Liana stared at the dark house that had no in the driveway. Her parents clearly still hadn't come home yet. She'd been back in her own world for hours now, and in the meantime she'd gone to the snack bar for dinner and eaten a huge "kapsalon" with kefta, which was really a strange experience now. She had never expected how much getting to know other worlds would have the side effect of seeing the strangeness of her own world so clearly now in everything, including previously unimportant details of her own culture. Even a short walk through the deserted main street of Doodzout was now a completely different experience, in which she constantly noticed details about her own world that were invisible or irrelevant to her before.
She hadn't really done much since she got back, just walking to the snackbar and back, but even that had proven to be an alienating experience already. She'd placed her order before she realised what she was doing, and it wasn't until later that she noticed how strange it was to eat meat after her visit to the all-vegetarian Nummerfa. But she'd been doing what she'd always done on autopilot, and she didn't have the energy to change all her patterns yet. She knew she couldn't completely remain who she had been, and that she had already changed a lot, but to change all of her old habits would take time and focus. And still there were more things in the world now than before that she felt were completely pointless and no longer wanted to participate. But that was for another time, now she was just going home to get some rest.
She went inside the house, and turned on the lights to chase the darkness away. Almost bedtime, though she wouldn't be able to sleep fast. Involuntarily she picked up her phone, which was now almost charged, and checked her messages again. She hadn't gotten many in her absence. The school secretariat had sent one every day she had been absent, Joris had tried to reach her, and her parents had both sent that they were not going to come home on different days. It almost had been as if her existence had not been missed by anyone at all.
She turned on her computer. She needed to catch up with Joris, but she didn't know where to start now. Too much had happened. How do you explain to someone that you have been to another world, and then yet another world, where a conspiracy was plotted to wipe out the humans on Earth? Even with Joris as that person, who had already heard of Inaya and the other worlds? Even for her best friend this would be too strange. But she also needed him as an alibi for her attempt at saving humanity, so she set up the chat service.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The conversation went on for a long time until Joris went to sleep and Liana turned off the computer. She put on an extra sweater, put on a little water to make tea, and took a book and a candle and sat outside. The moon shone through the clouds. Would her parents have missed her? Would they even have noticed she hadn't been there? She needed them to write her a note for her absences… She glanced at her smartphone to see what time it was, and subconsciously went through her texts again. Apparently she had also missed a message from Izabel. "Is everything OK?" Well, her classmates weren't that bad compared to some of the humans and non-humans she'd encountered recently, and in fact, even the bullies at school were a lot better now than they were a few years ago.
Suddenly she realised she had no way of explaining to her classmates either how she had just disappeared that day. Ellen and the rest would probably have been scolded for hanging out in the hallways, but her disappearance would be much harder to explain. She hoped the teachers hadn't made a fuss about it. Or that Ellen and the rest hadn’t told them that they had followed her, and that she had suddenly disappeared. But that was a problem for later…