trans_9 | Paper Cranes [open]

It was just for practice, and also something to distract himself and pass the time. It was almost meditative, after all.

Not that he was feeling as sad anymore. Life happened, there were hurts that were just part of it all. He was human so he could feel them and understand them, so he could know heartbreak just as well as love, calm just as well as anger, sadness just as well as happiness. He was human so he'd make choices he wasn't sure were right that he had to live with, so he could be hurt and wonder if it was right to feel that way.

Aang had come to accept that, so now he was just distracting himself. He'd managed to find paper--real paper--from Weapons and Possessions. It was rice paper, in a wide variety of colors, and he sitting against Appa in his Sensorium and folding it into a wide variety of animals.

Some were pretty good, depending on how long he'd actually bothered to practice doing that kind of animals. Others...well they were almost recognizably animals.

"What do you think, Appa? What does it look like to you?"

Appa grunted a long groaning sound, and Aang scratched his head.

"Actually, it's supposed to be a bison like you, not a boarcupine. But I guess it's a boarcupine now!"

He smiled and placed it down with the others and picked up his birds (most of them cranes) and started making them dance in the air over his head, which was the real point of all this. Airbending practice. Fine control was something he could always use work on and making the little paper birds fly overheard was fun.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"What kind of bending is heart? How would you heartbend? Wouldn't that hurt?"

Aang swept his hand and a few pieces fluttered over to Howard.

Edited 2011-04-01 05:59 (UTC)

"It kinda sounds like it would, wouldn't it? I'd rather my heart stay in one place, doing its own job." He picks up the paper and examines it. He probably has some more similar paper back at the salvage. "Where'd you find this?"

"Weapons and Possessions. Stacy doesn't mind sometimes if you take odds and ends, and next time there's a shore leave, I'm going to get new paper to replace it for whoever it belonged to."

It wasn't right to take people's things, but if they'd never know and they'd have them replaced, it wasn't really taking them, was it?

Howard raises both eyebrows at that. Someone who's going to replace odds and ends? Seems like this guy has a particularly squeaky - or naive - set of morals.

"You really think someone's going to post wanted ads over some missing rice paper?"

"Nope. I just think if it was my stuff, and I woke up, I'd want all my stuff to be there." A pause. "Not that I have much stuff to begin with. I'm a monk. We don't keep many material objects."

Edited 2011-04-04 05:23 (UTC)

"But most people don't know what of their stuff is there. They'd never miss it." Whoa, a monk? That's a new one. "Just a glider and a six-legged yak, right?"

"They might!" On that off-chance, he wanted it to be there. "Appa's not a possession, silly, he's my friend! But mostly, that is all I have. Besides that, it's just my bison whistle to call Appa from a distance, and three different pairs of shoes, but that's so I always have the right ones to fight in. Oh, and I have a flute, because I like playing music sometimes, and I used to have a bag of marbles to do Airbending tricks with, but I lost those."

Those were all his earthly belongings. That was it.

"Sometimes I even have a hat if I find a good one, but I lose those all the time or give them away if I think someone else needs a hat."

Okay. Monks are crazy. Also almost upsettingly chipper. And Howard hasn't been called 'silly' since he was about six years old.

"Seriously? All Spacey Stacy gave me was a handful of gold bullets from back home." He pulls one out and taps it against his front teeth absentmindedly. "No offense, dude, but you seem like the kind of guy who needs a hat more."

Bullets went in guns. Aang wasn't a fan.

"Nah, I don't ever get cold. I can change the air temperature around me to something comfortable, and then I don't need a hat. I only used to use one sometimes to hide my tattoos so people didn't recognize me."

Edited 2011-04-05 06:08 (UTC)

Howard senses a certain reticence. "We don't use the bullets to shoot," he clarifies. "We just didn't have any other mold to put the metal in. We use them to get food. Monks don't do money, right?"

They probably just have an infinite store of resources to just hand out to people. Howard's lip twitches slightly, possibly imperceptibly. He's jealous of the perceived ease at getting basic necessities. But he shifts quickly back into his more conversational mood.

"You have a problem with fame?"

"We had to deal with money, sometimes, but mostly we made and grew everything we needed, and traded and sold things to get what we couldn't make and grow. there was a big business in selling fruit pies--only Airbenders have the recipe and the fruit only grew on our mountains."

Less an infinite store of resources, more being self-sufficient and remarkably business-savvy when they needed to be. (Though of course, they'd give plenty away in times of famine or need).

"And it was less fame and more...infamy. Not that I'd really done anything bad, but there were people that wanted to lock me up until I got old and died."

Howard tries not to look hungry at the thought of fruit pies. It's been several months since he arrived on Stacy, several months with food available whenever, and the instincts drilled into him by famine are still strong. "Sounds special. You want to call one of them up now?"

"That sucks." Howard studies Aang with a neutral expression. "Why?"

"Sure!"

And there was a fruit pie on a plate in front of Howard, including plates for each of them and such. Funny that he called it a pie, but it was more like a cake than anything, with a gooey fruit center.

Aang sliced a piece for Howard and then for himself. There were no forks, but apparently the right way to eat a fruit pie was to crumble pieces off and dip them into the gooey fruit part.

"And id cause I'm the Abatar," Aang said around his chewing. He swallowed. "As the Avatar, my job is to keep balance between the Four Nations. The Fire Nation was at war with the rest of the world, and they wanted to imprison me to keep me from ending the war."

Howards eats his quickly and in big bites, forcibly reminding himself to slow down and not just tear into it. Even nourished here on Stacy, it's difficult to shake that feeling that you never know when your next meal will be or when someone's going to come take what's left on your plate from you. It's difficult to shake the feeling that it's never enough. Especially when, since it's Sensorium food, you know you're not full.

"Thid id prek good," he says around a large mouthful, then swallows hard. "So you'd have ended the war not in their favor. How?"

"By not letting them conquer the entire world," Aang said. "The Firelord's plan was to kill all the people in the Earth Kingdom and then have the Fire Nation occupy it."

Aang took another bite of his fruit pie.

"Alla dem. Not eben jus' the capital, to try to take dowd the kingdumb. He wanded to kill ebybody."

Genocide. Again.

Aang swallowed.

"I stopped it and now his oldest son is the Firelord, and he's a much more compassionate ruler. Or...well, he was. Before we ended up here."

"Oh. Well. That sounds like a totally reasonable and not at all ambitiously stupid plan of theirs." Howard says before taking another large bite. "So how long ago was that?"

Paper Cranes [open]

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