Let's chase away these indecisively cloudy days

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Anh Sang cocked her head to the side. "Oh okay," she said thoughtfully. "So, I make something like a cup and put a staff or something in the middle of it." That's what the suggestion translated to in her head, anyways. She giggled to herself a little. It looked really kind of weird when she put it that way!

Although, the girl wasn't too sure how to connect those things together. It might work if she smashed a hole through the bottom of the cup part and then sandwiched it between two discs or other things to keep it in place. But then she'd maybe have this weird end part sticking out and she wasn't sure she wanted that.

Well, the only way to really find out was to do it herself so Anh Sang grabbed one of her hard light butterflies out of the air and began to shape it. Orbs were always nice to start with so she squished it down into a lumpy sphere. She didn't really make cups with her magic ever, but she guessed it was kind of like making really long bracelets. Normally, what she did for that was to stretch out the light and fuse the ends together but if there was going to be a bottom, then maybe she couldn't do that.

Scowling, she looked at Mister Cunningham's sword. More specifically, she looked the part where the blade was coming out. It looked kind of like the thing holding it in place was some kind of ring. So maybe what she should do is make a cup and then a cap with a slot through it. Ack, but then it'll have to be a perfect fit! the young girl lamented. But okay, she liked challenges. She could totally do this!

Experimentally, she she held the sphere in the palm of one hand and then pressed her fist through it. Even though it was hard light, she could still shape it in the same ways as soft light. It just took longer and made her hands tingle more. So after a little bit, she ended up with a vase like object, caught somewhere between the shape of a bowl and a cup. Ehhhh....

"Annnnddd... That's too big." She squished it back into a sphere shape, feeling partially annoyed and a little embarrassed, but mostly really happy. Making things was fun. It was even more fun if she could actually make what she was wanted to get, though.

Huh... I need something about as thin as that. Anh Sang looked at the actual sword again as she levitated the sphere of light above her hand. Idly, just to see what would happen, she tried to get the light to snap into the form of the weapon by itself. Even though the girl knew from previous experience that it probably wasn't going to work, there was the remote chance that it actually might.

The light twitched. Anh Sang stared at it hopefully. It lifted into the air and promptly shattered into a shower of marbles.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

Ahhhh! So annoying! Not to mention embarrassing. Just when Mister Cunningham had been telling her how good she was, she just had to go and ruin her work. Anh Sang pouted, because she didn't tend to blush, before levitating her marbles off of the ground. They gathered in the air, meshing together to become a butterfly again.

"Oh. Weeelll, uh, I'm way better at making staff things anyways," the girl said with a nod, as a child's way of saving face. Frowning at one of her soft light butterflies, Anh Sang silently sent it back to the dorm. It was gone so quickly that it didn't even leave a blur. "I have some leftover things back in my room, though -um," she corrected herself as the butterfly returned and dumped a variety of light crafted objects at her feet, "I mean, here they are!"

Anh Sang really didn't understand why people talked about things like patience. Well, what she meant was that it was fine and all and yeah, okay, it was useful for making things. But she really didn't like waiting for things that were just like, right there, which was why she was always running all over the place. So she was sooo happy that she could call for any of her light crafted things to come almost instantly.

She shifted through the pieces of partially molded light on the ground. A lot of it was hard light since she hadn't really given the butterfly an especially specific order. But whatever! She would need it eventually anyways, probably. The girl sorted through them, putting the hard light on one side and soft light on the other. It was pretty obvious to her which ones were which, though people looking on might have had some difficulty. When Anh Sang was done, there were seven rods of hard light and nine rods of soft. All were slightly lumpy and misshapen, with the hard light ones also have some attempts at decoration on them.

The girl took one of the soft light rods which looked the smoothest. It was maybe two feet long and half an inch in diameter, only just a little bent. So it might have been a little too small circumference wise to hammer out a real katana blade with but then again, this wasn't meant as a real katana anyways.

"Do you think this is good enough?" Anh Sang wondered, presenting it to the teacher. It had been originally meant as a staff. Or a wand. She honestly wasn't too sure anymore.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

"Oh, yeah, of course!" Anh Sang giggled in response to the teacher's question. The answer seemed pretty obvious to her, since it had never crossed her mind that her magic might work in any way besides the way that she intended it to. Well, sure, sometimes it blew up in her face when she didn't want it to, but as far as the girl was concerned, that was cool. And maybe she didn't always want that result but sometimes she did and eventually, she really did hope to be able to do something with that.

"People tell me that sometimes it feels funny, but it's okay to touch them. That one over there is hard light," she said, poking at the rod Mister Cunningham was bend over with the other rod in her hand. "So it'll probably be fine if you just pick it up like normal. The soft light ones, though, I don't know. If you squeeze them too hard, your fingers just go through."

"Oh, you probably wouldn't be able to do too much shaping with it, though," Anh Sang remembered with a slight frown. "A lot of times, people can't do it themselves. But sometimes they can. It's kind of strange! I don't know how that works. It's just, sometimes you can do things with the light like me. And most of the time, you just can't." If she had been a little older, the girl might have thought about looking into why exactly that happened. But since at that time she was much more concerned with physically doing things herself, she didn't think so much about that.

Pham Thi Anh Sang

"Well, okay!" Anh Sang said. She looked at the hard light rod in Mister Cunningham's hand and then at the one in her own. "I don't really know how much to flatten it, though. Or how long I should make it. Or how wide. Oh!" She hummed as she thought, images flashing through her mind of the things she could make out of her light. "I guess I'll just have to make a whole bunch, huh?"

She put down her hard light rod and took a soft light one instead, just flattening it with her palms until it was twice as long as it had been when she had started. It seemed too long, though, since she was pretty sure that it might be as tall as she was if she propped it up next to her. So she broke it in half. Kind of. It was more like she broke it into a third and two thirds. Well, that was good enough!

Even so, the broken off parts still weren't perfect. Anh Sang let the smaller bit float while she worked on the longer one. She pinched the end of imperfect part into a point. But then on second thought, that looked kind of dangerous so she frowned at it until it rounded itself out. She might not have been able to order her magic to immediately form an object as complex as Mister Cunningham's sword -she hadn't ever made anything like it, after all- but she could still do little things like this. The plainness of it kind of bothered her, but she supposed that it was meant to be that way.

Still, the girl decided that she really didn't like the ugly box shape that she had now. Shaking the light impatiently, she made the edges soften themselves out. Okay, that's better! Now she just had to go and do some stuff with the hard light. She still wasn't too happy with how the soft light turned out but at least it would do for the time.

Now, the hard light, that was kind of ridiculously easy. She just broke off a piece of it it and flattened it out like Mister Cunningham said to, but ended up making it into a kind of long bangle instead of just wrapping it around. The bangle was just a little smaller than the blade of the pseudo sword but since one was kind of rectangular and the other was circular, stuffing them into each other worked pretty well. There was a little bit of extra light squishing out of where the two pieces met and Anh Sang left it behind with just a little molding because it looked like it that circular thing that seemed to keep Mister Cunningham's sword together.

She turned the -finished?- product in her hands. It seemed to be okay, if not just plain... ugly. Ahhhh! So embarrassing! But, okay, fine. Just a practice, yep. Nothing to get too worried about! Looking up from it, however, the girl noticed something that was definitely not usual. At the end of the still levitating end of the soft light rod was a small marble that she must have missed picking up way before.

It was purple. Not white with a purple tinge. It was purple. Anh Sang blinked at the marble a few times, the section of light now hovering right in front of her face. The marble remained purple. Her eyes went wide.

"Waaah!" Embarrassing practice thing floating forgotten in the air, that little marble had all of her attention now. "How did that happen?! Did you see how that happened?! I can never get colors like that!" Mentally, Anh Sang was cheering.

Best. Day. Ever!

Pham Thi Anh Sang

"It's really, really hard! I can't ever, ever get good colors!" She complained, even though she was really quite proud of herself now, torn between the urge to show off what she had done and the urge to hide it away and hoard it forever. Because, well. The obvious and all. It was still awesome, though.

"I keep trying to get colors," Anh Sang explained excitedly, "but it just gives me weird um, um, light colors?" What she meant was pastel, but she couldn't remember that word. "Sometimes you can't even tell those ones are there but this one is so clear!" She tilted her head to the side and scanned the ground quickly.

"Are there more?" The girl picked up a few of her other light crafted rods, trying to see if there were any other colored marbles around. To her disappointment, it didn't seem like it. But no, that was still okay! As long as she had just one of these, she could definitely find a way to make more! Probably. Eventually. Ehhhhhhhh.

She went back to looking at the purple marble, just a little more closely than before. "Do you think this is safe to touch?" she wondered. "The last time I made a funny marble thing, it kind of blew up the court yard. I mean," she added hastily, "nothing really happened. But it blew up the court yard?"