ORIGIN - birds of a feather

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A smile twisting up a stag's lips could look strange, but there it was: contentment in Pride's face. James had taken to babysitting well, as he'd known he would; the horse already looked after Comet well enough. He was, if anything, overprotective (if only Pride knew the extent!), so Jampa had been in good hands, at least against any of her own missteps.

Had a true predator come, Pride wasn't sure, but-... he was here, now.

"Oh, no, I'd hate to interrupt," came his lilting call, playful; "but of course I would have to help my daughter."

Magic-... well, he'd tossed one of his sons into the air half as a joke once and almost hadn't caught them, so he was cautious with even the most minor spells, now. Slowing James, speeding Jampa up--any of those could prove foolish. So for now, expression playful, he sent out his magicka toward a different aim.

A moment later there were three other Jampas--not very convincing, but as a game it was amusing--all ethereal light and translucent glow, bounding toward the winged horse. "Can you tell which one is real-? I bet she'll catch you," he called out. It was all playful, of course, and for Jampa's sake; none of the illusions was particularly convincing, but Pride hoped that James would play along.

@Jampa

When father appeared near her Jampa was promptly distracted by him. She wanted to run to him and listen to his voice tell more stories, even if she couldn't keep up with all the details. Before she knew it Jampa had agreed to a game of tag, and James was racing away from her - with Mischief hot on his hocks! It would be rude to ignore the horse, so the juvenile turned and launched in to a run of her own.

It wasn't the most graceful thing ever. Fawns could 'earn their legs' faster than most herbivores and Jampa had certainly had more than enough time to master walking, maybe even trotting at a decent speed; taking in to account her own frail-boned geometry and the sizable wings she had to corral, it was quite a sight to witness her first attempt to canter. Her forelimbs felt as if they were flailing. Her hindquarters, built with a little more power due to their cervidian muscle, added more oomph than she required. It took a few strides for her to find a rhythm.

That wasn't the end of it though: Pride had cast his spell, and as the energy transmit through her in a wave it collected in to fragments of light, each bounding with the same enthusiasm as the original body. They didn't have as much definition as the real thing but it was certainly a startling spectacle. Jampa lost a step out of awe for that dazzling display, forgetting her purpose - forgetting that she was supposed to be chasing James at all - as she stared at these duplications of herself. It was like witnessing her own deification.

Would she one day be as radiant as these light manipulations? Would she be able to control her magic to the same extent, to dazzle and confound? For now it was a task to keep her mind focused on the game and to be self aware enough not to trip on her own feet. As the duplications sped along she picked up her pace again and charged after James.

Her strides were swift. What limited musculature she had was utilized as best she could manage, until she fell away from the more equine style of running and found a natural gait comprised of leaps and bounds; it was easier to jump like a deer, using the slightest tilt of her wings to catch air and carry herself further. It was exhilarating.

@James

James grinned and looked back, grinning at his mentor and then at the illusions, their flaws easier to see than normal (like the ones Pride had cast that day), but he kept his eyes wandering, trying to see which one was 'real'. Choosing one to divert, he used a trick he'd learned and adapted from Pride himself. He caught a hoof on a groove and didn't quite slam on the breaks, but he shot to the side instead, leaping forward through an alley and taking off. He found an obstacle quickly, and shimmied through the small gap that, without his wings, he'd have found easy to run through. He would get stuck if he kept going, so he attempted something else.

A slab before him, one of the many that were leaned against the houses, either having collapsed from the opposite house or having been moved by a past occupant. But it should be big enough for this. Hopefully.

His body disappeared, replaced with the slab, the piece of stone blocking the alley. James took a moment to breathe, shaking himself off and ruffling his feathers back into place.

"HOO!", he finally exclaimed, "Goodness me- feels like I just got dumped in ice water!"

James trotted away, the game of chase now expanded to the maze of buildings. Now instead of speed, this was a game of intelligence. Different obstacles, now. But it gave James a moment to recover from the feeling that was all of his molecules shifting place with a giant slab of rock. Hopefully he hadn't left anything behind. He most likely didn't, but still.

Bleh. He didn't like that thought.

@Pride

Pride flinched when he saw what James had done. A translocation could be a deadly thing, a dangerous thing--it wasn't something, in his mind, to use in mere games. Playtime with a child could have turned to screaming agony and permanent trauma. He'd have to mention it--gently, later on: not to use potentially-dangerous magic near impressionable kids without good reason.

For now, he said nothing--he didn't want to frighten his child; instead, he kicked himself into a brief but blinding race to come up alongside Jampa. He accompanied her in her pursuit, his gait slowing somewhat to match her own. "So how have you been? Do you like James?" he asked, and fired her a mischievous look: "He has been treating you well, right?" It was asked in a humorously conspiratorial tone, as if inviting her to make up all sorts of imagined wrongs, for laughs; but he intended, too, to help her search the area ahead.

He slowed to a trot, then a walk, and cast out his mind; his magicka reached forth, a grip gained, after a moment's focus, around the stone that James had placed. Pride lifted it up, and out of the way; to Jampa it may have seemed simply to levitate itself up onto a nearby roof. But the path through had now been cleared. "Magic," Pride explained softly, with a wink to her; "Magic I can teach you, some day. Can you find him? I'll help you win," he added, and his glance to Jampa was nothing but loving.

He hoped James wouldn't go too far--there was little way the kid would catch him on her own, and if he refused to be caught it would, Pride imagined, probably disappoint her. But he'd say nothing; he'd see how it played out.

@Jampa

James was there, and then he wasn't. Jampa was enjoying the sensation of boucing off of the ground a little bit too much. She was grinning and gasping, not quite able to fly with her power but getting enough of a reaction with the spell that she could almost glide. When the magic slipped out of her grasp she flexed her wings and returned to the floor with a small clattering of her hooves as the only indication she'd landed. There was a small stumble as she regained her footing (sort of swaying as if she had sea legs) before she took off in a fresh run; this time, her father's ghostly shape came up alongside her.

Jampa was focused on the game and having a lot of fun; she hadn't fully grasped the concept of winning so even if she wasn't successful, it was doubtful if she'd care. Pride's question went in one ear and out the other, but she clued in a second later and nodded, huffing a breath while her heart thundered in her chest. Pride's magic focused upon the slab and in a flash, the obstacle was removed. She didn't know what to say - she was awed, thankful for the assist, but also concerned to a degree. She hadn't seen if James had gone over the obstacle or around it; the rocky terrain did not leave many clues and so she had to stop running.

As she caught her breath she listened to Pride. He mentioned "Magic -- magic, I can teach you, some day." And maybe he saw the perplexity on her face as she looked around at the dirt, the ruined buildings flanking their postion. "Can you find him?" No; but she didn't want to admit defeat, plus she couldn't really breathe. All that running - and the unintended use of magic by her stone - had left her winded.

"I can do it!" Jampa finally voiced back, sounding out of breath despite the insistence. Love swam in her eyes but so too did determination - and she veered between the buildings at a new clip, lunging between the buildings haphazardly. She felt her wings drag on some of the surfaces and had to be mindful of the space around her.

As Jampa came to a particular open corridor - where one of the buildings had crumbled some time ago - she took a deep breath, looked at the dilapidation and piled debris, then took a running start at it. She didn't know how to focus her magic so whether it worked or not was completely up to chance. It had worked when she'd willed herself to be faster, so maybe that was all it took..?

Her palms dragged on the stone, but when she connected her haunches and made to leap with a kick of her hooves, she managed to channel the energy down, and when her hooves connected her body found lift again. She cleared the ruins easily; but without any plan for afterward, the girl didn't know what to do next. Her hope - that she'd reach high enough to spot the dark figure of @James somewhere among the buildings - was overshadowed by an immediate sense of weightlessness and confusion.

James was trotting gently along, tail swishing behind him happily, his feathers awkwardly pushed in every direction. He tried to push them back into place quickly, but there simply wasn't enough time before a shadow crossed overhead, a big one.

He spooked forward and whirled around, looking up at Jampa with his jaw dropped.

"Oh my- are you flying?!", he exclaimed, incredibly surprised to see her do such a thing, before remembering his own rule.

Right, this was probably a spell. He felt tempted to follow and make sure she landed okay, and looked around for a route. When he saw none that wouldn't get him as stuck as before, he stepped back and galloped straight for the buildings before launching himself into the air, using his wings to boost himself up.

He landed clumsily and fell to his knees, staggering a bit, but he was up! And once he was up, he leapt from rooftop to rooftop, at an angle just to the left of where he thought Jampa might land. If she was okay, the chase was still on, but if she wasn't, he was plenty close enough to provide quick aid.

@Pride
Ignore the roll i'm stupid

The sight of Jampa soaring--bouncing off the ground and careening into the air--struck cold fear into Pride's heart. He darted forward, father's focus honing razor-sharp on Jampa. He very nearly did not make it to her in time; perhaps she'd have been all right, but leaving such things to chance was certainly not his way.

Pride attempted to reach out his magic to catch her, instead--to snag Jampa and gently set her down. His attention toward this game--toward James racing off--was gone.

"Jampa! -I think we had best discuss magic," he called, clattering toward her with a rush of hurried hooves. Suppressed alarm was in his face--in dilated pupils, in flared nostrils, in eyes that he tried not to widen but failed. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest; he knew the magic, he thought, that she'd used. "Can you come here a moment?"

Foolish not to think of this before--she is the child of a Master; of course she will be strong. And of Pride--and was it arrogant to think of this with chagrin? To remind himself that he was the most powerful magic user that he'd met; that Jampa might be extraordinarily powerful as a result of such parentage?

Perhaps--or perhaps a father was merely worried that his new daughter had almost bounced over a building into the dark.

"James-!" (And there'd been no playing along there, had there-? No gentle trot to lead a child along, no, James had launched himself away--but he'd stayed close, in case she'd fallen-) "I think we had best take a moment, perhaps to explain magic to Jampa. So she doesn't accidentally hurt herself," he explained, and there was no denying the fear in his face as he said this, as much as he tried to hide it from her.

@Jampa

It wasn't exactly flying so much as it was falling upwards; she had little to no control over her body as it hit the stone and was launched up to great heights, which frightened her the higher she went. Thankfully both her father and her new friend were there to use their own magic in tandem to stop it; she felt something grapple on to her, mental shackles at her ankles or something of the sort, and as she drifted back down the the safety of the floor Jampa felt a wave of gratitude for the both of them.

Her heart was still racing. It didn't take a genius to tell that her father was rattled by the display she had perpetrated, purposefully or not, and the smaller cues of his discomfort made the gratitude sour a little bit. She felt a conflicting mixture of adrenaline and embarrassment as well as worry, all tossed together. It thundered through her veins.

"I-I'm sorry! It worked the first time, and I thought I could... I thought.." She was too flustered to complete her sentence, which was fair. The girl was still so new! And the way that Pride looked in that moment of his own panic filled her with an intimate kind of guilt. "I didn't mean to scare you." She addended, glancing between both of them. Her whole body stooped in to a posture of apology, low and contained. The feathering along her shoulders fluffed a little bit as she pulled her wings in close, draped like a cloak.

If listening to their lesson would fix this, she'd listen! She'd learn everything she could, so long as they didn't worry after her.

@James

James finally took flight and floated over, swooping down and landing beside them, a grin on his face.

"Wonderful!", he said, "Look, Pride, Jampa's already flourishing!"

Oh yes, he saw the fear, the same kind reflected on his own face most days, his grin faltering, "... We were there to catch her, she would have been fine."

He offered a wing to his teacher, a touch on the shoulder to reassure him that Jampa was okay and that they'd been there. If Pride's magic had failed, well... James had wings and his own to catch her with.

"Jampa," he said softly, looking over at her, "Perhaps starting small should have been a first lesson- a game of tag is wonderful and a brilliant way to show adeptness and to expand the mind to more creative ways to use magic, but you're new, and I doubt the basics have been shown yet."

He remembered when he practiced with Comet, how he used his own kind of magic to teach her to use her own.

"Don't be discouraged," he said softly, "But always remain cautious. If you'd fallen, and since you can't fly yet, you could have been hurt. Take care to measure the risks, alright?"

James looked back to Pride and nudged him gently, "Don't worry, teacher. You never worried this much about me."

He narrowed his eyes in playful suspicious, despite knowing that when they'd met, he'd been older than Jampa and had already started to teach himself magic, growing comfortable with it. Pride had simply given him technique and direction. He could be trusted to stay safe- mostly because he was a wuss, but that was besides the point.

Hopefully, though, he'd lightened the mood a bit.

@Pride

Her miserable apologetic demeanor briefly wrung his heart, and Pride was quick to lean down, to offer a warm and reassuring nuzzle to the child. "No, it's quite all right--I just didn't expect you to be using it so powerfully already," and again mentally berated himself for such a foolish assumption. His own chrysalis, even, had practically exploded around him at his hatching and she was a couple days old, already.

James was there, then, the touch of wing unwelcome--Pride had never been a particularly touchy type, and James was. But he made no motion to indicate as much. He tolerated it, ignored it, but he couldn't hide the irritation that flashed through him briefly at James taking over this little lesson to his own daughter. Kids had limited attention span and what James was telling her was hardly related to magic. Tag was to show adeptness-? At what? He exhaled, his brief sidelong flash of annoyance visible in his eyes, but he forced it away. James was a friend, and still young, and had done nothing wrong; it would be cruel to be rude to him--and it would set a bad example. (And now he'd nudged him again. Pride paused, staring briefly at James before looking back to Jampa.)

"Jampa," he began, seriously but kindly, gently, "James is mostly right, but that isn't the lesson I'd offer you. Instead, I will point out this. When a parent creates life, the child gains their type of magic. You don't have Tenzin's magic; you share my own. And our magic is very, very powerful--and very, very dangerous. I do not wish to scare you, but you must be cautious in learning it. Even a small misstep can be dangerous." A repetition, kind but solemn. To a bystander it might have seemed overly ominous, to a child, but Pride still bore awful memories of his first close friend shattering her leg nearly off of her body as a freshly-hatched pup. He'd had to hunt for and feed her for cycles after, and it had never truly healed. "So what we can do, perhaps, is teach you about this magic--while James and I are here to help in case anything goes wrong, yes?" Now that he had healing magics, it wouldn't, perhaps, be quite so deadly.

"And our magic is wonderful!" he added, warmly, offering another nudge to his child and then stepping back. "We can move things with just our minds, flinging them about; we can protect ourselves from anything that might strike us. We can change things around us however we see fit! It is a magic of the mind, a magic that alters reality itself. But we must be careful, with such power, that we don't change something we didn't mean to--or ourself." You don't want to move your leg off your body, he again thought, grimly, but did not say.

The reason he hadn't worried this much about James was the difference in element. The horse held magic of the mind, but it wasn't quite the same sort; not the explosive, chaotic sort, difficult to control, as Pride's often was.

"But it can be a lot of fun, if you learn it well, and if you're careful. Like this," he offered, kind-eyed, and cast his magic out with caution.

Gravity around all three of them was... nullified; he floated a few inches upward, weightless and content. "I can teach you to float, if you like. Not high up, of course, but it's quite fun to hover around--and you leave no footsteps that can be tracked, that way," he added, with mischief in his tone. "I can teach you everything I know, in time."

He kept the spell up for awhile, giving the others time to speak, and eventually lowered them all gently back to the ground. Hopefully, though, he'd made his point--without frightening her too badly.

@Jampa

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