roc_on | bones are important / advisable to keep them / also, stay alive

The news is grim today. A self-driving software glitch caused the first Republic City car accident in the last four years, uptown; someone has a concussion and someone else has whiplash from their own car swerving to avoid. The company is swearing to have the software patched as soon as possible. There was a food poisoning incident at the Flame Festival in one suburb, and a fireworks accident out in earth country, but these have resulted in no deaths. Death has resulted from what appears to be a murderer - it's hard to explain natural causes leaving a corpse with most of its bones missing.

The news doesn't speculate. Chali, however, does; Beila brings it up with him once he's home, and he says that out in a little town called Hirakyo there was a graverobbing incident - missing bones. They don't have hard evidence on it yet, but they think the same person may have escalated to taking his trophies from living victims, that this could be a serial.

Disquieting. To say the least. But Chali has no reason to believe that it's Avatar business - no spirits, no geopolitics, no heavy-duty bending. So Beila reads another chapter in the autobiography of Avatar Meixing and goes to her firebending lesson.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Sort of. I mean, the fact that I didn't master it at age twelve already puts me firmly below Aang on the list of prodigy Avatars so it's not like I have to push to make the record or something. I wish I'd tried bending other things as a kid but I was never a precocious enough airbender to strongly suspect it. I mean, I was fine, but in retrospect I must have been constantly distracted just keeping myself upright, and I don't think any of my predecessors already learned that for me."

"Yeah, that seems like a really specific problem that you have."

"It is a really specific problem that I have! But I should've tried to bend some water at least once. Practiced very quietly, got a jump on things."

"Really? Like... I dunno, I guess I think being the Avatar is already cool enough and you don't need to scrounge up extra cool points by figuring it out before they tell you and doing a bunch of stuff younger than Aang."

"It's not that I wanted to do stuff younger than Aang. That was really a joke. But... I don't like that I was actually ignorant of the fact until I was sixteen, and that I didn't allocate my time the way I would have if I'd known more."

"That makes sense. I kind of get why they don't tell people earlier, though. Maybe all the people who are the Avatar are also the kind of people who are really responsible and stuff as kids, but maybe not, and it'd be tough on whoever had to say 'yes, you're the Avatar, but no, the spirits didn't tell you that your dad should buy you more candy'. You know? And if I'd - like, assuming it were even possible, which it's not, but, if I'd found out I was the Avatar when I was a kid I would've gone crazy over it way before I turned sixteen. I mean I'd probably still go a little crazy over it now, but, 'hey, the person whose job it is to deal with all the most weird and terrible stuff in the world like angry spirits and huge wars and things, that's you' - I feel like that's the kind of thing that a lot of people would rather find out when they're sixteen than nine."

"Yes. But I would have liked to know when I was little, like Korra! And I didn't even try. So I'm kicking myself."

"Well, okay. I'm not gonna stop you."

"Although that's another thing, the huge-wars-and-stuff - there haven't been any huge wars since I was named, but if there were, it's actually really ambiguous what I'm authorized to do. Not only on the level of 'will somebody try to kill me if I go encase all their soldiers in ice to make them stop doing whatever they're doing', but on the level of 'is it, in fact, legal within the scope of international law for me to intervene there, or would somebody be technically obligated to arrest me for it, or what'. The test cases for the last few Avatars always wound up getting resolved in ways that didn't set firm precedents."

"...That's... well... I sort of get that but I sort of don't. Because nobody thinks their country is going to be the one that needs the Avatar to hit it with a rolled-up newspaper, and if they do, it might be because they're planning something terrible and don't want the Avatar to stop them. And it would be kind of bad if the Avatar, like, actually went and took over the world. But then when stuff happens like somebody else trying to take over the world and the Avatar stopping them, you'd think the people who were coming up with the international laws would be like 'yeah, that's a thing that happens, we should decide what that means for us'. Like you shouldn't be allowed to take over the world but you also shouldn't get arrested for stopping somebody else from doing it."

"In practice probably no one is going to arrest me if I'm out fighting the good fight. In terms of what legitimate authorities I am not actually assailing at that moment are likely to do, I can play vigilante hero to my heart's content as long as there are targets I can justify in the court of public opinion. But it's peculiar to have so little actual legislation down about it."

"Yeah."

The fire is burning pretty merrily. Beila starts putting together dinner above it.

Hooray! Food!

And it's pretty tasty when warmed up, too.

And when they have eaten it all, Beila idly bends the flames into a spiral up over the wood.

Dao smiles. But - kind of nervously.

"Are you all right?"

"...maybe? Um. We had - plans. And I think I am... not okay with myself enough right now. For the plans."

"Okay." Flop. "No rush. ...You'll let me know if there's things I can do about the you being okay with yourself?"

"Yeah. If there's things."

"I could put the fire out, we could adjust to the dark again, see if the stars have been arranging themselves into rude messages while they thought we weren't looking."

Dao giggles. "That sounds great."

Beila stretches out her hand, closes her fist.

The fire winks out, and she snuggles up.

Snuggle snuggle.

"I think they're onto you. They must have erased all their rude messages while you were putting out the fire."

"I'll catch them one of these days."

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