ONE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE: Happy Avowed Days
199
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By 8:14 on Thursday morning, Alden was dressed (school uniform—on), educated (science lectures—viewed), and organized (organizational software with multiplanetary calendaring—downloaded.)
He’d woken up in the mood for maximum efficiency. It was an urge he knew was driven by yesterday’s realizations that he couldn’t do everything he cared about and that he wouldn’t be putting any significant amount of effort into impressing Baxter Washington and the Chicago superheroes. But it seemed like a useful urge, so he was welcoming it.
Currently, he was sitting at one of the tables on the roof of the Forthright Building, enjoying the sun and a bowl of sweet potato breakfast hash he’d gotten from the cafeteria, since Haoyu hadn’t made oatmeal this morning. He was keeping the bowl preserved on his lap or in one hand while he worked on his laptop, setting up his new calendar to display times of day for LeafSong and Vethedya as well as Anesidora. He’d just figure Rapport I time based on Vethedya when he glanced at it. If someone ever stole or hacked his laptop, he didn’t want them to see entries like “Wandering around the Primary’s Home Right Here in the Privately Governed Territory.”
Visits to Stuart or Yenu-pezth would just be labeled “Artona I”.
Ooo…it does weather forecasts! It looked like Stuart was having a beautiful morning that would have felt like a hot tub to Alden, assuminghe was at LeafSong right now instead of on votary duty for his cousin.
Alden closed the forecast and unpreserved the hash so that he could take a couple of bites. It was just as fresh as when he’d picked it up more than half an hour ago. The Bearer of All Burdens, Keeper of Hot Potatoes, and Preventer of Wilted Cilantro.
Keeper of Hot Potatoes was amusing to him, so he clicked on the logogram for Ryeh-b’t at the bottom right corner of the calendar. The dates slid aside to reveal a character profile. So far, it just had his name and class on it, but if he’d been so inclined, he could have turned the animated character that would act out events he put on the calendar into his lookalike.