"Do I need to just try to stop ever wondering why you blush when you do?"

"Um... well I don't always know," he says.

"That must be weird," comments Beila.

"Do you always know why your face is doing things?"

"I would if I got a picture of my face at the time and took a minute to think about it," Beila asserts. "Writing it down helps; thoughts are slippery little snakenewts sometimes."

"Weird," says Dao.

"Thoughts being slippery little snakenewts is weird, or me being able to catch 'em is weird?"

"That mental image is pretty weird!"

Beila snickers. "Well, what can I say, I have a lot of snakenewt-trapping practice. But anyway, that was a decent movie as mediocre horror goes, nicely acted, everybody looked convincingly like they were living through nightmares, well done Extra Number Twelve."

"Yeah!" he agrees.

"Of course, the bloodbender's only motive seemed to be that she was, you know, a villain, she didn't seem to have any goals, but that's par for the course," shrugs Beila. "You know there's some suggestion in some histories that Katara of the South dabbled in bloodbending? But no one talks about it because it's Just So Evil and Katara was Good And Virtuous."

"...I did... not know that," Dao admits. "But I mean. Bloodbending is pretty evil, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah, no kidding," says Beila. "I don't think I know how to hate somebody enough to want to bloodbend them. But if I were ever going to be tempted to, I'd have some end in mind, I wouldn't just want to send puppets lurching through a city in a vaguely cinematic fashion. Killing people is evil too and killers have motives."

"Well, do we know why Katara supposedly did it?"

"It's all very speculative, but they think she learned it in the Fire Nation around the same time a Water Tribe criminal who escaped prison was found capturing and storing people in a cave with the power. So possibly she bloodbent that lady, and possibly also the guy who killed her mom."

"...Well, if you're gonna bloodbend somebody, 'killed my mom' is a pretty good excuse."

"Mmm - no, I don't think so. It's higher on the list than 'someone with a video recorder was nearby and the lighting was right and the music cued me', but it's not like he was about to kill again, he was retired."

"...Yeah but like," Dao says, "people get mad about stuff."

"Yes, but that's not a good reason to do things, it just makes you have to think harder to not do them. Bloodbending isn't time travel. It wasn't going to help her mom."

"Okay," he says, "I don't exactly mean it's a good excuse, I just mean - I'd believe that somebody would do that."

"Oh, sure. Realistic character motivation. Which," she adds with a gesture, "the movie villain lacked. Unless they set it up in the last installment that I didn't see? Did you catch it?"

"Nope, I didn't. Maybe she just liked watching 'em twitch," he snorts.

"They do twitch a lot, don't they. I wonder why," muses Beila. "For that matter I have no idea if it's accurate, it's not like they could do a lot of fact-finding, is it."

"Guess not," he laughs.

"I feel like people might get nervous if I started asking for books on the subject."