In which - watch out, sweet thing, a change in the weather is all that you bring.....

"At which point this bloke, who fancied himself to be quite the "new frontiersman," as he put it, tells me that he doesn't need to know more about plants than he already does..." Not everyone is as receptive to devic wisdom as the Findhorn folks. "I decided against telling him he was standing in the middle of a lot of poison ivy. I supposed he was going to figure that one out himself before too long,"

Yeah, giving a deva a hard time isn't any more advisable than giving Mother Nature one.

No such problems here today. Aura talked to Azalea a couple of days ago and it looks like Tori is going to be out of our hair for awhile. We hope, anyway. Scaramouche is expecting a protege - according to her, the word is NOT "mentee" - a young tidepool deva (according to her) who she met while she was down trying to help find that plane that vanished in March....

 "This is the lion's den/I hope you knew that before you came in/this is where the angels and the devils fight/and they're choosing up sides tonight!"

(You have to imagine Hawthorne trying to sing that when she can't carry a tune in a bag....)

She sometimes hangs out with this band from her hometown of Kansas City called the Rainmakers. (Maddy was pleasantly surprised to find out they were still together. Another band she liked back in college that's still around.) Judging from some of the old magazines Maddy dug out to show me, Hawthorne adopted the stovepipe hat from their lead singer  who did NOT accessorize his with a pink bunny dress.

"Hawthorne, what are you doing?" I said. "And who's that?"

"Hey guys, this is Tempest. She's a storm deva. I met her back in Missouri a few years ago when we were stopping a tornado."

"Trying to. We didn't really." Tempest had an accent that Aura told me later was Welsh. "We ended up having to send it into a bunch of unoccupied buildings because we couldn't steer it far enough around the town."

"Oh yeah, right. We kind of took out the church, didn't we?" Hawthorne looked sheepish.

"It destroyed several buildings," Tempest explained. "None of them had any living occupants. It was the best we could do with what little time we had to work with."

"You don't, like, drop tornadoes on purpose?" Not the best way to phrase it, I know, but you try asking that question.

"Oh no, never. I'm just one deva of many who bring rain and snow where it's needed. At least I try to. But I can't call up a cloud if there's not enough water vapor in the air to work with. And sometimes the rains I call up get out of control and the next thing I know, I'm trying to control what your human friends call a supercell thunderstorm."

"Sometimes those things take on a life of their own," Hawthorne added.

"They are alive, in their own way. Some of the most powerful storms are almost sentient," Tempest said quietly. "All devas work with powers we can direct, but not control."

One thing she hasn't worked with before is humans. Unlike the others, her work really doesn't lend itself to human collaboration. So this is a first time for her.....


















Note: Tempest is a Pukifee Dony who arrived about six weeks before I was expecting her. I'm not complaining, though.

Bonus shot - Tempest in action a couple of nights ago.