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

[roc_on]

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.

Comments

[roc_on]

She wafts down from her bird and sits next to him.

"What's on your mind?"

[thinklikethis]

"—Huh?"

He looks up at her, and manages a smile.

"Oh. Hi, Beila. Um. I was just. You know what, actually, let's talk about it in the deserted wilderness, I bet you found us some really nice deserted wilderness and I'd hate to miss it because we got distracted talking about my weird problems."

[roc_on]

"I found some pretty good deserted wilderness." She takes his head and pulls him birdward and wafts them up. "There's almost no light pollution, or at least there won't be until I set something on fire to fix dinner."

[thinklikethis]

Dao giggles and hugs her around the waist, as is right and proper for flying on a roc and also right and proper for when his girlfriend is being excellent.

"Dating the Avatar: so convenient," he asserts.

[roc_on]

"My finest quality." She whistles at Liqing and Liqing takes off.

[thinklikethis]

"No way. Your finest quality is definitely something else. Like maybe how cute you are, or how smart, or how good at catching snakenewts."

[roc_on]

"Maybe a bunch of things tie with my convenience."

[thinklikethis]

"Your convenience is pretty great..."

[roc_on]

"Though I do come with inconvenient media attention."

[thinklikethis]

"I've been keeping up to date on my weird animal trivia, just in case that one guy comes back. And it's all your fault." Extra hugsqueeze, to emphasize that he is kidding around in case tone of voice and context didn't carry it.

[roc_on]

Giggle. "What's your most recent weird animal trivia?"

[thinklikethis]

"Ooh. How about: Ever since that one Earth King with a pet bear in Avatar Aang's time, there have been periodic bear sightings all over the Earth Kingdom, but nobody's ever verified one as definitely not a platypus bear or gopher bear or whatever, and the origin of Bosco the Bear is a mystery to this day?"

[roc_on]

"I think the most plausible theory is that Bosco was some sort of awkward crossbreed."

[thinklikethis]

"I'm not sure about that, and neither are some of the experts! I mean you'd expect him to be weird somehow if he was an awkward crossbreed, like he'd have anatomical problems or something, or even just have some features that weren't strictly bearish from one of his parents, but they've got his skeleton in a museum and he's surprisingly well put together, it really looks like somebody did some kind of cosmic math and factored out the 'bear' part from platypus bears and skunk bears and gopher bears and armadillo bears and lynx bears and hyena bears and so on. I've seen the pictures."

[roc_on]

"If you think about it, it's a little weird that there's so much convergent evolution in the first place."

[thinklikethis]

"I guess. Weird animal trivia aside, I don't actually know that much about biology."

[roc_on]

"Are there any more weird things like 'bears' that you have encountered in your trivia hunting?"

[thinklikethis]

"Yeah, there's a bunch of - I forget the real biology word, I just think of them as factored-out. Cats, hawks, spiders - there's polar bears at the south pole, but they're different from bears like Bosco, I don't think there are any regular animals that have a plain-bear and a polar-bear kind, like there's polar bear dogs but no bear dogs and lynx bears but no polar lynx bears. But Bosco was a one-off as far as anybody can tell, and cats and hawks and spiders and polar bears are all real established species."

[roc_on]

"What kind of spiders? There's lots of kinds of spiders. I saw one yesterday with a dragonfly butt."

[thinklikethis]

"I dunno. It's hard to describe what kind of thing a factored-out creature is. Like, it's not a spider snake or a spider wasp or a - a dragonfly spider, I guess, or a goat spider or a monkey spider or a spider cat or a spider rat or a spiderfly. Actually there's a whole bunch of different kinds of factored-out spider, apparently, but I didn't read about them all because the pictures of Bosco's skeleton were way cooler."

[roc_on]

"Oh, spirits, spider wasps, I hate spider wasps. Dangerous at both ends."

[thinklikethis]

He giggles.

"Spider wasps are bad," he agrees. "Boo, spider wasps."

[roc_on]

"Boo! The dragonfly spider was easy to catch and take outside. Ranyi doesn't like to kill bugs if she isn't startled when she finds them."

[thinklikethis]

"Yeah, I try not to kill bugs much either."

[roc_on]

"I kill spider wasps. I won't kill a monkey spider. Depends on what the pest is."