Annie - USA
Location: Muni XIII

With a loud huff, Annie set her supplies out on the great wooden table before her and opened an old and dusty book to a marked page. She had attempted this drawing of the Earth card several times already and each one had seemed to get worse. She looked back over the drawings and imagined herself drawing the same border patterns and runic text in volumes like a twisted punishment forever and then pushed the thought aside before it could overwhelm her. Earth was grounding and solid and strong. And [i]Patient[/i], she thought and wrinkled her nose at the idea. Annie was not. Not when it came to her own skills. She wanted to move quickly and get on to one of the more fun elements like water or air. Those were about movement and action. 

But her grandmother had insisted that there was an order to learning just as there was an order to the seasons. "How could she flow like water if she could not stand on the ground that held it? How could she fly with air if she had no where to land? How could she learn to be strong if she had not learned to grow?" Her grandmother had annoyed her with her endless, answerless questions. And Mary Beth just smirked, even less helpful than her mentor. 

Ink met paper and Annie began again, twisting runes into stone and dirt into magic. The image of a mountain worked its way across the paper but would not be contained by her lines and shortly she had gone off the page again. It didn't make sense! She looked at the book and then back at her own. The mountain was definitely larger than the card, yet somehow it was contained in the master image but came unbound in front of her. She would never master it, she concede and pushed the paper away. 

She heard the front door of the apartment open and Mary Beth answered someone in the front hallway but Annie couldn't tell which of her teammates it was. They weren't really a [i]functioning[/i] team yet, which was another frustration to add to the list. Moving to Rome had seemed to come with a lot of them. She flipped through the old, magic book as she waited for whoever had stopped by to find her.