Liana strolled home cheerfully from Doodzout station. The weather was awful again but she didn't care. How she loved this world and its human inhabitants today! Although she missed the oak wood, she probably had never been more excited than today to experience another normal day of school. It didn't matter that some of the subjects were irrelevant, at least no one shot her with alien weapons or locked her in an isolated cell that ruled out not only Wi-Fi but even telepathy. And there were no American CEOs who wanted her dead or maniacal forest nymphs from another world who wanted to wipe out her species across the multiverse…
She was just going to school, and not standing out too much. She didn’t have tobe an ambassador for the Earth who had to make decisions that history could depend on, and who also could die at any moment. There were no wars between three different worlds that could wipe out everything she knew. There were no alien weapons aimed at her. The riskiest thing she'd done today was buying an unhealthy soda can from the vending machine. Just being an ordinary schoolgirl was what she needed now.
The life of a schoolgirl was so simple… She didn't care anymore that some things were even too simple. The papers' story had been more of an unbelievable fantasy than what actually happened, and strange conspiracy theories had sprung up on the internet in the meantime. But apparently certain secret services had involved themselves, even as far as the school, to hide certain things. Thus a whole cover-up had arisen that she did not fully understand about the attack by the STC agents on her own school and the fact that the four of them had been gone for half a week, and they had not even had any problems with the student secretariat.
There were whispers of strange military figures visiting the school during her absence, but no one could say who exactly had kept everything quiet. It was better this way, and 'too easy' was a nice change actually. School itself was also quieter now. Some of her classmates seemed to be avoiding her since she got back, Erissse even avoided her like she had leprosy. But she also did have a new good friend in Izabel after the whole adventure. Sharing secret worlds is something that can bring people together…
Even Ellen ended up being a lot friendlier than usual, although she kept her distance. The fact that she dumped Derek probably had something to do with it. And that while she was just starting to remember his name… Annoying how things sometimes work out.
She quickened her stride. Doodzout was empty today, and the weather was extremely drizzly. It was not clear where the rain clouds ended and the fog and the drizzle began, and her vision didn't go very far.
These neighbourhoods, which seemed to belong nowhere, always had something dodgy about them, but today it seemed like a monster might come out of the fog at any moment. But even that wouldn't put her out of her mind now. There probably weren't many things in the worlds she couldn't handle when it really came down to it, and still she loved that she could just be a simple schoolgirl now who didn’t have to save worlds and humanities.
She passed the industrial estate where she'd met Inaya less than three weeks ago, but the whole area felt especially empty and desolate now. Even the birds were absent today, and invisible activity was also rather low today. Yet through all the worlds she continued to feel the Life that flowed through her, and was present in everything.
She came home and didn't realise until she went up the stairs to her room that today, for a change, she wasn't alone. And yes, she found her mother in the living room, watching TV on the large sofa. She barely spoke to her again, but Liana didn’t care this time. She knew now that there were people in this and other worlds who cared about her. She didn't do anything anymore to keep chasing people who didn’t notice her most of the time.
"Is there dinner, Mom?" she asked when there was barely any response to her arrival.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Her mother didn't look up, but she did answer.
"Get a pizza out of the freezer to warm up, honey."
"I will do that!" Liana muttered, and then she disappeared to her room.
Supper time was still a long way off. Somehow she knew that even her parents had to love her in some kind of way, even if they didn't show it clearly. When she got to her room, she turned the old LP player as loud as she could without disturbing the neighbours. In honour of Izabel, she put on some old hardrock, and then she lay down on her bed. She probably would have fallen asleep quickly if the LPdidn’t have to be turned.
Since it was still too early to sleep, she looked for other distractions. She didn't feel like doing homework yet, so she started up her old PC to see if Joris was already online. She had barely been able to tell him anything about what had happened and, in fact, webchat wasn't the best medium for that either. The screen bored her quickly today, and Joris didn't have much to say either, and she wasn't in the mood to keep turning LPs over and over again. She told Joris that she would call back later, and fell back on her bed. Her mind kept spinning but went nowhere. Finally she went downstairs, where her mother was still watching some American soap opera and didn't even look up when she put the pizza in the oven.
When the pizza was warm, she ate it alone. He wasn't bad per se, but missed the acorn and linden flour cakes from Nuanderra, and she'd learned to recognize the taste of pollution, which she now recognized in most foods in her world, not just in the soda from the vending machine. While she was eating her pizza, Americans were arguing on-screen over a damaged car and alleged adultery. Liana winced at the accent of one of the actors, but she knew it was a stupid response: these people had nothing to do with the Superior Tech Corp. that had tried to kill her. And still it sounded like the language of evil to her now.
After dinner she went back upstairs and did her homework. Second degree positions for mathematics and endocrine and exocrine glands for biology. Her interest was not very high and her thoughts flew back and forth regularly, but in the end she got everything done quickly. The unasked questions stuck more than the subject matter: What did a Nummerfil's metabolism actually look like? And a Drotniril's? How did biology work for beings that moved their bodies in and out of the material plane so easily? All things that didn’t fit within the worldview of the lessons she had to follow, of course.
Before going to sleep, she dug out an old smartphone belonging to her father that had been collecting dust for quite some time, and inserted her old spare SIM card. After entering all the phone numbers she could find, she called Joris to meet up. There was way too much to talk about that wouldn't work via chat. The final conclusion that forced themselves on her was that they should see each other again in real life. That in itself was not such a stupid idea: her parents thought because of her false alibi that she had been with him for a whole weekend, while in reality she hadn't met him in person for over six months. And sometimes the cyberworld just wasn't enough. For now it was enough to hear his voice, even though they were both bad at talking on the phone. She needed it, but she would need more too.
“No problem if you stay here all weekend. My parents wouldn't notice if I had a male harem of seventeen boyfriends that I held heroin parties with. But you should know that I can't rule out any visitors from other worlds, or at least Izabel or the Flying Spaghetti Monster…” She finished her conversation.
“No problem, alien A, I've been used to you all my life too!”
Liana smiled.
“You are a good friend, Joris!”
After all, she had come home to her own world.