Sometimes time has the strange habit of going much slower at exactly the wrong moment. This school day was a good example of that. Liana stared out of the window and observed the empty playground for what felt like six-thousandth time, but this class still wasn't over. Today was a school day just like any other, with nothing particularly fun or interesting happening, but it seemed to last forever. Liana hadn't taken in much of the info about imports and trade routes, nor about the graphs of nonlinear functions and their formulas. She didn't find geography and math particularly difficult, but what she did find difficult was keeping her focus on the kinds of subjects that made you wonder why on earth anyone would ever be interested in it. She saw all of the steps as logical, except for the reason why you would make them and turn them into a lesson to torture high school students with.
But this endless morning was about to end, and now finally the long-awaited moment of a minute and a half after 11:55 AM was there, when the far too long ringing bell signalled their midday break. It had taken a while to accept how the school bell always rang too late, and she still found it irritating. Surely, classes also started a minute and a half later and so there was not really a net loss of time, but to her it still felt like an attack on her time, and therefore on her freedom. But for now class was over, at least for noon.
Slowly, Liana strolled onto the playground, following her classmates to the dining hall. Usually she didn't have much contact with most of her classmates, mainly because it rarely seemed to lead to satisfactory results anyway. She had really tried her best at times, but she seemed to live in a completely different world. But unlike Nuanderra and Oranderra, they were two worlds occupying the same space and they had to meet all the time.
Unconsciously she picked up part of a conversation for her. “Have you seen Izabel's new coat? Black again…” she heard Ellen say in front of her, to a boy she didn't recognize especially, someone from the fifth year. He was the rather unremarkable type with short hair, but still carefully dressed in the right brand clothes for the cool youngsters of today with an eye for detail. Her new boyfriend? Liana wasn’t able to keep up with the soap operas in her class.
Ellen continued loudly. "He really thinks she's cool, doesn’t he?" and turned her head to be heard better by both Izabel walking in front of her, and Liana herself. "Almost as hopeless as our geek Liana in her stupid sweater, who could never even have a boyfriend." Liana wished she could make herself invisible like Inaya could. She couldn't, of course, and even if she could, it would only cause more trouble if she did it at a time like this when everyone had already seen her being there. Psychic abilities and superpowers probably wouldn't help her gain acceptance in the classroom if she showed them openly, it would be quite the opposite…
She sighed. Bullies weren't always avoidable, and she'd endured much worse in previous years than this superficial nonsense, and she couldn't really complain when in other worlds creatures were lurking that would destroy you on sight because they considered you a threat for the multiverse, eh? Ellen grabbed a few other girls as acolytes and turned against her now"Liana, come here and tell us what you think you'll accomplish with that weird sweater of yours." She didn't answer. "You're really not going to attract guys like that." Liana looked at her furiously, wondering if it would do any good to even answer. It occurred to her that Ellen had had a boyfriend constantly since the second year, but that they had been replaced regularly. “And why would I even want to?” she bit back. They had no answer to this. “Do you like girls then? Are you like that?” Erisse asked mockingly. Ellen snapped at her. "I didn’t know that. But it won't make much difference. You’ll even be less successful with girls.” Liana didn't feel like making a comment about homophobia would accomplish anything, but she stuck with that type of jargon.
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“Nope. Your pathetic soap operas all the time don't give me any interest in relationships. I'm more of a misosexual. Or maybe more misoromantic even.” As she said those words, she realised she was making a mistake. Using weird long words you picked up somewhere on a nonstandard corner the internet was not a good idea with these people. Especially if the words in question are probably exaggerated when used on yourself, and may not even be used completely accurately. Erisse laughed scornfully. “Are you there again with your weird words? And what does it even mean? misosexual? Romantic with miso? Are you dating a bowl of Japanese soup now? I've heard they're really hot…” She laughed loudly, but most of the bullies either didn't seem to understand the joke or they didn't find it funny.
“Mostly it means that I have an aversion to all that sexual and romantic stuff. Quite logical in a world like this with all your miserable soap operas.” murmured Liana. The girls and Ellen's new boyfriend looked uncomprehendingly at her, but she didn't answer, only her body language told clear enough that she was tired and wanted to leave. "No, we won't let you go." Ellen smiled slyly, and they closed in on Liana, who looked for an opening to get away from her classmates, but there was none. Yet she suddenly darted in between the bullies as if there had been an opening and slipped into another hallway.
As an introvert, she had already had her dose of annoying people for one day and she wanted somewhere alone to recharge. Preferably somewhere in a remote abandoned monastery or a Nuanderran oak wood or something. But Ellen and her followers quickly recovered and came after her. Too late she realised she couldn't get out of here either. The hallway she'd taken came to a dead end behind the corner at the chemistry lab, which also was a place where they weren't supposed to be now. Wrong move! She was faster than Ellen's group, but they knew she had nowhere to go beyond the corner.
What was she even doing? Couldn't she just open her mouth, put those idiots in their place, and go to eat? Why did she have to run away? She didn't know, but she felt very small now. Time seemed to slow down again as she ducked around the corner, which led to a dead passage that could only take her to a now closed lab. Her breath and her heart began to speed up. In a few seconds Ellen and Co would pop up around the corner and she would be surrounded by a gang of mean girls that would be mocking her. In itself that wasn't so bad compared to the wars in this world, deadly gun violence in American schools, or even some of the bullying she endured in earlier years, but it still was bad enough to try to escape. Over the years Liana had grown less tolerant towards this sort of thing, and at this moment she just didn’t have the energy for this nonsense . She would have done just about anything to be left alone now, and didn't even think about what she was doing at this point. Anything was good to have a break from this stupid situation.
In desperation she made the same move that she had seen Inaya make, and at the same time she wished with all her might to end up in Nuanderra; but at the same time she was afraid to even want to be there, being a "gorchbold" or how did they call it, the dreaded demon that she apparently was in the eyes of the "people" there. Still, something told her to carry on, so she stepped into the nothingness as she had seen Inaya do. Amazingly, she noticed that everything around her gradually began to fade away as time was put in slow motion again. She just heard a room open and the voice of the science teacher mutter "What is going on here?" to Ellen and her acolytes, who stopped in their steps, and it seemed as if the background disappeared and the whole world was zapped away. Suddenly she was completely cut off from the world, and nothing else seemed to take its place.
She opened her eyes in a complete darkness.