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A minor celebrity has just arrived in Republic City.
He styles himself Delightful Jun, and if he has a last name, no one's ever managed to find it. Reports of his age vary, but you'll usually find it quoted between thirty-five and forty in recent years. His press interviews are rare, unscripted, occasionally contradictory, and inevitably surprising.
As for what he's famous for: he is a firebender, the producer and performer of a multimedia stage show that defies description. Delightful Jun's Palace of Fiery Delights combines music, lights, dancing, sleight of hand, a certain amount of acrobatics, flamboyant costumes, and of course, creatively applied and exquisitely controlled firebending. The show is never the same twice. Audience members are permitted and even encouraged to bring recording devices, but cautioned that if they do, they might be so busy getting it all on tape that they miss half the fun.
He has been known to remove all his clothes onstage; he has been known to take audience volunteers for various occasionally hazardous tricks; unsubstantiated rumours claim that he might have combined those two things, but no one's ever coughed up a video, so the rumours are generally discredited. He has been known to set off small explosives. He has been known to breathe rolling tongues of flame over the heads of the audience. When he booked an outdoor venue for six weeks in Chin Village, he concluded his final show by setting off a row of fireworks that wrote 'Delightful Jun' in the sky stroke by stroke. The headlines the next morning read, 'Delightful Jun Autographs Sky', and he cheerfully stole the turn of phrase for use in his own posters and advertisements.
One of his best-known signature moves is an elaborate, graceful bow ending in a sweep of his arms that gives him momentary wings of fire. It appears in countless photos, and it's how he ends his show every night for his first week in Republic City.
fiery-delights
roc_on
"Yeah, like - in both the case of air and the case of earth, if I don't do anything to them, they continue existing - the fire is taking advantage of existing but if it has nothing to catch on it will just dissipate -" She fire-punches again, paying close attention to that dissipation-tendency.
fiery-delights
"Yeah," nods Jun. "And you don't create air or earth. Or water. You're just moving around what's already there. If you consider firebending just in terms of the obvious, visible flame, it's very different from any of the other three that way."
roc_on
"Yeah, they all have their unique properties -" She tries again. "Although all the master practitioners argue for theirs having the most or the most important unique properties."
fiery-delights
"I usually leave this one until later," he says, "because it's the point at which my students tend to call me a crackpot and run away, but I think you can handle it. See if you can tell how the fire is going to spread before it leaves your body."
roc_on
Beila frowns, muses, sets up a punch, controls her winds - throws the punch, forms a prediction the instant before the fire goes at near-random -
fiery-delights
It turns out to be wrong.
"There is a way to tell," he says. "I do it every time I bend. You just have to pay attention. But it's hard to pick up at first, because the flow of energy is so much subtler beforehand."
"There is a way to tell," he says. "I do it every time I bend. You just have to pay attention. But it's hard to pick up at first, because the flow of energy is so much subtler beforehand."
roc_on
Beila repeats herself, noting successes and failures and partial cases of each, and what she predicated each guess on, trying both arms.
fiery-delights
It gradually becomes apparent that Jun is right - there is an extremely subtle sensation of energy in motion before the flame itself appears, and the character of that original flow predicts the character of the result. But just knowing it's there doesn't make it easy to read, or even easy to pick up on in the first place.
fiery-delights
"Yeah. Well, now you know. And you're going to have to get comfy with it if you want to learn how to bend lightning, at least from me. But you don't need to be reading it perfectly anytime soon."
roc_on
"I'd like to learn lightning, yeah. All the niche stuff - Shifu Riko couldn't teach me much about metal but my dad says when I've learned fire he'll put me in a police course on it."
fiery-delights
"In my utterly non-humble opinion, the industrials are way too casual about lightning," says Jun. "If I teach it to you, I'm going to do it properly."
fiery-delights
"Something else," he laughs. "I mean understand it the way I do, the way a firebender does - from the inside. Ideally, I don't even teach you how to throw your first bolt. I explain how it works, when you're at the point where you'd understand the explanation, and then you figure out how to adapt what you already know to create lightning instead of fire. It's much, much safer that way, because you're controlling it from the beginning, with full knowledge of what you're doing."
roc_on
"Interesting," says Beila. "You realize in my case there's some risk I will be remembering things - I have to learn most stuff from scratch, but there is a very real sense in which I've learned to toss lightning a few dozen times before, and I've made leaps that surprised past teachers a couple times. I'm not sure you can count on that setup to render me able to do it only when I have all the preliminaries - I don't plan to be irresponsible, but there's not as much built-in constraint on the order in which I learn things as there is with plain firebenders."
fiery-delights
He shrugs.
"And if you remember how to toss lightning before I'm ready to teach it to you, then it's up to you whether or not to try it early. But my advice is don't."
"And if you remember how to toss lightning before I'm ready to teach it to you, then it's up to you whether or not to try it early. But my advice is don't."
roc_on
"I just mean that I can't be like, 'Oh, I could do it now, therefore I must know what I'm doing with it', I'll have to actually talk it over with you first."
fiery-delights
"Yes," he says dryly. "That would be the plan. I don't want to teach you lightning until I'm sure you understand the element well enough to come up with it by yourself and I'm sure your control is good enough to handle it well from the start. That applies regardless of whether or not you come up with the technique independently while we're working on the foundations."