[ Action, Voice ] .028

[markofthebrave]

[So today? Katara cuts short her usual routine with a cheerful wave and ducks out on her housemates. Aang showing up pushed so many things out of her mind, and now they were all crowding back in, along with the strangeness of Zuko's return.

She misses the Straw Hats. Going camping right now sounds wonderful. And she really wants Aang to meet them! She thought about trying to contact them over the journals, but... didn't really want to interrupt. Besides, it was better... to get used to people being gone.

She can handle this by herself. Katara is not given to introspection, but at her favorite spot by the South bridge, Katara has gathered a fair amount of smooth stones, and is alternating between stone-skipping and staring at her conversation with Nephry. She only knows one way to deal with this, and that's facing it straight on and adapting.

Water is the element of change. Water adapts.

And so, to find some way to remind herself of this and gather up the courage and mental clarity to sort things out, Katara will eventually step off the bridge and walk a ways beside the river. Once there, she closes her eyes and very slowly begins to practice basic forms, the water streaming about her in constant change and accompaniment to her thoughts, until she can almost see it in her mind's eye, overwhelming the flames.

Much, much later, she takes a seat, and makes a filter. She only hopes that she truly means what she says.]


Nephry, it's Katara. If you'd like to meet sometime today, or later this week... I'm ready now.

Comments

[bamfing]

[Stopping it or not, Kurt panics and immediately vanishes in a puff of smoke, reappearing behind her, holding up his hands to show he means no ill will.]

Whoa, easy! It's just me!

1/2

[markofthebrave]

[It's a good thing he did teleport because, dropping the water or not he still would have gotten wet if he'd been sitting there.

As it is, his sudden reappearance behind her startles her so much that she whirls and pulls more water from the river before she knows what she's doing.]

la la la 2/3

[markofthebrave]

[Only to hold it just there as she says in exasperation:] Kurt!

[markofthebrave]

[...waaaait. Oh, great, really? Another one? Really?]

How did you... are you a teleporter?

[She'll just send the water back into the river now.]

[bamfing]

Uh, yeah. Sorry about that. It's annoying, I know. [So everyone keeps telling him anyway.]

[markofthebrave]

[Katara waves that off.] It's not annoying - it's startling. If you weren't fast enough, I could have hurt you.

[And then a reluctant sort of half-smile] And I haven't exactly had the nicest experience with teleporters.

[bamfing]

Really? How many of them are here? And what happened? [He knows his teleporting is a pain for his enemies, but... well, he's one of the good guys.]

[markofthebrave]

Uh - I don't know how many of them are here, but one of them just walked out of my bedroom the other day. Claimed he was an angel. Whatever that means. And then there's Yuber - and you heard about Yuber, right?

[And he burned my house down with me inside it! /not happy, and not thinking about this.]

[bamfing]

I've only heard of him, I don't know anything about him... [The angel thing makes him curious though. Was he like a real angel or like just Angel?]

[markofthebrave]

Long blond hair, he wears it in a braid. It's not usually hard to figure out who he is because he's always talking about blood or chaos or setting things on fire.

[...why is it always fire?]

[bamfing]

Sounds like one bad dude, definitely. [But... he didn't come here to talk about that. So he switches gears.]

You never mentioned you were a mutant!

[markofthebrave]

[Bwah.

...and they have only talked once, Kurt, c'mon.]

A what now?

[bamfing]

[He looks a little startled too. Maybe it was something else? Magic?]

What you were doing with the water... I thought maybe you were a mutant, like me.

[markofthebrave]

Well... [Something about the way he said 'like me' makes her a little bit more considerate in her response besides asking 'what's a mutant?']

We're from different worlds, so it only makes sense that people who have different abilities would be called different things. I've never heard of that word before, though. What's a mutant?

[bamfing]

[Ahh, that question. He looks down at the ground, shuffling his feet a bit.]

In my world, there is something called an X-Gene... those of us who are mutants are born with it. When we're old enough, usually becoming a teenager, our powers manifest. It's completely random and there's no telling who will be able to do what. For most people, it's a very scary time. Nobody wants to be a mutant, after all.

[markofthebrave]

An X-Gene? [...Katara would vaguely remember a conversation about genetics with Leto, but this doesn't ping that memory at all. She's trying to figure out why Kurt seems so upset about this.]

Is that like... a birth mark that gives powers or something?

[bamfing]

[He's a bit surprised at her coming up with that. Did she just have no understanding of genetics? Hmmm...]

No, nothing like that. The X-Gene... it's a mutation of the genetic code, right? You could say it's an accident. I really don't understand it all myself. But really, we shouldn't exist, though.

[markofthebrave]

That's ridiculous. If you shouldn't exist, you wouldn't exist. [This still doesn't ping her extremely rudimentary knowledge of genetics, but what it does remind her of is her conversation, all those months ago, with Sigmund, and how he wanted to know how people without powers were treated.

From what Kurt was saying...]

So people having powers in your world is pretty rare?

[bamfing]

[Well, she doesn't get what he meant by accident. He should probably explain it better.]

Yeah, like I said. It's an accident. When a person is first conceived, everything about how they will grow is in their genetic code. Whether you would have brown hair, blue eyes, dark skin, or even be a girl, right? That's how it's supposed to be. But for mutants... when all that happens, something else happens. So we end up... different. But it only happens to very, very few people.

[markofthebrave]

[Blah blah blah, science, blah blah blah. She latches on to what the important part is there.]

...So just because it doesn't happen to a lot of people, you think it's not supposed to happen at all?

[bamfing]

It's not what I believe, no.

[markofthebrave]

But it's what everyone else believes?

[bamfing]

A lot of people, yeah.

[markofthebrave]

That must be hard... but when you look around Luceti, and you see so many different people from different worlds with different kinds of abilities... it's like maybe that X-Gene is your world's way to catching up to all the other kinds of worlds.

[bamfing]

Well... it could be. [He's not sure how he feels about that.] Does everyone have powers in your world?