Right. I guess she had the ability to warp reality, and she could even take people and things from other worlds. It wasn't a very stable power, so she was an object of research and experimentation to try and control it... So when she started breaking herself apart, she just created incomplete images of people.

[ Not even static memories, but the simplest interpretation of them. It's probably disingenuous to call those she kept hostage playthings. The girl was a child, so she probably thought of them as people who would fill the gaps in her life - friends and family and companions - telling them that they would have a happy life together.

But no one was happy, and no one would want to be friends with a selfish and harmful person. How infuriating must it have been to see them love a fraction of her life that she didn't? Something that was a toxin which she'd expelled? ]

... There's a little bit more if you want to hear it.

[ Just enough to carry them the rest of the way, he thinks, now that they're this far. ]