Blinx: Before the Time Sweeper

Chapter 8: Swimming in the Rain

Time-Factory - Terrarium Swimming Pool (Terrarium Under Construction: Nearly Complete)

June 5th, XXXX

18:06pm (TF Timezone) - The Past

There was one thing guaranteed in life, and other than getting yelled at by your teachers which was much more than just a regular guarantee, even for people who aren't me: this was law itself. It was one of the very rules sketched into the back of my skull to the distant sands of time before I even knew what an Academy, or even what a stick was. It was but a way of life for naive baby Blinx, and it would be considered a crime against catkind everywhere, or by my own nature to go against it.

Which is exactly what I did when I actually went to sleep on time. I even went to the trouble of dry-cleaning and laying out my swimming uniform like I was a wife waiting for her husband to return from work, or the Goddesses themselves tailoring time before us. As awful as ruining my 5-hour sleep schedule sounded to me though: I very rarely did make exceptions if any very good reasons for not slacking off popped, against everybody's (nobody else cared, so it was really just me) expectations.

Today was the day I promised Aniki I was actually going to win at something, and not just any something, but a competition, and not just any competition, but an athletic one at that.

See all those visits to the swimming pool, and terrarium weren't just me trying to appreciate the finer side of life: that is nature. I already had plenty of that when I wasn't being pinned down to the toilet, and forced to well-it-up like a dog as they said, nor the Tom-Tom like-snoring in class, but neither being particularly fun for anybody else: was like a bon-voyage of adrenaline for someone liked me who loved to either lap the dingy water up (Ew, I am weird...), or lap everybody in the pool water itself. Most people however were just trying to focus on the rhythmic tick-tock that represented that same corny waving cat-tail of the clock at the front of the class like any of us would: we all had that same uncanny feeling that maybe it was even alive, and was trying to sync up with the heartbeats of every student, like the first robot clock was just waiting for the android revolution to start.

Naturally, we were too busy though looking for any sign of movement or mercy shown to make their rush back home, so their stomachs didn't end up rumbling in empty classrooms like yours truely. To do what is the question that nobody but them knows the answer too, but probably not not to their bedroom for a 5 hour nap like I did, but maybe more on side of everything else that a normal teenager felt was better to do than anything an adult would consider "productive".

I was practicing my dolphin flop for a good diving showcase, and my back had never felt like it wanted to climb out, and kick my stomach like this before for not putting in same the work that it did putting itself out for the concrete that made the brunt of the pool below it, but that as we divers call it: "not a bone intact; not a day unslacked".

Of course it was mostly just a subtle method of showing everybody that I wasn't just that same slack-jawed, drooling moron who thought he had better things to dream than he had to live, like we all pretended we didn't do (probably Benito himself was guilty of this). Really though it was just  a clever way of setting my pal Necoji up with just an equally large opportunity to come with Catherine in her new swim-gear that she badgered him into waiting hours for. So much so: the time-monsters themselves were likely destroying entire universes in his absence. He surely deserved to at least see it after wasting the entire summer away with her shopping-fever in tow...

Really I just felt more at home washing in the water than on any terrain they wanted us to wash out for the interest of their higher-ups. People who if they didn't results that were just as or even more promising as their share of time: would probably unleash the Tom-Tom's entire army of teleportation devices into the entire Academy, suck us all in, and just start all over again from scratch, and in that regard – I wasn't anybody's favorite student.