"Anyway, we're just about out of officially planned lesson time, although you could probably squeeze in a little more fire-following practice without making yourself late to anything. Up to you."

She does a fire kata across the room, with fire following her but not emitting from her strikes.

"I'm definitely stealing that trick."

"Get me a ticket. Two."

"Absolutely."

Beila takes a bow, looking rather like an Avatar-shaped campfire, and then trots out of the practice room.

As she leaves, Jun is beginning to experiment with fire-following.

That evening, she has a date with Dao - hiking to some deserted wilderness out in the country courtesy of Liqing, looking at the stars, toasting toastable foods, and experimenting with toasting each other, because she's pretty sure she has the control now for that to be safe to play with even while highly distracted.

When she arrives to pick him up, he's sitting out front of his apartment, to one side of the door, so absorbed in his (apparently unsettling) thoughts that he actually manages to miss her arrival, roc and all.

"I found some pretty good deserted wilderness." She takes his head and pulls him birdward and wafts them up. "There's almost no light pollution, or at least there won't be until I set something on fire to fix dinner."

"My finest quality." She whistles at Liqing and Liqing takes off.

"No way. Your finest quality is definitely something else. Like maybe how cute you are, or how smart, or how good at catching snakenewts."

"Maybe a bunch of things tie with my convenience."

"Your convenience is pretty great..."

"Though I do come with inconvenient media attention."

"I've been keeping up to date on my weird animal trivia, just in case that one guy comes back. And it's all your fault." Extra hugsqueeze, to emphasize that he is kidding around in case tone of voice and context didn't carry it.

Giggle. "What's your most recent weird animal trivia?"

"Ooh. How about: Ever since that one Earth King with a pet bear in Avatar Aang's time, there have been periodic bear sightings all over the Earth Kingdom, but nobody's ever verified one as definitely not a platypus bear or gopher bear or whatever, and the origin of Bosco the Bear is a mystery to this day?"

"I think the most plausible theory is that Bosco was some sort of awkward crossbreed."

"I'm not sure about that, and neither are some of the experts! I mean you'd expect him to be weird somehow if he was an awkward crossbreed, like he'd have anatomical problems or something, or even just have some features that weren't strictly bearish from one of his parents, but they've got his skeleton in a museum and he's surprisingly well put together, it really looks like somebody did some kind of cosmic math and factored out the 'bear' part from platypus bears and skunk bears and gopher bears and armadillo bears and lynx bears and hyena bears and so on. I've seen the pictures."

"If you think about it, it's a little weird that there's so much convergent evolution in the first place."

"I guess. Weird animal trivia aside, I don't actually know that much about biology."