Howtobeanairbender.avi

Most stories, no matter how absurd, have some truth to them. I never imagined such a truth could ever be like this.

Have you ever noticed that dark places tend to be colder than sunny places? Of course, the obvious reason for this is that sunlight stimulates movement in air particles, which is, by definition, heat, but some shady places are unusually cold, as though there were somehow less than no sunlight there. As though somehow there were so many shadows in the room that they blocked more sunlight than was actually shining.

I used to be somewhat of a connoisseur of all things related to *Avatar: The Last Airbender*. I know it’s a ridiculous show, but I was a martial arts fanatic at the time, and besides, my best friend made me watch it, so I figured I may as well learn how to be interested in order to suffer as little as possible from the experience.

As I was browsing the web one evening, this particular friend of mine sent me an email containing a bonus episode. She claimed it was taken off the air, but just for historical purposes, a single recording was saved, which her father, being the rich bastard he was, then purchased for her. She then went on to explain: “lolol neat howto vid gon try nao kthx byye.” I was not amused by my friend’s acquired online dialect, but the prospect of an episode I had not seen before excited me. I downloaded the attachment and opened it.

The video started out a bit blurry, and the colors twitched occasionally, presumably due to damage over the time the video was stored. Nevertheless, it was basically clear what was being shown. The video appeared to occur from the perspective of the viewer.

The episode had no title card; it simply leaped into action, and before I knew it, Aang’s face was staring at me. He grinned playfully and rotated the view to show me our surroundings. A grassy field. A patch of flowers over on the left. “Hey, there, Avatar-watcher,” he began. “Ever wonder if it’s really possible to do the things we do in this show?” I had never thought about it.

“Today,” he continued, “I’m going to teach you how to be an airbender, just like me!” I rolled my eyes. It was probably going to be some kind of collection of platitudes and cheesy Hallmark-card dos and don’ts.

“Sokka here will be my assistant.” Sokka walked onscreen and nodded excitedly, grinning and forming a peace sign, then extended his arm to his side and began to fiddle with the positions of his fingers, watching his shadow intently.

“First,” narrated Aang, “on a bright, sunny day, go outside and stand near something shaking in the wind so that your shadow falls over it. Like this!” He gestured to Sokka, who stepped carefully forward, still staring at his shadow, until the shadow’s hand fell over the flower patch.

“And then, um…” Aang raised an eyebrow and pulled a scroll out of his pocket. “You ‘carefully manipulate your fingers so that your shadow’s hand appears to be pinching the chosen object’,” he read aloud, his eyes following his finger as it ran across the page. Sokka chuckled and did as the instructions indicated. His shadow closed its fingers around the trembling flower.

“Make sure that when whatever you’re using moves, your shadow moves with it, so it looks like your shadow is shaking it, not the wind. Once you’ve got it, keep doing it for about a minute.” As the wind continued to blow, Sokka wiggled his fingers, trying to keep the flower in his shadow’s hand. After a few seconds (time seems to happen faster in TV shows than in real life), the wind stopped, but the flower continued shaking with Sokka’s shadow. As Sokka moved his hand to his chest, the flower moved with the shadow’s hand, picking itself and allowing itself to be “blown” across the grass.

“If you did it right, you—Hey, Sokka, don’t get ahead of us.” Sokka laughed and “blew” the flower across the ground with his shadow’s hand. “Anyway,” continued Aang, “as you can see here, if you did it right, congratulations; you now have power over wind.” Aang scratched his chin and stared thoughtfully upward for a moment. “Well, actually,” he explained, “you have control over your *shadow*, and your shadow does the same stuff now as wind does, so… it’s *kinda* like having control over wind, right?” He smiled.

It didn’t look to me like Sokka’s shadow had the power of wind. Wind was less reliable. From the way the flower was moving, it looked more like it was being pushed by a solid object. As I thought about the matter, from the corner of my eye I thought I saw Sokka’s shadow move by itself. Maybe it was just the crappy video quality.

“Just one more thing. Once you become an airbender…” The screen faded to black. Aang and Sokka appeared near the camera and stared at me with large, glazed pupils. They began to speak together in slow, deep unison. “Never leave the sunlight again.”

The video cut to static. I shuddered and closed the media player.

I looked at the filename: howtobeanairbender.avi.

I began to research the episode on Google.

Apparently, the episode had stopped airing due to the disappearances of the children who watched it. The children were all found dead, each of them in dark rooms. The marks on their necks indicated they’d been strangled to death, but the lack of foreign DNA on their necks confounded the question of the killer.

I saw a picture of two victims side-by-side.

One of them had no shadow.