The City Of Ideals (I)

"Morning." I open my eyes to the same dark sky filled with stars I fell asleep to. Sitting up, I see the person who spoke to me, an entertained look on his face as he holds what looks like two ears of corn. The fuck? Where the hell did he get those from? He seems to sense my question, pointing up to sky where, after a few seconds, something seems to rain down. It looks like bricks. They fall past us and disappear in the endless bottom. "It seems like things from your old town are raining down here. At the very least, I'd say our food problem is solved." Joshua says, throwing me one of the ears. I chuckle at the absurdity of eating sky corn before peeling off the skin and digging into the corn inside. Delicious, especially since I haven't eaten since before I died…the first time…unless I didn't die a second time and ended up here another way. Ugh, too confusing for me.

"Well, no use looking a gift horse in the mouth." I say as I eat, my eyes maneuvering over to the surrounding rooftops. Much like when I looked before, nothing really strikes me as worthwhile. Still, progress has to be made. If all directions seem rather equal, we may as well just pick one. I stand up, corn in hand, and feel like my soul is pulling me north. In fairness, North is just always the answer people feel confident in. I turn to Joshua to give him my idea of heading north, to which he gives no real counter. He really has no idea where to go either. Well, okay, he knows he wants to go wherever the exit to this place is, but he informs me not to be a smartass, so I refrain from making fun of him. Once we're both finished eating, we move to the north facing side of the building and make a confident step over the quite small gap between the two buildings.

We continue on in this direction. As we do, Joshua points out how the stuff that's falling from above is starting to repeat. He seems to believe that it's possible the endless bottom of this place really just comes back to the top. It's an interesting theory, and I'm sure to mentally back-pocket it as we keep going. For larger gaps, we don't take the risk of falling and just have Joshua pull himself over by transforming his arm and flinging it over to something it can hook onto on the opposite building before having me jump with his arm wrapped tight around mine. The process is a bit time consuming, but better than falling. For almost an hour we keep this up, looking for anything to catch our attention, but nothing does. It's all just buildings. I feel my frustration close to boiling over when I notice that there is a gap between the building we're on and the next one. The gap is about the size of a building and looking down we…see…another building, one of its floors completely exposed and its topmost floors completely gone. The separation is far from a clean one, too. It looks more like the building was bitten into then anything.

"Jesus." Joshua mumbles. We share a look of pure astonishment, before deciding to just use the buildings to move around the destroyed building. We move to the west, stepping onto another building when I feel something bizarre nestle against my foot. It's…an urn. Bizarre. I was certain nothing had been there before.

"If god were to step into your home, would you let him stay?"

The rooftop fills with urns after only a single blink. The source of those words is unknown to me. Joshua seems just as caught off guard, his foot accidentally knocking over an urn.

"GAAAHH!" Something stabs up from where the urn had been only a second ago, tearing through Joshua's shoe and foot. He kneels down, soaking in the pain. "FUCK, FUCK!" He grits his teeth as I watch him. Damnit, I can't let any of these things fall over then. What the hell is this? The work of this dimension's god? Huh? Wait…I feel something. Somewhere, the air is stagnating against the rest of the atmosphere. In a panic, I grab onto Joshua and pull him close to me, making sure we both stumble out of the way of any urns. As I do, I pray for us both to be invisible. A shooting pain roars through my head as I watch, behind Joshua, a blood red spear flies through where he just was. I hold my breath, keeping us both still.

"The hell?! Where'd they go?!" A buff looking man seems to pull himself up from the side of the building. Was he hanging there the whole time? No surprise I didn't notice him then.

"You idiot." Theres a sigh behind me. I turn my head to see a skinny man, his arms crossed. "If they're still here, then our surprise is gone." The skinny man clicks his tongue.

"Hell no! They just disappeared! They're definitely gone man. Probably one of them can teleport or some shit." The buff man grumbles with annoyance.

"Well…if they're still here, we just need to find them, right?" The skinny man points to the buff one. "Meathead, walk between the urns and listen out for them. I'll watch from here. Also, don't be a clutz or you're a dead man." The buff man rolls his eyes at the skinny man's words.

"I oughta kill you for being a bossy prick." The buff man grumbles before doing as he's told, leaving the two of us in a rather large pickle, especially with my growing headache. Fuck…what now?