It's safe to assume that people who believe that Reality Bites live in
the world on their own creation. A world fashioned by their own
imagination...through art, through dreams, through anything one
perceives as her destiny. Where the impossible is possible, where
dreams are reality, where the end is endless....a mixture of paradoxes
all blended together in one fantastic realm.
Some call it a place for dreamers, those who defy Reality on their own
accord. Others call it hogwash, that such a world exists. And still,
others believe that this is a realm of beginnings, endings, and
eternity....where nothing is limited as long as the person has a
complete control of her visions.
Though the place remains nameless, I believe the third statement.
Where visionaries like us are given a perchance to dream, to explore the
possibilities of one's mind, one's imagination.
I called this place Ether.
A.C.E. NON-JQ PRODUCTIONS hesitantly presents........
E. T. H. E. R.
(Everything Through Heart, Everything Real)
I figured that Ether was a perfect name for the place. Webster defined
it as "An imaginary substance regarded by the ancients as filling all
the space beyond the sphere of the moon, and making up all the stars and
planets."
Ether is a substance that creates, yet it exists as something unproven,
something unreal. Something that makes things possible.
Something that works like a person's mind, one's imagination.
Something that captures the attention of everyone's soul.
In my case, however, it went through extremes. It captured my
attention alright.......
By pulling me in. PHYSICALLY.
And so my journey on Ether begins.
EPISODE ONE: NEW BEGINNINGS
"Hey Alexis, what's the matter?"
Alexis slumped on her chair, sulking. Her large, dark green sketchbook
lay in front of her, opened to a self-portrait of herself drawing. A
penciled, gray B marked the upper right corner of the page.
"I got a B....AGAIN," Alexis muttered in reply. She eyed her friend,
Annabelle, morosely. "What didja get for your 'mundane scene'?"
As expected, Annabelle got an A.
Alexis gave her friend a smile. "You deserved it," she commented.
Annabelle Arriola pushed up her glasses and smoothed her fine,
partly-bleached hair. "Yeah...but look what she told me."
Annabelle handed Alexis her sketch, which was of Annabelle reaching out
into nothingness in her empty locker. Alexis looked at the picture,
then at the neon pink Post-it note attached to the page.
"Very good, but next time, draw from life," Alexis read out loud. She
looked at Annabelle with wrinkled eyebrows. "So WHAT?!" she asked,
irritated. "I mean, you draw what you think inspires you!"
Annabelle shrugged. "Yeah, I mean...what if you don't like drawing
from life?" she sighed. "It's not that easy."
Alexis and Annabelle were two out of the three seniors relatively well
known for their drawing techniques, which mainly consisted of Japanese
Animation. Jael Cosico was the other one. Annabelle was number one,
and Alexis was forever envious of her friend's artistic capabilities and
she admired her enormously.
Alexis slumped back in her chair. "I can draw from life if I tried,"
she muttered. "But...it's so...BORING! I mean, HALF the time I live in
a dream world, nothing in reality inspires me." She sulked further down
her seat. "I don't do good when I'm not inspired."
The two girls were in their second period AP Art class at Notre Dame
Academy, a catholic high school for girls in California, USA. It was an
academically challenging high school, which was the only high school in
the US awarded with the Blue Ribbon Award for Academic Excellence twice
by the government.
Dyanna Schetina, a pale girl with red-dyed hair approached the group.
She was about an inch shorter than Alexis, who wore her hair regularly
with a flip, and who was extremely fascinated by her Russian heritage.
"Hey Dy," Alexis muttered. "What's up?"
Dyanna's gray-blue eyes flashed indignantly. "Do you know what Ms.
Beauvy said to me?" she whispered hoarsely. "She called me a SCREW UP!
She said that I'm always talking in class and doing other stuff that it
was the reason I can't draw!"
"That's stupid," Alexis snorted. "You never talk in class, unless it's
really important or unless you're asking a question, that is."
Ms. Sophia Beauvy was the AP Art teacher, and it was her first year of
teaching Notre Dame Academy. She was a good artist, but she could use
some help in teaching techniques as far as Alexis was concerned. She
tended to be overbearing, and some of her policies were useless....and
she didn't know the difference between her AP Art students' grades and
her Exploratory Art students' grades, since they all had class in the
same period in the same room.
Alexis sighed and grabbed her sketchbook and backpack as she turned to
leave when the bell rang.
"Maybe I'll give you a ride next time...." Jael Cosico told her usually
quiet friend, Alexis Ericta, as they made their way down the steps to go
to the main floor of the school campus.
"I wouldn't wanna bother you," Alexis said as they made their way to
the Senior Locker Hall. "My house's out of your way. Maybe when you
got the time."
"Yeah, okay," Jael replied. "Catch ya later, okay 'Lex?"
The black-haired, tan skinned girl waved as she hitched her dark blue
backpack up her shoulders and headed to her locker.
Alexis stopped by her locker, narrowly avoiding the door of Room 204 as
it suddenly swung open and a bunch of female students poured out. She
made a face. She HATED where her locker was located at, as it
threatened to give her a bruise on the forehead everytime she stood
behind the door next to it in order to open the metal thing.
She sighed tiredly and made a checklist on what she had to do. "I have
a Physics test.....a Comp Programming powerpoint thing I have to
do....oh jeez, plus the strategy and exhibits for the Mock Trial
Prosecution team....and my portfolio concentration...."
Alexis rested her forehead on the cool metal of her locker. She felt
so tired....
"Hey Alexis," Dyanna said, stopping by to see her groaning friend
muttering curses against her locker door. "What's wrong?"
Alexis looked at Dyanna tiredly. "Nothing," she said quietly. "i'm
just really really tired..."
"You look like hell," Dyanna teased, opening her locker.
"Thanks a lot."
Alexis caught a glimpse of herself in Dyanna's locker mirror. She
looked as bad as she felt. Her high-set ponytail sagged lower during
the course of the day, her scrunchie loosened so stray wisps of black,
shoulder-length strands framed her pale face and neck. Her dark brown
eyes looked tired and sleepy, and she just knew her father would be
late..AGAIN...to pick her and her sister, Natasha, up.
Once again, she cursed herself for being sixteen, unlicensed, and
unemployed.
She grabbed her huge sketch pad oout of her locker and closed the
door. She waved goodbye to Dyanna as she wove her way through the
string of students eager to go home.
By the time Alexis got home, it was already seven-fifteen in the
evening. The weather was starting to get colder at each passing day,
since it was the fall of her senior year in high school.
All she wanted was to lie on her medium-sized, quilted bedspread and
loll to sleep, but a part of her wanted to do something creative before
she did so.
She brushed her hair from her face and dropped on her knees in front of
her book shelf. She rummaged the things underneath the row of mystery
novels, and came across a dusty old box.
Alexis smiled slightly to herself. It was her box of old, used arcylic
paints...her first set of real art materials she ever gotten. Her
father gave it to her the last Christmas she spent in the Philippines,
and it had been forever since she used it last.
"Maybe it's about time I started dabbling with these things again..."
Alexis mused. She grabbed her platinum paint pallette and stood,
walking over to her desk. She propped her sketchbook up, then grabbed
some water from the bathroom just outside her bedroom, where she was.
After checking her horde of e-mail she got daily from her friends in
the Jonny Quest Mailing List, she started to work, putting in a CD of
classical violin music to play in her CD-ROM. Once again, she kicked
herself for not borrowing Jael's Celtic Music collection. She was
curious to hear it.
Her eyes traveled to her desk, seeing her "scratch" notebook. She
picked it up and flipped the pages, groaning slightly when she realized
that most of the stories in it were unfinished. She made up her mind to
finish a chapter of another JQ 2000 story later on as she placed it in
her lap.
Alexis got to work, mixing the acryllics in her pallette and swirled
them around the thick paper of her sketch book. The violins played a
soothing melody, and like one of the things her old art teacher, Mr.
Caspers, told her, "just do what you feel like doing."
It was almost as if she was on automatic pilot. Alexis didn't care on
what it looked like, it just felt like it was right. She swirled
patterns of red, green, blue, gold, brown...all the colors she was
envisioning in her mind. Whatever happened, she didn't want to paint
anything real. She wanted to paint something that inspired her,
something she alone can see.
When the CD finished all its twenty-five tracks, Alexis stopped, then
wheeled her chair back to look at her work.
Her brown eyes widened as she gaped at it. What she created seemed
unreal...ethereal at most. It was like a melding of the seasons, with
the green of Spring, the yellow of Summer, the white of winter, the
red-gold of spring all in one landscape. A green forest, dark in some
areas, with a clear, sparkling brook. Mountains stood out from the
horizon, with the white-capped peaks slightly pinkish from the setting
sun.
And in the middle of the path in the forest, stood a majestic Unicorn,
staring defiantly at a small Wyvern dragon which was hovering in front
and above it.
"Ummm....did I...DO that?" Alexis murmured to herself, blinking at the
arcryllic picture. Almost hesitantly, she reached out and touched it,
her heart hammering in her chest for no apparent reason.
"I never...I never drew or sketched anything like this before..." she
thought, her fingertips touching the white Unicorn, feeling the cool,
damp paint in her skin. "But actually PAINT it?"
She was in awe with her work, and didn't believe it came from her, and
as far as she knew, Alexis painted more on what she felt, not what she
saw.
"It looks so......REAL."
A warm, tingling sensation started spreading from her fingertips. As
Alexis' eyes widened, a glow pierced the part where she was touching the
unicorn, then shot out in front of her face.
In a split second, Alexis Marie Ericta vanished, dissolving in the air.
The paintbrush dropped on the coffee-and-milk colored carpet of the
room, ownerless.
*grin* Comments? Questions? Hey, for once, I'm a central
character...though it seems that I play the average human being again
*grin* to some extent. Well, any comments, send them all. And yes, this
IS the result of the fantasy survey.
ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF ETHER....
The young girl blinked at Alexis. She had her hair in a pony tail,
with a sword hanging from her side. She had a leather pouch on the side
of her hip, and black gloves covered her hands. She was dressed in a
long, green tunic and black leggings, with a yellow sash wrapped around
her waist.
"Boy," the girl tsked in disapproval, eyeing the taller, black-haired
girl. "You sure dress strange."
Alexis looked down at her clothes. She was dressed in a loose, white
button down polo shirt, a short khaki skirt, white socks, and
black-and-white nike sneakers with a big, jeans jacket tied around her
waist. Her hair was, as usual, worn in a high pony-tail.
"ME dress strange," Alexis cried defensively. "What about YOU?! You
look like one of those gang banging muggers about to hold me up!"
The girl raised her eyebrow. "What's a mugger?" she asked.
Alexis sighed. "Nevermind," she told the girl. "By any chance do you
know the way to Westchester from here?"
EPISODE TWO: THE CHILD MERCENARY
Coming soon :)
********************************************************************
* The Jonny Quest mailinglist jq@edc.ml.org *
********************************************************************
* To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to: majordomo@edc.ml.org *
* with the message: unsubscribe jq subject is ignored *
********************************************************************
(
geocities.com/televisioncity)