You enter to find The Manager eyeing a glass ball. You ask him if it’s one of his snow globes, but he only laughs.
“No, no, Traveler. Compared to this the snowglobes are but a mere parlor-trick. These are rare items indeed.”
He holds the object up for you both to see better. It’s a glass orb within which is a red shape. The red shape looks somewhat like a folds of a red rose, only the petals all seem to be moving in and out and through each other, transforming shape in a slow rhythm.
“That’s right, Traveler,” The Manager says. Once again you must ask yourself if he can read minds.
“This is an interdimensional rose. Very rare. And very forbidden…” His voice trails off as he turns the orb around in his hand, eyeing it carefully.
You begin to wonder if it’s dangerous, but say nothing. The Manager chuckles.
“No, it isn’t dangerous. At least, not in its current state. Anyway, it’s not the rose we have to fear. Just like with normal roses.”
You nod in understanding. The thing is incredibly beautiful. You ask The Manager in what way it can possibly cause harm. The Manager puts the orb close to your face.
“Do you see that there, below the rose?”
Below the constantly shifting petals you can identify a translucent line, a little more than a hair’s width thick, connected to its bottom and heading straight to the bottom of the orb. The line has small jutting spikes coming off of it.
“That’s the stem. The stem and the thorns. If you get pricked by a normal rose’s thorn, what happens?”
You respond with the obvious answer.
“Correct. Well, if you get pricked with the thorn of an intergalactic rose that same thing happens to you in every dimension.”
It sounded problematic, but you still couldn’t see why it was forbidden. The Manager nods, as if understanding your feelings.
“Doesn’t seem so dangerous, right? But you see, if you grind the thorns up and put them on or in something, than the same thing applies to that something as to the thorn. Can you imagine it? Intergalactic knives, guns, poison. Heck, I suppose even missiles wouldn’t be out of the question.”
He looks once again at the rose.
“Too dangerous to let loose. Too beautiful to destroy. Every rose has thorns, I suppose. But some roses have sharper thorns than others.”
Other Nights:
