“Leave your car,” they told me, and pointed. “There’s a hole in the fence down there that you can climb through.” They, however, did not use the hole. They just walked through the fence. Not like ghosts, more like Play-Doh, pressing through the links. That killed any doubts I might have had about them. They definitely were not from around here.

Ed turned back and saw the look on my face. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “It’s a three-dimensional fence. In spite of what it looked like, we just walked around it in a different dimension. If you’d like, we could show you how,” he offered.

“Uh . . . thanks, but no,” I told him, still not ready to follow them.

“Don’t worry,” said Ed. “We won’t do anything to hurt you. We couldn’t hurt you even if we wanted to; it’s not in our nature.”

And although I wanted to turn and run, I swallowed my highly rational terror of this highly irrational reality, walked a dozen yards down, and climbed through the hole in the fence.

There is nothing cheerful about the inside of a dead toy mega-store. The space had been stripped of everything that wasn’t built in, which left tons of empty, brightly colored displays, barely visible in the scant lighting the Edwards had set up. Aside from a few forlorn stuffed animals, and the occasional Barbie head, there was nothing else to see . . . until we got to a space that had once been the Lego pavilion. Instead of a quaint Lego city, the Edwards had set up a makeshift living space. Furniture. A television. A refrigerator. All the appliances were fully operational with no visible source of power.

“If you’re not human, why do you need all this?” I asked.

“When in Rome,” Ed said, which is the first half of an expression I don’t actually know the rest of.

Their lair was not the cleanest of places—fast-food wrappers were everywhere. Edd saw me noticing the mess and glared at me.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

“No. But how are you supposed to clean up the universe if you can’t pick up your own trash?”

“It’s not trash,” Edd grumbled. “It just projects into this universe as trash.” Even so, he began to clean it up.

Meanwhile, Eddy turned on the TV, settled in on the sofa, grabbed what looked like a game controller, and began to play a video game that they told me was not actually a video game. It was their quantum interdimensional research tool (QuIRT).

“It’s the QuIRT that identified you as the current center of the universe,” Ed told me. “Technically, it’s called being the Subjective Locus. Sub-loc for short. While you’re the sub-loc, you redefine reality, bouncing what is into a variation of what isn’t. Or at least what wasn’t until you made it so.”