thearena | They sing forgotten songs

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They sing forgotten songs

WHO| Aang and Clementine
WHAT| Aang is tunneling through the snow. Clementine finds him and they start to goof around on their way back to shelter.
WHEN| Mid-Week Two
WHERE| Near Aang's cave, then in Aang's cave.
WARNINGS| Little kids being cute, eventual obvious sponsor shipping.

Aang is as bundled up as he can be. He doesn't like how the gloves make it harder for him to move his fingers freely, but he figures he'd prefer to have constricted fingers over having none at all.

He has made a little network of tunnels in the snow outside of his cave now. They're surprisingly warm, but he shouldn't be surprised at all considering how toasty the igloos in the Water Tribes are. He crawls through one of them, digging his way forward like a groundhog, attempting to make an escape route to the river just in case anyone invades his cave. While he works, he hums softly, an old Water Tribe song that's usually sung in a big circle with the whole family.

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Clementine has no idea what's going on beneath her as wades, well more like plows, her way through the snow. It's three feet tall, that's over half her height and she's praying to anyone that will listen that the Gamemaker's won't send anymore their way or she won't be able to move through it at all, that's for sure.

Working her way through the snow is so hard and so exhausting that she doesn't expect it at all when her foot steps into an empty space below it and just like that Clementine goes down. She slips in a way that lands her on her wear and collapses part of the tunnel around her. "Ow!"

She groans and then looks around her, registering what it is she's fallen into. "Whoa..."

"Hey! Are you okay?"

Aang, not even considering the possible danger, turns around from his digging and crawls through his tunnel, searching for the source of the cry. "Sorry! I didn't mean to put a tunnel through the way you're walking! I didn't even think there would be anyone--"

And then he turned a corner to see someone very familiar looking around. "Oh, hey, Clementine!"

"I think I'm okay, I--" wait she knows that voice and a moment later her suspicion is confirmed, "Aang!"

Her surprise knows no bounds as she peers down both sides of the tunnel she's fallen into. "You built this?" sitting up Clementine starts to brush the snow off herself. At least she can assume that Aang didn't build this as a trap, not like the last hole she fell into.

"Yeah! It's much easier than trying to walk through all this snow." He is way too short for that to be at all a practical thing. "And it's warm, too. The snow insulates everything."

He squints out of the hole Clementine created. All the warm air is escaping. "Maybe we should go back to my cave. I don't think you should be walking in this."

"You're telling me. I get exhausted before I've gotten twenty feet in this stuff!" when the snow was up to your chest you were in trouble. She usually had to walk behind Nick or Luke, or wait for them to carry her to get anywhere fast. It's enough to make her miss Georgia.

"Does it? I didn't know that." Clementine nods in grateful agreement to that, "How far is your cave? Wait, how far does this tunnel go?" she doesn't think there could be more than one. That Aang made this one alone seems an impressive amount of work to Clem.

"Yeah, it does! That's why people who live in the north and south poles make houses out of snow and ice." He tugs on her sleeve gently before beginning to crawl back towards his cave. "It's not far. I made a little network of tunnels so I could get away easily if something happened. It'll be warm there, plus there's food."

"Like Eskimos!" she exclaims when he says that, "They live in igloos, made out of ice." Clementine shifts onto her hands and knees to follow Aang, sticking as close to him as she comfortably could.

Maybe she could make something likes this back near where she was staying with her friends, like a bolt hole in case something happened to their cave.

"We don't have those where I come from, but yeah, like that!" He just assumes that Eskimos are another people that don't exist in his world, like people with yellow hair or big round eyes or Clementine's springy curls.

It doesn't take long to get to Aang's cave. He has to disable a little trap at its mouth designed to drop a few rocks at an intrusion to alert Aang if someone's nearby, but then he crawls inside. There's a fire pit, baskets of berries packed in snow, baskets of water, a spear, and a little sleeping area. Basically, everything anyone would really need. "Go make yourself comfortable. I'll start a fire."

On the walls, designs are absently scratched in with stones. Aang is a surprisingly good artist, and the designs are clearly from home, with fantastical animals and people manipulating elements and sweeping landscapes. He drew them because he was really bored, being snowed in, and he kept them because they reminded him of home.

Clementine smiles more widely. It's easy for her to fit through Aang's tunnels, they're roughly the same size despite him being a year older than her, so what's built for him works easily for Clem.

"This is really cool, Aang. You did it all by yourself?" she brushes some snow off her pants as she comes inside, then her attention is immediately grabbed by the paintings on the wall. Clementine scoots over to examine them in more detail.

"Yep. I had a lot of time on my hands." And a lot of energy. He's used to being able to get lots of exercise, not being confined to a cave all day.

He leans down at his fire pit, arranging kindling carefully before taking out his fire-starter kit and beginning to make sparks. He looks up to see her eyes on the pictures, and he finds himself smiling, because he has company and someone to talk to besides himself. "That's the city of Omashu you're looking at." It's a picture of a big city on a mountain, and the city has long networks of slides everywhere while a woman stands above them all. "The story goes that a woman named Oma and a man named Shu fell in love, but they were from warring towns. They were said to have learned to be the first earthbenders so they could be together. When the war killed Shu, Oma flew into a rage, but instead of destroying both towns, she forced all the people up the mountain that separated them and founded a city that both people had to live in in peace." The fire flares to life. "I'm not sure how much of it is true, but it's a cool story, isn't it?"

He gestures for her to come over and sit by the fire while he starts to feed it. "Are there any stories about where you come from?"

"Are these slides?" she asks, tracing her fingers down the lines that Aang has drawn. If they are then that makes it probably the coolest city that Clementine could imagine, because who wouldn't want to get to travel by slide everywhere? It would be sort of like the big water park she'd gone to with her parents once, though she hadn't been allowed to go on the really big slides then.

She thinks over that for a moment, "Oma... and Shu." Well that was an easy way to name a place, she guessed. "It is pretty cool. That she was so mad, she was able to make everybody live in peace." she liked that it was the woman who made that happen in the story too, rather than the man.

"Um..." she tried to think for a moment. "I know the story of how people came to America, well how some people did. There were already people already living there first but it wasn't called the United States then."

"Yep! They used a system of slides to deliver mail across the city. Gravity pulls packages down, earthbenders push them back up." He crosses his legs and pulls off his gloves and scarf, warming up by the fire. "It's one of my favorite stories. Usually, most of the big stories you hear involve the Avatar somehow. I like hearing about what people do on their own." It gives him hope that his world will learn to take care of itself one day.

"That sounds like it'd be interesting. Why did so many people want to move to another land? Was there something wrong with their home?" As a side effect of the rigid relationship between peoples, geography, bending, and the Avatar, mass immigration is relatively rare in his universe. There will sometimes be pockets of people descended from immigrants in foreign nations, like the Foggy Swamp Tribe in the middle of the Earth Kingdom, but the indigenous population has always ultimately stayed in the majority.

"That sound really cool!" she exclaims on confirmation, a grin spreading over her face at the idea. "I think people would be a lot happier if they got to travel around by slide all the time."

It must be weird for him, she thinks for as much as she understands about the Avatar, to hear those stories all the time, like people knew you better than you did.

"I think it was because the people in their old country tried to stop them doing what they wanted. They were called the Puritans and everyone else in their home didn't like them very much." Clementine had been in a Thanksgiving play once, though she hadn't got to have any lines in it much to her annoyance. "So they all decided to leave and got on a big boat called the Mayflower to sail across the sea to another land. When they got there they met some people called the Native Americans," her mom had been very insistent that she not call them Indians like the rest of her class did (in fact her mom had seemed unhappy with the story as a whole and said she'd explain to Clementine when she was a little older). "and they let them stay there, showing them how to find food. So they made dinner and the Natives and the Puritans ate turkey together."

"They're not supposed to ride on the slides, but my and my friend Bumi did it all the time. We were an earthbender and an airbender, so it wasn't like it was dangerous."

Aang hugs his knees as he listens with rapt attention. Despite never seeing her home, he's still fascinated by the idea of a place he's never been to before.

"That sounds nice. And so the Puritans and the Native Americans stayed in America together?" He just assumes that the Puritans were probably the minority. Surely the indigenous populations still outnumber immigrants like they do back home.

"What? What's the point of building slides if people can't use them. That's dumb, you did the right thing."

Clementine nods. "More of the Puritan's came over after that. And other people too from other places. They made the country into the United States. Though they didn't always get along with the Native American's, they fought sometimes."

"I know, right? They were prime slides, and totally safe if you had a bender around." Well. 'Totally safe' might be an overstatement, but humph.

"What did they fight over? Seems like it'd be easier to work together for things like food." Not that Aang professes himself to be an expert in these matters. That would be what the Air Nomads would try to do, or else they would just quietly keep to themselves and try to not bother their neighbors, but he knows that most civilizations are not like the Air Nomads.

Clementine shifts uncomfortable. "The white people wanted the land the Natives had for themselves and the Natives didn't want to give it up. They weren't always nice about it."

To put it lightly, not to mention what her own ancestors went through.

"White people?"

That... Aang has no idea what that means. People who wear a lot of white? People who have a philosophy surrounding the color white? What?

"Why couldn't they just share?"

"You know, er..." she tries to think how to explain it. "people with pale skin, not like yours, but from a place in my world. They thought it made them better than everyone else back in that time. It's different now though."

Pale skin, but not like his? He looks down at his hands--he's pale with a yellowish tint to his skin, like many Air Nomads. Being out in the sun on the mountaintops darkens the complexion, but not too significantly.

"Um, you mean..." He perks up. He thinks he understands. "People with the pale pink skin and big rounded eyes like yours?" People like Bucky or Thorongil or Cassidy. He doesn't have people who look like them in his world, but he doesn't have people who look like Clementine either. "Why would they want to bully other people? The ones I've met are nice. Mostly. Depends on the person."

"Yeah, people who looked like them."

Clementine shakes her head, "It was a long time ago, way before I was born, they don't do it anymore." Mostly. "I'm not sure why they thought it exactly... I just learned a little about it." she shrugs helplessly, unable to give him the exact answers.

Edited 2015-05-24 19:20 (UTC)

"That's weird."

Aang doesn't understand it, but he's learned that he can't always understand things. Maybe he'll ask Bucky about it later. "We don't have people who look like them where I come from. We don't even have people who look like you. Lots of people have different skin colors, but everyone has mostly straight dark hair and more narrow eyes." He puts his chin on his knees. "If they're called white people, then what are you called?"

"Black. Or African-American. Africa's the country my ancestors are from and America was the country I was born in." she explains to Aang. "We have people who look like you in my world, from different countries in Asia. Like China or Japan."

"Black? Your skin is more... light brown than black." But if that's what she's called, then that's what he will go with.

It's really fascinating to hear about this stuff. He gives her a big, bright smile. "I've never heard of places like that. What's your world like, with all these different people around? Is it nice there?"

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They sing forgotten songs

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Oh my gosh, guess who let this tag get buried in other tags >.<

haha, it's okay, it happens! c:

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