april ryan
beginning of The Longest Journey, April lives in the "Border House", a small boarding house for students, then located in the New Venice district of Newport, and prepares for the admission tests at VAVA, one of the biggest art academies in the world. She has a stable job as a server at the local café and two good friends: Charlie, who pursues a dancer's career, and Emma, who plans to be a sculptor. The only things troubling her are her dreams, in which she sees dragons, magic, and mythological monsters. Moreover, a man whom she knows as a local eccentric named Cortez – who is, in fact, the Red of the Draic Kin and therefore one of her blood relatives – tells her that her dreams are actually more than unsubstantiated images.
The truth behind this is actually the disturbance of the Balance between Stark and Arcadia caused by the current Guardian of the Balance's departure from his position without naming a successor. April is one of the first humans to become aware of it, because (as Cortez informs her) she is a Shifter; a person capable of traveling between the Twin Worlds. After some contemplation, April travels to Arcadia via a Shift that she opens with Cortez's help and lands in Marcuria, one of its largest cities.
Despite her difficulty to accept the presence of an alternate dimension, April convinces herself of its reality and even learns the true history of the Balance and the Twin Worlds from the local priests. To return home to Stark, she, being not yet fully in control of her Shifting powers, gets help from another Starkian, Brian Westhouse, who has arrived in Arcadia some years earlier.
Upon her return, Cortez informs her about the disappearance of the Guardian, which compromises the Balance, and of their common opponents, the Vanguard, also known as the 'Church of Voltec' in Stark, who seek to reunite the worlds, disregarding the risks that go with this operation. In order to preserve the Balance and thus both Twin Worlds from imminent destruction, April must cooperate with Cortez and find both the old and the new Guardian, locate the "backdoor" entrance to their Realm and thereby save the worlds. Cortez also hints that April is a chosen one whose journey is foretold in countless prophecies.
April begins gathering information about the Guardians, who have presumably both been captured by the Vanguard, and about the Vanguard themselves. First of all, she gains access to the central police archives of Newport and with the help of an experienced hacker, Burns Flipper, finds out that the Vanguard Headquarters are located in Newport and that their leader is Jacob McAllen, who is later revealed to be the Green Kin. Meanwhile, the Vanguard capture Cortez; April, seeing this in a dream, unconsciously opens a Shift and flees to Arcadia.
While in Arcadia, April decides to search for the parts of the Stone Disc, an artifact vital for unlocking the entrance to the Guardian's Realm. As she finds out, the Disc consists of four parts distributed for safekeeping among four magical peoples of Arcadia, who would presumably gain nothing but death should the Balance be compromised, and of four sacred jewels called the Dragon's Eyes, each associated with one of the four Draic Kin. Since two of the Kin (Red and Green) permanently reside in Stark, Cortez has agreed to get their Jewels himself, while April is responsible for the rest.
April realizes that she has need to travel to the tropical island of Alais, where is a possibility of finding one of the Draic Kin and getting more information pertaining the Disc and the Guardian's Realm from Alatien, a magical people famous for remembering millennia-old legends. She travels north of Marcuria and defeats Roper Klacks, an alchemist who trapped the wind with his spells, stopping every kind of sea ship traffic in the Marcurian region, and who is secretly a powerful agent of the Vanguard. On her trip north, she discovers the Banda, one of the magical peoples who have a piece of the Disc; by gaining their trust, April gets it into her possession. During a night in their sacred Spirit Dig, she is forced to confront her underlying doubts of herself as well as realize that she is not alone in completing this monumental task. She also hears that Charlie loves her, although she never finds out if this is true or not, despite things others have said to support this. Upon returning to Marcuria, Vestrum Tobias, the head of the Sentinel Order, informs her that she is, in fact, the next Guardian and presents her with the powerful Talisman of the Balance, which she reluctantly accepts, for she is not ready to suddenly accept such enormous responsibility.
En route to Alais, the ship she has boarded in Marcuria is intercepted by a magical Chaos Storm; A desperate attempt to escape results in the ship's sinking and in April's being cast out into the middle of the ocean, with no land or people in sight. She drifts into the territory of the Maerum, a race of Merpeople, who save her and teach her to breathe under water, only to make her work for them as a gatherer of Tan'yen, a magical substance vital for their existence. April is able to convince the Maerum that she is the Waterstiller, a messiah from their prophecies who will reconcile them with their bitterest enemies, the winged folk of Alatien, with whom they share common, albeit forgotten ancestry.
The Maerum bring April to the island of Alais and after a long exploration of the ancient ruins of a common Alatien-Maerum city, she is able to find her way up into the volcano's caldera where the new Alatien settlement is located. She convinces the Alatien that she is their own long-awaited messiah, Windbringer. April finds out that the Blue of the Draic Kin is residing on the bottom of the sea near Alais and that both Maerum and Alatien are, in fact, his progeny.
Acting as an emissary, April manages to declare peace between two peoples. As a sign of gratitude, they present her with the second part of the Disc and a passage to the Blue Kin. The Kin is extremely reluctant to give any answers, but he willingly parts with his Jewel and even summons a Shadow Ship of the Dark People, who without causing any more trouble for April acknowledge her as the Wave (another messiah) and hand over their part of the Disc as well as a stellar map indicating the location of the secret entrance to the Realm of the Guardians, which is somewhere outside the Solar System.
With half of her task done, April returns to Marcuria and finds the city deserted because, in the meantime, the Vanguard have spurred the lust for conquest in Marcuria's neighbors, the Tyren, an aggressive and barbaric nation, who are now preparing to attack the city. Immediately upon her arrival, April is attacked by the Tyren's champion, Chaos Vortex, a mysterious terrifying creature somewhat resembling the Langoliers. She is able to escape through a Shift, again unconscious.
In Stark, the Vanguard are already after her, now that they have Cortez. Led by Gordon Halloway, Jacob McAllen's right-hand man and the latest prospective Guardian, whom the Vanguard's experiments stripped of his nature, they take all April's friends hostage and threaten to kill them if she refuses to surrender herself. Emma provides April enough time to flee; April escapes, though Emma is shot. After a short but intense chase, April escapes Vanguard agents through yet another Shift and ends up in the mysterious House of All Worlds, between Stark and Arcadia, whose owner, Lady Alvane, calms April by telling her that Emma will be all right.
Shortly thereafter, April leaves the House for Arcadia and quickly locates the last missing piece of the Stone Disc in possession of Abnaxus of the Venar, who hands it over to her proclaiming her the Kan-ang-la (the Venar messiah) and leaves before the Tyren block all ways to the city. April recombines all pieces into a full Disc by using the ancient mechanisms of the Sentinel Enclave, where it was initially kept before being split, and escapes Marcuria through a Shift just before the Tyren attack.
In Stark, April recalls that Lady Alvane suggested using her talents to control her Shifting abilities, and tries to apply it by drawing a picture of what she saw in one of her dreams. Immediately, she is transferred to the very location in Arcadia that she drew; that is, to the "nest" of the White of the Kin. The Kin is exhausted by her previous battles against Chaos Vortex and dies shortly after April retrieves her Jewel. When she dies, the single egg in her nest hatches and a new White Kin is born, whom April calls "sister". Both leave the place immediately.
April, now fully in control of her Shifting powers, returns to Stark and visits Flipper, who gives her a fake identification card that will help her enter the Vanguard Headquarters and confront McAllen and Halloway. Up in the Headquarters, McAllen quickly forces April to hand over the Disc and the two Jewels and sets a mutant (probably a result of a failed experiment in Vanguard laboratories) on her for further intimidation. She destroys the mutant and is later found by Cortez, who has just escaped the Vanguard custody. McAllen reappears and engages in a fierce fight against Cortez. Both assume their true dragon-like forms during this battle, wherein they apparently die after falling from the top of the HQ skyscraper.
