Chapter 1

One

If you looked at a picture of Los Angeles, California you would see a bustling metropolis filled with millions of people going about their daily business. Each person has their own ideas, their own worries, their own dreams, their own friends, and their own enemies. Children have to worry about how they will convince their parents to let them stay up watching television for just one more hour and also how to make sure they don't get any of those far too contagious microbes from the opposite sex whom they find incredibly icky, but who they can't seem to be without when playing their meaningless games devised to relieve the boredom of the ever-lasting day. They worry about the menacing bullies and threatening older siblings. They dream about the day when they will be big and all their problems will be gone. They dream of the day when they will be the older sibling and they will be able to intimidate the young children. They will be able to do whatever they want with their lives. There will be no parents to tell them to go to bed or to force them to keep their hygiene to be at unnecessarily clean standards. They want to be free.

You will also find the pleasant, polite and compliant teenager in the city. The mind of the teenager is always anxiously brooding on the facts that teachers assign them too much homework and parents give them too many chores. Between the two they never have a chance to socialize, but in the rare event they have the chance to go to a party they have an even more terrible burden on their mind. They must devise an infallible plan to evade the wrath of their begetters when they arrive home three hours late because there was an abundance of fog on the road which forced them to drive slowly with extreme care. For some reason their begetters do not believe the adolescents are telling the truth about why they are tardy and they also fail to see any truth in the fact that the only reason they are walking a bit wobbly and slurring their speech is because they are a little tired. The teenager dreams of the day when their words will be respected. They think that it's unfair that no one believes what they say. Everyone has got it better than the teenager. They envy the little children and wish they could go back to having the freedom of playing all day and not having a care in the world. Or, they wish they could be older. If they were older than people would respect them and what they have to say. They would also be free to do whatever they wanted and to socialize whenever they want. The best times of your life are when you are young and when you are old, not in between.

And of course there would be adults in this picture. These adults most definitely have the hardest life. Their life is the closest thing to a dystopia that there could possibly be. They constantly have to take orders from an asinine oaf of a boss and work in a job they dislike and which belittles their true skills and intellect. They dream of the days when they were in their childhood and all they had to worry about was counting the petals on a flower or making sure they won the competition of who could eat the most ladybugs. They wish they could go back to the prime of their life when they got to sneak out of the house to a party they weren't allowed to go to and then come home a little too tipsily. They are depressed by the fact that they never lived out the dreams they once had. As a parent they have to deal with the little tykes whose sleepiness is practically turning them into zombies in front of a television and also the defiant progeny who always seem to disobey the rules of the family. The tyrannical rule of their lives that the children and the workplace have makes their life a terrible one.

As you look at the picture perhaps the most prominent things you would notice would be all of the mammoth skyscrapers. The giant modern marvels of mankind's genius allow our cities not to grow outward, but upward. Next, you might direct your gaze on the roads, highways, and vehicles. These oil-eating smog machines that travel on pathways made of black gold are considered to be one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind because of their contribution to the always thinning patience of humans. These incredible structures are those that define Los Angeles today, but if you look past those soaring buildings you will see nature's lofty scrapers of the sky. If you look beside the roads and highways you will see trees and luscious green grass. If you look out west you will see the infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean. These are almost all almost all that is left of the Los Angeles of the past. They are the last glimpses into the past that we have.

Los Angeles wasn't always the bustling metropolis it is today. It didn't always have millions of people, millions of cars, miles of paved road, and tons of steel. At one time it was almost completely devoid of human culture. The city was first started as a Spanish outpost along the Los Angeles river in order to protect their ownership of the area from the British and Russia. Today there are millions of people in the city, but back then the Spanish government had a hard time getting any people to come form a settlement there. In the end 11 families settled down to form the establishment of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles on September 4, 1781. The settlement grew and grew and around 1847 Mexico surrendered it to the United States government along with the rest of Mexican California.

Spring forward in history to the year of 1919 when the University of California Los Angeles is founded by the eloquent and determined Earnest Carroll Moore. At this time the university only had fifteen hundred students and it was not as grand as the campus is today, but, just as all healthy and dynamic objects do, it matured and flourished with time. As El Pueblo grew bigger, and so too, did El Universidad, or the university. Not only did it grow in the number of people and the area of land it took up, but it also grew upward like a skyscraper of knowledge with each new floor being an area of study for the eager students to delve into. And so the pathway that this land has taken is thus: It has gone from a barren wilderness to a struggling Spanish outpost to a thriving city with a small university. Both the city and the University continued to grow into what they are today and they are still constantly developing. UCLA now has a vastly increased amount of students and many fields of study. One of these students, a sophomore studying history and psychology, is named Emmet Levicomh.