The Purple Haired Craze

In Which Time Has Passed

The winter holidays came so quickly that Valkyrie was stunned when she realised she had already been in a magical 1600s school for a whole month. Livena laughed at her expression when Ghastly had mentioned it to the two of them in passing; she described it later as being her goldfish expression. Valkyrie couldn't stop the small pout from appearing on her face.

Thankfully, it hadn't taken long for Valkyrie to ease herself back into the Dead Men's friendship group and was soon back into the routine of casually flirting with the boys.

Livena was the person who suggested that she should try and make friends with people outside of the Dead Men and introduced her to Elysia Venka, the girl with the insane red, frizzy hair who had commented on her fight with Skulduggery during the first Physical Combat lesson she had at Ende Academy. Ely reminded Valkyrie painfully of Tanith with her quirky personality and the fact that she had an identical discipline to her remnant possessed friend. Elysia's friends (who quickly became Livena and Valkyrie's friends) were just as quirky.

September Ora, a kineticist, was a short brunette, but was able to sprint so quickly that you could barely see her when she did so. She would generally get mocked for her height (she was barely five foot), but she would generally be able to beat them up badly due to her incredible speed and the strength she gained from her discipline.

Elena Darnell was a skilled sensitive who had short, bright blue hair that stuck up everywhere and bounced to lessons instead of walked. She was fortunate that she didn't have to do anything with her hair unless she was going out in public, where she had to wear a wig so as not to shock any of the mortals around the area (of which there were few, but precautions had to be made). She was also ridiculously pale and September liked to recount the story when Lena got horrible sunburn and was bright pink for a week after.

The five girls became almost inseparable. Valkyrie introduced them to the Dead Men, who were more than happy to have new people to flirt with. Erskine briefly dropped his crush on China and insisted that Elena was the girl for him and he attempted to spend their first lunchtime together sitting next to the blue haired girl, whispering things in her ear. It must have been somewhat suggestive because she swiftly threw a hefty punch at the boy's face, which gave him a black eye that stayed swollen for at least two days. It was the only act of violence that Valkyrie ever saw Lena commit and Erskine never bothered her again and resumed his obsession over China Sorrows.

Valkyrie was amused to see that Saracen and Dexter, despite generally flirting at the girls, seemed to take some sort of interest in each other. In her head, whilst she knew that she had a small baby crush on Dexter, she had always thought that the two of them would make a very cute couple. She was surprised to find that they actually did appear to like each other as teens in a romantic way. She made a mental note to herself to ensure she asked Dexter and Saracen about their feelings for each other when she returned to the twenty-first century. It would be very amusing to see their reactions when she did.

If she did.

The doubt that Valkyrie would ever return to the 21st Century had been haunting her for her entire time at the school. She did not notice how much this mystery affected her during the day because of how busy she was, but she struggled to sleep during the night, tossing and turning. Skulduggery had even picked up on the signs that she was not herself, and he had only really known her for a month. She had tried approaching Liv about the topic, but she had always managed to evade her, making random excuses. Valkyrie was planning to confront Livena about the problem again when she was distracted. As the holidays approached, the conversations around school changed to discussions concerning the Winter Ball and whether they would be going home for the holidays.

"What ball?" Val had asked Dexter and Saracen when they had mentioned it.

"Every holiday, the school plans a ball for the school to give us a chance to socialise and have some fun," Dexter explained. "They mainly do it to distract us all from the war."