'... That's odd, the conveyors seem to be slowing down at random.'
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... Time.
Such a valuable thing.
We always have so much we want to do,
yet a majority of our time is passed doing things we're obligated to do.
Working, sleeping, taking care of our social life, eating, making things to eat, getting from point A to point B.
Cleaning.
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"this isn't normal, is it, Kate?"
"Nope. Conveyors are too cold, they're having trouble. That's what happens when you stop heating the place when everyone's gone!"
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I used to have a lot of time.
Now 44 hours are taken off of every week.
Thankfully, I get multiple days in a row off, so I have time to do my other obligations before finally having some free time.
I cannot fathom how anyone could manage to get bored when they have so little time on their hands.
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'Ah, time for lunch break, finally. I'm starving.'
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Drawing easily uses up over two hours.
Playing games can go from two hours to 6 hours very easily.
Same for shows.
Figuring out how to mod something takes about an hour of trial and error before giving up and trying again later.
Making music, or just listening to one's music, trying to find how to improve it can also use up over one hour, if not 4 to 6 hours.
Sleeping takes a minimum of 8, though I try to limit myself to 10 hours as of late.
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'... The hell is that awful ringing?'
"Hey Midnight, what does that ringing mean?"
".. Ah, that's the fire alarm. Everybody evacuate! Straight to the exit, we don't have time to stop by the lockers! Come on, let's go!"
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Think about it this way;
we have 24 hours in a day.
Every day, 8 hours is taken off for sleep, provided you follow a healthy sleep schedule.
That means you're left with 16 hours in a day.
Every day, you take time to eat a breakfast, a lunch, and dinner.
Being generous, the time taken to cook is not counted.
That's about one hour and a half gone every day.
14 hours and a half.
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'Yep, it's a Saturday alright.'
"Hey, was there really a fire going on?"
"Nope, the basement is flooded! Half the pipes burst!"
'And that's why you keep the heat on even when you're not home.'
"See over there, you can see the water dripping out of the garage!"
'Huh, he's right. That's a lotta damage.'
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14 hours and a half, times 7 days.
101 hours and a half of time.
Take 50 hours off of that for work, and getting to and from work, on top of preparing yourself in the morning each day.
51 hours and 30 minutes left in a week, provided you don't have errands and groceries to take care of, which easily take up more than 4 hours each.
We can take about 16 hours off of that for variable obligations.
35 hours and a half.
That's a day and 11.5 hours worth of time to work with.
I don't know about you, but my days go by pretty fast.
That is hardly a lot of time.
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'Ah, it's the fire department. They kinda came here for nothing, didn't they.'
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Let's say you're playing Kingdom Hearts.
A casual play-through of that game is about 24 hours.
Same for the other Kingdom Hearts games.
That's 168 hours to complete the franchise, Kingdom Hearts 3 on the horizon notwithstanding.
If you divide that by 35 hours, that's 4.8 weeks of free time used up. An entire month, and then some.
A Television series! What a great idea!
24 episodes.
Each episode is 30 minutes long.
12 hours, you've got 23 hours left. Not bad.
You pass 6 hours on a drawing, and then you work on music for another 4.
13 hours left.
You pass the rest of that time with a friend or two, doing anything and everything.
There's still things left to do and experience, isn't there?
How can you get bored?
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"Okay guys, the fire department has left, it's safe to enter back into the building now!" said one of our managers.
As we made our way back inside, one of my colleagues stopped by me.
"Oi, did you hear? They're letting us out early today!" he said.
"No way!"
I had to check for myself, so I asked the closest manager to where I was.
He'd been right.
I had to wait for my ride to be ready to leave, so I went to have a look at the basement.
It was like a shallow lake everywhere. Thankfully, most of the water had evacuated through the garage doors on its own.
When I came back to the lobby, Guy, the manager handling my team, asked for volunteers to go push the water out with scraping shovels.
'No way I'm doing that if I'm not told to.'
Thankfully, one or two people volunteered, since they needed the extra money, and we weren't paid over 3 hours for that day.
On the way back home, my co-workers started talking about how dumb it was to not leave the heating on, and how panicked our big boss had been when he arrived on the scene.
Of course, more terribly bland music was played.
Finally, I was back in my humble abode.
I had finished the third week of our work schedule cycle.
That meant that I had 5 days in a row off, and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to be using them.
I decided that I would pass my free time binge-watching "Your Lie in April."
I had already seen a good half of its episodes, so it was hardly a challenge to finish the rest that night.
I have no idea why I kept watching it.
It was incredibly cheesy, and it was also very predictable.
On top of that, it was a romance show.
I never enjoyed romance shows, and I had an especially scalding loathing for soap operas.
The symbolism all over the show also conveyed where it was going very often, and yet, I still cried a few times watching it.
It was hard not to connect with the main protagonist.
The art style was also very appealing, and I was a sucker for nice art styles despite myself.
After finishing the show, I headed to bed, and went on dreaming.
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A corridor.
A very familiar corridor.
It was the upper floor corridor of the last elementary school I had gone to as a child.
I vaguely remembered a teacher from the school allegedly dying of a heart attack here.
I decided not to linger for very long, for fear of waking his spirit from the dead.
I went to the staircase entrance.
'That's odd, when did they remove entire fleets of stairs from the staircase? Why?' I wondered.
There were large gaps in between parts of the staircase, and I had to come up with a logical reason for that to be the case. I had seen dumber things before.
'Hm, perhaps it was to prevent bullying in the stairway, since they never bothered to put cameras there.' I pondered.
It still didn't make much sense, but I didn't question it. I jumped over the gaps to the first floor.
At some point, I went back up the broken stairway.
I arrived into one of the corridors of the high school I had gone to.
It was the one that had all the pictures of the people who finished their high school every year.
'Am I dreaming?' I wondered, noticing the incongruity that I had just gone from one school to another, merely through stairways.
I looked at the writing under the photograph facing me.
"1334 - board" it said.
I looked away, and then looked back at it.
"love - dool"
The writing had changed.
Bingo.
I was dreaming.
You see, in dreams, symbols and text only stay as they are as you look at them. The moment you look away, and look back, they'll have changed.
It was a method of lucid dreaming I had learned.
You look at text in real life, and double-check that it remains the same, while asking yourself if you are dreaming.
Because you did it in your waking life, you would remember doing it in your dream, and thus, you could manage to realize you were dreaming.
As soon as I realized as much, I decided to attempt phasing through the floor, to find somewhere nicer to be.
School was pretty boring after all.
unfortunately, I somehow couldn't manage to phase through anything.
I tried floating.
It didn't work either.
I was starting to grow impatient.
I didn't want to pass an entire dream inside of an entirely empty school.
I tried "closing" my eyes and imagining myself somewhere else.
Failure. when I "opened" them again, I was still in the same place.
It was quite frustrating, but there was allegedly nothing I could do about it, so I went for a small walk.
I got to the entrance, near the rows of lockers, in front of the corridor that led to the gym, and I sat on the wall of the middlemost line of lockers.
'Why is nothing I'm usually able to do working?! It's so simple! Just imagine the world moving as you stay in place, and bam, you're flying! Why is it not working?' I debated internally.
I tried imagining myself floating up every time I took a deep breath.
No dice.
I accepted my fate at that point.
Then came a most ludicrous idea.
I tried playing piano in the air.
Behold, there was a note!
I tried again.
Another note.
'What if I use both hands to play simultaneously?'
I played with both hands.
It sounded fantastic!
Keep in mind I had never actually learned how to play the piano.
As I played, I looked up at the ceiling, right at the sky.
There was a large window up there to see through.
I kept on playing for a little bit, and then I realized that this track was too great to simply forget the moment I would wake up, so I forcibly woke myself up, and immediately whistled the root notes of what I had just played into my phone.
I still had a few hours, so I went right back to bed.
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I was in bed, trying to fall asleep.
I felt a very familiar pressure pass beside me on the bed.
It was my cat, Stoner.
I started petting him as he reached my pillow.
'... A dream, huh.'
My little feline had been dead for a year.
There was no other explanation to this than a dream.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." I told him. "I had no choice, we didn't have enough. I'm so sorry"
I kept petting him. He kept purring and leaning on my hand adorably.
I took it slow, enjoying the time I could still pass with him here.
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I woke up again, crying.
I checked the alarm.
I didn't have much time before waking up, so I closed it and got up to start my day.
I transcribed the song I had heard in my dream into LMMS.
I didn't have a piano, and I hadn't thought of using samples, so I used a synth preset of a piano.
In hindsight, it sounded horrible, but I uploaded it anyways.
I then realized a part of the melody had belonged to Dark Hyrule Castle from Minish Cap, but that was hardly surprising, as dreams are made up of memories.
I also ended up realizing what I had done in that dream was very similar to what the protagonist in Your Lie in April had done while drowning in a pool, and looking up at the waves.
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Little did Willhelm know, he had not been the only one witnessing those dreams.
A certain royal blue alicorn had watched, unable to bring herself to interrupt the dreams, choosing instead to let them play out.