NOVEL WEB Chapter 33 (Teacher)
“Okay kids, everyone here? Josiah, where are you?” The sun shone brightly into the train station as I looked around to find the prankster of the class. He was one of a kind so far and never ceased to amaze even the most patient of teachers with his playfulness.
“I´m here Sir!” Josiah lifted his hand eagerly. Luckily, we were having an excursion which meant that for once, the class would stay in line.
“Okay then, our train arrives in a few minutes, so get ready!” Some students nodded excitedly and began talking amongst themselves like teenagers did. Keeping them quiet was a horrendous task to begin with so if the noise stayed down a bit, I would let them be.
As soon as the train was scheduled for arrival, one of the many portals to the left of us opened and the trains nose pushed out of it slowly. Metallic screeching followed shortly afterwards as the train decelerated slowly and came to a halt before us. The doors slit open shortly afterwards and the students entered the train one by one while being scanned for their tickets and possible security threats.
Finally, I tucked my wings in and followed after the students closely. Soon afterwards, a train attendant greeted me respectfully like usual and guided me towards my seat which was very close to the students. A few minutes after I was seated, the train slowly crept forwards again with a few students giggling with excitement.
For obvious reasons, interdimensional travel quite rare for normal humans, but these kids were selected by a god to become one of their angels which meant that I had to teach them everything they needed to know. I loved to be of help to god of wisdom, but I certainly did not like dealing with the soon-to-be angels of certain gods.
Their characters were just too different from each other as the god of fire selected hot-headed, while the god of water obviously took a calmer person. I could deal with those two, but if your whole class consists of characteristics that go into the extreme, the task of teaching them suddenly becomes a lot less fun.
“Hey, what is this?” A boy asked nobody in particular and pointed towards a red lever near the entrance. He had the highest chances of all to become an angel, but not because he was particularly clever or had any good qualities. No, he was just chaotic. In one moment he was the sweetest kid of the class and in the next he was thinking about activating the emergency stop of the train while we were crossing through a portal.
“Don’t touch it Christoper.” I sternly gazed at him until he finally backed down from pulling the lever. Shaking my head, I realized I needed to keep them occupied unless I wanted a potential disaster to happen. “Instead, tell me where this portal is leading to.”
“Purgatory!” A boy two rows behind me said, looking out of the window into the darkness. One could barely make out the stones that made out the vast majority of these lands as it was just too dark, even for an angel like me.
“That’s correct. And why are we going there?” I asked into the round yet again.
“It is the only place connecting all the worlds, including ours. For efficiencies sake, it was chosen because every soul returns there after the body died. We can’t see them, but they say they are wandering these barren lands to reach their destination.” A girl mentioned while playing some game on her handheld console.
“What is their destination?” I asked her, but she was already deeply engrossed into her game yet again.
“Basically a portal tower which allows souls to move between the worlds of the living and purgatory.” Someone right behind me mumbled quietly. As a complete introvert, he really had it hard in this class full of borderline inane people.
“That’s correct. Take a good look while we are here and you still can.” Just as I said so, a small rumbling went through the train. Nobody was worried though as it was quite normal that one ran over a few larger rocks on the way. Soon afterwards, the purple portal opened at a large wall and we passed through it, arriving at our real destination.
The class was already jumping up from their seats, but from my experience we had to wait a little for our tour guide to arrive. Thankfully, that did not take too long as a blonde angel soon stepped into the wagon.
“Welcome to the land of all possibilities! I´m Mihály, the security manager of this wonderful place and I am ashamed to inform you that you may not disembark right now. We were informed of a slight error on your way which is quite rare. We will deal with it shortly, so until then please stay seated.” With these words, he left the wagon through the door and entered one further to the back where I assumed another angel sat. Sighing quietly, I waited with my students for twenty minutes in which even I had to wonder what had happened. I had never heard of an error during dimensional travel so I was rather curious indeed. Sadly, we were not informed what had happened as our real tour guide entered the wagon ten minutes later, wearing a happy smile on his face.
“Welcome again to the Universal Studios. Please do apologise for the short interruption. With that out of the way, I was told we may start our tour right away and we have prepared a free meal for everyone of you as an apology. If you would be so kind to follow me, please.” Like usual, humans in the service of the gods were overly kind to angels as all of them were hoping to become like us one day. The chances for that were slim, really slim, but the hopes of being one step closer to near immortality made humans like I had been do everything.
Instead of telling him that his chances were the highest when he had some weird personality trait another god had, I simply kept my mouth shut and followed the kids out of the wagon. Curious, I kept looking at the train while we walked towards the station and didn’t find anything suspicious until we arrived at the front. A plastic pane was put over the front and while the kids simply strolled past it, I gathered my courage and glimpsed underneath it. The damage to the train was non existent as far as I could tell, but the red paint on the nose of it was certainly new.
We must had run something over on the way and my suspicion was that we did so in purgatory. It was never a good idea to probe into the affairs of a god even as an angel, but telling my patron god, the god of wisdom was probably not a bad idea. After all, he wanted to know everything.