Quoted By:
"?????," one of the Managers— slicked-back hair, curved sunglasses, sideburns— snakes at you. You look blankly back. He pauses, exchanges glances with his neighbors, and tries again. "Ahem. Sunbringer?"
Huh? Oh, you. "Yes?"
"What is your opinion on what you see?"
Damnit. Do you need to sound Herald-y? Or will anything you say sound Herald-y, given the talk they just got? Probably the second one, unless you really blow it. "What's in those cubes?"
"The cubes? They are..." Sideburns thinks, touches his lips, mutters to himself. "I don't know how to say it to you, Sunbringer. They are... prisms?"
"????," says his neighbor, the Manager (formerly) in front. "I would say 'generators.'"
"Paper-presses," a third says, to hissing laughter. "Learned Herald, they— do you know all the states of reality?"
Oh, God, you're being quizzed? Richard has talked about this, though. There's the normal one, and the kind the ocean is, and the kind manses are, and the kind the void is. You think. Oh! And the kind real glass is. Five kinds. "Yes!"
"As you must. The cubes are— I think it is— 'extra-real.' They are containers of extra-reality."
Extra-reality. It sounds familiar. Is that the kind glass is? You are recalling long-ago experiments with shards of Ellery, and your skin, and— wait! Paper-presses! "The kind that sucks the reality out of—"
"Yes. By its nature it attracts Law to itself, and extracts it from others. It does so cleanly and purely. We are in great need of purified Law, so you may understand the resulting extent of our operations."
"...Yes." The elevator is descending through the middle of the cubes now. The ones in the distance look like lit-up windows, the ones even further like stars. There's a thousand of them, dead minimum. Maybe more.
These "paper-presses", you are becoming certain, are what lurk in the bottom of Headspace manses. They're what people get trapped in. No wonder they die so horribly, if they're stuck in the equivalent of cubes of glass— there's a reason the real stuff, the true stuff, is banned. Eugh. Ellery must've visited a couple dozen of these, the long way around, but there's no way Management couldn't fill them up faster than he could clear them.
"If they extract Law," you say delicately, "what do they extract it from?"
"Waste product, Eternalness. The mechanism is extremely clever." The Manager pauses. "If I may say so."
Waste product. Is she lying? Or is that how they actually see it? You suppose they "replace" the people they take, so it could be legitimate, in a horrible snake-y way. But still! How villainous! You look forward to blowing them up in short order. Can you even wait that long?
(Choices next.)
