Taken By a Demon

The New Girl - Chapter 5

Diana always walked with Dylan and Stan to school in the morning. They only lived some ten minutes away from the school by foot and that wasn't worth getting in a car for. Sometimes it felt like it was impossible to live more than ten to fifteen minutes away from anything in their town. If it was further away by foot, it wasn't by bike and if it had the audacity to by more than fifteen minutes away by bike, it wasn't in the town anymore.

That morning Dylan was walking while balancing on the outmost part of the sidewalk while Diana explained the math homework to Stan. He hadn't quite managed to wrap his head around what the fractions wanted to do, while it made perfect sense to Diana. The mornings were always slow and rather absent of cars. They still drove by once in a while, but not often enough to scare Dylan away from his balancing.

"Hey, is it just me or are there a lot of birds these days?" he said looking at a v-formation of somethings in the sky. None of them knew enough about birds to tell what kind they were.

"Aren't they all migrating at the moment?" Stan asked. "That should make it make sense then, right?"

"No, I agree," Diana pondered. "There was that bird that distracted us on the way to The Caboodle the other day as well. The one that was going to use its secret moon base to take over the world, remember?"

"One does not simply forget a conversation like that," Dylan confirmed, "But I was mainly talking about all the flying ones. I think Stan had the answer."

"Aww, no moon base conspiracies this time?" Diana asked.

"They're migrating to a moon base," Stan said and nodded, proud of his deduction.

The twins nodded seriously as well. "Definitely."

***

Shizuka was driven to school that first day. While she also lived those ten to fifteen minutes she had no clue how to get there and her dad wanted to go with her to talk to the principal at the office. Due to the many complications of getting out of the house at the right time and driving the right way out of their maze of a living area, they arrived at least ten minutes later than they had planned, though still around five minutes before the first lesson started. They were met in the office by the principal, a nice kind of old man, and the secretary, a woman of around the same age. They introduced themselves, but Shizuka didn't quite catch their names. She also didn't catch a single word of the principal's rather long speech about the school and its goals for the future and, she assumed, how he hoped she would enjoy her school life there. She was much too anxious to focus on anything happening around her and besides, she presumed it was more or less exactly the same as the one she got last time she moved schools and that one had been too boring to listen to twice. She nodded interestedly at times it seemed relevant, though. Didn't want any trouble.

The principal ended by saying her home room teacher would be there soon to show her the way to her new class room. "She was supposed to be here already, but, well, she can be a bit... forgetful" As if on cue, they heard the door to the outer office open almost immediately after he said those words, which prompted a fond shake of his head. "Is that you, Lea?" he called.

"Hellooo," a lady said as she opened the door to the inner office. Her brown hair was up in a very messy bun with hair sticking out everywhere. She wore a blazer and a skirt, formal enough clothing, but the blazer was buttoned wrong and the skirt very precisely didn't match it, just enough to completely ruin any formal vibe and leaving her putting off a very honest feeling that Shizuka immediately liked. This was lucky as she was apparently Lea Jensen, her new homeroom teacher. "I'm here. Sorry I'm late, Daniel, I didn't remember you wanted to see me until I was almost at my class room." Then she looked around the room and saw Shizuka and her dad. "Hi," she said, directed at them.