The Dimension Wanderer *HIATUS*

Chapter One ~good birdy~

Aelia tapped her pencil against her notebook page, watching through tired eyes as the teacher furiously scribbled nonsense onto the board.

"These are all still in the theory stage, students, but scientists are working hard to find out more. So the first dimension is the x-axis, which is essentially a straight line in space."

Aelia yawned and tapped her pencil again. The teacher, yapped on about the first dimension. Tap. Yap. Tap tap. Yap. It had a nice rhythm. Tap. Yap.

"The fourth dimension is time- the sequence of events in the past, present, and future. "

Aelia stopped tapping her pencil. She has just missed everything the teacher had said about the second and third dimensions. She hastily jotted down a few notes and frowned at the blank spaces under the two dimensions she had missed. Ah, well. She could always ask Kellan about them later.

She glanced over at the boy, whose eyes were transfixed on the teacher, and whose pencil was moving across his page at an alarming rate. Aelia shook her head in amusement and turned back to the teacher.

"The seventh dimension-"

Darn.  Aelia mentally moved the fifth and sixth dimensions under the "ask Kellan later" list that was constantly growing longer.  Apparently, the seventh dimension was something about another world where the sequence of events was different from the start to the finish.  This translated in Aelia's mind as gibberish, which was practically what she wrote down on her paper.

"Now the ninth dimension is-"

Aelia had just missed the eighth dimension. Forget it. They were only theories, after all. Aelia would just pick Kellan's brain later. She studied her paper for a moment, contemplating on the empty spaces. They were too empty.

Aelia doodled a little in the space. She was a horrible artist, but she enjoyed drawing small cartoons in the margins of her paper, or sketching odd, otherworldly creatures from her mind. She never thought out what to draw. She always just imagined a creature-scary, or cute; big, or small- and then let her hand draw away.

She had once drawn a large, flying, scaly animal that had reminded her of a pterodactyl, yet it wasn't. It was striped, and its back was bumpy like that of a camel's. Kellan had watched her draw it, laughing at its absurdity.

"The beak isn't quite right," Aelia said slowly, staring at the picture she had drawn.

"What do you mean?" Kellan swept up the paper in his hand. It was the back of the math test Aelia had just gotten back, and she grimaced at the grade before snatching it back.

"It's just... wrong; I don't know," Aelia said. She scraped the used, black bits off of her eraser and began to carefully remove the offending beak.

"It's your creation," Kellan insisted. "The beak can't be wrong if it's from your imagination."

Aelia let out a "mmph" of frustration. The creatures never felt like her creation. They were... borrowed, for lack of a better word, so that she could draw them. But they were never hers.

She began to redraw the beak. It was the curve that wasn't right- she was sure of it.

"Why does it have to be just right?" Kellan asked her.

Aelia set down her pencil. She sighed. "Why do you always have to have perfect grades? Why does Sierra always need to have flawless hair? I don't know. There's always something that just- just drives us. Spurs us on. Satisfies us. So the beak has to be just right."