As he walked from the stage, his hair fell reaching from his chin to his shoulders. He quickly replaced his knot, if only to keep the hair out of his eyes. He reached his dressing room and quickly removed the sweat-soaked shirt that had survived the intense bath of fire that he had just put it through. He regretted needing another new cape, and needing one in the first place, but it added to the silent intensity and the drama that he loved to focus on.
After changing into more street-appropriate clothes, he left the stage, watching as another entertainer begins a more conservative version of his dragon routine, popular during the Great War, due to the Avatar being in attendance at one during a Fire Festival. He shook his head with silent laughter, thinking how easily it was done with the thin "leash" of flame allowing the performer much more control, while seeming to struggle; more a parlor trick than anything else.
As he leaves the theatre a man dressed in a messenger's garb approaches him and hands him a scroll emblazoned with the Xi Fang family, the resident power elite. It surprised him that such a high class family would want anything to do with a simple performer, little better than a peasant farmer. He accepted the missive with a nod and tipped the man for his trouble; changing had taken longer than usual and he expected that the man had been stationed here as soon as the show had ended.
He read the letter as he made his way home, a roll from the local stand in his mouth. He stopped dead mid-step and his snack hit the ground as his mouth gaped. This family wanted to hire him as a tutor for their daughter! He had never considered taking a pupil ever, let alone before his fame left his own town. He had to refuse. There was no way he could further his own career and skills with an unsteady little girl under his feet. He was sad for the salary to be forgone; the family had not named any strict limit on his pay. He would accept their meeting time; it must have been consciously scheduled at a time he would have no shows to interfere with, but he would refuse the offer to train their daughter.
--
He walked into their lavish guest quarters and wondered at the detail at the carvings etched into their entryway. As far as he could tell the only way to have done so much would have taken any single man a month of hard labor, just for the single arch. He continued on, his gaze wide and eyes wandering, trying to take in the unfathomable tapestry of paintings, statues, and carvings decorating the walls and ceilings of the rooms he passed through.
As he was shown into the room where the family would meet him, he noticed the two parents; their presence pervaded the room as if the sun was to their backs. Only on a second look through the room did he find his intended pupil. She was small and thin, she sat erect in the chair, but it seemed to devour her slowly, almost imperceptibly. Her brown hair, unusual for the Fire Nation, was straight and unadorned, but silky and hung to her mid-back. There was something about her that lacked the air of self-assuredness that her parents had.
He sat in the proffered chair and waited politely to hear whatever offers they would use to bargain with him. For a while he turned away all offers of a high wage, supplied costumes, and the like, but then he was shocked to hear the girl herself chime in. "Would not the most attractive bargain be to put a patron's backing behind such an artist?"
He gaped. Not only had this girl seen the one thing her parents hadn't offered, that they probably had never thought of since the times before the war, when culture was rampant. True, the practice had started again, and because of this there was talk that this would be a revival, The Reawakening, of the old arts.
He could do nothing but accept that offer; that this family, among the richest in the Fire Nation, would support him completely and utterly in all matters of finance, so long as he tutored her daughter.
He had a pupil.
