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The cube had removed itself from the ground. It hadn’t materialized. It had already been there.

His brain needed time to process that. His materialized iron hadn’t materialized.

What in the world did that mean? If he wasn’t materializing, then what was he doing?

Wait, was this a dream? He did feel pretty numb, though that was probably because he was already dead.

And wait a second. He'd been horrifically wounded in that fight with Banda, hadn't he? Entire limbs missing, as he recalled. But he was looking at them now, and here they were, already having regenerated. When had that happened, exactly?

So many questions.

And before he got too much further into dwelling on them, he figured that he should probably try to contact Garovel again. He was fairly certain that he tried earlier when he was freaking out, but he decided to try again anyway, now that he was calmer.

'Garovel? You there?'

He waited. And kept waiting.

'Garovel?'

No response arrived.

That wasn't good. It wasn't entirely unprecedented for him, however. He'd bumbled his way into pocket dimensions before.

With surprising frequency, now that he was thinking about it.

There was the Shards, the Candle, and then whatever that weird dream state was where he'd been able to talk to Rasalased. Either way, he was pretty sure that he hadn't been able to talk to Garovel in any of those, either.

Though, maybe he just hadn't tried? He couldn't remember.

Whatever this place was, it was definitely different from those other ones. For one thing, he could actually see stuff. With his actual eyeballs. Which felt dry as hell and like they might have been slowly boiling out of his head, but for the moment, at least, they were still working. He was again thankful for his numbness.

Regardless, the rules here were clearly quite strange. Materialization was strange. So strange, in fact, that he felt like he couldn’t even call it materialization, anymore.

This felt more like telekinesis, Hector thought. Which was a peculiar thing to think, perhaps, because he wasn’t even sure that he understood how telekinesis even worked, really. He’d only glimpsed it in action because of the wrobels.

Hmm. If he had to articulate his thoughts more fully to himself, then telekinesis was simply the ability to make objects move with psychic force. Like levitating a book or turning its pages, as he’d seen Hanton do.

But as he kept thinking about it, Hector wondered if that was really what was going on here. It seemed more than a little weird that he would’ve suddenly developed psychic powers for no apparent reason.