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the-badger-mole · 2 months ago

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Clouds, Fog and Mists

The scholars and archeologists that Aang had been working with had come out of their museum basements and dimly lit studies with a wealth of Air Nomad histories and artifacts that had been lost during the war. Aang now had access to recipes he hadn't tasted in years, scrolls that gave historical context to the things he had just begun learning at age 12, and objects he had never seen, but was excited to learn the use of. At 22, he was just now learning that the Air Nomads had a variety of subcultures and customs he'd never encountered, even though he had visited every Air Temple that existed back then.

"Did you know..." became as common to his vocabulary as "hello" and "custard tart". Every day, he approached his wife with some new bit of lore he'd learned.

"Did you know that the Southern Air Nomads had a Festival of Remembrance?" he'd excitedly asked as Katara was hanging the laundry out to try. She was only half listening while she tried to keep Bumi, their nearly three year old son out of the basket of wet sheets, but she gave a polite hum of encouragement.

"For a whole week," Aang continued needing no further prompting, "no one was allowed to play music or speak. They even wore velvet over their feet so their footsteps wouldn't be too loud. Then, at the end of it, there was a huge party! Loud as anything with music and plays and games. I think I remember going one of those ending parties, but I didn't know about the vow of silence before it."

"That's fascinating, sweetie," Katara said, rubbing her heavy belly with a look of discomfort. She was seven months along with their second child, and this one was very active. "Bumi, last warning. Do not touch the clean clothes!"

"Okay, Mommy!" Bumi said before swatting at one of the sheets Katara had hung on the line. She sighed and turned to her husband.

"Can you take him?" she asked. "I'm tired, and I'd like to take a nap after I finish this."

"Oh," Aang said reluctantly. "I was going to have an afternoon session with the Acolytes. I'm dying to tell them what I've been learning."

"Aang, please?" Katara sagged tiredly, taking Bumi's hand and pulling him away from all her hard work.

"Alright," Aang sighed. "I'll watch him for a bit. Come on, Bumi! Let's go practice some air katas! I want you to be ready when your airbending kicks in!"

-:-:-:-:-:-

All Air Nomads were airbenders. That's what Aang had always been taught. He had to account for late bloomers, of course, but at age four, going on five, if Bumi was going to be an airbender, there would've been signs by now. Kya was a lost cause. She had started waterbending just before her second birthday, and despite the fact that her father was the Avatar, there was no chance that she would inherit the ability to control more than one element.

"Well, maybe it's not true that all Air Nomads were benders," Katara said with a shrug. "After all, not every Water Tribesman is a waterbender, and not everyone in the Earth Kingdom is an earthbender."

"It's different," Aang insisted. "The monks told me that all Air Nomads were benders because we have a unique connection with our spirituality." Katara didn't quite manage to hide her annoyance from him.

"Then explain our kids," she said. "Unless you're the first Air Nomad in history to have children with a non-Air Nomad, someone somewhere got something wrong." Aang went quiet after that. He had no response.

"Just because the Air Nomads may have had children with people from other nations doesn't mean that their children were Air Nomads," an acolyte named Qiao said. She was one of the most apt and studious of Aang's Air Acolytes, and they had spent many hours together pouring over the newly discovered texts. Sometimes, Aang thought that she had a better grasp of Air Nomad culture than even he did.

"I suppose....I suppose that's true," Aang said thoughtfully, taking a sip of his tea.

"The Air Nomads were mostly not monogamous," Qiao pointed out. "I'm sure there were a lot of Nomads who had understandings with their lovers from other nations. Especially among the Air Acolytes of the day."

Aang pondered that for the rest of the day. Then the next. Then the rest of the week before he finally approached Katara. He found her by the fountain with Kya and Bumi. Kya was busy making imperfect little shapes with the water while Katara was teaching Bumi how to put his hair into a warrior's wolf tail.

"You look just like your uncle Sokka," she laughed, pressing a kiss on her son's cheek. "I bet you'll be a great warrior just like him, too." That twisted Aang's gut uncomfortably. He cleared his throat to get Katara's attention.

"Hey, sweetie," he said.

"Hey," Katara smiled at him. "We're just about to have story time. Do you want to stick around for How Umiak Rowed Her Boat to the Stars?"

"Oh, um..."Aang shifted uncomfortably on his feet. "Sure. I was just...thinking of something."

"Yeah?" Katara raised her brow at him. "What?"

"I was just thinking of how all the Air Nomads were benders." Katara didn't bother trying to hide her disgusted snort or the rolling of her eyes.

"Okay, and?" she huffed. "Did you draw any new conclusions?"

"I can't have been the only Air Nomad to have children with someone from a different culture," he said. Katara stared at him blankly for a long moment.

"I told you that," she responded finally. "It's just now sinking in?'

"No, I understood you," Aang told her. He kicked at the ground. There was a loose pebble under his toe and he focused on rolling it back and forth. "It's just...well, the Air Nomads, they weren't strictly monogamous."

"Monogamous," Katara scoffed. "That's a big word for you." Aang bristled a bit at that, but he took a breath and let it go.

"I was just reading," Aang said with a shrug. "It occurred to me that maybe because the Air Nomads weren't monogamous, they just didn't bring their non-bending kids into the Air Nomad society." Katara looked up at Aang with her eyes wide.

"That's awful!" she said. "So because their kids didn't bend the right elements, they had to be cut off from one of their parents?"

"No, I'm sure it wasn't as bad as all that-" Aang started to protest.

"What exactly are you saying, Aang?" There was a dangerous edge to Katara's voice. A warning.

"Nothing, nothing!" he scrambled back, tripping over his tongue, trying to call back his words, and cursing himself for trying to bring up the subject without a plan. Katara eyed him coldly. She was angry and trying not to show it.

"It's time for lunch," she told her children. "Let's go inside and fix something to eat."

"But Mommy," Bumi protested. "I want to hear about Umiak!" Katara turned to him with a tight smile.

"That's okay, sweetie," she said. "I'll tell you while you help me fix lunch." With one last scowl at Aang, she took Bumi's hand and swung Kya up onto her hip and went inside.

-:-:-:-:-:-

Aang felt vindicated when it was discovered that he and Qiao were right. The Air Nomads would often leave non-airbending children with their non-Nomad parents. Sometimes the Air Nomad parent would stay with their non-Nomad partners and build a life with them and their children (something he made a note to tell Katara about). Then it was discovered that they were only partially right.

Some of the Air Nomads stayed and raised mixed heritage families. Some left their non-airbending children behind with their non-Nomad partners. That was expected. Reasonable, even. What Aang was not expecting, however, were the accounts of non-airbending children being given away. Some were adopted, and those adoptions were traceable through documents and letters. Others were sold. Those transactions were traceable, too. By most accounts, those children went into indentured servitude and many of them learned trades and were able to start businesses once their indenture was up. Aang tried to focus on the positives. Katara, however, was horrified.

"What right did they have to sell those children into...into slavery?" she demanded hotly while they were getting ready for bed.

"I'm sure it wasn't that bad," Aang insisted. "After all, the Air Nomads wouldn't have put children into situations where they could've been hurt."

"Yes," Katara sneered. "I'm sure their new owners were very gentle with their exploitation."

"That isn't fair!" Aang protested. "Do you know how difficult it would've been for those kids to live among the Nomads?"

"Probably about as easy as it's been for our kids." Katara glared at Aang meaningly. He felt his cheeks heat as he looked away, pretending not to understand.

Bumi was going on eight now, and Kya was five. They were both old enough to ask questions about why it was so difficult for them to move around their own home. Katara and the Acolytes had an easier time being adults and able to maneuver obstacles that short legs and small hands couldn't without help, but it was still a regular challenge to get around the Air Temple for them. Aang was in the process of building a complex near Republic City where non-airbending Acolytes could live and learn with more ease, but it wouldn't be ready for anyone to move into for another year or so. It would be safer for children with no airbending ability, too. Aang glanced over at Katara from the corner of his eye, at the soft swell of her stomach, already showing signs of pregnancy at her second month.

-:-:-:-:-:-

Tenzin was the last of Aang's children with Katara, and the only airbender. When he was almost one, he airbent for the first time, and Aang couldn't stop celebrating for an entire week. When Tenzin was two, the first of the burial mounds were discovered.

Archaeologists working at the mostly restored Northern Air Temple found it at the base of the mountain. There were several layers to the grave, suggesting generations' worth of use. Most of the bones were small. Infant and toddler sized. The largest bones were about the size of an average eight year old. The bones were all jumbled together, as if they had been tossed in a heap. Some of them wore the clothes they were buried in, but most of the bones were too broken to hang on to any frabric. There were also no signs of any shrouds or anything indicating that they had been given any of the customary funeral rites of the Air Nomads. The fact that they were found at the base of the mountain in itself was unusual. All the different groups of Air Nomads had their own unique funeral customs, but one thing that remained the same was that they were laid to rest as close to the sky as possible.

When the first reports of how the children came to be at the base of the mountain came out, Aang was certain it was the rankest propaganda. None of the Air Nomads, no matter how stringent they were about non-airbenders living among them, would ever harm a child. For a while, he seemed to be right, as all the proof was from secondary and tertiary sources.

"Lies the Fire Nation used to justify genocide," Aang said confidently.

"But how did the children get there?" Katara asked. Aang had no answer for her. Yet. There must have been a good one, though. Maybe a plague had run through the Air Temple, forcing them to bury the bodies at the bottom of the mountain to prevent contamination, or something equally tragic. Aang began talking to the archaeologists about giving the bones a proper burial as soon as they could be sorted. The count at that time was 700 bodies in the pile and there were still so many more to go.

A few months after that, the oldest of the Air Nomad accounts were uncovered. It went back a good 300 years, and it spoke about a surplus of infants born without the gift of airbending. There were too many to be disposed of the normal ways, and many of the non-bending parents were unwilling or unable to raise the children themselves. The anonymous monk wrote of a meeting to discuss the crisis. They wouldn't be able to care for so many that couldn't get around the temple, or travel with the Nomads. There was a food shortage. A water shortage. An everything shortage. So the head monk suggested giving the children to the air. That had been the first time the practice had been recorded, near as anyone could tell. But some of the bones were older than that.

That's what they called it. It sounded lovely. Poetic even. In practice, though, the babies were carried to the edge of the temple grounds and held in the air. A short prayer was said for the souls of the children, and then they just...let go. They were so high up, they probably couldn't hear the children hit the ground.

The public began to call them the Fog Children. They were babies born to Air Nomad parents, but without airbending abilities themselves. People clung to the term and it soon spread all over the world in hushed whispers. Aang hated it. Katara hated it. It was the only thing they could agree on by that time.

"It isn't fair!" Aang bemoaned. "It's like people are using it to justify the Fire Nation killing all the Air Nomads."

"If it bothers you so much," Katara said after she'd put the kids to bed, "then speak up! Condemn what they did."

"I do!" Aang insisted. He had protested, loudly that all of the Air Nomads shouldn't be judged by what one fringe sect did.

"Not just them," Katara said. "All of it. It's just like with the Fire Nation. Remember what Zuko said? You can't expect to move forward without acknowledging the past. All of it was wrong. The Air Nomads treated their non-bending children as if they had no value. Condemn the adoptions and abandonings and the selling of the children!"

"How is it my responsibility to make up for all of that?" Aang demanded.

"You're the only one left," Katara reminded him, trying to be gentle. "I'm not saying you have to call the Air Nomads monsters. They did something wrong. They were human. You can acknowledge that and commit to being better than that."

"How?"

"Start with your children."

It had been a frequent argument between Katara and Aang how Aang treated their children. Bumi was 13 now, well on his way to becoming a man. Kya was 11 and Tenzin was five. Often, Katara would quiz Aang on his children- what Kya's favorite color was, or the name of Bumi's best friend. Aang could admit that he was correct about Tenzin more often than the others, but it was only because Aang had so much he had to teach his youngest. Katara should've understood that. After all, there were things she did with Kya that she couldn't do with Bumi or Tenzin.

"It's not the same," Katara told him. Aang could never remember why, though.

For the next year or so, Aang spent much of his time doing damage control. He did his best to separate the practices at the Northern Air Temple and the particular sect of Air Nomad culture that grew around it from the rest of the Air Nomads. Every criticism of the culture was met sharply by Aang's rebuttals and justifications. Penning article after article espousing the virtues of the Air Nomads at large became his full time job, and obsession. It took him two weeks to notice that Katara had left with all three of his children, and another month for him to find the letter Katara had left in his bedside table telling him she was seeking a divorce.

He got Tenzin three months of the year. It was all he could manage, being completely unused to parenting alone. Aang taught his son what he could of airbending and the Nomad philosophy he could in that time, and did his best to ignore the people whispering fog children in the same breath as his oldest children.

#HAPPY NEW YEAR #atla #anti kataang #anti aang #air nomad critical #air nomad lore #a lil' sprinkle of aang salt to kick 2025 off #poor kya and bumi #although since it's canon that they aren't known to be aang's kids in lok the whispering probably stopped pretty soon #especially after their mother remarried and they became known for their connection with their stepfather #zutara #a lil' sneaky sneak zutara in the tags #fan fic

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sevastiel · 12 days ago

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Behold ye, my Protoframe oc, Darius.

(Ft @doggojin and @thatfluffyboi's Chanho n Sol, they make an delightful trio tbh)

Some extra deets (lots of notes on him be warned) post cut! :)

Separated into physical and psychological/lore.

Physical notes :

Spanish-Mediterranean, mid-to-late twenties, looms at a ridiculous 6'6" (200 cm I believe? around there.) but is normally hovering an inch or two off the ground. Thankfully, he's gotten into the habit of tucking his legs in a bit so he doesn't hit every single doorframe that he passes through. He lost his left leg from the knee down due to an unfortunate incident with a landmine, and had a prosthetic for several years before the techrot.

Darius's body is made up of connected pieces held together by sentient energy, and all of his organs have either been replaced by the techrot-sentient hybrid growths, or are no longer necessary and have been removed. He currently lacks the entirety of a regular digestive tract as we would know it, and subsists mostly on energy. However, should he require physical mass for either rebuilding/modifying himself, or creating other sentients, he can 'eat' by putting materials in his mouth, pulling his bodily pieces together, and allowing the techrot systems to dissolve things into more workable particles, or pushing things between separated segments of his body (usually his chest) and letting the sentient bits pick things apart and feed them to the rot for storage. (This takes longer and is less effective at energy conservation) Extra notes on this later when we discuss his abilities.

The connective energy between segments is manifested in string-like bundles of force, which are manipulatable and can be 'touched', though unless he's focusing on keeping his energy properly contained you will likely get a light zap, and with prolonged touch you'll likely be able to feel them hum with power. They normally have about the same tactile strength as woven spiderwebbing of the same thickness, stretching easily but ultimately severable with either enough effort or something sharp. Should you sever all the connections, the piece will just fall off. Removed pieces aren't controllable by him any longer, but are re-attachable, and although he's got a body plan that his form defaults to, every single bit of him is entirely modular except for his cranium. Removing his jaw takes some effort, as there are technically still segments of flesh (his lips, basically) holding it on, but it is possible. If he really puts his mind to it, though, he can remove a segment, and maintain the links through mental focus, or by tethering them to something that he/they can feed off of. Through this, he can make replacement limbs for others, or additional armor, given they've got the bio-energy to keep the segments active.

Bodily segments are almost entirely made of toughened armor plating, with the majority of flexibility being located on the twin pieces that make up his chest/torso, as this is also where the majority of the techrot based organs lie. Although he does need to breathe, each segment intakes oxygen individually, through the softer and more porous dark insides. He has full sensation in any piece of him that he's linked to, as the energy connections serve as a nervous system, and can 'digest' pieces if he's in desperate need of energy/materials in a pinch.

Being modular, he can, in the same way he summons other sentients, simply craft himself differing body parts whenever he so pleases. The larger the piece, the more effort/thought it takes, since it requires a greater complexity of systems for nutrient, oxygen, and waste management. Due to his own lack of knowledge, he doesn't manifest any replacements larger than his own legs, and would rather just spit out a patch and slap it onto injured areas and let the techrot do its thing. This is why his 'armor' looks less dramatic compared to actual caliban, because why the hell would he want that much weight throwing him off balance? He'll accept the techrot/sentient's desires and keep his form adjacent to it, though.

Ability wise, he's functionally pretty similar to a vampire. While he technically could subsist entirely off of regular food, it would require a lot of time and careful dieting to gather the proper resources his body needs, and his energy levels would be rather constantly low. So, instead, he just eats as much techrot as he can and prays for the best, or drinks directly from power generators when he can get away with it, or anything similar. Pure energy as a baseline keeps all his sentient systems running, and metals/proteins allow his techrot systems to keep going. Thankfully for him, he's got two boyfriends who are both quite energetic, and really don't mind his needs as much as they should.

Manifesting sentient fighters usually happens in the same way as he manifests new pieces of himself, but with the added caveat that they don't need functional internal systems for long term usage, and he can charge them up with his own power to keep them running as long as he needs. This is obviously extremely resource intensive, but if it keeps those he cares about safe, (and since it appeases the eternal need to consume and create and consume and create and consume and create) he'll do whatever he must.

Due to all of the above, he prefers particularly tight or comfortable clothing,, as it helps mitigate the changes that happen depending on his energy levels. The less he's got, the looser his pieces, and things will just fall off if he's dead tired (lol). So... Avoiding that is nice. Additionally, although he needs his chest cavity within reach for making sentients at a quick notice, he does like looking in the mirror and not seeing his own body immediately as so blatantly inhuman and monstrous. The straps he uses for his military harness are half to hold things and half to straight up just keep himself together. The mask is for keeping his eyes clear of gore while he's in the middle of shit, because that was a severe issue beforehand. Take a bite, get blinded bc there was more fluid than you expected, have to panic and try and fix that mid combat, leaving you even worse off than you were previously? No thanks.

Psycological notes and lore:

Before Entrati got his hands on him, he was a well respected mediator that worked on communications for the ICR, and worked directly with the Hollvanian government and its military to allow for the ICR to remain in the city.

Coming from a well off and well expecting background, from a young age he was put through his paces and taught to be the finest edition of a modern renaissance man, giving him very little time to do anything but his studies, and very little affection from anything but perfection. Even then, kinda mid. As such, he is a well mannered and well spoken fellow with a deeply repressed childish nature that only ever comes out at the worst possible times amidst the best possible company.

Having been tailor-made for communications work, he was also ensured a healthy dose in very many other skills that might come up from time to time while traveling. (Including, but not limited to, sewing (which he hates), cooking (which he has extremely low patience for), midwifery (which thank god hasn't come up yet), medical triage (unfortunately has), general electrical and mechanical knowledge (much better for him now than it was before), a few languages, and so forth. Post becoming a protoframe, much of his knowledge has degraded due to the changes required for his brain to be able to control his bio-energy, leaving him constantly irritated when faced with a challenge that he knows DAMN well how to deal with, but cant remember specifics on.

He deals with irritation and anger very expressly, not one for subtlety or sarcasm when it comes to his displeasure. This man will Not be the one making snide jabs across the table, he would instead pull you aside privately and explain quite logically the behaviors he's disliking and see if either an agreement can be reached or if another specialist should be put forth. A trait learned from his parents, no doubt, but also one that helps considerably when it comes to governmental relations and respect.

All of his emotions are generally delt with highly logically, which, when it comes to more positive or soft feelings, gets very awkward and confusing for him very fast. One might find have found him before sitting on a bench, staring up at the falling leaves. If you asked him what he was thinking about, he'd respond that he's trying to comprehend why exactly he should be feeling happy about witnessing something so mundane. He wouldn't leave, of course, he'd still watch, but there will always be a part of him that shies away from emotions as a whole. All the sweeter, imo, when he really starts feeling and letting himself feel. Love is a strange thing, isn't it?

During his time in Hollvania, he got infected through volunteer work, doing his best to actually be helpful past the eternal red-tape. He hid it for as long as he could, taking extra care to frequently wash, scrub down, and then properly bandage and ointment up the affected bits of his arms so he wouldn't risk spreading anything, but it didn't do much for him at all. He was needed to maintain good relations, often running intermediary briefing dialogues to keep both sides as up to date as possible on the ICR's doings, so duty really did pull him in half. (haha) As the rot progressed and claimed more of his body, leaving him weaker and more frequently ill, it was less and less ethically feasible for him to keep working, despite it more or less being the only thing he really knew how to do, and there being very few people who could replace him. If he wasn't doing something, if he wasn't being productive, solving problems, keeping people happy, then what was he?

And then he heard of a man with a miracle cure, our good old Doktor Friday, and the fact that it worked. Naturally, Darius paid him a visit, already having used his infected status as an excuse to let him do a bit more hands on assistance wherever he could. And Entrati indeed did give him a cure, listening and nodding along to all the reasons Darius gave as to why he would likely be a good test subject, especially if it meant that if it worked, Darius would be in an excellent position to grant Albrecht significant funding for expanding his cures to the greater populous, who needed them desperately.

Well, it sure didn't fucking do much, did it, leaving him visually better, but when word got out that the others who'd taken the cure had become super-spreaders, you bet your ass he started panicking immediately. He'd been in rooms for extended periods of time with everyone in command, just his presence might have been enough to entirely destabilize the local government, or absolutely gut the ICR. So, once more, he claimed a stomach illness to take some time off. This was a very big problem, so back he went, livid as all hell, to hunt down Entrati.

He got the whole spiel about unforeseen mutations within the techrot responding strangely, and although he didn't believe it, he already had nothing left to lose. He wasn't a soldier, sure, he had training in fencing, could handle a gun, but he couldn't help like the others could, and he could not go back to the one thing he'd been set up all his life to be. And Entrati had a bit of a twinkle in his eye when he said that there might be something that he could do, but it would take time, and multiple tests, to be able to make it all work. There was another strain Dr E was experimenting with that, as he was shown samples and heard the explanations, seemed to be able to nullify the techrot almost entirely. (It was actually just subsuming it, but visually, the two outcomes were nearly identical.)

So he said yes. Like a fucking idiot.

The initial dose laced him with the helminth strain, preparing his body, granting him strength, even though it hurt so very much, the pain leaving him borderline insensate, unable to do anything but lay there and cry as he felt his very flesh twisting and saw Entrati approach with the second dose after a few hours.

Number two was a low dose of the sentient strain, modified, following Caliban's biological approach, and the reaction between the two was violent, techrot subsumed with a rapid hunger and made to serve a new master. Darius's body quite literally began tearing at the seams, and Entrati took his time with the process, utilizing several more small injections, so he wouldn't die of pure blood loss.

When all was said and done, his twisted body was held together by a scant few threads of power, and he was very much unconscious, having fallen into a coma that would last multiple days, fed with an occasional battery set into the new cavity within his chest.

Wisely, Entrati was not there when he awoke, starving, terrified, and in great pain. All he could focus on was the hunger, that pulsating desire that screamed at him to consume, create, consume, create, consume, create, his human mind utterly overwhelmed by the twin techrot and sentient desires. It took him some time to figure out how to move again, much less walk, and the hunger only got worse by the second.

When the Hex found him, they came across a crying, shattered man, tearing into mounds of freshly killed techrot with his bare hands, stuffing wires and flesh alike into his mouth with an inhuman voracity. He was guarded by bizarre automatons, whos' origin was quickly made apparent by him reaching into that glowing gash that bisected his entire body and pulling out another, his own form splitting and reshaping as he dragged it free.

It took quite some time for him to regain his humanity. Quite some time to mediate the new desires of his reformed body with his own. The urges have not left him, but at least he's got a choice, now.

Prince of both worlds indeed.

#warframe #warframe 1999 #oc art #warframe art #also if you lean in real close and whisper 'balls' during an important meeting #you will watch him struggle to maintain his composure for the entire time until he can leave for a few moments to laugh about it #I dont go overboard with my ocs I'd never #hes just a silly lil guy!#There's more little tidbits of sub-lore that I'd add on if I wanted to double the length of this post #but they're also all super unorganized and would fit better as like a bullet point list #its all shit like #'he actually really loves spicy foods #and is immensely glad that his tongue still works like a tongue'#'he really likes pigeons #and takes every opportunity he can to bring seeds with him in one of his pouches #just in case.'#and 'yeah he can make himself *any* thing he wants #He's only missing what he used to have for about 5 seconds and then he's got custom made variants'#there is some shitpost art that I cannot post on tumblr about him going wayy overboard with that particular power #500 cigarettes style yk #and his ass is absolutely a switch #he enjoys having the control #but he also enjoys *not needing to manage things* for once in his life too #Also yes #you can pull a tf2 medic and keep him as just a head #wouldnt recommend it and he would NOT like it but like you COULD

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