"Bar?"

The mythology is not quite clear.

"Well, fair enough, mythology does that sometimes."

"Oh well."

"She sounds nice, anyway, I have a friend who has wings and he took me up once instead of my going under my own power. It was different."

"I like having a roc. The traditional Air Avatar animal companion is a flying bison but they're a nightmare to keep and feed in an urban environment. A trained roc can be half-wild and still take passengers."

"How does a bison fly? Are they a cross with some kind of bird or bat or something?"

"No, flying bison are actually crossed with manatees; they fly with airbending. There's one kind of animal that can do each kind of bending except for some reason waterbending - I guess you could count the sacred koi as 'doing waterbending' but really they don't."

"What are the sacred koi?"

"There are two koi in a pool at the North Pole who represent the moon spirit and the ocean spirit. But the actual fish don't do any bending, they just swim in a circle."

"Ah. So what does...fire bending and earth bending?"

"Dragons do firebending and badgermoles do earthbending."

"Dragons are another thing we have legends of! And some kinds of mythological dragon can breathe fire, so that makes sense."

"Dragons do totally breathe fire. There aren't many isolate dragons left, though, which is sad."

"Yeah. We have endangered species in my world too."

"The flying bison went through a bottleneck too but they've recovered better. They're more domesticated than dragons ever really get so people wanted them and there were obvious incentives."

"Given some of the themes of dragon-related stories in my world this does not surprise me."

"Hm?"

"Oh--sometimes they're villainous mauraders, sometimes they're wise old beings, but they're always--orthoganal to humanity somehow."

"Fire Avatars get dragons. Basically no one else can keep them, though. Flying bison will get along great with any airbender and okay with other people who give them enough hay."

"What does a flying bison look like, I wonder. Bar?"

Here is a photo of a small flock of flying bison!

"Aww. I think those are cuter than manatees or regular bison just by themselves."

"They like to lick people."

"Awwww."