is he?"

From:

ignorable

Sedge points at the back door. "Watering his trees, last I checked."

From:

cumulonimbus

Out Stormy goes to where the tiny trees are.

From:

nonbird

Rook is watering the tiny trees! He is using a normal-sized watering can, however.

From:

cumulonimbus

"Earlier I asked Sedge if I could check out the sky and he said I could so I did but then Elyth said something that made me wonder if I'm going to have to do that in a magic circle from now on and Sedge said you would be able to tell."

From:

nonbird

"Well, what does checking out the sky look like? Show me and we'll see," he says, putting down his watering can.

From:

cumulonimbus

"Okay. Usually I flop in my hammock but I don't have to, as long as I'm outside." She sits. "I won't stay long," she says conscientiously, and up she flings.

From:

nonbird

Rook observes this. She is quite surprisingly un-leaky, for someone so completely untutored... but unfortunately that doesn't mean she isn't leaking at all.

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy races around the sky, soaking up sun and twisting herself along the paths of winds, and then she dives back down and opens her eyes.

From:

nonbird

"You don't leak very much," he says, "but you do leak some. Until you learn how to meditate properly, I think it would be a good idea for us to make a circle around you while you're being the sky, to stop the leaking from going all over the place. But it's not as important as making a circle around all the students when they're learning to meditate together, so if we can't make a circle that stops the leaking but still lets you check out the sky, it'll be okay if you still check out the sky anyway as long as you do it out here by Discipline and not near the Hub or anywhere else magically sensitive."

From:

cumulonimbus

"What does the leaking do?"

From:

nonbird

"A lot of the same kinds of things that leaking, say, water might do. But magically. There are things, like paper, that if you get them wet they can be damaged or ruined; similarly, there's some kinds of magical things that are sensitive to leaked magic, and if they get too much on them they go wrong or stop working. And it's your magical power that you're leaking, so if you didn't leak, you'd have more of it to use for the things you want to do."

From:

cumulonimbus

"I've never run out before. I guess maybe I'll be learning more things to do with it though."

From:

nonbird

"That's the general idea!"

From:

cumulonimbus

Stormy smiles. "Is it a lot of trouble to make a circle? Can we see now if I can still go up when I'm in one? How often can I get one to be in?"

From:

nonbird

"It's not very much trouble at all. If you usually go up from your hammock, then it might be a good idea to get Sedge to make a circle under your hammock, because he can open and close his circles very easily once he's made them and they stay made even while they're open. When I make mine I have to pour circles of powdered plants on the ground and it is generally less convenient. So first let's see if Sedge can make a circle that lets you go up."