"...I don't think I'd want to do it as a business. It's- not very interesting, now that I've worked out how to do it."

"Fair enough! Reinventing things isn't usually what I'd do with myself either, it's just pretty important right now."

"Are you going to go back to doing that?"

"Probably. I haven't wanted to invent things that'd be too useful to the war, I don't want to escalate it, but some stuff I need to get through to be where I have to be is unavoidably useful. Not sure how the calculus on that changes now I'm in another country, do you suppose the Earth Kingdom likes kidnapping inventors too?"

"Probably. But they might be less... unified of purpose about it."

"Can you elaborate?"

"The Fire Nation all works together, following the Fire Lord. But no one outside Ba Sing Se has seen the Earth King since the last one died; he stays holed up inside the walls. The lords and the generals run things locally and the ones not right on the front lines spend more effort politicking against each other than helping the war."

"Okay, so if one picks me up I can probably at least negotiate for one who can give me five years and a big budget and some research assistants and then when five years are up it won't matter any more."

"Probably."

"I might want a bigger city than this for materials access, although I guess I don't know how good earthbending is for ores and such."

"Earthbenders can't bend metal."

"Yes, but maybe you could find it by its - density or something, and get it out, by moving the rock around it."

"I think I could do that. Maybe not many others could, I don't think a lot of people practice in the right way. But the soil around here isn't good for mining, it's the wrong sort. Or you'd have to go very deep to find anything."

"A lot of what I might have the most trouble finding is the sort of thing that you don't have much use for yet and accordingly don't mine, which might be found in different conditions, but yeah, maybe there's nothing here."

"I don't think I can usefully look for something without knowing what it is already."

"Well, I can tell you the exact densities and so on, but yeah never having seen it can't possibly help."

"What sorts of ores would you be looking for?"

"Some of them didn't appear in the dictionary I've read. Uh, do you want an impromptu chemistry lesson?"

"Okay." She drags the chair from the desk over to join the one already at the table, and grabs paper and writing utensils.

Tarinda draws up the periodic table of the elements, with numbers in lieu of symbols made of letters Eliko doesn't know. "These are the chemical elements in order of mass per atom. An atom is a very tiny amount of - one of these things; if you have a tiny amount of something else, it isn't an atom, it's several atoms or something smaller than an atom which isn't a substance like we conventionally understand it. Some of them are found in more or less pure form, like, say, gold -" she points to gold. "Others you mostly find in compounds, mixed with other kinds of atoms. Water is made of two of these and one of this." Point point.

"One and eight. Is air on this?"

"Air's a lot of different stuff. I don't have a complete chemical analyzer on me but Page would have noticed if it were weird enough to affect my physiology so it's probably like air from home, which is mostly this which doesn't do much, and some of that which is the thing you need to breathe, and a little bit of this which doesn't do much, and some of a compound of both that and this which is what you breathe out and plants need, and bits of this and that and this and this and a compound of that one and this one."

"And earth is probably also a compound, right? But more than one, because there are different sorts of earth."

"Yup! Mostly compounds. Dirt has a lot of organic stuff in it, which is full of this one in various forms and mixes, and there's tons of kinds of rock but the most common one on the planet where my ancestors are from is one of this and two of that."

"But fire isn't made of any of these. It's a different kind of thing."