LNYE FIC: Four inventions Sokka never built (and one he did), for recessional

[whitelotusmods]

Title: Four inventions Sokka never built (and one he did)
By: sholio
For: recessional
Rating: PG-13 (some discussion of sex and sex toys, nothing explicit)
Word Count: 2500
Character(s)/Ship(s): Sokka/Suki (plus appearances by Katara & Zuko)
Content Notes: none
Author Notes: Thank you very much to (anon) for the quick beta!



1. Computer


"I call it," Sokka said, with a grand flourish, "the Prognosticator!"

His audience -- consisting of Suki and Katara -- looked distinctly unimpressed. "I thought you said fortune-telling was total bunk," Katara said. "And now you drew up plans for a fortune-telling machine?"

"This is not fortune-telling; this is science." Sokka waved the plans under their noses. Suki snatched at the edges of the nearest scroll and pulled it to her to study it more closely. "Look, the world can be explained by simple natural laws, right? Even the most complicated phenomena are just a matter of simple processes piling up on top of one another like -- like --"

"Like trash on the village midden?" Katara asked, folding her arms.

"No," Sokka said loftily, "nothing like that. Well, actually, sort of like that --"

Suki caught his chin and pulled him to her eye level. "Focus."

"Focusing, right. Anyway, all you have to do to predict the so-called future is feed slips of paper into one end of the machine -- it's reduced to a special code, which is read by these pins here, and recorded onto these cylinders here -- and then it tells you what's going to happen next based on simple physical laws of cause-and-effect, which you've put in -- or, as I call it, input --"

The girls looked at each other and commiserated for a moment.

"-- using these slots here, and a similar, very simple code that the machine can read."

"It's a machine, Sokka," Katara sighed. "It can't read anything."

"I'm still working on that part --"

Suki studied the plans thoughtfully. "That isn't the part that bothers me. Sokka, the information you'd have to put into --"

"Input."

She sighed. "-- input into the machine would be ... You'd have to do it all day, every day, for years. And things would be changing in the meantime. What if you missed something?"

"Well, that's why I need an entire staff. Do you think the Earth King would hire some for me?"

"No," Suki said flatly. "If he wouldn't pay for your speaking machine or the moonship, then I doubt he would pay for this."

"It might be different if it did something more useful, Sokka," Katara said.

"Predicting the future is useless now, huh? What if we could have predicted the entire outcome of the war beforehand? Known how the assault on the day of the eclipse would have turned out?"

Suki kissed his ear. "But look how things turned out anyway. If you'd been able to take the Fire Nation capital at the eclipse, you'd never have found me in prison."

"Well, that's true ..."

"And none of us would have ever made friends with Zuko," Katara said, "and Aang would never have learned firebending --"

"So you're saying that we're not supposed to know the future? That we're better off in ignorance?" Sokka spread his arms. "But the whole point of science is that we can learn everything!"

"And half the point of life is not knowing what's going to happen next," Katara said. "It's part of what makes life interesting."

Sokka scowled at her. "And where was this philosophical attitude when the whole bunch of you were going ga-ga over Aunt Wu and her alleged predictions?"

"Maybe I've grown up a little since then." Katara patted his shoulder. "It's not a terrible idea, it's just perhaps an idea that needs some refining."

"Now if you could turn it into some sort of machine for playing games ..." Suki suggested. "Like, I don't know, predicting Pai Sho moves or something."

Katara laughed. "But is it really fair to do that to poor Iroh?"

"What about predicting the weather?" Sokka suggested, still sulking. "I don't see how anyone -- and by anyone I mean certain people's sisters -- could argue that isn't useful."

"If this machine of yours can read, can you teach it to read books in different scripts and translate them?" Suki said. "Because I've been trying to read some of the Dai Li's texts on Earth Kingdom martial arts, but they're in the Old Earth Kingdom script. It's making my eyes cross."

They spent most of the afternoon coming up with increasingly silly and implausible ways to use Sokka's Prognosticator -- "What if you could combine it with that speaking-machine idea of yours, Sokka, and use it to send messages to people far away?" -- but in the end, all three agreed that none of them were likely to work, and Sokka tucked the plans away. There was, after all, no point in spending the rest of his life building a machine that probably wouldn't be anything but a giant waste of time anyway.

---

2. Vibrator


Suki gazed at the scroll for a very long time. She turned it around. She viewed it sideways and upside-down. Sokka pointed out key bits of the drawing, adding helpful comments such as, "The vacuum attachment is detachable for easy cleaning!" or "... and that's where it hooks up to the steam engine."

Finally she said, "No."

"No?"

"Well," Suki said, "no might be the wrong word --"

Sokka perked up.

"... because I think that 'By Honored Kyoshi, I would rather be rolled in honey and eaten alive by antweasels than put this thing between my legs' sums up my feelings more accurately."

"Come on, Suki. It's for you!"

The fact that he'd even asked before building it and presenting it to her along with an industrial-sized bucket of lubricant was probably a step in the right direction for him, and Suki didn't want to stomp on him too badly. She did, after all, want his thoughtful behavior to continue ... just, maybe, aimed in a different direction.

"It's a very sweet idea," she said at last, then rolled up the scroll -- resolving to stuff it down the privy at the earliest convenience -- and straddled his lap. "But no machine could ever replace you," she added, and darted her tongue along the corner of his mouth.

"You're the best girlfriend in the world, Suki," Sokka said when they came up for air.

"I know," Suki said, pushing him down onto his back.

This gave her hope, though. Maybe in another few years, she'd be able to show Sokka her small box of wood, stone and glass dildos without his ego being completely shattered. She had some entertaining fantasies about the sort of things that two people could do with them, and she didn't need any steam engines for that.

---

3. Mechanical cabbage-picker


"Are you ..." The official whipped out a long scroll and consulted it, his mustache quivering officiously. "Soaka?"

"Uh ... sort of?" Sokka said, before Suki, rushing in from her training room with a wooden training sword in one hand, shoved him to one side and tapped the sword meaningfully against her leg.

"It depends on who's asking."

The official cleared his throat and twitched a bit. "I represent the Ba Sing Se Guild of Cabbage Farmers and, by the authority of his Royal Highness the King, you --" He slapped the scroll to the doorframe, then neatly affixed it with a small, slim knife. "-- have been served."

"Served what?" Suki demanded, yanking the scroll free of the door as the official retreated with dignified haste. Sokka peered over her shoulder. The legalese made her eyes glaze, but eventually she managed to decipher the key points: Sokka was prohibited from building any device pertaining to, or to be used upon, the common cabbage.

"It also says you're not allowed within a hundred paces of a cabbage, period."

"But I haven't even built anything yet!"

"And it does have the King's seal on it." She sighed. "Of course, all you have to do is pay a bribe down at the courts and they'll stamp an edict for anything. This place is so bureaucratic; there's no telling what they'll outlaw next." Folding up the edict, she added, "We should move back to Kyoshi Island for a while. It may be rural, but at least you can build a cabbage picker in your own home if you want to."

"It's all right. I wasn't that interested in picking cabbages anyway." Sokka got a faraway look in his eyes, the one she'd begun to dread. "This just means I'll have more time to work on the mechanical wings. Or maybe the ..."

---

4. Spaceship


"Would that actually fly?" Zuko asked, studying the plans speculatively. From the look of this and his other designs, Sokka had been getting someone else do the actual drafting for him. Probably Teo. At any rate, it was much too neat to be his own work, unless he'd gone to art school in the last five years. "To the moon?"

"Of course it would." Sokka gestured grandly. "I'm me, after all!"

"I know; that's why I'm asking."

"When have my plans ever failed to work?"

Zuko opened his mouth.

"That was rhetorical," Sokka said quickly.

But it was also exactly the reminder that Zuko needed to get a vivid mental impression of what his Minister of Finance would say if Zuko brought him a proposal that looked like a bunch of set designs for the latest Ember Island Players fiasco. "No. I'm not allocating Fire Nation funding for this."

"But you're turning down a chance to gain technological superiority over the Earth Kingdom! This is an exclusive offer I'm only making to you, Zuko."

"Earth King turned you down too, huh?"

"... maybe?"

Zuko sighed. The fact that Sokka and Suki had stopped by the Fire Nation capital on their way to Kyoshi Island, for no other reason than to hang out with him for a little while, was flattering. But while Mai and Suki did lady things in the courtyard -- probably comparing notes on ways to kill people -- Sokka kept hitting him up for ... well, things like this "moonship", which looked to him like nothing more than a creative way to commit suicide.

"Can we go back to the cabbage-picking machine? It sounds like the kind of thing we're trying to invest in right now -- something to make the people's lives better."

"It's been outlawed in the Earth Kingdom," Sokka said cheerfully, spreading out the plans.

---

5. ... and one he built.


"Suki, my little ocean kumquat ..."

"Sokka, do you remember our discussion about pet names? Especially those based on members of the plant or animal kingdoms, no matter how charming?"

From the look on Sokka's face, he did remember, but he looped his arm around her neck anyway. She relaxed into it, carefully laying down her paintbrush before she spoiled the neatly painted markings on her newest combat fan.

"I made you something," he whispered in her ear. "Something really awesome."

Uh-oh. "Does it have vacuum attachments?"

"Nope. Come on."

Suki rinsed her paintbrush -- the first layer of the design needed to dry anyway -- and followed him out into a brisk Kyoshi Island spring morning. Some of her girls were drilling in the courtyard, under the first unfurling sakura blossoms. The wind off the ocean smelled of fish and salt. Suki inhaled deeply. It was good to travel, but also good to be home for a while.

Sokka led her up the winding path behind the dojo. There was nothing back here but old storehouses, which was why the elders had agreed that Sokka could set up his workshop there. Nestled behind sakura and pine, the buildings could barely be seen from the rest of the village.

Sokka took her to the largest of them, a round wooden structure that had once stored grain. The holes in the sides had been patched, and the hinges of the door had even been oiled -- they didn't creak as he opened it and ushered her into the lightless interior.

"Close your eyes!" Sokka said quickly before she'd been able to do more than glimpse dust motes floating in the shaft of light from the door.

Suki giggled, but she did as he'd asked. The world behind her eyelids went from red to black as Sokka closed the door. "Can I look yet?"

"Not yet." She could hear him bustling around and drew on her Kyoshi Warrior training to guess at his location. His clothing rustled: he'd bent down to do something. She smelled lamp oil and paints, and heard the flare of a light being struck.

"Sokka --"

"Not yet! Just wait!" Now he was in a different part of the silo, and she strained her ears, but the series of metallic clicks only puzzled her. It sounded like a clockwork mechanism being wound; she shuddered to think what he might have built up here.

"Maybe someday I'll get you down to the Water Tribe village in the winter, so that I can show you the real thing," Sokka said. "It's much better than this. But for now ..." His voice came closer, and his fingers slid into hers. "For now, this is the best I can do. Open your eyes."

She did.

For an instant, light dazzled her. She blinked, clearing her vision, but the lights still danced around her in shifting, rippling waves -- blue and green, yellow and white, fluttering tinges of purple. Suki tilted her head back, and gasped. The lights filled the inside of the silo, flowing through velvet blackness like water. They seemed to fill the whole world. For a moment she felt as if she might fall away from the world, fall up into the cosmos.

"Oh," she breathed. "This is the celestial lights, isn't it?" She'd heard about them, but Kyoshi Island was too close to the equator to ever get anything but an occasional glow on the horizon.

"We call them the polar lights, but, uh, yeah." Sokka squeezed her hand. "Do you like it?"

For answer, she caught him with an arm behind his head and kissed him hard. When she pulled away, she could see the shifting curtains of light reflected in his eyes. "It's like they're moving. How does it work?"

Sokka showed her the lanterns with their rippled glass covers, rotating slowly on clockwork mechanisms -- "It's a lot like the magic lanterns that they use in the theater." He pointed up to the places where he'd used painted canvas to construct a dome inside the silo, like the night sky.

And all the while, the lights rippled around them.

"I even have a name for it," Sokka said. "I'm thinking i-max: i for image, of course, and max for maximally cool."

Suki decided that they could rename it later. For now, the lights were so captivating that she couldn't take her eyes off them. "We should show my warriors. No, the whole village! Would you mind that?"

"I don't mind it at all. But --" Sokka sounded a little breathless, and she pulled her eyes away from the lights to look at his face, with the colors rippling across it. "So I've had this, um, fantasy for a long time. The polar lights, and you, and some furs -- okay, so we don't have the furs, but actually this is better, because it's not even cold -- ack!" Suki's tackle was gentle, but they still went down in a pile of tangled arms and legs.

"How much oil is in the lamps?" she asked, wrapping her legs around his hips.

"Oh, uh -- a few hours, I guess --"

Suki slid her hands under his tunic. "Then we'd better not waste any time, don't you think?"