I'm not sure whether it was meant to be a challenge or not, but one was issued nonetheless. This should make the cultural differences a little more realistic…

Secrets of the Past

I watched as all the kids sat around the small fire one of the boys had made out of thin air. It amazed me how fast the three that I had known for years were able to recover from something so traumatic. I knew Danny and his friends had been doing something out of the ordinary for months now, I just didn't know what. Now, I saw that what ever it was, it had certainly exposed them to things no child should have to live through.

My mind started to drift off to the days of my own childhood as we began to settle down for the night. These were memories I hadn't touched in years, mainly because up until now, no good could come from reliving them.

Maddie and I were always so intent on going back to the Ghost Zone because we had grown up there for the most part, we each spent a little over twenty-five years there before the same thing that had dragged us into the Ghost Zone dragged us right back out.

No one ever really knew exactly what had happened, but ages ago, something had brought the whole of the primitive Amity Park into the ghost dimension. My best theory is that there was a massive influx of spectral energy that surrounded the town, but I'll probably never know because I wasn't alive for the actual event.

Five hundred years, the town spent five hundred years trapped in the Ghost Zone. Needless to say, the ghosts were never particularly happy to have us there, not when I was a kid nor back in the times that the few historical documents of our town mentioned. Amity Park was haunted because of that, even when we finally escaped it was considered pay back by the specters.

Ghost technology was developed first out of necessity, the rest of it fell into place as we became fully capable of defending ourselves. My old history classes said agricultural technology came next, followed by luxury as the town gave in to being stuck in the Ghost Zone.

When I was twenty-five, Jazz as an infant and Danny on the way, we finally returned to the realm of the living.

There was just one problem. The city had disappeared fifty years into the war and reappeared right around the 85 year mark. While we'd gone through generations of inventors and innovation, the rest of the world was still trapped in it's early days.

It was a general consensus to keep our time in the Ghost Zone a secret from the outside world, but it quickly became more than that. A few families tried to tell stories of their younger years and the Ghost Zone to their kids that didn't live in that time.

All of them just disappeared one day.

No one knew what had happened to them, all we knew was that they had tried to explain their time in the Ghost Zone to their kids and then just disappeared. No one was willing to risk finding out what had happened.

Here we were today, the younger generation without a clue as to what happened. Cultural development was never taught in schools and the history they started to teach was shady at best. Empathsis was put on science to encourage our development more and discourage those bright enough to realize something wasn't quite right. The officials didn't want everyone thinking we were just a town of crazies if they ever stopped ignoring us. The easiest way to keep outsiders from knowing? Just act like it never even happened.

We put the shield up as soon as we could to keep spectral beings from invading the rest of the world when they came with us back to the realm of the living. The side effect of it was that bending powers were practically cut off. You'd occasionally see signs of an element trying to be reached with in a person, such as Sam's love of nature gave perfect sense to her earth-bending.

Now, there's just the four of us and the kids are about to see just how different our world was from the rest. At least now I can tell them the truth if I wanted to. They were finally going to learn about the bending they probably had in their blood, though which element each one had was beyond me. I honestly didn't know what element I was myself as the Ghost Zone and bending don't get along very well.

I sat back against the (what had Aang called it, a flying bison?) large animal that more or less provided at least some relief from the wind and began to wonder which elements each of us would find our connection to as Toph and Aang were already starting to teach Sam the basics of earth-bending.

There had always been such a blend of bloods in Amity park, enough so that Aang may not really be the last air-bender. It was a slim chance, but it was there.

So...does that help to make up for the culture differences?

Comments and feedback are welcome as always! :D

Invisible One