"You're a psychologist?"
Shade asked curiously.
"I can only be considered a scholar. Let's begin."
Richard said. Shade nodded. The album's cover was a hand-painted landscape with nothing noteworthy about it. Opening to the first page, Shade looked at the strange painting where black, purple, and white intertwined, while the blocks of color constantly wriggled and exchanged hues. After hesitating, he said:
"The first one: eyes."
Richard made a note in his notebook with a pencil.
"Please continue."
The second painting was even more abstract. Hundreds of eyes of all sizes densely covered a mottled black background. Those eyes kept blinking, enough to drive anyone with trypophobia mad. Shade forced himself to stare for a while. Since he had already used "eyes" as an answer, he barely managed to spot another shape within them:
"Butterfly."
The third painting became a colorful butterfly, fragmented and filling the entire image against a colorful background, its wings marked with abstract eye patterns.
The butterfly looked as though it had been forcibly torn apart, and the fine fuzz and antennae depicted on its body were still trembling.
"Beauty violently torn apart."
He made this answer a little more complicated.
In the fourth painting, irregular blood-red bands divided a pitch-black background in two, and the bands swayed up and down.
"Tail."
He answered one question after another. When he turned to the thirteenth page, it happened to be the last one. He had already seen all kinds of bizarre, unsettling patterns, so when the final image showed a huge moon in a starry sky, the normal scene actually surprised him a little.
"The last one. A Silver Moon. Yes, Silver Moon."
"Is it over?"
Richard asked. He nodded and took back the album Shade handed over.
"Different people see different content and different numbers of