First Year Time Travel Students
A Bit of Flash Fiction to Start Your Weekend…
A warning via your crusty, seasoned professor:
Freshman year time travel students are all the same. You’ve spent a full semester reading about it, an agonizing, tedious, and uninspiring four months at The Dante School book-learning a subject that you’ve basically waited your entire young life to try. That it takes more than a measly few months at university to prepare yourself for what is about to happen is beyond you.
Rookie.
For the uninitiated, the term “time travel” conjures up a host of romantic images, from swordplay in Medieval Saxony to barnstorming with Bessie Coleman. Real time travel is complicated, gritty, and dangerous. It involves massive amounts of research in order to be successful, and not just about the specific time period in which you intend to go either. The technology behind it is brilliant and wicked fierce — far more advanced that the rudimentary stuff hinted at thus far in your primary or secondary level education.
Nor is it for the faint of heart. The role of time traveler is a rewarding one, whether you make it a career in Law Enforcement and Retrieval or one that delves into the field of Live Archaeology, but one runs across quite a few unexpected twists and turns when doing it and you need to be prepared.
This is what it really takes to get there:
You spend your first year at The Dante School reading all about temporal exploration: the technology, its brief history, its possible applications for future generations. You’re inundated with courses in ethics and history; first a general world history course and then a concentration in your intended time period. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a faculty advisor who guides you through the process of narrowing down your scope of vision there.
The second year you do the mock journey. The theatrical comes into play here. Every week you’re taken to The Centre where you are scripted and dressed for the occasion. Supplies are given; a destination is assigned. You enter into a small, dark chamber about the size of a closet that smells of peat moss and chocolate and wait for the countdown.
When the bell rings, at first nothing happens. It takes about ten seconds before the burning sensation begins. The skin on your wrist beneath the Chronomatica sizzles and you feel butterflies in your stomach for the first time. The nausea that you’ve been warned about hits you full throttle and you double over, afraid you’re going to be sick. You wonder if any of your classmates have tossed their cookies on the first run and hope you’re not the only one.
The alarm is still echoing in your ears when you open your eyes again. Only now you’re standing in the middle of a room that looks rather like your great, great, great Aunt Abigail’s parlor at the turn of the last century. You’ve just made your first leap- ten minutes into the future, to the other side of The Centre into what amounts to set design.
These practice runs evolve into encounters with “period people” (again the theatre department of Dante shines) which in turn leads to problem solving sessions, for which you are graded.
Third year students get the real deal. You begin plotting your own coordinates. Travel to an authentic historical period is allowed with a licensed companion! Saturday night dorm parties are traded in for weekend excursions to 17th century France for chess matches with the Sun King in his court. Language lessons, heavy technology, and Ramifications & Logic courses intensify. The cumulative toll it takes on your physical body shall be noted. Think jet lag times a thousand. Typically here is where the romantically inclined are separated from the serious, career minded individuals.
For your senior year project at Dante you will take unescorted journeys back to the time period and place of your major. By now you will have studied as many of the customs of the locale that you possibly can and have collected all of the accoutrements needed. You officially log in on the books as a Controlled Roamer and are given a fully operational Chronomatica minus the time lock device implemented throughout training. The proscribed stays are three days apiece. This journey is repeated every month throughout the year until thirty days prior to graduation. You must then complete your thesis based on what you’ve observed during your onsite research.
Upon graduation you will receive full certification in the field of Temporal Studies. You will then be free to pursue a career in time travel. For the right person, the perils and constant discombobulation is nothing compared to the thrill of the crossing. Taking part in the grandest game in all of life is a privilege that will intoxicate and leave you breathless.
Some friendly advice when roaming the globe throughout time immemorial: mind your manners. Leave no footprints. Don’t think that you can circumvent the Tenets of Destiny no matter how much experience you have. And, above all, whatever you do, do NOT try to invent Twinkies before their time. It could be destructive to humanity at large in a way that you cannot possibly comprehend.
Cheers!
Vivie V. McKinley
(I can also be found on Amazon for other short fiction under the name Karen M. McKinley…and on Facebook under my author page with updates and tantalizing tidbits of the oddest sort- https://www.facebook.com/KMMcKinleyIL)
