In the morning, Lina's alarm clock rang out loudly, throttling her from her sleep very suddenly. The morning made her memory foggy, but if she remembered correctly, she'd spent the majority of the night crying herself to sleep--trying desperately to figure out a motive to be back at Garden, but finding none that didn't have to do with him. If this was how it had to be, then why? Why did he kiss her before he left the Calm Lands?
Lina looked through her drawers and tried on her old instructor uniform. For some reason it was too short on her waist. She frowned and looked at herself in the mirror--had she really grown that much? Lina didn't pay it much mind, and instead, put on a normal shirt and jeans, and tied her long hair up into a low side ponytail, the bangs she'd just have to deal with. The second Lina walked out the door, Dan and Karen ambushed her.
First was Dan--he suddenly jumped up out of nowhere as Lina was locking the door and flung his arms around her screaming, "LINA!!! It's so great o have you back." Lina squealed in shock, then came Karen jumping on the both of them and knocking them to the floor. They laughed and stood, dusting themselves off.
"Man! You won't believe the CRAZY CHAOS that's been going on without you!" Karen jumped up and down. She jumped ahead of them while they headed for the classroom, twirling around on her tippy toes like a ballerina. Dan and Lina lagged behind her, laughing and hanging onto the each the way best friends do after not seeing each other for a while.
"Really? I thought there'd be more trouble with me here," Lina said as Karen stepped back in line with Dan and Lina. Karen shook her head furiously and Dan joined her. "Well... whaddya know? Seems like my trip was really for nothing then." She pushed past them and together they hooked arms and skipped down the hallway, but ended up cracking up badly and unshackled themselves from each other as they entered the classroom. Dan and Karen took their seats and Lina headed towards the front of the too.
"Thank god our instructor's back! Messenger girl was so damn annoying," was the first remark Lina heard in the classroom. Lina didn't even have to look up to figure out who it was.
"Good morning to you too, Seifer," Lina said casually as if she had never left. It was good to see everyone again...even Seifer though she had a score to settle with him.
"How was your two year vacation, Instructor?" Hainc asked from the front row, half joking.
"Could've been better," Lina laughed, recalling when she had been blown away in that tornado, almost killed twice, and gotten amnesia and recovered again. She looked up and saw Zell sitting in the back of the room, looking up at her with still worried eyes. Perhaps he was the only person besides herself who could see the small swell in her eye lid acquired from her tearful night. Just looking at him made her heart sink again, so she tore her eyes away from his familiar gaze and tried to focus on the class. "So--what'd I miss here?"
"Lots of stuff," someone said, and the entire class laughed. Lina nodded, kind of rolled her eyes and sighed. "Well... I heard there was a Sephiroth sighting by Balamb." Lina blinked, then pulled out of her pocket her cell phone. "What's that good for against Sephiroth, Instructor?"
"This? This is just a cell phone," she said and the class laughed. "But I do hope you know that the emergency button on the phone that is usually disabled is a special little button." The laughter stopped and the students leaned in over their desks to get a better look. Some even pulled out their own cell phones to examine the button up close. "You press that only when you see Sephiroth."
"What's it do?" someone asked.
"It's a panic button. As soon as you hit that button, it sends out signals to some of the greatest heroes of our time. They're all on some kind of special list issued by some organization--I don't know," Lina kind of mumbled, flipping her cell phone around in her hands. The students were absolutely enthralled--their instructor had gotten so cool over her vacation. "Cloud's the first on the list. He's everyone's only hope. Think of the pressure!" The others chuckled.
"Are you on the list, Instructor?"
"ME!?" Lina looked incredulous. "I sure as hell hope not! I mean it'd be flattering and all, but I like life." The students laughed at her remark--she'd become a lot more extroversive over her extended break also. "I think Commander Leonhart's somewhere on that list. Sometimes goes by Leon because he thinks he's all that. Sora's on that list near the top too."
"Have you ever met Sora?" Lina smiled and shook her head.
"I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Sora," Lina chuckled. She'd trained with Cloud before when she had amnesia the first time, she'd met with a very famous alchemist for a very short period of time, and she'd surprisingly met the High Summoner Yuna in a whirlwind of events, but not to say Lina was any special spectacle or anything. She was just lucky and she'd met lots of other less significant names in between each meeting, and had oftentimes become closer with those names than others.
"What's Ed like, Lina?" Lina smiled widely, suppressing a very girly smile. This shocked Zell--who exactly was this Ed that was making Lina smile so cheerfully?
"Ed is..." Lina's eyes sparkled in memory--and how good it felt to be able to remember! "Don't get me wrong here--I didn't get to meet him for a very long time, but from what I remember, Ed was a brilliant person. He was a genius. Up to my shoulder about then." The students laughed. "And we all know he'd explode if he heard that."
"Instructor?" a student asked from the back of the room, and Lina had to concentrate not to look right at Zell who sat next to the student--what a struggle and she wondered how obvious it seemed. "What was the whole thing with the Lutrisius thing? From the last time a while ago?" Lina, who'd been smiling a second ago, suddenly had a pained facial expression.
"Well.." she thought of the risk, of the pressure and how overwhelming everything was mixed together. She struggled with herself for a moment, wondering whether or not it was safe to speak.
"Lina?" Dan asked from the third row and she looked up at him with her sad eyes again. "Squall made us sign some kind of censorship thing that doesn't allow us to say anything about it, but no one knows what it's about."
"That's because they took it out of the textbooks, dumbass," Seifer shot from the front row. He smugly settled back down into his seat, kicked his feet up onto his desk and smirked at Lina. "So, Lina. How does it feel? You feel like a celebrity yet? Or has the press not caught on even after that seven on the Richter scale by a teardrop?" Lina glared at his direction, frightened. Suddenly, she was aware that Seifer knew a lot more than the others did.
"Do we all know the story of Hyne?" Lina asked the class, choosing very cautiously to avoid a potentially noxious conversation with that smug smartass sitting in the front row. The class was a little bit unsure about her question, so she quickly walked to the shelf in the back of the room while quickly explaining some background information, "Hyne was supposedly a deity figure--ruler of the world. He was one greedy sunofagun and created in inspired by his greed a sort of 'weapon,' but this 'weapon' was a special type of human. You won't find any information on what kind of 'weapon' this was, but you can see select clues residing all across the planet. Ironically for you guys, one such clue is right in this room speaking to you right now." Lina kind of smiled to herself as she reached for a book on the highest shelf and pulled it into her hand.
"A sorceress!" Karen called from her seat and Lina nodded. "That's youuuuu Lina!"
"Yes, Karen, it is," Lina said plainly--it wasn't anything new anyway. "However, Hyne had a heart, even if a very small one. The first sorceress was all alone in her kind and even though the people on the planet comforted her, she held a sadness that could not be consoled. They called her Lutrisius which means 'a beautiful sad glow' because of her sweet but painfully melancholy temperament. Hyne realized his mistake in only creating one sorceress and tried to create more in order to comfort the first one, but by then, Lutrisius had passed away of loneliness."
The class was awfully quiet for a second. Lina chuckled to break up the silence. "Cheer up guys," she told them. "There's more." She flipped open an ancient looking book to a book marked page somewhere near the end. "This was a present, and before you comment on what a stupid present is--think again. This book is a textbook from maybe two hundred years ago. Listen to this, 'After the death of the well-liked Lutrisius, the people of the planet presented similar hospitality to the novel creations, but the people ascertained them as a foul and corrupt race. Forever, the people looked for the return of Lutrsius to right the wrong in the creations.'"
"Didn't Lutrisius pass on her powers?" Kati asked.
"No...only the other sorceresses started doing that. They didn't want to lose a moment where they could be trying to conquer the world," Lina said. "They took this out of the textbooks two hundred years ago because the sorceresses were becoming aware of the fact that Lutrisius's rebirth was inevitable. Each time she returned, she was assassinated by none other than her own peers. The people started wising up, took all records of Lutrisius and burned them. They knew they couldn't afford to wait for Lutrisius's rebirth again--they knew their fate would rest in her hands."
The class was silent again and Lina shrugged it off. She wasn't expecting them to fully understand the pressure, and the pain she felt for each casualty, each day, each moment. "Some of the sorceresses still know." Lina looked up after setting the book on her desk and saw Seifer smirking at her once again.
"Don't get too cocky, Seifer," Lina told him. "If you hadn't been so obsessed with your so-called 'romantic dream' you wouldn't know any more than anyone else in here. Ultimecia had access to the present past for a very limited amount of time."
"Sure thing, Lina," Seifer muttered. "At least I'm not the one being hunted." Lina froze, then glared at him.
"I want to speak to you after class."