After a brief silence filled with deep thoughts, she casually broke it.
"What exactly are you thinking about?" She asked calmly.
"Just pondering a certain phenomenon unique to humans."
"You'll understand it eventually." I said with a monotone voice.
"Alright. But by the way, I haven't finished my explanation yet."
"Wasn't finished with what? I thought it was clear?"
"You jumped to your own conclusion before I even mentioned the third cause."
"And what might that be?"
"I'll be your older sister."
Ah yes, the floor is made of... floor.
"I was joking."
Don't pull that asspull trick on me ever again.
"No, seriously. I was just joking."
"Oh sure. Then what is the third one, Selene, my genius inventor?"
"That mocking tone of yours really shows how insufferable you are."
Stop name-calling and just get to the damn point.
"The third cause."
"By forming this contract, you'll be separated from me—but you'll gain a complete soul."
"However, in return, half the interval between your current vessel and mine will be lost."
Could you please stop talking in such a convoluted way?
This doesn't flow at all—it's just... unnaturally inefficient.
"It reflects a certain elegance of speech."
Who even gives a f*ck about elegance?
This reminded me of how I used to be treated like some prim-proper little princess back in the day… what a ridiculous nightmare that had been.
"You sound like a broken record."
"I get what you mean, but the way you say it makes me wanna throw myself off a cliff."
"Even Mytheia is more reliable than you."
"That's enough. No more responses like that."
Sorry not sorry for being sassy.
"Apology accepted."
"That wasn't even an apology."
Never mind, she would've figured it out eventually.
And seriously, Selene, stop questioning all these terms.
I warned you.
"Alright then. Understood."
"Now, may I continue?"
I nodded without hesitation.
"This vessel of mine will activate once I turn sixteen, due to a time constraint following the event."
I see… Huh. Maybe having an older sister like her wouldn't be that bad.
I could still spoil her a little.
Wait, hold up—did she just say time constraint?
I thought time dilation was already complicated enough...
"What do you mean by time constraint? And why sixteen years old? Isn't it contradictory for you to even exist in this timeline?"
I mean, come to think of it, it's one of those paradoxes that always bugged me in sci-fi movies. Did it even make sense for your future self to exist in a timeline where your past self was still alive? I thought grandpa's paradox already explained it clearly.
Well, unless...
"To answer that," she said, tilting her head,
"Do you understand how a creature moves through time?"
Just say time travel or time machine, Selene. Shake my head.
It's not like this was new to me.
Sci-fi's been throwing around paradoxes and timeline splits since forever.
Still, if someone actually claimed to have done it in real life, I'd call bullshit.
"Yeah, I get the basics."
"Then explain it."
"...From what I understand, if someone from the future meets their past self, it will cancel each other to keep the cause and effect. Meaning… one will get erased."
"Intriguing."
She propped her chin, her voice sharpened, as if amused I wasn't completely clueless.
"You at least did explain its mechanism correctly, but this butterfly effect you were referring to... what if such a thing never exists but merely as an illusion?"
Hearing her explanation, my mouth went agape
Nope, not due to amazement, but rather... a perplexion.
Her words felt like someone suddenly yanked the floor out from under me.
"What? No, that doesn't add up. Butterfly effect exists to explain how small changes ripple through a timeline. Cause and effect is practically the mechanism of time."
"False." She leaned in, her gaze a little too steady for comfort.
"There are no such things as cause and effect."
"Kairi, simply think about it carefully. Use your mind."
"First—you unintentionally rewrote the timeline just by being here. Which means, this version of reality is already a reiteration, therefore not an original."
Okay, this is unsettling. I already begin to lose my mind.
"Second, time doesn't actually 'move forward.'"
"...Wait, why?"
"Time is not a singularity." She explained.
"It's like a moving cliff. It doesn't flow steadily forward. Instead, it falls—downward, spiraling. The more time passes, the further you descend into the abyss."
Huh, are you kidding me?
"Wait, isn't time defined by experiences? You live, you remember, you move forward."
"False. Time is defined by every moment of your awareness, not your experience. It doesn't flow in one direction. Instead, it moves up and down, fitting itself to space."
Okay, now this is out of my territory. These are beyond my understanding.
"Then if time doesn't move forward, what pushes it?"
"It's space. Space moves the time forward."
"Space stretches as the time compresses, going up and down to mold into space."
I rubbed my face. I opened my mouth to protest but closed it.
I was too far lost to argue.
"Any objections?" Selene asked, little amusement in her voice.
I let out a long breath, feeling both exhausted and lackluster.
"I... I can't process any of this right now."
She gave a small nod. "Fair enough."
"You realize I'm a doctor, not a theoretical physicist, right?"
"Well, you're still following, though. And I'm not a theoretical physicist either."
Then it hit me. Wait—she said half of her timeline interval was sixteen. Shouldn't that be fifteen-point-five? Or, if time's a cliff, wouldn't it fluctuate?
I frowned, feeling my frustration grow again.
"By the way, you're contradicting yourself. If it's 'half,' why not 15.5?"
"Is it not exactly half, or what?"
Selene gave a faint sigh.
"It's not that simple." Selene's voice took on a more philosophical tone, airy and brittly.
Her expression hardened, but only for a moment.
"When I said half of my age's interval, it means something much more complicated."
"Time isn't linear. When I said 'half,' I meant that my timeline is 'condensed.' If my future is erased, time forced to fill the gap, as in the present."
"Therefore, unknown factors alter the result. For instance, if my future gets erased, time condenses to fill the empty space—the present. In other words, what I'd call as 'half' shifts is depending on what gaps exist in my future and yours."
"And therefore, when I said sixteen, it was a point of compression as the result."
I groaned, not wanting to continue any of these even further.
"I regret asking. Now I don't understand anything."
Was this what inferiority felt like?
This was as if you're arguing with a walking, talking quantum philosophy book that deliberately refuses to use normal terminology. And the worst part of this was I couldn't even argue properly, because none of this followed textbook rules.
Also — I'm a f*cking doctor, or healer damn it. Not a rocket scientist.
I work with people, not paradoxes. My brain had officially mentally checked out.
"Still complaining internally?"
"Shut up. I can't even process this anymore. Let's just move on."
There had to be a better thing to prioritize, and it wasn't physics.
"There's something way more important than this theoretical nonsense."
I locked eyes with her.
"How the hell do I get out of this place?"