Chapter 3: Para Bellum
AN: Probably going to be the longest chapter of the fo at about 8K words it's quite beefy.
This is basically all the SCIENCE! and prep work for later chapters. Next chapter is a gore filled slaughter, if nothing else it's an exploration in writing violence.
This is where it turns to completer crack.
Reasonable discussion and reviews are fine. Just keep in mind:
I write for fun. I don't care if it's not your cup of tea.
The next few years pass peacefully and quickly. Rather than making leaping strides in new directions, she focuses on the basics. Timing, control, power, speed and balance. Working on removing unnecessary movement from her bending.
Working with her chi helps with this. Moulding it without movement, observing the effect her bending has upon it and streamlining her techniques. She's only 12 and others would consider a master at her level. Keira doesn't feel like one. Not yet.
But she's accepting of her calm and steady progress, it feels less like a rush of mad SCIENCE! experiments and more like the consistency she grew up with.
Before, this would bring feelings of melancholy and pain, not now. Now it's easier to accept, time heals all wounds after all. Her experience with loss and grief from her time as an adult comes to her aid, the peaceful valley she resides in, a balm to her soul.
The wounds aren't so deep, there are scars left on her souls for sure, but they're healing nicely now. The trauma easier to face.
It's slow going, but she's beginning to feel more self-assured of herself, more like her old self. She hasn't really been able to be happy for a few years now, there are still days where she wants to give up, days where she breaks down and cries, but she's healing.
It's a process. Her old snarky sense of humour has taken a beating, she hopes it's still there, she'd be boring otherwise.
In the meantime, she's also perfected condensation techniques, drawing water from air, making mist from seemingly nothing. Hiding tendrils of water and blades of ice within.
In order to maximise her fine control, she draws out and moves individual droplets of water, eventually forming dotted words, then shapes, then full sculptures, adding fine detail as they hover in the air. The only limits being her concentration and the amount of water.
Keira has also been working hard with her senses. Drilling it into herself until it's become more of a passive second nature than an active ability, her range grows constantly.
Currently it's enough to cover the whole valley, that's not to say she can focus on everything at once, but it's enough to notice most thinks that stand out, such as movement and anything with enough chi, essentially letting her find anything alive within her range.
It's made hunting dead easy when combined with bending.
It's enough to make her realise there might be those out there that can sense well too. They may also be able to hide their chi, but movements in the water in air is usually enough to tell.
She's working on ways to suppress her chi, but it's not like she has anyway to test it. She just hopes it's good enough if she ever has to use stealth.
In the meanwhile, she's developed techniques of at least blending it to seem more like the background. She feels much better at it when in the mist however, especially since she can easily flood it with her chi when bending it.
She's been working on making the mist her mainstay weapon, forming blades of ice at will at any point within, forming tendrils and cutting, powerful jets of water that could easily incapacitate foes.
The valley itself is slowly shaping up to be more than just her home it seems, the natural mists and fog performing as adequate starting points, allowing her to quickly weaponize any part of it. To that end she's been making alternative shelters, bolt holes and emergency stashes in the event of attacks.
Over the years, a lesser used skill has been her healing. She doesn't get injured often, but when she is it's dead useful in recovery. She's been meaning to experiment with it, but she's been distracted.
You see, she's been wondering about some similarities between chi and chakra from Naruto, if there's somethings that can be learnt from the show. Specifically, wood release.
She technically has earth and water already, it shouldn't be too hard to manipulate wood, right? Wrong.
Trees are alive. They have their own chi. Replicating their chi does nothing but help them grow faster and healthier. Woodbending is on the back burner with the other earth manipulating experiments, it seems.
So, back to healing. People are made mostly of water. It's a fact most people know. Therefore, cells are made mostly from water. This is essentially how healing with waterbending works.
Cells need energy to do things, i.e. divide to heal the body. The body's cells are 'bent', chi is transferred and manipulated, giving the cells enough energy to do their thing, the cells divide at a rapid rate and the body heals. Inexperienced healers can get this wrong and make things worse.
The first few burst blood vessels highlighted this fact to Keira. This is only the beginning.
Using waterbending, you can potentially give people cancer. How? Giving someone's damaged cells enough energy to replicate rather than just dying off like they should, bypassing their internal biological 'kill switch' and forming a nasty tumour, doing the opposite of healing.
Now, you might think, 'hey let's weaponize healing!' (you bloodthirsty nerd), that's before you realise there are so many better options of killing people.
For example, Keira's new toy, bloodbending.
As in, puppetry, cardiac arrest and more through controlling your victi-ehm enemies' blood.
She's been trying it out during hunting, it makes it too easy. Being able to draw out and weaponize both living and dead enemies' blood to wreak havoc is akin to being a fucking blood mage.
Now, you might be wondering about the focus on living enemies. If you've ever played Dragon Age, she's essentially recreated walking bomb. Except it's instant, and violent. The animals she's tried it on basically blow up in a fountain of gore. Yummy.
It's fair to say she vomited a few times after. It's also fair to say she's only going to use that far behind mist sense because fuck watching it happen, but she's not going to say no to an anti-Fire Nation terror weapon.
Speaking of terror weapons, back to mist. Specifically filling it with blood, making it red. And then using her burgeoning control over her chi to replicate killing intent.
Ah, Naruto gives out the best ideas. Haku and Zabuza alone give plenty of ideas for potential war crimes against her would-be assailants.
She can also freeze and solidify their blood into weapons. Yet another morale killer. Lovely.
Keira decides to back away from the fear campaign for a bit for some nice and sane self-experimental "healing".
Or basically the combined principle of 'magic' body reinforcement, forcing her body into peak condition and otherwise pulling a not-quite Tsunade/Ororchimaru with better strength, flexibility etc.
To begin with, she includes earthbending and finds that, when used with waterbending 'healing', she's able to manipulate the carbon, the nutrients AND the water in cells. This effectively gives her MUCH better control with her biology.
Allowing her to mess with production of chemicals, metabolism and otherwise streamlining her inefficient processes. She also gives herself a minor innate healing factor that she can easily speed up, costing only chi.
This can potentially shorten her lifespan, not good.
Solution, more in-depth sensing. Result: half remembered biology detailing telomeres, having them extended, applying a sort of template to the rest of her cells, giving her pseudo-immortality in that past a certain point her body will stop ageing.
Cells will still die and replicate, but the speed won't change, there won't be a drop off in effectiveness. Therefore, making her ageless, when she stops growing. She'll get fewer wrinkles, but she'll still get a couple, it's not perfect but she'll be healthy and won't die from it, which is the main thing.
Bear in mind this doesn't make her any harder to kill, but death of natural causes is becoming less and less likely.
To round this off she uses chi to bolster her immune system against poisons and diseases, particularly potent ones such as auto-immune diseases may still require direct intervention but with this, she can at least survive them long enough to heal them manually.
Her newfound control of biology needs to be tested further before she uses it in combat. This she recognises, she's not happy considering the blood bomb that was last time, but she'll do it.
One more weapon is one more option in war after all, having as many tricks as she can get her hands on is her best bet for surviving any upcoming conflict. She's certainly not an experienced fighter.
A few wolves end up having eyeballs explode or are just given cataracts. Balance is disrupted by messing with fluid in ears. Spit is bent, choking occurs, Darth Vader impression check. Blood puppetry check.
Manipulating CSF has all kinds of effects on their brains. She can make them rabid, make them catatonic, cause seizures, knock them out or just straight up kill them.
She can manipulate blood from bone marrow and snap them, effectively crippling limbs. The best way of causing paralysis is through csf, combined with freezing blood flow. Blowing up internal organs is another fast way of killing, easiest is via cardiac arrest. Neck snap by spit bending is easiest.
Nasty stuff. More vomit. She decides it's time to play with nice fluffy clouds for a few months.
Specifically, she makes it rain. Getting the pressures and temperatures right for other weather conditions takes time to get right, but clouds are large, and the effects are obvious. It doesn't take long before she ends up with a localised ice storm, pelting down shards of sharp ice.
A few months' worth of experimentation and she can control it as an aoe. She is quickly able to make it rain ice sharp and fast enough to cut through trees and scratch away at rocks, effectively bypassing armour.
She has her army killer. Her mist control has also reached the level where she can shred groups in moments. She finally feels strong enough to feel safe from incursions. She can relax now. But she doesn't really. She's having fun with bending.
Keira starts working on earth techniques again. She makes walls, towers and forts of rock. She makes towering golems that she's filled with tubes of water, making easily puppeted hydraulics systems.
They give the golems deceptively fast speed for their size, based from sheer power of movement, giving tremendous momentum and the biggest ones have enough force of impact to shake the ground just from moving.
She's considering using the idea of her better material science to make them strong, fast and flexible, giving her the potential of making a small army, a squad at least. The main difficulty will be in controlling more than one at once, so far even just one gives her difficulty. All the different moving parts are hard to work with.
She's managed harder things by now that it's not insurmountable, besides, they don't need to act as expert fighters, just big slabs of rock that hit hard and fast, while keeping her safe.
She's taken the idea of hydraulics based earthbending and run with it. Her new idea: power armour, currently it's based on the standard rock armour that earthbenders can use, but she has plans to make it an exoskeletal power armour based on Fallout or Halo.
The hydraulic water will give her a force multiplier, while her better materials will leave her practically untouchable via foot soldiers, siege weapons won't fare better when considering her increased mobility or defensive bending.
Fire will also have an extra layer to consider before she's affected, minimizing risk of burn injuries. She also plans to have a layer of water beneath its armoured plates, reducing that risk to nil when she can much more easily manipulate its temperature.
Before all that she needs to improve her material gathering and refining. She's gotten the idea of having a template in mind of the 'zoomed in' part and then copy pasting it from her cellular experiments.
Working on this scale, with such a high level of detail is tedious, long, hard work. Getting the position and structure of molecules right takes a level of focus and dedication that she's never had to use. It takes weeks to get it right, but finally, it works.
Drilling the template into muscle or 'chi' memory, so that she can bend rock into advanced chemical compounds on the fly, will take her even longer, but it will be worth it.
Her new focus, now that it's just a matter of training, is working towards metalbending. Metal is just another part of the earth after all.
She feels that the right direction is with magnetism and electrostatic forces, the earth is also just a big magnet so it's not that big of a leap. Vibrations and friction to create static charge are a good first step.
She feels the next step will then be to create and manipulate metal ions, using small, but powerful, magnetic fields to achieve that. Her fine control and visualisation will get a workout at the very least.
Perhaps she may be able to find a new sensory aspect, by attuning her chi to detect magnetism will allow her better control on that scale, she muses. Besides, she'll need it if she wants to play with electric charge and therefore, bend lightning.
Not all metals are ferromagnetic, true, but their atoms aren't. Working on that scale will take her a long time to reach and learn, but she has the patience for it. She has time after all.
In the meantime, using it with waterbending to instead create thunderstorms sounds like a way to hone her macro control, whilst giving her a new, terrifying level of power. Being able to call down lightning at will sounds awesome.
Seasons change and Keira reaches 14-ish, maybe. She doesn't have a way of telling her birthday, but she knows that it's midway through summer and she's made a sort-of tally mark calendar in her cave.
She's discovered that metalbending is tricky, but doable. It was hard at first due to its nature of locking in place and just generally being hard and robust. But so was rock, it just required a slightly different mindset, breaking and reforming ionic bonds to shift it around.
Earth is much easier to move for most people, mainly due to a lack of physics knowledge. They work with spiritual and elemental concepts rather than scientific ones.
Keira has found she can work with both.
She often has to switch between the two mindsets, it was jarring when she was first learning to bend, but now, after over a decade of it? It's become second nature to flow between them, even in the midst of complex bending.
It's the only way she's been able to get so far, metaphorical and spiritual concepts doing the legwork where her old, yet no less true, modern viewpoint falters.
Her attempts with lightning using waterbending were much easier to handle. Her innate grip of waterbending being that much stronger, her understanding of it on a spiritual level that much deeper, her greater experience with it allowing her to progress that much faster, upped the ante so-to-speak with her trials with it in earthbending.
She's been able to make lighting storms for a while now and her control and guidance are only improving. Experience with macro control with her 'razor-hail' combined with the small streams of water she used to work with has already laid down most of the groundwork.
She just builds up a charge using the already heavily electrostatic forces and gives it an easy path to follow. Electric charge follows the path of least resistance after all. She almost feels sorry for all the metal wearing and weapon using soldiers she'll eventually come across. Almost.
As a side project she's been working with her woodbending, giving her home furniture with an actual bed, no mattress sadly. It's still an improvement and anything that makes her life easier to bear is good in her book.
The white-haired girl has also figured out how to turn even more of her already dangerous (for enemies) valley, into even more of a death-trap by being able to move the very trees themselves. The hard, yet malleable, roots and branches has given her yet another set of deadly weapons.
Being able to outright uproot and crush enemies with the entire forest brings an evil smirk to her face.
It's looking more likely that she can sell this place as haunted. Moving forests, dense bloody mist that kills and inspires a foreboding feeling through killing intent and a whole host of other horrors that allow her to kill and terrorise without even being near, will surely inspire talk of spirits and demons.
It'll probably end up with an obvious name like forbidden valley or some other bullshit. People are usually terrible at naming places.
Continuing on, she's made strides in growing her own crops, performing rudimentary bioengineering and setting up a steadier, farmed, food supply. Being able to capture animals easily, through bending their blood helps, giving her few livestock such as goat, boar and rabbit.
She might come to miss hunting, but she'd rather have the convenience than not. She can always hunt for fun later. Taking care of crops and animals with bending has its own relaxing appeal anyway.
Regardless, she's made strides in a previously underutilized area: chi absorption and increasing her capacity for life energy. After mastering her current projects, she then hopes to take everything to the next level of full on energybending.
She has ideas on where to start with that, but nothing concrete for now. She never watched the show so doesn't know where to start with it as an elemental concept.
Energy in general though? That she can easily visualise. Her understanding of it in comparison to the rest of this uncivilised world is far beyond what anyone else knows.
But first, back to chi absorption. What she means by that, is that she's found that she can connect to and absorb the energy given off by the living world around her. So far, she's only been able to do it while meditating and focusing solely on the process.
It's slow and time consuming, but so far, the same could be said for most of her other creative ideas. Eventually she'll make it a constant passive effect like her sensing.
In the end though, she aims to be able to fully absorb and redirect other people's bending. This will give her blanket superiority over others. Possibly only when fighting one-on-one, but it may have protective applications against multiple foes.
Being able to have the equivalent of a life/spirit drain spell, or even a draining aura, will give a great advantage over others.
She's also had the idea of improving her own capacity and energy regeneration through constant use and cycling it, in and out, working the energy like a muscle. She's honestly not sure if it's working the way she intended, but it at least helps as a multitasking exercise, it may take time for any noticeable effects.
The more likely route is through greater understanding of her soul, she feels as though the deeper in tune you are with your spirit, the easier bending becomes. Luckily, being alone allows for long periods of introspection.
Unfortunately, being alone for so long has sent her a little mad. Having focus and determination has helped, but she's essentially a hermit now, she doesn't really know if she even wants contact with others after so long.
Sure, she's a little lonely, but she was never a people person anyway, besides, she's not bored with messing with superpowers in slightly crazy ways. By this point, she doesn't think she'd know how to live with others anyway.
Ultimately, she's at peace here. She was just so tired of people, from a life and an extra childhood of dealing with social issues, is it really so bad to settle down, away from all the worries of the world?
Keira doesn't think so. Perhaps she might eventually want to go out and find love, but she's not even sure how this world would take her sexuality. Assholes from her old life certainly had a few issues with it and that's in the modern era, she's not sure if she wants to find out in this barbaric place.
She feels it's better to play it safe for now. Maybe when she can no-sell everything they can use against her she'll change her mind, who knows.
With her convictions reaffirmed, she returns to her meditation.
Observing her chi, the way it flows through her with each breath, each heartbeat, brings her no closer to her goal. She feels it's her metaphysical understanding that's lacking, she never was a religious person, it's catching her out now, she supposes.
Not having a clear view of the issue becomes frustrating for her after a while, she decides to take her time with it, maybe eventually she'll reach "enlightenment" she snorts. Well, it's probably what she's after at any rate, she shakes her head with a rueful smile.
She decides not to dwell on it, understanding may come with time, or it may not. Regardless, she moves on, deciding to plan out her next moves, besides refreshing herself with her now vast amount of techniques. She sets out a schedule for it all, working on old techniques in the week and developing new ones on the weekends, her repertoire is large enough as it is.
Maybe not, she reflects. She currently lacks any training with weapons or hand-to-hand. Everything she's practiced so far has been bending, her young body wasn't really up to sparring with adults when she had the chance.
She decides to check through her villages' scrolls for any lessons she may need. She finds some basic katas, but she guesses you're usually meant to have a teacher. She decides to learn them and then make her own style.
She has a eureka moment.
Fighting against golems.
It'll do wonders for her concentration and control, not much for fighting others considering a lack of autonomy. But it should be fine for just learning how to use them in the first place and how an enemy might move to attack her.
She nods, deciding on weapons training, at the very least ranged and thrown weapons, using bending on them to home in on enemies would make for a deadly option. With her range through sensing, she could potentially become a sniper with them.
That's also something to work on with her bending as well, rock and ice projectiles, rock spikes from the ground, single target striking from cloud ice and lightning.
She'll also look at recreating the lightning cloak from Skyrim, or lightning attacks from Thor Ragnarok. Maybe. She might burn herself a bit unless her chi protects her from herself. A better plan is to use metalbending with her magnetic control to turn her arms into a makeshift railgun.
She also works on adding metal to her armours as outer plating, keeping the carbon nanomaterial as an underlayer. Growing biological carbon allotropes, specifically in the shape she wants by modifying plants to make her efforts faster has her thinking about self-repairing, living armour. That might take some doing and may end up being a process she has to learn to do herself just like sensing.
With a busy schedule of weapons training in the mornings, followed by the less frustrating refreshers of her bending later in the day, finishing with her new ideas on weekends.
The refinement of her skills carries her through the next couple of years. It's only when she realises that she's been 16 for at least a month before she takes stock of herself properly for the first time in years.
With long, flowing white locks, hard as steel abs and fighter's musculature, she's not a dainty flower. She's strong, fast, flexible and enduring.
Her minor lifebending has been put to use, giving her a low level of shapeshifting, her muscles are tighter, denser than is natural. Her skin is flawless, her once natural form has taken a slightly supernatural edge.
Her now sizeable curves are firmed slightly; her body would seem to defy gravity is some areas more than others.
Her bones are hard as iron, it's been a long time since they've been broken. Considering her vigorous and sometimes dangerous mad SCIENCE! Infused bending, it's a testament to their fortitude.
Her organs have been streamlined, immune system enhanced, glands, hormones and other natural processes have been brought up to par.
Her natural senses have been enhanced, her eyes sharp, vision of more colours and at all light levels, the increased sensitivity is counterbalanced with more resilient cells, reducing glare and pain when bright flashes occur. Her ears sensitive to more, yet able to handle louder sounds.
The increased robustness of her senses proved necessary, especially when she temporarily blinded and deafened herself when she used lightning bending, after the changes were first implemented. She quickly corrected that after vomiting from the shock.
Her sense of balance and touch have also been improved, she had a field day getting the sensitivity right, pain was excruciating till she toned it back down. Pleasure on the other hand was another story.
Smelling blood, animal shit and all the other lovely smells of the world just aren't worth it to her.
She's come a long way in her time spent here. From minor control over rocks and limited healing via waterbending, to being able to conjure a hurricane of lethal blades of ice while smashing through whatever gets in her way in bootleg power armour.
The core aspect of her recent training streamlined her arsenal, bringing speed, efficiency and letting her flow from one style to another almost effortlessly. The boon of attuning herself towards water has clearly paid off.
Being able to tear the ground asunder with jagged spires of rock and metal that ripple and churn, like stormy waves in a sea of dirt, fills her with a sense of power.
The quaking of the very ground she walks, bringing down trees, causing landslides and a general collapse of her vicinity as she runs roughshod over the once, in comparison, near silent valley.
And once it's all over, when the dust settles, and she sees the devastation she's wrought; she fixes it. It's like watching time reverse. Uprooted trees once more finding homes within the now placid and steady soil.
Cracked and wrecked earth remoulds into the image she desires, the resulting area becoming a perfect replica of what it once was. Her control perfect, the rejuvenated land looks flawless.
Keira's skills in repairing what was damaged have been tested very thoroughly over the years with her experiments. It shows.
Her control with water has reached the level that she can draw together a veritable tsunami of water from the air alone, not even touching the mist or clouds, her combined control on the micro and macro scale is enough to supersede all but the most ancient and dedicated master of bending, her knowledge, understanding and creative drive, carrying her further than any, surpassing the spirits of the Avatar itself.
That is not to say the Avatar doesn't have more power and endurance than her, this she knows. She seeks to instead use control and discipline to turn away overwhelming force, her own will being strong enough to at least weather the storms that such primordial powers may bring to bear.
Keira's improvement in close quarter combat has at least removed a major weakness and been turned into a minor strength. That strength is only amplified when used alongside her prodigious bending.
Even then her fresh perspective of the world breathes new life into the tried and tested forms of her village. The more traditional styles have been incorporated and improved upon, the basics mastered, her fighting style flows from a solid core of balanced poise, the ground always steady beneath her feet, no matter her environment.
Weapons of all kinds, polearms, swords, axes, hammers, daggers and bows have seen practice. The rarer weapons only being trained to a lesser extent, broadening her basic knowledge. The main focus has been with spears, swords, daggers and the bow.
Using bending with the already deadly weapons turns her from a decent fighter into a hyper-lethal storm of blades on the battlefield, metalbending guides each of her attacks home with every strike, every throw and every arrow shot hits its mark with pinpoint accuracy.
Her puppeteering of rock/metal golems filled with water has reached the threshold that she can comfortably sink into meditation and direct a squad of them in combat against themselves. This requires a level of multitasking and focus that should be impossible to achieve by all but an awakened avatar.
It's testament to her sheer stubbornness that she manages it, her spirit is reflected in that.
After her reflections, Keira begins on her latest experiment. Bringing together waterbending with magnetic control and lightningbending to superheat, pressurise and contain dense water.
The result: plasma.
She's finding it to be a bit of a bitch to work with, cooling too rapidly to be of use or escaping containment of the magnetic fields and fizzling out. Currently it's not much use, it probably won't be much better in the future either, but she wants a lightsabre, end of discussion.
Perhaps, she's trying to do this the wrong way, maybe the old tried and true method of using her chi directly might help. It certainly does with everything else, acting like a stabilising bridge between possible and impossible.
So, over the next few weeks, that's exactly what she does. Eventually it works and there may or may not have been mad cackling.
Making a magnetic baton, cough lightsabre cough, to help her direct the superheated beam of plasma to wield it with one hand while using the other to bend lightning and scream "unlimited power" was definitely worth the time and effort. It may not be much use in actual combat, but it's fun and that's what matters.
Not having fun with mad SCIENCE! would make it all pointless anyway.
After getting bored with impersonating Palpatine, she decides it's time to make this place into a true home, rather than just squatting in a cave, she's been running out of ideas that let her procrastinate the hard work it will be.
To start with she carves a series of stairs into the mountain, next to her cave, she then hollows out a large space, she changes the structure of the reclaimed rock into denser, harder stone to form support pillars and beams to prevent a cave-in.
For now, she sets aside any metals she finds for decoration later. In the meantime, she creates a series of rooms and floors in the cavernous space, adding places for lighting as she goes along, filling the braziers with coal that she lights on fire.
She uses sensing to dig out small shafts for ventilation. She then bends metal and feeds copper pipes through the earth, connecting the mountain's natural springs to the rest of her hideaway.
After she feels as though she's done enough utility work for now, she carves a staircase going up near the entrance and makes a balcony that leads into what will be her spacious bedroom.
She then decides to add ornamentation, metal writing is engraved in the stone pillars. Metallic statues with fearsome looking armour and weapons with design similar to that of knights. They sport helmets that resemble the design worn by the 300 Spartans, only fully enclosed for a more medieval look, with full plate armour and longswords.
She bends rock, crystal and metal on the bare walls, creating stylish colour images of her working with the elements. Metallic art of Keira's more impressive looking bending soon finds homes throughout the halls.
For more materials to work with, she uses woodbending to gather trees that dot the mountain near to her home and break them down into planks. She also chooses to grow some cherry trees by the entrance, manipulating the trees around her to match.
Keira eventually finds her way back to the entrance and shapes it into an Asian looking style, with stone pillars holding a canopy of dark wood.
She then makes her way inside, continuing the theme into a great hall, with thick pillars flanking the wide, flat ground. She caps the hall off with small steps leading up to a raised circular dais with a long stone table with wooden seats.
She then adds a few long tables with chairs of wood on the lower floor to complete the aesthetic.
Next, she creates a side room for a kitchen area that has its on stairs down into her currently bare storage area, she fills the kitchen with workspaces, cupboards and bends metal cutlery, pots and other cooking ware, she'll make clay/pottery for plates and cups later. She adds in a sink before carving a ventilation shaft for a coal stove and oven.
In order to make the storage rooms even colder, she first bends the walls into an insulative material. She then surrounds the walls with water and bends it into ice, making it thicker than she usually does.
For the final touches, she bends the gathered planks into a light shade of wood and starts fitting it in as flooring. For doors, she uses a dark brown wood and for chairs, bed frames and other furniture she uses wood that's a shade lighter.
She then decides to make an indoor training area, making the walls, floor and roof out of sturdier materials such as her carbon-based creations.
She creates a connected armoury on the left side of the room with weapon racks and mannequins. She then brings in her weaponry from outside, makes copies of her different designs of armour and bends them onto the mannequins.
On the right side of the training area, she makes a large room that she'll turn into a workshop where she can work on designs on armour and golems.
At the back end, she decides to open up an even larger room, digging a small channel through one side for water to flow though, giving her an area to practice bending indoors.
Over the next few weeks, she personalises the place between her training, farming and meditation. Adding decorative channels of flowing water, making cold and warm storage rooms as a basement and finishing off with rooms for bathing.
Eventually she fixes the plumbing so she can finally have a flush toilet. It only took her 16 years of shitting in the woods.
Later into the project she uses earth and water sensing to find hotter areas of the mountain, channelling water there and making a series of artificial hot springs. She then lays down a second set of water pipes from the springs, giving all her rooms hot water to go with the cold.
She decides to make an outside bathing area by drawing up another hot spring and raising up the ground, making small steps up into the rocky clearing. A route indoors is carved into the mountain, splitting off, with one corridor to the stairs to her bedroom and the other leading to the main hall.
She bends the earth and fills large stone baths with the spring water, directing any excess back into the ready-made water system. Wood is then brought in and bent into shape as flooring, decoration and partial roofing. Dirt is then brought up to make a garden with plants, grass and a couple cherry trees to finish off the area.
It's late summer when she finishes her work on the large structure, only changing bits and pieces as she pleases, overall she's satisfied with the place, but decides to carve out more windows and open areas around the outside of the small mountain, letting in more natural light so it feels less stuffy.
She also decides to make stone walls to protect the place, with towers, parapets and crenellations, finishing the imposing defences with a large stone and metal gate.
Inside the walls, she expands her small farm to include an orchard, uprooting and bending fruit trees from the outside forest to give her diet more variety. Speaking of, she earthbends some clay from the soil, ready to be shaped into plates, bowls and cups then fired in an oven.
Later on, she collects her ceramics, ready for the kitchen and prepares herself a proper cooked meal of venison stew. While eating, she reflects over the past few weeks and feels a wave of satisfaction over the results of her work.
She decides that her next project just has to be better clothes than the roughly tanned leather she's shoddily made over the years, she wants to stop living like a barbarian squatting in a cave, she nods firmly.
Lifebending some cottons and flax into fabrics shouldn't be too hard, Lord knows she's done much more complicated things down to the molecular level. Basic linens are fairly simple, hell, she could life bend her leathers into better shape too.
Getting a hold of silkworms and spiders to recreate their different silks shouldn't take her too long, she'll just have to fine tune her sensing to that scale with some meditation.
Over the next month she spends most of her free time working with different materials, she makes clothes of all kinds. Suits, dresses, shirts, trousers, underwear, tunics, jumpers, hoodies, coats, cloaks, hats, gloves, scarves, boots, shoes, sandals, kimonos, she goes on a bit of a binge and has to expand her wardrobe a few times over to cover it all.
She also ends up making some light and medium weight combat armour from her advanced materials and nanomaterials.
They look like stealth suits with plates where possible, giving more mobility and flexibility than her heavier gear, built for any subtle work she may find herself doing.
Recreating dyes for her clothes took some doing and somehow, she ended up getting paint first but, in the end, at least she has colourful walls now.
Over the next few months, she ends up working on trying to recreate generators and steam engines, she manages the basics fine, but it takes time for her to get the mechanisms to work without her.
After a while at work, she decides that rather than coal powered steam engines, she'll be using geothermal energy to heat the water for steam turbines. Much more reliable and doesn't require much oversight, while with coal or oil, she'd have to constantly refill the engine.
She'll also use water wheels and wind turbines, in the end all a generator requires is a spinning magnet and a wire.
By the time Keira reaches 17, she has a fully electrified hideout, using her carbon nanomaterials as an insulator for her wires, she would use rubber, but she hasn't quite got to rubber and plastics with her bending. Goodbye coal fires, hello filament bulbs.
At this point her growth has slowed down, growing naturally she might remain at her height of 5'11". She isn't going to finish growing naturally, she decides.
Instead, she uses lifebending to take the final steps with body modification. Her advanced tests with biomaterials that resemble carbon nanotubes over the next few months let her refine them to where she's comfortable with having the material strengthen her. It's pointless to take unnecessary risks with her health after all.
To start with, her already dense bones receive reinforcement from the new material, improving their flexibility while also increasing their toughness. Next her muscles are reinforced with chords that provide extra strength and speed.
Then, her tendons and ligaments are fully replaced with the resistant and flexible material, giving her more freedom of movement, with less risk of damage.
Her body in general receives upgrades across the board, reinforced joints, improved organs, subdermal armour, a faster healing factor to name a few. She also gains another couple of inches, bringing her to the tall height of 6'2.
After a long week of modification, resting, healing and testing of her new body, she can safely say she's reached the realm of super soldiers. Being able to hurl a couple tons of rock with ease gives credence to her newfound strength.
She's fast too. Faster than peak human performance at least, not quite at the level of Halo Spartans, but not far. Flexibility wise, she's basically a contortionist.
Under her skin, there's a layer of the dense, flexible material, making her effectively stab-proof. The material has also covered the gaps between her bones where appropriate for extra organ protection, removing the chance for a blade to slip through her ribs.
Her appearance hasn't really changed, besides her height. There are probably more invasive improvements she could use, but she feels safe as is.
Keira spends the next year retraining with her new body, having a totally different height and weight ratio has thrown her balance somewhat so having time to train with it does wonders.
Besides basic training to keep her skills sharp, it's been a peaceful year for Keira, spending most of it relaxing with her new comforts that she's been missing, (finally figured out mattresses and fluffy towels yay).
The only new work she's done has been experimenting with earthbending to make decorative luminous crystals and metals, essentially just decorating with glow in the dark stuff.
The period of rest has done wonders for her psyche, she can tell. Being able to feel her own 'spirit' is a big clue.
One thing of note, she's found ruminations around the nature of her soul and souls in general have brought her closer to spirit and energy bending.
Wait. She feels like slapping herself.
It's a less common trope sure, but it's still a trope that all things have souls, plants, animals, water, even fucking dirt might have a soul. It's just the kind of bullshit metaphysical concept a universe like this one might have.
Which makes chi, soul energy.
So, in that case then affecting your chi has an impact on a person's soul, it certainly makes sense with elemental bending.
How to exploit this, then? Souls are eternal and don't really age, at all. They're incorporeal and, from what she can tell from coming from a different universe altogether, they can change. They don't seem to really have any kind of limits on how much 'energy' they produce either.
This should mean that we don't really have a 'capacity' for energy, it's more how deeply we connect with our spirit and how the spirit world and physical one come into balance. This essentially means our bodies aren't chi generators like she thought, they're conduits.
Our physical bodies give the physical ability to act upon the world through bending from the metaphysical 'weight' of our soul, the deeper our connection to the spiritual world, the greater that weight.
The connection results from knowledge, understanding and the nature of the soul itself. Some souls are geared for bending, some aren't. Her soul is different than most. She's reincarnated and therefore has two 'natures', two states of being.
The nature of her old life, the foundation of who she is, the core of her identity and the nature of her new life, the foundation of who she could be, the core of what path she chooses her future to take. These two parts have sort of coalesced, with the first being earth-like the latter being water-like.
The first is stable, rock solid, she was already an adult, her path already chosen, habits already formed, fate decided, death reached. Violet.
The second is change, free flowing, reborn as a child, her future in flux, path yet to be decided, life yet to live. Keira.
Her soul is an amalgam of the two, her identity chosen, she is both Keira and Violet, they are her 'masks', they are who she shows herself to be in the physical world.
Her soul itself is nameless, formless, it's identity can be changed, just as hers can. Her names carry weight in the spirit world just as her soul carries weight in the physical one, indirectly.
Her names, her experiences, her choices, her consciousness, her soul is all of these and more. It is shaped by them, just as it shapes her, weighs upon her fate, pushes her one way or another.
Death is the only way of truly reconnecting with her soul. She sees that now. Her body and her consciousness temporary, her soul is eternal.
Her soul is what gives her life meaning, how her actions matter even after this life ends.
It is all she is, all she has been, all she could be. Her soul is formless potential moulded by her desires, thoughts, feelings.
Her soul is the shape of her life, spirit of her potential. Her life is the form of her soul, her potential realised in matter.
It all makes her feel so small. Souls don't have a size in the real world. She can be so much more than she seems. Her life is tiny before it, yet the affects her lives have on it are profound.
She feels her soul, it surrounds her, it flows though her, it is her.
She can feel how she came to be; her body was given life from the midst of nothingness. Her soul existing where there is nothing. Form is emptiness. Her life was provided form by nothingness. Emptiness is form. Her soul is the embodiment of this.
She came from nothing and to nothingness she will return. Life, death and rebirth. An eternal cycle.
Upon these newfound revelations, her connection to that which is nothing has become ever deeper. Her past death ever more meaningful for it. Her current and any subsequent lives changed for it.
It is with new certainty that she opens her eyes, her connection unbroken, unchanged. Meditating brought her no closer to her soul than it did before, it's always there, it has always been there. It doesn't have a mind, a consciousness. It simply reflects her own.
There is nothing to fight against, she just needs to believe and will it, just as her life was given form by nothingness, so too can the form of the world be remade.
This is what it means to bend energy, to bend spirits, to bend life. You bend form.
To bend the chi of others, she must bend the nothingness that is their form.
It is terrifying to have such level of power over others. It's worse knowing there are those out there that can do the same, could have done the same to her. Now it's different. Her soul will not be bent by others. Nothing can change that now.
If they should attempt it, they will be returned to nothing. Human, spirit, animal, or Avatar, it matters not. She will not be moved; the world will move first.
She borrows the phrase once more, crystallising it within her soul. Invictus. She will not bow. Unbowed. Her spirit will not bend. Unbent. Her will cannot be broken. Unbroken.
With the determination to never be at anyone's mercy, her soul reflects this determination, accepts it. It becomes indomitable.
She slowly comes back to her senses.
Her body aches, she realises that it's nightfall. She's spent a full day here, without food or water, she's more tired on a level she's never been before.
Physically she feels at the lowest in her life, mentally she's exhausted after making such a profound change on her soul. But she knows, she can feel, that spiritually, she's never been stronger.
She's tired, hungry, cold and thirsty. Her body will break eventually. Her soul will never.
Keira eventually stands, she's ready for a long rest, so after getting food and water, she does. She collapses into her bed with a tired smile on her face, nothing she will accomplish in life will ever have more meaning than that.
Keira gave her soul Invictus. Even after death it will remain, whatever comes after will be faced with unbreakable determination, no matter what it is, heaven, hell, rebirth, reincarnation, God. None of that matters. For none of it will ever be able to break her now.
She is ready for whatever may come. May whatever God out there have mercy for those that stand in her way, for they will have none from her.
With newfound ruthlessness and cold, detached determination to follow it through, she looks to the future.
AN: Next chapter is filled with gore and fun times with murder.
Pretty much all of the SCIENCE! she gets up to has been explored, now it's applying it in combat.