A Manifestation looks like the thought that made it, as clearly as the thought was clear, and is always a little unfinished. A chair may have three legs; a thought of a dragon may make a dragon of smoke. Their surfaces show the medium they were made from: drawn things keep pencil lines, painted things smell of wet oil and leave smears, things made of sound shimmer like ribbons in the air. A half-made Manifestation flickers like a candle about to go out, and a finished one glows softly from within.

They exist only in the Studio and only for as long as they last there. Their number depends on how many minds are at work in it, and on how well those minds are governed.

A Manifestation behaves as it was imagined. One made to build builds; one made of anger is angry. Unintended ones, made of stray boredom, fear, or spite, behave like the feeling that made them, and a moment’s fear can make something that hunts its maker. They have no will beyond the thought they carry, but that thought can be strong.

They can do what they were imagined doing, within the limits of the matter and energy the Studio had to make them from, which is why a small room cannot hold a great beast for long.

They begin at a thought and decay fast if they are not finished or approved by their maker: a half-done painting fades to grey, a half-built machine rusts in moments. A finished Manifestation lasts, and what is carried out of the Studio keeps the form it was given.

Artists use them as hands and tools. The danger is the overflow, when a traveller imagines too much or too wildly and the room fills with what their mind could not keep in.

Tales of the Studio grow in the telling into tales of artists who painted a lover and lived with her. Others hold that every Manifestation is alive and suffers when it fades; what fades is matter returning to what it was, and whether a thought-made thing can suffer is not known.