The apartment building wasn’t much to look at. It was made of simple multicolored bricks. Four stories tall and ten windows across. There was a playground behind the building, and near the playground was two strange courts of some sort. They weren’t basketball courts, he could tell because there were no baskets anywhere to be seen, and they weren’t tennis courts since there wasn’t a net dividing the courts down the center. But there were no other kids out playing to give him some kind of hint as to what they were for. So all he could do was shrug and add it to the constantly growing list of things he didn’t understand. 

The building where they would apparently be living from that point on was connected to another building by an atrium, the second building had a fenced off playground that was somehow different from the one that was behind the building they would be staying at. It didn’t look like there was a way to get into that fenced off area either. 

“Why don’t you stay here and play with Chain for a little bit,” his mom said once the car had dropped them off. “I have a few things to take care of.”

“We can let her out of the carrier now?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Chain can wander around as much as she wants as long as the two of you are in the Cedarium dome,” she explained. 

So he set down the carrier and opened the door, the strange cat poked her head out cautiously at first. Then when it was clear that nothing was going to harm her, she jumped out all and once and started to sniff the grass nearby. 

“I’ll be back,” his mom said simply before heading into the building’s atrium. 

There were no other kids around, but he wasn’t really in the mood to play with other kids anyways. But he did notice something interesting. The strange courts that he had noticed earlier had a third sibling. And the third one was made out of sand. So he took off his shoes, and ran around in the sand with Chain. He didn’t really know why, but he liked the feeling of sand between his toes. 

He hummed to himself as Chain ran around burning off some of the extra energy that he had built up from being trapped in the carrier all day. He wasn’t really aware of time passing at all. And then something happened–another hole opened up near by where he was standing. He remembered the first hole he had jumped into, where he had met Chain. And he had no reason to think he wouldn’t be able to get back before his mom was done with whatever she was doing. 

So he jumped through–and on the other side of the strange hole in reality–was a strange multicolored beach. Red, green, orange, blue, purple indigo, and violet, those were the colors of the sand, formed in waves across the beach. Vividly colored crystals sprang up from the ground in hague columns all around the beach, and some of them even sprouted out of the red colored water that the beach lead to. He had never seen anything quite like it, and few ever would. 

“What do you think, Chain?”
“Meow…” the cat monster said.

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” 

Cryptix swam around in the water, fins and frills of various kinds move around just below the surface. There was a strange cat like monster that was colored like a goldfish with the tail of a mermaid. A strange finned pixy monster that was barely a foot tall, strange mice with scales and gills. A turtle like creature swam out of the water, and kept swimming–through the air. 

“Poem!” he wanted to stay, but he heard his mother calling from the other side of the hole that had stayed open behind him. And so he turned around and stepped back through to the normal world. 

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This is part of an ongoing story called Strange Worlds read from the start here: https://wanderingpoems.blog/cryptix-worlds/