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[OPEN] For business.

#1 - At your service!

Ah, telephones. A luxury item. They're mostly reserved for people with enough money to live in Borough #1 or people of high status, but today could be a very lucky day! Maybe! Satoru is going door to door with a mission and that mission is to sell telephones. Or sell something. Sure, his main goal is to convince consumers that they need a telephone and simply can't live without it, but telephones are still a little pricey. So! Every telephone salesman needs a backup plan. He has a variety of backups carefully packed away in a sack. Plus, he's got an arsenal of skills. Leaky roof? He can fix that! Empty fridge? He can go shopping for you! Whatever it takes to make people think (even more!) positively of Varrick's business.

So, ahem. Knock knock!

#2 - Breaktime! Part I

It's less of a break and more of a "finished with work" kind of thing, but Satoru has taken refuge in Avatar Korra Park, something he finds a little funny because he'd only recently learned the name of the current Avatar. Oops. At the moment, it's around sunset and he's demonstrating quite the skill! The "cannot play sports" skill, if you will. He's doing it mostly to pass time (and to probably forget about how terrible of a salesman he is), so he doesn't seem too bothered when he misses his ball with the stick he's using, or when the ball doesn't go very far. At least he has a good attitude about it.

3 - Breaktime! Part II

Okay, so sports aren't his thing but that's fine. Sports aren't his passion! Engineering is. So he's ditched the ball and his stick he stole from nearby a poor, defenseless tree and pulls out a sheet of parchment. Instead of drawing a blueprint of anything—he's 100% sure he'll never build anything as cool as one of those airships any time soon—he folds it up into a paper airship instead. By the time he's got something airworthy, the sun's just about finished setting. To be honest, Satoru thinks his build is pretty good for it being made out of a sheet of parchment. When he throws it in the air, it even flies a little. Hooray!

Things are pretty terrific! Until he excitedly catches the paper airship and it catches ablaze out of nowhere. What. No. WHY?!

"C-Combustible paper?! Do they make that here?!"

Satoru instinctively drops the burning paper and it drops into the grass. At least he has the brains to snuff out the fire with the heel of his boot before it can spread. Hopefully... no one saw that....

"Who invents that kind of thing, anyway?"

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NO ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO SEE THAT! He has a habit of making a fool of himself, especially as of late, but this was just getting ridiculous. Satoru knelt on the ground, poking at the blackened parchment with a contemplative frown on his face.

"Of course not," he said slowly, his cheeks a little red from embarrassment. "I'm not a firebender at all."

Nezha laced his fingers behind his head as he peered down at the boy lamenting his lost paper ship.

"You sure?" He sure looked a lot like a small child first discovering their bending, but it would certainly be odd for someone to get to his age before their bending emerged. "That looked like firebending to me. Sort of."

Satoru gathered the remains of the paper airship into his hands. Completely irreparable. Oh well. At least he hadn't spent his afternoon drawing up blueprints. That would have been devastating.

"I couldn't firebend to save my life," he said wistfully as he stood back up and held the ruined paper up so he could view it from all angles. "But I do agree that it's weird. Paper doesn't just... combust like that. Still, I can assure you that the paper would have more luck firebending than me."

From the look on Satoru's face, it seemed he was well aware of how ridiculous that explanation sounded. Either way, it sounded more plausible than him being a firebender. "Believe me," he added. "I've tried.

Nezha canted his head. For a moment, he considered pressing the matter, but eventually decided that he didn't really care enough, and besides, arguing would take effort.

"What was that supposed to be, anyway? Before it exploded."

That was probably a question the guy would regret asking. Once Satoru got going, he had a hard time shutting up.

"Oh! It was a paper airship. I've heard all about them but never got to see one close up, so I decided I'd try my hand at making one. Well, out of paper instead of steel. It's... a lot cheaper. I just wish it hadn't suddenly gone up in flames. It was still pretty neat, even if it was just made out of paper."

It was at that point where he finally seemed to realize he was rambling. "Sorry for the long explanation. Um... have you seen one up close before? An airship?"

On the contrary, the brunet listened with a good deal of interest... for the first few seconds, but it quickly tapered off and he found his attention being drawn elsewhere. At least until Satoru brought it back with his question.

"Hm? I've ridden in one." A bunch of times, in fact. His father being a politician meant they did a lot of traveling. Well, not anymore, it seemed. "They're okay, I guess."

"Flying fire ferrets! You've ridden in one...?!" Satoru lit up like a fountain surrounded by gleaming lanterns at night. "What was it like? How high did it go? Was it built for comfort or speed?"

The assault had begun.

Dear lord, someone save him.

His brows knitted at the flurry of questions, and the boy crossed his arms over his chest. "It was okay?" It's only really interesting the first few times, and that had been when he was very young, so...

"I didn't really pay attention." Can he punch it? No? Then he doesn't care enough.

Deep down, he knew that someone crossing their arms over their chest was a sign of probable annoyance, but in all honesty he couldn't help himself. How could the person standing in front of him not pay attention to flying on an airship?! Back home, they were mostly a thing for the military, but it sounded like they've been made open to the general public as well.

It took some effort, but he managed to reel himself in. "Sorry, about that. Really, I... know it's rude to just launch a thousand questions at someone, especially someone you just met." He could work with 'okay.' All it meant was that it wasn't bad!

Satoru took a deep breath to calm himself and exhaled slowly. Good. Calm. Well, he was still buzzing with energy, but at least he wasn't attacking the guy with more questions.

"If you weren't paying attention, then the technology must be really smooth. I've always thought it would be hard not to worry about crashing from so high up." He clapped his hands together and a sparks literally flew. Well, uh...

How could he not pay attention? Because the first time he flew he was too young to remember, and his family flew often enough after that that the novelty wore off long ago. Nezha's family could hardly be called 'the general public,' but it was true that their use had become much more commonplace in recent decades.

"Maybe it was that way when I was young, but I don't remember." Not that it bothered him. If anything, he was largely indifferent to it.

That was when Satoru clapped. Instantly, Nezha's face lit up, and he jabbed a self-satisfied finger at the other teen's hands with a loud "Hah!"

"I knew it! Why would you pretend you aren't a bender?"

Edited 2014-11-11 04:11 (UTC)

"I'm not! I swear!"

Satoru held up his empty, gloved palms facing Nezha as if that would actually prove anything. In the back of his mind, he was wishing that Toph were here so she could prove he was telling the truth with her earthbending.

"I-I mean, I can't be. It doesn't make sense."

When a people discover bending, it's when they're a child! Once they hit puberty, it basically becomes an impossibility. That's how it had always been and that's how it had been with Satoru. He couldn't explain the paper airship catching fire or the sparks that he had apparently just created, but he was not a bender.

"I'm an engineer. I can't be a firebender. N-Not that firebenders can't be engineers, but... look, I don't have any reason for lying. I mean, I'm pretty bad at lying to begin with."

"Maybe you got some of that combustible paper on your hands?" Though the tone in which he said it made it obvious he didn't believe a word of it. I mean, who makes combustible paper? It's the first this firebender's ever heard of it.

"...Yeah, maybe."

Satoru slowly lowered his hands and let them fall to his side. He didn't really believe the whole combustible paper thing at this point either, but... he's not really sure if he ever did. Still, it made more sense than this. Even if this city was, to him at least, the future, it still had rules. Something that had been true for what must have been thousands of years wouldn't just change overnight.

"People don't just start firebending out of nowhere," he said, trying not to groan. "If people could just become a bender whenever they wanted, the world would be completely different." He looked down at his hands with a firm frown on his face. Even if he were a firebender, he didn't know how to work it. Firebending was so... strong and potentially violent; he didn't know how to fight. How would someone even make the fire come out?!

Pffffft 'potentially violent' nothing. It was definitely violent. That wasn't to say the other elements lacked the capacity for violence, but fire was, at its core, pure destructive energy. At least, that's how Nezha saw it, but I digress.

The boy shrugged, unwilling to press the matter because it frankly made no difference either way whether Mr. Engineer was a latent bender or not. Still...

"A bunch of people became airbenders a while back who couldn't bend before, so who knows?"

"You mean it's true?"

He'd heard about more airbenders, but the stories just seemed so outlandish. Now, if Aang had had children, that would be perfectly understandable... although whether or not that happened isn't something Satoru's aware of. But the way people talk about Air Temple Island made it seem like it really was just teeming with airbenders.

"W-Well, even so, at least that makes sense in a roundabout way, don't you think? Airbenders were nearly wiped out! Although it is rather strange people would learn to bend so late in life... but in contrast to that, firebending's not rare. It certainly can't be dying out. And besides, giving that kind of destructive people who aren't even sure how to harness that power or control it seems... well, it just seems dangerous."

The last thing he wanted was to accidentally start a real fire he wouldn't be able to snuff out.

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