Mystery from Another World

Part 47: Deku finally Tells

After this, the three students had another session with Shine, and Bakugo was cross because he was thinking of their exchange.

 Todoroki had other things on his mind too. "Likstar-san, how much control do you have when you travel in worlds...? I know you said your interference is limited but how limited? Can you go back in time?"

"What brought this on?" Shine asked, looking up from her book. 

"I was looking more into dimensional travel, and it came up a lot," Todoroki explained.

"You know a lot of stuff out there is very inaccurate, and you shouldn't be prying into it," Shine said, "not with any serious intent to use it."

"Why not?" Todoroki frowned suspiciously.

"That's exactly how people start abusing it," Shine said, "I didn't care about it before I started using it, and it's better that way. I study it now only to improve how I maintain a balance. And I don't study it extensively-- just as it comes up... I would feel better if you didn't try to figure it out too much. There's a lot of conflicting messages about it,  and if you get any weird ideas about testing my powers, just know I'll be sorry I ever told you about it."

That was heavy. Bakugo thought. But, she probably had a good reason to say it.

"If you don't want me to look into it, you should answer my questions," Todoroki replied.

Shine looked up at him oddly, like she was trying to decide whether to get angry or not.

"I can't decide if that was you being cute or sassy," she said.

"What?" Todoroki had never had anyone say something like that to him before, and it weirded him out.

"I'm sure he just meant he would find it reassuring." Momo tried to smooth it over. 

"Oh, he meant nothing of the sort. He just has no sense of politeness..." Shine said.

"I... what?" Todoroki said.

"It's fine." Shine waved. "I find it amusing... but don't talk to other people that way, most don't have my sense of humor... and irony. But, hey, Todoroki, don't threaten me, okay?"

"I wasn't trying to..." Todoroki had to think before he saw why what he said could be taken that way. "I just meant... it's an important question, isn't it? Time travel?"

"Time is the most difficult thing of all to explain," Shine sighed, sitting up, "I can explain the space part just fine. Most people have no issue understanding that space can be cut across, because we can see it in real life, but time is something we experience but can't see, feel, hear, or test, even. Finding an analogy for it has been very difficult. I prefer not to explain it at all, but you all are so dang curious....The simplest answer Todoroki, is that I should not time travel."

"Is that the full truth?" Todoroki had begun to catch on to her way of speaking.

"The full truth? When you tesser, you bend space and time both," Shine said, "You'd have to. It'd take millions of years to travel even across our own universe, even at a speed humans can't achieve. As far as I can figure out, the speed of portals is the speed of thought. Thought is not bound by time or space and neither are portals."

"That's interesting, because we can see them," Momo said, "and they appear to be static."

"So does a picture of something in motion," Shine said, "When you see the portal's doorway, you are seeing something like a still frame of it... So we can enter it through our time... but inside the portal, there is no time. There is no space, except what's inside of it... I've gotten stuck in there for longer periods of time when I had interference with it and something threw it off, but the time in there is not the same as out here. I think I only experience it as time at all because I am a living being and my body ages... but strictly speaking, time isn't a thing in there. We can't think outside of time. We measure everything in our minds with a sense of time, but if we could stop doing that... we might understand... You could say time is a law that binds mortal minds, and we aren't free from it till we're dead."