The rays of the large orange sun in the still cloudless sky awoke the trio after an extra long night of sleep. Immediately they started packing, because they had another long walk through the alien no-man's land ahead of them. Even if you woke up in it, Kavanderra's world remained a strange experience to find yourself in, with strange effects on your mental stability. At least that was what Liana found, even if the second day was less extreme than the first day had been. It's amazing how much you can get used to being in another world when you wake up after a long night's sleep, instead of arriving fresh from a place that is still very similar to your own!

After a short breakfast, they set out for the long day's march, knowing they might reach their goal much later that same day. In any case this would be a very different day from yesterday, when they had seen only dead empty landscapes. Inaya had warned them that they would probably encounter the first presence of the Onnobolda very soon. Possibly they were already present within a few miles of where they had been sleeping, and after that they might encounter more and more of them, until they somehow would find the headquarters itself. Whatever they would do when they reached the actual base of the Onnobolda was still unclear, and Liana still had a nagging feeling that it hadn't been fully thought through and that even the so-called ‘Council of councils’ themselves didn't quite know what to do. Politics and planning were a mess on every world…

Liana sighed as she saw the ancient ruins again between which they had slept. Strange rectangular blocks with hexagonal window holes were scattered here and there, in between very high cylindrical turrets of some kind of red material. There were a few wrecks of things that probably had been vehicles in the street, and above her head there had once been a rope that stretched from building to building, from which what looked like the remains of flags hung at irregular intervals. Probably a kind of plastic that hadn't withstood the test of time very well.

She stretched out her arms and tidied up her sleeping bag. Today they had to move on through this world looking for people who wanted the extinction of her species, or worse. They packed up their things and, without saying much, headed back in the direction Inaya was pointing, which happened to be the direction the main road was headed. Apparently it went to where the base of the Onnobolda, probably in some center of the old city structure.

They passed another new architectural style that seemed ugly and wrong again, and there were an awful lot of weird appliances hanging from certain houses here. But as always, they only saw the remains of lifeless things. They had not yet come across a single skeleton of a Kavanderraan or of any of the animals they occasionally saw depicted, nor anything vegetable. No organic matter had survived the times it seemed, everything ha gone to dust without leaving behind any trace. And yet, now that they were walking again Liana felt like she could sense a presence of life as they went stepped further through this weird landscape. No strange alien life per sé, more like something familiar. No nawa either, like the Onnobolda they were looking for, but something much simpler, more like a lawn or a swarm of mosquitoes. She had thought that would be completely impossible, but Inaya confirmed it when she brought it up.

“Your senses are right. I noticed it too. Apparently there are not just nawa rebels here in this place. I think there must be plants nearby, a lot of them, and maybe even simple animals.” Just as she said that, an insect flew past her head, and she carefully caught it with her hand. It was an ordinary brown lacewing with golden eyes, of a kind commonly found in both Oranderra and Nuanderra. "Where does that one come from?" Lun muttered surprised. “Where there is one insect, there must be more of them.” Inaya replied, “And it's close. I feel the life flowing!” They stood between very tall buildings now, but they had almost reached the end of these constructions, and it was unclear what they would find behind them. Slowly they walked along the main road through the strange landscape, on a road made up of strange bluish hexagons, and past the wreckage of some sort of six-wheeled vehicle. The glass had melted, and lay like surreal solid puddles around the vehicles, something that reminded Liana of Salvator Dali's paintings.

A couple of huge towers loomed behind some sort of huge warehouses, and then suddenly they saw what had been out of sight: a green plain that was very different from anything they’d seen in this world yet. Liana felt the difference immediately and when they got closer she instantly knew why. They were indeed standing in front of a field full of live plants! Although they had talked about the possibility, it was still a shock to suddenly stumble upon familiar lifeforms in this dead strange world.

Liana ran up to the plants to get a closer look and fell on her knees before the first stems that gave way to a sea of green. From closer they were bigger than she had thought, and they were all the same species. The whole place was filled with them, in different stages of development. The fully grown plants were slightly higher than a full-grown man had bamboo-like stems at the bottom, but they ended in broad, almost heart-shaped leaves, and some of the bigger ones had clusters of small white flowers or seeds with triangular membranes. There were also a lot of dead ones, which looked completely like bamboo.

For some reason this plant species looked familiar to Liana, though she didn't immediately know from where she recognised them. The plants appeared to have colonized the entire valley, and the road they had been following all along since they had arrived also stopped in this plain at the border of the sea of plants. It wasn’t clear whether that was simply because it was overgrown or because the road originally stopped here. But there were clearly other things in this plain that had been overgrown, for from the green mass that lay over the valley sprang huge boulders here and there, and the wreckage of alien vehicles. Further up they saw something that might even have been a weathered spacecraft that had been badly damaged by the ages.

“So there’s life here.” Liana concluded. Inaya nodded, while Lun studied the flowers and leaves very carefully and packed a few pieces to carry them in his backpack. “Then are these plants from here, I mean, originally?” she asked. Inaya firmly shook her head. "That is impossible. All original life is gone, but in the meantime there have been nawa here from our world, and possibly over the ages even from other worlds, and apparently someone also brought other creatures with them, and left them behind somehow to colonize this valley. No, these plants are clearly not from here. They come from closer to home.” Lun had a leaf and a bunch of flowers that were going to seed in his hands and showed it to Liana. “A kind of Mul Yan, but I don't know this one.” he muttered, wrapping some samples very carefully in paper-like material and tucking them away in his backpack. Inaya looked better at them and nodded. “I recognise them now. Akhina would certainly have known these, they are from Oranderra. I do not know the name in your language, and in my language they have none.”

Liana took a closer look at the broad leaves, still trying to recall where she'd seen those plants before, and then she remembered. She had seen a photo with the exact same leaves on an article she had read on the internet about invasive exotics. She had noticed this because she had also recognized the same plants in Doodzout, on several industrial sites. “Aren't those the same plants that grow at the old factory ruins where I first saw you? The Japanese knotweed, one of the most invasive plants on the planet! They can multiply very quickly, and control costs a lot of money in some countries. I personally think they are quite pretty here. But I've never seen them this big, and with so many together." She certainly had a point there, the whole plain here was one huge monoculture of the same species, possibly the only kind of plant this world had known for even hundreds of thousands of years, and it was apparently trying to catch up on that lifelessness.

“Something in this place craves life. A world without life is a vacuum that offends the laws of nature.” murmured Lun, who seemed to be making some little ritualistic gesture. "Keeping invasive aliens away is apparently not part of the onnobolda's plans." Liana noted. “There's only one they're concerned about. And you know which one.” Inaya said darkly. Liana didn't answer. She had never wondered what Japanese knotweed would think if it were able to, but she could suddenly sympathize with it in how it was hated by some people just because it was strange and didn’t belong.

But the other two were more interested in the valley's ecosystem than in its concerns about humans as an invasive alien now. Inaya leaned closer and turned over some leaves, pointing to some black dots. “And there are insects on it, also from your world I think.” Liana watched and recognized, in addition to the aphids, not only another gold-eyed lacewing fly, but also some kind of small black ants. She never thought she'd ever be so elated by a few tiny pest insects, but she almost cried with joy when she saw them, after being in this dead world for so long. Lun had picked up a strange larva on his hand and was studying it. “Apparently, these life forms can survive well here. Then nummerfa and other Nuanderrans can certainly do that for a longer period of time.” Lun took some kind of lens from his backpack and looked first at the larva, which to Liana looked more alien than the other insects, but actually was just the juvenile form of the lacewings. Then he studied the aphids. “And that they are here suggests that there has been very early activity here, and historical traffic between the worlds. And given the huge population of these plants, it must have happened long ago, longer than we thought and than the council assumed. The Onnobolda must have had access to this world for a long time.”

That was probably all true, but something was bothering Liana now. The picture was wrong. There was something wrong with the whole story. She held a knotweed leaf above her head, in the light of the sun, and the lacewing on it flew away with an orange glow on its wing. “But according to you all these plants and animals come from my world. That's impossible then, not? The Onnobolda come from Nuanderra after all. And they want nothing to do with my world.” Inaya looked thoughtful. “That's right, Liana. There's more going on here than we suspected, but we won't know exactly what it is until we go further. We have to pay attention from here, because I have a strong feeling that there will be a guard behind this plant field.”

Even quieter than before, they crept further through the greenery on their way to where the main road resurfaced on the other side of the valley and dragged itself through a new part of the city. The plants grew taller than a human so that wasn't that difficult, only the part of not making a sound on this surface was more difficult, because here and there were all kinds of fragments of unknown devices on the ground creaking under your feet. Liana fervently hoped that some monster wouldn't suddenly jump from behind the plants, but all the animal life here seemed to consist only of the three insect species they had seen before.

“And what on Earth is that?’ Liana said, pointing at something that disappeared quickly. What she had seen was certainly not an insect. It had legs and wings and moved like a brownish winged lizard through the branches. Inaya seemed to be using her sixth sense to scan the animal, which had disappeared out of sight. “I don’t know what it is. It’s probably the biggest species in this ecosystem, and doesn’t come from here, or from any of our worlds. An animal if you want to call it that from a completely different evolutionary tree.” “An actual alien, you mean?” Liana asked. “A tiny one, yes. And not a nawa at all. Clearly bio-compatible with the Oranderran species here. It might eat the insects or the plants or both. Seems to be the top predator of the food chain here.” Liana stared at the leaves in front of her, where the tiny alien was hidden from her eyes.

“There is only one species of alien animal that’s bio-compatible with almost all kinds of words. Even though it’s currently extinct in both Nuanderra and Oranderra as far as we know.” Lun said. “A zoka you mean? The thing that lives in the toxic world of Yokanderra and that once started propagating around the university of the Southern desert tribe after one had accidentally hitched a ride on the explorers who were investigating that world with a portal?” Lun nodded. “Ah, yes. I had a lecture about them once at the university. Yokanderra is not the only world where it was found, and there are fossil remains known from Nuanderra too in very different eras of the geological column, maybe even from Oranderra I think. It seems to be very adaptive to various worlds. But it’s also bio-compatible with a lot of predators who like to eat it.” “What are you talking about? What is a zoka?” Liana asked.

“Ah, well, you know… We said that there were more worlds, and that it would be dangerous to go to other worlds because you wouldn’t survive there. A lot of them are too different for our nawa to live there, or even visit. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own lifeforms. And one of the most well-known lifeforms that is found in all kinds of worlds with lifeforms of completely unrelated evolutionary trees is the zoka, which doesn’t really seem to come from any of the worlds that we ever investigated even, but it was found in several of them. It has a completely different kind of DNA as you call it from plants and animals, structure-wise, and a weird body plan. Four legs with four fingers, four wings, a body that’s flexible like an eel or lizard, limbs without joints, and one eye and a sucker for a mouth, like a lamprey. They can propagate asexually when needed, and eat almost anything if they’re hungry. But they’re not really dangerous and they seem to be easily outcompeted by our rodents and birds.” “So, we’ve just seen an actual alien?” “For certain. We don’t know yet if it’s a zoka or something else, but I think we can say that the biggest animal here in this mostly Oranderran ecosystem is completely alien. I feel several of them hiding in the leaves around us.

“This trip is getting weirder and weirder.” said Liana.