The Time Travel Addict

T13

I am a time travel addict. You might wonder what I mean by that, but it's exactly what it sounds like. I am addicted to time travel. Unless you look closely, it appears to be nothing more than a worn old pendant — but this device has a special function that sends me somewhere in the past. It's roughly the size of a 500-won coin, with four round beads arranged so that three form an equilateral triangle at the top and both sides, and one sits in the middle. I'm not sure exactly what it's made of, but the countless scratches and scuffs tell me it was built well enough to last a long time. The topmost bead is for the year, the lower left for the month, the lower right for the day, and the middle bead — for some reason — doesn't move. And all of this timekeeping is done by the lunar calendar, of course. It took me quite a long time to figure out that it ran on the lunar calendar. On the back of the pendant were various small buttons, though I still don't know how to use them. Would you believe that I flew into the past while trying to clean this old, dust-covered pendant I found while unpacking at my new studio apartment I'd recently moved into? The confusion I felt in that moment is beyond any words I could use to describe it. Anyway, I'll explain later how I ended up in the unfamiliar sea of Busan in the 1990s and how I managed to get back. What matters is that after several experimental trips, I figured out how this time machine works. My lunar calendar calculations are still rough, so I can't get exactly where I want to go just yet — but close enough.