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]

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

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"Probably accurate, from context."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"Your father being Charles Xavier?"

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

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."

[iamnotpolaris]

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