Sixteen cycles? Was that counting jaunts, or how many times they'd played the game?

And to tell the truth, finally didn't sound all that better to Matthew. It all sounded very, well, final. All things ended. But it didn't make the ending pleasant.

"That's not enough. We would love nothing more than to see this game end, yes. We would go home. But if what your...colleagues...have been telling the others is true, one of you is going to get to reflect themselves throughout reality. Which is, mind you, still a pretty vague statement, because what does a reality with more of Empress or Tower reflected in it actually look like? What does a universe with more finality look like? Maybe the answer to that question is simple to you, but sorry, I've still just got a fleshy lump of brain cells to work with, and imagining and a potentially completely altered reality is just a bit beyond me."

"You want this to end? Fine. But what comes after? That's what we want to know. Because whatever you do is going to have consequences beyond just all of us going home."