The door to the plastic paindne opens with a dull, thrumming magic. Plastic spins into the construct’s shape the moment my awareness seeps through, and it turns to us with an absolutely emotionless visage.

  “Hello again. Is there anything–”

  “Bye.” Clutter waves as he jogs through the room and into the halls. “I hate you!”

  I chuckle and shake my head, then give the construct a salute as I, too, run past it. The thing follows me with its eyes, nothing at all showing on its face or in its body language, and as I walk through the threshold of room to tunnel it unravels into plastic threads. Looks like it doesn’t have the ability to feel anything.

  “So what’re we looking for now?” Clutter looks over his shoulder at me as I approach. “Just another one of those panel-things?”

  “As far as I know, yeah.” I nod. “Until the quest tells us otherwise, we’re just flying blind. Feels wrong on so many levels, though.”

  Pearl grabs onto my collar as we speed up. “Something tells me we’re still waiting for the real stuff to go down. Like with those paindne… things from before. Things are progressing, but not to the point that the quest feels like it has to give out a new objective.”

  “Most quests don’t ‘feel’ like they have to do anything.” Clutter grumbles. “Why’d we have to find the only one with an actual, living administrator?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “How many quests have you done?”

  He slightly tilts his head to the side, then murmurs as he ticks off quests on his fingers. It doesn’t slow him down even a little.

  “Um… I’ve actually done two big quests like this, but neither teleported me anywhere.” He folds down two fingers, leaving up six. “The other six were small things; like the tree asking us to destroy the plastic pile. Those are way more common than the big ones.”

  Hm. That’s… both more and less than I thought he’d done. But he’s still pretty low clearance, especially if he’s been doing this for years, so they must not’ve been worth all that much. Not like the quest that almost killed me down in those tunnels gave me much of anything for my troubles.

  “Shit, speaking of.” I click my tongue and raise a coin. “I’m starting to run close-ish to low on Worth. Can’t remember if I already told you that.”

  Clutter’s eyebrows shoot to his forehead. “Oh, no! How much do you have left? A thousand?”

  I snort and shake my head. “Hundreds. And if all we’re going to get is a few hundred-Worth infusions during this quest, I’ll have to be really miserly with what I’ve got left.”

  “Which means that I…” Clutter pales and gulps. “I’m going to have to start fighting.”

  “Or we avoid fights altogether. Not great for rewards, I know, but… well…” I sigh and shake my head. “Nevermind, that’s probably impossible. Especially if we want to keep improving the tower. So, yeah, you’re going to be on simple fight duty, and I’m going to save as much Worth as I can.”

  “I… I can’t just give you coins?”

  “Nope. Not how it works.”

  “Dang it.” He whimpers. “I hoped it would.”

  “Hey, if that’s how it worked, I’d just have the other Worth classes load me up with ammo and never have to worry about it again. But that’s not how the system drew it up.” I shrug nonchalantly. “Nothing we can do about it, so we’ve got to try different things. If something pops up that I can completely destroy, then I might be able to make some profit off that, but it has to be worth something in the first place.”

  “Urgh. I’ll start coaching myself, then.” Clutter shudders and balls his fists. “Um, you should be ready to run really hard whenever I fight. Just in case I lose horribly and have to go invisible just to survive.”

  I almost start to say something sarcastic, but the genuine worry and nerves on Clutter’s face stop me before I can say anything. Obviously he’s still got that trauma. Saying anything now could leave him with the wrong idea in so many ways, so I shut my mouth and nod seriously. A little relief muddles the worry, but it doesn’t really change anything.

  Especially not in the face of the unknown.

  We jog. Nothing but the same walls comes out to greet us, and the general vibe of the area doesn't change one bit. I pull out my Class Card a few times to see if there’s still magical leech cannons aimed at us, and sure enough, three little squirming projectiles screech out of nowhere to dissuade me from checking anything.

  It feels like hours pass at both a breakneck pace and the slowest, most excruciating clock-watching anguish I’ve ever felt. My mind’s constantly watching every corner–every shadow–for more of those things that turned into paindne, so I can’t get into a groove and just jog without a care. Neither can Clutter, from how he keeps whipping his head around like he’s trying to catch a glimpse of a stalker with freakishly good reflexes. And Pearl… well she fell asleep a few hours back and is still snoozing away with her goopy body connected to my neck and jacket.

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  “Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.” Clutter mutters in high-strung frustration. “No monsters, no hints, nothing at all! Are we even running down the right level of this place? Should we just… I don’t know… randomly go left, right, up, or down every ten minutes to change things up?”

  “Clutter, I honestly have no idea what we should do.” I admit with a sigh. “Maybe we missed something with the roots under the tower. There could be a… set of directions, or maybe it powered something on that was inactive before. Anything’s more likely than the quest just expecting us to run into a needle in a thousand haystacks.”

  He quickly nods. “More like a thousand needles in infinite haystacks. What about… um… what about our jewelry? Will that do anything if we… do anything with it?”

  “Like what?”

  Clutter stares at me blankly. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. But it’s a fine idea.” I open my Class Card, we both dodge the leeches, and then I swipe over to my map. “Alright, both our markers are here. Let’s see if this does anything.”

  I bring the armlet close to my map, and… nothing. No notifications, beeps, or changes in the map. Something tells me Clutter’s at least a little right–that our pieces of plastic jewelry have to do something–but apparently that isn’t right now.

  I shake my head. “No dice. Any other ideas?”

  “Nope. Do we want to try going down a level, though?”

  Pearl stirs with a cute little groan. “Don’t. The magic is here. Follow it.”

  ‘The magic is here’. The hell does that mean? I haven’t seen much of anything since we started running, and unless something literally pops out of the walls–again, to be fair–I don’t see anything happening.

  “Good second morning.” I say as Pearl sits up. “You all good now?”

  “Eeehhh…” She waggles her hand in a ‘so-so’ motion. “Not perfect, but I’m okay for now. As for the magic–it’s here, it’s all around us, and it hasn’t changed in a while. If you’re going to make a change, take a quick look before you do. Just in case.”

  I take a look up at all the same-y material. “Couldn’t hurt. Clutter?”

  He falls to his knees, skids for a few feet, then slaps his hand on the floor. A door opens up instantly, and he drops through it without so much as an ‘eep’. I jump down a second later, and the door closes closely behind me. Clutter rubs his knees with a hiss of discomfort, but stands without a limp or a wince.

  “Did you mean to do that?” I ask.

  He smiles sheepishly. “I thought it’d look cooler. But it kind of just hurt my knees.”

  “It did look cool though.” Pearl admits. “A little dumb when I started thinking, but still cool.”

  Clutter grins and looks around. It fades as he takes in the same-y halls, except for one little difference–the sensation of warning is completely gone. There is absolutely nothing here.

  “I guess you were super right.” He says to Pearl. “I guess we should just go back?”

  Pearl shakes her head. “Run in safety for a few minutes, then you can go back up. I didn’t feel anything really off with my awareness.”

  “Okay.” Clutter nods and turns to start jogging. “Were you always feeling for stuff? Even when you were asleep?”

  “Yep. Not, like, a whole lot, but definitely enough to feel anything important. That’s what I’ve got Sheby here for.” Pearl smiles proudly and pats my cheek. “There’s no way she’d miss anything important. We can–”

  Tap.

  My heart skips a beat before thundering to full force. I swivel on one foot and whip a projectile-filled coin at the source of the sensation–a lump of magical sensations down the hall. Clutter spins around at the sight of my sudden movement, and before the tap can repeat, all the sensations die out. And the stain just changes into a very undead-looking paindne.

  It lurches forward, the familiar-ish body moving like a sack of slightly hardened pudding with fur stuck to it. I swallow hard as my projectile detonates right above its shoulder, exploding into a whirl large enough to completely consume the hallway with salty destruction. Clutter grimaces as… chunks… of wrong meat and fur and teeth and bones paint the hallway.

  “I still can’t feel it.” He almost longingly whispers to himself, then straightens his back. “Where did that come from?”

  I have no damn clue. “Pearl? …Pearl?”

  Clutter and I turn to look at her–mouth wide open, eyes slightly closed in scrutiny, and one hand gripping my earlobe for stability. She takes a second to realize we’re looking at her, but doesn’t try to play off the expression. Whatever just happened managed to surprise even her.

  “It was… nothing.” She murmurs with visible discomfort. “But then it just transformed into something. That’s not possible. Someone has to be here. Someone has to be making these… things… appear.”

  “Nothing into something? Isn’t that just magic?” Clutter asks.

  Pearl vigorously shakes her head. “No, you don’t get it. Shelby does, but you don’t. Magic… it feels like something. It’s there. But this place–first the doors, then the leeches, and now this–things just appear out of absolutely nothing. Is my awareness really so weak that I can’t feel whatever’s going on?”

  Ah, there it is. She isn’t freaking out about the things themselves–she’s worried that something strong enough to hide from her is doing said things. Can’t blame her at all; the quest doing it is bad enough, but with the horizonguard and the potential shadowy figure I saw on the walls, the number of people who could do that is going up.

  “So… do we go back up?” Clutter motions awkwardly at the ceiling. “Or is this another thing leading us to… another thing?”

  I honestly don’t know if my heart can take an onslaught of the things that can tap without glass. But a glance at Pearl shows she’s really thinking about it, and from the concerned glances she sends back at me, the only thing stopping her is being worried about my well-being.

  “We stay on this level.” I decide, though my heart still thunders with anticipation. “Something has to be waiting for us. And I want to see what the hell it is.”