Alma 156 Easy Peasy

Green stalks of tall grass danced merrily in the breeze as far as the eye could see. A contingent of great trees stood tall in the middle of the grasslands, here and there, as if they were nature's own knights. The stood sentry in the arcadian landscape as they oversaw the rise and fall of the seasons. 

For thousands of years, they had overseen the growth of the Silvermoon Azaleas and would continue to do so, under the command of their father, Velvund. It was he who had planted them in the grasslands as mere saplings in an age long forgotten by himself along with the flowers. 

They swiftly fulfilled the noble task they had been imparted by their father the moment the fissure appeared and desecrated their homeland — it was they, the hacca trees who had called for assistance and alerted Velvund of the disaster in the Silvermoon Grasslands. 

A detection system — that was what they were. Exceptional hardy, extremely long-lived, and stationary by nature — they were trees, for heaven's sake. In essence, they were the perfect guardians for the Silvermoon Grasslands. 

Eventually, summer faded into obscurity, and fall came along, bringing with a seedling of the end. It was here, during the fall of the previous year that everything began. 

In the blink of an eye, disaster struck the Silvermoon Grasslands. On a perfectly normal day, no different than any other, the land shook in fury and gave way, wrenching the grasslands into two. An enormous gash upon the earth had formed, and with it came the disruption of both space and time. 

It was a loss of nature comparable to the destruction that had below in Centlani Deep — possibly even worse. Everything that had been unfortunate enough to have been near the fissure had died that day. If not by falling into the abyssal chasm below, then by the chaotic spatiotemporal storm that had arisen right after. 

Shredded into pieces by the unstable mess within the anomaly until not even corpses could be recovered. Turned into dust in a matter of seconds as they aged to death within the turbulent zone of disordered spacetime. Nothing survived, be it the local fauna and flora or the foolish Chosen who had ventured into the anomaly. 

Lu'um flicked her hand again, this time in grasping motion, as if she had reached out to grab something in the air. The moment she caught it, time itself ran into a screeching halt. She had hit the brakes on time, slowing everything back down to normal. 

Well, that is, if anything within the current Silvermoon Grasslands could still be called normal. 

The entire place appeared out of focus for Reed as it struggled to hold itself in place, shifting slightly between time. Events that had already happened sometimes looped in on themselves, repeating on end without stopping. Temporal glitches, Reed thought. 

"Is the world trying to make up for the fact that some pieces of time have been lost?"

Again, why is he so intuitive when it comes to picking up concepts and ideas when it matters the least? It took him less than a second to figure the repeating loops without any help.

Lu'um clicked her tongue. "Yes, that's right. The world is trying to make up for it by duplicating the information it still has not yet lost. It's shoddily patching together a semblance of logical order, despite the fact that there isn't any left. The more information it loses, the worse these glitches will become until it becomes too much for it to handle. 

That is when a causality hole is born. A perpetual hole of shattered causes and effects that will continue to grow and spread even further as it consumes more and more of the world around it."

"This thing has a name?" Reed gazed at a cute rabbit in the distance as it hopped across the grasslands, only for it to suddenly reappear when it had initially begun. Again and again, ruthlessly attempting to outrun the crumbling ground behind it.

Well, it's not really losing, I guess. Technically. But being stuck in the same moment isn't really winning, either. 

"Of course it has a name. My ancestors created many of them during our... first attempts at temporal incursions back in the day, more a dozen millenniums ago. 

Ah, don't look at me that. Relax, they only occurred in smaller branches of the multiverse — older parallel universes that were already near death. You know, for safety purposes. Were our 'tree' — our multiverse — to lose a small branch, it would not die. If the worst ever came to happen, we could prune the entire branch off, but that would be in a nightmare scenario in which everything got WAY out of control. 

A highly improbable possibility. Less than a hundred billionth of a percent, given the redundancies and safety measures we had in place."

"...Is that supposed to make me feel more comfortable about what they did? Because it's not really helping, considering they were, you know... trying to meddle with TIME!" 

Reed sighed. 

An entire race of super-dweebs, too far up into their books, the whole lot of them. 

He greatly enjoyed intellectual pursuits too, but there was a limit to Reed's curiosity. He would never go around poking the temporal hornet's nest that was the continuity of time with a stick. 

I guess that's what happens when you live for thousands of years like the Ancient Mulians. You get so bored that even an idea as monumentally idiotic as tampering with time becomes tempting to the ear. 

"We would never test on the larger, main branches, or heaven forbid, the prime universe, the 'trunk' of the tree that we lived in. Never. It would be a direct violation of more than a hundred sacred protocols. 

And we only experimented on universes that were already devoid of life, so not a single life was harmed in the process.

Those 'leaves' would have eventually died off and fallen off the branch anyway, right? So why not use them before they die, then? Trees always grow back new leaves, and our multiverse was no different. I'm sure you would have greatly enjoy—" 

Reed had heard enough. He grabbed Lu'um and put her over his shoulder, carrying her toward the fissure and blocked out the noise coming out of the chattering girl.

He knew that once a topic of interest was brought up that she enjoyed, it'd be a thousand years before she'd finish talking. Reed quietly noted another topic that he would have to avoid mentioning from now on during important situations. 

"...Oh, don't worry about that, though. The Lanuis-Garron theory proposed a different framework..."

It wasn't as if he hated that her getting excited about something. Reed liked that. He found it very cute when she gushed over some academic topic far removed from his knowledge, even if he couldn't understand more than half of it. 

How her cheeks would become flushed and her eyes would sparkle with interest as she monologued about her fascination over sub-quantum Anima fluctuations, stellar-thought bridges, and macro-scale entropy management. 

He was fine with that, it just annoyed him whenever she would stare at him in her heated monologues, as if she had met one of her own kin. 

"Hey..."

I'm no mad scientist. And I'll be damned if I ever become one. This relationship can barely handle one egghead, thank you very much... 

".....Are you listening to me?"

Reed peered over the fissure's edge. It was mostly pitch black, but he could see a shimmer of warm light at the bottom, though he was confident that it would be everything but comfortable down there. It was like the devil's house down there, at the bottom of the continent. 

He took a deep breath and quietly thought to himself, "Just like the last time, Reed. Go in, touch the node, and get the fuck out pronto. It'll be easy peasy. You already did once. You can do it again."

There was no doubt in his heart that it would not be as easy as he had made it to be. Even so, he couldn't back down. If a small lie helped him do it, then he would lie to himself. 

And then... he did it. 

He, in an unexpected turn of events, chucked Lu'um into the fissure without warning like a sack of potatoes.

All in all, it was a pretty funny thing to do — well, at least for Reed. 

Her sudden yelp of terror and surprise had been very entertaining to him. Never before had he heard her make such an adorable noise. Reed chuckled heartily as he held his stomach in pain from his fit of laughing. 

Ah-h... shit, man... That was fucking golden. Her face, oh god, that dumb expression she had...! 

His lingering fear had finally gone, though at Lu'um's expense. Still, it was worth the price, though Reed.

He wiped the tears out of his eyes and quietly mumbled out, "Ohhh, man. That was some good shit right there. ...Well, I guess I better go and apologi--" 

Before he could even finish his sentence, a pale hand shot out from the darkness and grabbed onto Reed's ankle and pulled him in great force. 

Reed couldn't even react. He let out a frightened yelp in a heightened pitch as he disappeared into the abyss. 

He was gone.

Chapter end