The Idea

In case you were wondering, the two main characters are actually real people: my friend Emily and I. Also, don't give me any crap about how this should be on FictionPress because there's real people in it, because in case you haven't guessed it yet, this did not actually happen. One more thing: no flames. Constructive critcism is welcome.

And now I'll stop yammering so you can read the story. Enjoy!

I was sitting on the couch when the idea came to me.

I was watching my favorite show, Avatar, and it was probably partially the abnormality of the show that caused my thoughts to be so...much more distant in all aspects than it was in all normality. My family is grounded in personality by traditional values: ever since my royal ancestry traveled over from Germany, where I am bred, we have been a down-to-earth kind of family. It has remained that way for many thousands of years prior to my birth, and will remain so with my children and grand-children and great grand-children and every child after that. In this tradition, also, I have learned that the Levandowskis (my surname) are prolonged as fabulous literary geniuses. (Regrettably, I have not much in this category, thus making every word you read revised by my best friend, Katie, who happens to be rather gifted in this way.) We are also rich, a trait that runs deeper than blood as well.

My father is a lawyer rooted in Wells Fargo; my mother a stay-at-home female with an excess of calm tones and indifference. She is a fragile creature, my mother, and she takes great pride in wealth inherited from her husband and his family. We reside in a large, bright, airy house in a cut-off street in the high rent district. Katie, my best friend, an introvert with a sharp tongue, calls the area that I live in "Snob Hill", which could be partially true, judging on the other people who reside here with me.

Anyway, as a result of my parents' wealth, my family is able to afford several luxuries that are not uncommon in our high society, but must be uncommon when compared to every stage of poverty; this list includes cable television. It was now time for my favorite show, and as a result I was sitting on our leather couch with my mother's renowned popping corn bowl nestled in between my knees, and Sokka's oval-shaped face had just been subject to a close-up for what must be the thirteenth time when the idea came to me.

As I have said, I am usually quite grounded in unrealistic ideas in these matters. Yet something caused me to think of it at that moment; I know not what. I can only suppose. I can suppose that perhaps it was a spur of the moment: a strange, wild moment with my favorite character reciting one of his favorite lines, perchance; or how I was struck by how incredibly average my life, in all of my fabulous past and all-too distant future seemed to be to me now.

There was my brother, John, playing a tunes expected from a techno music geek on the large classical piano in the living room area, my second brother Paul who was making his own Leaning Tower out of HoneyNut Cheerios and apple butter, my mother with her bland voice, her eyes glassy from hours of computer work, and my father absent at work, as was tradition, and I, stuck in a humanitarian rut, simply stuck here with no sort of excitement or danger as was experienced on television every day.

I was bored; I needed entertainment.

Yes...now that I think of it, that must have been the reason why I first thought of it!

Whatever the reason be, I knew that I had to inform Katie of it immediately. Being a daredevil as I have never met before, Katie, at least, was sure to jump at any chance to do something utterly stupid and brainless.

Three Days Later

-o-

If I had the opportunity to do anything stupid and brainless, now would be the time; everyone is always telling me that I'm too much of a hyperact to sit still for four minutes anyhow. If they really believe that I've got about as much hyperactivity as rapid chipmunks (which are apparently extremely manic), then they wouldn't be handing me ninety problems in geometry and expecting me to sit there like a good little braniac and just do them like a-god forbid-normal person. I think that they might even expect me to be all cheesy like they are in the educational films they show us sometimes in school, and be all like, "I believe that I understand it now! If the nose of a swordfish is driven all the way into a coral reef, and the duckbill platypus's duckbill is approximately six point five inches, and if you factor the quadratic formula of the squared area of a triangle with one side as x and the other side as x+x, then you will get (2-7.5x)(5-xxxx) and if you then complete the Pythagorean Theorem for the distance that an orange can roll vertically after being catapulted down Mt. Everest by a hunchbacked lumberjack with muscles the size of basketballs that have a circumference of 2.5555555555, then the number of coral reef cell-things killed by the snout of the swordfish will is equal to the amount of square inches that the duckbill platypus's nose would go flying in an atomic bomb explosion. I shall write this down immediately."

It's even worse that I don't even like Math at all. Truth is that I'm more of a literature geek. I might not sound like it, but I'm actually pretty talented with words, and my friend Emily Levandowski is always asking me to "revise" i.e. write essays and prose for her because of some issue about how her royal ancestors created this tradition where all Levandowskis have to be good authors. It all sounds kind of stupid to me, but then again, I think most things sound pretty dumb.

Most things that I don't know about, that is, which is a lot, believe me.

See how it is: I'm sarcastic, truthful, and realistic: I see faults in people like I'm looking at them through one of those really expensive scientific magnifying microscopes, and I face them. That's life. I'm not excluding myself from this, and I can name a lot more things that are wrong with me than right, but that's not so unique among freshman chicks anyhow. See, I'm not what you'd call pretty; I work out. I'm strong. I can be mean when I want to be, and most of the time I do not look before I leap, something that's proved to be pretty hazardous over the years. But then that's life too.

I don't think of myself as really judgmental or anything, but Em tells me that I come across that way, and she's probably right. Em thinks she's all-knowing in the way of emotional shit, and sometimes she is, but not with me.

I say this because, however many times that Em has consoled some random person or dramatically impacted a friend's life or something else she's always claiming to have done, she doesn't get the point that I simply don't think of anything as a serious enough problem to go whining to her about. I don't whine to anybody. I'll complain when I'm dead.

There are a few things up with Em and I despite our being practically inseparable: she's fragile, I'm not; she's soft-tempered, and I'm fiery; she's optimistic; I'm realistic, or as she calls it "pessimistic."

I think that the latter is the one that makes the fire. She's always trying to see the good in everybody, and I think that there's just not good in some people. Or at least they choose to show their bitchy side so much that you're fooled into thinking that they're all bitch. If you ran into some black gang member in the ol' dark alleyway, you wouldn't start talking to him about his inner feelings to try and see if he's got a heart. You'd run screaming out of there hollering bloody murder, or at least any even-minded person would. I would.

That's another thing: she's always getting on my case for stuff like calling dark-skinned people black instead of African American, because she's said they've gone through a lot. I say, so have whites and Christians, but you don't exactly go around calling white people "Caucasian Americans" or anything. Also, some of them aren't even African. She calls me racist, but I've seen directors of movies get called racist because they used black actresses in a remake of an old movie when the original actress was white, so I think I'm going to take her opinion with a grain of salt.

So my point is that Emily's claim to fame is that she's down-to-earth, but I'm not so sure that she really is.

When I got her phone call, I was outside taking a walk around my local lake. The lake, Blackhawk, is surrounded by a bunching of dense forest, and my pop's always worrying about what I'm going to run into there, because my neighborhood's safety meter is dropping like a ton of bricks.

Not joking here; it's getting pretty serious.

Deal is that Pop banned me from coming here, but I come here anyway? Why? For one, I'm dumb and adventurous. For two, I'm disobedient and crazy. For three, I love going there, and there's no way I'm stopping. Also, if he's worried about me getting raped or kidnapped, there's plenty of sizeable sticks laying about, seeing as it is a forest, and I can do some pretty hot karate. Yeah, I've run into some pretty sizeable characters, but none of them ever bother me. Deal is that guys want to rape and kidnap chicks like Em, with soft hazel eyes and a pretty face, but they'd rather not have their eyes scratched out in the process by some pale bitch that has bigger arms than they do. Pop hasn't fathomed that one out yet. So, no. I don't think that I have to worry about much.

Anyway, so it was at that moment that my cell rang. I don't know why I'd brought it along, because I absolutely hate the thing. My mom thinks that it's "normal" for all fifteen year old chicks to own a pink flip phone. Don't ask me where she gets her info; I haven't a clue. Me being a girl, aged fifteen, I would automatically apply to her little mental picture, causing me to be forced to get this plastic-metallic piece of shit.

(One of the funniest things I do with Emily is try to plot out ways to totally demolish it. Once, I tried putting it in the washer, but it totally backfired: the washer pretty much blew up, all the clothes were wrecked, and my phone came out miraculously untouched, not even joking. There was not a scratch on the freaking thing. That stupid phone is frigging immortal.)

I even picked out this creepy-ass ring tone that isn't exactly my style (but it's more my style than the phone), but it still didn't fly, because the thing looks like a life-size pink plastic Barbie toy. If anything, it only worsened the situation, because I've got this horror movie worthy ring coming out of this stupid little girly phone. Some life, huh?

Anyway, so the ring started its creepy organ playing, and I answered it pretty quick. (I don't want any person seeing that. They might fall over dead laughing; it's happened almost twice before.) Of course, it was Emily, calling me on her nice little navy colored touch screen, and I can tell you now that I knew right off that bat that something- probably pretty epic- had caused her to go completely off her rocker, because she was doing this weird breathing sort of deal, and started whispering right off like she was intriguing about something. Who knew, maybe she was.

-o-

I suspect that I sounded quite the eccentric, then, breathing as I was and speaking in a low whisper that I knew was ineligible over her less-than-satisfactory reception. I heard her speak, and she sounded miffed: Katie usually sounds miffed whether she means to or not, based upon her severe case of sarcasm.

"Emily, are you having some sort of conniption or something? Girl, you sound like you're dying over there."

Yes, that was the typical Katie: quite lovable, I know. "No, Katie." I responded. "I'm not dying."

"Well, there's a big weight off my shoulders." She states. "So, what's up?"

"Guess." I offer, stating in quite a Katie-like fashion. I immediately recognize this as a brutal mistake, for Katie, along with having a sharp tongue, has a greatly imaginative mind, crafted from years of puzzle-solving and intellectual testing, that former that which she involves herself in almost daily.

"O-kay!" When she said this statement in that voice, I wish I had just told her right off: Katie was going to drive me to the nearest point of insane without ever guessing. "You're in a sexual relationship with Justin Beiber!"

I grimace. "Katie, don't make me vomit."

"Is that a no?" She asks innocently.

This is one thing that is perhaps the only truly critical thing that a stranger should know of me prior to a meeting with me: I despise Justin Beiber. He is the one person that I would never welcome with open arms should he come to me starving or what not, unless of course he suddenly decided to become a guy through trans-gender. It is perhaps the one thing that Katie and I have always been in complete agreement about: there is no fathomable way that Justin Beiber could be a part of the male population. He is obviously a girl with strange hair and a gangster hat. The fact that Katie agrees with me does not prevent her from teasing me about some sort of forbidden sexual relationship with him. This is only one of the traits Katie has that makes me wonder exactly why I'm friends with her. (Other than the fact that her fabulous gift with writing has caused admiration from even the greatest authors in my ancestry, and caused me to sound intelligent in this memoir.) I decide that I won't answer her, to save a sliver of my sanity, and order her to continue without any further mention of the pop singer.

"Shaw, Em. I know you secretly adore his hair." She teases further for only a moment, then returns to her guessing game. "You are secretly conspiring against the President in order to assist the CIA in a plot to corrupt the most secret code that will unlock the cabinet in the Oval Office in which is contained some pretty sexy china?"

As I had said before, I don't believe that any person has yet to have been born with a stranger mind than Katie. "Not quite." I state. "Keep on guessing."

She provides several dozen more of her somehow endearing comments before becoming bemused as to how she hadn't guessed it in the time span of what must be a good twenty minutes, and refused to guess any more. "Seriously, Emily. I'm creative, but I'm not a physic. I have a walk to go on and if I'm not back before twelve, my parents are going to believe that I seriously did get raped or something, and when I come back they're going to be all like, 'Katie! You went walking around the lake again, didn't you?' And then they're going to have to walk with me whenever I go on these little expeditions, and God knows that I need a break once and a while. C'mon, Em, at least give me a clue of some kind."

You should also know that it is so peculiar for Katie to emit such a lengthy and remarkably sensible burst of speech that I suppose it momentarily stunned or impressed me into blurting out my whole prolonged plan. This is the one thing that, in all of my open mind, I had not intended on or wanted to happen. I have always considered myself to be a reasonably rational being (as this runs in my ancestry line as well), and thought that despite the admittedly unusual situation, it would apply here. Apparently that was to much to ask for: I said everything that I had been keeping in reserve. There was a reason for me doing this: even Katie, in all of her...creativity might be doubtful of the truth that lay in my words, both because she knew me as she knew me almost better than she did herself, and because I sounded, most frankly, like a zany person, so unlike my usual personality.

"I've been thinking, Katie: life has become unbearably boring, and I want something new. I want an interesting life, and I want you to come with me to some place you've never been before. Will you come?"

Katie responds in the way that I knew she would in an awkward situation: she, most likely without trying, makes it even more awkward. "Emily? What the hell is up with you right now? You are, like, me at my wackiest, times at least four. Also, what's up with the whole 'I'm-bored-of-my-life deal? Whatever happened to Miss Ancestrally Optimistic and Level-Headed?"

I felt myself flush in embarrassment. I have said this before, and will say it again: I have not been living in Katie's resident small town for many years, hence I was not yet adjusted (to the extent in which life would become more to my liking) to the fact that Katie is brutally honest in every aspect. Thus, I winced at her sharp tone, and found that I couldn't find a strong enough response in me to respond to the fire-tongue that was my best friend. Thus, I explained further. "Do you know what the television show Avatar is, Katie?"

Katie answers instantly, as she loves questions. "Yeah," she says, "it's that movie with all the blue aliens, right?"

I smile, for the moments when Katie is oblivious are amusing to me, for she is quaint and small in these moments, and it is these times when I realize why I am friends with Katie in the first place. "Nope. It's my favorite television show."

My friend seems confused at first. "Oh." Then, she appears to have some sort of epiphany, and her voice rebounds into my ear, remarkably loud for one with a reception as she has on her cell phone. "OH! You mean the one with the people that can punch the ground and make an earthquake and make water spiral things and burn one another's hair off and other stuff! Right?"

I smile a little broader. "Right-o."

"Eureka! I have it!" Katie warbles. "Anyway, so what about this element massacre?"

Katie's frivolity and reasonable composure made me feel more bold, thus I dove right into what I had been planning on. "Katie, did you know that the world they live in is actually a reality?"

There is a dead, pregnant silence on her line for seconds more that Katie would normally fill with words, and then she laughs; it sounds hollow and humorless. "Good joke, Em. What do they teach you in that old school of yours, hmm?"

I pause and wonder how to continue: Katie has not only a wide and brilliant mind, but a skeptical one. As much as she makes stories that are as unbelievable as they are funny, they're never genuine as is mine. How to say it so she won't be estranged; that is the question. "Katie, do you know the story of creation?"

"Well, duh."

"Apparently," I pause for a dramatic effect, "the Earth wasn't the only planet that was created."

"Oh, that's right." Katie snaps, punishing me for wasting her time. "There were those other eight planets too."

For once, I ignore her and continue as if she said nothing. "I've been doing some research on the subject, and apparently that there's a strong possibility that Earth has some sort of sister parallel planet in a completely separate galaxy known as Ruritania. Apparently, the show Avatar was formed by Carter Reed, and after a lot of hard internet searching, I found out that seemingly Carter had somehow succeeded in gaining a first-hand experience with the planet of Ruritania, and the natives that he encountered there went to the making of the show."

Much to my surprise, my description is heavily laden with truth and said convincingly, and Katie's next words are perhaps less disdainfully unbelieving as her prior statement. "This sounds like a pretty huge thing for science, Em. Why haven't I heard of it yet?"

This is a question I had fathomed would come. "The scientists that major in the study of Earth's parallel are considered to be..." Here, I pause for I don't like to insult people that I know nothing about. "Well..."

Katie provides the word. "One fry short of a Happy Meal? Out to lunch? Bananas? Bonkers? Loopy?"

I find myself snickering despite myself. "Pretty much. Anyway, so even when progress is made on the subject of Ruritania is made, no one ever hears about it because there's no concrete proof that the scientists are willing to expose on whether or not the parallel even exists."

"So does it?"

"Yes. And the books that I read on the subject hinted that the scientists are conducting an ongoing experiment in which everyday testing subjects are sent along with a scientist for their guide into Ruritania in order to gain rare first-hand experiences with native Ruritanian inhabitants."

"No shit!" Katie sounds genuinely interested now, and I recall that Katie, though skeptical of many things and not easily convinced, believes that there are many events that occur in the span of the universe that are explainable only by the fact that the power of the universe is so great and mysterious that it can, in all reality, accomplish anything if it so wishes. Luckily for me, she considered my story a contribution to her belief, and that interested her. "How do they do this, exactly?"

That I can answer as well! This is going more smoothly than I thought it would. "When Carter Reed first ventured into Ruritania through unknown power sources, he brought back an array of ancient objects from the planet with extremely powerful auras that were almost more powerful than the most powerful radioactive source on land, only they didn't cause mass destruction."

"Oh no?" My friend doesn't seem to be able to fathom as to how such a powerful thing couldn't kill at least a few people every once and a while.

"Nope." I answer.

"So what does it do?"

"It's an extremely advanced power source that has the capacity to create fantastically complex and almost surreal objects that could never be created with today's technology, and probably not even technology hundreds of years from now."

"Such as?"

"Portals." I answer.

"No shit!" Katie repeats, revealing just how awed she is.

"And since these portals were created by use of items from Ruritania..." I pause for a dramatic effect, waiting for her to realize the other half of my sentence.

"Then...that means that the portals actually lead there!" Katie exclaims, spot on as usual.

"Right."

"Holy shiskabob!"

Holy shiskabob indeed. "These portals provide the only known way into Ruritania, and it is only accessible to non-scientists if you sign up to be a-"

"Lab rat?" Katie offers. "Guinea pig?"

"Experimental subject. Then, you can venture into the portal and enter Earth's parallel."

"Bombing!"

"Uh-huh." Regrettably, then I dive back into my over excitable self and go on yet another rant that is both intensely unnecessary and packed to the brim with information that I would normally only betray within several lengthy paragraphs of speech. "I signed myself up to do it and I also signed you up because I knew that you'd want to come with me and the lab is stationed in southern Minneapolis. The scientist that I talked with said that we have room for one large-purse sized bag to take along with us and his name is Henry Brisigner and-"

"Woah, sister!" My friend interrupts. "Okay, this whole thing sounds pretty cool, but I'm still thinking the whole thing is fishier than a bucketful of rotting fish, 'kay? I mean, I'm just on this relaxing little walk, and suddenly bam! You call me and drop this "There's-a-parallel-to-Earth-called-Ruritania-that-happens-to-be-inhabited-by-cartoon-characters-and-I've-signed-both-of-us-up-to-be-guinea-pigs-in-some-experiment-with-a-portal-involved" bomb on me. Not cool, chick."

I had been dreading this part: the section where I'm actually required to convince my best friend to accompany me on what I plan on being my greatest and only true adventure. "I know, Katie, but you have to try to understand me here. Life is so terribly dull nowadays, and this may be my...our only chance to truly have an journey of our own. Katie, you have to understand; you just have to."

When she speaks next, my hopes are renewed, for I can tell her guard is weakening by the tone of her voice: unsure, but excited. "Man, Em, I don't know. So many things could go wrong in this sort of situation."

"Things can go wrong in every situation," I assure her, "besides, the scientist accompanying us is heavily armed, both with real weaponry and the devices needed for returning to Earth- both in huge surpluses. Please, Katie, I'm on my knees over here."

She is quiet for a moment, then implores, perhaps in a quieter tone than usual, "What about my family? What am I going to say?"

I had forgotten this as well: being Irish, with her temper and family oriented nature to vouch, Katie cared deeply about her family and vis versa. Her two younger brothers treated her like a god, and her parents thought the world of her, and when without one another, they weren't quite as cheery as they usually were. What was I to say on this? "Bring your camera and take a ton of pictures." I offered. "When you come back, you can show them all the things you'd been doing in your time away."

She liked the idea, but persisted to find reasons not to go with me. "Yeah, but what would we say if, say, that one ultra-crazy lady came up to us in a deserted wood or something, and asked us what our-"

"Crazy lady?" I ask, quite puzzled. For you see that Katie's parents does not posses the desire to buy any cable television as my parents have, thus she would only know as much about the show as I have told her, which amounts to very little as I prefer not to speak to her about my home life. It is also that my friend has a way of putting things so that I may never comprehend them.

"Yeah," she responds, sounding rather annoyed, "the one with the insane hair? I think she's the sister of that guy with the creepy eye?"

Ah. "You mean Azula?"

"Geez, I don't know what her freaking name is. Why do you think that I didn't call her by a name in the first place?" I wince, for Katie always says things in a harsh manner whether she wishes to or not, and I have not quite adjusted to this trait fairly yet. "Anyway, so what if she asks us what symbol we have or something-"

"You mean what nation we belong to?"

"Whatever! So, anyway, so what if she asks us that, and I'm all like, 'I wear the symbol of the monkey," and she doesn't like the answer and we both get put in a meat grinder or something? What then? I don't know what the hell anyone's talking about half the time."

That seems a simple problem to solve to me. "Just say that you're of the Fire Nation, and you'll be fine."

"Oh." Katie seems puzzled, but satisfied, and doesn't give any more reasons not to come along. "All right then. Life's gotten kind of boring and I don't want to stand here talking too long because I've got a walk to go on so...we might as well try for it, yeah?"

I sigh with happiness. "Exactly."

"One thing, though." My friend adds. "If I lose any limbs in this portal thing, the second we get there, I'm throttling you."