A Supermagnet, A Doctor, and A Twin Walk Into A Bar

[iamnotpolaris]

Milliways. Oh, bless.
Dr. Xavier could have finished her shift, made it home, and buried her head in a pillow if she had to. But this is much easier.
"Hi, Bar, can I have a stimulant that won't interfere with my judgement or dexterity or anything like that?"

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

"Thanks." Pretzel. Munch munch.

[roc_on]

Slush. Sip sip. "So what do you do?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I'm a doctor. I was actually at the hospital where I work when Milliways picked me up."

[roc_on]

"Oh, cool. I specialized in healing when I learned waterbending, sometimes I volunteer at the hospital."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, I bet that's good for stopping people from bleeding to death."

[roc_on]

"...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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"Like I said, it probably happens, but officially nobody ever bloodbends."

[iamnotpolaris]

"That sounds like a story."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I. Am not sure how that's obvious. But if it's a thing that happens I can understand being paranoid about it."

[roc_on]

"It's the best known use, anyway."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"In my experience it can be more difficult to deal with things that are already moving, but that's a reflexes thing. Like, if a chunk of metal is headed straight for you, don't just bat it out of the way, it could hit someone else.
...Your thing sounds totally different. I'm going to chalk it up to differences between how our respective moving things abilities work."

[roc_on]

"Yeah, sounds like it."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

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