They arrived early to New Republic City with the help of dozens of the best earth benders in the Zaofu and some other volunteers from other regions of the earth kingdom, four residential neighborhoods and the first of many planned town squares had been erected in just three hours.
"How are things going?" Lin asked Su who sat at a table with Baatar Sr. and Jr. pouring over some maps of the future city."
"Its great, hey, would you mind helping us? We need an even number of metal benders for an assembly line for Baatar and Asami's new joint creation."
"Assembly line?"
"Yeah, Baatar will explain."
"It was Asami's idea, maybe she should."
"It is called a cograil. It uses hooks and springs to bring the trains up and down the sloped rail at a constant speed, but even just making the rail ties requires extreme uniformity and precision. So I thought if each metal bender knew his or her part down to the smallest fraction of an inch, we could achieve that uniformity. Like One metal bender punches the form out of the sheet metal and the next bends it and the next connects it from pieces from another line, and the last pair of benders sticks it into the ground," Asami explained.
"That is actually a pretty good idea, so tell me where to go," Lin said raising an eyebrow in great interest.
Wing and Wei punched out the general form of the piece out of the metal sheet while Lin and Suyin bent them into shape, then Korra and Bolin fit the pieces together from the other two assembly lines and then two metal benders from Zaofu planted them into the ground.
In an hour, they had over a mile of the new cograil laid down. They were able to use it immediately to transport more building materials, metals, and glass up the mountain side for more neighborhoods while the rail team took a break.
"Lemonade, anybody?" Kya asked arriving with a tray of ice cups balanced on an ice tray hovering above her hand.
"Thanks," Everyone grumbled taking a seat on rock stools on either side of the rail watching a new cog train car click its way up the mountain side.
Kya bent a cup of lemonade into each person's hand.
"So what did you do to get the kids to do their chores this morning?" Korra asked curiously taking a sip of lemonade.
Just then, there was a grumble of a sky bison above and they all looked up to see Tenzin and the three oldest air bender kids approaching.
"I'm sure you'll find out soon enough, Avatar." Lin said kicking her heel into the ground, shaping her chair into a recliner seeing Tenzin not looking too happy.
"You blindfolded Ikki with metal?!" Tenzin yelled with rage.
Lin shrugged. "She cheated on a game. I had to."
"G-game? You were playing games? I thought I told you to pick potatoes!"
"Dad we did pick potatoes, but Lin made it fun! Weren't you listening at all?!" Ikki yelled back. "We were complaining it was boring and then Lin said that it didn't have to be but we didn't have seismic sense and at first had no idea what she meant but made us realize that we SHOULD be able to feel the slight push of the air as something falls or floats through it like Daw did when that one bison poacher attacked him with that deploy-able net and so she made us catch the potatoes out of the air and then sit them gently by her side and count and clean them, and Meelo smashed one potato against the kitchen and I think i smashed a couple more than that but it was still barely anything and Jinora-"
"I get it! Okay,"
"I thought it would be better use of everyone's time if I trained while supervising them doing such menial tasks," Lin summarized.
"That is actually pretty brilliant, I should do that with Wing and Wei," Suyin thought aloud.
"But mom," Wei began.
"-we're not airbenders." Wei and Wing said simultaneously.
"Still you should be able to feel all of the earth around you," Suyin said.
"I would just prefer you not use such medieval methods such as blindfolding them with metalbending,"
"Hey its not medieval if our own mother invented it a rather short time ago, relatively speaking," Suyin replied with a dismissive wave of the hand that was so characteristic of all of the Beifong women.
"Don't worry Dad, we had fun." Jinora said.
"Hmph!" Tenzin grunted before departing on Oogi, leaving his children with the Railway building team.
"What's his problem?" Lin asked the children.
"I don't think I wanted our help rebuilding the new city," Jinora said sadly.
"I heard him say something about us being a distraction to the volunteers," Ikki said frustratedly.
"I'm not a distraction! I am a capable young man now!" Meelo declared ferociously before farting rather loudly, launching himself a few feet in the air before drifting down again with a bashful grin, blushing redder than the inside of a watermelon.
Lin's expression didn't change.
"Is there anything we can do to help here, with the rail?" Jinora asked kneeling beside Lin's rock recliner.
"I don't think there's anything you can do with the rail, but there might be somewhere else where you could be extremely useful in the building effort."
"Where?" Ikki, Jinora, and Meelo exclaimed looking up at her eagerly.
Just then, lin stomped her foot on the ground beside the ground and they heard a young man yelling in the distance behind Lin. The others looked up to see Mako flying through the air from wherever he was working in the new city to where they all sat on their rest break by the cograilway. The airbenders and Korra all helped bend the air around him to slow his fall to the ground.
"Who did that?!" Mako yelled, enraged.
Everyone pointed at Lin who just sat with her arms folded and the ice cup of lemonade in her hand.
"Do you know how glass is made?" She asked Mako and the children.
They shook their heads.
"Extreme pressure and heat applied to sand. Mako, why don't you help the children make sheets of glass for the windows of the new buildings."
"But chief, I was in the middle of-"
"Are you defying orders?" Lin interrupted before taking another sip of Kya's Lemonade.
"No," Mako said sulking off with the children.
"Here's some sand!" She said with another stomp of her foot generating a mountain of sand a small distance away from them.
"Who knew the Chief was so good with children?" Asami asked with a smirk.
"Yeah, it looked like you even had Tenzin jealous for a minute there."
"Hey! Don't think this changes anything!" Lin growled in her former, stern tone, standing up. She finished the remainder of her lemonade in one large gulp and threw one hand back dropping everyone's earth chair back into the ground causing everyone to spill lemonade on themselves. "Break's over, back to work!" She ordered as everyone fumbled back to their feet.
"Was that really necessary, Lin?" Su asked holding her arms out as Kya bent the lemonade out of her long black and green robes.
"Yes!" She turned and whispered to her sisters, "And I can't have the Avatar and her friends thinking I've become soft. I have a reputation to uphold."
Su just smiled and took her metalbending stance again ready to bend more parts for the cog rail.
There is a scene in the episode Nightmares and Daydreames when everyone tries to get Aang to relax enough to sleep, and when Toph fails to relax him by massage, she decides the only option is acupuncture and bends a porcupine from the middle of the field to land perfectly in her hand. So here, Lin essentially bent Mako from the middle of nothing to land right in front of her.