"What about the Sideways exactly?" he wonders, with his mouth full.

"Do you guys have any idea why it's, um. There? And inhabited with the monster things – Picassos or whatever – and why people get warped or whatever it is by it, that sort of thing. I don't remember if you explained."

"Well... I mean, it's just always been there? As long as the City has, as far as anyone knows." He shrugs. "I was born here, the Sideways is kinda just a fact of life."

"Have people, I don't know, studied it?"

"It... doesn't like being studied very much. I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by 'studied,'  people make maps and such."

"Doesn't– like being studied? What, does it throw up signs saying 'please stop I don't like this'? I doubt it's as friendly as that, but…?"

"I mean, like I said, depends on what you mean by that, but it likes changing on you or... changing you."

"I didn't realize it was a malevolent force that could make you into a Picasso, I thought that was just– I don't know, a thing that you could catch if you were unlucky from that sort of stuff?"

"It's... more complicated than that, really? Have you heard about the New Deal?"

"I don't think so?"

"Some mayor or another decided it'd be a swell idea to refurbish a bunch of buildings, take them down and build new stuff. Whole district went cubist."

"… And this was in the city, not the Sideways, right, he didn't try doing some weird renovation in the Sideways?"

"Correct."

"That sounds, uh. Just wonderful?"

Nowhere's safe. How nice.

"It doesn't happen if you don't try to take anything down. The City wants stuff where it wants stuff, but you can redecorate and turn one of the fifteen shoe shops that got dropped at the same neighborhood into a deli, another into a hair salon..."

"Okay," she says. "I will try not to be too frightened by the fact that implies some weird intelligence behind this place."

"There is definitely some weird intelligence behind his place," he nods. "A weird intelligence that wants the City to be like this and not like that."

"I'm in a weird world that doesn't happen to like being poked in certain ways. Okay," she says. "I. Have opinions about this, but– Okay."

"Opinions?"

"I don't wish to be in a universe that's going to harm me if I do something that I'm used to expecting to be able to do, especially if it's based on weird lines that you can apparently cross by simply modifying a building, and since it seems to have some sort of intelligence, I don't want to inflict whatever upon it that it presumably doesn't like, and I don't have a neat way to resolve these things other than 'don't do anything it might not like' which is very vague and– restricting."

"Yeah. The cubism problem... is a problem." He furrows his brows as if this was the first time that had occurred to him.

"Yeah," she says. "It kinda is. I mean – that thing, whatever it was, it didn't seem human, it wasn't going 'oh dear I seem to be scaring people I should stop' nor was it like screaming out or anything – it was on fire and just attacking us, that's not, I'm pretty sure, like, a human thing, not unless it was a very fucked-up human in the first place."

"People who go cubist get—stuck. In a loop. They revive moments of their past and in between that they're terrified and not very sane. That kid probably became a Picasso in a house fire or something, so they're... on fire. Forever."

"Yeah," she says. "Which sounds just wonderful."

How's the feeling?

Same! Maybe it's just a Sadde-feeling she associated with the Sideways after all.

"Going cubist must be awful. I should fix that."