Almost experimentally, Rhys pushed impurities into the barrier. It fizzled for a second, then easily suppressed them. The impurities vanished. He couldn’t sense them any longer, but for them to vanish like that, the barrier was either transporting them outside of itself, or completely obliterating them.
Don’t like that.
He stepped back, considering the problem. The impurities had fizzled the barrier for a second. He didn’t need long to pass through, especially not at his tier, but neither did he like the idea of possibly getting cut in half as the barrier ate through his impurities and snapped shut before he got through. Lifting his hand, he called out some fiercer impurities and shaped them into a ring, then pushed the whole ring forward at once into the barrier. Once more, the barrier fizzled, but it snapped shut in the blink of an eye, closing the hole the ring of impurities made so quickly that Rhys couldn’t even dream of testing it as a pathway.
Still, the impurity ring had interrupted the barrier for a moment. He’d even been able to sneak a peek at the other side. Not a very informative peek; he’d seen a wall that obscured his vision not far from where he crouched. The barrier wrapped around a building. If he got past the barrier, he’d only have maybe half an inch to work with before he hit a wall.
It’s a start.
Rhys walked along the barrier, occasionally summoning a ring of impurities to peek to the other side. The barrier ate the impurities, and he couldn’t retrieve them, so after the first ring, he used weaker, more commonplace impurities. The barrier snapped shut almost as fast as it did with the strong ones; the strong ones gained him maybe a millisecond. It was bad news for his impurities, but it was good news for Rhys’s new hobby as a Peeking Tom, because it meant that he only had to use his weaker impurities and he could still gain just as much value as the strong ones.
Peeking Tom is a strong term. Implies that I’m getting something out of it. What I really am is a like serial wall-looker, because that’s all I’m seeing. The wall stretched along the length of the barrier, as far as he could see. He peeked every few meters, but only ever saw more wall. Still, he kept trying, treating it the same as a search for hidden doors in a Bad Souls knockoff. After a few peeks, he felt his path assisting him, and he smiled. I knew it. Soulslikes are trash!
Soulslikes were a plague upon gaming. They hadn’t started as trash, and certainly, the originals were masterpieces that deserved a knockoff or two. But then everyone had started putting soulslike mechanics into their game, whether it needed it or not (it usually didn’t). For a while, he struggled to find an indie game that didn’t involve bonfires that respawned enemies, three potions per bonfire, and absolutely brutal bosses that were so damn boring that he almost wanted to take a nap between each of their slow, slow, slow attack animations, except he couldn’t, because if he dodged at the wrong millisecond, his character would die and he’d have to run for half an hour through bullshit enemies to get back to the boss, just to fail one dodge and get sent back again.
He hadn’t started as a hater. He’d thought the original games had merit, and in fact, they were fantastic for introducing new ideas and concepts into the gaming meta. Even the first knockoffs had been pretty solid. In fact, he’d even been happy for fans of the genre, who got so many wonderful games. But then they’d infected everything, until he just had to walk away and play non-action games for a few years because gods-damn was he sick of shitty soulslikes. He didn’t like them. He didn’t want to invest half an hour per boss attempt just to get to the boss, then feel like he was getting slapped in the face for another hour as he waited for the boss to finally finish its seven-attack combo of one-hit-kill attacks with full body I-frames so he could do one attack that did five out of seven thousand damage, wash, rinse, repeat. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play them or wasn’t good enough to beat them; he could, and that almost made it worse, because then he felt like he should at least finish the game even if he found them so unbearably boring. Couldn’t someone make a game that wasn’t a soulslike, please, pretty please?
Guess I’ll never find out what trashy trope replaced soulslikes. The fad was still raging when he’d left. Signs of the sun after the long rain were starting to glimmer, but they hadn’t fully taken shape yet. He didn’t know if he’d like the next fad, but at least it would be different.
For whatever reason, hidden doors were a staple of soulslikes, and so, while he—and he was pretty sure most people—would definitely argue that Bad Souls and its knockoff soulslikes hadn’t started as trash games, they had definitely evolved into it. Not the usual way of a long, slow decline in quality (like assassins games and beat ‘em ups), but purely by eating up 100% of the market share and forcing poor indie game devs to play the meta and put soulslike mechanics into games that were wholly unsuited for them, just so that the soulslovers would click on their soulslop games and actually give them a try, as opposed to ignoring them because they weren’t soulslop. Thus, as he approached the edge of the barrier, a tiny twinge of insight popped up in his brain. Here, it whispered, and Rhys stopped a few feet earlier than he’d intended to and opened another peephole.
This time, the peephole pointed not at a wall, but at a shallow gap in the wall that housed a door. The gap was small, just large enough to stand in, but it was all Rhys needed. Or rather, it was the first step in the process.
The peepholes opened for long enough for him to look through, but the speed of light was still far above Rhys’s maximum speed. He couldn’t so much as shove a hoop through in the tiny span of time they were open. He pinched his chin. He felt like he was moving in the right direction with the impurity rings, by constructing a shape, then pushing it in, but he was still missing something.
He tilted his head, thinking as hard as he could, then shrugged. Let’s start by making it bigger. Rules of physics dictated that it would take longer for the barrier to close a bigger hole. If he constructed a him-sized impurity ring, then pushed it in, hypothetically, even if the barrier collapsed the ring at the same exact pace, the bigger hole he’d opened would have a larger area that would take longer for the barrier to cover.
Let’s test it before I invest a lot of strong impurities into this. It wasn’t like his peepholes, which basically ate negligible impurities. The larger ring would require more impurities, and while it still wouldn’t make a dent in his reserves, he didn’t want to go all-out on draft one, just to take 99 drafts to finally create a working model. It was the same idea as building a prototype out of cheap, trashy material. It wasn’t going to work perfectly the first time, so why invest heavily in something that was guaranteed to fail? Let it fail, figure out why it failed, then build it better. And if it turned out that the poor materials were the source of the failure, all the better, because it meant he had a fully working prototype on draft one.
He wasn’t sure if it qualified as trash logic or good logic, but it definitely generated trash and was made of trash, which landed it solidly in his domain. He held out both hands at about shoulder-width and shoulder-height, as if he were holding an imaginary steering wheel, then paused. He wanted this to be big, not just-big-enough. Shifting his arms outward, he changed to holding them at their full length, out on either side of them, then paused again. Now, if he wanted to make an arc (or, at this point, a loop), then just due to the fact of the matter of him holding his arms out on either side of him, the impurities would have to go above his head and under his feet. Above his head wasn’t a big deal, but under his feet was. He’d have to burrow the impurities through the ground. Usually, that wouldn’t matter either, since earth was naturally full of impurities, dirt being generally considered impure, but he wasn’t on the ground right now. He was floating in the sky on top of an artificially-pure mage-crafted disk of magic material that probably resisted impurities, if for no other reason than mages generally disliking impurities.
But then again, what said he had to use his body to define the size and shape of the loop? He lifted one hand up over his head as though he were about to summon some great attack down from the heavens, holding the size of the loop he’d defined with his body in his mind. Rhys pushed impurities out of his body into the ring, building them on top of themselves as they grew.
The loop began to form, only to crumble. Rhys narrowed his eyes, focusing. Impurities were naturally weak on their own; they didn’t have a lot of structural stability or tensile strength. There were many ways to overcome this problem, like using iron as the basis of the hoop, then loading it up with impurities that strengthened it into steel, then growing yet more impurities on top of that hoop, but he was lazy and in a particularly trashy mood, so Rhys decided to just brute force it. He could control impurities, so he didn’t really need structural stability. He could just will them in place. It took more concentration, effort, and energy from him, but not an impossible amount. His concentration strained, and he had to exert his whole effort to keep it in place, but he welcomed the work. At Tier 5, he didn’t need to strain for much anymore, so at a moment like this, he relished the opportunity to train.
Once more, the loop took shape. This time, Rhys forced it not to crumble. It wanted to; or rather, it had no ability whatsoever to hold up its own weight. Gravity won. But not when Rhys was around. He pushed back, forcing the impurities on top of one another, gluing them together with will alone—then had a thought. Gravity. It’s kind of a trash concept, isn’t it?
It really was. It’d existed since forever, but no one had thought to name or describe it until some random dude had an apple fall on his head. And not only that, but the apple story was a total fiction, completely apocryphal with no known source. That sounded like an early bit of disinformation if Rhys said so himself, and what was disinformation but pure trash? Plus, Sir Issac Newton had been a bit of a weirdo himself. He was the trashy kind of guy to stare at the sun for hours just to see what’d happen and shove needles behind his eyes to see if he could figure out how they worked thanks to that. What a freak! He was fortunate he hadn’t gone blind, honestly.
And gravity. Thing go down. Simplest thing in the world, except it wasn’t, because science still hadn’t been able to fully describe it or determine the forces behind it when he left. It was the magical pull-inny force, except no one wanted to admit that, so they called it gravity and said 9.8 meters per second per second and pretended they knew what they were talking about. Trash, trash, trash! Glorious, beautiful trash! He couldn’t have asked for a trashier scientific concept! And it was a total tsundere piece of trash too, pretending like it wasn’t interested in trash at all. It was a high-falutin scientific concept, caged in the beautiful, pure world of academia, not some mystery magical force no one understood.
But wait, there’s more! Rhys thought, in the timeless voice of a certain infomercial actor. What was gravity, but the key component in the lowest form of fiction: slapstick? No one thought slapstick was anything but trash, and gravity was the primary actor in ninety percent of slapstick. Sure, it wasn’t a one man show, and there were other forces at work, but gravity was an important one. Without gravity, there wouldn’t be any prank falls or silly drops or items falling on peoples’ heads. Without gravity, many of the funniest home videos wouldn’t be very funny, since no one would be humorously landing on their ass at the bottom of an icy driveway after the third attempted scramble up it.
Discovered by trash, a trash concept, a trash tsundere, a trash mystery, a trash form of comedy. Gorgeous. And thus, totally in Rhys’s domain. He reached out again, but this time, he didn’t control the loop. Instead, he reached out to gravity itself. To the ephemeral force that all the science of his world and all the magic of this one couldn’t understand. You’re trash, aren’t you? he said, pushing just enough mana out into the world to (hopefully) be able to talk to concepts like gravity. You know it, I know it. Everyone else pretends you aren’t, but we know better, don’t we?
It was a total shot in the dark. There was no reason for him to believe that it would reply. He hadn’t at all communicated with concepts, though he had communicated with objects, but fundamentally, it was possible, wasn’t it? It had to be. At some point, things had to get conceptual, right? So he might as well try, even if it probably wouldn’t work.
And then, to his absolute shock, something responded.