There was a knock at my door. On the other side, it turned out, was Shang. Did he know about what our parents were conspiring? The only way to stop it, I decided, was to make sure they knew that Shang and I wouldn't be anything more than friends. Surely if they saw we weren't meant to be they wouldn't force us into a marriage, right?
"So have you settled in?" he asked. I nodded. We both stood in awkward silence for a moment before he offered to show me around the palace again. Was it a good idea? What if he was being genuinely nice and they found us alone and…
Maybe I was being overly paranoid.
"Alright," I accepted after my internal battle.
"So you're from the Southern Water Tribe, huh?" he asked, in an attempt at conversation. "I guess it's a lot different than here in the Fire Nation."
"Well, yeah; it's cold." I replied. Then, realizing how lame my response was, I added, "All of the buildings are made of ice. Actual walls are a change for me. Not to mention how many more people there are." I hadn't seen many people compared to the number of people I knew lived in the Fire Nation since I'd been here, but the people I had seen probably had totaled up to the entire population of the Southern Water Tribe.
"It doesn't snow or anything here, you know. I've never seen the stuff," he responded. I was, to say the least, surprised. How does someone grow up not seeing snow? … Probably the same way I grew up never seeing solid ground.
So I said, "Yeah, grass is a foreign concept to me… Like snow is for you, I guess. I never knew the ground could actually be green… You know, growing up on a block of ice and all."
And so our geographical differences were the base of our conversation until, as I suspected, the quirky man from before found us and told us that we needed to prepare for dinner. I figured this man had no real importance, and that his seeing us together had no real influence on my plan to thwart the Firelord's plan of our arranged marriage. After all, I still had a chance at freedom, right?