After the the goddess Tau'va manifests in M42 a narrow slice of the population amongst T'au and their auxilaries/allies find themselves able to control elements identically to the Bending of Avatar. T'au castes are locked to their element and non-tau are able to become any kind of bender though it is slanted toward people who most strongly resonate with an Element's spiritual character. The number of people in avatar propper who actually 'have' Bending and what makes a person get it or not is a bit loosie goosey as is so just go along with it being a clean 1% of the population. Training of bending takes the same amount of effort as in Avatar. Ethereal caste doesn't get any normal benders, but rather there is a single reincarnating ‘Tauvatar’ Ethereal with direct line of communication to Tau'va and a backlog of past lives as reincarnations inevitably start to pile up.If this Tau Ethereal perishes Tau’va will be able to cook up a new Tauvatar at no expense and keep the cycle going. This caveat is to just not have them lose their Tauvatar the first time something kills the magic blueberry while they're glowy.Bending is to be treated like a Psyker power in terms of there being forces which dampen, amplify or prevent it's usage but the act of doing a Bending is nonetheless treated as ‘safe' insofar as it's having nothing in the way of perils associated with it though do try not to astral project as an airbender into a warp rift.All this freely provided Bending magic to the tau is ‘not’ generated at any expense of the emerging Tau’va’ goddess’s power. She/it is still in manifesting miracles in the canon ways as normal like warding shrines or patroning for shadowsun.Anyway the question really being asked is how much of a boon does bending end up being to the benefit of T’au as a faction?
>>97985169I don't think the bending powers in avatar matter that much to a highly advanced sci-fi civilization. They can do everything bending can do better with their tech already.
This >>97985246The Fire caste already has plasma rifles or giant robots covered in flamethrowers.Earth caste probably has some utility. Earthbending heavily beats out how quickly you can dig even with machinery most of the time. So just having a couple Earth caste combat engineers to whip up an instant trench or a wall in the middle of a battlefield is pretty good. Less resource-intensive than their current method of mobile cover which is to have big hovering fortifications.
>>97985169The benefits of having the bending 'are' generally not worth the effort in the most direct of comparisons to a gun if used b a joe bum blueberry, "Yeah it's a great blessing to the greater good that you can use magic to project the equivalent of a flamethrower or send a boulder hurling but your space gun is better on the draw and will shoot further and faster." If you rule out using bending powers in place of shooting a gun you are left with either letting the skill totally' lapse to a minimally trained version of itself which is still not an unappreciable amount of help actually. It's still 'good' to have a guy who can magic up a hole in the wall or air jump to a rooftop on command.Either they become that or they train into a sufficiently good bender that you can leverage yourself towards any number of 'other' uses that are just going to be an obnoxiously long to list off swiss army knife uses.A water bender, not an amazing one...just a normal waterbender can:Do the magic water healing, purrification of water, Freeze rivers for pontooning, make mist smokescreens, freeze up sticky mud, ice wall covers, freeze over open wounds, freeze staircases to walk or a slide to escape to say nothing of just crashing a wake.And of course you are going to get outlier masters like Katara (pic gif) or Amon's family line who can bloodbend a full room of people. You're drinking some wanky hotsause to think that there is actually going to be 'no' value in this.
>>97985169Stepping back a little from determining how much this is a power up or not, bending does make for a pretty early upset in the slow power balance strife between Ethereal authority and the emergance of Tau’va worshipping/Caste breakaway politics that are already an issue.Magic martial arts circulating around the septs along with the perpetual holy mouthpiece of that religion always bumming around and giving friction against the caste’s agendas in their service to the deity is just such a mean kick in the shin to the Ethereal’s authority.
>>97986918People need to get off the Phil Kelly Ethereal hate train desu. Making the Tau a bad copy of the Covenant was shit lore and the more recent stuff presenting a unified Tau has been far better.
>>97985169Benders as a whole would probably be kept out of the battlesuits to have them best leverage their martial arts dance routines. Tau are usually open minded on most things but Caste role delineations are not one of them, Fire & Air are the “fight” castes. Earth and water and not and that’s just how it goes, not to say it isn’t malleable and that earth and water Enders won’t be put towards the support of war like forming bunkers and demolitions or giving backline water healing.Water Caste would probably find the most minimal of use for their bending inside their safety of their own borders but amongst the espionage and diplomatic missions there are some neat tricks that can be pulled like nonlethal iceing of guys who try and pull a knife in a meeting or leveraging the magic of healing hands and unpoisoning wells when they’re making their rounds in oppressed poor villages or primitive xenos.Air caste I can see them floating around easily in zero g environments with the air bending helping when navigating space.There isn’t as much of a caste autism about Airs being war deployed as earth or water so there is basically no reason to think that there won’t be a perpetual output of airbenders being sent down to planets as skirmishing light infantry.
>>97985169I'd much prefer it if the Tau "goddess" were to pick a Tau from each caste (Earth, Fire, Air, Water and Hea... I mean Ethereal) and grant them elemental powers, which when combined could be used to summon a champion of the Tau'va, similar to a Daemon Prince or Imperial Saint.It could called something like O'Tau'va.
>>97993948Pic related is some concept art I whipped up
