[IMG] [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/aa/ff/77/aaff77ad0b53efaca336349ba9a79f90.jpg]
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When Lin Xiaorui awoke again, it was Saturday August 9th.
The song of chirping birds and cicadas chorusing in the early morning light could vaguely be heard from outside the bedroom window. The shutters were closed today, just as the curtains were drawn, a testimony to the fact that nobody had opened them again ever since Xiaorui had passed out yesterday afternoon in bed.
Ordinarily, Xiaorui did not sleep with the curtains down. Part of this was because she liked the natural light in the morning, and often times she preferred to be woken up by the gentle brush of sunlight in her face as opposed to the blaring ugly tone of an electronic clock. Similarly speaking, Xiaorui also was not in the habit of sleeping at night with air conditioning either, even with the sweltering heat of Hangzhou's summers. Part of it was cultural in a sense -- the Lin family was not poor by any means, but frugality was a valued trait that for some reason her family continued to practice despite the career successes of Xiaorui's father that brought them to the upper middle class over a decade ago. This made Xiaorui's home life strikingly ordinary. Like many other middle-class Chinese families of the era, everyone owned an air conditioner in the house, but nobody ever turned it on except in the rare situation there were guests to be entertained.
That was culture for you, in a sense.
Lin Xiaorui sat up in bed somewhat groggily, still hugging a pillow between her arms.
She rubbed her eyes, and remarked silently to herself that at this point she didn't really feel sick anymore.
She touched her forehead briefly and confirmed that she no had a fever, and then she looked to the right to briefly lay her gaze across her bedroom.
Unsurprisingly, there was no sign of Li Fenghua, the girl who always seemed to strike like a violent hurricane and disappear the next moment without the slightest trace.
Honestly, Lin Xiaorui felt that all of yesterday was almost as surreal as a dream.
Had all of that hectic chaos really happened?
A brief thought flew across Xiaorui's mind, and moments later she extended a hand down and reached underneath her shorts.
Yep. She closed her eyes as she confirmed it.
It's still not there.
Her fingers changed course, quickly located, and then grazed by the opening of her vagina. A few seconds later, Xiaorui withdrew it from underneath her shorts.
She looked at the tiny amount of sticky viscous fluid on her fingertips, and squinted her eyes to examine it closely.
It was mostly clear and kind of egg-white-like, possibly the faintest tinge of yellow if you looked at it very carefully.
Frankly it was basically the same as the discharge that Xiaorui had found on her underwear yesterday, but this morning it was much thinner and frankly such a tiny volume that it was hardly anything to remark about.
Lin Xiaorui brought her fingers to her nose and she sniffed the fluid quickly, and it didn't really smell like anything to her. She didn't really feel weird or itchy down in her lower parts either, so was the conclusion that she was supposed to draw was that it was fairly normal for women to have vaginal discharge like this?
Even so, was yellowish fluid considered normal? How often was it okay to have discharge?
Part of the reason why it had alarmed her yesterday was because the amount that she had found on her underwear after school was far more than Lin Xiaorui ever imagined as a "man". It was also much thicker and stickier than expected, almost the consistency of creamy lotion. Well yes, she was always aware of the fact that women could get "wet", of course, but being the oblivious kind of person in the past who didn't know any better, Xiaorui had always assumed it would be well... more watery... and probably only be produced if the girl was aroused?
So that was a myth, then?
Xiaorui closed her eyes and concentrated on her own feelings.
Yeah...
Well nope, she wasn't aroused right now at all.
Still somewhat curious, and probably against her better judgement, Xiaorui ventured her hand back underneath her shorts and tried pushing her middle finger physically into her vagina, but Lin Xiaorui winced a few short seconds later because it was actually kind of uncomfortable and hurt slightly.
She withdrew fairly quickly after that and decided immediately on the spot that this was more than enough exploring for one day.
Maybe she was doing it wrong.
Or maybe it was kind of stupid to try stuff like this when you weren't even aroused in the first place.
Lin Xiaorui gave a wry smile to herself as she thought about the hundreds of "genderbender" novels online, the majority of which had a leery perverted MC who always spent chapter 1 groping boobs and masturbating themselves to orgasm within the first 500 words of the story.
Now that Xiaorui thought about it, it was actually kind of fairly comedic how grossly different imagination was different from reality. Having woken up with a vagina a full day ago, was the experience perhaps somewhat underwhelming? Probably.
But in all honesty, she wasn't upset about this at all.
Lin Xiaorui's mood was a little bit brighter on the inside than she dared admit aloud.
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After brushing her teeth, changing, and doing the various necessary toiletries in the morning, Lin Xiaorui eventually made her way downstairs.
Today, it was Lin Xiaorui's mother sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper with a coffee mug in hand.
"Rui-Rui, how are you feeling?" She looked up immediately, her voice steady and level.
"I'm doing well, Mom."
"Sorry I couldn't be there for you yesterday," she spoke. "I got the call that you were sick at school, but I couldn't leave work quickly enough with all the project deadlines coming."
Xiaorui shook her head. "It's okay, you don't need to worry about me. You can't control what happens at work. I'm feeling a lot better now too."
Xiaorui's mother put down the cup of coffee and leaned forward with her elbows on the table.
"I'm really glad that Fenghua was around," she remarked. "That girl is an absolute treasure. Make sure you take good care of her in the future, okay? I think all of us can rest easy this way."
Lin Xiaorui's hand froze for a split instant on the refrigerator door, but she quickly recovered her emotionless mask within a heartbeat.
Wordlessly, Xiaorui continued with what she was previously doing as she reached into refrigerator shelf for one of the the tea leaf eggs [1] that Lao-Lao had prepared several days ago. She also grabbed herself a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table.
A mischievous smile came to her mother's face a few minutes later.
"So, tell me Xiaorui, how long have you and Fei-Fei actually been dating?" She said.
Xiaorui almost choked and spat out a mouthful of milk.
"We're not dating!" Xiaorui adamantly denied it.
A knowing look flashed across Xiaorui's mother's eyes as she laughed heartily like crisp bells sparkling.
"Fei-Fei said it exactly in the same way last night," she said.
"You don't have to hide it from me, you know," she continued, taking another sip from her mug of coffee.
"The Lin family isn't nearly as a strict as Fenghua's family. I won't say anything to her parents, either. I like that girl. She's very bright, and also much more perceptive and sensitive to her surroundings than most others her age. She cares very deeply about you."
Xiaorui silently looked down at her glass of milk, having no words to express her actual thoughts.
Her mother could think what she liked, but she had no idea what Li Fenghua was truly like underneath that deceptively innocent rabbit skin.
"You know that the Fei-Fei didn't leave until very late last night. She also asked me to record the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics [2] last night for you, since she knew that you'd want to watch it."
Lin Xiaorui suddenly shot up from her seat.
"--Wait, what?!"
Her voice was nearly shouting, a completely shocked look on her face.
Her mother held a quizzical look.
"The opening ceremony of the Olympics? Is there something wrong, Rui-Rui?"
"That was yesterday?" Xiaorui cried aloud, incredulously.
"Yes? I didn't think you'd forget though? You've been talking almost constantly about it for the past month."
Lin Xiaorui felt her hands practically trembling as she counted the dates mentally backwards in her head.
It was true. It really had been last night. But if that was the case, she had preciously little time right now.
Xiaorui pushed away from the kitchen table, her chair screeching on the ground as it grated roughly on the hardwood floor.
"I'm sorry Mom! There's something I need to do right now! I'll come back to clean up afterwards!"
She blurted out, as she dashed out with a clatter from the dining area, leaving her mother behind alone at the kitchen table with an astonished expression on her face.
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Lin Xiaorui raced into the office room in the Lin family residence, practically diving in front of the computer as she waited for the aged Windows XP machine to turn on.
She tapped her fingers impatiently as it seemed like forever for the PC to complete its boot up sequence.
Behind her, there was the sound of the door opening as Xiaorui's mother also found her way into the office.
"Is Long Yangsun competing today?" She asked, leaning in with her arms folded across her chest.
Xiaorui glanced back momentarily before quietly nodding.
"Well," Xiaorui's mother started, and then she paused. "I guess it's true that is kind of a big deal. Come get me when you're done with the computer. I guess I'll probably start my morning working on something else."
"I'll be as fast as possible." Lin Xiaorui told her mother. "I just need to quickly check QQ and my email, and then I'll be done."
"Take your time. The computer isn't going to grow legs and run away."
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Long Yangsun.
Long Yangsun...
It's somewhat difficult to know where to begin, when talking about Long Yangsun.
His biographic information is fairly straightforward.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Age 17. Family name is 龙. Given name is 杨孙. Born and raised in Hangzhou. [3]
An enormous giant that towered over everybody else at 190 cm tall and 89 kg.
Most famous probably for being being the local star of the swimming team. He was so talented that he didn't even swim for his high school team or even any of the university teams. Instead, he trained at the provincial team, the famous Zhejiang National Team that sent several athletes to the Olympics every year.
He was also Lin Xiaorui's closest friend and as intimate as a brother.
Somebody that Xiaorui treasured so dearly that she would jump off a cliff for him in a heartbeat.
And yes... the one and only person that Lin Xiaorui had ever developed an unrequited love for.
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The story begins with two young elementary school boys sitting at the edge of a swimming pool.
Both of them had were being kept in detention for breaking rules at physical education class.
One had dark short hair, a gloomy expression, and a perpetual emotionless veil drawn over his eyes. Earlier, he had gotten into trouble for pushing people around on the pool deck and starting a fight.
The other had long lustrous hair, radiant eyes, and an ever-curious inquisitive look on his face. He had gotten into trouble for breaking into the tool shed and running while hollering through the girl's locker room because he reportedly just wanted to know "whether the girls have peeing competitions into the communal shower drains just like the boys did".
One of the boys knew how to swim, and the other didn't.
"Lin Xiaorui, I barely know you at all." The boy with lustrous hair said, looking to his left. "Why are you here in detention?"
"Because people are stupid," the gloomy boy responded and turned his back away. "I hate stupid people."
The first boy got to his knees and crawled forward on the sun-baked concrete, inching in front of the child who was dreary like a rain cloud.
"Am I stupid too?" He asked, curious, his hazel eyes inquisitive.
The short-haired boy paused.
"It depends," he answered cryptically. "Does taking stupid actions make you stupid?"
The radiant boy laughed, his voice crystal clear like spring water.
He spoke. "If that's the case, then I am the stupidest dude alive!"
Lin Xiaorui looked up at that point with his eyes slightly confused.
"You don't get upset when people call you stupid or retarded or a fag?"
Long Yangsun gave a warm, friendly smile and then pushed himself up from the ground with his hands. He walked to the edge of the pool where the deep end was marked and then turned around, spreading his arms out wide.
"I don't know how to swim," he suddenly said. "If I jumped into the water with no life-guards here, that would be considered stupid, right?"
Xiaorui looked at him confused, completely lost about what this child was going on about.
"Yes, that would be considered dumb," Lin Xiaorui responded.
"Okay, then I'll jump in right away."
And without another word, Long Yangsun took an enormous leap and plunged into the water.
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10 minutes later, there were two sweaty boys soaked and coughing out water, crawling and hacking on the pool deck like they had only barely managed to extricate themselves from a desperate life-or-death situation.
Lin Xiaorui was the first to angrily shout, "What the fuck was that for?! You just said you don't know how to swim!"
The other boy choked up water from his lungs a few more times before he finally responded.
"I just wanted to make sure that you saw me as stupid." He said with a raspy voice, a grin on his face. "You know, stupid, just like how you say you hate stupid people, kinda like the ones you smacked earlier today in the face."
"You're an idiot!"
"Thanks for the compliment. And I just proved that you're a nice person."
"?!! What the heck does that have to do with anything?!"
"Well, you did pull me out of the water, right?"
"Anyone with the slightest conscience would do something like that!"
"That still makes you a nice person though," Long Yangsun insisted.
Lin Xiaorui was speechless at this point.
He was beginning to realize that Long Yangsun was a totally different kind of person than he was. Where Lin Xiaorui was a total pessimist and only saw the worst of people when he interacted with others, Long Yangsun was an optimist who looked disproportionately at people's positive qualities.
They were almost polar opposites.
And technically, you couldn't precisely say that one was more correct than the other.
"You're still an idiot."
Xiaorui finally managed to squeeze those words out from his mouth, having nothing else to say.
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Back to the present, Lin Xiaorui closed her eyes as she thought about those past memories, sitting in front of the computer.
That felt like it was from a distant time long long ago.
She also thought about the future.
Having time-traveled back to the past from 2017, she thought about the joys and sorrows, all the excitements and the disappointments. It was a very painful yet also very bittersweet time. It made her heart ache remembering it all, many parts of it from a future that had yet to come to pass in 2008.
Long Yangsun ended up becoming an amazing swimmer, specializing in long distance events like the 400m or 1500m freestyle.
Lin Xiaorui herself accompanied him side-by-side in the beginning, and later ended up focusing exclusively on the middle school diving team. However, she was never as gifted as him. Although she occasionally qualified for municipal and prefecture-level youth championship meets, she was never talented enough to make it to the provincial level.
Yangsun, on the other hand, constantly improved like a weed. The faster he got, the more he improved. By the time the two of them reached the last year of middle school, Yangsun was already swimming at a national level. Xiaorui stayed beside him, following him, cheering for him, laughing with him, arguing with him, and making memories with him every step of the way.
When high school started though, Yangsun was recruited to attend a sports-focused high school [4], and Xiaorui quit diving entirely to focus on her studies. Despite being separated for more than a year by 2008, the two of them were still very close, and Xiaorui was... well... she had developed feelings for him at some point, even though it was unrequited and something that she never dared speak aloud about.
In 2008, Yangsun qualified for the Beijing Olympics at 17 years of age, which was his first major international event.
Even though he wasn't expected to make it to finals [5] or anything ridiculous like that, to Lin Xiaorui, it was already an amazing achievement to qualify for the Olympics in the first place.
...and well, his swimming career would only get better after that point, but Lin Xiaorui had no intention of remarking any further on that topic. She kind of felt like it would be jinxing it, almost, if she said or thought too much about it, so instead she felt compelled to focus on the present.
Just one step at a time.
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Xiaorui suddenly felt nervous as she turned on Internet Explorer and navigated her way to the QQ app.
Her mind felt kind of fuzzy and blank, being somewhat unsure about what to say since her present self was coming from the future.
Xiaorui shook her head at that moment, trying to clear her mind.
No, no. This wasn't about her.
This was Long Yangsun's special moment, and Lin Xiaorui only had a supporting role to play.
As long as she stuck to the role she had played in the past, it shouldn't change the future too much. This was something that Lin Xiaorui was absolutely dead set on. She wouldn't be able to face herself if she said or did something that caused Yangsun to perform poorly and ruin his athletic career.
Saturday, August 9th, 2008, the day after the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the qualifying heats for the 400 meter freestyle, Long Yangsun's primary event. It was potentially his first (and last, if he did poorly) appearance on an international stage.
Lin Xiaorui remembered it almost as clearly as yesterday.
The problem was...
...the past her had gotten into an argument with Long Yangsun in the weeks just prior to the start of the Beijing Olympics, and they had messaged constantly on QQ before finally making up with each other before Yangsun's turn to swim. This was part of the reason why Xiaorui remembered that sequence of events so clearly.
The two of them had been in the middle of a fight.
However, the current issue was that 25-year-old Xiaorui teleported to the past and had completely forgotten about the date the Beijing Olympics started. This also meant that she hadn't been checking QQ, which subsequently meant that she hadn't been messaging Long Yangsun like the former her would have religiously done in the past.
It was very possible that from Long Yangsun's perspective, it might have appeared that Lin Xiaorui suddenly stopped talking to him and was ignoring him.
This wouldn't impact his swimming performance, would it?
It made Lin Xiaorui deeply uncomfortable and anxious.
She hoped desperately there was still something salvageable about this situation.
The web page finally loaded, and Xiaorui immediately clicked into her inbox.
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Author's Notes:
1. Chinese Tea Eggs: See wikipedia. Hard-boiled eggs that are boiled in soy sauce and tea leaves until the flavor soaks through.
2. Beijing Olympics: The 2008 Olympics were held in Beijing. It was a huge deal in China. Blah blah blah. Nobody reads these notes, do they?
3. Long Yangsun: Definitely not based off of a real-life person... *coughs*
4. In China, athletics are not a major part of high school. Those that are interested or serious about pursuing athletics will typically attend a sports high school.
5. Finals: In swimming events at the olympics, there is often first "qualifying" round with multiple heats, a "semi-final" round, and then a "finals" round. This is because an Olympic swimming pool typically has 8 lanes. The "finals" round is in many instances the only one that is televised.