As much as a little nine-year-old girl can in a place like Auradon, Ao Tianyun has never cared about her looks one way or the other. She's always been secure in the fact that her true humanoid form is stunningly beautiful--so much so that she's begun to find it downright boring and prefers to shift into monstrous forms instead. Despite the regular outcries from both adults and peers that she would never find her Happily Ever After if she looked like that, there was no limit to the depths of creativity she unleashed in molding her shape to be everyone's worst nightmare--no limit to the number of eyes, the size of the horns, or the strange textures of skin ranging from glass-sharp scales to mucus ooze that she would employ to make herself as delightfully freakish as possible...
It all started with a burst of flaming frustration in her chest, the kind that caused her hair to set on fire like her father Ne Zha. She'd come home from a long day at school during which the other kids had been so, so cruel as per usual about her chosen form that day--but one child's barbed remark in particular had really gotten under her skin. Why throw away what your parents gave you? Appearance-wise, that is. Aren't you tired of shaming them? he'd said. Shaming them. Shaming them! When they had only ever supported her to take whatever form had made her happy!
What my parents taught me was to find my own path! she had screamed back as her hair ignited and she seized that insolent little shit by the collar. THIS IS MY PATH!!
The kid who'd said that--as well as the rest who were tormenting her--had all run away at the sight of that. One bright side to the fact that everyone in Auradon was so appearance-obsessed was that many felt incredibly intimidated by what they perceived to be ugly, and so of course being screamed at by a flame-haired, green-skinned ogre would cause those weak-minded children to scatter. She came home that day with the aura of her father's flame surrounding her, pissed beyond belief with a declaration much like her parents' that only she gets to choose what she wants: They want me to be pretty and cute so bad? I'll be the OPPOSITE and I am NOT changing back no matter WHAT anybody says!!!
But as with all declarations in the heat of the moment, one might later have second thoughts. The next day she marched up to her teacher, Ms. Mason, the one most adamant in the school about her taking the "wrong" sorts of forms--and in front of the entire class she announced that she had shapeshifted so many times into her ogre form that she was now stuck in it forever. A lie, of course, but not one that someone not an expert in the art of shapeshifting would be able to detect. She drank in the gasps of the crowd with great satisfaction as she watched her whole group of peers so hopelessly brainwashed by the strictures of Auradon's Happily Ever Afters try to wrap their heads around what had just happened--the perfect beauty, "ruined" before she could even have a chance to use her looks for their intended purpose.
She wasn't laughing long, however. Ms. Mason had tried to comfort her at first. Oh, child, she'd said. There must be a way to restore your beauty. But with the ad-libbed story that this had been going on for years and even the best doctors that her father surely had access to agreed that she was stuck, Ms. Mason's response began to put cracks in her fierce resolve.
Oh, how the woman wept, the tears from Ms. Mason's eyes as fierce and unstoppable a deluge as one of Ao Guang's mighty storms. How could you do this?! she cried, unable to keep her composure even in front of a room full of children. You were the most flawless little girl! All we had to do was to get rid of those dark circles under your eyes and make you act like the princess we all know you are and you would have been destined for the happiest of Happily Ever Afters! Now look at you! What man would ever want a wife so--so--
The teacher must've gone on for at least ten or fifteen minutes, sobbing about what a waste it was that someone so beautiful from such a highborn lineage as a deity's would lower herself to such base hideousness--and what a tragedy it was that she should be punished for her youthful folly by forever losing the thing that mattered most to securing a happy end to her story. Then even after she appeared to have calmed down, she stormed over to Ne Zha when it came time for him to pick her up from school and screamed, "It's your fault! YOUR FAULT you enabled this!" Ms. Mason was lucky to have escaped that with only a slightly singed dress. If Tianyun had been in a fighting mood, and chosen to egg him on instead of try to hold him back.....
Quite obviously, there's so much to unpack there. But at the moment though, Tianyun has chosen to throw away the whole suitcase--blocking most of those events from her mind as she walks up toward Aster, partway numb to everything but her sadness as her teacher's unhinged threats to call CPS on Ne Zha vaguely swirl around on repeat in her brain. This time, however she's not in the monstrous form she loves best. She looks how she actually is, the perfect princess that Auradon wanted her to be: bright, shining eyes, soft, pale cheeks, the spitting image of her mother Ao Bing--someone who would surely grow to become a beauty of legend like both her parents. But she's tamed herself far too much: her long black hair isn't loose and free-flowing and a little bit messy like Ne Zha's, which is how she usually likes it--she's combed it out and straightened it to the point it falls almost limp down her shoulders and back. And her clothes--not the rebellious and brightly colored T-shirts, skirts and boots she loves wearing, but a white and gold hanfu that could have been forced on her by the evil Chan sect of Immortals that her parents defeated so long ago. And then, to complete the picture that something is terribly, terribly wrong in her spirit, she's shapeshifted away the dark circles surrounding her eyes that she had inherited from Ne Zha that both of them were so proud of, the one thing she found the most interesting about her natural features which were otherwise so conventional.
Of course, her parents had told her not to listen to Ms. Mason. And she had wanted to believe them. But a nine-year-old can only be so strong in the face of the world telling her what she ought to be--and so it is here she crumbles. This was supposed to be a happy day, one of the few days of the year that she was able to cross through the barrier weaknesses Ne Zha had discovered to go to the Lairs of the Lost; she would have taken the opportunity to unwind with some self-expression, if not for the stain that her teacher had left across her will to be herself. It would be so, so much easier for her to give in, to give up her fire, her ferocity, the very essence of herself--to go back on what she'd told the entire class, to apologize for having caused such a "crisis," and to forever be how she appears to Aster now. But maybe there's a chance they can convince her that her chosen path is worth the pain. And right now, she wants to be convinced.
"Auntie Aster....?" she squeaks, looking up at them, her uncertain eyes beginning to brim with tears. "Can you please help…?"
