I blink repeatedly, reach up to rub my eyes, and take a deep breath. This is the second example of the plastic stuff acting like it’s alive in one day. Some extremely important piece of the puzzle has to be staring me directly in the face, but I’m too damn blind to see it.

“Can you feel a core in that thing, Pearl?”

She furrows her brow in concentration. “I can sort of feel… something. It’s nothing like how the thing at the graveyard felt, though–this is so much closer to actually being alive. But it’s really bad at being alive, so it’s going through its life cycle super quickly.”

“It’s life cycle?” I stare up at the thing as it solidifies. “Did we just witness the one before this give birth, die, and wither away in five seconds?”

Pearl nods. “That’s my leading theory with how it’s magic feels, at least.”

I try to think of something to say about that, but my words fail me. The thing, right before my eyes, is effectively growing up. In however many minutes, hours, or even days, it’ll pop out another blob of plastic and start the cycle anew. But… is it actually making more plastic? Or is it just constantly recycling the same stuff?

“We need to get closer to it. Which means we need Clutter to get the hell back here. Keep your eyes on the monster.” I tell Pearl as I turn to face Clutter, who is still somehow not done with the farmers. “CLUTTER! GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE!”

He stands bolt upright and snaps off a salute, then freezes in place. I frown at him when he stops moving, but then he starts to shake as his neck cranes skyward.

“He never looked up and saw the monsters.” I whisper to myself in disbelief. “How can he be this ignorant?”

One by one, the farmers and their families all turn to look at what has Clutter tongue-tied. Gasps and screams echo out one by one, and I hear more than a few calls for someone to contact a horizonguard. Meaning we don’t have much time to do this–especially since they’re getting this freaked out over one single monster. If I stand up just a little more, I’d trigger more than a few heart attacks.

“CLUTTER!” I yell once more.

He finches, tears his eyes away from the monster, and focuses on me. I fully expect to see reluctance or fear, just like at the graveyard, but all I can see is glittering excitement. Which puts his shaking into a brand new light. With a wide smile he sprints away from the group, which now have bigger things to care about, and disappears into the stalks. Rustling gets closer and closer as he approaches, and soon enough, his excitement runs smack into the rock I’m standing on.

“It’s real?! I thought it was just a story!” He says as he scrambles onto the rock. “Okay, I’m here now! What do you need me to–yipe!”

Before he can stand tall, I yank his arm to force him to my eye level. He stares at me with confusion, but shifts into a seated position with bouncing energy anyway.

“Don’t stand up–we’re insanely lucky none of you decided to look up for about a minute.” I half-explain, then grimace at the idea of Clutter getting too curious for his own good. “Actually, here’s the real reason–at this eyelevel, we can see the thing the kid reported. If you stand any taller, you get monstrously huge things towering in the skies and walking over the land like they don’t exist. You can come check that later, but for now, we need to do this.”

“Okay. I’ll come back later.” He says as he bobs his entire upper half. “What do you need me to do right now? Just stare at the monster for a little bit so it doesn’t disappear?”

I wasn’t expecting him to get it perfectly right on the first go. “...Yeah, exactly that. Keep staring at it until I get close enough, and once I actually touch it, you should be good to move. If a horizonguard shows up, run like hell if they don’t come as a bunch of ribbons and a light breeze.”

Clutter briefly looks at me like I have two heads, but his unbridled enthusiasm overrides it in a second. He stares up at the monster, completely enraptured. A stark difference from the graveyard, that’s for sure.

“That tree really did a number on you, didn’t it?”

A shudder cuts through the excited shaking, and Clutter closes his mouth tight. “Yes. It did. Can we leave it at that?”

I nod and shift to the edge of the boulder. “Consider it dropped. Can I trust you to keep an eye on the monster?”

“You definitely can. This time.” His smile fades, and for a brief second, the self-pitying Clutter returns. “I won’t screw up. Again. Um… again-again. Sorry for how useless I was at the graveyard.”

“Apology accepted.” I slide off the boulder, and in my awareness, I feel how long it takes Clutter to go back to being enthusiastic. He must’ve felt how his apology was the only thing I accepted from that situation–nothing more.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Pearl quietly sighs and shakes her head. “He’s a good person, and I want us to be able to trust him, but he’s just… not consistent at all. If we’re in a cave, and he gets a little distracted, we could be five tunnels down by the time he realizes.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” I quietly agree. “We just have to hope the quest doesn’t force us into groups.”

“Because we don’t have the right to completely exclude him. Heck, he did most of the work before this–he has more justification than we do.” Pearl glances back at Clutter. “That’s if we even find the quest in the first place. The only real clue we have is ‘Marywell Den’ and the bauble.”

I brush aside a tall stalk and step into the farm once more. Pearl goes quiet as we both focus our collective awareness on the monster, which is still pretty damn far away. I stare up through the stalks to try and get a better look at it, but it’s not a good angle. So I walk, shoving aside stalk after stalk and feeling my awareness latch onto the thing little by little. As it does, sensations come with it.

Instantly, I see what Pearl meant. The thing feels like a living creature inside all that plastic, with organs and muscles and bones, but they’re all… wrong. For one, I can feel the individual organs, muscles, and bones–something I definitely can’t do for any other living thing. Maybe I’ll feel a muscle tensing close to the surface, or a bone breaking, but definitely not the almost anatomical diagram I can sense with my awareness alone.

Each of the legs has exactly one bone–an extremely long spinal-cord like thing that’s all fused together to make said single bone. It breaks whenever the thing’s legs bend, and fuses the moment it goes straight in what has to be the least efficient display of natural design I’ve ever seen. And it doesn’t get better from there–the leg muscle wraps around it like an elastic band taped to either side of the bone, and it must be what helps crack the bone. Then you get up to the body, which is just a mass of organs inside of a bunch of ribs held together with muscle fiber.

It’s like what you’d get if… uh… honestly, I’ve got nothing. This thing shouldn’t be alive–the heart has no veins connecting it to anything, the brain is just bumping up against the stomach, and the intestines are… just trailing down the left leg like a tail on the inside.

“What the actual hell.” I murmur in disgusted disbelief as I finally catch up to the thing. “Are the big ones’ biology this messed up too?”

Pearl shakes her head, seemingly just as disgusted and confused as I am. “They’re closer to me than a creature with organs. This is just… it’s just… it’s like someone tried to make the worst anatomy possible for the… those creatures.”

“Someone, huh. You think the system did this?”

“Directly? No. But something created the plastic for the quest, and the system created whatever created that thing. So technically, it is at fault.” A smile plays onto her lips. “The system isn’t as hands-on for everything as it is for me, you, Illumisia, and the other Worths.”

“Then literally everything else has it good.” I mutter and walk right up to one of the thing’s legs, trying to ignore the horrible cracking of breaking bones being walked on. “The thing’s brain isn’t connected to anything, so it probably can’t even feel pain. Killing it would be putting it out of its misery.”

“Be careful.” Pearl warns as I take out a coin. “It’s still technically being seen into existence.”

“Yeah, but once I do this,” I wrap my hand around the thing’s leg and shudder in disgust as my fingers sink into it. The thing has the texture of rotting flesh. Whatever I was about to say dies on my tongue as I whip a projectile straight at its other ‘knee’. “Just… it needs to die.”

Pearl nods in agreement. My projectile pierces the thing’s knee straight through, and it instantly tilts to the side before coming crashing down. I step to the side, hand still holding the leg, and wait for the wet squelch of it hitting the ground. Instead, I get a dull thump that barely displaces some stalks.

“Alright, that should do it CLUTTER! YOU CAN COME–”

The leg twitches, and I throw up a shield before it can hit me straight in the side. A web of thick cracks spreads from the point of impact, then the ‘foot’ pushes off, shattering it into a spray of magical shards. I grunt as my grip pulls me along for the ride, forced to follow the far-too-long motion of one of the creature’s long strides–except it’s going nowhere.

“SHELBY! ARE YOU OKAY?” Clutter yells from off in the distance. “I’M COMING OVER THERE RIGHT NOW!”

I groan and shake my head, then look around. A crescent of stalks sheared right down to little nubs on the ground is all that’s left in the wake of the thing’s leg. That easily could’ve been me if I didn’t have my awareness. And it could easily be Clutter if he bursts through here unaware of the danger.

“STAY BACK, CLUTTER!” I call into the rustling stalks, and the sounds die instantly. “The thing’s dangerous, so make a huge detour and meet me near the main body.”

“Okay! Thanks for the warning!” He replies, his voice already moving in a safe direction.

I sigh in relief and turn to the leg. Staying here is pointlessly dangerous, and I have to get close to the main body anyway. Carefully, and making sure I keep my hand glued to the leg, I start to trail up to the main body. Gunk sloughs off the monster like rotting dough, revealing the ‘bone’ underneath that looks exactly like my awareness said it would. I shudder and push the sensations out of my mind as I work my way up to the main body with Clutter rustling in the stalks a good thirty feet from danger.

He pops out just as the main body comes into view. “I’m here! Oh, whoah, that’s gross. It looks like something died and you squished it into a big ball after everything started to decay.”

“Thank you for the vivid image, Clutter.” I shake my head and wait for the half-leg to make a sweep, then step in close to the fifteen-foot wide sphere of disgusting material. “At least it doesn’t smell. You want to do the honours of digging for the prize this time?”

A hopeful, yet cautious look overtakes Clutter. “Can I really?”

I’d intended that to be sarcastic. I’d also expected him to decline. But hey, if he wants to dig around in the plastic equivalent of rotting flesh for whatever passes for a clue, then he can be my guest.

“You’ve earned it, buddy.” I say with a smile and make room for him.