"Oh, the birds. We don't have those in real life so far as I know, but we have stories about them. In my language, 'roc' sounds exactly like 'rock' and a 'pet rock' is something you give to kids who want a pet but can't be trusted to take care of a living thing."

"Oh! That's cute."

"I know, right?"

"Yes. My roc is a bird, though, and I ride around on her. And when I'm not doing that she catches fish in the bay and sits on top of sufficiently large trees."

"That makes much more sense in the context of flying. What's her name?"

"Liqing."

"Does that mean something? If it does it isn't translating."

"No, it's just a name. My name doesn't mean anything either. Well, Beila doesn't, my last name is - do I just mean it differently when I say it and -? Swan-owl."

"That's all right. It's a nice name, anyway."

"Thanks." Pretzel. Munch munch.

Slush. Sip sip. "So what do you do?"

"I'm a doctor. I was actually at the hospital where I work when Milliways picked me up."

"Oh, cool. I specialized in healing when I learned waterbending, sometimes I volunteer at the hospital."

"Oh, I bet that's good for stopping people from bleeding to death."

"...Burns, mostly. Bloodbending is pretty flatly illegal; I wouldn't be surprised if some healers got away with therapeutic uses and everyone looked the other way, but mostly water healing is great for burns, good for scrapes and cuts, okay for bruises and swelling, mediocre to ineffective for everything else."

"Oh, I guess that makes sense. Blood has enough iron in it that I've done the thing I suggested one or two times when someone's life was on the line."

"Like I said, it probably happens, but officially nobody ever bloodbends."

"That sounds like a story."

"It's more a cultural paranoia. The obvious application of bloodbending is to puppet someone else's body, which in addition to being horror movie material is extremely painful, and it's also possible to use it to create a permanent chi block which prevents the target from bending."

"I. Am not sure how that's obvious. But if it's a thing that happens I can understand being paranoid about it."

"It's the best known use, anyway."

"If I were going to do nasty things to someone using their blood--which I wouldn't--the most obvious thing that comes to mind is to just rip it from their bodies. But if that's a thing, I can see how it would...linger in the public consciousness."

"It's hard to bloodbend at all - I mean, absent an open wound. Most people who try find they can only do it on the full moon, at night. It's not the most convenient way to injure someone with waterbending if there's any other water around - if you can pull it from nearby plants, if you've been sweating all day, if there's a speck of humidity in the air."

"I wonder why that is. Blood's difficult for me, since the iron's on a very small scale, but...I haven't tried to do anything to blood that was in someone's body, but it doesn't feel any less responsive, if that makes sense."