Liana looked at her watch. Today had been a terrible day from the start. It had started rather depressingly with endlessly dripping rain, and then her train had then stopped for what had almost seemed an eternity to 'wait behind a closed signal', whatever that even meant. Of course that also meant that she had arrived late at school, after running from the station to school again through a torrential downpour, in which she’d become completely wet too. After waiting in a long line at the student secretariat for a stamp in her school agenda, she had also been yelled at by the teacher at the moment she entered the class for disrupting the lesson. Most of the class had looked very dirtily at her when she entered. And that had just been the beginning.
She looked at her classmates and then at the schemes on the whiteboard and sighed. Home sweet home… This was the world she had longed to return to while she was away from hers in that paradisaical oak wood. How crazy had she been. She’d almost want the Onnobolda back now, or the knotweed valley in Kavanderra...
It was now almost a week after her return to her own world, and she was still a little destabilised by all that she had been through. She would never see her own world in the same way again as she had before the adventures in Kavanderra, but she still had to adjust to her normal life for now nonetheless. And still sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t stayed in the oak wood. It was disturbing how little she had been missed during her inexplicable absence. Perhaps she was less bound to this world than she'd previously thought: as a matter of fact she'd been gone for a little over a week during the entire adventure, and hardly anyone had worried about her. Except for Joris no human had wondered where she had been all this time.
What had struck her most was how her very own parents had barely noticed her absence. Of course it was extremely convenient that her mother had written an absentee note for her sick leave without asking any questions. Otherwise she might have been in serious trouble after a whole week's holiday in other worlds, as you would expect, education is compulsory in Belgium for students no matter if they periodically spend their time in other worlds! But easy or not, it felt wrong that her existence was so harshly ignored by her parents. What happened to her apparently didn't matter at all to those around her. She had told both of them that she had gone to Joris's over the weekend and had stayed there for two nights. Her parents had apparently been at home while she was gone, alternately but they hadn't spoken to each other, and no one had even realised that her sleep-over story couldn't match her other alibi of the so-called illness that she had had.
Plus, they weren't worried about their teenage daughter at all; Not being at home for a weekend unannounced and staying with a boy in the next province was suddenly no problem at all anymore? She had often jokingly called herself invisible, but apparently reality was even worse than that. No one really cared and she really was completely non-existent to most people, including her family, and she just floated through her world like some kind of ghost. Not that she'd really like her parents to be more involved, but a little interest in your own kids wasn't out of the ordinary, was it? Liana could have openly lived an excessive life of sex, drugs and rock and roll and her very own family wouldn't even notice until she was 8 months pregnant or had overdosed or had been taken out by the leader of the rival gang in a fight to the death or live or so.
Didn’t they understand how lucky they were that her form of teenage rebellion was mostly limited to reading weird fantasy stories, making bizarre drawings that she didn't show to anyone, and reading wikipedia articles all night about subatomic particles or trans-Neptunian dwarf planets? It seemed to have made no difference that she supplemented that kind of rebellious behaviour with travelling through dimensions now, exploring dead alien worlds and saving her species from planned extinction. Of course, that was all part of normal puberty and adolescence, wasn’t it?
Her frustrations about her parents weren’t the only thing she was dealing with right now, though. Many other things that had seemed so important all her life seemed so futile now. Even a note for irregular school absences, which she had still feared when she had been in Kavanderra fighting dangerous aliens, couldn’t really excite her anymore now that she was finally home. Not only had she seen alien worlds, but she had witnessed the deaths of beings that seemed human enough to her, in pointless combat at close range, just before she had narrowly missed an apocalyptic explosion that could have been her end, and that of her new friends. And now it was hard to return to her old life.
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She felt less than ever at home in her class now; if in the past her classmates had always seemed a bit dull and superficial to her, now she didn't care at all for their games at all anymore. The upside was that she wasn't afraid of Ellen and her bullies in the least now, because when you've faced the Onnobolda with their magical powers and the Superior Tech Corp with their alien weapons, Ellen and her new boyfriend from the fifth year suddenly weren't that impressive… What was his name by the way? Liana always forgot. He wasn't that interesting anyway.
The geography lesson was again extremely dull today, with imports and exports from countries in South America and Africa, and descriptions of various forms of government she cared little for. Just a lot of different systems that power-hungry idiots could use to make themselves better and ruin life for the rest, nothing more, nothing less… She was only half paying attention, her thoughts wandering off to the Superior Tech Corp who were still somewhere on the planet, probably somewhere north of where the teacher was now pointing at the map even. She still wasn't sure she wasn't going to have more trouble with them.
And even if they wouldn't find her, they might still have plans with her world that weren't so much better than Andira's had been. She also was irritated by the lax attitude of the Nuanderrans now that they thought the story was over, when her own world was now saddled with a new radical group that might try to seize power at some point, or help others to do so in new and unseen ways. There was the question of what weapons Superior Tech Corp had actually taken from the ancient aliens. The fact that they'd probably wiped out themselves and all life on the planet with a monstrous weapon even more dangerous than an atomic bomb wasn't exactly encouraging, either. Had Andira and the tech corp come up with something like this and co-developed it before she herself was sidelined by John? What had happened to her anyway? Had they left her to die in the explosion, or perhaps taken her elsewhere? Marah had thought she was dead, as did the council, but Liana wasn't quite sure of that.
“Liana, what form of government does Belgium have!” The teacher's question took her out of her mind.
“Um, a parliamentary monarchy?” she replied.
The teacher looked like he expected something else, so she added something.
“Constitutional parliamentary monarchy to be precise. We have had a constitution since 1830, which has had endless amendments since then. But it’s a whole procedure to change the constitution ” She replied on autopilot.
“Okay, enough!” The teacher looked at her angrily.
Apparently he had expected that she wouldn't be able to answer so he could bawl her out, which wasn’t the case now, so she left her alone after bawling her out anyway.
Her mind returned to the STC. Would they really have plans to overthrow democracy and take over the world with their weapons? Or would they keep the technology of the other world to themselves and get rich in other ways? Or would they mostly sell their weapons to the highest bidder, making the wars on her world even more grim than they already were?
And like that the whole lesson passed, half paying attention. Towards the end of the class they had to do an exercise that required her to use a green pen, but she noticed that most of her pens were not in her pencil case, but probably still at her desk at home. She asked Izabel who was sitting behind her if she had a green ballpoint pen, who looked at her for a moment as if she had broken into her word, and then rummaged through her pencil case which didn't contain an extra green pen either. In the end she passed on a four-colour pen. “Thanks,” said Liana. She suddenly noticed her neighbour's T-shirt, which had a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the words 'Pastaman vibration'. She couldn't help but wonder how Luigi would react to that. But now she had to search for some forms of government and mark them by underlining them in green, so she quickly forgot the whole thing.
The rest of geography class went by without much happening. The teacher rambled on, and Liana let her mind wander again. Outside, the seagulls flew over the playground, and inside she was back in the oak wood instead of taking notes about strange forms of government and discussing revolutions that mostly had made things worse for the ordinary people. But suddenly she had a stinging feeling, a strange premonition that something was wrong. She didn't know what, but there was something in the air.
Something bad was going to happen...