OOC: Ashura Essay

[whohastimeforthat]

To paraphrase a song, what a difference a year makes.

Following his recovery from the damage he'd done to himself after his guilt had literally haunted the swamp, Azmuth had made a music box for Jiminy to express both his gratitude for the cricket never giving up on him and as an apology for the trouble he was likely to cause in the future. Jiminy's reaction to his creation prompted Azmuth to start attempting to create again, getting swept up in the joy of creating things for others once more.

However, he still had issues with Bending. The guilt of using the knowledge gleaned from building Ascalon still triggered the headaches every time he'd Bend, but he decided to try to actively learn to at least Bend with the guilt instead of letting it suppress something that could be used to help others. His initial attempts led to failures but with the help of Nash, he started to finally reach a point where he could start Bending more complex things with decreased pain.

At the same time, he started developing a teleportation system to replace the old "transmutation circle" system that had become near-unusable due to damage from Ursaems' attack and its creator no longer living in Nautilus to repair it. It proved to be an unexpected challenge given that, while Azmuth had been building teleporters practically his entire life, he didn't have easy access to the standard materials he was used to. With his Bending skill still much too low to be able to reliably produce the raw materials he needed, he began experimenting with materials he found around Nautilus, searching for substitutes just in case. He settled into this new life, creating things for others' usage while satisfying his own scientific curiosity via passive monitoring the various districts via sensor probes, and found himself quite content with it.

That was why nobody could've been more shocked than Azmuth when his name was announced as one of the newly-Ascended Angelii back in August. After the myriad of mistakes he'd made and his own mostly-observer role, Nautilus had decided that he was worthy of Ascending.

He humbly accepted the charge, determined to live up to the Aeon's trust. It was just the kick in the pants Azmuth needed to step up and start taking a more active role in trying to improve. He bound himself to Klement--the Deva he felt was most stable--and worked to improve his Bending. While he's not totally over the guilt of the billions of deaths he indirectly caused (and likely never will be since he refuses to forgive himself for it), he has reached a point where he can at least use the tool at his disposal with no intense side effects unless he does something incredibly strenuous even with Ascalon tucked away in its dimensional sheath anchored at his side. He still uses Bending as little as possible as a general rule, but it's more because he finds the skill at times to be more trouble than it's worth than because of a sudden onslaught of guilt manifesting as a terrible migraine or because sometimes you don't realize how flawed your image of something is until it manifests and is useless for what you intended. He also has built up a method for Bending which in many ways makes it easier for small things he doesn't know much about such as an appropriate gift for New Year's: putting in the parameters for what he wants and then allowing the Chaos (or perhaps Nautilus himself) to fill in what fits those requirements.

With his Bending skill improved, he started working on the teleportation pad system with the proper materials at his disposal though it did take him several tries to work out a simple control system that anyone--even those like Jiminy who came from worlds with little or no computerized technology--could understand and use. Not long before Christmas, Azmuth called out to other Wakened for assistance though he wouldn't tell them what he was building until he made a formal announcement once the system was in place.

At New Year's Azmuth decided to step outside of his comfort zone when he'd realized he'd made a serious faux pas in regards to his friend Jiminy. Not being from Earth, the Galvan didn't understand or really participate in Earth holidays. His previous experiences with them in Nautilus had not been great including being thoroughly spooked during one Halloween to the point where he'd literally run for cover and then having an Ashura teleport unexpectedly into his home--onto his private floor, no less--and proceed to decorate the entire floor in ribbon and tinsel that'd taken time to clean up even with his drones. However, thanks to his time with the cricket and due to past mistakes with his former colleague and lover Zennith, he'd realized that perhaps there was something to be said for showing someone your appreciation on a date that encouraged it...and then he'd realized he'd missed the usual date for such things. With Nautilus's help, he Bent up a bottle of wine to give to the cricket and stayed the night at Jiminy's invitation to enjoy the bottle together. Though drinking alcohol was frowned on (though not outright banned by Galvan society), Azmuth let his proverbial hair down in Jiminy's presence and the pair ended up turning "a drink or two" into "emptying the bottle". Despite feeling rotten in the morning, Azmuth will never say that he didn't enjoy those few hours with his friend...even if the memory is a bit muzzy.

He had no idea during this time that he would have to put the lessons he'd learned in controlling his own sense of guilt into more immediate practice. One Reality Storm popped up bringing out some of the worst in him specifically and then a second required him to pass on his hard-learned lesson.

During the Alignment Swap Storm, Azmuth's sense of right and wrong was completely erased. There was only "what advances my own goals" and "what doesn't". While too smart to be full-on evil (as he'd explained to Sunset Shimmer, evil was utterly pointless in the long run), he'd had no qualms about essentially torturing the non-Wakened creatures inhabiting Nautilus to study them more thoroughly in his ongoing quest to understand if it was Nautilus specifically creating these creatures and other things to "enhance the experience" (so to speak) or if it was the subconscious Bending of everyone else much like what had happened to the swamp a year earlier.

The second storm was, more interestingly, the most recent Valentine's Day storm in which dueling cupids sent arrows flying throughout Nautilus. Azmuth had been busy in his lab, ignoring the holiday, so he'd fortunately missed out on it all. However, he'd ended up having a chat with Jiminy, the latter explaining that he'd been afraid of being impaled by one of the arrows flying around and that a child he'd made friends with was feeling guilty over it all. Speaking from the perspective of one who'd actually hurt others, not coming dangerously close to it, Azmuth talked Jiminy through what the other might need him to do: that it might be a long time before the child would be able to move on from it and sometimes all that could be done was to remind the child that he wasn't alone.

Also during the past several months, Azmuth started opening up more. While his tower will always be surrounded by swampland (just the way he likes it, thank you), he's been opening his doors more and more. He'll never be fully welcoming to everyone knocking at his front door, but he's unbent enough to let more people in...within parameters. (After all, he does run experiments that he doesn't want disturbed and there are potentially dangerous things in the lab which could be harmful to someone poking around blindly.) He even took in the Tenth Doctor on the man's first night...even if he did wonder if it came back to bite him when the Doctor brought Rose Tyler unexpectedly to his doorstep and practically thrust her at him. (At least he'd mellowed out enough not to just throw both of them out in the cold in sheer annoyance.) He'd even held the "Doctors Summit", acting as referee and filling in information holes for Nine and Four as the three Doctors tried to find some sort of balance with each other.

As if that weren't enough, Azmuth stepped up to volunteer to assist with a potentially flawed world discovered by Knuckles the Echidna. While his Bending is still improving in leaps and strides, Azmuth offered not just his direct but his technological expertise to help find things that "didn't fit" outside of what Angelii normally looked for. This was also a major step forward for Azmuth since he'd unbent himself enough to leave the tower largely "unguarded" (the drones, after all, were only machines and could be overridden with Bending) but trusting someone enough to have full access to everything in his tower: Jiminy Cricket himself.

In short, Azmuth is starting to make the transition from largely-passive observer to a potential leader in the community which is a lot like what happened to his Unwakened self.