Images of rocks flashing into existence and crushing the hell out of us flash into my mind. I jump backwards as far as I can, and my feet blissfully touch down on the semi-hard soil that houses the insanely tall stalks around us.

Clutter tilts his head to the side in confusion. “Why’d you do that?”

“I… you… because of the damn falling rocks!” I gesture at the sign for emphasis. “What happens if one appears out of nowhere? We’d be pancakes!”

“Oh. I didn’t even think of that.” Clutter mumbles to himself, then looks up at the sign. “Well, these aren’t a danger right now, so I don’t think they’d crush us. Not unless someone did exactly what the boy from my info did. Which… is completely possible.”

A shudder works its way down his entire body as he realizes just how close we came to a pointless end. He takes more than a few steps away from the carpet of crushed grains for good measure, then carefully works through the stalks so he stands at what seems like a random place.

I wait for him to offer an explanation, but he just quietly gets to work. My annoyance at being kept out of the loop goes away after a good thirty seconds, and after almost five minutes of silence, Pearl starts grumbling to herself. That’s my sign to move before my brain gets filled with obscenities from the most adorable voice I’ve ever heard.

“What’re you looking for now, Clutter?” I make my way to his side, careful not to step onto the carpet. “How do we make these rocks… appear? Exist? What’s the right word for it?”

Clutter gently brushes his fingers against the dirt and frowns. “‘Exist’ is closer to the truth. These rocks are always here, just in a magical place like my spell we just walked through. If we want to see them, we have to find the exact right place that’ll let us see them.”

“Must be hard to find if someone planted stuff under where the rocks appear.” I note as I look around. “Nobody’d be stupid enough to make a farm in an interdimensional rockslide.”

“Hmm. You’re right.” Clutter stands up and brushes off his pants. “If someone could make the rocks exist from here, they never would’ve planted anything right here. But there’s enough that it looks like the rocks crushed mature plants–which means it hadn’t been triggered in a long time. So we need to look for somewhere we can see this exact spot that only a young boy would think to go…”

His tail swishes behind him, smacking the stalks like a pair of thunking windchimes as his body quivers with curious energy. It’s a stark contrast to the cowering at the graveyard, that’s for sure. And it only lessens my confidence in bringing him along–he needs to be constant. If I can’t account for his actions, he’ll just be a hindrance.

“Up there!”

Clutter juts a finger off into the distance, pulling my attention back to him. I follow his motion with my eyes to its destination, but it doesn’t fill me with anything close to what I assume he feels.

“A water tower. You really think people don’t go up there at least semi-regularly?” I shoot him a quizzical look. “I bet people go up there at least twice a week for various reasons.”

“The water tower, yes, but not… just… look! Look harder!” He insists with pleading eyes.

I sigh and humor him. The water tower’s not as tall as the ones I’m used to back on Earth–this one’s about as tall as a barn–and it has obvious spiraling wooden stairs leading up to it. There’s so much graffiti at the very bottom of the tower that you wouldn’t know it’s steel grey if you looked at it from a certain angle, and I can make out more than a few emergency welds. There must be a… homestead or something below it, but I can’t make it out over the stalks.

“Can’t see anything weird, Clutter. Illuminate.”

He points even harder, like that was the problem. “All the way up there at the top! Can’t you see it?”

The top? I frown and narrow my eyes, the sharpness of which I’m still not quite used to. The graffiti only reaches about halfway up, but from there, it’s completely steel grey. Except for one small thing–a scribble that looks a hell of a lot like a stain. But Clutter seems convinced, so I focus as hard as I can to try and see something in it.

“It looks like a…” I trail off and shoot him a glance. “A name?”

He excitedly nods. “Yes! A name! Bustle–the name of the boy that reported the monster! He was up there!”

“Bustle? Is he a Paindne too?”

“Yes!”

“Alright. So, what happens now?” I wait for an answer, but get only silence. “Clutter?”

The sounds of footsteps and whipping stalks answers me. I breathe out through my nose and shake my head as a small frown breaches my lips–he’s only solidifying my resolve not to let him come. It’d be like taking a golden retriever on a bird watching trip–you know something’s going to go wrong, but you just don’t know when. I take another few steps into the stalks just in case and wait for whatever’s going to happen.

I barely have time to tap my foot before a wall of rock blinks into existence. Surprise barely has time to register as I reach forward and touch the rock, my fingers brushing lightly against it as if it weren’t real. But it feels just like a rock. Normal, boring, and definitely not phasing in and out of reality.

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“It worked!” Clutter yells down from above. “I knew it would work! Don’t look away from the rock–it might disappear if you do. Oh, um… no, I’m not trespassing… it’s for a quest…”

As the sounds of angry farmers overtake Clutter’s voice, I chuckle to myself and really take in the boulder. My initial thought is that it’s like the one Clutter already showed me–full of a bunch of plastic. But the rock looks… normal. Not the weird hexagonal faces from the other one. I knock my knuckles against it, as if that would do anything, then cross my arms.

“Weird. Pearl, is this… normal?”

She raises an eyebrow. “The rock?”

I nod. “Yeah. Is things phasing in and out of existence based on how you look at them a regular occurrence?”

“Not that I know of. It’s probably something the system did.” She stares at the boulder with narrowed eyes. I’ll keep an eye on it while you do whatever you want to do. That should stop it from disappearing.”

Well, I don’t really know what I can do with it, so… yeah. I drum my fingers against my arm and take in the rock one more time–all that’s left is to climb it or break it. And there’s only one order that’s smart to do it in. Walking around the rock to find the best footholds takes a few seconds, and actually climbing it is even easier.

As I pull myself onto the not-at-all flat top, I look out over the grains–but just barely. The rock’s only about three quarters as tall as the stalks, making it much wider than it is tall, and adding my own height to it just barely lets me get a good look. Now that I can see further I get a better view of the water tower–which is about twenty feet taller than I initially thought. And… there’s Clutter, tail tucked between his legs, apologizing to a dozen people of various species.

“If he can get up there so quickly, he can run away just as fast.” I note with mild disapproval. “Either get in and get out before they see you or actually get their permission–don’t get caught and apologize profusely. We’re on a time limit here.”

Pearl shrugs. “He got caught, and there’s nothing we can do about that. Should we wait for him or try to replicate whatever that kid saw?”

“No idea how we’d do that, but sure.” I turn away from clutter and my breath catches in my throat.

It isn’t just one of them. Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe even thousands of them stride through the fields, their massive gangly legs leaving nothing behind where they touch down. The bottoms of their legs–which are just long poles without feet–touch down on the tip of the stalks like solid ground, the grains not even bending under their massive size. I swallow as I look up at the closest one, it’s body straining against the clouds above, and words fail me.

Not because my vocabulary sucks, but because it’s just… not. It’s shapes. It’s colours. It has a texture. But my brain can’t make out something physical for me to latch onto. I’d be making shit up, and these things don’t deserve to have false rumors spread about them. I watch in stunned awe for what feels like minutes as they follow one another like a river of living things, more taking their place on the horizon as others disappear into the distance.

“They’re beautiful.” Pearl whispers with awe. “I thought all the ___________ were ________. But they’re just… here.”

I wince at the system’s censorship. “Censorship, Pearl. You knew these things?”

She nods without taking her eyes off the things. “They were… um… there when I was. I think saying anything else would trigger the censorship. But they definitely were completely real, not this… half-real existence we’re looking at.”

“Amazing. So the system didn’t just murder or jail the things it didn’t like–it can banish them too.” I grimace and look down at the rock, which didn’t disappear when we looked away. Maybe us being on top of it is just as good as looking. “Why would my skill say this is better for the quest than the river? There was actual plastic in the river, but these things just look like… like…”

“Nothing.” Pearl offers.

I nod without thinking. “Yeah. They don’t look like anything–certainly not magical plastic. But my skill led us here, so there’s got to be some kind of a lead to the quest. Maybe we do need to destroy the boulder.”

“That’s not a great idea. If we do that, I think we lose access to… this.” Pearl gestures at the scene in front of us. “Whatever this quest is, those __–I mean, things, are much more important. They’re… kind of… um… I don’t think I can explain it right. But they’re really important.”

That’s news to me. “Tell me this–if we managed to get these things back to full-time reality, what would happen?”

“Magic.” Pearl says without hesitation. “Raw, untamed, __________ magic. We can’t lose this view, Shelby. I don’t know how we can do anything about this, but we can’t lose it.”

“Alright, no destroying the rock. There’s a chance that screws us out of the quest, but I’m not completely convinced.” I look over my shoulder at Clutter, who hasn’t managed to break away from the crowd. “Why’d he think this was a lead, anyway? Everything else seemed way closer to the plastic than this does.”

Pearl nods along. “Maybe the kid described the monster like it was made of plastic? But… didn’t he say the kid only saw one of them? I don't think this is the kind of thing that gets left out by accident.”

“Good call. Looks like we need to find the kid. Or wait for Clutter to find him.”

I shift to sit cross-legged on the rock. My eye level dips as I go down, and the world shifts with it. All the monsters disappear like smoke in the wind, and as I settle into a seated position, something new takes their place. A much smaller version of one of the monsters, walking through the field on spindly legs, taking care not to step on the stalks–not ignoring them completely like the huge ones.

“That much of a shift changed everything?” I mutter to myself. “That’s… that should be impossible. How’d Clutter get the rock to appear if it’s that finicky?”

“Sorry, I don’t have anything close to an answer this time.”

I pat Pearl’s shell reassuringly. “Now you know how I always feel. Maybe this one’s–”

A wet splat rips my attention back to the monster. I catch the tail end of something falling from the main body, colourful and pristine, as the main body starts to crumble to dust. No words form on my tongue as the monster falls, its body dissipating before it can hit the ground, and another rises from the stalks. But before it stands tall, the colours in its body muddle together to form the uniform strangeness that all the monsters look like.

For a few seconds, though, it looked like the entire new monster was made of malleable plastic.