Jinsu wasn’t sure what kind of checks or measures were put in place for Jino to decide it was safe for the students to venture out again, but it didn’t bother her too much as she was going to be staying in the Attayear and the clearing for the day.  Jongin approached to ask for directions back to the healer’s, since apparently none of them had decent memories, but once he and the others had departed, the Attayear became wonderfully calm.

“Quiet, isn’t it?” Minseok observed as he and Jinsu settled in adjacent seats in the circular computer room.  “We only have a very low-power generator running at the moment converting sunlight into the electricity you all need.”

Twenty minutes later, Jinsu was more or less in seventh heaven.  The codes were phenomenal.  Beautiful.  Perfect.  They were neat and orderly and they made sense.

And they went on forever.  But given the scale of the Attayear project, that was only to be expected.

Minseok watched her as she zoomed from computer to computer, which Minseok had set up to have different parts of the base code on each screen.

“Well?” he prompted after a fair amount of time had elapsed.  “How much of it do you understand?”

“A little,” Jinsu said vaguely, much more interested in the rows of characters in front of her.  “Not very much.”  Then she pointed to the screen on her right.  “I can tell that’s the code that programmes the doors, but that’s about it.  As soon as it starts hitting the different alphabets. . .”  She blew out air through her lips, eyebrows raised.

“And as a computer scientist, what do you make of it?”

Jinsu sat up, eyes sparkling.  “Well, I can tell there are strong influences from JavaScript, C++ and PHP, which I always thought didn’t really mesh well together, but there’s another one I remember learning about during the orientation module at school whose name I’ve forgotten—”

“Python,” Minseok supplied, twisting his chair from side to side.

“Yeah, that.  Except, what’s with all the non-Roman alphabet letters?  I mean—”

“You’ll figure that out soon enough.”

Jinsu wasn’t convinced, but she resumed studying the screens.  “Is the third alphabet Cyrillic?” she asked after a moment or two.

“Yup.  Roman, Hangul and Cyrillic.”

“The numbers are all binary,” Jinsu murmured to herself.  “And the frequency. . .”

It was another hour and a half before she worked out that each room in the Attayear had its own unique programme and coding, and a total of five hours before she twigged that the large parts of it in Cyrillic, once Minseok had written the script out phonetically for her, were to do with the time aspect of the time machine.

“And Hangul is location.  Or flying it, or whatever,” she concluded.  “And the Roman script is everything else.”  She looked at the screens with renewed interest.  “Wow.”

“See if you can figure out how the language works,” Minseok encouraged her.  “If you can understand that, you could potentially control the Attayear.  Not that I’d ever let you, but maybe when we’re back in the present and your father’s stopped being a misogynistic snob.”

“That’s code for never.  Does the language have a name?”

“You’re gonna like this one.”  Minseok grinned at her.  “Tardis.”

It figured.

Jinsu’s paradise of nerdship was rudely interrupted by Jongdae crashing into her room at about six o’clock.

“Yoooooo!” he called loudly, flopping onto her bed.  “I met a friend of yours today!”

Jinsu threw him a quizzical look.  “I don’t have any fr— oh my God, Jongdae, there’s blood on your hands; get off my bed and go wash it off!”

“Chill.”  He held up both hands with a lazy grin.  “It’s actually clothing dye.  You’re lucky I changed before I came in because otherwise I’d stink to high heaven still.  But yeah.  Lu Han.  Said he knew you.  Something to do with that tiger you were telling me about yesterday, I think.”

Jinsu wasn’t sure how to react to that.

“Well, I don’t think, I know.  He was actually wearing a tiger skin and celebrating or something.  It looked pretty fresh.”  He caught sight of Jinsu’s rapidly paling face.  “But I’ll shut up about that now.  How’s your day been?”

They were interrupted by the door banging open, a breathless Junmyeon standing there.  “Kyuhyun said you were given a composite bow by this Han person everybody is bumping into!  What the actual ?”

Jongdae sat up, revealing that said bow was strapped to his back.  “Jun, you know it’s considered rude to barge into a lady’s room without knocking.  What if Jinsu had been changing?”

Jinsu snorted, half at the fact that Jongdae hadn’t knocked either and half at the idea that she’d get changed without locking herself in the bathroom, especially when it was already so difficult for her.

Once Jongdae had had a chance to show off the bow and Junmyeon had had a chance to fawn over it – his main concern being over whether Jongdae would be required to submit it to a museum when they got back or if he’d be allowed to keep it (Jongdae reckoned the latter as he’d apparently been regional champion of archery for the past couple of years) – conversation returned to what Jinsu had been up to, since she hadn’t gone to one of the three nearby towns that had been discovered.  Jongdae looked a bit freaked out at how animated she became over the Tardis sc