"It's a little big to carry with us on the swoop."

"You can't absorb things back into the book?"

"Nope. Maybe you can, uh, void them, with your void blade. Or maybe I can give it away."

...Cor touches the model and attempts to void it.

The model - sort of shivers, and pulls in on itself and becomes rapidly smaller and less solid and more translucent and wavery and dim, until half a second later there is no model there anymore.

"Oh, cool," says Riale.

Also, Cor now has - something. It's like he learned a very detailed description of the model and then halfway forgot it, so that the information is accessible but only when he thinks about it directly.

"...hang... on a second -"

Can he put it back?

"Mm?"

He cannot.

...but this new bundle of knowledge is sort of... page-shaped. It feels like he could maybe put it in the book if he tried.

"...lemme see the book?"

Book!

Thinnnng innnnnnnnn book?

Thing: in book!

Riale blinks at the page, which now contains a perfect shimmering picture of the world-model. "...huh," he says. "I guess you can put things in the book after all. You just have to - void them first?"

"Yeah, how about that." Does he still have it in his head?

Yep. But he can't put it in the book again, he already did that and now the book has it.

"Well, that seems really useful," says Riale.

"I'm reluctant to try to cover for your deficit in handling people this way. I guess parallelism is good and everything but it seems unaesthetic for that to be the principal advantage of having me along..."

"Yeah, let's not experiment with vanishing people away to see if we can put them back."

"So what is my thing for?"

"...If I weren't already really good at putting things in the book accurately, it would be really useful to have somebody along who could get things perfect every time even if they had to destroy the things to do it. But I agree that that is probably not the point of you. I'm not sure what is. So far we have one thing we're told you're supposed to do, which is 'not destroy the world', and a bunch of things we've observed you can do, and none of them seems like it's quite sufficient justification for needing a person to be attached to this package... I mean, 'don't destroy the world' can't be that hard, can it?"

"You'd think. My track record is not great and you'd still think."

"Right?" he agrees. "That's sort of ominous now that I think of it, if the implication is that stopping the Blade of the Void from destroying the world is a challenging task in some way, because it's not like the thing came with an instruction manual."

"I guess I should not void the facets? Am I going to be tempted to do that?"

"I sure hope not!"

"Note to self don't do that."

"Yeah, no kidding."

...Cor attempts to void a rock without touching it.

Goodbye rock. Hello abstract description of rock.

"That is slightly unsettling to watch. But kind of cool? But slightly unsettling."