Taylor walking alone across the Gnosis campus.  It is dusk.  There is no snow on the ground, but it clearly cold, as he is wearing a jacket and a hat, and is walking somewhat hunched over, with his hands jammed into his jacket pockets.

CAPTION: “You might want to take some time to think it over,” was what Iris ended with.

Extreme close-up view of a tabletop.  There are some polyhedral dice (four-siders, eight-siders, twenty-siders) and some sheets with what look like crudely-drawn maps visible.

CAPTION: When I was in high school, I did a lot of fantasy role-playing.

View of a knight in badly scratched and dented armor, swinging a battered sword at an ogre.  They are fighting in the midst of some sort of hellish landscape.

CAPTION: In games, your characters would keep going, enduring all sorts of things that no ordinary person would do.

View of the same knight, sitting in front of a fire, with a wizard and a roguish-looking fellow, plus a female elf in a chainmail bikini.

CAPTION: Stay up all night, live in your armor, go charging into battle as long as you had one hit point left. A player-character was nothing like any real human being.

View of two figures, set against an abstract landscape.  One is the knight in armor, now bright and shining, holding his sword and striking a heroic post.  The other is Taylor, in his jacket, cowering.

CAPTION: That’s the difference between fiction and reality.

Taylor standing under a tree (very small), facing away from us.  The tree is large, dark, ominous; its branches are bare.

CAPTION: Reality sucks without you in it, Marie.  I’d rather be a fictional character.

Professor Waite standing in her laboratory, adjusting the X-ray like device over the bed.  Jill is leaning against the wall in the background.  Little Michiko sits on a stool next to her.

WAITE: I can’t believe you actually talked that boy into this.

JILL: It wasn’t that hard.

Close up on Waite, peering into a cavity in her machine.

WAITE: Yes, well, if I were him, I’d be wondering why someone who wasn’t already a woman wouldn’t be volunteering.  Are you sure he’s smart enough?

View of Jill and Little Michiko.  Little Michiko is looking ahead, sternly.  Jill is casting her a sideways glance.

JILL: Not a question of smart.  He’s nineteen, and a boy, and in love.  In short, the kind of hopeless romantic who wouldn’t think to ask.

Close up view of one of Waite’s hands, turning a dial on a control panel.

CAPTION: I just hope you can make him pretty enough.

View of Little Michiko and Jill.  Little Michiko has a wry expression, while Jill has turned to her and looks slightly shocked.

LITTLE MICHIKO: I think he’s rather pretty already.

JILL: Michiko!

Close up on Little Michiko, who looks somewhat irritated.

LITTLE MICHIKO: I hope you haven’t forgotten that I’m not really an eight year-old.

Taylor is standing next to Professor Waite and her apparatus.

TAYLOR: I’m ready.

WAITE: Excellent, Mr. Chase.  Please disrobe completely and lie down on the table.

Taylor in profile in part of the panel, looking nervous.  In the back of the panel we see Little Michiko, still on her stool resting her chin on her palms (elbows on knees, little-girl like).  Jill is standing, also grinning.

TAYLOR: Uh, in front of…them?

Close up on Jill’s face.  She has an eyebrow raised.

JILL: If you have trouble being naked in front of people, Taylor, you’re going to have a hard time on this mission.

View from above.  He is lying naked on he table (his genitals obscured by the apparatus above.  He is strapped down at his ankles and head and one of his wrists.  Waite is fastening the straps on another of his wrists.

CAPTION: Now might be a good time to get used to being tied up, too.