Space-Time Man

The Space-Time Man (時空のおっさん, Jikū no Ossan) is a middle-aged man who guards the Otherside against intruders from the surface world and sends back those who wandered in unintentionally.

He was a part of a phenomenon Sorawo and Kozakura experienced in File 4: Time, Space, and a Middle-aged Man.

Appearance
He appears as a middle-aged man wearing working clothes that were somewhere between gray and blue and a badge of a windmill or a flower on his chest. His face cannot be described as a whole. However, people looking at the Space-Time Man can easily describe his individual features.

His real form is a tall plant with a green stalk splitting in two in its middle. At each end of the stalk bore five bunches of small red fruits that resembled salmon roe. Arrowhead-shaped leaves grew from the whole of the stalk.

Background
He is said to live in a transitory zone between the two worlds and was able to appear in both in the form of a middle-aged man wearing work clothes and a symbol of a flower or windmill on his chest. He was encountered by Sorawo when she wandered to the interstitial space between the surface world and Otherside. Despite his warnings to not go after Toriko, Sorawo went to Otherside to search for her. Along with Kozakura, they found a glitch that took the form of a town. The Space-Time Man is one of the phenomena occurring inside the glitch.

Lore
The collection of net lore “Jikuu no Ossan” (The Time-Space Man) first appeared in “Shinu Hodo Share ni Naranai Kowai Hanashi wo Atsumete Minai?” (Do You Want to Gather Ridiculously Scary Stories?) threads about  “Jikuu no Bannin” (The Watcher of Time-space) and “Jikuu no Zure?” (A Time-space Dislocation?). It was after this that the number of narrators saying, “I had a similar experience,” increased.

The person experiencing the story would suddenly wander into a world where everyone else had vanished. There, in a place where they are the only person around, the person experiencing the story would encounter a middle-aged man wearing janitor work clothes. The man would be surprised to see the person and give incomprehensible warnings before the person suddenly finds themselves back in the surface world. The story of the Space-Time Man belonged to the “wandered into another world” genre of ghost stories.