Perhaps the most extraordinairy adventure of all of the students of Sandra Corlani’s time travel class was the one that happened to a 17 year old boy who had a major crush on Sandra Corlani herself. His name was Ryan, and he had attended her time travel class from the first day, not because of an interest in time travel per se, but because of an interest in Miss Corlani.

When the school term drew to an end, she taught the final lesson after school as usual, and waited while all of the students packed up and went home. Ryan stayed behind waiting as well, until he was the only student left in the room.

“I’ve really enjoyed this class, because you were teaching it,” he said.

“And you’ve done very well.”

“Would you like to go out on a date with me?” he asked her.

She accepted, and they made their date for dinner, followed by a walk in the school grounds during the first week of the holidays. When they had circled the grounds once, he took her in his arms in a secluded spot and kissed her passionately.

“Well that was nice,” she said, “But do you know how old I am?”

“What’s wrong with you being in your thirties?”

“I’m 57.”

“Really?” he said, watching her blushing, “It makes no difference to me.”

“But you could make the difference, if you applied the class you’ve just completed. I was a teacher here from my early twenties until I was widowed at 46, and I didn’t get married until I was 41. All you’d need to do is go back a little over 30 years each time you made a date with my younger self. There’d still be a few years’ age difference, but you might as well make the trips.”

“Could I spend these holidays with you as you are now, and then travel back after school on the first day of term?”

“You really meant it, when you said it made no difference. I’d like that,” she said.

When the first day of school term came around, he took a backpack time machine he’d built out of his schoolbag after school, in a secluded part of the school grounds, and set it for 32 years earlier. Sandra Corlani would be 25 back then. Lurking in the bushes, looking for someone to shrink (with the device that she had once acquired from Colleen Balfour without her knowledge) was the mischievous Ellie Blish She had no idea what Ryan was doing with a peculiar looking backpack. All she knew was that she had chosen him as her next target, because he was in a place where nobody would see her using the shrinking device. His own desire for secrecy had made sure of that.

Ellie fired the shrink beam at Ryan, just as Ryan activated the time travel backpack.

The combined effect was extraordinairy.

From Ellie’s perspective, Ryan seemed to simply vanish instead of dwindling in size. From Ryan’s perspective, he began time travelling and fracturing into multiple tiny versions of himself, each one with all of his memories up until that moment, each one landing in a different time period.