I'm liking the first four panels. It's like "not so tough now, huh?"
I suspect as much too. Also, if she realizes she CAN trust them, she'll probably try to acclimate (some of) them to the Storm.
I'm gonna read that story sunphoenix.
Third reaction, to do nothing. Of course, to do nothing is never truly to do nothing, there is a yin-yang seesaw of fear and fight. To nothing, plus fear is to be in shock. To do nothing plus fight is to face one's fear. And dead center, is to analyze one's fear. To still be afraid, and yet want to see beyond the storm.
I think the first part of the story is more impressive than the latter. It sounds like if you were in third phase, your best instinct to get you through intact would be concern for your sister.
As for me, I am very studious, but in terms of what everyone else seems to know, it always seems they have the important stuff figured out. Of course, sometimes they were wrong, becomoing ambitious about things that don't matter, but even the higher levrel lessons, when I became spiritual, I noticed most of the other people got it alot more.
There was a similar point of adjustment to physical darkness. But I took another approach. I at one point believed in elementalism (still do, but there's more important things out there). That things like Earth and Fire, had a sort of presence in the world and in our bodies. And stuff. Each of these had a sort of breathing style and a tai chi like kata, but anyway the point is... one night I decided to study Darkness. My fear of the dark never truly went away but I basically was at a hotel on vacation, and I decided to allow myself to become completely afraid of the dark, and then just study what I felt. Ummm, it was interesting, but didn't really change too much.
What did was one day I was on a trip, and I got some of hymn stuck in my head. "In him there is no darkness at all, the night and the day are both alike..." It would appear that light and dark are opposites, but this isn't really what either Taoism or Christianity implies. Rather than light and dark being two extremes (fundies see it this way, nobody else does), Light is the unity of everything (all colors put together, all concepts put together even apparently opposite concepts), while Darkness, of the kind that includes pain and the despair of loved ones dying, is separation (again, you find this in the color wheel). That the reason we fear death is that there is a sense of never being able to see them again (Christianity teaches this as an illusion, while Taoism teaches reality itself is an illusion). The point that I glean from this, is that as I later discovered, Taoism had a number of states of existence (interestingly, Buddhism beat out Taoism for popularity, because they said basically nothing about an afterlife, but it is more personally interesting). Basically, thye have The Void
(Wu-chi), then separation into opposites, and the Tao is everything INCLUDING separation, in cycles. Or as Sora claims "Kingdom Hearts is Light!" before closing the gate to keep out both the heartless and King Mickey. ...What? I'm a geek.
Also, hum the Smurfs song while reading panels one through two then at three through five gradually switch to bass keys and whole notes. It cracked me up.