It's time for students to start reporting on their Reality Abroad Program experiences!

So many of you are experiencing homestays, travel itineraries, or just "living rough" in the many dimensions Psyhigh's portal system provides access to, and now's the time to start reporting back on your experiences here in your journals.

Don't forget that failure to submit your reports will result in your being marooned and otherwise stranded in your respective realities until your reports are filed, so don't delay!

I'll be taking a holiday later this month with @Seketus Reed so it would be most convenient for all of us to get your stories in tout suite! This will be reflected in your grades.

Sincerely,

A. Hazeltine
Student Activities Coordinator

My homestay family is an upper class family in the Inland Empire, alternate future 699b-gamma. They manage all the radioactive garbage mounds around the Tri-cities, keeping the trade moving.

I've got my own room next to the water recycler in their bunker. Tomorrow's a work crew roundup and they're taking me along to see how it's done. Can't wait!

STOP, SHOP, and see the STORMS!

That's what the sign says here at the top of Peak Dragana! I've been tramping around the Nine Moons of Ishtr for my Reality Abroad program. Met two super cool travelling companions--Nims & Bets--and it's all our first time so it's awesome!

Peak Dragana is a great place to watch the non-stop lightning storms on this side of the sixth moon, Lugal-Marada. Nims & Bets and I will spend the night then spend a couple days trekking back down to the regional spaceport and haven't decided on moon five or seven next.

ttfn

The evenings in the Merhj Valley were exquisite. As soon as the sun went behind the higher mountains, peak above peak, red and snow-slashed, flamed against a lemon sky, the strong wind moderated into a pure stiff breeze, bringing up to camp the thunder of the mindless Tumberbuns, smashing their enormous shell-encased craniums together repeatedly as they battled for the dominance in the fields below.

It was like sitting in the world's biggest bowling alley.

Uh oh! Big mixup at the work crew round up. I got separated from my homestay parents and got rounded up.

“Hey! Don’t you know who I am? I’m an exchange student from Psychic High School! You don’t want to mess with—OOOOOF”

And got a kick in the stomach!

So I stuffed myself into a leaky old hazmat suit and joined the press gang.

Don’t we have little transmitters or something injected in us before we go in these trips? Wasn’t that one of the shots? You can come get me, right?

Nims & Bets found boyfriends. Ok not exactly “boys” but locals who hang around the tourist traps on Mythika, the seventh moon. They're pretty handsy — in that each of them has six hands — but seem pretty harmless. Probably going to get a kickback from the skinless horse rental stable they helped us find.

Skinless horses are the only way to cross the Howling Plain, because they keep the ghosts away.

Working the radioactive garbage mounds is hard work. But they incentivize it in really fun ways, like for every wheelbarrow you bring in you get a nickel (a New Inland Empire nickel, which is usually a bottlecap, or a rusty screw). And if you get enough nickels you can trade them in for a slightly less used filter for your mask. But you only actually get the nickel if there's something interesting in your wheelbarrow, otherwise they kick it over and laugh at you.

My co-workers have their own incentivization systems, like you're incentivized to share your food ration with the bigger co-workers, because if you don't they take it anyway and it hurts. Those co-workers are extra big, and seems like they are covered with fur even under hazmat suits, and may have small tusks. They have strange accents. I think they might be Canadian.

Before the entrance to the Psychic Academy of Arts in Merhj is an altar to Love, with an inscription that Dean Hammer was the first dean to dedicate an altar to that god. The altar within the Academy is called the altar of the Love Avenger, complete with cape and mask and spandex tights, which they say was dedicated by extraterrestrial aliens, squirming with love.

Bets brought home a bug from our tour of the Temple of the Crawling Vines.

We've been on Endicott (the fifth moon) for about a week and all the other trekkers we met here said we had to see the Temple, but be sure to get a local guide. After their experience on Mythika, Nims & Bets said no way to that so we went it alone, and while we found ourselves in a few tough patches we made it through mostly unscathed.

And so we're relaxing in an admittedly somewhat sketchy pension and Bets takes off her gear and there's this giant bug on her back, something like a cross between a shrimp and a cornstalk. He seems to be good natured enough. Bets has named him George.

Hi. I am in a place where I don't know where I am.

The coordinator said it would definitely be somewhere familiar and I guess it is, if by "familiar" you mean good old Earth. But it does not comport with any image of Earth I've ever viewed either televoyantly or not.

All I can say for sure is that this is sometime in the future. Either the year 2524 or 2425. There seems to be some disagreement about this.

Will check in again when more information becomes available.