"Probably? Definitely in a couple of hours. But I won't be able to do anything more with it for a while after that regardless."

"Maybe we should've started with the book we had reason to think was strange after all, if we were going to at all. Do you want to try The King in Yellow now and risk it not working, or discuss the case for a while first and try in a couple of hours, or have you decided against doing it at all for now? ...If there's anything I can do to make it safer or more certain I'll do my best."

"It's-- not just not working, it's not going to fail but doing it too much isn't safe. I'll try in a couple hours."

"In the meantime, um. I've been avoiding thinking too much about what Valentine said because it's horrible but I think I need to stop putting it off."

"So-- feel free to stop me if you think there's an obvious mistake I'm making--"

"One, my hypothesis space might be wider than most people's, but it is not infinite, and I don't make a habit of believing every claim I come across because I know I'm psychic and the Dreamlands exists. Most things that say they're magic turn out to be scams, and most impossible murders turn out to have been entirely possible all along."

"Two, Valentine Donovan is in fact in an insane asylum, and it is much more likely that the person in the asylum for the criminally insane is criminally insane than that Satan exists and likes to rape people to death for fun."

"But also, two-point-one, we don't actually know she was psychotic or hallucinated, and we do know she's a lesbian which is enough to get her into an asylum all on its own; which makes it somewhat less likely that she's just psychotic although not zero likely but also I'm concerned I'm doing motivated reasoning there because I really, really want it to turn out that if I could get her out I should."

"Which brings me to, three, none of that had any commonalities with the magic that I know to be true. It also had very few commonalities with magic that I know to be fake! But the vast majority of magic turns out to be fake and so that should be my prior unless I have very compelling reason to believe otherwise."

"Except, four, we have no explanation for how or why she would have or could have done the murder herself, and 'somehow through some means we don't know snuck in a knife, which for some reason she used to murder someone, and the knife was missed the first time somehow, and then more than a year later she murdered someone again, and she has never used the knife for anything else even though she's suicidal and has no reason to want the nurses dead, because she's insane' is not an explanation."

"And, five, her description of the murder matches up with what the street cat said about the bodies in the Roby house, and what Carter said about Parker means we now have three improbable accounts of impossible murders, and while all of these things are very unlikely individually, each one is evidence against the 'everything is perfectly normal and physically possible' hypothesis."

"...or, like, whatever it turns out to be it will have been physically possible, that being how things being true works, but conventionally understood to be physically possible."

"I've been trying to account for the amount that -- well, William Way had a vision, and Roby has been having dreams. And you yourself get information from your dreams -- leaving aside whether the place you visit exists somewhere out there, it seems obvious that the room you're physically sleeping in does not transform into an impossible city at night. If we take Ms Clapper completely at face value, some of what she said pertained to things that happened in our reality, and some of it was about other realities. So -- in every case where a single person witnessed something, there's some chance that what they saw and what happened in front of them don't match up one to one."

"I don't know how to weigh that. I don't know how to weigh whether it's likelier that Parker desiccated someone or that Parker caused Carter to see -- you see, it's simpler in some ways but more complicated in others, and all it does is inject uncertainty into the actual proceedings."

"The way I know the Dreamlands physically exists is that cats physically visit it, for what that's worth, if they're there they aren't here."

"To your actual point-- I don't know. I think that's making it more complicated until and unless we find out someone was having a vision of an alternate reality in which the impossible thing they're describing happened?"

"Which might be the case, most of my probability mass at this point is on 'something that I haven't thought of yet is happening', but until it happens I don't know that there's reason to elevate the hypothesis. If that makes sense."

"I just mean to point out that if conventional perceptual and spatial laws don't always hold then we ought to have some uncertainty about assumptions that rely on them. Though this hasn't made me any more certain about any specific ways the things we've heard could be breaking with them. I don't understand the reality I find myself operating in, and I'm nervous about reasoning inside of it."

"This might be close to becoming a tangent, though."

"If it's any help, the reality hasn't actually changed. Whatever is true has been true the whole time."

"But yeah, I get it."

"My reasoning is something like.... anything could be true, because we don't understand the world we live in yet. There could always be a blind spot. But-- you can't reason like that--"

"And the way things usually, most of the time, almost always work is that, for instance, knives cannot be pulled out of thin air or go through walls. So that's what I'm assuming now, unless I have a really good reason to believe something else."

"Maybe, given that the explanations we can reach for don't make any sense, we should just bounce ridiculous ideas off of each other and organize them by how unlikely they are."

"I can start. Is it possible to manifest... an energy knife. A knife created from mental energies."

"I've never heard of it but..."

"No, ugh, this is why I don't do this, I can feel myself starting to take the idea more seriously now that it's been pointed out even though I have literally no reason to believe that it has ever happened."

"I guess that's one problem with the kinds of unknowns here."

And a few hours later Inaaya puts her hand on the King in Yellow to read it.

you are a princess are a god are a king are a lake are a city are an island are the yellow sign are a star are a planet are lost Carcosa are a play are a meme are a word are a symbol are Cassilda are Camilla are the Stranger are the rags in tatters are the pallid mask are a mask are a mask are a mask are a mask

you wear no mask

This seems... different from last time?

She recoils from the book. She's visibly shaking.

"Don't read that one. Definitely do not read that one. What the fuck."

"Are you okay? What happened?"

"I-- I'm okay. I think. I-- wow that's weird--"

"I got a lot of rambling that doesn't make any sense and a bunch of proper nouns I don't recognize and-- something about, about being a star and a city and a god and a play and a symbol and, and a stranger and a lake and a mask and wearing no mask? It wasn't anything like the gods book. I don't think I've ever had that happen before."

"...Should we be worried about Terrence?"

"I think we should definitely be worried about Terrence."

--now she blinks, for the first time since putting her hand on the book and going glassy-eyed and blank.

"Not because I have any specific idea of what the book might do to people, to be clear. Just on general principles. But it's worrying and I'm worried."

He scribbles down star city god play symbol stranger lake mask no-mask before either of them can forget the words.

"Is there -- anything I can get you," he asks. He feels shaky. She looks worse.

She should do that too. Princess, god, king, lake, city, island, yellow sign, star, planet, lost Carcosa, play, meme, word, symbol, Cassandra(?), Camilla, stranger, rags in tatters, pallid mask, mask, mask, mask, no mask.

"I don't know. ...I'd take a hug."

He hugs her. He's not used to holding someone smaller than himself; he aims his hands wrong and has to readjust. Maybe it's the moment, but she feels remarkably fragile.

He's warm. ...It's nice.

The play sits two feet away from them on the table.

When Oscar gets home, Hannah is doing her best to do the dishes. The six-year-old is tugging at her dress, while the four-year-old is crying about some topic primarily of interest to four-year-olds.

So he has a bare-bones conversation with Hannah and goes to his study as soon as he gets a chance. Who can blame him after the day he's had.

"Can you please take Charlie?" Hannah says.