|| -------- -- -----  A E R I E   O B L I V I A N A . singular book of text wandertainment by Frank Edward Nora ------------------- ----------- FOREMAN ITTENER PIER--CUP 18--"FEATHER" <-------  ||  Severe Repair  ||  Foreman Ittener Pier  ||  -------> (Cup SRfi018, Created v2 (6/7/99), Copyright 1999) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = I closed my eyes and swallowed, tightening my grasp on the leather straps. Breathing heavily, I realized that with my eyes closed, it wasn't all that bad. Then--SPLASH! I was covered in water. Opening my eyes, I saw it was now early morning or late afternoon, raining hard. My ears again felt weird and my hearing was muffled. It was like Bandelion jumped right into a river--I guess she must have time-jumped into a deep puddle or something. "Wha'd we get that time?" I asked. "Maybe not even a month." Lunatether replied. "Yeah." I said. Soon Bandelion jumped again, and it was a sunny mid-afternoon in the woods. "Cool!" Lunatether said. "Big chunk of a year there!" "How many jumps will we have to make?" "A lot. The max we want for a five decade journey is gonna be about five years--so that's about eight or nine right there. Gotta slow down though, once we get close, to be accurate. We don't want to overshoot--Bandelion'll need a good night's rest before she'll be able to head backwards." "Okay." I said. What else could I say? The journey seemed to last forever, but it was over in about half-an-hour, personal time. We jumped somewhere around 15 times. I tried to keep count but lost it toward the end. As our time leaps got farther and farther, it took Bandelion longer and longer to find what Lunatether described as the "sweet spot". A few minutes between jumps in the middle there. But we arrived, at the time I figured at being a little past what would have been the present back in Daptin's Land. That is, just far enough forward so that if I went to Daptin's Land, I wouldn't be in danger of meeting myself. And I knew from the training sessions with Whale that time clones were something to really try and avoid. Messy situations, you know, could result from time clones. Anyway, we got to the right time, and we left Bandelion to rest in the woods as we headed back for the boardwalk. It was a breezy summer afternoon. Lunatether was carrying a saddle pack of gold bullion which looked really heavy. I offered to carry it for her, but she said it was no problem. We got to the residential neighborhood, and the passage of time was plain to see--the style of the cars, the paving of the roads, the clothes of the few people we passed. I felt a weird kind of power, knowing that I'd just been 50 years in the past. Guess I felt cool. At a corner store about a mile from the boardwalk, I got to a payphone and dialed Peeferkihint information. I breathed a sigh of relief when they found a listing for Overwhelm Associates. "Got it!" I announced to Lunatether, who was leafing through the yellow pages of a phone book chained to the phone. "Great!" she said. "Now if I could only find a place to sell this gold... "Maybe the car dealer or whoever will just take the gold...?" "I guess. But still, I'd like to get some time-local currency, for whatever--food, information, lodging..." "Yeah." I said. "Well here goes..." Dialing the code for a collect call, then the Overwhelm number, I crossed my fingers and waited. "Your name please?" an operator asked me. "Feather." I said. It was an Overwhelm code. "Hello?" I heard a woman say. "Collect call from Feather--do you accept charges?" the operator. There was a pause, then the woman said "Uh--yes. Yes." "Go ahead." the operator said. "Hello?" I said. "Yes?" "Uh--" I said, trying to think of a good ID code. "--um--Feather the white kitten, uh, broke a lot of stuff today..." "Who is this?" she asked. "It's Prince Ferrajalt--of the Derolbam Team?" "Okay." she said. "Yeah, I'm here in, like, Oijamaka, y'know, by the sea? I wanna head over there, so I just wanted to make sure you were there." "Hold on..." she said. Lunatether looked up from the phone book. "Got 'em?" "Yup. Lookin' good." "Cool." she responded, then someone else got on the phone. -------> ------------------- ----------- -------- -- -----