You purse your lips in thought before nodding to yourself. "Aang, Mukk, how would you two feel about working together?"
Aang blinks, looking from you to Mukk. "You think I should learn mudbending like him? I was thinking about it, but-"
"I could teach 'im, but if I was you guys I wouldn't choose me as a teacher. Only I can mudbend, but I'm also real bad at bending normal water. Maybe y'shouldn't go with me."
You kneel down to get to his eye level, cocking your head and grinning in a way you hope thoroughly hides the majority of your emotions. "Kid, don't talk yourself down. Avatars have been learning boring old waterbending for a bazillion years, you're the one who'll give Aang an edge nobody else has seen. Plus, if you ask me, using water to let yourself bend earth is pretty amazing, and I'd love to see more of it."
In reality, your confidence is half a front. You grasped desperately at the first opportunity to distract from what happened with you in the swamp, and you're beginning to realize that as strange as it feels to be in the position of a leader, it also feels pretty darn nice all things considered. Secondly, you'd really like to have Mukk on your side, if not as a traveling companion, and it can't help to butter him up a little. You're no master manipulator, but he's a little kid- it shouldn't be too hard to get on his good side.
Sure enough, he grumbles through a barely-hidden smile at your compliment. "S'allright. I'll teach Aang if he wants."
Aang, apparently noticing Mukk's growing enthusiasm, nods vigorously. "Yeah! I'd love to learn from you! Welcome to the team!"
Eagerly, he sticks out his hand to shake, the same stiff handshake he offered you. Mukk looks at it like an alien, before eventually picking up on (more-or-less) what he's supposed to do and clasping his fingers tight with Aang's. "Thanks."
Huu smiles. "I'm mighty glad to see everything going so well so far with all of you. Would've been a shame if the Avatar and his friends hadn't gotten along with us for some reason."
Kakaze gives him a wry grin. "Don't count your eggs before they hatch, old man. We've got plenty time to become enemies yet."
You raise an eyebrow, and catch Aang doing the same. Huu's chuckling response suggests that he read the comment as dry sarcasm, but it was so dry and deadpan delivered that for a moment you couldn't be sure if Kakaze had been being serious.
"Well," Aang interjects, interrupting the silence, "we should probably go meet the rest of the people who live here, right?"
Huu nods. "I'll be staying here, but Mukk knows the way."
He barely moves at all, merely glancing up at the canopy and shifting his weight, but somehow that's enough for him to move dozens if not hundreds of vines, giving Appa a clear shot into the sky.
"So that's what enlightenment does for you," muses Kakaze.
"T's not as big a deal as some people make it out to be. I just hung out around this tree a while."
Kakaze grins again, this one a bit less bitter than the last. "If it's really that easy, maybe I'll join you some day. But I don't know if enlightenment's the way for me. I'm more of an action man- I just hope we make a world where my kids have the time and freedom to make that choice."
Huu nods. "You can always make the choice to change your path, but you sure sound pretty sure in yours. But if you ever do change your mind on that, come on back here. I'll be under this tree for a few more years yet."
You pull yourself up onto Appa's back. "Thanks for the help, Huu. At the very least, we'll fly by before we leave the swamp."
"Least I can do for the Avatar himself, even if his friends are a bit lackin' in the respect for the swamp."
You and Kakaze both nervously look askance. "Sorry again."
"Yeah, that was my bad. Won't happen again."
Kakaze mounts Appa, followed by Aang and eventually an unsteady Mukk.
"Everybody's nervous the first time. Appa's shockingly easy to ride with, as it turns out."
"That so?"
"That's so."
Aang waves to Huu as he picks up the reigns. "Thanks again for all the help! And for all the stuff you explained!"
Huu lazily waves back, a satisfied smile on his face. "You too. I'll be keeping an "eye" on you four as long as you're in the swamp."
You and Kakaze also wave as, with a "yip yip," Appa rises into the air and flies out away from the trunk of the tree. Just as before, the impossible breadth of the Banyan Grove Tree's canopy defies belief, taking Appa longer than a minute just to escape its branches and begin flying over the rest of the swamp.
"So, Aang, you said that this whole swamp was one living thing- was that just a metaphor, like the swamp bringing things together, or-"
"Well," Aang starts, "I don't think any of that was just a metaphor, but the swamp thing definitely isn't."
"Nope," Mukk interrupts, "this whole swamp's just one big ol' plant. All the rest'a the trees sprout up directly from the Great Banyan Grove Tree's roots."
You gape as you look out in all directions, the horizon green wherever you look. "Kakaze, can I see the map?"
Barely acknowledging you, Kakaze hands you the rolled scroll, which you unfurl, swiftly using your fingers to measure the size of the swamp, before comparing it to the map's key.
"About a thousand kilometers to an edge or more… all one creature, as big as an entire country- It must weight…" you struggle to remember large numbers from math class, which until now had been only trivia. "Hundred, thousand, million, billion, uh- trillions of tonnes. Or more."
Aang glances back at you curiously. "I guess that's a lot, but you sure do sound excited."
You peek off the edge, staring down at the swamp flying by beneath you. "How could you not be? This is beyond amazing."
"Yup. Sure is crazy. Aang, turn thataway."
Mukk directs Appa to make a gentle turn, banking and beginning to descend. "If y' look close, y'can already see the town through the leaves."
Sure enough, if you squint, you can make out the flickering firelight of human civilization past the canopy. As Appa anxiously approaches the omnipresent tangle of vines, they supernaturally spread themselves for you, allowing Appa to comfortably land in the midst of what, sure enough, is a small but seemingly bustling town, cabins of wood on all sides.
Immediately, you're thronged by swamp-dwellers, similarly underdressed to Huu and Mukk, all curiously crowding around Appa. Suddenly, they grow unsteady on their feet as Mukk raises his hand, unbalancing the mud underneath them. "Ev'rybody quiet! This here's Avatar Aang, and I'm gonna be teachin' him mudbendin'."
At the mention of the A-word, people shut up, as they generally are wont to do when hearing it.
"The other two are his friends, they're here too. Big fella's his bison, Appa, and he ain't for eatin'."
Appa snorts and Aang's eyes bulge. "You had to clarify that?"
A few hours later, you're settled and the specifics have been worked out. There's no free homes, but you can camp out in partially build ones for shelter (as you and Kakaze choose to) or sleep in the homes of one of the swamp dwellers (as Aang chooses to).
Aang will spend most days training with Mukk, and Kakaze, idle as he is, plans to watch them most of the time. You, on the other hand, learn that Kakaze was wrong about the sulfur thing, and that as long as you don't blast flames at the ground willy-nilly, will be fine and explosion-free, so you plan to spend the better part of your time here training your own firebending, practicing forms, experimenting with new techniques, and seeing if you can find some new style to satisfy Aang's pacifistic nature.
The first day, though, you decide to watch the training, not wanting to miss Aang's first conscious waterbending. Mukk begins by taking him through a basic form, flowing and bending movements very reminiscent to Aang's own airbending style. Appropriately enough, he takes to them like a fish to water, and as Mukk causes ripples and splashes in the river, and raises great waves of mud, it's not even an hour before Aang can coax a response from the water, causing it to defy gravity and raise into peaks and valleys on the river's surface.
At his first success, easily forthcoming, Aang whoops and hollers in excitement, Kakaze loudly and boisterously cheering for him and even Mukk refusing to hide his grin at the victory. You, for your part, feel somewhat like a proud parent, but feel somehow a bit wistful as you watch Aang near-effortlessly bend his newest element. You snort and roll your eyes at yourself as you realize it must be pure jealously, something deep inside making you wish it was you born with Aang's gift. Shelving your asinine selfishness, you congratulate Aang (and Mukk) once more and leave to somewhere more isolated to meditate on what's next for you.
Once you've found yourself some privacy, you center yourself, focus your breathing, and go through a few firebending forms for the first time in a very eventful 24 hours. As always, the heat and flickers of pain at the edges of your sensory perception are grounding, although not as relaxing as usual as you can't help but notice the smell of sulfur in the air.
You eventually slow down, sweating slightly after you've completed your forms, each with only very minor mistakes.
You return to your thought process from before the royals rudely interrupted you at the Southern Air Temple, hoping that just thinking about it isn't somehow jinxed.
Fire.
You ignite a blaze in your palm as you have countless times, watching it flicker. Fire is five things that you can think of. Heat, light, smoke, the "shape and appearance" of a flame, and pure destructive energy that burns, consumes, and spread. Fire's ability to consume, you muse, may actually be a sixth "thing."
So, can you have one without the others? You close your fist and snuff the flame, opening it back, your other open palm joining it to sit side-by-side. From the right, you focus your attention to generating a great heat, which nearly seems to bend the light around it. From the left, you convert your chi into a wispy smoke, then focus it harder into a thick black cloud you make pains not to inale.
There, heat without smoke or light, and smoke without heat or light, nor any of a fire's other traits.
If you can detach those from fire's other aspects, surely you can detach the other aspects from them. Light, or pure destructive force, or even the flickering appearance of the flame, all without its other aspects. Surely, it must be possible, right?
You frown, frustrated. It sounds easy in concept, but in practice you really have no idea where to start. Will you just have to experiment until either something happens or you give up?
[] Write In how to spend your time while Aang and Mukk train…
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