“Given that this is a shared experience I’d wager on the active ingredient being magic over alchemy or brain trauma. Unless, of course,” the same thought occurs to Richard, “I’m not real.”

He takes the prospect as well as he takes anything, keen eyes fuzzing distant, as inscrutable in fleeting existential confusion as they are when they focus back on her a moment later. If he’s a figment of her imagination, she’s produced a very lifelike simulacrum of Dick Dickerson. It doesn’t really matter, does it? Nothing here matters.

“Rather than transport us into a neutral or even nonsensical illusion,” he starts again as if he’d never stopped, “they seem to have left the designwork to one of us.”