"It's been a long night, Muplassta," sighed Cruella, as he stood almost expectantly at the end of the vast corridor in the penthouse. He was smart enough to know what that meant without pushing it. There was always his wife. He smiled, and moved off down the pulsating, addripping space.

Cruella waved her hand, the multiplastered door slid open, and she drifted into the omni-ad suite: the glossiest most tasteful advertisements, everywhere as far as the eye could see in all directions. At last she could bathe in it all. She dropped her portfolio with the gold inscribed mousears onto the bedside table, all smothered with chocolate and sleeping draught ads.

She undid the doublemouse eared clasp to her cloak, and was just pulling it from around her shoulders when she caught a glimpse of her face in something.

She shrieked, out loud. "What the Waltdamn is going on here!!!!!No space, I specifically said, NO SPACE!!!!!!!! What the Waltdamn am I paying for!!!!!!!I'll kill this hotel!!!!!"

She saw then that there was a small damaged peeled away spot in the wall corner where someone had brushed against it, and a tiny fraction of blank shiny metallic space had peeped through the ubiquitous wallpaper of shrieking ads.

That was why she loved Trascedaria: there was no place like it anywhere. Every possibility of emptiness, of blank space, and especially of mirrors was covered with advertising. But still these stupid things would happen.

She could not stop herself. She tried not to, but she could not stop herself. She came up to the broken corner of the wall, and looked at her reflection.

Was it....was it....you could almost....but then she couldn't see it, and then she could.

She hated herself for doing it, but she couldn't stop. She sighed, and went to the addraped closet and slid out her suitcase. She reached down deep into a pouch, and pulled out a pocket mirror. She hated this, but she couldn't stop.

Relentlessly, she turned on all the lights in the room, as high as they would go, high intensity lights, blazing everywhere. The colours of the advertising, the letters shrieked and howled, beckoning at ever higher intensities to unexplored pleasures, unthinkable, unavoidable.

In the almost blinding crossfire of light, Cruella de Villeneuve sat down in a chair, and looked into the pocket mirror.

Yes, she thought in horror, yes, you can see it. Or can you? When she tilted her head just so, yes you could see the hairline of the scar down her cheek.

She held the mirror in her hand, shaking, looking. Maybe it was because she was getting old. No, no, that wasn't it. They had said that some things were impossible, she knew that, but still! No. Nothing would work. She remembered when Roy 23 had first got her out of that Aldebaran "Place" and fallen in love with her, he had been so sweet, old, but sweet, and when he had said she could have anything in the galaxy and he meant it, and she had touched the scar on her cheek. And good old Roy, he had done his best. Those 50 Terran baby girls they carved up to get the genetic meat out of, all that. And the Genicians had done their best. But as the Head Genician said, sadly, just before Roy had had his body lifted in a particularly gruesome fashion, the Cybanians had been at it a long time and knew what they were doing. There was some amber acid they poured on the slaving knife that just dug it in too deep so no one could ever change the brand or hide it.

But....but, Cruella thought to herself, the Genicians had done good work, the babies were good meat, they said so, you had to know to know, no one could tell. No one. No one except her.

She sat in the blazing blinding light that would not, could not blind her, no matter how hard she tried. She sat in the brightness, stroking her face, her beautiful face, feeling for the scar that she could not feel. Or could she? She rubbed her hand against her face, over and over again, and over and over again. She knew that she just had to let the fit pass, that it could take an hour or more. On she rubbed.

And off in the distance, as accompaniment, she could just hear, circling in infinite unconsummateable desire, all the rest of Trascedaria settling down once more to squeeze the last drops out of another night's glittering endless revelry.