Quoted By:
Time travel is hard. Really, really hard.
Haruka Karibu was reminded of how hard time travel was when she decided to go to yesterday to score some limited edition Timbits that were no longer offered as of today. She could've gone without them, or ordered an ordinary 20-pack, but then, she reasoned, how would she know what she had missed? Besides, time travel was hard. If she planned on doing it again, it was worth working in some practice.
Unfortunately, instead of appearing neatly in an unoccupied Tim Horton's washroom stall where noone would be around to observe her, she found herself instead several kilometers above the surface of what she assumed was the earth. And also, falling quite rapidly.
The word "fuck" exited her lips, followed by a lot of other expletives, though it was questionable if any of these properly conveyed the seriousness of the situation. She must've fucked up the calculations somehow. Any time jump required intense focus, feeling the motion of the earth and determining its location at the desired temporal destination. Any distraction and you could end up exiting inside the earth, in space, or in this case, nowhere near the ground.
She thought back to the words of the Karibu elders. They had told her she had the power to cross seconds, months, or even eons, but that eventually her travels would take her to a dark place. She would beat one of her closest friends within an inch of her life, and the both of them would be forever changed by the experience.
Haruka liked to refer to the post-beating Haruka as Bad Haruka. They'd met. She'd looked the same as her, almost acted the same as her, but there was something different about her. The shine in her eyes was gone, as if all the joy in her life had been drained out of her. She didn't like her future self. She had resolved to find a different way than her, even if already meeting her meant that would be a paradox. She would break the universe itself to protect her friends.
She had no idea she already had.
More importantly, she had finally broken through the cloud layer, and saw the ground clearly expanding in her direction. The ruminating she was doing wasn't helping. So she thought about solutions instead. Time travel got her into this mess, she thought, maybe it could get her out of it.
She closed her eyes, and began to focus. Two small jumps. Each one just milliseconds into the future, but each changing her position and orientation in different ways. The first would reverse her momentum, allowing her to bleed the speed off using gravity. The second would put her close to the ground, where she could hopefully make a gentle landing.
Her brain hurt. It must've been the pressure of calculating two jumps at once, she thought. Even if she were able to execute these jumps perfectly, she might not be able to do another jump for at least a couple weeks, a month at most. But that wasn't important right now.
She tensed, and made the first jump. The world inverted around her, and down became up. She kept her eyes closed, focusing only on the feeling of the air flowing about her and her own sense of motion to time the second jump.
Everything stopped, and she jumped again.
--- IT HAS BEEN "0" DAYS SINCE HARUKA KARIBU FUCKED THE TIMELINE ---
