  For Gamma-Ray Burst 100901A, we have obtained Gemini-North and Very Large
Telescope optical afterglow spectra at four epochs: one hour, one day, three
days and one week after the burst, thanks to the afterglow remaining unusually
bright at late times. Apart from a wealth of metal resonance lines, we also
detect lines arising from fine-structure levels of the ground state of Fe II,
and from metastable levels of Fe II and Ni II at the host redshift (z =
1.4084). These lines are found to vary significantly in time. The combination
of the data and modelling results shows that we detect the fall of the Ni II 4
F9/2 metastable level population, which to date has not been observed. Assuming
that the population of the excited states is due to the UV-radiation of the
afterglow, we estimate an absorber distance of a few hundred pc. This appears
to be a typical value when compared to similar studies. We detect two
intervening absorbers (z = 1.3147, 1.3179). Despite the wide temporal range of
the data, we do not see significant variation in the absorption lines of these
two intervening systems.
