#Haha yayy wheee

[listentothelittlebird]

I would be embarrassed at how quickly i did this but frankly i’m not! So @skizzlemanweek hi :)

Day 1: calm / chaos - I think I’m supposed to pick one but. Uh. I didn’t

word count: 1079

AU: idk man i made it up. Brain go brrrr

enjoy :D

-

This is what Skizz knows: elytras do not agree with him. This is not because he does not know how to fly. Moreover, he knows how to fly too well. Born in the air, flying his whole life, and only learning to walk as a teen. 

When he joins Hermitcraft, he brute forces his way through learning elytra until Impulse brute forces him into talking with Xisuma. Now he flies with his wings, though the wind will not answer his call, has not answered him since he left his home.

This is what Skizz, and all the hermits, have discovered: that the new world has brought them enemies that command the air. That their droppings, when grinded down, form handheld blasts of wind, pockets of air that they can twist to their will.

“You got the wind charges?”

Impulse is just a speck of yellow in the distance, nearly indistinguishable against the sunlight. Skizz has to use his communicator to talk to him, with how far away he stands. 

“Yeah, I got them.” A pause, a message flying through the worldwide channel. “Oh, hold on. Tango wants to watch.”

“Get him to bring his own wind charges!” A shadow zips over Skizz’s head, Zedaph descending onto his own haphazard column of red sand. It makes Skizz feel like the widest sandwich on earth, with Impulse on one side and Zedaph on the other.

Skizz shakes out his wings, idly catching a stray feather as it floats around his face. His skin feels restless, though the heat is probably just as much to blame.

Skizz waits for Tango to join their voice channel before he starts pestering him.

“Hurry up!” He bellows, cackling when Tango responds with muttered blaze noises and the sound of whistling rockets.

“Have you guys tested this yet?” Tango asks, as he quickly assembles his own pillar into the sky, slapping together a frankly unnecessary amount of scaffolding.

“Nope!” Zedaph chimes brightly. “Well, Impulse says Grian tested it out, but only Gem was with him to throw the wind charges. And Grian’s not even windborn! I bet Skizz can do much more than blow some guardians out of a lake.”

“At least Xisuma’s around.” Impulse pauses as he types a message, and relays the replies to them. “He’s got a backup copy saved. Feel free to let loose, Skizz.”

“We should’ve done this at your base, then!” Skizz shakes his wings out again, looks around at the barren landscape of their sand collection point. 

They know Skizz well enough, by now. Even with a backup saved, just being near to their precious architecture would make Skizz dial it down by the dozens.

Here, though, is no man’s land.

“Okay!” Tango has finally ascended his scaffolding. “Reefy!”

“Great!” Without warning, white wisps explode towards Skizz from Zedaph’s pillar. The gust kicks up the sand beside him, ruffling his feathers. “Oops, sorry! Test shot!”

“Wait, wait!” Skizz eyes the horizon and plops down his bedroll. “Let me snooze.”

It gives him a moment of calm, a chance to settle his thoughts and get into the space he needs to do this well. By the time his bedroll is rolled up, his valuables stashed away in his ender chest, he can feel the difference.

The air in this desert is warm, slowly floating upwards from the sheer heat of the sand. When he breathes, the air shifts. It does the same near Zedaph, near Impulse, near Tango.

Skizz closes his eyes. “Fire another test shot for me.”

The burst of wind comes from Impulse this time. Skizz sidesteps the blast and opens his eyes to take in the impact as it collides with the sand. The white wisps glow brighter now that Skizz is concentrating, and he diligently tracks as the magic fades. 

“Alright. When I say go, just keep firing until you run out of blasts, okay?”

Skizz nods as his friends agree. 

“Right. Three, two, one…go!”

Skizz tracks the first wind charges as they whizz towards him, not with his eyes but with the honed instincts of a windborn. The wind charges part the air like icebreakers in the ocean, barreling towards their destination with no care for detours.

Three seconds before the wind charges reach Skizz, he spreads his wings. Two seconds, and he flaps them, feathers glowing aether white. One second, and a swirling ring curls around Skizz, just in time to catch the wind charges.

The ring quickly engulfs Skizz’s sight, shooting far past his head faster than any time before. It takes a moment for Skizz to hear his friends cheering through his communicator, because the wind is so loud it creates a veritable vacuum of sound.

When Skizz tilts his head up, he can only gape. The wind charges have gained a glow akin to his wings, swirling upwards in a spiral that can only be described as a tornado. The pure white has become a dusty maroon, sand sifting through the currents like an ocean on land.

In the middle of it all, the eye of the storm, stands Skizz. For the first time since leaving his birthplace for good, the skies have bent to his will.

“Skizz!” Impulse yells through the communicator, barely restrained glee in his voice. “We’re out of wind charges! How’s it looking in there?”

Skizz takes in everything one more time, the way the vortex seems to turn without a sign of slowing, and can only laugh. 

“Oh, it’s looking pretty calm here. I could take a nap.”

“You’re nuts!” Tango yelps. He never got used to extreme weather in the overworld, and it still shows. “I’m about to fall off all this scaffolding, and you want to take a nap?”

Skizz grins, and shifts his feet. When he moves, step by step, the tornado follows.

His wings have to stay outstretched to keep the tornado going, but flying around has kept them more than strong enough to hold the air for a little while longer. 

“Want to join me, Top?”

It takes a moment, but then Tango is letting out a blaze shriek and firing several rockets at once, to the unhelpful cackling of Impulse and Zedaph. Skizz elects to ignore them for now. The day is still young, and their own whirlwind terrors will come soon. 

A test jump is enough to tell Skizz that the wind will carry him, far faster and further than any elytra there is.

Skizz grins, and gives chase.