Clutter visibly deflates at my suspicion. The poor guy looks like I just blew out the candles on his birthday cake and cut the corner piece that he wanted. He really needs to learn how to take mild disappointment. And explain himself better.

“I thought you’d be more excited. Your messages sounded excited.” He looks down at the table and his tail droops down to the ground. “I worked really hard at this, you know?”

I sigh and shake my head. “Clutter. You have to–and I mean have to–learn to talk better. Let’s’ start with you giving me the run down on why this is more important than the other stuff you showed me, yeah?”

He nods slowly, his eyes nervously rising to meet mine. “Okay. The things I showed you last time were just little deposits I pulled out of some rocks I found. But this huge glob–I found it in a huge boulder at the top of a mountain. It was like a geode filled with writing plasticy stuff.”

“Plasticy stuff. You don’t have a name for it?”

He shakes his head.

“Nope. It wasn’t in the system, so it’s something that hasn’t been discovered yet–or at least the system doesn’t want me to think it's been discovered yet.” Clutter’s eyes start to twinkle just a little bit, and his tail wags ever so slightly. “I’ve tried making things with it, but it won’t do anything. Not even when I do normal things with it. The quest must be to find where all this stuff comes from.”

Makes sense to me. “So how does you finding a bigger glob get you closer to finding the quest?”

“That’s easy; I have a friend doing geological analysis on the rock itself. Once that comes back from the lab, we’ll know generally where it came from. Then we just go there and poof–we have the quest.” He smiles, his tail almost going full speed. “I bet there’s something else we have to do with the plastic stuff before we can get the quest, like making a bracelet or a seal or something, but I won’t know until I can see the origin of the boulder with my own two eyes.”

Huh. That’s… actually pretty smart thinking. If I knew more about geology, then maybe I’d be able to tell if his plan’s actually going to work, but then you throw magic in with it… yeah, I’ll just leave this to him. I doubt he’s working with Nib right now, since geology isn’t exactly her field, but weirder things have happened. Much, much weirder things.

“Oh, do you want me to take you to the boulder?” He stands bolt upright without waiting for my answer, his tail wagging up a storm. “I put a thing there that lets me get there super easily! And it’ll let me show you some of my magic! Can we go? Please?”

There’s the one-eighty in personality. I chuckle to myself as I stand then nod at Clutter, who almost vibrates out of his fur in excitement. “Lead the way, my sharky friend.”

A giddy grin splits his face, bearing teeth very similar to mine, yet somehow less intimidating. He reaches out a hand with an open palm, motioning excitedly for me to grab it. Seeing no reason not to trust my easily excitable and just as easily disappointed friend, I grab his strangely-textured palm and open my awareness to let whatever spell he’s about to use in.

Buzzing warmth like a carbonated drink that’s been left out in the sun for too long shoots up my arm in thin lines like spider silk. I shudder at the strange sensation, which Clutter seems not to notice, because he definitely would’ve been disappointed with my reaction. Instead, he stares straight through me as his eyes take on a pattern like an endless constellation of spider webs. Some part of me recognizes a specific point as Palastia. Almost none of the others feel like anything, save for three or four that are completely foreign.

His shifting eyes stop on a dime, and he refocuses on me completely. Both of his pupils are locked in on the exact same ‘star’, and he shakes with excitement as the fizzy magic slowly spreads over the rest of my body. And I do mean slowly; it takes a whole two minutes for his spell to coat my body, and even then it doesn’t feel complete. I take the opportunity to push relocation into two coins and drop them for Illumisia. She accepts the targeting for one, and takes the one connected to me in her mouth.

“We’ll be back soon–with or without Clutter.” Pearl assures her. “Hopefully with a brand new quest to complete!”

Illumisia nods as I bend down to pick up her coin. “If you need to kill a lot of people, summon me to your location instead of risking a return. There will be far less collateral damage that way.”

With a flick of the coin through my fingers and a smile, I feel Clutter’s magic finally take hold. Illumisia and Palastia melt away into a blur of colours and sensations, but it doesn’t feel like my relocations. This feels more… tangible. Almost like a tunnel connecting where we just were to wherever Clutter’s taking us. I raise a hand and brush my fingers against a floating patch of colour. Clutter yelps and covers his ears.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Please don’t do that.” He whines from behind his hands. “Anything you do in here gets amplified a lot and returned to me. So… um… please don’t leave the path or do anything else.”

I tilt my head to the side, then look down. Sure enough, there’s a path under my feet that leads off into the distance. It looks like it’s made out of spider silk, carbonation, and the spray that shoots from a wave crashing up against a breakwater.

“Alright.” I say, which gets another yelp from Clutter. “Sounds too?”

He nods weakly. “I can talk, but other people can’t. Well, you can, but… um… please don’t?”

I nod silently and make a zipping motion across my lips. Clutter stares at me blankly. And since he wants me to be quiet, I can’t explain it to him. So instead I roll my eyes and gesture for him to lead the way. Which he does. While rambling about everything he did that led to him finding the first bits of plastic, and then the big boulder.

Most of it is complete filler. What the weather was like, who he was exploring with, even the different places he found them–nothing gives me anything to work with for what the quest’s going to be. When he shifts to talking with his geologist friend I listen a little closer, but soon enough, it becomes obvious Clutter doesn’t really know anything yet. Though I did learn his friend’s name is Dizzy–which is adorable–and that he’s a Paindne that’s a foot taller than Clutter is and built like a brick shithouse.

Honestly, that makes it even more adorable. And finally, after what feels like half an hour of silently listening, Clutter gets to the important part–how he found the big boulder. The first half of the story is pretty meaningless, since it’s just lead up, but with one sentence he captures my full attention.

“So anyway, after I almost got assassinated, I found the big rock on top of Stargazer Plateau.” He says casually, as if it was less important than his very detailed lunch he just told me about. “There’s a pretty big reservoir in there that collects rainwater, and a bunch of us Paindne like to go there to watch the stars and swim. I dove to the bottom and rummaged around looking for cool rocks, and would you know it, there was a little wiggling strand of plastic sticking out of the bottom!”

I raise both my eyebrows in surprise. Half at the fact that one of the assassination attempts was right before he found the plastic, and half at the fact that he found it when he wasn’t even specifically searching for it. I want to open my mouth and ask why the hell he didn’t mention that in any of his messages, but honestly, that could just derail him. Might as well listen to everything and take it in as Clutter sees.

“Then a bunch of us dove down to the bottom and tried yanking the thing out. But instead of coming free, it just got longer and longer and longer! Dizzy–I told you about Dizzy already, right? Well, Dizzy held onto it and got out of the water, tied it around a big rock, and then used his magic on it. We all expected a big wad of the stuff to come out, but instead, it ripped a giant boulder straight out of the reservoir with a huge SPLOOSH!”

He throws his hands up while making a ‘thbbpt’ noise with his mouth to try and capture just how big the ‘sploosh’ was. It gets across, and not just because I have to wipe Paindne slobber off my left shoulder and part of my neck and face. He doesn’t notice and goes right back to his story.

“Anyway, Dizzy and I agreed that we should leave it there just in case it’s important to the quest. We cracked it open and found a bunch of the stuff, all of it half gooey but solid enough to… um… be solid. I showed you one of the big chunks we took away, but there’s a lot more still in the boulder.”

Pearl coughs in disbelief as if she’d been caught mid-sip of water. I feel my own eyes widen as well, but I should keep quiet to protect Clutter. Even if he just did something incrediblyl stupid. With the stuff I kind of hired him to be on the lookout for.

…Yeah, nope, not staying quiet for this one. “You left the damn open boulder on the mountain?”

Clutter winces. “Yes?”

“And that’s not a problem? Even after you were almost assassinated minutes before you found it?” I hiss as quietly as possible. “How can’t you see the issue here?”

“Well, we left behind something to defend it. But… well… okay, I probably should’ve made the connection between the assassination attempt and us finding the rock. It's still there, though! Or else Dizzy would’ve messaged me!”

I grumble in dissatisfaction, but decide to hold my tongue. Dizzy obviously has a piece of the rock to study. Even if the rest of it is gone, we’ve still got enough to go on. Clutter fidgets nervously as I glare daggers at him, and for the rest of the walk, he’s silent except for a few half-hearted excuses that it doesn’t even sound like he believes.

“We’re… um… here.” He says as the path flashes under my feet, then shifts and twists into a perfect circle. The center disappears in a flash, and below, I see perfectly clear water. “It’s a little wet, so–”

I hold up a hand to stop him and walk up to the exit. A shield coin makes me a platform to walk down on, and once I’m out of whatever Clutter’s magic was, I look up to make sure he’s following. There’s just a… hole in the sky above the reservoir with shimmering strands of magic trailing way off into the distance that’re so subtle I would’ve overlooked them without my awareness.

“What’re you waiting for?” I ask as Clutter carefully puts his foot onto my shield. “We’ve got work to do.”

He gingerly steps down, eyes darting about, and scurries to stand with me at the edge of the reservoir. A sigh of relief escapes his lips as both his spell and my shield disappear, then he turns to gesture at a… holy shit, that’s a huge boulder. A huge boulder that’s made of perfectly hexagonal facets, one of which has been removed to reveal a mass of multicoloured plastics inside.

“Here it is.” Clutter says proudly. “Eighteen feet tall, eighteen feet wide, and it’s a perfect one-foot thick layer of rock around a core of that plastic stuff. If this can’t lead us to the quest, nothing will.”

I look the boulder up and down with a strange mixture of awe and discomfort. “It better. We’ve barely got any time to spare.”