She raises a hand to her neck, apparently unconsciously. "And even if they don't, you've only delayed things a century at most."

"Yeah. Well, that and depending on how signature the powers are you might be hard to track down? Unless you look the same every time."

"We don't look the same every time. Bar, can I get pictures of Marie Angelov, Helen Fitzroy, and Beatrice Carter?"

Bar supplies the most photogenic available examples of each.

Marie is a woman with frizzy brown hair and skin a shade darker than she would later have as Ava. Her facial and body structure are completely different from the ones she has now.

Helen had long wavy black hair, a willowy build, and was almost six feet tall. Beatrice had blonde hair that was a noticeably different kind of wavy and a little shorter than average. Neither particularly resembles Annabelle.

"Yeah, those are pretty different. All girls, which is more than I can say for my discount-brand reincarnation. All your appearances are kind of weird relative to people in my world. Maybe just ethnically. Like, I don't think people in my world have naturally yellow hair."

"...At risk of being accidentally racist, you do sort of look some variety of Asian, and as far as I know people of entirely Asian descent don't have blonde hair."

"...I don't think I could possibly consider that racist in the total absence of knowing what Asia is, so. My actual background is kind of 'Republic City mutt', heavier on the Earth Kingdom, I could break it down if you'd recognize the places but I doubt it."

"I'm less worried about being racist to you and more about being accidentally racist about Asian people from my universe."

"What's Republic city?"

"It's one of the biggest cities in the world. Founded after the Hundred Year War resolved by the then-Avatar and some of his friends to try to create a more international cosmopolitan culture. Did okay at the job."

"Hundred Year War?"

"There was a war. Fire Nation versus Everybody Else. Lasted a hundred years, mostly because the Avatar at the beginning of that century was a twelve-year-old boy who panicked, accidentally sealed himself in an iceberg, and couldn't bring it to an end until he was diseniced by some South Polars a hundred years later. They did various things, including de-bend the Phoenix King and put his more cooperative son on the throne, and the war was over. Airbenders had an enormous population bottleneck - that Avatar, Aang, was the only genetically-airbender person on the entire planet. And he only had three kids. And only one of them was an airbender, so I and all other airbenders are descended from that one kid. Fortunately he had more than his dad did and reliably threw benders; we're still hugely in the minority, but we're not going to go extinct any time soon and I'm a generation too late to receive probing from nuns about when I'm going to reproduce."

"Thaaat sounds uncomfortable."

"Yes, but I don't have to deal with it. My mother likes to tell me how lucky I am. She actually considered having more than just me but decided against, I'm not sure why."

"To spite the nuns?"

"I don't think so. It's probably a combination of really little things - hard to fly when heavily pregnant, rough patch with my dad around the time I was a baby, flareup of minor ailments, that sort of thing. Wouldn't put it past her to decide she wants another baby even this late, though, they're still pretty young."

"I'm already not going to have kids ever but I feel like if there were nuns trying to pressure me into it I might pretend it was at least partly to spite them."

"I think Ranyi likes to imagine herself above that sort of thing. Besides, it was a grandmotherly sort of interest, from most of the involved nuns. Ranyi teaches little kids basic airbending forms for a living and sometimes talks to nuns who teach advanced classes about the students."

"I guess that makes sense. I don't think I'd take grandparents trying to get me to reproduce very well either, though."

"Even if you had a rare genetic trait the continued existence of which might be really spiritually important which had spent a hundred twenty years just shy of wiped out, and they were being nice about it, and you liked children enough to work with them all the time anyway?"

"Oh, I wasn't criticizing your mom. I just...I try not to get attached to more people who aren't reincarnating than I have to, and the idea of loving someone as much as I would love a child and then watching them die and not come back sends my brain into a screaming panic if I dwell on it too much."

"Oh, shit, I hadn't thought of that. It's not so much a thing with discount reincarnation - I don't get weirded out about being my own great-great-great-grandfather... twice..."

"I'd imagine that would be different, yes. I have enough people I miss as it is and I don't imagine I'll be able to avoid accumulating any more."