Portal Rocks

Date: September 30rd, 2010
Location: The orchard
Written by: Cole, age 10

Ok, so I know this record book thing belongs to Jeremy and Smokey, but I'm stuck here now, too, and I figure I've got a right to add my thoughts, especially since I know about dragons and stuff. Sort of. I know they exist, but I can't see or talk to Smokey like Jere can.
So, I guess I should introduce myself for the record. My name is Coleman Parker, but I go by Cole.
I'm not from this dimension.
Originally, anyway. I think I'm stuck here for good now.

Jeremy already mentioned it before, but there's tons of dimensions that all run parallel to the one we live in, and they're all different. The one Jere is most familiar with is populated by dragons, but my dad says there's one that's all shrimp, one that's got all these weird, zombie like people, and one that's just like ours, only the industrial revolution never happened so they've been kind of stuck in the 1700s for centuries.
My world is a lot like Jere's, but people back home have a lot more magical abilities than the ones that live here, and we're all a lot more open about our abilities.
In fact, it seems to me like Jere should be from where I live. I find it very strange that he's not.

Despite all the differences in the dimensions, they all do have one thing in common; they can be accessed by something called a portal, which is essentially a bridge into the dimension you want to travel to. Very few people know how to open a portal; it's really hard to do and you have to have something called a Portal Rock, which is mined on some moon somewhere. They're really hard to get.
Anyway, my dad is one of those rare people that can open up these portals, and people pay him big bucks to do it (he gets a lot of business from shrimp fishermen).
He gave me my portal rock for my tenth birthday last week, and told me I was old enough to start learning how to do it too.
With him telling me what to do, I'd opened up my very first portal and was feeling pretty good about it... until I tripped on the rug and fell in to the darn thing.
It closed up behind me, and that's that.
Here I am.

The big problem is that since I opened it myself, my dad probably doesn't know what dimension I fell into, and can't really open up a portal to bring me home. I guess he could try searching through all of them, but there's thousands of them, and he probably doesn't even know where to start looking for me.
My best bet is to keep trying to open my own up, but something keeps going wrong. It's like a vacuum to other worlds, not a full bridge... I've sucked in the most random assortment of junk I've ever seen!

I'm so frustrated, and homesick. Jere is nice, and so is this new kid, Joah, but... I wanna go home!
I wish I knew what I was doing wrong.

I guess it could be worse... at least I didn't fall into the shrimp world.

New Kids in Town

Date: September 23rd, 2010
Location: The Bottom Bunk
Written by: Jere, age 9

I told Smokey I was really going to be bad at updating this journal thing, but he wouldn't listen. So sorry about not writing in a while.

THERE ARE TWO NEW KIDS HERE THAT KNOW ABOUT PORTALS AND DRAGONS!!!
Well, one kid knows about portals, the other knows about both portals and dragons.
Their names are Joah and Cole, and they've kind of popped up in kind of an odd way. I don't want to rewrite the story, so here's where Cole's arrival story starts. He's cool, but I don't think he really knows what he's doing.
Actually, I KNOW he doesn't know what he's doing, but without him being a total klutz, I never would have met him OR Joah probably, so I guess it all works out.

Joah showed up the same way Cole did, but for different reasons. Joah says his family is descended from a long line of dragon hunters, and he's chasing a really bad one through the dimensions.
Joah says people like me, who can see and talk to the dragons outside of their own dimension are really rare, and he had something called a watcher look for me. He already knew about me and who I was before he even showed up here! There's a story there, too, so go here to read it.

All right, I have to get some sleep. Apparently, I'm hunting dragons tomorrow.

-Jere