"So, Romi, how was your trip to Tyrannia?" Anya called as she caught sight of her friend. After carefully stepping over a pile of pulled weeds, the Uni unlatched the back gate and let herself in.

"It was great! You ought to take your next vacation there," Romi's muffled voice came in reply. The Kacheek's back was turned, as he was stooping over a flower patch in the corner. "The omelettes there are delicious and free. The miniature golf was relaxing. And the vegetation! What strange plants they had there!"

Anya smiled. Her friend was an enthusiastic gardener, and plant life always interested him, no matter the location. "Oh, really? Like what?" the Uni said as she walked over to the Kacheek.

"Like this!" Romi declared, pointing with a flourish to a prickly-looking green plant. "They call it a cactus! These incredible plants are somehow able to grow in that arid landscape with barely a drop of water to help them thrive in the blazing sun. It’s amazing! Mystery Island doesn’t have any plants like this, so who better than me to introduce these new, wondrous cacti over here?" He patted the dirt from his hands, obviously very satisfied with himself.

Anya, however, was not nearly as enthusiastic. Instead, she stared at the plant, a frown creased in her brow. "Romi..." she began slowly. "These plants are used to living on the bare minimum, right?"

"Yes, that's why they're so amazing! With just a drop of water, the cactus can grow up to-"

"Romi!" the Uni interrupted urgently. "How fast would they multiply then if they were introduced to the extremely fertile ground of Mystery Island?"

"Well, I suppose they would grow a little faster. That's why my experiment-"

"No, Romi!" the Uni cried, stamping her hoof agitatedly. "It would actually grow visibly faster! Why, during our conversation, that plant has already spread across your backyard and over the fence!..."

After a minute or so had gone by, Romi said rather faintly, "I...I think I have a bottle of weedkiller or two in the back of the shed..." Anya said nothing at all, but merely lifted a forehoof to her mouth and bit down. Hard. To her great disappointment, she did not wake up.

"Now you've gone and done it," a voice muttered crossly somewhere to their left. "Here I am, just back from averting the Meridell search for Jelly World, and I'm welcomed with some idiot's attempt to make myth into memory. No respect, I tell you. None at all."

As though on some unspoken signal, Anya and Romi turned in unison to face this new addition to the lunacy. There didn't seem to be anything better to do.

The speaker was purple. It was very, very purple. It was so awe-inspiringly purple that upon seeing it, all thoughts immediately fled screaming from your mind but the idea of how incredibly, mind-blowingly purple it seemed to be. For some reason, Anya's mind jumped suddenly to the bushel of vineyard grapes she'd been given as a present for her first birthday by the vineyard's one-eyed one-legged flying purple Pteri groundskeeper. It was that purple.

If the creature had to be compared to a Neopet, she supposed a Gelert would have come closest. At any rate, the creature seemed to have four legs and two ears, or else six legs and no ears. In place of a tail, it seemed to have a rather clumsily reattached Jetsam's tail on the purple creature's backside. It gazed at them from far within its head with eyes like echoes resounding in shadowy caverns, the effect of which was to try quite hard yet just fail to be frightening. As the icing on the cake, the creature was wearing a straw hat.

Anya moved her lips experimentally, and found that every bit of moisture seemed to have evaporated from her mouth and made a frantic bid for the decidedly not-purple sky above. Shuffling her feet nervously, the Uni swallowed several times, and then attempted to speak once more. With a considerable amount of will power, she managed to bleat, "...We've done what?" From beside Anya, Romi gave a soft whimper. The Kacheek seemed to be trying, and failing miserably, to sink into the planting soil below his feet.

The purple beast huffed irritably. "You broke it."

"B... broke... broke what?" Romi stuttered.

The creature gave them a look that indicated it thought they were one step in terms of intelligence above the shovel clenched in Romi's paw. "Reality..."

"Reality?" said Romi eventually.

"Reality," replied the purple... thing.

"Reality?" Anya said incredulously.

"Yes, reality."

There was another silence.

Romi opened his mouth again. "Reali-"

"Will you cut that out?" interrupted the purple creature. It gave the impression that it had changed its mind; these two were a couple steps BELOW the shovel, at least. "Yes. Reality. Broken. By you. And those little plants. Get it?"

"But -- but reality isn't breakable!" Anya insisted, stomping her hooves nervously. "It's just, I don't know, there! Like space! And time!"

The purple beast raised what might have been an eyebrow, unless it was a very small purplum.

"But -- but reality isn't breakable!" Anya insisted, stomping her hooves nervously. "It's just, I don't know, there! Like-" She broke off, silenced by a strong sense of deja vu.

"Yes, well, space and time are part of reality, you see," said the purple thing irritably. "You broke them too. You might have even scratched the paint."

"But all I did was bring home a plant!" moaned Romi, pointing to where the cacti were now eating his fence. With mustard. "It was on sale!"

The purple creature rolled its eyes, which was rather frightening to watch. "No one ever realizes how dangerous plants are," it muttered. "All right. Why did you bring it home, exactly?"

Romi waved a paw at the spiny green mass that was now engulfing the neighbors' house while the neighbors ran around screaming. "Just look at it!" he said admiringly. "No other plant could do that! It can grow anywhere other plants can't, and it becomes some sort of super-plant where they can! And it's pretty, too."

Anya snorted. "Those things look like a sick mutated octopus, they're eating Mystery Island, and you still think they're the best thing since sliced bread!"

"Exactly," said the purple thing. "You see, this is precisely what happened when that was invented..."

Yep. Reality was as gone as Romi's mustard-covered fence.

"Ahem," said the Purple Thing. A large purple rose erupted from his right ear and began bark madly. Romi and Anya acted as if there was a salami-flavored cupcake on a bike lodged in their throats.

"So..." Anya started. "How was reality restored when bread began to come sliced?"

"Well, it was on sale, you see," said the Purple Thing matter-of-factly. "So, naturally, we only had to uproot the entire global economy and reundermine all associations with the Neopian Nourishment and Economic Committees, therefore retaliating to the accusations of the corporate Neopia that bread was no longer in existence and that old gym socks would be the replacement in submarine sandwiches, and that tomatoes would be unabashedly and impermeably outlawed, all this effective the second Tuesday of the hyperbolic-theorem's-second-example's-square-root-number month of the previous year. Simple as that."

"Oh. That makes sense," said the cactus.

"Of course it does."

Romi and Anya stared at the Purple thing and at the cactus, which had grown to a height quite exceeding Romi's house and was now making its way toward the faint line of steam in the distance that indicated the island's Cooking Pot.

Romi turned to Anya, just in time to catch a young Tanizard as it crawled out from her nose. "Okay, so reality is gone, I get it already," he said. "I mean, talking doughnutfruit is basically where the line is crossed. So, what do we do?"

"Ugga cortegajiggamundo gufruple flurp," she said, her eyes darting wildly about in every direction.

"Okay, no help from you," he said.

How do you fix reality? he thought. Bringing sumbarine-sandwiches-containing-veggies-and-meat minus-tomatoes-and-gym-socks-instead-of-bread to the Neopian market did not seem the best way to go.

"Distorted reality," Romi said to himself, while a swarm of bees began to shoot from Anya's nose as she exhaled in thought. "How to fix distorted reality-"

Then he shot a finger into the air, and a small firework came from out of nowhere and colorfully exploded. "I got it!"

"'Bout time," said the Purple Thing...

"Yes," the creature replied resignedly. "It was actually started a long time ago by Dr. Sloth. I was there -- though not so mutated. That only happened in the last few minutes, when you two decided to make kindling out of my neatly repeaired reality. I was a purple Grundo, attending to the project: Sloth Baby I. You'll notice they're the same color, Sloth and that plant," the thing said irritably. "And of course as soon as they added the fructose juppie juice the thing took off, gobbling bits of the reactors and navigational systems on the ship. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it -- pandemonium. Even Sloth went crazy in the end, yelping about slippers and pickles. Before he could take care of his 'baby' it had sliced an entire chunk out of reality -- the few square kilometers in which we had the ship. Sloth managed to stun it when he'd had enough (without the help of reality, he'd been put into a pink tutu, which is NOT something I recommend), and he dropped it in Tyrannia."

There was a long paused as Romi blushed at his feet. The creature looked at him. "It was put there due to the hideous growing conditions, to KEEP it stunned and weak." It rolled its eyes. "Which is why I advised the boss NOT to drop it somewhere rich and fertile, like Mystery Island. Bang-up job, you two."

"So it broke reality," said Anya, thinking practically while Romi wallowed in his own private guilt. "What did you do about it?"

"I used super glue," confessed the creature. "I had to wade about in the mess for a few good weeks, checking for cracks -- that's how I got a little warped -- but I did get them all. Or most of them. Maybe not all -- the Happiness Faerie seems to be a bad by-product. As was the bread."

"I can get glue, if you want," said Romi, perking up. "That way we can keep the plant, glue reality back together, and no one's the wiser!"

"No way," said the purple pet, snorting with disdain. "I broke a corner, a few kilometers, chipped the edge. You SNAPPED IT CLEAN IN TWO!" he yelped, his voice oddly high-pitched and slightly frantic. "When you break your mummy's vase like that, you don't sit there with a bucket of paste and the pieces, do you? You go to get a NEW ONE!" He took a deep breath for a moment, wishing to himself that he had a paper bag to hyperventilate into. When he had calmed sufficently, he said, "So that's why I'm here. We've got to get a new one made, or else you'll have to LIVE with this mess."...

A quiet yelp from Romi snapped her atttention back to her companion. As her hooves turned pirouettes (though her legs disagreed, and remained firmly where they had been) within the new-dug dirt, Romi muttered, "Anya?"

Without a moment's hesitation, the Uni's hooves disattached themselves and began the weary march to Mystery Island's separation council, complaining all the way of inconsolable differences. Her legs went unphased; they immediately began plans for a celabratory trip to the courts of Meridell. "Yes, Romi?"

"I'm not entirely positive, but I... I think I'm being turned into a Lupe plushie."

And Mystery Island fell into silence.

37 seconds later, Mystery Island fell back out of silence. It bruised itself on the landing.

"I know what you mean."

"About Grundos," Romi began conversationally, "There's always been something I didn't know-"

"Romi, I'm sure that what you don't know could fill several large encyclopedias," the purple creature snapped, flicking aside yet another newly-spawned carnivorous WooWoo Grub with one of its ears. Legs.

As the three slashed their way through the Mystery Island jungle, the jungle did its best to slash back at them with even greater force. With its constant pitfalls and communities of hyperintelligent shadows, the jungles of Mystery Island were awful enough on typical levels of normalcy, but this creeping shrewdness that seemed to have infected so much plantlife through the gaping hole formerly known as the Laws of Physics (thank you Romi) made the very ferns seem positively wicked. An eerie silence had draped itself over the treetops, disturbed only by a wet squelch as one of the unwilling heroes was forced to yank their foot out of the mud's jaws (luckily its teeth weren't fully formed as of yet), or the occasional soft cluck from Anya. The Uni's power of speech seemed to have run off to Meridell along with the upper part of her legs. Well. Perhaps not "run", exactly.

Of course, the dog-eared Lupe plushie perched upon her back had shortly been a creature perhaps 11 times its current size. So Anya supposed she wasn't doing too badly.

"Most Grundos don't generally have noses, do they?" Romi asked, eagerness unabashed by the stuffing dripping from the end of his tail. "So how do they smell?"

A Mazzew scurried across Anya's path. She balked to avoid stepping on the Petpet, but her worries were unfounded; it scarcely reached the other side of the path before abruptly turning into an uprooted petunia. After a moment's consideration, the Uni lowered her head and snatched the fallen flower between her teeth, crunching noisily. It tasted vaguely of salmon.

"Terrible. Trust me, I've been in the Virtupets locker room," the purple beast responded without so much as a backwards glance. From above their heads drifted down the first flakes of a snowstorm. Mystery Island's temperatures were hot enough so that on a bad day, the air would present you with second-degree burns if you didn't navigate your way carefully.

Anya gave a clipped, "WooAAAIIZIGg!" which she felt was quite a bit of progress towards a proper cry of outrage. The echoes of the sound richocheted off a gypsy's caravan and slammed into the trunk of an ancient fruit tree, causing the trunk to slam down several inches short of Anya's heels.

Heftily, the purple creature sighed. "Look," it said, turning to face a very startled Romi. Anya was not quite sure how a weatherworn plushie who appeared to have been through the wash several times too many could have enough elastic left with which to be startled, but her friend managed it. "Do you know how you're speaking without any vocal cords."

The plushie looked away from their guide's gaze. He knew, by some faint Kacheek instinct that filled his head with images of wet earth and roaring Lupe cubs, that it was impossible to win a staring contest with this being. Even if you didn't have eyelids.

"It's the same principal for Grundos." As the jungle opened itself up into a clearing, the trees seemed to be suddenly shed away. If Anya listened carefully, she could almost imagine she could feel the marshy ground below her hooves shaking itself like a wet Gelert, the soil trembling beneath her. Then again, it might have been the Turmaculus rolling over in his sleep on the other side of the world.

Without warning, the muscles of their guide's six limbs bunched into a spring. It landed neatly on a tree branch several meters above their heads, and the wood on which its pawpads touched turned to copper. "Well, good luck, kids." The unutterable purpality of its fur seemed to fade a bit, and that was when Anya became truly frightened. She parted her jaws in an attempt to demand what in Fyora's name was the creature doing?! It was their guide! It was their only hope, Reality's only hope! It was a walking advertisement for Dr. Sloth! Where was it going to go, to the mall food court?!

It fixed her with a drawling, magenta gaze. "I think I'm gonna go eat sushi or something."

The sun flickered, and then she and her plushie companion were unutterably alone. And when Reality isn't there to turn on the nightlight, Darkness falls early.

...Now what?

The stitches of Romi's poorly-sewn nose pulled on her mane as he nudged her towards the roiling atrocity that waited for them in the clearing. This evil... it had time. It had all the time in the world. Which, if Reality went uncorrected, would be about 12 hours and 52 minutes.

Gently, he reminded her. "Now we save the world..."

"So how do you fix reality?" Anya said softly, suddenly finding that her power of speech had returned. For lunch, maybe.

"How do you make a new one?" Romi answered. "This one's too far gone to fix. We have to get something entirely different. We have to start from scratch."

"Well how are we supposed to do that? Walk down to the Marketplace and ask if we can buy a Reality?"

"That's a possibility. Realities are on sale today," chirrupped a little voice. "But really, I'd save that as a last resort. Boxed realities never are as good as home-made ones."

Anya looked around frantically. "Who said that?"

"I did. Down here!" drawled the voice.

Anya and Romi looked down. A little Mootix was waving his front legs. "Yessir, I never saw a pre-made reality that could equal one made from scratch. Just doesn't have the same touch."

Romi stared incredulously. "You mean we can just buy a Reality and it will solve all our problems? Let's go, Anya!"

"Wait, didn't you hear what I just said? Why not make your own? They're so much nicer," cried the Mootix. He hopped after the Uni and her odd rider.

"We don't know how to make our own, or else we would." Anya snapped. "Now, you said Realities were on sale?"

"Yes," sighed the Mootix. "Well, if you are determined to go, at least take me with you. I know the best-quality Realities you can get."

"Um, that's ok, we--"

"Sure, hop on!" Romi said quickly. To Anya he whispered, "We need all the help we can get. He seems to know what he's talking about. The quicker we get done, the better."

Anya resignedly stood while the Mootix climbed up her leg. He perched on her left ear. "Tally-ho!" he shouted gleefully. "I always wanted to do that."

Anya broke into a run. She ran until she could run no more. Panting, she looked around. They were in the clearing!

"What on Neopia..." she ran a short distance into the jungle toward the Island Marketplace. When she stopped, she saw she hadn't moved. She stood in the middle of the clearing.

"What's going on? We should have been there already!" Romi didn't answer for a moment. Finally he said, "Try walking the other way. Don't go anywhere in particular. Just... well, just walk aimlessly."

"What?! This isn't a time for a leisurely stroll, Romi! We need to get to the Marketplace!"

"Just do it. I read about something like this happening in a book. Now go!"

Anya dubiously turned around. Skirting a puddle of melted white chocolate Tuskaninnies, she went in the opposite direction of what she felt was the right way. Every instinct told her it was wrong. But then again, running in the right direction hadn't helped...

"Finally," breathed Romi. "We made it."

Anya said nothing. She was starting to feel like she was slipping away from the world. This was just too much.

"Good job, little lady," the Mootix murmured.

The unlikely trio walked toward the Island Marketplace. Stumbling into the shop the little Mootix pointed out, Anya walked to the counter.

"Here for a Reality?" said the shopkeeper in a sing-song voice. "Sorry, folks, we're sold out. We'll be getting a new shipment in about 24 hours, though."

"You mean there are none left? Zero? Zilch? But we need it!" Anya cried.

"Sorry, ma'am, but I can't help you."

"Well, sorry guys. I guess we should just go," spoke the Mootix.

"What are we going to do now?" wailed Romi. "We can't possibly make a new reality in such a short time!"

The Mootix (which Anya realized hadn't given his name yet) smiled gently. "Well, my mother used to tell me, when you can't fix something, just destroy it completely and another one will take its place, just like seagrass. Cut off everything but the roots, and it will grow back, strong and healthy."

Anya didn't get it. "What do you mean, destroy reality? We've already broken it, won't it just make things worse?"

"I mean you have to obliterate it! So that it's gone forever. Then something will spring up, something new and different."

Romi spoke slowly. "If I understand you correctly, you want us to... destroy reality or something?"

The Mootix grinned. "You sure do take a good while, but you do catch on."

Anya and Romi stared at each other in horror.

"You've gotta be kidding..."

Anya opened her mouth, intending to answer, but found herself instead mumbling around a double-cheekful of fresh marzipan; spitting it out, she sighed. “Well, I guess not... things can’t possibly get any weirder than they are already.”

“As a matter of fact, they can. Odds are they will, too, so if you’re going to try what I suggested-" the Mootix paused, jiggling one foot in order to dislodge a migrating glob of marzipan- “then I’d suggest you do it soon.”

It was at this time that the trio found themselves being shooed out of the shop, which was looking more like a wicker basket by the moment, by the perpetually cheerful shopkeeper, who insisted that it was time for stock taking and wouldn’t you know it, he had left his radio in the freezer. Anya cast a despairing glance about the marketplace; the glance, slightly offended at being cast about so cavalierly, took its leave soon afterward, slinking off among the happily gyrating trees.

“So we’ve got to destroy reality. Great. Where do we start?”

The Lupe plushie that was Romi furrowed its nonexistent brow in thought, insofar as a nonexistent brow can be furrowed, and turned gradually from orange to teal. “Well, there’s a question,” he declared unhelpfully several seconds later as a seam split along his side and a small amount of wet semolina leaked out. “Couldn’t we just let reality destroy itself? The way things are going, that seems pretty likely anyway. Cabbage.”

The Uni didn’t have to ask what he meant by that, as the cabbage in question whistled by her head a split second afterward -- literally whistled, although she couldn’t place the tune. The Mootix, however, shook its head again very matter-of-factly.

“That isn’t the way things work, I’m afraid. Realities don’t just go destroying themselves, you see; they simply alter. What we’re in the middle of is normal now, and it’s just going to get normaler and normaler the longer you wait.” As if to drive its point home, the Petpetpet sprouted a long, curly feather directly in the center of its head. “If you destroy it now, reality will probably go back to the way it was before, since that’s the most stable state for it to be in. I think.” Shrugging nonchalantly, the Mootix hopped down from its perch on Anya’s shoulder and began sauntering off to nowhere in particular. “Now, if you’ll excuse me...”

“Wait!” called the Uni in a slightly panicked tone. “Where are you going?!”

Looking vaguely surprised, the Mootix held up what appeared to be a rather burnt train ticket and promptly vanished in a puff of barbeque-scented smoke, but not before answering: “Well, you see, I’ve just been invited to sushi.”

Now in a state of very soggy disrepair, Romi slumped over on his friend’s shoulder and looked quite close to tears, which is an impressive feat for a Lupe plushie. “But how are we supposed to destroy reality if we don’t know where to start?”

Anya closed her eyes in thought, though the banjo music currently emanating from the unsettlingly energetic palm trees was making that a bit difficult. To destroy reality, they would have to introduce an element so radical, so extreme, that the entire skewed existence would be shattered.

Then it hit her. ('It' was a candied yam, but she'd just had an epiphany, as well.)

Looking back over her shoulder and ignoring the yam at her feet, the Uni was only slightly surprised to see that the shop they had just left minutes earlier was now a rather large picnic basket; the shopkeeper, having apparently found his radio, was being sweetly serenaded by an avocado. Anya approached him boldly, heedless of the sucking noise her hooves were making against the curiously sticky ground.

“Excuse me, sir -- do you happen to have a loaf of bread we could borrow? And a cutting knife, too, if you please...”

He vanished into his picnic-basket shop, then appeared a moment later with a dripping loaf of bread, and Anya thanked him for it before adding, "And what about a knife?"

"Knife? I have no knives. They're out dancing with the plates and the spoons, you see -- they've been doing that ever since that silly Kau jumped over Kreludor."

Anya blinked, then looked around. Wouldn't you know it, just about every item imaginable was flitting or tumbling about in the chaos, including the partridge in the pear tree and the kitchen sink, but nothing was nearby that looked suitable for slicing bread.

Something wrapped around her tail, and the Uni leapt forward, unseating Romi and losing her hold on the bread. The plushie landed on his head, and while Anya scrambled to retrieve the precious loaf Romi picked himself up and stared at the tendril of cactus that had attacked his friend's behind. "Anya, the cactus!"

Anya spun around, expecting an attack from behind. When none presented itself, she looked at Romi questioningly. "What about it?"

"Behold: Our cutting knife!"

Anya's eyes lit up, and trotting quickly forward she held out the bread, watching hopefully as the writhing jumble of lethal spikes tore through the soggy loaf...

Instantly the air erupted in a hideous high-pitched wail, as if Reality itself were screaming in mortal agony. Every pet on the Island covered its ears, adding a scream of its own to the horrible keening as the world suddenly went black...

The sun shone brightly down on a bustling Mystery Island, which seemed to smile back at the glimmering sky as tourists meandered across the beaches and locals went about their daily business. The neighbors whose house had been demolished wandered through their immaculate yard, inspecting the paint on their suddenly un-ruined home and discussing the need or lack thereof for a new coat, when one of them glanced up and called, "Romi? Anya? Are you all right? You look like you've seen a giant Ghostkerchief!"

The Uni and the Kacheek blinked numbly, still trying to process the world that surrounded them. "Um -- yeah, we're fine," Anya finally called back, and the neighbor turned his attention back to the paint on his house. Staring at Romi, Anya finally managed, "Was all of that... real?"

Romi frowned in deep concentration as he glanced around at the perfectly normal reality of an unwarped Mystery Island. "I don't know." He gave a sheepish smile. "But I do know this much: my next vacation will definitely NOT be in Tyrannia!"

Anya laughed. "Where will it be, then?"

"I don't know -- maybe Neopia Central. I hear they have some interesting plants there, and according to the Lupe next door the Bakery has some excellent sliced..." Seeing that Anya was staring at him, aghast, Romi trailed off, then gave a weak cough and smile and added, "On second thought... maybe I'll just bring back some sushi."

The End