Beila's tempted to mix it up and try to do a sine wave, but she sticks to the curriculum for the time being. Flat! Flat! Flat!

Jun nods approvingly.

When she has that, she puts it in three dimensions.

This wins her some light applause from her instructor.

"Okay, good shaping," he says. "You're picking it up quicker than I did, although that's less impressive than it sounds because I was inventing a lot of it from scratch and didn't have a teacher handy. Unfortunately, that was the easy part. The hard part is placement. You could shape wings just fine right now, but you'd still be throwing them as classical fire strikes, and not a lot of flying creatures have giant wings coming out of their hands and feet. So. Pick a movement, something that feels appropriate to producing wings with, something you won't mind practicing a lot in different variations. Don't try actually throwing wings with it yet, but try it, see how it feels, think about how you'd shape the wings to fit in the space around you. I do my wings like this," he gives his signature sweeping bow with flaring wings of flame, "but almost purely for showmanship, there's nothing inherent in the movement that makes fire like to do wings with it, and you might feel like picking something else."

"...How bad an idea would it be to combine this with actually flying?"

"I wouldn't recommend it to start with," he says. "I'm pretty confident that you can make it work once you've got the wings part going, but we've already seen that combining air and fire can lead to unpredictable results. If you want to pick a movement that's flying-compatible, though, go for it."

"Yeah, I was thinking -" She spreads her arms wide, like she's just let go of her glider or jumped off her roc.

"Looks good to me," he says. "So practice that a few times, don't try to firebend with it, but pay attention like you're trying to read the energy flow in a strike you're throwing. See if you pick anything up, fire-wise - any sense of how the element reacts to what you're doing. You might not, for a while, and if you get frustrated I have a few tricks to try to get at that skill a different way, but first let's see if you need them or not."

Arm spread. Arm spread. ...Flap. Flap.

Jun waits. He seems charmed by the flapping.

"There does not seem to be any fire to react to me flapping my arms," Beila observes.

"I've heard of people doing all kinds of bending with any movement. I wonder if I could learn what any element thinks of all the ways I can move. ...I wonder if Shifu Riko has anything to say about that, come to think of it, she likes to talk about listening to the earth. Anyway. Let's give this another few flaps..." Flap flap flap flap flap.

"I encourage you to go talk to her and see if she has anything to contribute. In my experience with firebending, any-movement bending can come from either an intuitive or a conscious understanding of what you're doing with the element, and the conscious kind is easier to explain and easier to design deliberately. I've never talked to benders from other disciplines to see if they've noticed the same thing. Come to think of it, you seem to do intuitive any-movement airbending pretty much constantly. That's... probably going to either help or hinder you learning the conscious kind with fire, but I'm not sure which."

"The air isn't forming its own opinions. It's supporting me," Beila says. "My body sort of does what I tell it, but with a lot of noise added. The air cancels the noise."

Jun shrugs. "I like to talk about fire as though it has opinions, but you might find you understand it better a different way. Or maybe you just don't have a conscious sense of the way air's energy reacts to how you move, or maybe air and fire work differently in that sense. I could tell you if I was an airbender, but unfortunately nobody seems to have invented a magic charm to grant dual bending. Anyway, if I could have my pick of second elements I'd want water. Healing."

"Healing's great. Hmmm. Fire can't support my movements - I mean, that would be a disaster if it tried - but do you think I could get anything out of having it follow them? Trailing off my arm like a fringe?"

"Interesting idea," he says. "Coming at it from the production angle first instead of the sensing angle. I could definitely see that being easier than trying to get arbitrary fire out of arbitrary movements. It might help, it might get you nowhere, it probably won't actively set you back. Try it and see."

"I think I can sense it while it's following me, yeah," she nods, waving her arm again and getting fluttery streamers of fire chasing it. "What with it being there." She flaps her arms as she was doing before, trailing fire from each.

"Sensing it while it isn't there is how you get the generally applicable ability to decide you want to make a certain kind of fire with a certain movement and then immediately figure out how to do it," he says. "Otherwise known as how I invented half my repertoire. But the silhouette trick is a clever way around the hard part, and I bet you can get pretty far with it. Try seeing how the fire follows you naturally, and seeing how you can vary the shape, and pay attention to how the energy feels both ways."

Flap. The trail lengthens. Flap. It shortens. Flap. It's ragged-edged, long in places and short in others. Flap. It smears, lengthening as she moves her arm rather than moving wholesale.

Jun watches this progression thoughtfully and with a certain amount of pride. Beila is such a great student. He's glad Shifu Riko introduced them.

Flap. She lets it hug her arm a little closer, not touching, and extends her fingers; she forms a wide wing shape, with featherlike protrusions extending from her hand.

"Nice," says Jun.

"Wheeeee," she says, twirling; the wings follow her like she's wearing them attached to invisible sleeves.

Jun laughs and applauds again.

"What next?"

"I've got a mirror at home. I can take it outside someplace good for fire practice. I feel like the obvious thing to do with fire-following is to run through katas, not bending anything else, just going through the forms? I could also go dancing but I might alarm someone at a dance place."

"It takes a pretty big mirror to see the big stuff like wings clearly enough, but you can use it to watch the smaller stuff, yeah, good thinking. Unless you have a wall-sized mirror at home which you can conveniently haul out to the beach for some firebending practice, I guess I shouldn't assume. Katas are a fine idea, not alarming your fellow dancers is very kind of you, it is as always a pleasure to teach someone who is both clever and methodical."

"I can detach my closet door if I get my dad to bend the tracks it slides on aside. It's big. I'm imagining doing some enormous combination dance thing with all four elements, now."

"Well, you know your closet door better than I do. Stick to doing things you can see clearly in it and you should be fine. As for enormous combination dances, I will happily help you choreograph one. I don't fear the competition."

"I don't know if I'm cut out for the performance lifestyle, but it'd be an interesting exercise. Maybe go up on a wind funnel, fire following me around, and bend water and sand around in parallel."

"Good aesthetics," he says, nodding. "If you wanted thematics I'd suggest sticking to rock for the earth aspect, or waiting until you can do lightning and including lightning and metal for a more modern composition. If you wanted thrill factor I'd suggest lava."

"Oooh, lava. Well, nothing says I have to stick to one of these patterns."

"The performance lifestyle might not suit you, but I think the challenge of crafting a performance might."

"Yeah. Pity I can't pass them on entire to actual performers. Unless you want to coordinate with three other people."

"Find me an earthbender, an airbender, and a waterbender who're interested, and I'll work with them. Why not?"

"Cool."

"Anyway, we're just about out of officially planned lesson time, although you could probably squeeze in a little more fire-following practice without making yourself late to anything. Up to you."

She does a fire kata across the room, with fire following her but not emitting from her strikes.

"I'm definitely stealing that trick."

"Get me a ticket. Two."

"Absolutely."

Beila takes a bow, looking rather like an Avatar-shaped campfire, and then trots out of the practice room.

As she leaves, Jun is beginning to experiment with fire-following.

That evening, she has a date with Dao - hiking to some deserted wilderness out in the country courtesy of Liqing, looking at the stars, toasting toastable foods, and experimenting with toasting each other, because she's pretty sure she has the control now for that to be safe to play with even while highly distracted.

When she arrives to pick him up, he's sitting out front of his apartment, to one side of the door, so absorbed in his (apparently unsettling) thoughts that he actually manages to miss her arrival, roc and all.

"I found some pretty good deserted wilderness." She takes his head and pulls him birdward and wafts them up. "There's almost no light pollution, or at least there won't be until I set something on fire to fix dinner."

"My finest quality." She whistles at Liqing and Liqing takes off.

"No way. Your finest quality is definitely something else. Like maybe how cute you are, or how smart, or how good at catching snakenewts."

"Maybe a bunch of things tie with my convenience."

"Your convenience is pretty great..."

"Though I do come with inconvenient media attention."

"I've been keeping up to date on my weird animal trivia, just in case that one guy comes back. And it's all your fault." Extra hugsqueeze, to emphasize that he is kidding around in case tone of voice and context didn't carry it.

Giggle. "What's your most recent weird animal trivia?"

"Ooh. How about: Ever since that one Earth King with a pet bear in Avatar Aang's time, there have been periodic bear sightings all over the Earth Kingdom, but nobody's ever verified one as definitely not a platypus bear or gopher bear or whatever, and the origin of Bosco the Bear is a mystery to this day?"

"I think the most plausible theory is that Bosco was some sort of awkward crossbreed."

"I'm not sure about that, and neither are some of the experts! I mean you'd expect him to be weird somehow if he was an awkward crossbreed, like he'd have anatomical problems or something, or even just have some features that weren't strictly bearish from one of his parents, but they've got his skeleton in a museum and he's surprisingly well put together, it really looks like somebody did some kind of cosmic math and factored out the 'bear' part from platypus bears and skunk bears and gopher bears and armadillo bears and lynx bears and hyena bears and so on. I've seen the pictures."

"If you think about it, it's a little weird that there's so much convergent evolution in the first place."

"I guess. Weird animal trivia aside, I don't actually know that much about biology."

"Are there any more weird things like 'bears' that you have encountered in your trivia hunting?"

"Yeah, there's a bunch of - I forget the real biology word, I just think of them as factored-out. Cats, hawks, spiders - there's polar bears at the south pole, but they're different from bears like Bosco, I don't think there are any regular animals that have a plain-bear and a polar-bear kind, like there's polar bear dogs but no bear dogs and lynx bears but no polar lynx bears. But Bosco was a one-off as far as anybody can tell, and cats and hawks and spiders and polar bears are all real established species."

"What kind of spiders? There's lots of kinds of spiders. I saw one yesterday with a dragonfly butt."

"I dunno. It's hard to describe what kind of thing a factored-out creature is. Like, it's not a spider snake or a spider wasp or a - a dragonfly spider, I guess, or a goat spider or a monkey spider or a spider cat or a spider rat or a spiderfly. Actually there's a whole bunch of different kinds of factored-out spider, apparently, but I didn't read about them all because the pictures of Bosco's skeleton were way cooler."

"Oh, spirits, spider wasps, I hate spider wasps. Dangerous at both ends."

"Boo! The dragonfly spider was easy to catch and take outside. Ranyi doesn't like to kill bugs if she isn't startled when she finds them."

"Yeah, I try not to kill bugs much either."

"I kill spider wasps. I won't kill a monkey spider. Depends on what the pest is."

"I guess, yeah."

"Are you all right?"

"My weird problems again. Talk about it when we're, like, on the ground?" he says/suggests/asks.

"Okay. Five more minutes. Unless there's traffic."

He giggles softly.

In five more minutes, Liqing lands, Beila feeds her a roc treat, and she leads the way up the hiking trail.

Dao does not immediately begin discussing his weird problems. Well, the hiking does take some attention. And the wilderness is very pretty.

"...That's a pretty awesome trick," says Dao.

"Jun's gonna steal it!"

"Ooh."

"He'll give us tickets for when he's incorporated it."

"Ooh. Not only do I have the best girlfriend, I also have the best secret celebrity affair."

Giggle.

"I know, right, this is like the best hill. I'm supposed to meditate on it, but also, hiking trail."

"It's a great hill. I'm a fan."

"I thought you were my boyfriend."

...Snort.

"Sense of humour, that is going on the list of things that are great about you."

"But is it more or less important than my convenience?"

"Good question. Hard to decide."

"The traits are going to have to go into a sudden death round."

Snrk.

"Anyway." She holds his hand. "What's on your mind, Dao?"

"I heard on the news that they found some missing guy with like all of his bones removed, and I'm having weird complicated feelings about it?"

"There was a similar graverobbing incident in Hirakyo. Chali thinks it might be the same person, escalating."

"Well, that's even creepier."

"Yeah. Because the modus operandi kind of screams 'serial killer'. But they're looking for him and there's millions of people in Republic City, so I wouldn't worry too much about it."

"I mean, yeah, but - 'what if that happened to me' is only half the story and it's not even the most upsetting half. The most upsetting half is 'what if I did that'."

"What do you mean?"

"Like... I can think about it, and - I can see why somebody might feel like tearing somebody's bones out? In an 'I kind of want to try it' way? And I—I don't—I don't want to be a serial killer, but like. It really seems like I could, if I just stopped caring that most people don't want to be horribly murdered. And that's creepy and upsetting."

"Aaaare you likely to stop caring that most people don't want to be horribly murdered?"

"I sure hope not! But how would you even tell a thing like that?"

"I think most people with obvious deficits like 'do not care that most people don't want to be horribly murdered' would show signs of that before your age. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but I don't believe you can just come down with sociopathy the way you can come down with a cold."

"Well, no, but... I don't think I understand, is there more to it?"

"...Can you rephrase that?"

"It's hard! I don't really know how to say it. Like. It's either stupid made-up examples about eating too much candy that aren't even really the thing I'm talking about, or examples about my weird problems that we already know you don't understand."

"I mean... there are things I have slow down and remind myself I don't want. I don't want to, say, violently take over the world, because that would be dangerous and there would be casualties and even if I pulled it off it would probably be hard to hire good help after a stunt like that. That doesn't mean I never think about taking over the world, it means I, like, pause, and go, 'the actual details of this would be unpalatable'."

"I have like... the exact opposite of that problem? Also, wait, you want to take over the world?"

"I just explained that I don't want to take over the world! It would be a huge mess. But every now and then I read the news and I'm like 'I could fix this if I had more than vague symbolic power over involved parties!'."

"Okay, so you don't want to take over the world, you just want to have already taken over the world. Well, I don't want to go around ripping people's bones out for the results, the results are a bunch of murdered people with their bones missing, that's exactly what I don't want. It's the, like," he blushes, "process."

"So you want, like, virtual reality?"

"Maybe. Um. It would have to be pretty good virtual reality, I think."

"Well, in the extremely high resolution actual reality, after we have dinner we can mess with the cinders. ...Is the problem that if you had nobody who wanted cinders put on them you might start stealing people's bones, is that what's got you upset?"

"I mean, no? I don't know? I hope not? Before you came along and were all convenient at me I sort of... didn't really even think that would ever be a thing that could possibly happen. And I wasn't stealing anybody's bones then."

"But you're worried anyway."

"I'm worried because I don't think most people have to deal with thinking about stealing people's bones, like, at all, and I don't know what would have to happen before it'd start looking like a good idea, and - I wish I didn't have to deal with this stuff! I wish my first thought when somebody starts ripping people's bones out wasn't 'man, I wanna see that'!"

Beila squeezes his hand. "I'm sorry."

He sighs. "Thanks."

"You could, like, get a therapist, if this is majorly upsetting you?"

"I don't wanna talk to a therapist about my murder problems. Especially not when there is an actual murderer around? Like if they think you're a danger to people they have to tell the cops, right? So now is a really bad time to be telling a professional that I think about ripping people's bones out."

"I think they're capable of distinguishing people who can distinguish fantasy and reality? But I get it if you don't want to trust that. And the timing is kind of awkward, fair."

"I really do not want to trust that. Like. I don't want to start stealing anybody's bones but I think I even less than that want to go to jail for stealing people's bones when I didn't do it and the actual bone-stealing guy is still out there somewhere probably going to steal more bones."

"Yeah. After they catch him, maybe."

"Maybe," he sighs.

Handsqueeze.

Tiny smile.

Hiking, hiking.

Such pretty wilderness.

So pretty!

"So pretty." She puts her head on his shoulder.

"I am. It is true."

Giggle.

"You are very lucky to have me." Nuzzle. "Fortunately, you are skilled in the art of showering me with one hundred percent accurate compliments."

"Yep." Snuggle. "Such as: you're great."

Giggle.

"And cute! And smart! And funny!"

Kiss.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Kisses!

And when they've had their fill of stars, Beila gathers some branches and arranges them, earthbends a firebreak, and sets the wood alight.

"So convenient," says Dao.

"Utility bending for fun and not having to actually pick up rocks or light matches: that's what being the Avatar is all about."

"And building bridges across the ocean."

"I'll get there. The nuns think I might need the Avatar State for it not to take months, though, and they're pretty sure I can't master it until I've been in it at least once, and I haven't been fight-or-flight enough for it to sneak up on me."

"I mean, that's kind of a good problem to have, isn't it?"

"Sort of. I mean, the fact that I didn't master it at age twelve already puts me firmly below Aang on the list of prodigy Avatars so it's not like I have to push to make the record or something. I wish I'd tried bending other things as a kid but I was never a precocious enough airbender to strongly suspect it. I mean, I was fine, but in retrospect I must have been constantly distracted just keeping myself upright, and I don't think any of my predecessors already learned that for me."

"Yeah, that seems like a really specific problem that you have."

"It is a really specific problem that I have! But I should've tried to bend some water at least once. Practiced very quietly, got a jump on things."

"Really? Like... I dunno, I guess I think being the Avatar is already cool enough and you don't need to scrounge up extra cool points by figuring it out before they tell you and doing a bunch of stuff younger than Aang."

"It's not that I wanted to do stuff younger than Aang. That was really a joke. But... I don't like that I was actually ignorant of the fact until I was sixteen, and that I didn't allocate my time the way I would have if I'd known more."

"That makes sense. I kind of get why they don't tell people earlier, though. Maybe all the people who are the Avatar are also the kind of people who are really responsible and stuff as kids, but maybe not, and it'd be tough on whoever had to say 'yes, you're the Avatar, but no, the spirits didn't tell you that your dad should buy you more candy'. You know? And if I'd - like, assuming it were even possible, which it's not, but, if I'd found out I was the Avatar when I was a kid I would've gone crazy over it way before I turned sixteen. I mean I'd probably still go a little crazy over it now, but, 'hey, the person whose job it is to deal with all the most weird and terrible stuff in the world like angry spirits and huge wars and things, that's you' - I feel like that's the kind of thing that a lot of people would rather find out when they're sixteen than nine."

"Yes. But I would have liked to know when I was little, like Korra! And I didn't even try. So I'm kicking myself."

"Well, okay. I'm not gonna stop you."

"Although that's another thing, the huge-wars-and-stuff - there haven't been any huge wars since I was named, but if there were, it's actually really ambiguous what I'm authorized to do. Not only on the level of 'will somebody try to kill me if I go encase all their soldiers in ice to make them stop doing whatever they're doing', but on the level of 'is it, in fact, legal within the scope of international law for me to intervene there, or would somebody be technically obligated to arrest me for it, or what'. The test cases for the last few Avatars always wound up getting resolved in ways that didn't set firm precedents."

"...That's... well... I sort of get that but I sort of don't. Because nobody thinks their country is going to be the one that needs the Avatar to hit it with a rolled-up newspaper, and if they do, it might be because they're planning something terrible and don't want the Avatar to stop them. And it would be kind of bad if the Avatar, like, actually went and took over the world. But then when stuff happens like somebody else trying to take over the world and the Avatar stopping them, you'd think the people who were coming up with the international laws would be like 'yeah, that's a thing that happens, we should decide what that means for us'. Like you shouldn't be allowed to take over the world but you also shouldn't get arrested for stopping somebody else from doing it."

"In practice probably no one is going to arrest me if I'm out fighting the good fight. In terms of what legitimate authorities I am not actually assailing at that moment are likely to do, I can play vigilante hero to my heart's content as long as there are targets I can justify in the court of public opinion. But it's peculiar to have so little actual legislation down about it."

"Yeah."

The fire is burning pretty merrily. Beila starts putting together dinner above it.

Hooray! Food!

Dao smiles. But - kind of nervously.

"Are you all right?"

"...maybe? Um. We had - plans. And I think I am... not okay with myself enough right now. For the plans."

"Okay." Flop. "No rush. ...You'll let me know if there's things I can do about the you being okay with yourself?"

"Yeah. If there's things."

"I could put the fire out, we could adjust to the dark again, see if the stars have been arranging themselves into rude messages while they thought we weren't looking."

Dao giggles. "That sounds great."

"I'll catch them one of these days."

"I believe in you!"

"Your confidence will spur me on to victory."

"I feel so helpful!"

"You should be so proud of yourself."

"I am, I am."