A little pink pillow of a pill and a glass of water appears, along with a hot pretzel. Eat first.

"Yes ma'am, thank you ma'am," she says, and takes a bite of pretzel.

You're welcome, of course.

The door opens again.

Emily is tired enough to eat another bite of pretzel before turning around to see who the newcomer is.

"...Hi? Where is this? It lacks several signs of me having accidentally wandered into the spirit world but I don't have a better explanation."

"This is Milliways. It's a bar that hijacks doors in completely different universes. The bar proper is sentient and female, and the first drink is free. You can ask for whatever you like but I recommend taking Bar's recommendation. She is very, very good at what she does."

"...So you're from a different universe and that's why you're, uh, odd-looking?"

"I am almost certainly from a different universe and I don't know what you find odd-looking about me in particular but I wouldn't be surprised if dimensional shenanigans had something to do with it." Pretzel. Nom.

"It's mostly your eyes, I can't totally figure it out actually." The air in the room swirls oddly as the newcomer approaches the bar. "So you don't know who I am, either, because you're from a different universe."

"Nope. No clue. And I doubt you know who I am, either."

"Are you also world-famous?"

"Not me personally, but my father is."

"That's probably nearly as draining sometimes. Anyway, I'm Beila Guxiao." Bow.

"Emily Xavier." She inclines at the waist, but makes no move to get up from her bar stool. "So why are you world-famous, or would you rather interact with someone who doesn't have a clue for once?"

"I don't really mind being world-famous, the interest of going unrecognized has already worn off. I'm the Avatar. Do you have those where you're from?" She sits at the bar. "I'll take her recommendation to take your recommendation." She gets a slushy apple-rose drink. "Ooh."

"No, I don't think so. I haven't heard of any such thing, anyway."

"It means I can bend all four elements and I have some nifty spirit powers on top of that. I am technically reincarnated, but apart from oddly timed births and deaths not so you'd notice."

"All four elements? What, you mean like fire, water, earth and air?"

"Yeah." She pulls a glob of ice slush out of her drink, makes it orbit her hand with flowing gestures, plops it back into the glass.

"Cool. I think those are the Greek Classical Elements in my world. I do metal," she adds, the steel bracelet on one wrist deciding to do a mercury impression and twisting off to make a circuit around her arm.

"Earthbenders on my world can do that if they specially train for it. A lot of cops are metalbenders, especially in Republic City. I haven't picked it up yet, I'm still in firebending my first go-round and then I can go back and learn metal and sand and lightning. But you just do metal?"

"Well, I do magnetism, it's not quite the same thing. The earth is a giant magnet, so I can push off its magnetic field to fly, and I can do some stuff with things that are sensitive to electricity."

"Ooh, metalbenders can't fly, they mostly vault around or zipline. So that's different too."

"Ziplining sounds fun, but not as practical as flying."

"It really isn't! I love flying."

"Sooo...I'm guessing you fly using air? Or do you lift the water in your body or something, I'm guessing the air one would be more practical."

"...I do not lift the water in my body, no, that would be really uncomfortable. It's air and a glider. Also I have a pet roc."

"I thought it might be. What does a pet rock have to do with flying?"

"...Did whatever weird language aura this place has - do you not have rocs? Giant birds? They eat fish?"

"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."

"It's not quite that the blood is already moving, because it's not hard to pull water out of a river, even a fast one, but it's sort of like that. In our case."

"Yeah, sounds like it."

"Well, I'm not going to complain about limitations that make it harder to do unpleasant things to people. Especially since they don't seem to be limiting in any other way."

"I mean, waterbending in general does get stronger at night and during the full moon, like firebending is stronger during the day or when there's a comet passing and doesn't work at all during a solar eclipse. Air and earth don't have anything like that though."

"Sounds vaguely arbitrary, but I don't really know enough about your system to judge."

"It's usually summarized as 'waterbenders derive their powers from the moon and find the sun inhibiting, firebenders derive their power from the sun' with... no scientifically reasonable explanation for the comet."

"If waterbenders derive power from the moon, how can you bend here? Milliways doesn't have a moon, so far as I know."

"I don't know. I can't bend in the spirit world, but I can't actually do much of anything in the spirit world, because I need to airbend to walk and there isn't any air to use there, so not being able to waterbend isn't special. I don't feel particularly weak -" She bends the last of her slush. "...yeah, seems normal. Daytime new moon normal, but that's still functional. Maybe it's because I'm the Avatar, I don't know."

"Bar? Any light to shed on the subject? No pun intended."

I can't remember any other waterbenders entering the bar, nor do I have more theory available than does Beila, I'm sorry. Although many people who normally would find their abilities of whatever sort inhibited in an environment like Milliways do not experience that problem here and it may simply be that.

"I was wondering if it was something like that. I don't know, though, I can't push off of nonexistent magnetic fields to fly here."

The assistiveness of the premises is incomplete.

"Quite. Well, maybe it's because you're the Avatar, who knows."

"Sometimes things are totally because I'm the Avatar. It's a thing."

"I imagine it is! Sounds very Chosen One-y."

"I guess. I think it's not really a choosingy thing, exactly. It's a beingy thing."

"Oh, Chosen One is a sort of trope in literature in my universe. It doesn't literally mean that anything chose you, it just means you've got some sort of specialness that often has arbitrary features that stand in place of a more random Deus or Diabolus Ex Machina."

"Oh. I'm that, but the name is inapt. Insofar as anything is choosing things about who's the next Avatar, it is The Avatar Spirit, namely the thing that's going around being reincarnated. I wouldn't say I identify with it in a personal sense, but it's certainly not somebody else."

"Alas, I do not dictate the names of tropes in literature. I promise you if I did they would be either much more sensible or so silly no one would think they were infacetious."

"Of course, a lot of examples are chosen by something, so it's less a case of misnomer and more of applying the name of a subset to the whole, like calling all Norse people Vikings...and that's a terrible example, you probably have no idea what either of those things mean. Norse is a culture, Viking is a thing that some of those people did."

"I did indeed have no idea what those things meant. I'm going to translate that as 'calling a Foggy Swamp dweller a swampbender'."

"Probably accurate, from context."

"Not everybody bends. I think it used to be that literally all the air nomads could airbend but no other population has managed that high a concentration, it's more like thirty or forty percent."

"I don't have exact figures on what percentage of my population is mutants, but I know it's not that high yet."

"People with two bending parents aren't guaranteed to be benders - although four bending grandparents will usually do the trick."

"I don't think I've heard of anyone with two mutant parents who wasn't themselves a mutant. But then, we've been a public thing for barely half a century."

"...Really? What, just started happening one day? I mean, Avatars just started happening one day but there were regular benders before that."

"Nnnnot exactly. Or rather--we don't know. The oldest known mutant was born about a hundred and thirty years ago, and there were probably others before that. But it was only about fifty years ago that enough found each other to figure out that they were properly a thing and not just a handful of isolated anomalies, and then...stuff happened, and everyone else found out too."

"...You're skipping a story here."

"Okay. Once upon a time there was a very evil man who happened to be a mutant, and his name was Klaus Schmidt or possibly Sebastian Shaw or possibly something else; we don't know for sure that either name was his real one. He took advantage of some very bad things that were happening to murder a couple and kidnap their mutant son, Erik Lehnscherr. Erik managed to escape after several years, and then dedicated himself to hunting down and killing his captor for the death of his parents. Meanwhile, a government agent named Moira McTaggert found out Shaw and saw demonstrations of the abilities of several other mutants he had managed to get on his side. She sought out Charles Xavier, a recent university graduate whose thesis paper suggested the existence of human mutants with fantastic powers, only to discover that he was one. He agreed to help her stop Shaw, who was trying to drive two powerful countries towards war. It turned out that one of Moira's co-workers was also a mutant, a genius who built a machine that let he and my father find others of our kind--including Erik. They joined forces with him and several others that they found to thwart the last stage of Shaw's plan, and succeeded, but they succeeded very publicly."

"Your father being Charles Xavier?"

"Yeah. I guess I should have specified, I thought it was apparent from the surname."

"It was, but only because I actually remembered your surname."

"True. I suppose I shouldn't take that as a given."

Beila shrugs. "Anyway, it sounds like things got mostly resolved, so that's good. I'm sort of a point person for major international instability and environmental threats - I had to calm down a supervolcano once, but it was actually really anticlimactic."

"Wow. I think anticlimactic is the best possible outcome in that situation."

"I mean, yes. But it doesn't even make a good story. One day all the elements acted oddly so I accidentally pulled my boyfriend into the spirit world with me and he had to carry me because I couldn't bend, and we found a supervolcano spirit, and I told it I would figure out who was bothering it and make them stop. And then I called in a competent earthbender to put a lid on a pit and told off the landlord, and everything was fine."

"I agree with you. I would just have liked to have a good story on top of an unexploded supervolcano."

"You could make something up!"

"I'm just not the making things up type when I can avoid it."

"Aversion to lying, or lack of creativity?"

"First thing. I'm not exactly a bad liar, I'd just rather avoid it."

"Fair enough. I'm not too fond of it either."

Beila finishes her slush. "So what does one do in here besides meet extradimensional doctors?"

"Drink interesting beverages, consume interesting foods, flee despotic governments although I doubt that one applies to you, purchase nifty objects, purchase nifty technology close enough to your current level to be reverse-engineerable while advanced enough to be worth reverse-engineering..."

"My government is not despotic and if it were I would consider it entirely my job to fix that, not to run away. Technology sounds interesting; do you have tips on getting the right stuff?"

"Ask Bar."

"It helped in my case that my father's genius friend was nearby, so I could drag him in here, and he was going to be the person doing the reverse-engineering anyway."

"Useful. I don't have anyone like that convenient at the moment."

"I'm sure you can leverage your unChosen One powers to find someone appropriate."

"Yes, but unfortunately it's late enough that I don't think the nuns who help me find people to do Avatar-related stuff are checking their screen messages."

"Nuns?"

"Nuns. From the Reconstructed Air Temple. I'm an Air Avatar - all the avatars learn all the elements, but in a different order, and we're born to families that would normally have produced different kinds of benders; my parents are different kinds, but the last avatar was a Fire Avatar so we're sure that I would have been an airbender, not an earthbender, if I weren't the avatar. And I'm a girl - that alternates except when it's a fire to air transition. And therefore my support system is nuns."

"Ah, that makes sense."

"Yup. Although I haven't always taken their advice. My earthbending teacher picked out my firebending teacher, for instance, well before the nuns thought I was ready to move on."

"Well, of course. A group of adults chosen by a process other than 'these are the people I trust' are never going to have invariably good advice."

"I do find them handy. Although possibly more handy is the fact that my dad is the chief of police in my city."

"That does sound useful."

"Mostly comes in handy when I need reporters to leave me alone."

"...Definitely useful."

"This doesn't happen that often. I give plenty of interviews under more controlled conditions. It's just the one organization that had a photographer in a tree outside my room that I had to blacklist. Do you have this problem too?"

"Not usually, but sometimes. And our reporters are really obnoxious."

"One time one of them found my boyfriend before we were even dating, but he got the guy to go away by unhelpfully uttering random facts about panda carp."

"If someone had tried that with a reporter in my universe, they probably would have published an article about how he was hiding something or babbling incoherently and possibly mentally disturbed."

"Well, my boyfriend wasn't interesting to the reading public in his own right and we weren't even together at the time, so it worked. I wouldn't try it."

"Probably for the best."

"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."

"That works too. Who is it, or is it not usually the same person?"

"I brought my boyfriend by accident the first time; he was around to watch my body while my spirit went gallivanting off and I mistakenly pulled him in. I went on a sort of educational trip and brought a nun last year. Who I'd bring on a future visit would depend on what I was doing."

"Accidentally pulled him in? He turned out alright, I hope."

"Oh, yes, he was fine, he carried me around and then he realigned with his body and we were out. It was sort of nerve-wracking at the time but turned out all right."

"I'm glad."

"Me too. I'm not sure what would have happened if it had turned out he was stuck there."

"Legal awkwardness and a shift in focus of Avatar-related effort to getting him unstuck, would be my best guess."

"I mean, I guess I would have had to learn to make a portal or something. Those are a thing."

shrug. "I wouldn't know." Nom nom last bites of pretzel.

"What is that thing you've been eating? Is it just weirdly shaped bread?"

"Weirdly shaped and cooked differently. It's called a pretzel."

"Huh. Otherworldly food."

"Apparently. Why, what kinds of food does your world have?"

"I mean, we have bread, just not shaped like that. Apples? Sea prunes? Bean curd? Noodles? I'm a vegetarian most of the time, um - chickenlizard?"

"We have apples and noodles and chicken. I've never heard of sea prunes, and we usually don't eat lizard at all, let alone in combination with chicken."

"...What, you only eat the parts with feathers...? You only like possumchicken?..."

"...Possumchicken?"

"Arctic hen? Pig chicken?"

"We have chickens and lizards and pigs and possums but I've never heard of them being combined..."

"I'm not familiar with the phrase but from context I'm guessing yes."

"Weird."

"Weirdness is subjective! I think it's weird that you have something that's a cross between a chicken and a pig."

"They're tasty. And they're a leaner meat than moosow."

"I've never eaten pig because of religious restrictions but I'll take your word for it. And that would seem to follow, considering how huge just plain moose are."

"Moosows are pig-cows. I'm not actually aware of any moosepigs. Mooselions yes, dragon moose, moosewhales..."

"Ah. No offense, but those sound terrifying."

"Dragon moose are domesticated. They've fallen out of use, but they used to pull heavy loads."

"I'm trying to imagine what a moosewhale would look like and I'm probably doing it wrong because it's coming out implausibly comic and also very Canadian."

"I had the antlers at a different angle and was using a different kind of whale, is I think most of the problem. The Canadianness persists, I'm just going to assume my brain inextricably links moose with Canada. Canada is a country near mine that has a lot of moose in it," she clarifies.

"I see."

"So most of the animals where you're from are weird mix-ups? Weird from my perspective, I mean, sorry."

"Yeah. We have some isolate animals - an Earth King once famously kept a pet bear - but they're uncommon and tend not to do as well even if they establish populations."

"Huh. I wonder why that is."

"I don't know. Do you not have very many kinds of animals? Since there's no combinatorial explosion?"

"We have a lot of animals. We have I think several million kinds of beetle, thousands upon thousands of kinds of birds, mammals, reptiles, uncountable sea creatures...I'm not a taxonomist or I'd have better figures but it's a lot."

"...Okay. Maybe you have more kinds of animals than we do. Since instead of crossing and generalizing they're specializing ever-finer until you have millions of kinds of beetle."

"Probably, yeah. I'm not the best person to ask, evolution isn't my field of study."

"Fair enough. ...That is so many beetles. Counting everything that has as a component any kind of beetle we probably have a few thousand, it's a good design, but that's just ridiculous."

"I think beetles are one of the more numerous kinds of animal on the planet, yeah."

"Rocs are an unusually streamlined animal. I think they're eagle/ospreys but they're one of the animals that gets their own name."

"Well, they're a specific thing in my world's mythology. I think the fictional version eats elephants or something."

"I mean, rocs are big enough that they could probably eat most of an elephant-rat, maybe even an elephant-rhino if they took their time, but they prefer fish."

"...Rats are tiny. Rhinos are not tiny but significantly smaller than an elephant. I suspect that elephant-rats and elephant-rhinos are smaller than just plain elephants."

"I don't actually know how big any of these things are as isolates. An elephant-rat is yea big -" She gestures a size that's a bit bigger than a regular rat. "I say 'most of' because it wouldn't have fish bones and the roc wouldn't be able to swallow it whole, it wouldn't be much of a meal really... An elephant-rhino is huge, though."

"Hey, Bar, can we have pictures of an elephant and an elephant-rhino on approximately the same scale?"

They can get a spread of all the elephant crosses, including the elephant koi, which is the biggest. The elephant-rhino is second-biggest, about the size of an Earth elephant.

"Okay, that's about the size of an Asian elephant. African elephants are bigger, but I don't remember which one rocs were supposed to eat, so."

"I couldn't tell you."

"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."

"And they give a really smooth ride, moreso than my roc can, but that takes some of the fun out of it for me."

"Flying with magnetism is pretty smooth by default, but you can do a lot of midair jinks and stuff."

"I'm curious what it looks like but you said you can't do it here."

"And I'm not wearing enough metal right now to do it the other way."

"How much do you need?"

"Enough to support my body comfortably so I'm not just hanging from my wrists and ankles or floating on a thin enough layer that I'm worried it'll tear and dump me on the ground. It's not a hard line, the more there is the easier it is, and honestly I'm too tired to want to do it right now anyway."

"That's fair. If you want to go home and take a nap I won't stop you."

"Unfortunately, my shift doesn't end for another couple of hours. I'm using Milliways time-folding to take a break and get off my feet for a bit."

"Makes sense."

"And acquire a better stimulant than coffee, which I will consume when I'm ready to leave so I don't waste any of it," she says, gesturing to the pill and the glass of water.

"I'd been wondering what that was but it did look like it might be a pill so I wasn't going to ask in case it was personal."

"It is a pill, but it's just a stimulant, nothing personal."

"Lovely idea, but a bit difficult to manage."

"But sleep is such a waste of time!"

"Your body does important things while you're sleeping! And dreaming is fun."

"My dreams aren't that great, and I could squeeze all the dreams I want into an hour every day or two."

"Well, if you manage to figure out how to reduce your need for sleep to an hour every two days, kudos."

"I can cut down the need for sleep with meditation, but then I have to meditate. Which I'm really supposed to do but it's so boring, that is literally the point is to be boring."

"Why are you supposed to be doing something the point of which is boringness?"

"Because it's a vaguely spiritual activity and it is supposed to help me do other vaguely spiritual things. But hey, I managed the controlled Avatar State without going into the uncontrolled version first, I think I'm doing all right."

"And boringness is spiritual. Got it."

"Boringness is the most spiritual."

"I'm glad my powers don't have anything to do with spirituality, then, I have a religion but it doesn't require gratuitous boringness from me."

"Yeah? What kind of spirits have you got that are not boring? Nor, I hope, supervolcanoes."

"Not spirits, exactly. I'm a monotheist."

"Sort of. 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me,' is the First Commandment."

"...This is not the kind of religion with which I am familiar."

shrug. "Different universes."

"Yeah, I'm getting that. So instead of spirits you have one god. Is it nice? Spirits are mostly kind of orthogonal to human morality but some of them are pretty nice."

"It's pretty nice! They seem to have roughly human-compatible morality, the rest of the Commandments are things like don't steal, don't kill, respect your parents, stuff like that."

"Okay. But if there's only one why does it even need to... you know, bother... telling people not to 'have' any others?"

"There was this incident where a bunch of people got pissed off that they weren't being rescued from slavery conveniently enough and decided to pretend a statue of a golden calf was God instead, it was weird."

"...If rescuing people from slavery is even in this god's repertoire why wasn't it doing so conveniently? And how could a golden calf possibly help?"

"He rescued them from slavery by doing impressive things at the people who were enslaving them, and then led them across a desert to somewhere they didn't have a history of being enslaved. The people were upset about having to cross a desert. I don't know how a golden calf was supposed to help, aside from being a demonstration that they were upset."

"Okay, but why did the golden calf annoy the god, is it allergic to people doing unhelpful things in protest...?"

"I think it was an ego thing?"

"You have a god with an ego thing. That sounds, uh, dangerous."

"I...think he got over it? It hasn't caused a problem in several millenia, anyway."

"Okay. Is he a god of anything or does he have to be kind of all purpose?"

"He's pretty all purpose. Some people will refer to him as a god of Mercy or Love when extolling his benevolence."

"Benevolent all-purpose god who has gotten over his ego thing, I can see why that would appeal."

"There's actually three different major religions that prefer to worship him in different ways, I'm a member of the oldest."

"That I'm more familiar with, there's all different systems of being into this or that spirit."

"That makes sense. Different people have different opinions and spiritual needs and whatnot."

"Yeah. I'm not very spiritual, especially for an Avatar - I'd think it would be more common for a person who is technically also a spirit to consider the spirits more peers than objects of particular admiration, and yet. I mean, I have to be careful, they don't necessarily have ego problems but they have interests and ways of handling those interests that aren't always friendly or reasonable, so treating them with respect and care is important, but I don't go around in a Painted Lady hat or anything."

"That sounds...a lot like people, in some ways."

"Oh?"

"Having interests that aren't always reasonable, but you have to take the time to address them individually and respectfully. Of course, with people the consequences of mishandling things is just that you come across as an asshole. Different stakes."

"Yeah. Whereas with the supervolcano I couldn't exactly say 'have you considered that destroying a continent because some people have been littering in a peripheral bit of you is extremely disproportionate'."

"And, of course, half the reason I didn't even consider becoming a teacher like my sister was out of a desire to avoid even the human version."

"Hm?"

"Oh, my parents run a boarding school. My sister's known pretty much all her life she wanted to teach there someday, but I've never been interested. If I had been at all interested I might have gone with it, it's intellectual, and like I said I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life."

"My mom's a teacher. She does very introductory airbending lessons for little tiny airbenders."

"That's sweet."

"And she's good at it, I had fun when I was a tiny airbender myself."

"My sister's really good at what she does too. She has a bit of a temper, but it really only applies to adults--I have seen her draw upon endless wells of patience when it comes to children."

"I probably wouldn't be very good at teaching as a career, but I've helped a little as part of going through the curriculum - teaching cements things for the teacher, so they have older kids work with the younger ones. And that wasn't bad."

"Yeah, I helped with some tutoring when I was in school, but I wouldn't want to make a career of it."

"I'm not really a patient person, but I do like studying bending and my mom explained why I was doing the tutoring thing so I didn't mind."

"I can be patient when I have to, I just prefer not to have to."

Nod nod.

"Of course, a lot of medicine requires patience, but surgery is a sort of...charged patience? It takes a long time, sometimes, but you're doing things."

"Yeah, I wouldn't consider that the same thing at all. You're always making progress."

"With teaching you're making progress too, it's just slower. And mostly the other person doing things."

"Mm - I mean that's technically true but there are a lot of plateaus in which nothing is happening except the passage of time."

"True."

"And I should probably head back to work soon, before I forget what I was doing before I came in." Emily takes her pill and gulps down the water. "Thanks, Bar, what do I owe you?"

$3. A pleasure as always.

She takes out a few bills. "Likewise. I'll see you later, I'm sure." And she leaves.