After observing Judy for a while, he noticed something wrong.
"You must have noticed too. Something about Judy's behavior along the way was off."
Kahn's words struck a powerful chord with everyone, and Sokka complained:
"Off is an understatement. Every time I brought up meeting the emperor, she acted like she hadn't heard me and talked about everything but that, as though she didn't have ears."
Katara also spoke with a hint of hesitation:
"And she always wears the exact same smile, but it makes me feel like she's never actually smiling. Sometimes it makes my hair stand on end."
"So that's what they call a smile that never goes deeper than the skin!"
Aang suddenly thought of an idiom and looked quite pleased with himself. Ignoring his antics, Toph asked Kahn:
"So? Those things alone aren't enough to tell whether someone's brainwashed, are they?"
"Of course not. But those are far from the only things wrong with her."
Kahn shared his observations:
"From what I've seen, everything she says, every answer she gives, even the smile on her face, is remarkably formulaic, as though it were all set up beforehand."
"And whenever we bring up the war or meeting the emperor, her emotions become extremely unstable, as though she's afraid of something."
"At those moments, she also freezes briefly, then goes right back to saying her piece as though she hasn't heard anything. It looks like she's deliberately avoiding the question, but it's different from how someone would normally behave."
"That extreme separation between what's going on inside her and what she shows on the outside is why I concluded she'd been brainwashed."
"Even so, why would anyone brainwash her?"
Katara asked in confusion. It was what everyone else wanted to ask too.
Kahn shook his head.
"I don't