"And then what?"

"Then the moving thing spins the wires around the magnet and the wires have electricity in them and I can make the electricity do stuff, such as lightbulbs. I'm oversimplifying. I don't actually know all of this, Page will help me along when I have the prerequisites."

"Oh."

"Yeah, sorry, I'm not nearly as smart as I look."

"Sometimes I think that not many people are."

"If you say so, but I have more advantages than most of the people around here."

"And you use them better."

"A lot of that is the advantages too. I'm not an inventor! I like recreational swordfighting and doting on my girlfriend! Page is doing a lot of work in here, you just can't see it."

"You didn't have to pretend to be an inventor."

"Yeah I did, the things I need have to get invented at some point and it's way less complicated and faster to invent them myself."

Shrug. "If you say so."

"Sing is smarter than a human. It needs something much better than a human brain to run on and right now there aren't even machines as smart as bugs."

"But there would be eventually, right? If you just wanted to, type the code up and then do something else."

"Every day later Sing wakes up here, more people die in ways it can't fix."

"You don't know them."

"...so?"

"So why does it matter so much?"

"Because if they're gone forever I'll never get to know them, no matter what!"

"I don't think most people are that interesting."

"Give them a few hundred years in paradise."

"...I suppose you'd know."

"I mean, I find lots of people who don't need that long. And there's people I'm just never going to be close to, but they'll be good for somebody who'll be good for somebody etcetera and we all weave together even if it's only a little."

"So like elemental balance?"

"I don't understand the concept of elemental balance so I couldn't tell you."

"It's like... the elements are part of a bigger whole, and separating them makes them weaker than you'd expect if you divided the total by four. The strengths of one cover the weaknesses of another. It's why the Avatar can be so much stronger than any other bender, or any four benders."