Cost of themselves, you say. [ Sholmes perches on the top rail of a waist-high fence, smoking his pipe and watching Beatrix experiment with her barriers. It's yet another new form of dreamotion, but then again, everyone he's met has had their own unique spin. Some new application. ] The way you say it, if you conjure too many of those shields at once, you might be rendered immaterial. Poof! Do we know that for a fact, General?

[ He taps the toe of his boot on the lower rail of the fence. His questions are honest enough; he genuinely doesn't know how to isolate and define the constituent matter of dreams, if it can even be done at all. ] Is dreamotion not unlike a bodily humor—blood, bile, et cetera—replenished over time?