Time for Some Fun Pt. 01

It was something like a cross between a hiccup and a sneeze. The special zone where there is an involuntary inhale, meeting in perfect synchronicity with a compulsive exhale. A moment in which time stands so still in the body, but under such a forceful collision of opposing movements, was expelled from the body outwards. That was how she did it - by inhaling and exhaling at the same time, in a perfect harmonious moment. It was difficult at first, but the more she did it, the easier the maneuver came to be. It was really all about the breathing, the controlled execution of involuntary movements, recreating the sort of stress you feel when you hiccup and sneeze at the exact. same. time.

In fact, that was how this whole thing started, with a bad and very persistent case of the hiccups. It was the spring semester of her final year in high school, and she was struggling to suppress the compulsive gulps that had tormented her for the last seven minutes of her math exam. She kept getting dirty looks from a couple of the other students in the room, and sympathetic smiles from the teacher.

Aria pulled the collar of her sweater up higher so that the hoodie cradled her ears, the neckline hanging on her nose, hiding the offending mouth from view. It did nothing to stop the outbursts, but it made her feel sheltered enough to go back to focusing on question four. She was having trouble remembering what exactly to do to solve the problem. She was normally fairly good at math, she was fairly good at all her subjects, her grades being an even divide between As and Bs across the board, in all subjects.

She wasn't the greatest student, but she was still a pretty damn good one. She had a good memory and studied minimally, but that was enough to maintain a nice grade point average. She got along fine with most of her classmates, if they ever did notice her. She blended in just enough to not have too many issues with bullies, but when is that ever totally avoidable? She dressed comfortably, hiding her lovely figure behind soft and bulky sweaters, and tended to keep her golden blonde hair tied in a low ponytail. She was the sort of person who coasted by, and everything was generally okay.

That said, she was having the hardest time recalling how to solve this problem, let alone even how to start solving it. She knew she should have asked for help with this particular type of logarithmic problems sometime in the last few days, but she wasn't really the type to speak up or ask for help - and she was thoroughly regretting that now.

A particularly violent hiccup jerked her out of her musings, earning her a harsh "shh" from Stephany B. The collar of Aria's hoodie slipped off of her nose, stirring the dusty air in front of her face. She felt a sneeze coming on, the dust tickling her nose. Stephanie would be pissed, Aria almost delighted. It's not like she could actually do anything about the hiccups, 'shh' yourself, bitch. Aria lifted her arm to cover her sneeze. Any second now...Ahhh...ACHO-HICCUP.

Her throat closed or tensed and it felt like there was a small explosion - no, implosion in her head. She made a little gasp and shook her head. "Sorry." She said, apologizing for the strange gulping noise she made. There was no response.

Aria went back to focusing on her paper, the weird feeling in her throat and head subsiding. She checked the clock. She had about eight more minutes to solve this problem and one other. She skipped to the last question, and almost groaned when she saw that it was one of those questions with so many parts that it would take like ten minutes to solve. She really shouldn't have wasted so much time on a question she wasn't going to get.

She got quickly back to work. Her hiccups still kept going, but thankfully she had stopped getting angrily shushed. She scribbled out her math quietly, moving steadily through the problem set. Circling her final answer to the final part, surprised that she had beat the clock, she checked it again to see if she had enough time to attempt question four again. There was about seven or eight minutes left of class.

Aria did a double take. Did she really solve that in a minute? She must have been working on it for ten - that was a lot of writing to do in such a small time. It baffled her a bit, but she didn't dwell on the revelation long and took it as her final chance to tackle problem four - she had gotten an Idea on how to solve it while working on the other question. She went back to work, scribbling as best as she could.

She leaned back and sighed with relief as she circled her final answer and looked back at the clock. She must have just finished in the nick of time and - shit, the clock was broken. Still like seven or eight minutes until the end of class. She looked around the quiet room. Everyone was still hunched over their exams, pencils to paper... but not moving. Aria looked back at the teacher, who was reading something, hand clutched around the handle of her coffee mug. But Mrs. Hansen wasn't making a move to drink her coffee. She wasn't moving. No one was moving.

If you were in the same position, what would you think? The first thought isn't that there is something supernatural going on. You'd have the same thoughts Aria did - firstly that this was some sort of flash mob or a prank.

"What's going on?" No one responded.

"Hello?" Again.

"Mrs. Hansen, what's going on?" Not a peep. The silence, in fact, was disturbing.

After a while of this, Aria rose from her chair. She walked up to Mrs. Hansen, waved her hand in front of the woman's face. "Hey." Not a blink. "I'm not sure what's going on, so sorry but I'm going to try and get your attention. Sorry if I'm doing something wrong?" It came out as a question. Aria nudged the teacher's shoulder. It was warm, living, and there was a give to her nudges, but the woman stayed uncannily still. "Please say something," Aria begged.

Aria toured around the room, nudging people, waving at them. She stopped at Trevor's desk. He had his eyes half closed, frozen mid blink. She upped her attempts to get someone to move, or wake up, or whatever to dispel whatever this is. Her hiccups were gone by now, either worn away with time or scared away with her nervousness. And Trevor had his eyes half closed. Maybe she could get him to blink. So, she tickled him. She tried tickling his sides and (surprisingly firm) abdomen, his exposed armpit. Then she poked him in the eye. Nothing.

How about miss "Shush?" Aria headed over to Stephanie. Aria tugged on the popular girl's hair, and then tugged harder. She pinched the girls nose, and then slapped her across the face. Nothing. So she slapped harder. In fact, the slapping was doing a lot of help calming Aria down. Therapeutic, that's what it was. So she slapped her a few times more.

Aria was a little clearer headed by then, so she left the classroom and wandered the halls of the school, peering into all the other classrooms, looking at all the clocks. She was starting to think maybe time was frozen around her, but she wasn't ready to believe it. She checked the streets - her school was not quite in the city, but it was urban and near a small shopping center. No one else was moving. Seriously, what was this? A city wide-eerily well executed flash mob? Was America attacked with some sort of strange EMP or chemical weapon?

Aria took out her phone. She called her home, but there was no answer. She opened the google app, and after thinking of what to search and coming up blank, she typed in "help" and his search. Well, the internet was working. She was getting incredibly fast internet, to top it off. She searched something about time being frozen, and almost thought she found something useful that turned out to just be a YouTube video of the mannequin challenge from 2016.

Back in her classroom, she jumped up and down in the front and waved her arms in a last feeble attempt to garner anyone's attention. She sat at her desk. Time passed, at least for her. Everyone was holding these positions way too long. Aria wondered if she had had some sort of heart attacks or stroke, and she was in some sort of purgatory or astral projection. But she felt the same, unchanged. She looked down at her paper. Then she looked over at Dan's paper, the guy sitting to her right. Damn, different answers.

Aria did the natural thing, she looked at everyone's tests. Turns out, she had answered question four completely wrong, after all that. She ended up copying her answer and work piece by piece based off of the answers from the smart kinds in class, and even checked her work on all the other questions, too. That was when the hiccups - fortuitous, it turns out, but annoying to Aria at the time - came back.

She sat back at her desk. She had been thinking over what happened to get her into this situation and what she could do to get back out of it. She mimicked the position she was in during the exam, and focused down on her "peer reviewed" paper. Assuming she was the cause, and this wasn't the cause of some divine meteor drug phenomenon or whatever, she could think only of two things that she had done that had mysteriously prompted it. Either it was the extreme focus she had been exerting in an attempt to solve the problem and beat the clock, or it was the weird sneeze hiccup thing that made her head feel funny, or a combination of both.

So if movies or stories about this sort of thing are to be believed, maybe recreating the...thing...it would undo the...thing. Good thing she had the hiccups. Not a thing she would normally be grateful for, but this situation wasn't normal. So next step, sneeze. She remembered the old trick of staring into a bright light to coax out a sneeze, so she closed her eyes, and when her eyelids adapted to the dark, she opened her eyes and stared at the fluorescent light above her head. It was coming...coming. The sneeze wouldn't come out. She did it over again for a few times, hiccupping all the while. Dear god these hiccups were persistent...but she shouldn't take that for granted. Even if she could bring herself to sneeze, who is to say it would be so miraculously timed as last time?

She held her breath and focused, focused on time and time moving forward, and when the next hiccup burst from her throat, she forcefully exhaled. It sounded like a burp or a cough, and rather than a funny feeling in her head, she just felt an uncomfortable lump in her throat. She tried again. And again. And again. And again.

A lot of things then suddenly happened at once. Aria felt her body feel like it naturally snapped into place, and she knew that it was the exact same position she was in from before time stopped. Then was the wash of noise. A strange "aaaAAaahhHH" sounded to her left and Aria, along with all the other students in the room turned to look at Stephanie who was almost falling out of her seat, howling in despair and holding her cheeks. Immediately following was loud laughter coming from Trevor, whose arm was covering his abdomen and looked like he was wiping away a tear. A few others followed suit and giggled at the weird noises Stephanie was making.

"What is it? Are you all right, Stephanie?" the kindly old Mrs. Hansen asked.

"Ow... my face just suddenly started to hurt. I think I must have been stung by something. Aghhh"

"You're not allergic, are you? Do you need to go see the nurse?"

"No...no, I'm fine" her check started to redden. Aria stared as her earlier slaps quickly manifested a physical mark on the rude girls face. She looked over to Trevor, and he sat there massaging his eyelid, but then returning to work on his exam.

Class finally ended about seven minutes later, though this time it felt accelerated to Aria, whose mind was racing the whole time. She handed in her essay and spilled into the hallway with the rest of her classmates. She wandered over to the cafeteria for lunch distracted, autopiloting like a zombie. Already she was starting to rationalize what had just happened and understood to be true. She couldn't stop time - she had a vivid daydream. No, she fell asleep and actually dreamt it. She argued, but she knew that her experience was way too real to be in her head - unless she was going crazy.

After buying lunch she sat at the table where kids who would rather read or do homework than talk with friends sat. The kids at the big long table were either nerds, or gamers, or antisocial, or just desperately trying to finish homework due for their next class which they had procrastinated against doing the night before.

If she had been thinking straight and not riding some sort of adrenaline rush, she probably would have been too scared to try freezing time again - what a nightmare it would be if you ended up trapped in a frozen world. But she tried again. Her hiccups were gone, but she remembered the sensation she had to recreate. After a few failed attempts that garnered her some weird looks when she made choking noises later, the loud wash of voices abruptly stopped. She did it again. It took fewer attempts this time, and her body naturally dropped into the place she was before and the wave of noise once again consumed the room.

Time stop. Time start. She got the hang of it. After a couple dozen tries, it became almost easy. If anyone was watching her carefully, the only thing they might notice was her neck muscles tensing as she experienced the supernatural. To the outsider, she was just tensing and untensing with a wild look in her eyes, nibbling on her food from time to time.

She noticed each time how her body seamlessly fell into the exact place it was when she froze time. She made a conscious effort to change positions during a time stop. She froze time while covering a fake yawn, and made sure no one was paying her any attention. She placed both of her arms down on the table, and attempted to start time again and keep her hands on the surface. All parts of her body but for her arms fell into place, and with time in motion again a queasy feeling enveloped her arms - that was the best way to describe it.

That was teleportation, wasn't it? Well, not as in she blinked and was somewhere else, but to anyone else, it was. Time froze and part of her was somewhere different. She was in a different space in no gap of time. She froze time again and walked to the girls room and closed herself in a stall, then started time up again. She heard other girls in the restroom gossip, and her body kind of quiver. Then she turned around, bent over and puked. It felt so unnatural. It felt like her body had been disassembled and reassembled all over again. The bathroom got quiet, but not because time was frozen, but because some mystery girl was puking her guts out in a toilet stall.

When she emerged, she stumbled over to a sink to wash her face and rinse her mouth with water.

"Oh my god, are you okay?" asked some girl she vaguely recognized. "Are you sick?"

"No, I'm fine. I just got a little dizzy." Aria replied. In the room was four girls, and she almost groaned as she recognized them. It was Lauren Valdevilia, the make-up wearing, push-up bra wielding popular idiot that ran the social scene of the school, and her popular clique. Aria hurried out before she could get sucked in.

But just as she reached the door, Lauren spoke. "Oh my god, she's pregnant!"

"What?!" Aria couldn't help responding.

"You totally don't have to hide it, we all just saw you puking, and you're wearing a huge-ass sweater to cover your belly bump. It's like, so okay. We'll be supportive of you."

"I'm not pregnant!" Aria protested.

"Oh honey... So whose is it?" Lauren continued.

"No one's!" Aria argued.

"So you don't even know? Oh my god." The girls in the room tittered and began to quietly whisper to each other, gossiping about these revelations.

"You know I'm not pregnant, so quit it." But they didn't, so Aria focused and clenched her head. She could feel how the breathing in and out started a little pebble of frozen time in her head, and combined with her focus on the idea of freezing time, it exploded out around her and captured the world. Aria moved through the snow-globe world of the bathroom, the annoying girls frozen like mannequins around her. One of the sinks had been running when time froze, and she examined it. The water was unmoving, in an unbroken stream, like gravity was no longer a factor for it. She poked it, wetting her finger and watching the water splatter away from her finger, but not plop to the floor.

Remembering the earlier incident with Stephanie, she walked over to Lauren and slapped her, hard. She moved behind the overly-made-up girl, wiping her hand (the slap had covered her hand in wiped off foundation) on the girls brightly colored top, leaving a beige smear on it. How else to deal with this bully? A wedgie? Classic. Aria stuck her hand down the back of Lauren's skirt, feeling for fabric to grab. She couldn't find it. She felt around Laurens plump cheeks, tracing her butt crack up to her waist, but finding nothing. Frustrated at not being able to find the panties, Aria yanked up the skirt and was greeted by an eyeful. Apparently Lauren was going commando today, her shaven nether-regions only an inch or two of skirt hiding it from the world.

So... A wedgie was out of the question, then?

Aria turned her attention to the ridiculous girls who flocked around this queen bee. They all were wearing underwear today, so one by one she made sure their thongs and g-string were pulled up, wedged deeply between their cheek and even between their feminine folds. That was going to be uncomfortable, Aria decided. She stepped back into place and restarted time.

"Ugh!" Laurens hand went to cup her cheek. "Did you just slap me?"

Aria's eyes widened. Wait - how did she? The other girls all started to wiggle their hips; one of the blonde ones, Samantha, tried to subtly hide her hand behind her back to unwedge the scanty cloth from her ass cheeks.

"What do you mean, Lauren?" asked Ashley, the brunette who was obsessed with pink.

"My face hurts. Aria totally slapped me!" cried the girl who now had uneven makeup. The one side of her face seemed almost shallow, since the left half with makeup was untouched had caked on a few millimeters of dimension to her face.

Aria caught on that Lauren didn't know, she was just connecting the dots. Irritated unpopular girl plus face ache (and Lauren was probably familiar with the sensation of being slapped) equals her thinking that Aria slapped her, even if she didn't see it. Lauren was just assuming that it happened so fast that she didn't notice.

"Oh my god! What a bitch!" The girls behind Lauren played along - used to backing up Lauren's bullshit.

"What a whore!" they chimed.

"You know I didn't slap you, and I'm not pregnant." Aria replied.

The warning bell rang for classes to resume. One of the girls pointed out that Lauren's make-up was uneven, and in horror an emergency make-over began. Aria left the bathroom, collected her things from the table she left them at, earning a strange look from one of the guys who sat at the table who didn't notice her leave. She went to English class.

Aria sat at the back of the classroom, for the first time genuinely excited for this class. She liked English, but not enough to give her the kind of welling up excitement she was feeling now, waiting for the bell to ring.

At the bell, the young and handsome Mr. Krocker strode in. About a third of the girls in school had a crush on him, and Aria also couldn't help to find him attractive with his dark hair and bright eyes, perfectly stubbled chin and muscular body. What could she say, the girl appreciated the majesty of the human form. Lecture began and Aria looked around the room, planning what to mess with. She was tempted to freeze time now so she could brainstorm, but she figured that she would have to sit through the class sooner or later. She heeded no attention to the teacher as her mind danced over all the possibilities.