'Variant' is a type that can be returned from a Lua call in to the API, but cannot be instantiated. This is because a variant gets translated to the correct type when it gets passed to Lua. The types a Variant can be is limited to:

 * `int`
 * `float`
 * `string`
 * `Colourb`
 * `Colourf`
 * `Vector2f`
 * ''light userdata''
 * `nil`

So when a function in the [wiki:documentation/LuaManual/APIReference] claims to return a Variant, it will return one of the above listed types, but there is no way to figure out which type it is unless you know exactly what it is/should be before hand based on its identifier/name.