Clutter grins, jumps at the main body, and thrusts a hand straight into the monster with a sticky squelch. I grimace and half look away, but my curiosity forces me to at least partially watch him root around in the monster’s innards. He hums happily to himself as his claws tear through the plasticy outside, scour away patches of plastic, and make a perfect square for him to look into.
“What’s with the precision?” I ask as I lean in to try and get a better look. “Couldn’t you just rip and tear into it?”
His expression turns aghast. “How could I do that? We know absolutely nothing about this thing, it’s biology, or how important it is to the quest. What if I accidentally severed its brainstem, and that killed it, and then we failed the quest? I don’t want to screw up like that–it’s one of the ways I’ve never screwed up before.”
I tilt my head to the side. “Can’t you see… ah, wait, right. Sorry–forgot something important; you’re doing fine work, so just keep at it.”
He raises an eyebrow, but gets right back to it a second later while he slowly looks away from me. For a second there I almost forgot that it was my awareness that let me see the strangeness of the monster’s biology–and that it’s something Clutter still has to discover. Might as well let him think he’s the first one seeing it, since his confidence seems to be running a little low for him.
“Hmm… that’s strange… ick, how do these even connect… oh, they don’t.” Clutter mumbles to himself, deep in thought. “Wait, is this the brain? Why is it so… hard? Shelby, come look at this.”
“What’ve you got for me?” I ask as he shifts to make room for me at the window. As I kneel down next to him, my hand still firmly in the monster, I get a good look into what I’ve already seen. “Wow, it really looks like all this just got thrown in here randomly.”
Clutter nods vigorously. “The organs are all the wrong sizes, they aren’t connected by anything, and they’re all… well… here, just see for yourself.”
He grabs my free hand, pulls it close, and places something hidden in his hand on my palm. It feels like a sphere, but with a slight bulge on one side. I don’t need my awareness to guess that he just put an eyeball in my palm, though it doesn’t feel anywhere close to as slimy as I expected. Honestly, it’s closer to the texture of a piece of lacquered wood.
I open my hand to confirm my suspicions, and sure enough, an eyeball quite literally stares back at me. Except it’s a little wrong–the white is extremely yellow, the iris is blue, and the purple pupil looks like it burst at some point and is now bleeding into both the iris and the white. Can’t even make out what shape it was supposed to be in the first place. But as I stare at it, the bleeding pupil slowly overtakes more and more of the eye, even though it feels like it should be completely solid.
“How’s it doing this?” I shift the eyeball around, and of course, there’s nothing that would connect it to any other organ. “The thing’s as solid as a rock, but there’s movement in it. That’d be like watching a black fleck in marble take over the white parts.”
I turn to hand the eyeball back, and all I see is a vigorously wagging tail and a pair of legs sticking out of the hole in the monster.
“I know, right? Isn’t it cool?” The muffled lower half of Clutter responds. “Everything in here is like that–they’re all kind of frozen in time, but the outside of the monster’s still moving. Almost like the inside died but didn’t think to tell the outside just yet. Do you want to feel the brain? It’s just knocking around in here, and I don’t think the monster even needs it.”
“No, that’s fine. Just yell if you see anything important.”
“Okay!” He pops out, and in both hands, he carries a heart the size of an air conditioner. “Look at how big this is! I bet some gem collector would pay a lot for a heartstone like this!”
I stare blankly at Clutter while he stares expectantly at me. “...Is a heartstone something real? Am I ruining your pun through a language barrier?”
He pouts as he carefully places the heart on the ground. “Yes, you are. I’ll show you what a heartstone is when we get to the jewelry shop. Then you’ll see how funny I am.”
“Sure, buddy. Sure.” I smile as he frowns, then plunges right back into the monster. “Tell me if you see anything that looks… more plasticy than anything else. It’s the entire reason we’re here, after all.”
“I don’t really see anything like that right now, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell you.” He says as he tosses something that looks like a human-sized kidney out of the monster. “Hard organs, mushy skin, muscles that are like rubber bands under a lot of tension, and bones that bend way too easily yet still…”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
He trails off, then yelps as a loud snap fills the air.
“Snap like they’re super hard.” He finishes like nothing happened. “Nothing in this monster is like it should be, and I don’t even know if it needs a single one of these things to live. I mean, I just took its heart out a second ago, and it’s still kicking!”
The other half of Clutter exits the monster, carrying with him two armfuls of organs, muscles, and sloughed off plastic skin. He lets it all drop to the ground with far less care than he gave the heart, and then he stares at the monster to see its reaction. When it continues like nothing even happened, he crosses his arms and huffs.
“Purely magical creatures, like elementals, don’t have organs at all. They just have a core that sort of works like them, and if they look like they have other organs, it’s either to deceive you or a personal style choice. But this thing…” He kicks something that looks like half a bone and frowns. “There’s no core in there, and it doesn’t seem to need any of its organs. The only thing I can think of is that it’s some kind of raised corpse, but there’s not enough magic here for that.”
The mention of a raised corpse catches my attention. “You mean like necromancy?”
Clutter hums and raises his chin. “Not… quite. Necromancy is more… um… I don’t really know how to explain it, but it has to do with spirits and stuff, not just the dead body. You’d have to find a necromancer for that, and they’re way too popular to be hanging around here.”
“Popular? Necromancers?” I shake my head in disbelief. “I would've thought everyone hated them.”
“Really?” Clutter raises an eyebrow. “Do humans not want to talk to their dead family, or pull people’s spirits from their bodies so they can have super-intense life saving surgeries?”
I shake my head. “Guess we just have vastly different ideas of what a necromancer does.”
Clutter nods. “Probably. Dizzy’s good friends with one–I’ll ask him to introduce you in a few months when they aren’t so busy. But we got sidetracked; do any of these organs give you any ideas? Because they don’t give me any ideas.”
A glance down at the organs tells me nothing my awareness didn’t a few minutes ago. But there’s still the fact that my skill told me to be here. So there has to be something inside of the monster that we’re missing.
…Or it was supposed to lead us somewhere, and we just crippled it. Well, let’s just hope that isn’t the truth.
“Keep looking. There’s bound to be something important in there.”
A quick salute, and Clutter dives right back in. Fully and completely. He disappears into the monster with a small whine of disgust, and then hollow footsteps ring out as he rises to his feet in there. A thud and a yelp join in as the top bulges ever so slightly, and I can imagine that Clutter just hit his head on one of the strange ribs.
“Be careful in there. We don’t know how it’ll react.” I lean down even further and peer into the monster’s not-quite-corpse. “See anything that looks like it could be important there?”
“Nope, nothing. Just more weirdness.” Clutter shuffles around, his back bent slightly and awkwardly as he tries to get a look around. “More bones, more organs, more everything. Whatever this thing is, I don’t know how it’s related to the plastic.”
I… wait, didn’t I tell him about how the thing started off as plastic? …Nope, I didn’t. Well, that’s an oversight on my end.
I smack the monster with my free hand. “All this is made from the plastic, Clutter. I watched one of these things crumble to dust, and it looked like it birthed a hunk of plastic as it died.”
He frowns and turns to me. “And that plastic turned into this one?”
“Sure did.”
“Well that… does absolutely nothing to help.” Clutter taps his tail against the ground as he gathers up organs in his arms. “Even if this is some new kind of clue, it’ll take days to get it analyzed. Maybe you should try touching that thing you got from the… that place to an organ. It could trigger a reaction. Or not.”
I shrug and carefully take the ‘Marywell Den’ wreathe and sphere out of its protective bauble. “It’s worth a shot.”
Bauble in hand, I lean down and press it against the heart. Absolutely nothing happens. No magic, no sensations, no hints. I frown and move it around, just in case it’s the placement that’s the problem, but no dice. It just doesn’t do anything.
“Alright, so that was a dud.” I reform the shields around the bauble, then look back into the monster. “Got any other ideas?”’
Clutter hums to himself in thought. “Maybe… no, that’s not it. What about… no, no, that wouldn’t work either. We could grab some… no, they’re made to order and wouldn’t be ready for a week. Hmm.”
While he thinks, I take the time to really look around inside the monster. We don’t know if the one before this one was the exact same one the kid saw, or if that one gave birth to this one a while ago. There’s also the fact that, for some reason, the monster is still here. The other procession of unbelievably huge things were walking somewhere, but this one is almost exactly where it was seen before. So… why?
I purse my lips and close my fist around a bunch of not-quite-fleshy, not-quite-rotting plastic as I realize something; there’s one more group of questions that I haven’t even bothered to ask yet. Questions that I probably should’ve started this entire thing off with.
Why the hell did the plastic take the shape of those other monsters? How does it mimic things in the first place? And why did it do it so badly?