trans_9 | Bene Gesserits for Dummies

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Bene Gesserits for Dummies

The day after the Hannukah celebration, Katara had time to think about the last twenty four hours. The idea of a challenge, the training Sheeana was taking about, was still fresh in her mind. There was no avoiding it: she WANTED to be a Bene Gesserit, wanted to be trained well enough that she could move as the Mother did. She didn't know how enthusiastic she had seemed then, but she had even replaced one of her usual Yoga practices with trying to move a limb independent of all other: to no avail, sadly, but she was getting closer, she knew that well enough, but it wasn't enough for her to do the exercises, she wanted to know more about them too. So naturally, the Media library was the best place to go.

She made her way to the place and poured through the material, avoiding several interesting books about martial arts and looked up specific sisterhood paths. There were several interesting goddess ones she wanted to research later, and one called "Dianic Wicca" that would probably have bothered Sokka, but she was finally at the Bene Gesserit, and engrossed herself in her readings.

Thus spoke St. Alia-of-the-Knife: "The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness."

"Interesting," Katara said to herself aloud, reading on.

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"Heck, I wouldn't doubt it," Tess says brightly as she mulls it over. "It ain't the same way they taught us back home, but this kinda stuff, it ain't somethin' you can really learn the normal ways..." She lets out a little breath, and leans back against the wall, folding her arms up over her head. "Y'know, thinkin' 'bout it, I don't know much 'bout you, Katara."

"Definitely," Katara added. "I've had to start training already just to try and do what Sheeana was showing me the other day. Takes a lot of discipline to do it too."

The waterbender looked thoughtful. "Really? I usually wind up talking about myself first thing with people, just because it tends to get long. Now I sound conceited though." She grinned. "Waht do you want to know?"

"What d'you wanna talk about first?" Tess counters. "I ain't picky." One hand slides back against the helmet in an odd gesture; with the long hair she has, Katara is likely to recognize it as an odd half-adaptation of brushing hair back behind an ear, likely just an absent habit carried on from before she had the suit.

Katara shrugged, but she wasn't impassive about the subject, quite the opposite. In fact, she was quite eager to tell Tess about her world, starting with the Southern Water Tribe.

"Well, the thing to understand firstly is how the nations learned to bend. The Earthbenders learned from Badger moles, the Firenation from the dragons, nd the air nomads from the Sky Bison. Waterbenders are the only ones who didn't learn their bendeing from any animal: they learned from the moon. Watching how the moon managed the tides, the waterbenders learned the push and pull, and from there we became a people. Once I think we were all united, but then some benders started to break away from certain traditions, like women only being able to bend for healing and arranged marriages and things. So the Northern waterbenders kept their stupid chauvinist but honored traditions, and the other benders moved to the South pole to form the Southern water tribe, which had both male and female benders. Since then we've shrunk considerably...the Fire Nation saw to that."

There was a note of bitterness in her voice.

"Aw, heck," Tess says, frowning. Anger and sadness mix into her expression, with that same instant feeling and empathy that seem to come so easily to her. "That don't sound like it musta been very fun."

Katara shook her head. "It wasn't," she said, "Not any of it. Eventually the men in our village decided to join the Earth Kingdom in resisting the advances of the Fire Nation. So the people left in our village were the elderly, the young, my brother and me...the last Waterbender in the South Pole."

She sighed. "And because of that, I wound up playing mommy to my big brother for a while. Dad was gone, and mom wasn't around anymore to take care of us. That was all before we met Aang, of course."

"Nobody should have t'do that," Tess says, and edges a little closer to Katara, protectively. It isn't like how she usually is, with such a brightly childlike attitude despite being obviously older and more physically womanly than Katara is. "I got a bigger'n hell family, mam, gramma, great-gramma left a couple years ago, bless her soul, pap, grandpap, great-grandpap, aunts, uncles... Hell, y'get what I mean."

"I agree, it isn't something that should happen to anyone," Katara said, "But that's what war does. It displaces people, turns them against each other, all for the sake of getting more." She sighed. "But despite that, and everything about my world being gone, I've got to hope we can make a differences here, now, with the family we have here and all that they do."

She smiled at Tess. The closer contact felt comforting: it was something she would have done too. "So you have a lot of family? I'd like to hear about them, if you don't mind."

One of Tess' hands slides up to rub against her own shoulder absently, in a halfway-nervous habit. "Well, my ma..." She grins. "She's kinda like you, actually. Cares 'bout just 'bout everybody she meets. Got a big heart... she kinda don't really get sometimes why people act like they do," she adds, expression a little sheepish at saying that after having made the comparison and hoping no offense from it, "but, heck, she never got it through her head why I wanted t'be a grasshopper, and that didn't keep her from helpin' me with it."

Katara actually didn't mind being compared to someone else's mother: it reminded her that she still kept a part of her mother. "It's a little odd I remind you of someone's mother. I'm used to being underestimated because I'm young. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say not understanding people is something we share: I usually try to, though it hasn't always been the case."

Katara smiled a little. "I'm starting to get why you wanted to become one though. I never actually decided like you did, since it was more thrust on me, but I want to go, I know that."

"And my pa..." Tess purses her lips a little. "He ain't quite so acceptin', but ma keeps him in line. It's how he gets 'cause he's worried 'bout makin' sure that his family'n friends're all right, and I guess I can't really fault'm for that." She smiles. "I had t'work on him fer a while to get him to let me go out on my own."

"No, sometimes we have no control over what our parents think, or what they do. Half the time, they think they're acting in your best interest, only to find out that the children looked at it in a totally different way. Sometimes, I think parents and children don't see eye to eye, and it gets worse when we don't understand how the other is thinking."

But she was glad Tess became a grasshopper after all. Someone like Tess didn't seem like the type who wanted to only stay in one place for a long time.

"Every generation's different'n the last one," Tess says with a little nod. "Different tech, different attitudes..." She makes a little vague gesture, biting her lip for a moment in thought. "I'm from Amontadillo. There ain't many cities, but it's a pretty nice place... we try'n all keep pretty close-in and not mess too much with the scenery. My family were actually the first ones in, with my great-grampa. He learned a lot 'bout the first stuff t'do with riggin'." She makes an unclear, wiggly gesture with one hand. "A lot've the big tradin' routes fer the old worlds, he actually made some've them..."

"Yeah, I know," Katara said. She was fairly sure that what the waterbenders had to deal with in her lifetime was quiet different than what they had to deal with by the time she was older. The fear had subsided considerably, since no one had ever known that the Firebenders had been after every waterbender, or they would have stifled her bending as soon as they saw she had the ability.

Here though, Katara was interested, especially in histories she didn't know a lot about. " Could you tell me more about him, if you know anything?"

"Well, he was from Earth..." She makes a little wiggly gesture. "Everybody's from Earth if'n you go back then, though." The way she says it is as though it was some very long time ago, though that's only three generations difference. "He did truck drivin', just cargo stuff all around. Nothin' special, right?" She settles into a sly grin. "But that's when people started findin' out 'bout the jumpers."

"I keep hearing about that place, earth," Katara said. "I hope I get to visit it someday. It seems to be full of all of all of this history, and I hope I get to learn more about its diverse people."

Maybe if she wasn't a waterbender she might become an archeologist.

"What are jumpers?"

Tess taps her fingers together. "Somebody figured out how t'put together a jump-drive. Push the button, whoosh," and she gestures animatedly, "you're off over somewhere else. They were pretty big'n'ugly back then, but whoever it was that made it—we got no idea who put it together first–he gave it t'some other people, and they started showin' other people how to make it..."

Katara's eyes widened at this story. If she could, she would love to talk about this with Sokka and see if they couldn't find a way to see how something like that would work. She knew it would definitely be something he'd be interested in after the whole thing with the hot air balloons.

"Is that what started the grasshoppers?" Katara asked.

"Well, it wasn't so small then to make one've the boxes." Tess holds her hands about three feet apart. "And that was without any power fer it... But folks like Johnny, they figured all you'd need to do was put it in a truck. Then y'go up..." She makes a little 'whoosh' gesture upward. "Put a parachute in and y'can come down pretty soft if y'set it up right... Useta could that was th'only way 'round, but people've made better stuff. Grasshopperin's only 'bout... twenty years old, maybe? Longer if y'lookit the stuff that didn't really get that name yet but's kinda like it."

Tess' lips twist in a little thought. "I wish I could give you a lookit what it's like..."

"Well, there's always the Sensoriums," Katara said, "and the more I learn about your history, the more I'll start to understand about how it all works. Once, we were in an air temple which was, for my world, very technological, and they had to figure out their own way of flying too. One of my friends, he couldn't walk, but he was able to still sort of fly!"

Katara had even tried flying, and it was fun...until she got that bug in her mouth.

"Uh... I guess there is." Tess grins, thinking about it. "I ain't very good drivin' rigs, but I could probably do it well enough to show you..."

"That'd be so neat, although I don't know what a rig is," Katara admitted."But I'd still love to see what you could do!"

"Ahh... how 'bout I set somethin' up, and give you a tell once it's done?"

"That would be great!" Katara said, grinning. "I've actually been in the air before, mostly on a flying Bison. I'd love to know how it feels without a Bison or an air glider!"

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