First off: I'm still alive.
Secondly: Yeah it's been 2 years but hey! At least I'm back before the next Olympics I guess...I'm not helping, am I?
Well, I'm currently finishing my senior year of college and I've been applying to jobs (such as the Disney College Program and a full time position as a video editor at Rooster Teeth) and have been waiting to hear back. I graduate in May!
I can't believe this fic has been alive (and has been in a coma twice) since 2010, so my sophomore year of high school.
Either way, here's an update for you and while it may not be the ones you were hoping for, it will hopefully fill in some of the glossed over details and character growth of Edward, especially in regards to his new status as Avatar.
Chapter Setting: Chapter 3
Time Setting: Day 3 of Avatar Training in the Spirit World
Edward was said to be a genius. That was, or course, true not even counting the fact that he was the youngest state alchemist to ever join the military. However, being a genius did not help when there was not only an extreme amount of culture shock, but also having no form of contact with your friends and family. Plus being told that in order to even have a chance of seeing your world again, you had to save this one.
"I just don't see how any of this makes sense!" Edward growled as he threw a scroll on the ground angrily and stood up. "As far as I'm concerned none of this should even be possible. Where is the science behind any of this?!"
"Edward..." Roku sighed and Aang looked on in sympathy from his spot in a nearby tree. The three of them were sitting in a clearing in a forest and the entire place was littered in scrolls that told about the bending world.
"No, you have animals that are mixed together like chimeras, people who can make fire out of thin air and not to mention the people that can fly-"
"Technically we use gliders-"
"Shut up Aang!" The blond shouted and fell into the pile of scrolls and covered his face with his flesh arm.
"Now Edward, I know you're not used to this however you did agree to this. If we were going to teach you to bend the elements, you would have to learn about why we are able to and the history of this world."
"But how is the energy transferred to use that power?!"
"Well, how did your alchemy work then if bending is so weird?" Aang asked curiously and Edward sat up with a distant look on his face.
"Well, there's three stages of an alchemical transmutation. Comprehension, deconstruction, and reconstruction. You have to understand exactly what goes into something in order to transmute it and those are the various elements that make up matter. And they're not the four elements you're both talking about. I'm talking about things like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon; dozens of things that literally make up everything in the universe. Even here they'd make up everything though people may not know about them.
"From there you use a transmutation circle in order to use the energy needed to deconstruct the thing you're transmuting and then you reconstruct it to whatever you can within the laws of chemistry."
"So, how do you get the energy for a transmutation then" Aang asked innocently and Edward's eyes shot towards him.
"What do you mean by that? I just explained it."
"What he means," Roku interrupted, "is where you body draws the energy that is harnessed in the circle. From your tales in the past two days, you were able to transmute without a circle."
"Well, I suppose it comes from the human body since no energy or matter is ever lost, only transferred..." Edward started but Roku cut him off.
"Then what is so different from that to our bending? It just seems that it more focused by family blood lines that gather together in different nations. Can every person in your world perform alchemy?"
"No, but that's just-"
"Well we have plenty of non-benders here. And some can barely bend their element while others are masters. Can you say the same for your fellow alchemists?" Roku asked and Edward nodded. The elder man was bringing up a number of good points he didn't even consider but there was still things to consider.
"Then where does alchemical energy come from then?" Edward asked to himself and Aang suddenly jumped down from the tree.
"That spirit, in that land of nothingness. It said that you would give up your doorway thing and then you couldn't do alchemy anymore."
Edward suddenly jumped up as well.
"So it comes from an outside source."
"And from what I've been told, this place you were in was your world's counterpart to our spirit world."
"Something that I'm still not entirely comfortable with by the way," Edward muttered but got louder as he started to piece together more of the puzzle, "So if the energy of the dead manifests itself as an afterlife with residual presences while the process of bending is more of a genetic trait, my world doesn't have that. It just has the gate.
"So, if our worlds have similarities, and the Gate is parallel to your Spirit World, that would mean the extra energy that comes from a human when they die would end up there. Souls certainly exist based on our conversation here now, but 'spirits' do not exist in my world. The closest we have are homunculi which use hundreds of thousands of souls to keep them sustained. It takes human transmutation to achieve that so that is the link between alchemy and souls. If souls do go to the Gate when they die, their residual energy powers alchemical transmutations."
The young man gasped as he caught his breath after the realization while Roku and Aang looked at each other, impressed.
Edward suddenly turned back to them with a grin.
"This also makes 'The Avatar' cycle make sense. The Avatar is the post powerful being on the planet. Since your bending doesn't take the energy from the dead but instead from their own energy produced, it has to go somewhere. It is instead recycled into a new container with echoes that have a considerable amount of power behind them. From what you've said about this 'Avatar State' which you briefly mentioned before, it makes sense why it's so horrible.
"All of that energy is concentrated in one thing, in this case a person. And each person in the cycle has some of their energy saved in the newest person, just gaining interest like money in a bank account. So if it is cut off all at once, what happens to that energy if it's near ten times the amount it would be when it's already at the strongest a person can be on a normal day?"
"It has no where to go." Aang whispered in horror and Edward grinned.
"Right! So that's why when our two separate events ended up in the closest space it could, Truth saw what was happening and since I'm a, or was, powerful alchemist, I could be a suitable candidate to drain the access energy into and disperse the rest back into the previous Avatars."
"That's genius." Roku stated while looking quite shell shocked.
"And now all of this actually makes sense!" Edward cheered. "And the way benders use their energy is just like exercising a muscle. They're putting energy into a part of them that yields results in the sense that they can move water, air, earth, or fire. I'd have to look at it more carefully to research but this is at least a great building block!"
Roku merely smiled at the blond while Aang still looked slightly confused.
"So, can I still instruct you the history of our world since you don't have to focus on your conundrum anymore?" The firebender asked and Edward just waved him off while going to find something to write with.
"Now I just have to figure out the link that makes people only able to bend one element at a time and how someone is chosen as an Avatar at birth..." He muttered as he walked out of the clearing. Roku turned to Aang as they stood next to each other.
"Looks like we have our work cut out for us ."
"I'd say. I think even the monks would say I wasn't as difficult to keep on focus as Edward."
"Come, we must find him before he runs into someone such as Koh."
I hope you enjoyed my bits of logic in how the two universes intersect while having Edward go along with the idea of bending since on the surface it seems kinda non-scientific. This would be him reaching a breakdown to where he just wants to go home because none of this really makes sense to the comprehension of the elements that go into the energy of both transmutations and bending. Then the deconstruction of facts and ideas before they're reconstructed into a theory.
A nice little flashback before we reach the end of part 1 of this story.
