I almost missed it. I had a meeting with my Theoripute. I was at quad 78 running some skateboarding tricks. I have been learning skateboarding, it will be my physical skill if I ever - no - I mean when I come to your time.

Skateboarding was a big skill in your time, everybody needs a physical skill, a language, and at least one main mental preoccupation pertinent to a time when going to that time.

My mental preoccupation is reading / writing, that's another reason why I am writing this so I can work on my preoccupation and get a good score. Mastery of the preoccupation is necessary to get a good score, and graduate and not be discarded and get a good job and be somebody important in the world. So you better believe I will do well with my preoccupation.

My friend Nervé is going to Elizabethan England, or at least that is where he has focused his studies, real old time or that's his goal, and his physical skill is sword-fighting. That worries me a lot for him, because he only has one body - what would happen to him if something were to happen to it? His preoccupation is the stage, which is cool, because his and my preoccupations have overlaps and we can sometimes help each other out.

So I was practicing my heelflips - I can do 3 tricks real good so far - ollies, nollies, and boardslides, obviously there is even more basic stuff than that. So I was practicing and Sausalito walks by and holds up her right fist and points at the extra thumb extension (she's been learning to program and helped me set up this connection for the stories here) and the little timer hologram came out and I said a phrase I just learned from your time, really natural "Oh shit!"

And then I started running (it would be a big rule break to skateboard outside the designated training quads) and I got to my appointment with the Theoripute with only 150000 milliseconds to go!

That's not very good writing is it? I should do it so I describe how I ran, and how I felt running, and the things I ran by and how difficult it was and what it meant to me to be running to make my Theoripute appointment.

And that is difficult of course because you might not understand a lot of it, but maybe that won't be that important - I was reading a book recently and it had this in it

"I remember around three o'clock that afternoon I was standing way the hell up on

top of Thomsen Hill, right next to this crazy cannon that was in the Revolutionary War

and all. You could see the whole field from there, and you could see the two teams

bashing each other all over the place. You couldn't see the grandstand too hot, but you

could hear them all yelling, deep and terrific on the Pencey side" -- From A Book!

If I showed you all the notes I had to make and all the deep searches to even get a clue about what all of that meant you would glitch.

So when I said "Oh Shit" and started running I was starting in quad 78. I of course held my board under my left hand as I ran, I shortcut through the big arboretum that is focused on the Devonian

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

(I can't send Video back from my time yet because of the cost of maintaining this stream, so here is a video from one of the video services in your time about what the Devonian is like)

https://youtu.be/KJdCytwAigU

Everybody jogs in the Devonian arboretum because the trees love carbon dioxide, so I was being good. Although most people jog in orderly rows and I was all crazy, but these trees here put out so much oxygen I didn't even get out of breath, in fact I got maybe a bit high off of it.

I came out on the side with the white turtles and the pools with the Silurian life. The turtles are irritatingly hard to run around, slow but big so they're in the way. You gotta go somewhat slow and careful because what if two turtles came and crushed you, well at least then I'd have a good excuse.

Oh why did I ever accidentally turn off my notifications!?!?

I zigzagged between their giant shells, somebody had graffitied ɮɷ on the side of a really big turtle, I pictured with my eyes for later analysis and I jumped out the other side - that put me on the big curvy road with the food stops set up that follows the veldt where people go to tan between classes. Now I just had to follow the curve past the guardhouse where the Momentarium timekeepers come out on the hour and march about in their fanciest uniforms.

See recently I found a bug in the notifications template that tingles your inner ear when you have to be places and do things, and is so irritating because of course it has to be irritating to be useful! When you doze off in the cubbyhole near the timekeepers exit with the big old gloomy archway and you put your head up against the warmstone the radiations from within resets your notifications ticker. So I discovered that if you put on the warmstone right before timekeepers exit and then rub an ice cube counterclockwise below your ear you can set the notification tingle strength - and I accidentally completely turned mine off. Which was a silly mistake. I was going to write up a bug report but haven't done it yet. It would be a major infraction to turn off notifications on purpose but not if it's on accident like this was in the service of writing a complete bug report. Anyway I better turn it back on after this meeting.

Now I was on the home stretch where the road is by giant Ordovician lake with the graveyard of pirate ships, the ship closest to the shore is one called the Whydah Gally, its mast has fallen over to the side and I ran up it, and jumped across to the HMS Black Plague, which Nervé and I learned you can swing from onto the top of the artzibition center because there is a loose rope hanging from its mast that nobody has ever thought to take away.

The artzibition today is the evolution of Butterflies. Only there is some sort of technical glitch in it because there are some butterflies that should have died out in the Pleistocene but then ended up in Salzburg about the time of Mozart which is weird. Everybody is talking about it.

So naturally I swung right into a swarm of Pleistocene butterflies, but escaped with only a few caught in my hair by going through the glass doors and then I took the elevator downstairs and I'm here, outside my Theoripute's office with only 150000 milliseconds to go!

Oops, still got a butterfly in my hair. I put it in my side bag with the time stasis lock, and lock it. Otherwise it would probably die in there. I am nice like that and don't like to kill anything.

The green light above the Theoripute door just dinged green, so that means it's my turn!

That's it for me now, Noiruzi Sangsung, time to go, talk to you later!

That's it for me now, Noiruzi Sangsung, time to go, talk to you later! [https://img.wattpad.com/9f7eebf3bba00003f65c672464dd7641c2ee2750/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f6f6d495245754a6a3552566c51773d3d2d313439373239323431392e313830396562363337663934303430303837393938323933363031372e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]