Arrogance (thoughts/comments/suggestions/advice appreciated)

I'm completely well now. No longer helping with the kachinas-in-training, though. I thought I'd be glad about that, but it turns out I miss the little cretins, even that brat who would never do anything right.

Thanks, SAge, for saying that in the comment. Do try telling that to the others. *looks grim* They seem completely irritated with my skill. Just because I dance better than they do does not mean I'm trying to make them look inferior. Even if they are.

Alright, I'll admit that last sentence might have been out of line. But one can put up with this sort of thing for only so long. Flicker has started ignoring me, and Sparkle is constantly trying to show me up. She can't, and she usually ends up looking foolish trying. Her loss.

Flare is always making snide remarks about me. Everything that comes out of her mouth is designed to bring me down. She disguises the spite by saying she's joking, but everyone knows she isn't. At first it just surprised me, then it hurt me, now it's just getting old. At the very least she needs some NEW insults. She's resulted to recycling .

Firefly is most irritating of all. She turns everything into a lesson on pride. She thinks she's being incredibly clever and subtle, but it's ridiculous. We'll walk into a room with a beautiful tapestry and she'll say things like, "Hmm, I bet this thread in the middle thinks it's better than the ones on the edges."

I like to irritate her back by missing her point: "Well, threads can't really think..."

Or make my own point: "But I guess if threads could think, the middle thread would probably think itself better. Seeing how it's in the middle, the center of the entire design, the focal point of the entire room, the most beautiful thread in the whole piece. I guess it has a right to think itself better."

Even Coal seems glad I'm getting a hard time. He inserts his own mocking comments whenever possible, and readily laughs at Flare's insults. What a traitor.

Comet is the only one who understands. She doesn't seem to think it's such a crime to be a better dancer.

If this is some stupid ploy to bring me down and make me realize my "faults", it won't work. I can swear that to you. If I'm anything at all, it's stubborn.

Now, I understand that I come across as very arrogant. I understand that. But why can't anyone under stand me? IT'S NOT ARROGANCE IF IT'S TRUE! I am a better dancer! I am better than the others! No, that doesn't give me a license to brag, but it doesn't mean I have to pretend to be on their skill level!

Thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I see we have a new follower. Welcome, Cowgirls.

Firefly's Hurt Too

If the situation weren't so unfortunate, this might be humorous.

This is Flare, Ember's twin sparktressling. Firefly would be posting, but...Well, may I tell you a short story?

Ember is a very good kachina. I'm sure she's bragged about it before on here. She's really quite arrogant about it, you know. (Sorry, Em, just being honest.) She is talented, though. The Fire Lord always watches her more than any of us. So lately, he's been missing her. You can tell he doesn't get as much entertainment out of us. Today he snapped. Flicker accidentally hit Sparkle in the eye, and Sparkle fell into me, and I tripped and brought Firefly down. The Fire Lord was unbelievably angry and shouted that Ember wouldn't have fallen. He stood up and started throwing fireballs at Firefly. She's the oldest and supposed to be the lead kachina (although Ember's quite bossy so it's really more like her), so whenever we do something wrong she gets blamed. I felt terrible and tried to help her, but Comet and Sparkle told me not to move. The Fire Lord was going to beat Firefly anyway, it would make no sense to get beaten myself. I didn't want to listen to them, but I was very upset and afraid and so I did.

Firefly is in a pretty bad way and she's upset with Ember, seeing how this is all sort of her fault. If she had just followed the rules she wouldn't be lying in bed with a raw back. And if she weren't such a bossy peacock all the time, it'd be easier to feel sorry for her.

I do feel sorry for her though. She's in a lot of pain and I do love her. I feel worse for Firefly though. This wasn't Firefly's fault and she's still being blamed.

The worst part is that now we don't have a lead kachina. Firefly counts beats and decides what routine we'll do. I guess, being the oldest of us four left, it'll be me now, but I've never been confident about all this. I hate our costumes, they make me feel...exposed. I'm not comfortably with the whole thing. I don't know what we'll do.

Keep Ember and Firefly in your thoughts.

Ember Update

This is Firefly, Ember's older sparktressling.

Don't be upset, Ember is not dead, but she can't post because of the pain.

She'd like me to tell you that the Fire Lord had her flogged with fire ropes. She'd also like me to tell you that she is quite lucky. The Fire Lord would have killed her without a doubt if he had heard the entire story. Coal did not tell him everything. He merely reported seeing Ember leaving her room, not that she overheard anything from the spies.

I just want to say how upsetting this entire situation is. Ember is in more pain than I've ever seen her in. She is not even speaking, just tears running down her cheeks sometimes. The Fire Lord did not even send any sort of medicine to ward off infection. I know this is justice, Ember disobeyed the rules, but it's very difficult to watch. I hope to the Fire Lord she recovers swiftly.

Kachina Assisant?

I've been admitted back into kachina training to help the newbies. I am so upset. Instead of graduating out of the every day classes, now I have to go down to the lower level classes and teach little sparktresses how to do silly little things like splits and...well, let me use Earth terms for the other things, or you won't know what I'm talking about (although if you don't know much about dancing, you might not know what I'm talking about anyway).

Today, we worked on simple adagio routines, and one allegro. One poor sparktress (Scarlet) could not get her feet to land correctly in her fouette turns, and Blazette couldn't even do a proper pas de chat.

I don't know why I've been asked to help teach the younger ones, I'm certainly no more patient than the other. Actually, I'm sure I'm less patient. Firefly ought to be stuck teaching the brats, not me!

I grumbled about this to Firefly, and she huffily pointed out the I actually like being a kachina.

This is true.

I do like being a kachina. If I didn't dance, I don't know what I'd do. Dancing is the best thing that ever happened to me. Well, I suppose it's the only thing that's ever happened to me. I don't remember life before coming to the Palace hardly at all, and I've been told I started kachina training within a week of my arriving here (along with Flare and Firefly, my sparktresslings [sisters]). I suppose the Fire Lord saw a potential dancer in me and set me to learning the ropes right away.

Kachina training was hard from the beginning. Awake a 5am, begin training at 6am. Two hours of intense cardiovascular exercise (building endurance), and hour of stretching and flexibilty, two hours of toning and strength-building exercises, an hour of learning terms, break for the noon meal. Then two hours of education on fire streamers and how to get the colors and temperatures right. An hour of technique and general form, and the ten-hour day ended with a final hour of cardiovascular exercise.

Needless to say, by age seven, four years later, I could:

1. Do 1000 hundred sit-ups in a row without cramping
2. Do a 300 push-ups before I broke a sweat
3. Run around the entire Palace fifty times before I was even winded
4. Tell you how hot a fire strand needed to be for its coloring to be bluish-green
5. Walk across the training room on my hands
6. Do backflips, forward flips, dive rolls, and back hand-springs
7. Tell you precisely what an assemble croise derriere was

All of the above things were on the kachina examination I had to pass before age 8.

And I still love dancing.

Yes, I guess Firefly's right. Perhaps I am the best one for the trainer assistant job.

Chaos! Catastrophe!

This is exactly what Flame looks like, only he's obviously not in an iceland, but more like fireland and he doesn't wield a giant snow ax...

I apologize for not posting recently, but Palace life has just been one catastrophe after another.

Catastrophes:

1. Comet got very sick (she's doing alright now).
2. Three more peasants (two humans, one fire fairy) were executed.
3. The Fire Lord got sick.
4. Star Dancer got sick.
5. Flare got sick.
6. A stable sparker asked Flicker if she would court him (we had to say no on her behalf because she was speechless).
7. I got beaten twice in one day, first by the Fire Lord, then by Flame. I might have deserved Flame hurling fireballs at me, though. I did tell his sparktress-friend some things best left unsaid...*grins mischeivously*
8. Coal and Blaze got deported to Brightwood to spy for a while.
9. Life without Coal is horrible.
10. Asher got sick.

Some sort of plague is breaking lose in Furier. It's not deadly, just makes its victim bedridden for a couple of days. So far Flicker, Firefly and I are the only sparktresses in the Palace that haven't contracted it.

Having Coal gone is worse than we all thought it would be. I miss him just coming by and joking with us, and I especially missed him when Flame was chasing me through the halls of the Palace...

So, over all, life is not doing me any favors. Everyone is either in a bad mood or getting sick.

Thanks for reading, hope your lives are going better than mine.

Ideas, Please!

Things have been both usual, and unusual of late.

Sparkle has been too energetic and irritating, Flicker has been spineless and irritating, Comet has been basically invisible, Flare has been getting louder and louder, Firefly has been fine, and I've been restless and paranoid about being the perfect kachina. Basically, things have been perfectly normal.

The Fire Lord told us he fears we've been growing slack in our kachina practices and he wants to see improvement within the week. Never mind that we're the best kachinas out there (as far as we know), he wants better. How can we get better than the best? We're all in perfect shape and look it, too, except Sparkle, who always looks like she could be thinner. Just the other day we took a run around the Palace and through the village. We didn't tire out but once and that was because we were so thirsty. The weather has been unbearably hot lately.

I just don't know what the Fire Lord wants. He's been so irritable lately it doesn't seem like anything will please him! We tried making our style a little different, more like the Julese, but he didn't like that. We tried having new costumes with different colors made, he didn't like that. We tried adding a singer to the music, he didn't like that. We tried adding some new moves, he didn't like that either. He doesn't like anything, yet he insists on "better"! What *is* better? Please, share your ideas!!

Pictures of Us (captions underneath photos)

Well, it isn't us, but these pictures are pictures that look very similar to me and my fellow kachinas:

This looks remarkably like Sparkle, who's twelve.

This looks like Comet probably would have at age eight. She's thirteen now. She's Sparkle's sparktressling.

This could be Firefly, only she's more practical-looking and not as stunning.

This looks sort of like me, I supposed, only I'm not so old-looking and my cheeks are rosier. Flare says I'm much prettier than this girl, but that's just Flare.

Wow, this really looks like Flicker. Only a bit younger.

This could be Flare, but she looks much younger in real life.

Thanks for looking!

A Fire Fairy Rant

My friend Andrew from Rant Page asked for a book about the Fire Lord and his "underlings". I told him that any such book would be in the Palace Library (and therefore unexcessible for a kachina like me), but I can do my best to construct something.

I'm not really sure where to begin, though. And I'm not sure if Andrew wants something more like history, or more like...military standings. I'll have to ask him.

For now, I guess I'll do a little of both. Maybe sometime I can elaborate.

As long as I can remember very well, I've lived here at the Palace. I had a home before this, of course, but after my parents died, Firefly and Flare and I were taken to live here, along with many other sparklets whose parents had died at the same time. I'm honestly not clear what happened there. No one talks about it, and every time we ask, we're shushed. It's one of those topics that you learn young not to mention.

I was always meant to be a kachina, ever since I was brought here when I was four years old. The Fire Lord saw potential in me along with about fifty other sparktresses that had been brought to the Palace with us. We were all put into kachina training, which was something like a extreme fitness hell. As old toddlers, we did of sit-ups and push-ups and endurance exercises and flexibility exercises and all kinds of other things. Little by little, the class of kachinas-in-training were weeded out.

By age six, if you couldn't pass the kachina test, you were taken out of the class and put...I don't know what happened to the ones that weren't good enough. All I know is that Firefly and Flare and I (and most of our friends) always made the cuts.

By age seven, I could do five hundred sit-ups without cramping up, do a hundred push-ups before I broke a sweat, and run around the entire Palace fifty times before I got tired. I was the perfect kachina in training. By this time, there were only about twenty sparktresses left in the kachina class. I, followed closely by Flare, was the best kachina in class.

At age seven also, we began learning some basic routines. Now, don't be fooled by the word "basic". It doesn't mean "not challenging", it just means "short". There were plenty of high kicks and splits and things to do in the routines.

Up until this point, I've only covered the "human" aspects of kachina training. Now I'm going to go over some fire fairy bits.

Kachinas not only dance with their bodies, but with fire. Let me tell you that creating the ideal fire streamer is no easy task. It has to be just the right width, length, and color. (The color is determined by how hot the flame is. To be able to make an ideal flame, which is blue and red, I had to practice for weeks.)

In case you were wondering, we fire fairies can create fireballs, fire strands, fire streamers, sparks, etc. with our hands. We just loosely cup our hand, and make a fireball. Fire streamers are made the same way. We position our fingers right and using muscles that I can't explain to a human, we shoot out a length of fire. Fire strands and ropes are the same, except a true master can shoot them from his fingertips as well as palms.

It's difficult to shoot fire from one's fingertips because that's where the fireshields are located. We can put up a shield with our fingertips. We just hold up our hands, fingertips toward the enemy or approaching fireball, and shoot out a blue, force-field-like shield that can block the ball. It can also be used to put out a fire or to cool a burn.

Ah, here I am, getting all side-tracked. I was supposed to be talking about Furierite history, but I ended up talking about kachina training. I was supposed to be talking about kachina training, and I ended up talking about how to create fire. I guess that's what you would call a rant. *smiles* I'm no good at posting. Thanks for reading (even though I know you didn't).

Firefly's Mistake

Hello! This is my first time blogging. Some of the words I use might not be familiar to you because they're fire fairy words, so I suggest reading the Words and Terms to Learn thing on the side. Then you can start looking at the list of my friends and family if you want to. That might help you avoid being confused.

I suppose you'll want to know a little about myself and my blog before you decide whether or not you want to follow it.

My name is Ember and I'm fourteen years old. I'm a kachina for the Fire Lord. My sparktresslings are Flare and Firefly. We live in the Palace of Furier with the Fire Lord. I talk a lot and sometimes say things that I regret, though I'm trying to work on that. I always have a plan (whether it's good or not), and I hate it when people use incorrect grammar.

I'll be using this blog to vent and record what goes on during a typical Furierite day. Happy reading!

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Nothing terribly big and exciting happened today, but several humorous little things happened. Well, I thought so. Firefly wasn't too happy.

Firefly is my older sparktressling. She's the sort of person who LOVES organization. If things are disorganized or don't go according to the plan or schedule, she gets cross. I'm like that about some things (like kachina practice and getting dance routines right), but not about everything the way Firefly is. Well, today something definitely didn't go according to plan.

During kachina practice today, Flare and I made up a new move. All of us loved it except Firefly. I think she only hated it because she couldn't do it as well as I could, but I suppose that's beside the point. Anyway, we voted to add the move to our of our routines. The move was added on a vote of five to one.

No sooner had we perfected the Move when Star Dancer stuck her head in the room and told us that the Fire Lord was calling for us. We kachinas ran to the throne room as quickly as we could to begin entertaining the Fire Lord.

I just want to say right now how much I love to dance. Something about it just resonates with me. I love the eerie music we dance to, I love the tight costumes we wear to dance, I love the feeling I get when I execute an especially difficult move perfectly. Everything about dancing is what I love. It's just the fact that we have to do it for the Fire Lord that I don't like. He terrifies me to no end.

But I digress. Back to the story.

After we marched into the throne room and bowed and went through the formalities, the windows were covered, the candles lit, and the music began to play. Firefly whispered that we would do routine nine, which is the one we had added the Move to. She counted off, and we began.

We danced fine until the part came when we should have slipped in the new Move. Well, we forgot. At least, most of us did. Actually, everyone but Firefly did. Unfortunately instead of looking like she was the only one doing the right thing, it looked like Firefly was the only one messing up. The look on her face was priceless. She was first shocked, then horrified, and then angry at me and Flare for giggling at her.

The Fire Lord wasn't pleased with her either. He reprimanded her and teased her after the routine was over, which she hated. Firefly is a favorite of the Fire Lord's because she never does anything wrong. Everything about her is perfect, so whenever she messed up, everyone likes to give her a hard time.

Luckily the Fire Lord was in a fairly light mood or he might have beaten her. That wouldn't have been funny at all, but since he didn't, I found the whole situation quite funny. Hope you did, too.

Well, I guess I should stop blogging now before I bore you to absolute tears. I'll probably post a little something tomorrow. Hopefully it will be good news again, but I doubt it. Good things rarely happen two days in a row in the Palace of Furier.