Gristrift

Rift

Note that Rose is one of my favorite characters and there is a reason others don't yet like her.

He only fell three feet, but he still managed land in a tangled pile of limbs. The gristrift on the other side ripped through a rock wall with an inclined plane of rock gently sloping off of it. The other clones walked ahead of him out into the wilderness. A tiny, bald humanoid with black scales, sharp claws and teeth, and no toes scuttled away as John scanned the area for Dave.

"That's an imp. Ignore them and they'll ignore you."

John spun around to find a hazmat suit sitting cross-legged behind him. Peering through the headpiece, he could make out Dave's features. "Whoa, you startled me. Where are we headed? I want to kill a monster."

"Before anything else happens, we need to head out to the weapons stash. Without a sword or a gun or whatever, you're dead out here. We keep them here so we don't have to lug them up and down the stairs. You'll probably get yours tomorrow during training. I suppose she doesn't want you to kill a monster yet, and if there's one thing worth doing in life, it's defying her shitty expectations. Everybody gets a gun but you can find more stuff out here if you know where to look. Like some of the stronger monsters have weapons and sometimes you can trade for them in the carapacian cities."

They headed to the right of the gristrift. "Do you know how this place came about?" asked John.

"Not quite, but aliens are the current strongest contender."

John rolled his eyes. At the horizon, he thought he saw the sun of this strange world. Clouds floated behind it, though, which made it clear that this was a planetbound light glowing with a sunlike intensity. He thought he could make out the shape of a worm stretching to its side. "What's that?" he asked.

"One of the denizens. Jade gives them weird names and I think this one's Yaldabaoth. You don't normally see them because there aren't that many, but they're the biggest monsters out there. Definitely avoid them. Vriska saw that as a challenge and now she's missing an arm and an eye."

They arrived at a small cave in the mountain that contained the gristrift. Swords reflected the deep reds of the environment. More of the pink turtle creatures rushed out of the cave as they entered.

"This," said Dave, "is the greatest weapon ever. It's like the Batman of swords, since we all know that Batman could beat anybody with enough prep time. Sorry, Supes, but when you get reduced to a quivering Parkinson's baby at the sight of a rock that literally made up your entire home planet, you're shit at being super." He grabbed a sword with a giant hilt and a blade that seemed to be broken. "I stole it from Hephaestus's hoard. Had to break it in half because it's like the heaviest thing ever. But it'll slice through a boulder like a housewife's knife through a cheating husband's balls. All the others are shit but you need a weapon so take one."

"Okay. How do we find a monster to kill?" John picked up a small sword with a curved edge and sliced it around like Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, skilled and sassy scourge of the seven seas.

"You track them. They leave trails of - oh." A long pause followed.

"Oh?" asked John. "What does that mean? What do they leave trails of?"

"Oil."

"Oh."

"Yeah, but I mean, it still makes more sense for it to be Horuss or Equius who did the stair thing because first of all, a monster can't escape through the rift without a suit any more than we can. It would die from the air. Carapacians are like machines I think, so they don't breathe, so they can survive on both sides, but monsters can only live in here. And only monsters leave oil. There would have needed to be hundreds of them to leave that much oil and did you see anything roaming around all weird? Because I sure as hell didn't."