7. Powers

These blue spots of light not only travelled at different speeds, they would also teleport at random intervals too. The distance they reappeared varied and Gareth didn't realise it until he felt an extremely familiar pain coursing through his body.

Tired after the last encounter, Gareth couldn't resist the agony anymore and fell into a coma.

After an unknown period of time Gareth woke up from the coma only to fall unconscious from experiencing a unprecedented amount of pain a second later from the time he had been in a coma.

More time passed as he slipped in and out of consciousness until finally he could gather his wits. Tears and snot mixed with blood flowed out of eyes and nose respectively uncontrollably. His vision was blurry and he couldn't walk straight but somehow after being subjected to pain over an unknown amount of years his body he developed an uncanny sense of danger towards these spatial anomalies.

Anytime he felt danger his body would subconsciously move as fast as it could to dodge the arrival of a light orb.

With a danger alarm in place he could finally focus his attention towards escaping this unknown place.

Gareth didn't know that his body had absorbed minuscule amounts of time energy every time he was swallowed by a space rift. Through an unaccountable number he had gained power to wield time albeit small.

Gareth discovered this by accident when he was accidentally moved into a time field that surrounded time threads. He instantly felt a strange energy stirring within him and discovered that he had stumbled into a time zone.

To his surprise unlike last time where his body part instantly disappeared and hasn't been restored, he could see that his arm was visibly aging and after a minute it had become dust.

Floating to a safe are he began experimenting with this strange power, the first thing he found was that he could affect the time of objects. Through some conscious effort his fully naked body was now covered in clothing.

His thoughts then drifted to his missing body parts, it required some focus and time for him to restore it back to normal.

Initial attempts caused the parts to revert to embryonic form, and further attempts resulted with partial restoration, ageing the wrong part or abnormal bodily functions.

After countless trial and errors he managed to finally regain his normal body with normal body functions. He kept a mental note not to try using this power unless absolutely necessary.

He also discovered that he could emit this strange energy from his body and by surrounding himself with it he could venture into the dangerous time eroding zones that surrounded these strange coloured threads and not be affected by it.

His experiments with his new powers had also attracted a curious and friendly time elemental. Its size was as big as his face, semi transparent and was blue in colour. Like others of its group it was in the shape of a squid. He could only touch it when he covered his body with time energy otherwise the part that touched it would be eroded by time.

The time squid was small in comparison to others of it kind, not exactly the smallest as he had seen some the size of needles. The largest he had seen was bigger than an ocean and Gareth believed that there were also even larger ones out there.

After a period of interaction the squid clung onto him like a piece of gum it especially liked his head and would sit on it looking like a hat After some coaxing the squid turned into an armband though it would go sit on his head if he wasn't paying attention or after a couple of hours.

Gareth didn't know what to name it and just give it the nickname of kuchi as it liked being tickled only second to sitting on his head.