Jordan thought the speech Kano gave was alright. He could've been a bit more colourful, a bit more humourous, and maybe just a little more cheery. Of course, the Headmaster had gotten the essential information conveyed, and Manilow had a feeling that that would be Kano's only concern. Jordan sighed, and started walking among the pits. His job today, primarily, was to judge students who shared his elemental domain. Jordan normally didn't mind this sort of task, usually he even relished the chance to pick out individual strengths and weaknesses in students and help work through them. Today though, he'd already been emotionally strung out by the incident at the gym class. An incident he had neglected to tell Kano about in any detail, though he could probably expect a visit from the Headmaster when he finally heard about it. To take his mind off both the incident, and Kano's likely interest in the incident, Jordan started examining students and teachers in earnest.
Jordan spied Catherine up in the air with that young Kanako girl, the one with the overeager fluttering skirt, whom he'd recalled running into on the first day of the school year. Catherine didn't spare a glance in his direction, though he suspected that was because she was giving a lecture. Catherine had always been very singleminded when it came to giving lectures. A fact that had irritated Jordan to no end some days.
Turning his attention elsewhere, the strident voice of booming command that could be from none other than Jeanne d'Luc marked her efforts to coach students. She was currently raking some poor whelp of a boy over the coals for making some frankly impressive lightshows, and-
Was that a sword?!Jordan shook his head and moved on, spying a few more students hard at work. One of them, the worse half of the problem children from before, was seated on a damned ice throne in a hall, seemingly waiting for her subjects to come and greet her. Jordan smirked. He'd prepared the pits himself, and his awareness of the pits was highly tuned. Below most every pit for example, a tributary from the large underground river flowed, a hidden reward for intrepid water students. That being said, it was child's play for Jordan to walk past the pit, innocent as you like, and nudge a gentle touch of his power in the Ice Princess' direction. The resulting spike of rock piercing up through the spine of the throne would knock the pretty girl off her pedestal quite handily without harming her dainty little hands.
Jordan noticed that Marshall was down there with her, and waved at him cheekily. If there was anything the boy had a right to appreciate, it was a little splash of drama. Turning away from that chilled pit of vanity and entitlement, Jordan finally caught sight of what appeared to be earth moving through the air! He rushed to the side of the pit, anticipation lit only to arrive just in time to hear the student's cry of anguish and see the sand fall to the floor.
Here, thought Jordan,
is a student I can help. Gathering up some of the sand that had fallen outside of the pit, Jordan smoothly glided down an arm of the stuff to slide right onto the ground next to the student. Her name, if Jordan's scatter-brain could be relied upon, was Bhu Adamina. Something of her character seemed to evoke a resoluteness, even in defeat, that spoke to Jordan. It reminded him of basic training way back when... Still, he knew exactly what she needed to hear.
"Miss Adamina, I once had a student who came to this academy, and also had a specialization in sand, like myself, and like you, if that previous demonstration was of your strongest connection to earth. This student was only capable of controlling one tendril of sand, of this size and length." Jordan then briefly raised a thin tendril of sand that had the thickness of Jordan's own forearm and rose to maybe two and a half metres.
"I know what you're probably thinking. Are you serious? How weak! That student must've been a total pushover! His connection to his element must've been next to nothing. As a matter of fact, Miss Adamina, that student was the most proficient earth-user in that particular year. You see, he could toss rocks with sheer willpower, so he compounded his own strength with the sand itself, allowing him to double or even triple his own strength. He became proficient at manipulating the sand at such speed that it became almost invisible, but would do terrible things to any unprepared combatant who came at him unguarded. The things he could do with sand, Miss Adamina... This student's ingenuity, persistence, and sheer unwillingness to stop and decide he'd achieved everything he could with that one little tendril of sand made him stand out as the most competent and unstoppable students at the Academy at that time. I had already been teaching for several years by that point, but even I hadn't found some of the intricacies that he did, and I have no doubt that he likely hid some discoveries from everyone else, hoping to keep them for when he needed an upper hand that nobody could see coming. I've yet to see his equal come to our Academy since, in any elemental domain, in all my years at this school."Jordan stretched languidly, and then raised himself back up on a tendril of sand and propelled himself around the circumference of the pit, letting his hand run along the sides of the wall lazily, the earth moulding under his fingers to leave a recessed ring in the wall as he passed it. As soon as the circle was completed, the excess earth that had been removed by Jordan's hands gathered in the middle of the pit. It formed a pillar of hard rock, well-formed, and hard as steel. Jordan touched back down on the pit's floor, and nodded to Bhu, before looking back at the pillar.
"The reason I bring up the story of this student to you, Miss Adamina, is because it highlights the value of limitations. Without boundaries, given a well of omnipotence to draw from, anybody in such a position would be paralyzed by indecision. If you can do everything, why do anything? If you've not worked for hours, and days, and weeks to master something, to push beyond a limit you never thought you'd break, then where's the value in being able to conjure a vast tornado of sand to blow your enemies away? Kano's three principles for the proving grounds are Connection, Control, and Capacity. He wants you to demonstrate your level of control over the element, as well as how forceful or kinetic you can be with the element, but that first one still bothers you does it not? How does one prove one's connection to their element? After all, we can all control one, and we each have different techniques, specialities, and weaknesses. I would put forth, that the only thing a student need do to prove their connection to their element, is to demonstrate an understanding of the limitations of their element, and of themselves. Because the greatest indication of a lack of connection, is to think one's power boundless." After finishing his statement to Bhu, Jordan winked at her, and the pillar he'd constructed that seemed by all appearances to be constructed of hardest rock, collapsed as he poked it with his finger. The pillar dissolved and revealed itself to have been composed of many thousands upon thousands of grains of sand. Jordan staggered a little, and chuckled lightly.
"It took me a long time to get the hang of that little trick, believe you me, but it has its uses. Good luck Miss Adamina, I hope something of what I said had meaning to you."Needless to say, Jordan took the stairs out of the pit this time.
An explosive noise, and the characteristic sound of rocks thudding into rock drew Jordan over to his next pupil. He saw a storm of rocks of impressive sizes flying about the boy before they were all propelled at speed into the wall of the pit. Jordan scratched pensively at his face.
No lectures for this one, Jordan mused, the fact apparent from the way the boy seemed to slouch and stand as though he expected the sky to fall down on top of his head. A more recent joiner to the Academy, Jordan recalled his name as being Ethan, though his surname alluded the gym teacher. Walking around to where the steps into the pit were, Jordan raised a hand in greeting and called out,
"Excellent work Ethan!"As he approached the boy, Jordan, turned to the wall, yanked out several of the rock shards by hand, and then snapped them into a stone stool for him to sit down on, weary from showing off to his last student. He met Ethan's eyes and smiled widely, looking up at him from where he sat.
"I noticed that you waited until you had just enough rock to crest the upper limits of your strength, and then you let loose and gave an explosive burst of strength! That's a truly splendid way to demonstrate your connection to earth! It also employs principles of exercise when training that I can certainly appreciate. If you continue to do repetitions of that action, of reaching the peak of your strength, and then firing off with a little extra push past, allowing for natural breaks and rests of course, you'll find yourself extending beyond limits you never even knew you could reach! Keep up the good work, and make sure you're focused on tracking how you're doing at the physical level, because it will begin to take a lot out of you after a while." Punctuating his comments with another cheeky smile, Jordan got up from his stool and promptly exited Ethan's pit. He had hopefully given the boy's ego a necessary boost, while also giving him goals to pursue to further his training, without making it feel like an oppressive authority looking down on him. The stool had been part of that, allowing him to look up at Ethan, so that the boy might feel that Jordan's advice came as just that, and not commands from some unreachable doom-bringing principle type. Back in the Cadets, Jordan had always hated that kind of drill sergeant, who drove the men hard not because he wanted better for them, but because he enjoyed their suffering.
Jordan also neglected to mention the baffling amount of strength that Ethan had displayed in performing that particular manoeuvre, guessing that while helping the boy's ego would be a net positive, informing him of the very real fact that he had the elemental force of a fourth or fifth year might do more harm than good.
Jordan's next stop was an odd one, as he came across a pit bursting with plants. He did a double-take at first, before realizing that the student was one of a very unique and rare specialization of earth elementalists, designated as Flora-wielders. As far as Jordan knew, Jideh Basrah was alone in the Academy as their sole Flora specialist, which even for somebody as knowledgeable as Jordan in the earth element, left the boy somewhat isolated in his own realm of experience. However, as Jordan watched from the rim of the pit, he could tell right away that the boy was most certainly battling with his limitations, and the plants reflected that. He watched as their forms surged and then bowed, as whatever energies the boy was summoning battled within his body.
The spectacle was so entrancing that Jordan felt a pang of sadness when he saw how it ended, and how Jideh fell down and bent over some of his flowers. Not wanting to disturb the boy, but still wanting to help somehow, Jordan pulled out a notebook, that he mostly used to keep track of Catherine's movements during the week, and scribbled something on a page. He then tore the page out, crumpled it into a ball, and then tossed it down to land next to the boy.
Jordan turned away from the lush pit full of life, and found himself sitting in the middle of the proving grounds, listening to the sounds of children trying to prove themselves before their elders, while the elders passed on what knowledge they could, and he of course sat in the middle of it all, massaging his shoulder, wondering if the choices he'd made in the past were worth what he'd gotten from them, and even if where he had ended up was what he deserved at all. Eyes closed, breathing calm, Jordan sat, and he hadn't the faintest clue what the right answer was.
Member
Noctis