In the heart of the realm of primal chaos, Max was little more than a newborn tossed into the maelstrom.
He felt like it took him a day to crawl out of just the ship, as just touching the ground on the realm felt like a massive achievement for him.
Only when he was on the outside did he realise that this plane had illumination, yet there was no obvious source behind it.
He could see the barren terrain without life clearly, the terrain was shining bright as if under daylight yet the sky was dark and without any visible stars.
It was an odd place for sure, one that appeared to have no cycles of day or night.
Disorienting and relentless, the forces of this plane played with him like a child with a new toy, without any trace of mercy.
Every step he took, every law he knew would betray his expectations as he stumbled, fell, flew but was not able to walk.
Sometimes he would stumble a few steps by applying force at odd angles, thinking he had mastered the alien environment, only to find the ground shifting beneath him, tossing him into the air and in all possible directions.
"Damn this place!" Max cursed aloud as another attempt to walk forward ended with him spiralling upwards into the chaotic air currents. He could feel the sweat soaking his back, his heart pounding, and his body pleading for a break.
A significant portion of his energy was consumed by keeping his blood pressure stable, yet even with such a big advantage of him being able to regulate his internal system, he wasn't able to have any tangible achievements on the outside.
Time was a deceptive foe in this realm. His body clock told him days had passed, yet upon returning to his ship, the onboard clock displayed only a few seconds had elapsed.
This realisation was deeply unsettling for Max as he once again felt like he was inside the time chamber, that he was dipping a toe into an endless void.
But it also brought a sense of relief as he knew that on the outside he only had a 14 day leave period.
If he somehow returned after decades when the war was over and his child was an adult. If Regus did not kill him for abandoning duty, Asiva surely would.
It was day 25, when after countless falls on his chin, his back and on his arms, that he finally had an epiphany.
In a rare moment of clarity that pierced through his fog of confusion and frustration, Max realised that his very approach to understanding this place was wrong.
His education, his experiences, everything he had ever learned about the laws of the universe didn't apply here, yet he was somehow trying to learn how to move by adjusting those laws he knew by superimposing them upon the special characteristics of this environment.
His approach so far to learning how to walk here was that if instead of gravity acting downwards it applied on some angle, he would change the direction where he was applying force to adjust that counterforce so that he could walk in a straight line.
Yet what he failed to understand was that he was wrong about trying to adjust the forces this way, because from the very fundamentals that method would not work.
This space scoffed at Newton's third law, ignoring the notion that action and reaction were equal and opposite.
If he wanted to learn how to walk here, he had to forget all he had known, to adapt to this plane as a newborn would, learning to crawl before attempting to walk.
"I need to start from scratch," he muttered to himself as he felt hopeful that if he tried to understand the world around him as he felt it, instead of making sense of it through logic's he understood, he could finally decode its mysteries.
And so, he began, abandoning his old ways of movement, discarding his natural instincts.
Step by agonising step, he stumbled, tripped, and somersaulted, fighting against the erratic forces of the plane.
Instead of understanding how the plane affected his movement, he adapted to it.
If the plane dragged him right and he wanted to go left, he let the plane drag him to the right first, then after turning to an angle where the gravity would be perfectly acting downwards, he walked in the direction he wanted to go as he would on earth, as he repeated this process again and again and again until it started to come naturally to him without having to stop and figure it out.
When he finally walked ten steps without stumbling, he pointed to the sky and shouted " Booyah bitches "
But the plane seemed to take offence at his premature celebration.
Just as he was about to make another victorious step, a spatial tear sucked him in, and he was flung to an entirely different part of the plane, far away from his ship.
"What the...!" His exclamation hung in the air as he was violently jerked into the vortex. The shift was abrupt, tossing him onto alien ground. He looked around, a feeling of dread sinking in. His ship, his only means to get back and his safe spot in this chaotic realm was nowhere in sight, now he was stranded at a new spot in the plane with no means to even check what the passage of time was.
" Perfect- just perfect, as if left out, space went 'you forgot about me dawg-' " Max exclaimed as he couldn't even get frustrated at this situation anymore.
He should have expected that such a scenario was bound to happen as gravity and time were not the only things convoluted in this place, space was too.
He should have known that a spacial tear was sooner or later going to make his life more difficult.
" Throw at me in everything you've got, sooner or later I'm gonna make you my bitch " Max exclaimed as he threatened the realm only to be sucked into yet another spacial vortex and teleported to a place where the ground itself was not flat and he was stuck in a cylindrical loop.
Max wanted to curse, but afraid that it would anger the realm and trigger another teleportation he kept mum and began figuring out how the heck he was going to get out of here.
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/// A/N - Chapter 6/10, enjoy ///