"It's good for disrupting other peoples' powers too, if those powers involve moving stuff around in any way. And it can be good for things like mobility--I can make horizontal barriers in midair and stand on them. And if someone's dumb enough to start things anywhere near civilians it's really good for preventing collateral damage."

"What about you?" she asks Marie. "With the air powers, you'd be mostly like an airbender."

"...Well, I can fly. And I can knock other people out of the air reasonably well without hurting them, if there are fliers on the other side. I can blow things through the air under the right circumstances, so if there was, say, a pumice boulder handy I could throw rocks at people. I can make supersonic wind blades that make a loud enough boom to disorient and temporarily deafen opponents. Since I have very good control of my powers, I can almost hit someone with a regular wind blade and make them jump in a certain direction."

"Soundbending's very niche in my world. I can do a little, but if I needed to do anything major with it I'd have to go all glowy and ransack past incarnations for details. You can just straight fly? That's possible with airbending but very hard, it's overwhelmingly easier to do it with a glider or in a batsquirrel suit."

"I mean, my original costume was very floaty. But yeah, I can straight-up fly. Why would you make a suit that was a cross between a bat and a squirrel, wouldn't it be easier to just go with a bat or a flying squirrel?"

"...The suits are based on batsquirrels, I think. With the possible exception of the brands that are named for rabbats and opossum bats, I guess, those might have design inspiration from those animals above and beyond the names."

"Do you just have a bunch of hybridized bat animals flying around?"

"Some? There's wolfbats, flutterbats, viper bats, riverbats, batcats, batrats, manta bats... how many bat animals should I list, I could probably keep going."

"That's a lot. Why did whoever decided that hybridizing animals was a good idea get so fixated on bats?"

"...Nobody decided this. This is just how animals, in general, including animals that do not have a bat component, are."

"What, really? That's weird. We don't have anything like that at all."

"...You just have solo animals? Like, exclusively?"

"I mean, sometimes closely related species hybridize, but that's not really the same thing."

"Not really. Wow, that sounds boring. Bats. Squirrels. Every now and then a ratmouse to break up the monotony."

"I don't think rats and mice are that closely related. I guess I could be wrong. Anyway, there's tons of kinds of animals, it's not boring."

"Are they not? I always thought the distinction between rat hybrids and mouse hybrids seemed kind of artificial unless you're going to investigate the skeletons or something. That and the bald tails on rat animals."

"I'd get into taxonomy and stuff but honestly I'm not a biology professor, I'm not at all sure I'd be more informative than confusing."

"If you say so. I still think your animals sound boring."

"I don't need to be a biology professor to refute that. Peacocks, especially in flight or with their tails spread. Tigers. Mantis shrimp. Butterflies. Iridescent beetles. Viscachas."

"...Viscachas I haven't heard of, but we have peacock animals and tiger animals and shrimp animals and butterfly animals and beetle animals."

"Mantis shrimps aren't like other shrimps. They can see more kinds of color than I think any other animal. They come in colors beautiful even to limited human color vision. You can't keep them in tanks because they punch the glass hard enough to break it."

"Viscachas are profoundly fluffy."

"I have not heard of all the shrimp animals in the world so I don't know if we have that exact one. The fluffiest animal I've ever heard of is the chinchilla owl."

"And now I'm imagining a chinchilla crossed with an owl. Marie, I think she wins."

"But we have, what, millions or something species of beetle!"