"Now: While you two lovebirds were off getting all 'spirity,' I have been changing the world as we know it! It all started when Zhu Li and I were in the middle of—"
"Varrick, I'm sure this is thrilling news," Asami Sato sighed, accustomed to his love of rambling, "but could you at least try to be concise?"
Asami and Korra were sitting on a bench surrounded by the whirlwind of blueprints and posters that occupied Varrick's Latest Idea Room. From floor to ceiling were diagnostic drawings for devices that stood little chance of having any practical use, interspersed with the occasional poster for The Adventures of Nuktuk: Hero of the South.
"And was it necessary to bring along Korra? I suspect it's a waste of time for the Avatar to be—"
"To be what?" Varrick roared, planting both hands on his hips and eyeing his audience up and down. Even his fur collar seemed to be bristling with furor. "To be graciously graced by the greatest ideas this world has ever been graced by? Gracefully?" He slid forward on one knee, raising a finger to the lofty ceiling. Asami leaned back just a fraction, holding up both palms, but Korra continued to slouch with her hands hanging between her knees.
"I dunno," Korra said, "I think we can hear him out."
"See? Now here's a gal who has her priorities straight!" Varrick wedged himself in between the couple and placed his arms around their shoulders, just before bouncing up again. "Zhu Li," he called to the nearest room, "do you have the prototype? Of The Thing? Zhu Li! …Zhu Li?"
Zhu Li stumbled out of the nearest doorway, glasses askew and hair out of place. She gazed at them with a dazed smile. It was the kind of expression that no one had ever witnessed on her face. Ever.
All three of them gawked.
"Did you get the…The Thing?" Varrick stammered.
Zhu Li seemed to only just realize where she was, straightening up and fixing her appearance in an instant. Noticing Korra and Asami behind Varrick, she said, "The prototype is unfit for demonstration at this moment. I've been running some more…diagnostic tests."
"In the middle of the day?" Varrick whispered, or rather, used a verb of his own invention: The Hissper.™ It wasn't exactly possible for Varrick to whisper, but he made a valiant attempt at airy speaking. Thus, The Hissper™ was born. "It's like a mix between a hiss and a whisper," he often Hisspered™ to people behind a hand, as though it weren't obvious.
He turned back to his former audience. "Not an issue!" He recomposed himself and leaped to a nearby easel covered with a blue sheet. "Ladies and…ladies! I present to you my latest in powerful and furious inventions! I give you," he tore off the sheet, "The Varri-Brator! It will forever change how people do The Thing! Fingers are obsolete!"
Asami and Korra tilted their heads at the poster bedecked with images of multi-colored, multi-speed, and multi-sized "personal massagers" before exchanging complicated glances. The silence was only broken by the sound of Zhu Li edging out of the room. It was unclear whether this is due to the sheer awkwardness of the situation or because she needed to run more tests on The Thing.
Korra straightened up and jerked a thumb at the wall behind her. "I thought that the tagline about fingers was for the Mind-Reading Typewriter."
Varrick cart-wheeled past them and shielded the blueprints for the aforementioned typewriter with his outstretched arms. "That still has a few kinks to work out! I won't be on the market for years! And by then, I'll think of a good catchphrase for it. Something snappy. Hmm…"
"Looks like Varrick and Zhu Li have a few kinks too," Korra muttered.
Asami hid her laughter with a hand.
Varrick pulled out a sheet of paper seemingly out of nowhere and squinted at it. The main issue with the Mind Reading Typewriter was that it picked up too many stray trains of thought to produce anything intelligible. Or perhaps it couldn't produce anything from Varrick's mind, which rambled from idea to idea far too haphazardly for any rational machine to follow.
The contents of the sheet of paper could be summed up like this:
INITIATING MIND READING TYPEWRITER TEST RUN #1, Or maybe something that sounds catchier, like 1.0? A? But "A" isn't even a real letter in this universe! Don't think that this fanfic author would forget for a moment that all of the writing around here is based on Chinese Hanzi, but there's no way for me to be thinking this right now since that would be breaking the fourth wall far too obviously.
Taglines! Something catchy. Something that really sells the efficiency and takes people's attention away from the fact that there're electrodes sticking in their brain. Well, not really their brain. I'm not that mad. But I'll need a good scalp massage after this.
Typewriter! Make a note to tell Zhu Li to make a note that we're out of essential scalp massage oils because right now I'm hanging upside down and my hands are tied—literally! I mean, I guess it wasn't necessary, but I don't want to get any funny urges to type stuff when fingers are soon to become obsolete. Hey! That sounds like a great tagline! …Well, people use their fingers for a lot of things, don't they? I'll have to make a note of that. Typewriter! Do the thing! Oh wait. You are doing the thing. Stop doing the thing!
Varrick looked up from his notes. "People use their fingers for a lot of things, all right? Don't you tell me what you use your fingers for."
Asami stared at him for a long time and then finally said, "We weren't going to."