Ghazan's scene (while traveling across the Earth kingdom)
Zaheer: We leave at sundown. May our preparations lead to success.
You look away, while leaving the required smile plastered on your face. You never understood as to why he saw the need to be so grandiloquent all the time, but it must work? Or else how would he be the unchallenged leader of your group? Your eyes immediately gravitate towards Ming-Hua, resting but for a moment on her thin face, before they follow the curves of her body, from the nape of her neck, to the small of her back, to her shapely hips and then to …
Ming-Hua: Ghazan! Stop daydreaming and help us with the caravan. You'll get plenty of time to nap later, lazybones.
P'Li laughs. Ming-Hua, encouraged, makes another joke, which you neither heard, nor cared to listen to. It never ceases to irk you just how much her voice annoys you — almost as much as her body titillates you. But that's why, when you listen to Lakshmi's records, you imagine Ming-Hua swaying to the music and singing in that heavenly voice that only comes out of your gramophone.
Tenzin (after a meeting with the Republic city council concerning the non-bender curfew)
You have had a long day at the office today: Tarrlok has been pushing his agenda profiling non-benders, and you have tried in vain to sway the other councillors to be less aggressive in their countermeasures. Sometimes it feels as though your airbender nomad principles of nonviolence are lost to the world, and you are the doomsayer of ye olde days, yelling warnings of the impending apocalypse. Thoughts of your father come unbidden into your mind. You recall his retelling of the capture of Yakone the bloodbender, which you listened to with rapt attention while being chilled to your very core. You were thirteen, but already cognizant of your future responsibilities as the sole airbender among your siblings.
Even then, you were both expectant and apprehensive of stepping into your father's shoes as a councilman. At this very moment, however, you feel you have been a terrible disappointment to him — an incredibly skilled airbending master and fighter you may be, but an effective diplomat you are not.
"Master Tenzin!" - someone calls out in a quavering voice.
Jolted back to reality, you look around. You were still sitting in the meeting room, head tilted forward, all fingertips touching, with your index fingers on your chin.
You turn to speak to a bespectacled woman in her fifties, standing deferentially with a clipboard in her hands.
Tenzin: Yes, Kimari. What is it?
Kimari: Sir, we need the room vacated for the cleaning staff. May I show you to another room if you would like to work here?
"That will not be necessary," you say, picking up the docket containing the draft of the proposed counterterrorism guidelines for the RCPD. The one from the meeting in the wake of the Equalist attacks. You might as well go home now.
Notes: Lakshmi is a name I came up with for a singer popular in Republic City, who is popular over radio and has gramophone records.
RCPD - Republic City Police Department