“So you’re trying to say you’re not just another one of my voices?” the cat-like teacher joked to himself, in his own head, speaking Latin.

“No, not I am!” Tiftos shouted back into the void, trying desperately to transform his basic knowledge of the Demonic Language into actual sentences to speak with this mighty being keeping him captive. The "mighty being," or the teacher, as he was, considered himself lucky to be an English-Latin teacher, otherwise, this auditory hallucination wouldn’t have made any sense!

Tiftos, on the other hand, regretted not having taken his Demonic Language studies as seriously as he should have. But who would ever need to speak such a language fluently? All he needed it for was spells and incantations (for those with the talents to cast them)! Not to converse with some otherworldly creature that didn’t even believe he actually existed! Tiftos could feel his back hunching itself, and he felt like just falling down on the floor and letting the darkness claim him, but… no such thing happened.

Instead, he had to listen to that cackling voice joke to itself like some sort of looney. Ha-ha, et tu, Brutus. Groaning, Tiftos got back up on two feet.

“Look, I need to get out of wherever this is, I got someone I need to find!” Tiftos pleaded to the smooth voice above. A chuckle was heard.

“Now, now, don’t be coy. Stay awhile, who’re you looking for?” the teacher teased, leaning his head on his hand as he skimmed through a less-than-pleasing essay about the effects of hairspray on penguins.

“I’m-, uh…” and just like that, Tiftos was rendered speechless. Who was he looking for? Adam, right? But, Adam wasn’t Adam, was he? No, he was… Antenora. Evil God of Disgust and Despair. But that couldn’t be it, no, no way. Antenora was… not something that could act human. Tiftos knew what that beast had done, he knew it well. He was an apprentice priest, and part of becoming a priest, apart from learning the Demonic language, human anatomy and medicine, learning about all Ten Divines was an absolute must. Sure, he was mostly taught about the Five Gods and how great they all are, especially Beatrice, but learning about the Five Evil Gods was also a must, and… therefore, Tiftos knew what kind of things that creature had done. A human could never do such things.

Tiftos’ rational side and his emotional side, both sides arguing about the fate of his friend and his true nature. The only reason he couldn’t ask the person/creature in question was that their Telepathic link had been snapped like a twig, and, then again, there was also the whole stuck-in-nowhere-talking-Demonic-with-nobody, so… yeah.

“Yo-hoo? Still in there, disembodied voice?” the teacher asked, poking at the side of his head as if there really was a little guy tumbling around in his head.

“No-, I… who you are?” Tiftos asked, diverting his attention from the moral debate going on in his head.

“Oh, me? I’m… you can call me Teach, everybody else does,” Teach said, smiling a bit. He was having fun, after all! More fun than he’d had all day, in fact. Not that his day had been any fun after that weird Adam guy passed out after screaming like a banshee in the middle of class… but regardless!

“Now, what’s your name? It’s bad manners to leave a man hanging, y’know?” Teach said as he wrote a red line underneath somebody’s misspelling of “unnecessarily complicated.”

“I am Tiftos Petulia, Apprentice of High Priest Pellons!” Tiftos shouted proudly, making the classic Y pose of the priests of Beatrice, or as some called them, the Beapriests. Outside, the nigh-on nihilist that was Teach chuckled to himself at the absurdity of it all. Sure, he wasn’t a schizophrenic nor had he ever been one, but he found this kind of fun anyways. It was probably the seven cups of coffee he’d had that day that was causing this. Slurping his eighth cup of coffee for the day, Teach finalized the student’s test-score as a 15/19.

“Nice to meet you, Tiff,” Teach greeted with a smile.

Tiftos, meanwhile, was busy wondering what happened to everybody else. He couldn’t be the only one going through this, could he?... Not just he, but also Kratos, Ramona, Mirim and Master Pellons were all there when Antenora touched the weird gem. Therefore, it would only be logical to assume that this would have happened to everybody else, perhaps… Perhaps even including Antenora himself?... Or, this all had to do with his Telepathic link to Adam?... but that didn’t explain anything either. In fact, nothing here explained anything. The only outlet he had for information of any sort was the sing-song voice in the sky.

“Teach."

“How may I help you, Tiff?” Teach offered, turning a page to focus on another essay, this one about the spread of Rabies as a paraphilia/gender identity. Teach scoffed.

“Who are you? What are you? Can you see me?” Tiftos asked all in a row.

“Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there. Alright, as I said, I’m a teacher, and I’m also a human one. Not sure what you were expecting there, but… human, yup. I can’t remember the last one though,”

“Can you see me or not?”

“Oh, right, nope, I have no idea where or what you are, I assume you’re some sort of auditory hallucination, but I honestly don’t know,” Teach said, writing down a question mark beside the word “Tumblr”.

“You’re a human!? I, uh, okay, um… and where exactly is this?...” Tiftos continued, a bit unsettled by the fact that he was inside another human, like, how weird is that? It also threw a couple of divine theories out the window, but regardless.

“You mean like, postal code or planet?” Teach asked, slurping some coffee. Tiftos pondered the offer for a moment.

“Both?” Tiftos asked, not really expecting an answer.

“Well, alright, I’m currently in the teacher’s lounge of Peculi-, erm, Pristine High School, of the town of Humbugg, on the planet Earth. Does that answer your questions?” Teach said indifferentially, trying his darndest to focus on the homework/work in front of him but to little avail.

“I-, where… what?... What’s Earth?...” Tiftos asked pathetically, even though he could perfectly understand that the “Earth” was supposed to be the planet they were on. But, somehow, he instead hoped it was a different Dimension, or a hidden unfound island, or an underground empire-, or-, anything.

“The planet we’re on. What, you’ve never been to Earth or something? Then again, I’ve only been hearing from you for a day or so, so I guess you’re just a twerp right now?” Teach hypothesized, leaning back in his wheeled chair, finally accepting the fact that he probably wouldn’t get any work done with a quizzical voice speaking Latin in his head.

“I-, uh-... so, is that why you can only understand me if I speak Demonic? Does-, does everybody speak it here?...” Tiftos asked shyly, masking his panic with resignation.

“You mean Latin? Oh, no, few people speak that, it’s really a dead language, I’m surprised you speak it at all,” Teach answered, glancing at the clock. It was 17 already, huh? He really should start heading home, shouldn’t he?

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“It’s-, then, what DO you speak?...” Tiftos wondered.

“Well, most people speak English, but there are hundreds of languages. I’m sure it’s the same wherever you think you’re from, whether it’s Heaven or Hell,” Teach answered, getting up from his chair and giving Mark Hamill, the P.E teacher, a little wave as he walked out. He grabbing his jacket and briefcase before stepping out into the desolate hallway.

“I… I’m from… Lutum, I guess? It’s-, it’s this place, where, um, there are people, people like me, but we’re usually not in people’s heads, mind you! And, uh, I don’t know what I’m doing here? I think something’s gone wrong, but, uh… have you seen this creature? It was-, me and my party, the, uh, “Randomized Bunch”, we were trying to defeat it, not that we really could, but, uh… It’s this huge thing? Like-, like green and with a whole bunch of tentacles?” Tiftos described, his panic about the whole situation finally manifesting itself into his high-pitched youthful voice.

“Well, yeah, it appeared over the town yesterday. Killed six people, I think,” Teach recalled.

“It-, what? Uh, tell me exactly what happened,” Toftos urged, silently striking another point on favour of the "Adamnora" theory. If he didn’t mind killing a bunch of people here, why didn’t he just kill the Randomized Bunch back on Lutum?...

“You’re quite lucky, I happen to have witnessed it myself,” Teach bragged, pulling open the front door to the school and stepping outside. The air was cool and the sky was dark, just like Teach liked it. Very different from how it looked yesterday.

“Unlike right now, the sky was bright, the clouds were white, and there was a giant tentacle monster in the sky,”

“Giant how?”

“Giant as in the-size-of-a-cloud giant. It easily basked half the town in shadow,” Teach explained.

“That… that’s weird, when we fought, it was only nine-, no, there are spell circles that can do that…” Tiftos mumbled to himself. Teach wandered across a busy road, easily evading the traffic.

“Anyhow, it didn’t really do much up there. Well, it did kill a couple of people as I mentioned earlier, but you would’ve thought it’d do more than that, right? Anyhoo, it then disappeared like a shy guy courted in the wrong place, and that’s about… no, wait, it did fight someone. Well, I say fight, but it was more of a one-sided beat-down, heh. Some sort of red-dressed character flew at it with a sword, but that’s all, really,” Teach monologued.

“So, wait, only one sorcerer attacked it?” Tiftos asked. If the Evil God Antenora had suddenly appeared over the Divine Kingdom of Pteria, there is no doubt that at least half of the sorcerous populace would rush to attack, and this including priests, not to mention the Goddess Beatrice herself. For there to only be a single sorcerer willing to attack Antenora here… perhaps sorcerers were quite rare on this planet?...

“Sorcerer? You mean the one who attacked it? Um… I’m not sure how to answer that, but, I guess, there was no other ‘sorcerer’ to attack it?...” Teach explained with little certainty.

“There-, are sorcerers that rare? Then, uh, what do you have instead, can everybody use Magick?...” Tiftos hypothesized, not even once considering the idea that single sorcerer was an anomaly in an otherwise Magick-less world.

“Magic? Um, we don’t use that… we don’t have that unless you count my magical charms,” Teach said, grinning as he stepped into Buggy Park.

“You-, I-, what-, how-, um… then… how? Are you even alive?...” Tiftos wondered in bewilderment. He could honestly not imagine a world without any form of Magick being anything but a desolate dystopia. Any form of healing must be non-existent since they couldn’t use Magick to infiltrate the body of the wounded and heal that way, so people must die all the time! How would they do anything, like, at all? How would they build a house, without specifically assigned sorcerers to bend the dirt and rend the logs? How would they ascertain the fact that food wasn’t poisonous before eating it? And, most importantly, how would they possibly deal with the Beasts that roam the world?...

“What’s that supposed to mean, Tiff dear? I live quite well, sure, not as well as most do, but I’ve got a nice place and a… pretty somewhat okay job. I can’t complain. I guess,” Teach explain, somehow entirely missing Tiftos’ real question.

“No, I mean, how could you possibly survive without Magick? How do you even live? Do you, like, burrow underground-, no, wait, you need Magick for that, uh… do you live in trees? Like pixies?” Tiftos asked.

“Umm, no? I live in an apartment complex. Like normal people do?” Teach explained as he exited the park, somewhat happy he didn’t get mugged. The elementary school he visited every day was visible in the distance, and he increased his pace in excitement.

“What’s an apartment complex?” Tiftos asked innocently.

“For a voice in my head, you sure do ask quite a lot of stupid questions. It’s a building filled with small apartments, wherein sheep such as yours truly reside,” Teach explained sourly. Tiftos didn’t really understand what he was saying. At all. Didn’t Teach say he was a human? So where did the sheep come from?...

“I don’t understand,” Tiftos admitted.

“Maybe better you don’t, Tiff,” Teach mumbled.

He had finally arrived. The second last stop before going home. The elementary school “Happy Bee”.

Teach slowly crouched down outside the entrance. The time was 17. Most children had already gone home, and the few that remained waited patiently for their parents to come to fetch them, spending their time by drawing or playing with their friends. But one was different. One small little girl, with a little stuffed bee in her arms, sat outside the school, looking out into the dark. Teach peered inside, the soft ramblings and mumbles of the voice within him talking to itself making him feel just a tad bit annoyed.

The girl’s name was Sophia Lilywhite. Her hair was dark but her eyes were blue and bright: an unusual combination of colours. Somehow, she seemed sad. Sitting all alone, waiting for someone to come, her only companion a small bee-plushie. Teach smiled at seeing her. The door to the elementary school slowly opened, and a kind-looking young woman stepped out.

“Oh, Sophie! I knew I’d find you here, hasn’t daddy come to pick you up yet?” the caretaker asked, crouching down beside Sophia, who shook her head. “My, my, let me see here…” the girl mumbled, standing up as she peered around the courtyard and the entrance, as if searching for something.

“Oh! Sir, there you are!” the girl exclaimed as she noticed Teach, and jogged up to where he still sat hunched. “My, if people see you sitting like this, they’ll get the wrong thoughts! You’ll make Sophie sad!” she scolded, waving a finger in the air.

“Oh, sorry, you know I just can’t help myself, she’s just too cute~” Teach squealed, standing up fully to face the woman.

“My, you just do whatever you want, don’t you? Geez, geez,” she continued, pulling open the gate to let Teach inside.

Teach quickly slipped inside, and the second he met eyes with his beloved daughter, she shot up from her seat and ran at him, arms out and a big, goofy smile on her lips.

“Daddy!” she cried as she jumped into Teach’s arms, and, without missing a beat, he lifted her up, swung her around, and ended the graceful movement with a princess carry.

“Hey there, cutie,” Teach said, his eyes glittering. Sophia smiled brightly and giggled.

“Daddy, can you carry me and Billy home? He’s been flying all day and is suuuper tired,” Sophia argued, holding up the furry little bee to prove how tired he was.

“Well, if Billy reeeeeally is so tired, I guess I’ll just have to carry him aaaaaall the way home,” Teach said as he teasingly put Sophia down on the ground and carried Billy on his shoulders.

“No! Daddy, I wanna go on your shoulders, it’s not fair!” Sophia lamented, holding her arms up in hopes of being picked up as well.

“Hmmmmm?~ But I thought you wanted me to carry Billy?” Teach asked innocently, feigning ignorance.

“Daddyyyyyy,” Sophia pouted, wiggling her arms. Teach simply couldn’t resist, and with a smooth, confidant movement, he had Sophia on his shoulders, with Billy snugly in her arms.

The little girl chortled, her bright eyes excitedly peering out into the now expanded world.

“You happy up there, sunflower?” Teach cooed to the happy child.

“Yeah!! I can see all the way to Mariannelund!” Sophie exclaimed, pointing at various things with one hand and clutching onto Teach’s hair and Billy with the other. Cackling gleefully, Teach got to actually walking to their apartment. Thankfully, the road between the elementary school and the apartment complex he lived in was not a large one, and meeting a car there would be nigh on impossible.

Meanwhile, Tiftos was confused. That guy up there, Teach, had just stopped talking to him all of a sudden, and although Tiftos could at times hear his voice, it was in that weird, harsh foreign language that didn’t resemble anything Tiftos had ever heard before.

“Hey! Everything alright up there?” Tiftos called out in Demonic. It would seem that his Demonic had actually become somewhat fluent since he came here. Speaking of Demonic, the way that Teach guy spoke it was, well… really weird. All the words were right and all, but the pronunciation… it wasn’t quite there. It didn’t sound anything like the Demonic Tiftos heard on an almost daily basis. Then again, Teach had actually said that Demonic was a “dead language”, so the fact that he could speak it at all was a good thing, even if he spoke it weirdly.

“Oh, my my, sorry Tiff, I was just getting my daughter back from the ravenous talons of school,” Teach finally said, breaking his silence.

“You have a daughter? Wait, what time is it?” Tiftos double-asked in response.

“Firstly, yes, her name is Sophia and she’s adorable and you can’t have her, and secondly, it’s about… 17:23,” Teach answered.

“It’s… umm… do people usually pick their kids up from school at such an hour?...”

“No, that’s mostly just me,”

“Then, excuse me for asking, but… don’t you have a spouse to pick them up? Like a husband or wife to just bring them home before it gets so late?...” Tiftos asked hesitantly.

“Oh, no. It’s just me and my little Sophie here,” Teach answered, bringing one hand up above him to ruffle Sophia’s ebony hair. She giggled in return.

“...You… WHAT?!? That’s atrocious!! Haven’t-, Haven’t somebody come to collect your daughter yet?! How in the name of all that is holy can you possibly raise a child alone!?! That's-, that’s the epitome of sin, and you dare commit it, and with a girl, too?!” Tiftos ranted madly, his arms flailing haplessly in the endless darkness.

“I… are you a prie-, no, wait, you said you were, right?... Look, I’m not sure how you do it back on your world, but in this one, raising a child alone is not a sin. I’m lucky I was able to wrangle her out of my former wife's claws!” Teach replied angrily. This wasn’t the first time he’d been confronted about raising Sophia alone, or how she’d be happier with her abusive mother, but this was the first time that religion had come into the mix, even if it was some weird one from another world. Allegedly.

“This world or that, ethics are still ethics! It’s wrong, plain as that!” Tiftos argued, and although he was passionate enough, the argument itself wasn’t actually that strong.

“Alright, you know what? Convince me. I’m sure this is a heinous crime on your world, but here, this is perfectly fine, because she’s happy,” Teach sensibly retorted. He’d been part of enough rhetorics classes to know that it was the logical approach. After all, he might be wrong, and Tiftos might be right.

The theory about Tiftos being a sudden psychotic episode become less and less likely.