Liana looked around and didn’t see anything. Where was she? The bullies and the teacher, the whole school even were gone, but she herself was still there. She seemed to have stepped into a dream, or fallen into some kind of strange sleep. Everything was fuzzy and hazy, as if her senses weren't working properly. Her thoughts were unclear, and she felt unusually tired. She was out of breath even as if she'd made a strenuous effort. When the brainfog had lifted a bit she realised that she was still standing, and that she indeed had arrived somewhere, a place with almost no visibility where she had probably been for a while already while regaining consciousness.

She appeared to stand in a stale and very dimly lit place, and it took her eyes a long time to adjust to this otherworldly twilight after her sunlit school. She couldn't discern any light source, but she was now used to the vague twilight enough to see she was in some sort of huge hall, which seemed mostly empty. Here and there were tables and chairs, some of which had fallen over, but otherwise there was nothing.

"Is there someone here?" she cried into the darkness. Despite the size of the room there was no echo. No one answered her call, but strange unintelligible signs suddenly lit up somewhere above her, as if reacting to the sound of her voice. They were written in a completely unknown script which might as well have been from another world.

She stood still, utterly bewildered, and regained her thoughts. This was impossible. The silly trick with the invisible door had really worked! She had escaped the bullies, and ended up "somewhere else" as she’d wanted. But was this even Nuanderra? And did she really want to be in Nuanderra? It would have been nice to be with Inaya again, who could be a friend to her. Even though that girl with her lavender eyes wasn't completely human, and she seemed to be not just any girl, but someone in a very high position among her kind, being on the council of councils or something. On the other hand she would be considered a monster, a demon, a form of pollution? Wasn't it dangerous for her to just be here all alone? Nuanderra knew no internal wars, Inaya had said, but it still was at war with her own world, the world of the infernal kobolds, or what were they named? And then there were those problems about which Inaya hadn't elaborated, the original reasons for her visit, entities who might be planning something in her own world? Could they mean a danger to her too here?

Fearful thoughts crossed her mind now, even though something inside of her knew instinctively that there wasn’t much danger here. And then the other questions arose: What had actually happened? What the hell had she done? Had Ellen's pathetic bullying been worth it to disappear like this into an unknown almost empty world? A bit too much drama, wasn’t it? She knew she had imitated Inaya’s strange powers on a whim, and she had wanted intensely to go to Nuanderra, but at the same time had wanted intensely to not go to Nuanderra. Perhaps that was why she had travelled to another place, and not all the way to Nuanderra itself. This didn’t seem to be Nuanderra, at least she had pictured that world very differently from here... To begin with, there was no oak wood in sight here in these empty halls that didn’t even have any dust to begin with..

But if not in Nuanderra, where had she ended up? And had she really done this herself? She still couldn't believe that, even though she knew it was what had happened...

She hesitated. Her life had always seemed like an implausible fantasy story to many other people, for example with her chance encounters with invisible things, but this was really over the top. Like many people her age, she had fantasised about having superpowers like in Hollywood movies, but conjuring yourself into some empty room that might be located in some other world didn't seem like a very useful superpower. It was more a very dangerous problem that no one would understand, and one more thing in her life that she couldn't talk to anyone about. Even for Joris this might be too much. Going beyond the impossible had always been her thing, alas. Soon she’d have to make up strange stories again that were more believable than the truth, because otherwise people would think she was crazy. And she didn’t like to lie at all.

Maybe she wasn’t as surprised as she should have been given the circumstances. Had she done this before? Her mind went back to certain strange dreams that she’d had in her childhood, which had seemed very real, where she'd befriended huge beasts that didn't exist anymore in her own era. Once she had even been with a tribe of orc-like monsters that wouldn't have looked out of place in her Tolkien books. At times she had wondered if they had indeed been more than dreams, especially when she realised that even in the 'ordinary world' she was indeed able to see creatures that no one else saw, and that no one believed existed. Hadn't Inaya herself, after reading her memories, said that she had experienced many strange things? Hadn’t she meant with that that those memories she'd shared telepathically had been real?

The riddles would remain unanswered for now, but a more important question kept nagging: What now? She’s been alone with her wild thoughts for a while now, but this wasn’t really a good place to be, was it? It wasn’t a place for anyone to stay for long either, and she really had to go back to school as soon as possible, or she might get in worse trouble than Ellen’s petty bullying. Being stuck here in this lonely dimension of emptiness wasn't much of an improvement against a silly Ellen with her third-rate insults. That was more like falling from a shallow pool of rainwater into a churning primeval ocean—possibly with unreal primordial sea monsters, although she still didn’t feel any presences here. You never knew what you’d encounter in other worlds, but by the stories she had read, it could be surprising in both good and bad ways and never predictable. She only hoped now that her story was being written by someone with good intentions, and not by some Lovecraftian horror writer who didn't care for his characters and liked to torture them to death in the most absurd ways possible...

Focus, Liana, Focus! Her thoughts were all over the place again. She was mad at herself now for being so random. If she had to get out of here, she needed answers to some questions, like how did she get here? And could she repeat that to get back to school? Or would that only cause new problems? She doubted she could do it, but she had to try. Or was it a bad and dangerous idea? Nervously made the same movement with her hand. Was it the correct ritual? She didn't even know how she'd done it, and more and more doubt filled her up now when she closed her eyes and took a step forward.

She was still in the same stale dim hall when she opened her eyes. It hadn’t worked. What had gone wrong? Too much doubt, was that it? Or hadn’t it been a repeatable event? Maybe it worked only in one direction, away from her world? Were there unknown laws of magic or quantum physics that were holding her back? She tried to approach the problem scientifically, but everything was so strange that wouldn't get anywhere with logic either. One thing was certain though: spending the rest of her life in this shadowy place was not an option, so she had to get out of here, one way or the other.

She took another look around the place, and knew she had to try something different. She saw the doors. Why hadn’t she thought of doors? She noticed there were several of them on the sides of this room. Maybe one of them went somewhere. Maybe not, but she must have at least tried them. In another situation, she'd probably never enter any unfamiliar door into a potentially unfamiliar world, but she hadn’t many options here. Plus she still had the intuition that there was no immediate danger here. But then it was also utterly empty, no living soul and no other presences around. No people, animals, plants or invisible entities anywhere nor any Nummerfa or whatever people lived in Nuanderra, just one orphaned schoolgirl in an oversized sweater, lost in between the worlds. So what if she was indeed the only creature here? There was not only no immediate danger, but also nothing else here, which meant that it wouldn’t be healthy for a human being to stay here very long. She still needed stuff like food and drink and other basic necessities!

She walked up to the doors, but most of them turned out to be locked, even if she couldn't see any locks on them. They were roughly the same shape as the doors she knew, but there was something strange about the design that she couldn’t explain. Something that might confirm that she really had entered another world, one not made by or for humans. She tried the other doors, and the ones that weren’t locked opened up to side rooms that were almost exactly like she’d come out of. Apparently there just was a strange labyrinth of halls here, but not much else. Quite an anticlimax really, being in another world…

Finally, after trying several doors and halls and other rooms with more chairs and tables here and there she tried a door that looked different from the others, and was already ajar. On a placard on this door she recognized the same strange signs from the illegible messages on the ceiling. But she was even less successful, it led to a completely empty space with no light at all. Only near the exit a few tables were visible in the faint light shining in from the other rooms, of a slightly different type maybe than those in the main hall. But apart from that nothing. She couldn't even see how big the room was, and there still was no echo. This new room made her feel uneasy, so she went back to the main room where she had started from. She almost tripped over a lying piece of furniture, so she searched her backpack for her smartphone and turned on the flashlight. It gave her a bit more light, but the only things she saw were the same tables and chairs. On one of the tables there was a book, written in the same strange letters from the messages on the ceiling, which meant she couldn’t read it at all. What language was this even?

It also seemed that there was something strange going on with the time here. Although the almost electric-looking light of the letters still worked, everything here looked as if no one had been there for a very long time, even without dust. She was still holding her smartphone and noticed that there was no network connection. “Why do these things always happen to me?” she muttered, and put her smartphone away again. The fact that there was no wifi and no network might be an indication that she was indeed outside of her own world. Maybe that reversed logic didn't quite hold up; she could still be somewhere underground with no network, but if there had been wifi, at least she would have had confirmation that she was still somewhere in the ordinary world. And anyway, to end up somewhere else on Earth through an invisible door made with her hand wouldn’t really have been less strange than ending up in another world altogether, Nuanderra or not. Where was Inaya now? What was her actual world like? Would she ever see her again? Would she still be able to reach her own world again? Deep down she somehow knew that everything was going to be okay, but still it started to take long enough here! She became very annoyed with this stupid place.

She didn’t know what to do anymore, so she sat down on a chair in the main room, vaguely waiting without knowing what exactly she was waiting for. How long had she been here? The smartphone said 12:56 pm, but she wasn't sure if she could really rely on it. Who even said that time ran the same way here if she was really in another world? She'd read enough fantasy stories in her life where time in different worlds ran in very different ways tha in our world, and in a flash second a new fear entered her mind. What if she was stuck in one of those places where you only stay for an hour and then you discover that a hundred years have passed in your own world?

She was starting to have a problem now. Whatever time meant here, the clock of her smartphone had been recording time in this empty place for an hour already, which meant she had less than four minutes before the next class would start. Something inside her told her she should be panicking, but she wasn’t. Maybe she should try again one more time to get back by making an invisible gate with her fingers, but she was afraid of that.. Afraid to end up somewhere where people just couldn't live, unlike here where there was at least air to breathe. If it would even work. She still didn't fully believe she got here on her own in such a ridiculous way. Cognitive dissonance isn't always that easy to get over.