“Hello there, magical tree of magic. Long time no see,” I greeted the mana fruit tree for the billionth time.

I had long picked all the fruits it had to offer from my countless passes. It looked like a normal -- albeit slightly taller -- tree at this point. To my trained eyes though, I knew it was the same mana tree again since I’d seen it so many times.

“Say, you stupid ass tree. Are you doing this? Are you keeping me in some kind of cliché inescapable illusion maze thing? Or am I just that bad with directions?”

The tree ignored me. Jerk.

“Chad! You probably know about illusions and stuff, right?” I asked the elven hero made of stone. “As a hero, you probably went through exactly this situation at least three times!”

The serious expression on Chad’s face told me I was exactly right.

“Come on! Tell me how you got out! And don’t you dare tell me it was some kind of protagonist plot armor nonsense!”

The hero decided to not speak at all, which basically confirmed what I’d feared.

“Oh, come oooon! I don’t have plot armor like yours! How am I supposed to get back home?” I whined while spreading myself on the grass. 

“Ugh, why does everything and everyone hate me? Is this some kind of social experiment to see how long it will take for me to give in and destroy the world, after all?” I frowned at the tree from my lying position. “Well, screw you! The more you want me to do it, the harder I’m going to refuse!” I pointed at the tree with determination.

The tree ignored me again, like the smug jerk he was.

I sighed as my hand dropped back down to the grass. I thought about my situation and my cute goblin wife waiting for me back at home. She must have been worried sick. Not about my well-being in particular, but about me running off and destroying the world while she wasn’t paying attention.

I sighed again as the sun slowly retired and got replaced by the moon.

I’d finally found a new home and a companion… but here I was, lying on the ground in the middle of the forest, alone. Again.

I was getting really melancholic when I felt something really odd.

“Huh?”

I’d just bumped into something. No, not me, but a part of me.

My eyes widened and I sat up.

I felt my bubble space and found it had doubled. Not only that, but the new half of it felt different.

A grin appeared on my face.

“Land ho!” I exclaimed and immediately spirited myself away into my bubble.

I stood up, looked around, and found exactly what I was expecting. My very slow blue bubble vehicle has bumped into my target destination, the green bubble. The two stuck together but didn’t merge, even though I could clearly feel the space inside the green bubble with my ability as well.

Throwing all caution to the wind, I walked up to the boundary and tried pushing my arm into the green bubble. The boundary simply extended to encompass my arm though.

“Oh, come on!”

I began pushing with both my arms, then my elbows, and then finally with my entire body.

I definitely didn’t expect to hear a slurp sound as the bubble boundary gave way and let me into the green bubble. A bizarre sensation.

I looked around and found the green bubble to be empty, while my original blue bubble had nothing out of place.

That said, the green bubble felt kinda off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it somehow felt supercharged compared to the blue bubble. At the same time though, I didn’t feel like something terrible was happening to me while I was in here.

“Eh, whatever.” I shrugged.

I decided to test out whether I could still manipulate items in the other bubble from here and lifted up one of the mana fruits.

“Hey, what the heck?”

For some reason, the fruit felt way heavier than it should have been. Even lifting it up one meter took way more time and effort than lifting Chad normally.

“Hrm… so moving things in other bubbles is more difficult, huh?” I said to myself while dropping the fruit again.

As soon as I did though, my eyes went wide once again. Just as one would expect, the fruit began to fall.

Just as one might definitely not expect, it fell much, much slower than normal.

In fact, it was so slow, that I had time to slowly walk closer to the boundary, squat down, and watch as it soundlessly hit the ground, and very slowly burst into juice drops and pieces of flesh.

I kept staring at the spectacle for a good minute before yelling, “Holy crap! Time dilation?!”

That’s why the green bubble felt supercharged. Time inside it was sped up while the outside slowed down to a crawl in comparison.

“Oh, so I can do the very anime protagonist thing where I train for years while only a day would have passed in the real world?” I spoke aloud.

Even better, I was an elf, so my long lifespan meant more years of training.

But then I realized… “Eh, too much work.” I shrugged.

Tossing that silly idea aside, I wedged myself into the bubble boundary and plopped back into the blue one. Everything went back to normal when I tried picking something up and moving it around. No more slowdown.

“Cool. Now then… how about the reverse?”

Just as a test, I tried manually grabbing a fruit and tossing it into the green bubble. It passed into it without a problem and immediately smashed itself on the floor in fast-forward before I could catch it with my ability again.

When I tried to move the remains, it was like grabbing a bottle you thought was full, but it turned out to be empty, and the fruit corpse ended up smashing into the green bubble’s ceiling.

“God damn! Hahaha! This is fun!” 

I played around with my new physics-defying toy before I had yet another realization.

I walked up to the edge of the blue bubble and looked out into the void, spotting more and more bubbles around. Other than more blue and green bubbles -- and the scary black one -- there were also some red bubbles. My gut instinct told me exactly what these red bubbles would do, and I couldn’t help but squee in joy.

“Do you know what this means, Chad? I could probably make all sorts of freshly cooked foods and store them in there and they would last for months!”

Chad looked out into the void with me without saying anything. He probably shared my sentiment though.

“Alright, all aboard the bubble train!”

I began moving both the blue and the green bubble in the direction of the closest red bubble.

“Huh? Oh, what? That’s lame!”

It was twice as slow as before.

BottledChaos

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