Young Writers Society

Evaline could hear the others follow behind her, and normally she would be paranoid enough to keep her eyes on them at all times, but right now, she didn't care. She just needed to leave, and if they were going to attack her, she knew she could stop it from happening.

She kept her gaze straight ahead with a focused expression, and she could hear Lee talk beside her, asking where she was from. Great. Small talk.

Evaline let out a silent sigh, her eyes not having left the woods in front of her despite feeling his eyes on her.

He said he was from the Earth Kingdom, which was... odd, to say the least. Like, where else would he be from, the Mars Kingdom? And why even say kingdom? She narrowed her eyes ahead of her, tempted to give him a strange look, but deciding not to.

Sure. She'll pile on to the strangeness.

"I am too," she said blankly in response.

Lee gave an awkward smile.

"It's always nice meeting someone else from it," he said. Evaline hadn't even looked at him, but part of him was grateful for that. Even though she didn't fit what he traditionally thought of as Earth Kingdom heritage, he was sure she would realize he didn't truly fit that region if she looked closely enough at him.

Then his comment registered.

Lee resisted the urge to sigh, groan or do anything else that showed just how frustrated he was with his improvisation. It's always nice meeting someone else from it? What other places were there besides the Earth Kingdom? The Water Tribes? No one in the Water Tribe would be wearing such thin clothes, and it wasn't even like he regularly ran into people from them in Ba Sing Se. They had no reason to leave the poles.

"I was in Ba Sing Se earlier," he said, trying to once again seem like he really was an Earth Kingdom man.

(Even though man was a very loose term at this point; he really didn't feel like the adult he knew he was supposed to be now.)

"I work in a tea shop there," he said. "I haven't always lived there, but I came to find refuge from the war. It's...safe."

Peanut agreed with Maliachi as well, nodding his way before setting off towards Lee and Evaline.

Amused by the conversation, Peanut walked closer to the two of them. A tea shop sounded rather nice right now, a calm setting would do wonders for the moral of the rest of the people walking, that's for sure.

"I am not from the 'Earth Kingdom,'" Peanut said, putting the same strange emphasis that Lee put on those words. "But I'm just from a small town. Hey, is your leg okay? I'm no doctor, but we can probably figure out a splint or something 'cause you're still limping."

Lee faltered - and almost tripped when his injured leg lagged a little bit behind his good one.

"It's alright," he reassured Peanut with a tiny, dismissive wave of his hand and a smile. "I fell through a building when I was exploring the Lower Ring with one of my coworkers. It's not sprained or anything - I just had a piece of wood in it for a little bit. Walking makes where the wood went through hurt. Running doesn't really help, either."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"But I'm flam-" He faltered. "-doing okay! Just in a little pain. Thank you for the offer, though."

The rest of the humans, Chudnofsky continued to assume they were humans, made their way closer to Evaline. Chudnofsky hung back. He knew when he was the odd one out and as much as his natural instinct was to get to know the people and try to befriend him, in this instance he simply didn't seem to be welcome. At least the two that weren't Evaline at least seemed to agree with his idea and seemed to somewhat acknowledge his existence. This was a new feeling. For the first time in his career as a superhero, he was me with a situation where he wished he was more like the rest of his crew and not quite so friendly. Any of his colleagues would have proceeded to establish control of the group and situation, scaring the crap out of everyone if that had been necessary. Hopefully they would actually find shelter...Chudnofsky personally could sleep wherever, but the same was certainly not true for the far more fragile lifeforms in front of him.

Even for a strange hallucination, they were all talking so strange, and Evaline had no idea why. She couldn't help but give Lee a strange glance.

She had never heard of Ba Sing Se, but there was a lot in the world she didn't know about. Perhaps he lived outside the sectors, and that was the name of the town? It made sense since he said he took refuge from the war. At least the ungoverned lands were safer than the bloodshed war effort she was leading.

How he didn't know who she was—even with her name—she didn't know. But she was glad word didn't travel that far to him.

The other woman brought up his limping leg, and she just remembered that the injury was likely stemming from her.

She didn't care, though.

The winged Chud man was also behind the group, seemingly sulking. These were all the strangest people she had ever met

"We'll need food and water to survive," she said dryly out loud as she briskly continued to walk ahead, interrupting all conversations. "I don't know what is toxic here. The air is breathable, but the water may not be drinkable. The food may be poisonous. There is a lot I don't know."

She paused, wondering how long they were going to be here.

"I need to find a way out of here," she mumbled.

"If this is the Spirit World, the food and water should be safe," Lee said.

He wasn't sure why he said the if; he also wasn't sure why he was so reluctant to address how dysfunctional this group felt. Some part of him was starting to realize how wrong this place was. None of the people here matched the rules of what he knew of the Spirit World. They didn't match the regular world, either.

So what did that mean for him and his firebending?

And his secret?

He liked the idea of finally being open about that. He couldn't remember the last time someone actually called him by his real name. He had told the other Lee - the real Lee - his name before, but he didn't know the truth behind it.

"But I haven't been everywhere in the Spirit World," he finally added, giving an awkward smile, "and I don't know if it works differently here. At the very least, we can breath? I don't think we're at a high altitude, either. It would be harder to breath then."

Peanut, in between considering whether everyone semed crazy or whether she was the crazy one, peeked at Maliachi who was further behind them. She didn't have much to say about whatever 'Spirit World' meant to Lee, capitalizing those words as they sounded to be 'important words' for him, at least.

She decided to slow her steps, heading towards the rather tall Maliachi who seemed a bit small all alone. "Would you also say you're from Earth? Or the 'Earth Kingdom?' Or something else?"

Evaline slowly nodded along with Lee's comments, but she actually had no idea what he was droning on about. A tree branch got in her way, so she pushed it back in front of her so she could walk through it, but then let go, not caring if it would whip towards anyone behind her.

Lee had mentioned the Spirit World before. Spirit World, Earth Kingdom... what was up with all these names? It sounded like he took names straight out of a fantasy book. He may have been a bit strange, but at least he seemed to have good survival instincts. Not useless.

She squinted in front of her as if the tree-line held all the answers.

"So..." she said slowly, thinking of her words carefully. "You think we're dead?"

That was what he meant by Spirit World, right? He believed in an afterlife, and that was the name of it? Evaline had heard to traditional societies still believing in the afterlife, and although there were many names for it, she hadn't heard of it being called the Spirit World before. But he seemed to live in a traditional society that had all sorts of names she hadn't heard of before.

The thought of being dead terrified her, but she didn't let it show.

The branch slammed right into his face.

Lee stumbled back, the pain taking a moment to register. When he finally did, he ducked underneath the branch and tried to tell himself that Evaline hadn't done it because he was a firebender. It had to just be her personality.

And then she spoke.

And asked a question that most people would know the answer to - or would have at least phrased a little differently. Lee looked between her and the others, his brain finally putting the pieces together.

He wasn't in the Spirit World.

He wasn't anywhere he was remotely familiar with.

He came to a stop.

"You're-You're not from the Earth Kingdom," he managed to get out. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? If you were from the Earth Kingdom, you...you would have been more scared of my firebending. You wouldn't have been so accepting of a firebender from the Earth Kingdom."

Evaline could hear Lee drift away as he talked, so she stopped walking and turned around, letting the annoyance show in her face. This 'hallucination' seemed to feel so real, and the fact that she couldn't hide back her emotions seemed to make her think this was reality. But she didn't think about that too much.

"I'm from Earth," she answered back, emphasizing Earth and leaving out the kingdom part. "Fire isn't an uncommon power. At least, energy conversion isn't."

She narrowed her eyes at Lee, trying to study him. He was so odd. Why did he call his powers firebending? This was getting annoying.

"Why do you talk so weird?" she mumbled bluntly, half-rolling her eyes and turning back around to continue forward.

Chudnofsky smiled at the unexpected question. He had prepared himself to get ignored the rest of the night and act all lonely when someone immediately broke that plan. Well, he wasn't complaining about it, that's for sure.

"Oh...um not, not of Earth...in fact...I live probably about as far away from Earth as you can reasonably get...I'm from a place called Hydrania. I doubt you would have heard of it. Not many have. Where are you from?"

Lee gave the back of her head a long, tired look.

He had a feeling that she wasn't going to believe him no matter what he said or did. She said she was from a place called Earth, but Earth seemed to be a different place than the Earth Kingdom. No one would ever talk so casually about firebending if they were from Lee's world.

But he still followed after her.

"I'm not using weird words," he said. "I'm just using words that you don't recognize. If you were from where I'm from, you wouldn't call firebending common. It technically is. But no one outside of the Fire Nation treats it that way."

He rubbed the back of his neck as they walked.

"...This is one of the weirder situations I've been in," he admitted. "But it's not too...strange. Maybe that's the reason I'm more open to the idea of us being from two different worlds. I can't explain how. I don't know if I ever would be able to. But I know that your world and my world are nowhere near the same, and I have a feeling everyone else here is from a different world than me, too."

Evaline was trying to understand Lee.

Part of her wanted to dismiss him and live in denial, saying he was a crazy man who didn't know what he was talking about. But at the same time, part of her appealed to his logic. Somehow, explaining everything away by 'other worlds' made sense, and it especially didn't make her the crazy one.

It was a bizarre, strange, and almost hilarious idea.

But it still made the most sense.

Her head throbbed, and she glanced back at Lee while she continued walking, deeply focused on the path ahead of her.

"Other worlds," she repeated quietly. "You think we're all from other worlds... sent to a new world?"

"Oh, wow! I definitely haven't heard of that before," Peanut said. "Normally, I'd freak about that more, but this whole day has been crazy, so I've lost all of my allotted scream time."

Peanut smiled then, shaking her head. "I'm from Earth, clearly, and from Barrio Nelson, a small town in California. Nice to meet you, Maliachi."

"Ah," she muttered, groaning mentally at how red her cheeks were at her slip up. "I'm not great with names, so I shortened your name, sorry."