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“Role call!”
Students gathered on the blue tarmac under a darkened sky as heavy clouds drifted lazily past. Thick, blanketing clouds filled with icy rain that hung ominously, threatening to unleash their torrent without a moments hesitation. Tom sat quietly with the rest of the class, keeping a careful eye on the sky. His PE shorts and tea shirt flapped and rustled in the wind, and his thin button down sweatshirt offered little protection against the biting cold.
It was going to be one of those days.
When the teacher dismissed him, Tom stood up and walked along the tarmac towards the stadium steps. As he took great strides down the track, he pulled his hood shut along his neck to keep out the harsh wind that glided across his skin and raised tiny goose pimples.
As he continued to walk along the track, his sweatshirt became a billowing cloak, and the cold wind and droplets of rain became a white out blizzard. The track disappeared, and became a lane through a forest. The stadium steps had become a granite mountain, strangely shaped into stairs. As he slowly climbed the side of the mountain, it struck him just how much things had changed.
“Not again,” Thome muttered. “My head was still spinning from the last time, not again.”
He rounded a large rock, and in the wind sheltered crux, stopped dead in his tracks. There, huddling against the stone, shivering and quickly freezing to death, was a girl wearing a high school PE uniform.
She already had ice forming on her eyebrows and nose.
“Oh god,” Thome breathed. He pulled off his heavy cloak and threw it around her, then carefully lifted the girl into his arms and started looking for some better shelter. She stared groggily up at his face, not knowing who he was, or what was happening.
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