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]

"That does sound useful."

[roc_on]

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

[iamnotpolaris]

"...Definitely useful."

[roc_on]

"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?"

[iamnotpolaris]

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

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Probably for the best."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"...Genocide. ick. Go Aang. Why hadn't the previous Avatar done anything to prevent that?""

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh. I'm going to assume that surviving frozen for a century can also be put down to Avatar stuff."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yeah, automatic defense mechanisms usually aren't very smart. Automatic anything usually isn't very smart.
So would weather control be...water bending or air bending or both? I know a hydrokinetic mutant, but she's never done anything with weather. Of course, that could be because there was also another one whose power straight-up was weather control, so it would just be easier to ask a favor than to try to figure it out."

[roc_on]

"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."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Absolutely. My magnetism wouldn't be half as useful if we didn't have so many metal gadgets, either."

[roc_on]

"I'd imagine. It'd just be a parlor trick. With a reasonable background technology level you probably never lack for material."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"You just magnet your scalpels and such around?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."

[roc_on]

"...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..."

[iamnotpolaris]

"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."