"'Currently Untitled' - As Written by Jay Cash Thornton, Kid Avatar"

[Jaytalon]

Hey, everyone.

As I mentioned (extensively) in my introduction post, I've been working on this Avatar fanfiction for a while now, by which I mean "thinking about it constantly" as opposed to "writing it." Sure, I have some notes on my Microsoft Office Word documents and plenty of out-of-place scenes that don't fit anywhere else, but no actual, official, from-the-beginning work. Now, I don't want to just keep it in my head anymore; I've thought long and hard about it, and don't want it to go to waste, so I'm just trying to put this out there as a method of self-motivation--if I tell people that I'm going to finish it, then I'm going to finish it. Somehow, I'm going to write and write and write and make sure that everything is perfect, and weave all my ideas into something tangible.

Of course, the events of the story imply a different universe altogether from the one in the movie, so if you tend to not like that stuff...well, I'm just warning you now, the whole story doesn't even pretend like it could have a place in Avatar's canon.

(Very Important Edit: I have, however, changed the thread title so that it would stop advertising how egregiously non-canon the thing is, since it isn't really that bad; there's just an original character in the spotlight. I'm going to settle for the much more "charismatic" one that I have now. Nobody was even bothering to read the thing! Hopefully, this will take care of that.)

Right now, here's the prologue, spoilered for length. (Note: it takes place mostly after the fact and is written in present tense as a choice of style. The real story will start at the literal beginning, and will be written in past tense, in case you're wondering.)

Spoiler

Prologue: The Memoir

The last page is still hot off the printer in my hands as I stride down the hallway to the link room, confident as ever with the knowledge that I have finished the first part of my epic memoir, with more to be added on the way as life goes on. Mine on Pandora has been so short, and since it looks like I'm going to be staying a while, the adventures may have only begun.

Of course, my adventures are limited to how far a psionic link can carry me. Currently, Max, Norm, Tristan, and the rest of the Avatar Team are working on a way to extend the link between an avatar and its controller. Over the past months, they've extended it by a couple of kilometers, and they say that it's increase exponentially from there. I hope so, so that I won't have to live in a Na'vi body for the rest of my life if I want to do anything. I'd like to avoid doing a soul transfer on principle, and I don't want compromise that for the sake of a mountaintop expedition or raft voyage, or just walking the moon in search of knowledge, though that would be rather nice.

I am careful to simply slither into the link room on the tips of my bare toes, not making a sound until I'm barely six inches away from Tristan on the left side, so as not to be picked up by his video log camera. He's working on an entry summing up the base's physical condition and morale since the war ended.

Me, I try not to think about it too much. It isn't good for me to constantly ruminate over it. I will, at least, always have the memories—most of them are in the narrative, after all.

"There's not much life in this place anymore. It already feels like forever since the rest of the humans left," says Tristan. In his voice, there's a bit of a longing tone. He misses those guys. I can understand that. I'm already missing every single soul, either brutally killed or exiled. They were RDA, sure, but they were all good people, always doing something new, always ready to chat and laugh....

When is the next shipment due to arrive, again? Oh, right, five and a half years. Shoot.

"We didn't lose any of my Christian group in the battle, or anyone from most of the other religious groups, possibly because only a few of them fought in the main battlefield, and the OPS Center attack didn't suffer any casualties. Half of them decided to go back to Earth anyway. Some of my other friends, too. Well, almost everyone. Jake kept the number of staying humans to a minimum, beyond the ones required. Jay isn't too happy about the whole thing—"

"Hi, Tris!" I exclaim, clapping him on the shoulder with gusto.

Tristan nearly jumps out of his seat. He turns to me, clutching his chest with a look of exaggerated shock on his face. "What is wrong with you?" he yelps. "What, do you want me to have a heart attack?"

"You always concentrate so hard on these things, Tris. It was just too good to pass up."

He shakes his head and faces the video log camera. "Ah, speak of the devil. Gotta go. Lemme just pause this..." With a twist of his foot, his swivel chair turns again, and he smiles at me. "What is it?"

I hold out my enormous binder, which encases the narrative, to him. As hard as I try to keep a straight face, I can't. A grin of sheer pride in my achievement forces its way onto my face. "It's the narrative," I choke out through my teeth. "I spent this whole time working on it. The whole time I've been here, I mean."

I reflect briefly back on those four years. Indeed, it seems that all I've done in practically every moment of free time is writing. Narratives, mostly, like this one. Essays. Analyses. Maybe a short story or two. It's been wonderful seeing my learning curve absolutely skyrocketing upward, and it's all finally culminated in this masterpiece.

Tristan's eyes are shining as he flips through the pages, scanning the more dialogue-heavy ones; ones with choppier sentences in shorter paragraphs. He laughs for a moment. Then he sighs. Then he grins and blushes—he must be reading something nice I wrote about him. Still yet, his face suddenly falls, his eyes glaze over with tears for a few seconds.

An emotional rollercoaster, that's what it was. That's what it felt like to me, too.

"I remember all this happening. Jay, this is a freaking tome," he declares at last. "A binder-wrapped, copier-paper-and-Times-New-Roman tome. Maybe we can get this published sometime—"

I cut him off there, having no intention to make the story known. "Sorry, buddy," I say, giving him a joking pat on the back. "Nobody else even knows I exist here. If I publish this on Earth as a true story, which it is, Child Welfare or whoever will have us all killed. I ought to just keep this to myself."

"Yeah..." Tristan says with a sheepish smile. "Man, I don't know what I'd do without you here. I'd go back to bungling everything."

"Naw, you'd be just fine!"

"And," he continues, "if Jake ever gets out of line, I can trust you to put him back in again."

"I will soon. Trust me, it's not going to be long...." I let a breath seep out through my teeth, making a prolonged hissing noise. "Shoot, I hope I can keep up with all this."

Tristan nods and picks up the binder again, hardly noticing my diatribe. After this long, he has become all but desensitized to it.

"This is great...holy crap, it's better than I could have done, and I'm almost thirty. You should be proud of yourself," he says. "Think about when you're my age! You're gonna be one of the great ones, kid!"

"There's still one problem. A big problem."

"What? I don't see anything—" He scans through the numerous pages at random, trying frantically to find what I'm talking about. For a moment, I stand and watch, amused at his "efforts," then direct him to the very first page.

"So?"

"All this work,"—I shake my head with a pensive smile—"and I still don't know what to title it..."

[Jaytalon]

And, also, here's the first chapter. It's not very good, since it had to be cropped to fit the length requirement. It seems that I can never get the first three chapters arranged the way I want them, but nonetheless, this works to describe the main character's backstory and foreshadows a large amount of the conflict in later chapters.

Spoiler

Chapter 1: The Start of Everything

Earth Day always comes around twice when you're in the fifth grade at Westlake Elementary.

Or thrice. Four times, maybe, if you're really unfortunate. Even five.

In fact let's just suffice it to say that in Mrs. Bean's class, every day is Earth Day.

Her classroom was hard on the eyes to begin with, full of psychedelic designs and colors, Beatles quotes stenciled on the paper-covered walls in funky fonts (she couldn't get away with writing on the real wall), bright pink shag carpets on the reading area. It was a wonder how anyone could get stuff done with all that crap in their eyes.

Never mind the room, from the moment I saw the woman herself, tall, lanky, sinewy, fifty-odd years old, with her long gray ponytail that was stringy and frayed and oiled from insufficient washing, complete with her Peace buttons and Save The Whales pins on her teacher's lanyard and a bright tie-dyed T-shirt, drinking a freaking wheatgrass shake, I knew it: she was one of them.

Jeremy did, too. On the first day of class, he leaned over to me and whispered, "There's a hippie if I ever saw one," as if I couldn't see it for myself.

And as if I couldn't smell it. She had a habit of hovering close to the desks. I don't care what they say in those Saving Water presentations that every kid is forced to watch every single year, five minutes is not enough time for a woman with long hair to take a shower.

For that matter, every three days was too long a gap between five-minute showers for anybody. I wondered if she learned it from her class. The difference was that a bunch of ten-year-olds can get away with not bathing as regularly because they haven't hit puberty and aren't as greasy; fifty-year-olds are oily and germs can breed under the flaps of their skin, so if anything, they need to shower more than once a day.

"Aw, shoot," Dan whispered to me in his deep drawl about an hour after Mrs. Bean started introducing herself to us, "that lady need a shower."

I thought I could see Mrs. Bean's eyes glinting in his direction, but I wasn't sure. Her sharp cheekbones and nose in conjunction with her slightly droopy skin made her look hawklike, and there was no doubt that she had hawk-sharp eyes.

"Boy, I think someone needs a shower," Clark told me about thirty minutes later. He tried to tell me more, but I hushed him to the best of my ability on the false grounds that we needed to listen to the teacher.

Drake had an impish, almost serene smile on his face. "My mom says that it's polite to give the teacher a gift sometime during the first week," he said when Mrs. Bean was over at her desk as we worked on an easy Getting To Know You questionnaire, which was covered in odd designs and written in Comic Sans. "I say screw the gift card. I'm getting her some deodorant. And soap. A whole basket of soap."

"I would imagine that she could take a hint," Jeremy agreed.

"Oh!" chipped in Tess. "Get her some lavender soap. She seems like a lavender woman." She paused for a moment, tapping her gel pen on her chin and making a series of purple dots. "On second thought, maybe incense-scented soap, and some lavender shampoo, and maybe...spearmint conditioner? It sounds a bit weird, but it might work. Jay, does that sound good?"

I shrugged. I had always been a connoisseur of bath gels and soaps, spending much of my time at the mall at Bath and Body Works and actually looking forward to visits to Linens 'N' Things with my mom, but Tess was the master, so much so that she did not feel the need to visit Bath and Body Works unless it was to buy something, which took all of ten seconds. She knew the scent of every product by name, and knew more about shampoo and hair serums than your average professional therapist.

On the other hand, I believe I once used some sort of hair serum to get the stench of garlic and oil out of my clothes after a messy game at a summer camp. It wasted the entire bottle and then some other stuff I mixed in with it, but I'd say it worked pretty well, though my underwear never quite lost the faint scent of garlic, and always bore the oil stains on the back.

"Well, I think it sounds good." Tess returned to coloring an intricate border on her paper.

Misty, however, took a direct approach. "Yo, Teach!" she yelled across the room to the desk in the corner. Mrs. Bean looked up from her attendance sheet and showed some worn white teeth. "It's the first day of school! You oughtta celebrate by takin' a ten-minute shower!"

Mrs. Bean still forced on a smile.

"Hey, you could celebrate your un-first-days-of-school, too! You can celebrate every day!"

"Misty, do your paper, please," said Mrs. Bean.

"I dunno. That long ponytail needs a lot o' washin'!"

The next day, Mrs. Bean came to school with her hair in a neat bob around her face, nice and short and reasonably clean, and so it stayed.

She smelled better after that, though her clothes still carried the remnants of spilled wheatgrass juice. I figured I could put up with that, and decided to accept victory and start focusing on learning from her as my teacher.

It wasn't long after that I grew to absolutely adore Mrs. Bean. Despite her fanatical environmentalist beliefs, which she expanded on at great length at random points throughout the day, her head teemed with other brilliant ideas that echoed my beliefs much more closely, which she also tended to discourse on.

A lover of poetry and classic literature, Mrs. Bean read to us a new story or poem every day, and through it, we took levels in literary aptitude without even realizing it. I loved the stories especially. The Most Dangerous Game. The Necklace. Sections from To Kill A Mockingbird, which Drake and I both promptly read on our own; parts of A Separate Peace; all of The Giver; Shakespeare's works; and even The Lord of the Rings, which I already adored passionately.

She always, always engaged the class with her brilliant analyses, intriguing assignment prompts that almost everyone enjoyed doing, and, above all, her ability to waste most of the class talking in her eccentric, theatrical manner. No matter what she was talking about, she always managed to get the class's full attention.

And she knew it. Don't forget that, although Mrs. Bean was more than a hippie, she was still a hippie, and a perfectly stereotypical one at that. As we know, stereotypical hippies absolutely love to talk about the environment. She was on the ball, always seeing new opportunities and methods of teaching, and she deployed her own melodramatic way of speaking to great effect during her "green lectures," as I termed them.

The vast majority of the class remained firmly spellbound, but after a while, my willing suspension of disbelief was almost at its end. I began to realize that every single lecture boiled down to the same points, until it just became a jumbled, unbroken stream of thoughts, as if Mrs. Bean forgot for a while that she was a teacher with an organized lesson plan and started acting like she was simply musing in front of a hippie commune.

Hippie banter is something that I have very little tolerance and even less liking for, especially the stuff about how humans are terrible and aren't part of nature and should never have existed, and that's always been the case with me. By mid-September, I had grown sick and tired of hearing about the world's mistakes and shortcomings, and tried to tune her out most of the time.

Drake began to lose interest as well.

"I'm learning Esperanto. It's not like I have anything better to do when she's rambling," he told me on the fourteenth of the month, while Mrs. Bean was going on in the background. He pointed to his Cornell notes (the district's preferred note-taking style) full of words and definitions and his own annotations. "It's fun. You ought to try it"

Drake was such a geek, but a smart geek, no doubt about that. No, scratch "smart," he was brilliant, and had "future English major" written all over him—in his vocabulary, his speech patterns, his comprehension, everything. He always told me that I also had some really bright potential in the field of linguistics, and that I was the only person his age he could rely on for competition, which is why he suggested Esperanto to me and nobody else.

I smiled and told him I'd take it up.

The next day, Jeremy brought a book of optical illusions to class, which he showed to everyone at our table—me, Drake, Tess, Clark, Misty, and Dan; my whole group of friends.

"I'm thinking about going into hypnosis as a hobby," he said, sounding proud of himself. "I love things like this."

The idea of bringing that book to class didn't work out so hot for him. Misty took it for the last hour, much to high-strung Jeremy's annoyance, couldn't stop staring at it, almost in a trance. (Come to think of it, she had a similar interest in the room's décor.) I suspect that she was high or drunk or both to be so fascinated by it, which wasn't good, but it was the order of the day with Misty. I was just glad that she was being quiet.

The day after that, I brought Klutz a book about paper airplanes, and started folding them in class. As the hour passed, I managed to fold ten before the bell rang, and was satisfied that I had found a new way to keep the time rolling while tuning Mrs. Bean out.

It was time to go home, which normally made me happy like it would any normal kid, but today, I almost wanted to stay and practice my "not-listening" skills.


Our group's going-home patterns were firmly set, and it always stayed that way. Tess, Dan, and Misty always rode the short bus; Drake got picked up by his mother; and Clark, Jeremy and I all walked together to my house, and from there the two boys went their separate ways to get home.

This particular walk was slow and awkward, for reasons I could hardly understand. I suspected that Clark was going through another rough patch in his friendship with Jeremy, which largely stemmed from rumors that Jeremy and I, who had been good friends since the first grade, were dating (mind you, we were just barely ten years old at the time), and Clark had had a crush on me ever since I had allowed him to sit with me at lunch in the third, when he was new and nobody else would accept him. I tolerated Clark, but just barely.

On the other hand, Jeremy and I were peas in a pod, sharing several common interests, mannerisms, and opinions on everything under the sun. Most of our time was spent looking down at the idiocy around us, commenting and joking and having a grand time in general. For a while, we were each other's only friend in our grade level and were perfectly content with it, until the rest of the kids—all manner of social pariahs and short bus kids, who mostly came and went—started to flock to us.

Especially me. It was like I had a neon sign over my head that read, "Misfits Welcome Here." It was true, but sometimes, it wore down my patience, and I had to try and suppress my frustration most of the time. I didn't want to hurt them—most didn't have anywhere else to go, so how could I turn them away?

And of all of them, Clark was the one that stuck the most like industrial-strength Krazy Glue, and he did not hesitate to let everyone else know it.

"So..." I kicked at a Pepsi can with my thumbs in my pockets, hoping that the casual energy would assuage the crackling tension. "Mrs. Bean really is into that environmentalist stuff, huh?"

"I noticed that you guys weren't paying attention. None of you were," Clark said. "Except for me."

I could see that Jeremy had to bite his lip. "You're still listening to her, Clark? Really?"

Clark gave him his signature smoldering glare. He had intense hazel-blue eyes set in a sharply-defined, tan face, which was especially good for glaring at people.

"I care about the environment." He crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders over. "I care a lot. Did you know that every day, acres and acres of rainforests are destroyed to make room for new slums and stuff?"

"Yeah."

"And that trees are supposed to eat carbon, but there aren't enough trees and too much carbon, so all that carbon just stays in the air and traps heat. That's what causes global warming."

"We know, Clark."

"And cow farts—"

"We know about the freaking cow farts!" Jeremy burst out. "The reason we stopped listening to Mrs. Bean is because we knew that crap already!"

Clark didn't appreciate that in the slightest. I could sense a fight breaking out as we stepped into my driveway, and that was something we couldn't have.

I kicked the can one last time. "We just got a new washer," I said to change the topic. "It's bright maroon, like our van."

"Is it a top load or a front load?" asked Clark.

Confused, I stared at him blankly, waiting for an explanation. Clark could be cryptic like that, taking it as a given that everyone else would know what he was talking about.

"Do you load it from the top or the front?"

"Oh! Front. What does that matter?"

Clark narrowed his eyes like I was crazy or stupid or both. "Because if you have a top load, it wastes energy and kills the environment."

It kills the environment. Of course.

This time, it was my turn to cast him a glare. "Clark, that's ridiculous. Owning a top load doesn't mean you're going to kill the planet. One washer won't matter," I chided him. In the process, I didn't bother to tell him that our old washer was a top load, and we'd had it for twice as long as I'd been alive.

I squared off to aim the abandoned can into the dumpster, kicked, and made a perfect shot.

For this, Clark gave me a nudge on the shoulder. "Recycle!" he cried.

"Aargh! Clark, would you please—" I threw a glance at Jeremy, who was biting his lip to keep from laughing again. He could probably see my steam rising to the top with every word Clark said. The boy was certainly pushing all the right buttons, almost as if he was trying to annoy me.

Well, two could play that game, I decided.

"It's too late now, anyway," I said with deliberate nonchalance, bordering on callousness. "You'll have to dig it up. Besides, it's just one can."

"It is not 'just one can,' Jay!" Clark stomped his foot and stalked away to get the can out of the garbage. "It's never 'just one can.' Well, it's always 'just one can.' That's what's causing all our problems," he said from deep inside the belly of the dumpster. The only things Jeremy and I could see were his legs flailing about as he dug deeper and deeper into the leaked garbage.

Jeremy leaned over to me. "Do you really need to be annoying him? He is bipolar."

"He's fun to annoy."

He chuckled. "Yeah, you're kinda right."

"Has he had his medicine?"

"Well, I think so, considering he made a big scene in the cafeteria and threw pudding at the principal and the nurse had to drag him away. No point in dragging him away without making him take his medicine."

"Then I think he's stable."

"But that doesn't give you the license to be a jerk!"

"Guys, I got the can!"

We snapped to attention to see Clark proudly holding his dinged-up "prize" in our faces, with leaked garbage covering his arms and all in his hair and even on his face and shirt...but he had the can. Apparently, that was the important thing.

Jeremy squinted and crinkled his nose at the smell of garbage. "Really, buddy? All this over one stupid can?" He laughed. "That really was buried in there! How..."

"Too buried. That makes no sense." I shook my head. "Besides, that's a Dr. Pepper can, and I could have sworn mine was a Pepsi can."

"Let me see that trash." Jeremy sauntered over to the dumpster and peered in. Within seconds, he burst out laughing. "You got the wrong can, Clark!" He reached in, grabbed a dented though otherwise intact and clean Pepsi can, and held it up for the world to see.

Clark shrugged, grabbed the can from Jeremy, and threw them both in the recycling bin just as a red Hybrid pulled up next to us. Inside, Clark's dad honked the horn for him to get in while waving at us in his normal flamboyant manner.

"This," Clark said, rapping the scarlet chrome, "is a Hybrid. Ninety miles to the gallon. It really saves energy." He crawled into the front seat and slammed the door. As it pulled away, he shouted out the window, "You should get one!"

With a snort, I waved halfheartedly at the car, which was by now halfway down the block—Clark's dad was a chronic speeder. "See ya, nature boy."

After the car had turned the corner at the end of the block, as if Clark could still hear me as long as we could see the car, I turned to Jeremy and rather deliberately informed him, "I have had it just about up to here with the 'environment!'"

"You're not the only one, trust me."

"And for that matter, I'm tired of hearing about all this negative stuff, you know, like about how, 'Oh, it's all our fault,' 'We're gonna destroy the world,' 'We should never have existed,' and all that other crap."

"So?" Jeremy shrugged. "What are we gonna do?"

"We're gonna go inside and have a soda," I said, knowing full well that he always expected an answer. "Then I'll research Going Green on the computer. It's not all negative."


"Okay," I said, pointing at the computer screen with my free hand (the other had a Dr. Pepper in it). "Here's a list of all the businesses in our area that are trying to go green, right now."

I barely gave Jeremy time to read any of them. I was more focused on scrawling down the list with the mouse, slowly, slowly, seemingly forever, to emphasize just how long the list was. There were small businesses and mega-corporations alike, from a little privately-owned coffee shop down on the edge of town to the enormous Wal-Mart in the center, and the whole slew of things in between.

Not only that, but individuals everywhere were going green. Neighborhoods. Schools. Institutions of every shape and size. I already knew that advertisements telling us to reduce, reuse, and recycle were everywhere, as well as advertisements for clean fuel sources like wind turbines, and programs entirely devoted to teaching people not about our wrongdoings to scare 'em straight, but about how to make a positive difference.

And so we sat for an hour, researching, and I was absolutely reveling in feelings of optimism and hope for the world. Maybe Mrs. Bean was just preaching gloom and doom, and these were the people to listen to. There was hope yet. Through the industry and urbanization, which I never had any problem with in the first place, little shoots of green were starting to emerge and blossom at an incredible rate.

I felt better already.


After Jeremy went home, a sudden wave of tiredness and fatigue came over me. I told my mother that I was going to take a nap, put on my pajamas and bathrobe, set my iPod on Sweet Baby James, and settled into bed. I fell asleep with my headphones still in my ears, even before the first chorus of my song was over.

[Jaytalon]

I finally have the second chapter (not counting the prologue) up. As with the first one, it's not high literature and certainly not my best work, even after a number of rewrites (which is why it took so long), but it gets things across.

Spoiler

Chapter 2: In Which I Begin to Question My Own Sanity

As I lay there, falling asleep as my music played, my thoughts began to turn into my dreams. The flashes of neon light I saw in my mind started to come together, forming a sort of tunnel; a moving, swirling torque of pure light and energy. It whizzed by me in all of its blended glory, purple and blue and bright, blinding white, seeming to go on forever.

And then it ended, and I left my trance with a jolt.

I found myself in an odd state of lucidity then, totally aware of myself and the fact that the world around me was a dream.

I tried to stand up, but then lurched forward and fell onto the ground, skidding across it on my side. I felt my whole body on fire with pain, outside and in, with my head throbbing and my chest burning especially.

I couldn't focus my eyes no matter how hard I tried. All I saw were shades of brown and gray, and heard an indistinct, constant buzzing noise.

My head started to get fuzzier with each breath I took. The dream world began to fade, and the noise became dull. I tried to scream; tried to move—but it was impossible.

Then, out of nowhere, something hit me hard and fast in the side, almost like a speeding bullet. The pain I felt then was indescribable, sharp and aching at the same time, throbbing and stinging.

A long, drawn-out wail rose above the background noise, almost inhuman in its sound, and I realized with a sudden chill that it was me, crying out in pain.

A chain of footsteps sounded nearby, like bombs going off inside my ears through the sound of my own howling.

Then, another voice joined in.

"Oh, my God," it repeated, over and over, growing more urgent every time. "Oh...oh...oh, God..."

I knew that I was shutting down.

Then, I felt something soft and flexible finding a grip on my chin, and cool air rushed into my mouth and lungs, assuaging the burning for a moment.

I took several deep breaths, feeling the fire in my lungs and throat subside, and then everything went dark.

* * * * *

Even when I woke up, I didn't open my eyes.

I felt the goosebumps running all up and down my back, my arms, and my legs; the cold air, dry and crisp and sterile, managed to penetrate my pajamas and bathrobe with ease.

I tucked my feet in under me, and realized as my skin rubbed across the bed that the sheets and covers were a lot scratchier than I remembered, and I could have sworn that I'd slept on softer floors than the mattress I was on.

Must be time to get some new sheets, I thought drowsily, still in a daze from my earlier nightmare.

The nightmare!

With a sudden shock, I remembered everything—the burning, the pain, the acrid air, the dull colors, the voices.... Even though my throat and eyes were still stinging, it hurt to take deep breaths, and everything around me had a different feel to it, I managed to convince myself that it was the result of allergies and grogginess, combined with an episode of sleep paralysis. Terrifying, yes, but normal; it wasn't the first time I'd had a paralyzing nightmare, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

That's when I finally opened my eyes, only to find a terrible shock. To the left and to the right, there was nothing to see but blinding white walls bathed in fluorescent light, metal cabinets, shiny chrome everything, a large rack with everything from IV drips to syringes to tweezers on it, and a gurney—in fact, the one I was lying on.

This was not where I had gone to sleep last.

When put into that kind of situation, I did what most kids my age would do: that is, I panicked. Tears rolled down my cheeks, my heartbeat was racing, and my breaths were short and fast. All I could even think to do was call wildly to no one in particular, calling for help, calling for someone to come over and talk to me...

"Help!" I yelled, only to be cut off by a series of violent coughs. "Help! Somebody! Anybody!" I pushed myself as hard as I could into my pillow, pulling the corner of my bathrobe over my eyes, refusing to believe what was happening. "Please...help..."

I could hear noise directly outside of the room, slipping in through the crack under the door at the other end. It sounded like people talking urgently as they rushed by. Occasionally, a scream of pure agony would rise above them, followed by more shouts from the others.

What were they doing to that poor guy to make him scream like that?

I shuddered and pulled the covers over my head, lying down flat in an attempt to look invisible to anyone who might look inside. I prayed now that nobody had heard my cry for help, and as the voices and screams grew more distant, it seemed that I was safe for the moment.

I started to poke my head out from under the covers, and then felt the presence of a tall figure looming over me.

Trembling, I cast my gaze upward and saw the sharp, lined, thin face of a middle-aged woman, looking concernedly down at me. Her hair overshadowed her face for her most part, with her curls spiraling so far down that I could smell her shampoo.

"H-hi." I squinted, trying to pick out her features. "Hello, there, um..." I eyed a pair of dog tags around her neck, which read, "Dr. Mildred Jacobson."

"Doctor Mildred Jacobson," I muttered aloud. "Is...is that yours?"

The woman shuddered as she pulled up a swivel chair from somewhere below my range of vision. When she sat down and her conspicuously-dyed mahogany hair finally parted, I could see that she was smiling, but wincing at the same time. "I despise that name," she said. "It sounds like a moldy old woman's name. I go by Millie."

"Considerably perkier," I choked out. "Who...exactly who are you?"

Millie pulled up a clipboard from some other unseen place and grabbed a pen from her pocket. "I'm the head of the medical department."

"Head of the medical department of where?"

She looked up at me from her writing with a raised eyebrow and a scowl, then went back to scrawling notes, presumably about me. "I have a lot of questions about you, kid," she said, trying to push my own question to the back of her mind.

"I have way more for you than you do for me, trust me."

"Where did you come from?" she pursued.

I fidgeted, wriggling my toes and fiddling with the creases on my covers, until Millie repeated her question and added, "We've never seen you before," which was enough to get my heart pumping again.

"Well, of course not. It's a big world out there."

She cocked her eyebrow again and flared her nostrils. "Not here, it isn't. Whose kid are you, anyway?"

"I, uh, I..." I shut my eyes tight. This can't be happening. This can't be happening. Now, a feeling of detached denial was coming over me, protecting me from the surreal nightmare around me. "My mother is Callie Thornton, my father is Matthew Thornton, my little brother's name is Tyler..."

At once, Millie reached into her pocket and pulled out something that looked like some sort of cell phone or pager, but much smaller and very sleek, rounded and streamlined and covered with shiny black chrome. It was emblazoned with a logo on the front—a cluster of four circles, two white and two yellow, with the letters "RDA" written next to it in large yellow capitals. There was something else written beneath it, but it was too small for me to read.

"Hey, it's Millie," she spoke into it. "Yeah, hi. Listen, I need you to do me a favor here. You know that kid somebody found outside? Huh? Oh! Oh, well, good for you, then! Well, the alternative just wasn't an option to begin with, I guess."

I sighed. At this rate, whatever we were trying to accomplish here would never get done.

"You were outside and—what? I always told you that you were gonna hurt someone one of these days if you weren't careful. I don't care how much practice you've had, something could happen, and then I would be the one dealing with some guy who got hit in the head with a flying—all right, all right! Okay, I need you to check the records for anyone here named Callie Thornton...Matthew Thornton...Tyler Thornton. Okay, thanks, I'll explain later. Bye."

"Is...whatever you were talking about...why something hit me in my side earlier?" I asked. Millie, of course, was too busy writing to answer.

I raised my shirt to look at the spot where whatever it was had hit, and then shuddered in revulsion. It was horribly bruised, from red to purple to blue to black, with veins crisscrossing right below the skin. I would probably always have that scar to show for it, too.

The condition of the bruise caught Millie's attention. She dropped her clipboard and began scrutinizing it, really probing at it, poking it with her finger despite my cries of pain.

"Okay, please stop, it'll get better on its own!" I pleaded further with her to stop, but to little avail, until she finally stalked off to one of the chrome cabinets, then came back with a pad soaked with some sort of gel.

"Painkiller," she explained as she applied the ointment. The aching disappeared in a matter of seconds. I managed a smile and a "thank you," then let her examine the bruise until the cell phone-like thing in her pocket went off again.

"Hey, did you find anything?" she chirped into the speaker. For a moment, she just listened to the person on the other end of the line, looking almost alarmed. "No? Well...uh, okay then. I'll figure this out eventually. Bye again."

She folded the phone and stuck it back into her pocket, staring ahead with an emptiness in her eyes. "There's nobody in the database with those names," she muttered, seemingly to herself, and then she regained her composure like nothing had happened. "In the meantime, I had better get some information on you. What's your full name?"

"Jay Cash Thornton."

"Somehow, I expected something a bit more..." She eyed my features carefully, trying to settle on a good word. "...feminine."

"And I'm darn proud of it, too."

"How old are you?"

"Ten, as of the end of last month. The thirty-first, to be exact." I took a deep breath and asked, "What was happening to whoever was outside my room? You know, a few minutes ago, right before you came in?"

"There was a banshee attack outside," Millie said without looking up from her writing.

"Banshee?" I echoed. I had heard my medieval-roleplay-game-obsessed brother talking about banshees before, and he and his friends still passionately claimed that they had seen one up close and personal on a Boy Scout trip, but I didn't know what they were. He told once told me that they were some sort of "restless spirit," but I had a hard time believing that a restless spirit had attacked anybody.

Of course, given the situation I was in, anything's possible.

"I guess you've been hanging out with the Na'vi-sympathizers. You know—an ikran."

"Na'vi? Ikran?"

Millie reached up and laid her hand on my forehead, then my neck, then my wrist, trying to discern if there was anything seriously wrong with me. In her doing this, I managed to catch a glimpse of her clipboard and all the information she had written about me. It was mostly illegible, but I could pick out my name, and a bit of a description of what I had gone through: "Thirty seconds outside w/o exomask. No permanent lung damage sustained; treatment is not necessary. Large bruise on side; will scar."

There was another description of my mental state: "Confused, possibly delirious; claims to know nothing about basics of the moon and the base."

But perhaps the strangest thing was my birth date: "9/31/40."

But that's impossible, I thought as Millie returned to writing, having found nothing physically wrong with me. Maybe it's just a typo.
"Hey, Millie?" I reached out to tap her on the shoulder, then pointed to the date on the clipboard. "I think the birth date you wrote down...how do I say this tactfully? It, uh, it has not yet come to pass."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "Would you please stop talking in riddles?"

"No, I mean, you wrote my birth year down as 2040. By that time, I'll be old! My birthday was in the year 2000."

"What are you talking about?" Millie almost laughed. "The year is 2154!"

"No, it's not. It's 2010." I began to tremble, and tears pooled in my eyes. "Please, please tell me that this is a joke! Where am I?"

"You. Are in. The medical wing. Of Hell's Gate."

"Hell's Gate?"

"The RDA colony, Hell's Gate."

My stomach churned violently, and I felt like my heart was about to burst. I scrunched up tightly, tucking my knees in and balling my fists up until my fingernails broke the skin. I didn't care. All I wanted was to leave this place, to wake up in Austin, Texas, in my home, in my bed...this was just a dream...all just a dream...

"Kid, look at me. I don't know who you are, or where you came from, but there is something that I think you should know."

Millie leaned forward and grasped my shoulder, staring straight into my eyes as I waited for a final answer. She took one last deep breath, and then spoke:

"You're on Pandora."

Some author's notes:

This, obviously, is where we actually start getting into the actual Avatar-related stuff. (Hey, it may be AU, but not so AU that it doesn't involve Avatar at all!)

The beginning of the chapter is when Jay "wakes up" on Pandora. Needless to say, she's already been breathing Pandoran air for several seconds, and it's messing with her head, which is why that part is so cryptic in order to reflect her jumbled thoughts and feelings. Basically, someone brought her an exomask, dragged her inside, and then she woke up again in the medical wing. (I know you guys are smart enough to figure it out, but I've been told that I'm hard to understand sometimes, so I'm just making sure.)

The next chapter is where the plot starts to pick up, and things will start to come together.

Lastly, I'm going to warn you that this story will take a while--it could be over a year of intermittent updates, as this is a fairly big story. It will be far from perfect, as I am beginning to figure out. I've decided that it doesn't have to be perfect on the first try, so this can just be the first draft: writing by the seat of my pants; fleshing out the plot ideas that I have now as I go along. Then I can re-write it to look a bit more graceful, streamline it, make it flow better, etc. I'm sure that by the end, my writing will have definitely improved.