"Yeah. The relationship of my special Avatar privileges and the actual legal system has firmed up a little since a few Avatars ago and I have to care about public opinion even after I'm trained up to the point where I can look at anybody who might try to stop me and go 'meh, I could take them' unless I want to be, you know, evil. Avatar Aang - who is both my preincarnation and literal ancestor, which is fun - was basically the last avatar who could act like he was a free agent acting orthogonally to the law. He didn't exactly abuse the privilege, but if I decided to have very strong opinions about the leadership of the Fire Nation or the defensive preparations of Ba Sing Se or something I'd have to pay a little more attention."

"I think that anyone who outright doesn't care about public opinion is going to get labeled evil after a while," Emily shrugs. "I mean, if I had strong opinions about that sort of thing and had a chunk of social pull I'd probably organize a protest or something. In my experience governments usually take a while to get to a point where direct application of special powers to the problem is in any way helpful."

"Oh, during the early years of Aang's time as Avatar the Fire Nation was busy waging an arguably genocidal war against the entire rest of the world. It's widely agreed that Aang declining to actually kill the Phoenix King was a mercy and that if he'd wanted to he could have demanded the entire Fire Nation submit to his republican ideals instead of installing a legitimate Fire Prince on the throne - not the heir, that was the prince's younger sister, but still."

"...Genocide. ick. Go Aang. Why hadn't the previous Avatar done anything to prevent that?""

"Aang kind of was the previous Avatar. He spent a century frozen in an iceberg, so a new one couldn't be born but he also couldn't do anything about the war. At the time he entered the iceberg he was twelve, so he hadn't been announced as the Avatar before that - when they can swing it they don't tell anybody including us until we're sixteen; Aang knew and some monks knew but that was it. The previous previous avatar, Roku, is said to have tried to do some things to calm down the guy who started the war in the first place, but died and the war kicked off."

"Oh. I'm going to assume that surviving frozen for a century can also be put down to Avatar stuff."

"Yeah. I don't actually know how to do it, but I recently figured out how to enter what is called the Avatar State at will so I could figure it out if I had to. But the historians think Aang was iceberging himself as an automatic self-defense mechanism from a storm he was caught in, and since unlike him I can enter the State at will I could just, you know, control the weather instead."

"Both, in a sufficiently violent storm, and I could redirect lightning with firebending if necessary too. I've done some cloud-sculpting but I haven't actually controlled the weather per se yet - if there's a nasty drought or a hurricane somewhere and the waterbenders can't help by themselves I'll go fix it, of course, but these days a waterbender alone can do a lot if you just put them in an airplane above the weather. Technology and bending together can do some much improved stuff."

"Absolutely. My magnetism wouldn't be half as useful if we didn't have so many metal gadgets, either."

"I'd imagine. It'd just be a parlor trick. With a reasonable background technology level you probably never lack for material."

"It's part of the reason I became a doctor, actually. My magnetic fields don't tremble the way finger muscles do, which gives me an advantage in not accidentally doing more harm than good."

"You just magnet your scalpels and such around?"

"Yeah. Or, not all the time--the other doctors would look at me funny if I literally never did something like that by hand--but if I think there's any risk at all that I'd be insufficiently manually dextrous for a task, then yes."

"...Why would the doctors care? I mean, it wouldn't actually work with metalbending, getting that kind of precision is excruciatingly hard and requires physical precision too because all bending is controlled by moving the body, but if it did work I don't imagine anyone would mind a metalbender doctor doing it..."

"Because mutants are relatively new, and they don't have the visceral assurance I do that yes, I am actually better with magnetism than with my hands. Hands have been tested and retested over millenia and are by default more trusted than the new thing. Not that they haven't seen enough evidence to rationally convince them no, it's fine, but doing things by hand when I can helps soothe their primitive hindbrains."

"All right. And of course you'd have to whenever you were using things that didn't have any metal, like gauze or what have you. Unless you wanted to pick up the gauze with some metal, but I assume at some degree of remove not having tactile feedback is more of a problem than the precise control is an advantage."

"Yeah, of course. But bandaging someone has a much lower risk of accidentally hurting someone if your finger slips than delicate surgery."

"This is true. I don't actually know anything about medicine per se apart from water healing and the according hanging around hospitals."

"Medicine's not for everyone. Honestly, I mostly became a doctor because I'm not squeamish, I have an advantage, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, so why not something helpful and prestigious? But I like it. I'm very glad I chose to do this."

"I might have become a doctor if I were just an airbender - there aren't that many careers besides, say, dancing, where it's a measurable advantage, and it'd be a bit laughable for me to be a dancer when I need to bend just to walk. It gave me some trouble when I was learning to firebend, too - fire is more sensitive to nearby breezes than water or earth are."

"Some kind of condition, or...? Sorry, it's none of my business. My father was injured during the thwarting of Shaw, and he couldn't walk until sufficient medical technology had been acquired from Milliways, so it--catches my attention, I suppose."

"I have a neurological balance problem, and I think it's actually worse because I'm used to bending and haven't practiced walking without it. I didn't take longer to walk than a regular kid, I just fell over a lot - babies can actually use airbending but not purposefully; I didn't figure out how to stay upright until I was about four. And now if I go to the spirit world where there is no actual air I can't even take as many steps as I could when I was three."

"Thaaat sounds like it must suck. Can you bring objects into the spirit world, maybe you could have a spirit-world-going-into place with a wheelchair or something."

"The spirit world is not wheelchair accessible. And the extent to which one can bring objects is - ambiguous. When I go, I perceive myself to be wearing clothes, but I also perceive myself to be breathing the air that there isn't unless I pay close attention. Anything more complicated than a wheelchair has a decent chance of just not functioning in spirit form. So I bring someone along and they help me, but I don't have to go very often."