"I don't blame you."

"...If you don't have anything crossed with a mantis shrimp then we win awesome even if we don't win cute. Otherwise I give up."

"Do you have dragons, flying bison, giant unagi, badger moles, spirit koi, or rocs?"

"I surrender. Please be merciful in your victory."

Giggle.

"I mean, we have dragons or rocs in fiction, but it's not the same thing. Not sure why a cross between a badger and a mole is on the list, but I assume there's a reason."

"They earthbend. And flying bison airbend, and dragons firebend. Water's the odd one out; waterbenders talk about learning it from the moon."

"Huh. Do you think maybe there used to be a waterbending animal and it died out?"

"Could be. Dragons and flying bison both had close calls on the dying out thing. But you'd think there would be legends, if there had once been a waterbending animal."

"Maybe. Maybe they were moonlike in some way and the legends got conflated. Maybe everyone was so ashamed of whatever killed 'em that they all vowed never to speak of it again."

"Do you want me to ask some dead Avatars? I can also consult them on non-bending matters."

"If you can do that casually it sounds great."

"...At will and without expending scarce resources other than time, but, I mean, it takes a little doing and I'll be dead to the world, and also I'm not sure what being in this weird place will do to my interactions with my usual weird place. However, it seems sort of unlikely that you're the first person to wonder this within earshot of any Avatar before, so I would still expect legends if there had once been a waterbending animal."

"It just seems really strange that there's animals for all the other kinds of bending but not water. Although now I'm curious how and whether Milliways interacts with you other weird place."

Marie obligingly does not kill her while she glows.

"Milliways apparently freezes time in your home universe while you're here. Not that I have any plans to kill you at any time, but why would it have been more inconvenient if you had glowed?"

"Supposedly if I die in the Avatar State, no more Avatars ever. How this could possibly be known given that it has never happened I couldn't tell you, but I'd just as soon not risk it."

"Maybe there used to be something else like the Avatar and you have Avatars now instead of it because someone killed it while it was equivalently glowy. Makes perfect sense not to risk."

"I have never heard of there being an Avatarlike thing before there were Avatars, and suspect it was a spirit saying so and being misinterpreted or correctly interpreted and assumed to have theoretical knowledge of what would happen which may or may not be the case."

"That makes sense too. Maybe the whole thing was designed and the 'killed while glowy' thing was installed as a failsafe."

"Oh, it was designed, just not by humans."

"I didn't think it would be by humans, given that you have spirits and such. 'By the way, we installed a failsafe, don't set it off by accident' sounds plausible to me."