"I ask, you answer," Victor said bluntly. "Otherwise, I'll delete everything you wrote about the Psychoanalytic Method and publish only what I wrote."
"I'm surprised you still want to keep it." Schiller was equally blunt. "Do you really think you can force a mind reader to answer your questions?"
"Then can you sense how anxious I am?"
Schiller seemed somewhat hesitant, as if he could not be sure. Victor continued, "Then let me put it another way. If you don't answer, I'll embellish every part you wrote about the Psychoanalytic Method, while lavishly praising it in the narration. Then, when it's published, I'll specifically thank you by name for inspiring me. That way, you can say goodbye to your identity as an ordinary person forever."
Schiller squeezed his eyes shut. "I'm starting to wonder if I made some bad friends."
"You entered Hugo's mindscape, didn't you?"
"Then you think too highly of Hugo. He wouldn't dare let me in. He just used some kind of hallucination machine, like the one the Mad Hatter used before."
"What kind of hallucination did he make you experience?"
"Very boring. He probably just switched our positions. He became Gotham's renowned professor, while I was a criminal, a prisoner, and a vagrant..."
With a bang, the freeze gun's trigger was pulled again. The table beside them froze over. As the ice melted, Victor said expressionlessly, "This time, he'd better die quickly enough. Otherwise, he'd better forget about ever dying."
"I'm not some moral paragon. So it did me no harm at all. I lived the same life in different hallucinations, and while I was at it, I dealt with Hugo."
"While you were at it?"
"I don't remember whether I told you this before. When I was young, someone got some leverage on me and