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You can’t help but stop and gawk at the Cultural Center when you’re finally able to take it in completely. It’s a huge building of white stone with curved blue tile roofs, eight stories tall in its main portion with even higher towers on its corners, and as wide as the plaza it sits on. The entrances are two doors, nearly twenty feet high, at the base of round towers on either side of the enormous stained glass window at the center of the building’s front face. But what catches your eye most of all is the tiered fountain, detailed in traditional Southern Water Tribe style carvings, and topped with a thirty-foot bronze statue of the Tribe’s most famous hero and the inaugural chairman of the United Federation Council. Sokka, your grandfather.
“Uh, Ainu,” a firm hand shaking your shoulder stirs you from your reverie, “you’ve been staring for a while.”
“S-sorry,” you stutter with a blush, “just uh, I always liked the Southern Water Tribe, that’s all.” You leave out just how awed you are to see such a monument to your grandfather. There’s a mural of him and the old Team Avatar on Kyoshi Island, but the scale is completely different. It never really occurred to you just how much of a rallying point he was to his people in the new nation.
The other teenager shrugs, but goes to enter the Cultural Center regardless. After another moment of committing the statue to memory, you hurriedly follow after him. It’s a little awkward, in the too-long green pants and wooly blue jacket you found on a clothesline that someone neglected to take in, but you manage to hustle just enough to catch up with Noyon as he approaches the information desk.
The Cultural Center’s atrium is five stories high, with a balcony wrapped around the top level, and an almost completely open floor plan. Several huge chandeliers, luminescent crystal from the Earth Kingdom and strung in an imitation of the South Pole’s Spirit Lights hang from the ceiling; while massive glass sculptures wrought in the shape of icebergs, placed atop huge incandescent light bulbs line the floor. Along the walls there are several displays with plaques embedded in their frames, and by the entrance there are several desks, only one of which is currently staffed.
>(2/3, sorry for the blurriness of the picture, there are no high-res pictures of this building not on fire.)
