"My Plan." As if that explained everything. Or anything.
"What plan? To make more dwarves and flying ornaments?" Another few steps closer to the gun. Suddenly there was a loud cracking noise. For a minute Reggie thought that she had shot him, but it turned out to be the radio overloading, and igniting into flames. The woman seized the Jacket off the ground, revealing the complete shape of Reggie's shotgun, and used it to beat out the flames. For a second, the music got even loud, and then there was a horrible squeal, and complete silence.
"Damn, that always happens!!" She swore. "Stupid powercores always overload the wiring. Wish I had a stepdown transformer."
While she was distracted with the electrical fire, Reggie decided to act, before it was too late. It seemed that everytime he met a cute chick, she ended up using a flying cuisinart and trying to suck the wrong head. He lunged for his shotgun, broke it open and stuffed two shells inside. Before he was able to swing the barrel towards the woman, however, she squinted at him, and the gun wrenched itself out of his hands, and flew though the air towards her. She opened one hand, caught it easily, and tossed it atop the remains of his radio.
The woman looked at his bandaged hand, which had now begun bleeding again. "I have injurted you. I am sorry. But I cannot permit you to destroy this construct. It is too important for the operation of my plan that it continue to live."
"This.... construct?" Reggie winced as he pressed on his wrist to slow the bleeding. "What in God's name are you? One of the Tall Man's creatures?"
"No, I am not a human who has been altered or recruited by the one you call the Tall Man. In fact, I'm not human at all." "Really?" You could have fooled him. "Then what are you, exactly?"
"I'm Or'b."
"Or'b" Great. Get one question answered and there were a hundred more mysteries to solve. "And who or what is an Or'b?" The woman smiled. "You may call me Lucy Ashton. It is what Jebadiah named me. And as for Or'b, it is a creature that lives in this world. But it is very different from life as you know it. In fact, you should not properly consider it to be alive at all.
She waved her arms at the brick red dunes and blood red sky. "This whole world exists on the other side of that barrier which you call death. Does this astonish you? Well, I imagine it would astonish one of your Earthly fish to know that there was life above the water as well as below it. It certainly astonished Jebediah when he learned of it. In fact, it is part of what caused him to become what he now is."
"He came here! I remember Mike telling me about it." A wave of sadness seized him. Would he ever see Mike again? "Yes. You should know that the laws of nature are somewhat different here than they are on your side of the barrier. What you call matter is somewhat... congealed. It lacks the ability to perform certain reactions such as those necessary to evolve into life. Energy here, however, being denser than energy in your world can sometimes become life, of a sort. Such as Or'b. Being on this side of the barrier, it is not truly alive, but it is mind." Suddenly Lucy scowled. "A very limited sort of mind. It is a computer. It is an idiot savant. It is extraordinarily good at logic, but lacking in qualities which require imagination, such as morality, judgement, and emotion."
"But you said you're Or'b. You're just as solid as I am. Where did you come from?"
"I will get to that soon." Lucy gazed up at something Reggie was unable to see. "When Or'b appeared in this world, it spent several million years contemplating various forms of number theory. It had no reason to expect or wish that it would ever do anything different. However, one day something different did happen."