Avatar: Legend of Ai; Book One: Earth

[Paradoxius]

Your name is Ai, and today is your nineteenth birthday. You are a resident of the Earth Kingdoms, a loosely associated group of feudal kingdoms that covers the largest landmass in your world. You are an earthbender, and a good one at that!

You are currently traveling cross-contenant with your family, which consists of yourself, your mother, your little brother Tilu, and your baby sister Kongi. You love them all dearly, and you would do anything to protect them. Ever since your father died when you were sixteen, you have been the only proficient earthbender in your family (although Tilu might say differently) and you have had to protect them. It's hard living in the Earth Kingdoms. Cities are plagued by constant war between feudal kingdoms, and the countryside is and lawless rife with bandits.

Every once in a while one king or another claims domain over the whole of the Kingdoms and the state of affairs improves a bit, but it's not long before the new capital city is invaded and conquered and anarchy reins again. Lots of people are always surprised when this happens, but as impressive as huge stone walls may seem, when the invading army can manipulate rocks at will, they don't do as well a job as you'd expect.

Anyway, right now you are occupied with fetching this bucket of water to bring back to camp.



As always, the universe denotes the presence of pure elements, earth, water, and air, with element gauges. There is also a gauge for flammable materials. Right now the gauges for water and fire are fairly low, as only one bucket of water and a few flammable shrubs are present. The earth gauge is rather high, but this dirt is loosely packed, and all the good, solid rock is probably a few feet down. The air gauge is almost maxed out though; the only way it could be higher is if you were elevated such that there was air bellow you as well as above. An airbender would be living it up on these big, open plains.

Presently, you have been delaying the completion of your chore to practice earthbending. When the safety of your family depends on your martial arts proficiency, you can never get too much practice. Right now you are a mere 50 experience points away from level 10. Right now you know a few strikes and blocks, and you are working on building protective walls. You would probably be learning faster if you had someone to teach you, but out here in the wastes strangers are not to be trussed, and your family never stays long in cities or towns, just long enough to sell the goods you bought at the last city and buy more to sell to the next.

What will you do?

---

E: Sorry for the small image size. I'l fix it tomorrow.

Got photoshop; everything is good now.

[Tam Lin]

Lift up a circular section of ground below you.

Try packing soil into rock

[Prof. Skittles]

DANCE PARTY

[Askia]

Make your own prison refuse to leave

[Paradoxius]

Lift up a circular section of ground below you.

Try packing soil into rock

Okay, you'll give it a shot.



You select "COMPRESS" from your technique menu.



Hey! It's working!



Or not...



You guess you are not at a hight enough level yet.

DANCE PARTY

You get down with your bad self.

Make your own prison refuse to leave

You pull up earth from deep bellow you and try to form walls around yourself. After hours of effort, you have only managed a single wall, and it is getting dark.



However, all of that effort has brought you up to level 10 and given you control of the wall making ability. Congratulations.

However, you have spent hours out here training, and it is now dark. You should hurry back to camp, as there is a chance of being ambushed by bandits when walking in the wilderness at night, and, without a competent fighter at your camp, your family may not be safe.

---

E: Okay, well, the images are bigger now, but I don't know how to fix the aliasing, and something is up with the gif, but c'est la vie.

Everything is well now. Please carry on.

[kd7sov]

> You've heard that some earthbenders can make the ground move people around, including themselves. Wouldn't that be a cool way to get back to camp?

[ProfessorLizzard]

(( Aliasing can be fixed by turning off Interpolation in the resize options!))

>Groundsurf back to the camp

[Paradoxius]

> You've heard that some earthbenders can make the ground move people around, including themselves. Wouldn't that be a cool way to get back to camp?

>Groundsurf back to the camp

Alright that sounds like fun! You lift your stone bucket, with bending, of course. Now for the groundsurfing. You'll just pull up some earth and...



Hmm... that didn't work out as expected. You guess you could just slide this pillar along and ride it, but the hight kind of makes you nervous. At least you know how to make pillars now.

You pack the pillar back down and continue on foot. You better get back to camp before you run into any-



Thugs. Well, you've dealt with worse. You guess you'll have to show this guy... earthbending style!

---

(( Aliasing can be fixed by turning off Interpolation in the resize options!))

Thank you. This sounds extremely helpful, but I've no idea what it means. Is this done in an image editing application or on the image sharing site? WTF is interpolation?

Move along. Nothing to see here.

[Godbot]

You know how when you make a line graph, you draw a bunch of dots and then fill in the line between them? You don't actually have that data - you're just interpolating it, by filling in the gaps between the data points you've got.

Your computer does the same thing with pixel colors. When you resize or rotate an image, your computer tries to fill in the gaps between the different-colored pixels by blending colors, which gives everything a blurry outline. If you turn off the interpolating option on whatever image editing program you're using (or image hosting website, I guess), your computer will stop trying to fill in the gaps between pixels when you make the image bigger, and you'll get clean pixel art that's just larger, the way you would if you were using MS Paint.

As for where the interpolation option is, I'm gonna go way out on a limb here and say it's in the resizing options, like ProfessorLizzard told you.

> Pull up the dirt under his feet to make a pitfall, and then drop the dirt on him.

[Askia]

> bury him alive

you know you always wanted to

[kd7sov]

> Rocks fall, everyone dies. Or at least Thugs do.

[Paradoxius]

> Pull up the dirt under his feet to make a pitfall, and then drop the dirt on him.

> bury him alive

you know you always wanted to

Ha ha! Yeah. Ha, yeah, you can totally do that. It's not like you are embarrassingly bad at earthbending for an adolescent, let alone a young adult. You mean, what kind of idiot would be completely irresponsible and ignore their father's bending lessons for half their life only to find the skill absolutely necessary later on. Not you, that's who! Still, even though you're totally competent, you think you'll go with a simpler attack.

> Rocks fall, everyone dies. Or at least Thugs do.

Yeah, this is good. Nothing too complicated. No need to show off your completely real advanced bending powers now. Ha ha.

You just pick up the rock...



And strike.



Well, that wasn't so hard at all.



And now, according to the Official Rules of Nighttime Ambushes, which you just made up right now, you get to loot his body/corpse. (You're not quite sure how hard you hit him.)



SWEET! 35 gold and a bottle of medicine. It feels like Avatarmas up in here. You do feel a pulse when you check, though, so you decide to leave him his sword, and his food and water. If he has any luck, he'll wake up before the coyote-dingos get to him.

Anyway, you pick up your water bucket and head back to camp.

---

Thank you to all the people who helped with the images. I have realized that the drawing applications on my computer basically suck (I mean, I already knew that, but now I know they're the source of the problem), and I'm just going to wait until I get photoshop in a bit. Until then, I am taking a brief hiatus.

Hiatus over. Let's get cracking.

Also, here's my first ever attempt at a face. It's pretty damn almost passable, if I do say so myself.

[Tam Lin]

pff, bury him deep undergrouund, bro.

[Paradoxius]

pff, bury him deep undergrouund, bro.

You think not. You aren't about to waste your tenth kill on vengeance against some poor buffoon who though he could take you (as untrained as you are, you have a wicked right cross). You don't like killing people, but you do so when necessary for survival or defense. This is not at all necessary, and you will not do it.

Anyway, it's really late and you need to get back to camp. You just hope you can sneak in without waking your mom. She's a very light sleeper, and if you wake her up, she will almost definitely be cross with you for not getting back before nightfall and "worrying her sick".



You get back to camp. The universe has stopped making a note of bendable elements in the environment, because the universe has realized that was basically a dumb idea. Because these notifications are absent, you accidentally step on an errant stick from the fire pit.



You weren't kidding when you said she was a light sleeper.

---

Finally a post without technical difficulties! Regular updates will now resume. I apologize for that false start.

[kd7sov]

> Make excuses

(Incidentally, I notice their clothing seems to be in more Water Tribe colors than Earth Kingdom, though they're cut in Earth styles. Is this intentional?)

[Soadreqm]

You were busy practicing. This is a valid reason to be late.

[Paradoxius]

> Make excuses

You were busy practicing. This is a valid reason to be late.

Kaishi: You were busy practicing? I had no idea where you were. I need to know you're back at camp by sundown. You could have been ambushed!
Ai: I was, and I dealt with it. I'm not a little girl anymore!
Kaishi: But your sister is. And Tilu is still just a boy. I need you to stay safe for their sake.
Ai: I need to learn earthbending for their sake. To protect them.
Kaishi: And how will you protect them if you're out getting mugged while camp is being ransacked. What if a team of thugs came after our goods while you were out frolicking and tossing rocks about?
Ai: How will I protect them if I can barely earthbend.



Kaishi: I don't need a master martial artist. I just need someone else who can fight, and you can fight. Now get some rest, we're shoving off at sunup.
Ai: Fine.
Kaishi: I love you.
Ai: *sigh* I love you too, mom.

---

Alright. Familybending now. Kaishi isn't exactly what I was going for, but I have no clue how to draw age lines.

(Incidentally, I notice their clothing seems to be in more Water Tribe colors than Earth Kingdom, though they're cut in Earth styles. Is this intentional?

I always felt that purple is an apolitical color. Bumi wears purple. If anything it represents high class, as it does in our world, which would make this highly ironic. I don't know why Ai and her family would be wearing purple, though, because they're practical people who would never sacrifice a sale like that for fashion's sake.

Perhaps they're so far north that there isn't anyone with money enough to buy purple clothing, but there are plenty of people with money enough to buy their other clothes, so they sold the cheap stuff and wear the expensive stuff that no one wants. Practical people in a practical world wearing designer clothes because there is a low demand for them. I like this irony and I'm making it canon.

[Tam Lin]

Keep trying to practice late in the night. Keep trying that compression trick.

[Ghnaggi]

It's late. Very late. There's only one thing to do at this time of night. Wake up your brother and challenge him to a game of Pai Sho! He'll be so befuddled by lack of sleep that you'll definitely win this time!

[Godbot]

> Just go to bed like a normal person

[Paradoxius]

It's late. Very late. There's only one thing to do at this time of night. Wake up your brother and challenge him to a game of Pai Sho! He'll be so befuddled by lack of sleep that you'll definitely win this time!

Yes. This. You are going to do this. He'll never expect it. He should be sleeping in the wagon behind your mom's tent.



Darn it. Today just isn't your day.



Tilu: Now that you're done being lectured by mom, are you ready to have your butt handed to you at Pai Sho?
Ai: How do you always-? Never mind. It's late I really should go to sleep. We're shipping out early tomorrow.
Tilu: Did you hit your head out there? Since when have you cared more about sleeping than about your futile, if I say so myself, attempts at showing me up.
Ai: You act like I don't know what you're doing. Pushing my buttons like that. Really? It's like your not even trying.
Tilu: Doesn't matter. You can't resist a challenge like that. I've already cleared a space for us to set up over there. So, are you a sleeping quitter, or a waking loser?

> Just go to bed like a normal person

Ai: Little board, or big?
Tilu: What do you think?