I agree, I enjoyed this quite a lot. To hijack an analogy made earlier in the thread, it's like getting vanilla ice cream when you were expecting mint. But I rather like vanilla. I prefer vanilla, actually.

This story was an anecdotal, slice-of-life piece. No grand action, no major developments, just personal moments and character insights. But to me, at least, that's good stuff. That's always been my favourite part of the Eyrie stories.

Aside from the character interactions, the Diqiu material also represents a significant amount of worldbuilding. And that's nice to see as well. I'm one of those people who's only vaguely familiar with the Avatar source material. But I don't really feel that's a huge barrier to entry. A lot of what's been depicted in the stories is original.

(I'm also vaguely embarrassed that I had to look up how to spell Diqiu - I'm Chinese, you'd think I'd know pinyin phonetics by now.)

Admittedly, I also had to re-register on the forums to make the post, because I lurk so successfully that my account's been vanished twice now for inactivity. I'd wager there's a number of readers like that, who do follow the stories here, but don't offer feedback.

Granted, that's also supremely unhelpful to the authors, hence why I crawled out of the deep, dark, abyss of lurking to post this.

- Acyl