Mizu-2014 Shinlai Adopt

this is my entry for the 2014 Shinlai Adopts!!!
it's been a while, but school has been pretty hectic this term with final exams coming up and everything (also I had my art final and folio due just yesterday >0<) I'm really sorry for the art drought.

I told myself to not get attached, but I did.... I LOVE THIS GAL! *0* 
she's #8

_{sorry, I kind of wrote a novel}

Name: Mizu 水

Age: 35

Gender: Female

Element: Water

Allegiance: Dilian

Personality: Mizu is easy going. When faced with stress she ignores it and she favors the phrase 'wing it'. She abhors conflict and war and she doesn't like getting caught in the thick of other's business. She embraces the very essence of her element; she lets things flow, like a river. And when things get dammed up, her emotions bottle up until they overflow. Although she tries to keep the peace, sometimes it's too much for her and she lets it out in a wild torrent. Most of the time though she's very at peace, and very vague. Others find her hard to talk to because she often gets lost in thought half-way through a sentence. Now a days she is travels. Because she doesn't like getting dammed up, she has to keep moving. She's a bit of a nomad and a freeloader, but pleasant company (apart from her vagueness). But she wasn't always like this. She was a thunder cloud of a child.

Background: As a pup, Mizu hated her element. She wanted something cool like Fire, or Earth or Air. Or one of the spiritual elements, like Light or Dark. But most of all, she yearned for Balance. She wanted to be special. She wanted people to look up to her in awe. And why would they if she was just another Water Shinlai? As a pup, before she began to learn how to master her element in her adolescence, Mizu often pretended she had the element of Balance. She'd dig up dirt and throw it in the air, fill her tiny lungs until they almost burst and blew the leaves around. She also tried to 'master' fire, but she decided she'd leave that until last because she kept burning her little paws. As for Light and Dark, she would hang out with the Spiritual pups, hoping some of their element would rub off on her. As her mother healed her burns, her bruises and her broken bones, she would try and convince her young daughter that she was perfect the way she was, that she didn't need to have the element of Balance to be special. She had to make the best of what she's got because what she had in her heart nobody else had. no one else was like Mizu, but Mizu didn't really understand. She wanted to be like a hero.

As a result some recessive gene a long way down the ancestry tree, Mizu had very thick fur, unlike her parents. And as if mastering water wasn't hard enough for a young adolescent with the attention span of a gnat, her thick fur weighed her down and whenever she tried to swim she struggled to keep her head above water. All the other Water Shinlai were literally swimming circles around her. Mizu became so frustrated she refused to take part in swimming and instead practiced her water mastering techniques from shore.

Mizu's mother was getting increasingly worried. The more she saw her daughter come back home as angry as a hive of bees, the more she tried to help her and the more she tried to help her, the more Mizu shut her out. She supposed it was a typical teenage thing, or something to do with boys, so she didn't take much notice of it. Mizu at the age of 15 did have a VERY short wick of temper after all.

Mizu found that she could no longer stand being incompetent compared to the other Water Shinlai and she now understood that she could not change her element (as her younger self could not accept). So, at night when everyone else was sleeping, Mizu began training by herself. She found under the light of the full moon, when the tides were high, she felt strong, like she had mastered the element of Balance. She felt like she was more than just another Water Shinlai. She tried to do things way beyond her abilities and physical strength. She had huge potential, but she was not ready. And eventually, she got in trouble.

One night when the full moon was full and high in the sky, Mizu stood on at the edge of a lake. She could feel the moons energy pulsing through her body, and pumping through her heart like oil through the pistons of an engine. It was winter, and the water of the rivers still gushed between the ice blanketed riverbanks, the lakes were encompassed with a sheet of ice and everything was enveloped by snow. She had deemed herself skilled enough to have graduated from a small trickling stream to a much larger body of water: a lake. She had already discovered the techniques of turning snow into ice, and ice into water and vis versa, and she could lift small amounts of water into mid air and circle them above her head like a halo. But now, she thought she was ready for something bigger, MUCH bigger. Her paws crunched softly on the ice dusted bank before the lake. She breathed in and closed her eyes. The chill of the cold wintery night did not bother her. Her thick coat may been more suitable to be woven into a raft than for swimming, but it was good at keeping the bite of a chilly winter's night at bay.

Her mother always said in order to move water you had to understand how it moved itself, how it flowed and how powerful it could be. You had to respect it. Water could eat away at rock, put out fires, and combined with air, it could swamp the land with its huge waves. Water was one of the foundations for all living things. 'Our bodies are over 70% water,' She would always remind Mizu. But she didn't really respect as she should have, at least, she didn't fully comprehend its awe-striking power with the depth of understanding of an elder. Instead, she tried to control water, rather than endeavoring to work in harmony with it, like they were one.

With her eyes closed, she mustered all of her strength from very fiber of her body. This was the largest body of water she had ever attempted to command. She braced her body in anticipation. First she broke up the ice cloaking the lake. She strained, and her face screwed up like she had eaten a lemon. With her mind, she drew cracks in the surface of the ice and willed her power through them to break it up. She began to sweat, but soon the sounds of ice cracking echoed and rebounded off the mountains cradling the lake. The ice withdrew, and Mizu thought she was ready.

When she opened her eyes, she griped the water with all of her strength and lifted it up. Like an angry octopus with thousands of legs, the water twisted and flailed and fought against Mizu's grasp. She was failing to keep it under control for a moment, but she strained, and bore down from every angle to constrain the water to her will. And like the finishing touches of a painting, the water came together to form one harmonious ribbon that swirled and arched with beautiful grace. For the first time, she watched in awe at the beauty of her Element. Then she grew pigheaded.

With a sudden burst of ego-fueled energy, she darted the ribbon of water to the left, and then to the right. She swirled it in a massive circle above her head and then ran with it across the surface of the lake. As she ran, she froze the ice beneath her feet and the water writhed about behind her like a kite trying to escape its string, all the while her body was struggling under the enormous strain of the water fighting against it. 

Mizu thought the other Shinlai were going to look up to her now. She was going to be like a hero. The Ultimate Master of Water, able to tame the Seven Seas before breakfast! She was finally going to get noticed, and not just because she has one fluffy booty, or because she looks like a drowned rat after every swimming lesson. But because she was going to finally be somebody.

However, Mizu's body finally gave up. She had rendered her poor body to exhaustion and she didn't even notice. She was so caught up in her dream finally coming true that when she collapsed, she was brought down to earth so fast, the air was knocked out of her lungs. And before she knew it, her lungs were filling up with water. In addition to her zonked body, her heavy fur made her sink like an anchor.

Mizu watched the perfect circle of the moon slowly fade into darkness. She was helpless, totally suspended in her own Element's watery grasp dragging her down. She felt cold, and more alone than she had ever felt before. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to be in her mother's arms and to tell her she loved her.

By chance, that night at dinner, Mizu's mother had noticed her daughter had been acting strange. Mizu had had a tinkle in her bright blue eyes that hinted she was planning something. Her mother suspected it was something to do with a boy, and she had begun rehearsing 'the talk' in her head as they sat over dinner. But when Mizu snuck out that night, and she didn't go towards the community (rather in the opposite direction), Mizu's mother grew anxious.

She had followed her to the lake, and now her daughter was drowning, she leapt into action.

When Mizu woke up, she thought it had all been just a bad dream. But when she realized she was on the bank of the lake, she sat bolt upright. Behind her, her mother fought to breathe. The lake was deep, and Mizu had sunk to the very bottom of it. In order to rescue her, her mother had parted the water of the lake which took an immense amount of strength, especially since she only specialized in the art of healing. Now, she struggled to even maintain enough energy to sustain her heart beating.

Mizu panicked. 

"Mum, what should I do?" she asked with heightening panic. "Mum! What should I do! Mum! Mum!!!!"

But Mizu's mother was beyond giving instructions, she couldn't even open her eyes.

And when she stopped breathing all together, Mizu knew she had to do something… FAST.

She had to heal her mother. This time, she remembered what she had told her about working together with the water. If she lost control of her mother's water, Mizu realised could seriously hurt her.

She closed her eyes again, and instead of mustering all of strength, she reached out for the water and it's strength and implored it to combine with her own. For a while, she couldn't find that connection, and she trashed about to find it in panic. But then she felt it, like a trickling of understanding, she flowed into the water's motion, she followed it, and instead of taking control of it, she directed it. Her mother had taught her to circulate the water around the body, and so Mizu did.

For what seemed like hours Mizu did this until her mother woke up.

Mizu realised then how selfish she had been. All her life she had been lusting for adoration when all the attention she could have ever wanted was right there beside her the whole time. She felt guilty and overwhelmed with grief that she had never noticed the undying love and devotion of her mother. All she had ever wanted to be was somebody, and she was to her mother. She was everything to her mother.

Mizu made a vow then. She was going to love herself and everyone around her for who they are, and she was going to ask that boy Shinlai out that she fancied because that's all her mother ever wanted; to see her happy.

Mizu made her mask soon after this event. She made it out of a rock she had laboriously corroded away with water for hours and hours and hours. The curved lines on it represent the balance and flow of nature (especially water). It kind of echoes her newly developed easy going nature as well. She also really liked the colours and thought it would look cool.

well done if you read all this \(>0<)/

Shinlai species (c) AlanaRoseheart
Original design by OddOsprey

Shinlai is a closed species, so go and try and adopt one of your own!