Rhys blinked. Did I imagine it, or did I really get a response? It hadn’t been super clear, just a faint flicker. Something like an answer. It was his first time trying to talk to a concept, so he wasn’t sure what to expect, and this kind of felt like it, but it was so slight that he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. He reached out again and felt the same flicker, and this time, he lunged, grasping it with all his might.
There was a surge of energy. Mana drained out of him, but he heard a click. Something slotted into place, and the world felt different.
He felt something like intent or force pushing on his shoulders, or maybe pulling on his feet? He wasn’t sure. Then there was a giant, horrible something below him that defied everything he stood for, and beyond that, something huge, enormous, and comforting. A constant source that emanated endlessly.
Time froze, or rather, slowed immensely. Mana still flowed from him, but slowly, oh-so-slowly. A voice rang out directly into his ears. “It’s been a long time since someone reached out to me.”
“G-gravity?” Rhys asked. Holy shit, it can talk?
“That is how you refer to me. As it were, I cannot talk. You are processing my communication in a way you can understand it.”
“Oh,” Rhys said, overwhelmed in more ways than one. Immediately, his brain overflowed with trashy scenarios. In his mind, a girl in a school uniform with long straight hair pushed her fingers together. It’s not like I pushed you down in particular, b-baka! I apply 9.8 m/s/s to everyone! Baka!
Nearly at the same time, his mind supplied a second scenario. A handsome blond man with impossibly sparkly eyes held up an eraser to a girl sitting at a desk. I didn’t mean to snatch that from your hand, my darling, I just couldn’t help myself. Please, take it with my apologies. And remember, I’ll always be holding you safe and secure against the ground. For whatever reason, Rhys’s brain also supplied an image of that sparkly blond man kabedon-ing the girl against the ground.
“Those scenarios are amusing, but neither apply to me. In fact, mages rarely deign to acknowledge me.”
Rhys’s cooked, rotten brain supplied yet another scenario before he could stop himself: a girl again, but this time with curly hair and a sweater, looking down at her pigeon-toed feet. I’ve been quietly supporting him all these years, holding the planet together and giving him the ability to walk safely without flying into space. When will mage-senpai notice me?
The concept of gravity fell silent. So silent, in fact, that he could hear the ellipses.
“I’m so sorry. It’s just that… um, I’m so used to weird things being personified as cute anime girls slash hot anime men that I can’t help myself.” He paused. “Actually, hold up. Why did you answer me? I mean, you’re, like, a universal concept, and I’m just some guy.”
“By realizing, acknowledging, and somewhat-correctly conceptualizing my existence, you already qualified to contact me. Reaching out was the only remaining step. I will not necessarily respond after this, but the very first time a mage conceptualizes and subsequently reaches out to me, I will always respond.”
“Oh.” Now that he was thinking about it, if he was an ordinary mage from this world, he would have had to independently realize the universal law of gravity and make a few accurate measurements with largely inaccurate tools (though of course mages and mana could overcome this) before he qualified to speak to gravity. Even in his world, it’d taken a genius on the level of Isaac Newton, the guy who also invented calculus, gods damn him, to recognize and describe gravity for the first time. He’d used isekai cheats a few times, but this was the first time he really felt like an isekai cheater using op isekai cheats to do isekai bullshit like talk to god (the concept of gravity was pretty close to a god in his books) and instantly overcome barriers that were supposed to wall off all but the greatest geniuses of this world. I’m sorry, gravity. I’m just a dumbass with another world’s public high schooling to go off of! It just happens that our world’s public high school is so far ahead of this world’s science that the basic of physics basics give me the qualifications to talk to you!
“Why did you reach out to me?”
Cutting straight to the chase, huh? I get it. I would too, if I saw someone imagining me as anime girls. “I wanted to make these impurities into a loop, but gravity keeps getting in the way. It’d help a lot if you turned it down a little on the loop for just a minute or two.”
“You contacted the concept of gravity to help you construct a filth ring?”
“You know, when you put it like that, I almost feel guilty about it, but yes. Yes I did.”
It was silent for a time again, and then it chuckled. “What a strange mage.”
“Look, it seemed convenient at the time, and I really didn’t expect you to reply, let alone talk to me, so I’m very grateful that you wasted some time to talk to me, but yeah, that’s it. That’s uh. You know.” He hadn’t felt guilty about denying a concept, or contacting it so he could push it away for a while, but now that he’d found out the concept had a voice and moreover, intelligence and a personality, and that he was wasting its time, he felt the same exact kind of guilt he did when he was talking to a serviceperson, a waiter or a ticketseller or so on and so forth, and asking for something special. It made him die inside to say something like “hey is this dish made with…” or ask “do you have extra large seats I can buy?” even though he knew it was their job. And this time, he’d contacted some kind of massive, universal concept and done nothing but massively waste its time.
“You haven’t wasted my time. I am multitudinous. My capacity to attend to multiple things at once is far beyond that of a human, even a high-tier one beyond yourself. You could command twice as much of my attention and still not qualify as wasting my time.”
“Well, at least there’s that.”
“You haven’t accomplished anything, either, except to open by insulting me.”
“Huh?”
“I am not trash.”
“First off, not an insult. Not when I say it, anyways. Second off, yes, you are. You are a concept that seems simple on the outside, so simple, in fact, that the mass market dismisses you, but underneath, you’re so complex and detailed, so thoroughly created, that experts spend years discussing the implications of one line of dialogue. That is precisely the definition of trash, my friend.”
How many ‘trash’ games had he played where a bad opening sequence had the entire mass market dismiss them as bad? Or worse, the simple fact that they were a sequel to a not-particularly-great game made the entire world dismiss the sequel out of hand, only for the sequel game to be the best game in the long-running series? How many books had he read where the premise alone scared people off, only for the actual story to be so good and such a great fit for so many readers that he almost cried at what a waste it was that the world ignored it? Manga, comics, movies, cartoons and anime; there were so many “trash” hidden gems that everyone else seemed to dismiss out of hand without so much as engaging with them.
And what was gravity, but precisely that? A concept that the majority dismissed out of hand without ever engaging with it seriously, that was so obvious and blasé on the surface that they never bothered taking the time to find out how complex and cool it actually was? It wasn’t just any old trash, it was peak trash. In other words, precisely the kind of hidden gem that Rhys dreamed of finding.
It chuckled. “You have a curious definition of trash… but I am intrigued. This might be the strangest, yet most interesting conversation I’ve had in years.”
“Then… could you look the other way? Pretty please? Just for a few minutes?”
“I’ll give you ten seconds.”
“I’ll take it.”
Rhys opened his eyes. Now under a time crunch, he didn’t dare hesitate but immediately formed a loop of impurities. This time, it didn’t crumble, not because he’d constructed it better, but because gravity was looking the other way. He pushed it into the barrier, and the barrier snapped shut. It closed almost instantaneously… but not quite. There was a split second where he could push something through. Not long enough for him to step through, but something smaller, something thinner…
There’s only one answer, is there? My convenient teleportation hoops! He still had some of the ten seconds left, so he formed another loop of impurities. At the same time, he readied a hoop, using his mana to float it within the bounds of the loop.
Loops, hoops, even I’m getting confused. I need better names to keep them straight!
Rather than alter his nomenclature at this late juncture, Rhys instead pushed the hoop-loop combo forward, directly into the barrier, and just kept pushing as hard as he could on both of them. He didn’t stop pushing when he hit the barrier, or try to do anything nuanced like push just the inner hoop; he pushed as hard as he could and kept pushing, moving both hoop and loop forward at speed. The loop impacted the barrier, and the barrier instantly collapsed it, but as it closed in, the hoop popped through and fluttered down on the other side.
Before it landed, Rhys hopped through a hoop on his side and bounded out on the other side of the hoop, landing in the alcove on the inside of the barrier. He smirked proudly and did a little bow to no one (maybe the concept of gravity, if it was still watching).
Now that he was on the other side of the barrier, he could sense the space within the building beyond. Or rather… he still couldn’t. Not with his mana senses, anyways. Whoever had constructed this was so paranoid that they’d double-wrapped their pet project like they were taking chances at a cheap brothel.
He put his mana senses away and reached out with his trash senses instead, once again attempting to scan the space beyond the wall. This time, he succeeded, then froze. The building was clear to him, the massive open space and the boxes within, and the one thing that he absolutely did not want to see more than anything else.
Oh, boy. That’s, uh. Not great.