Besides the lever and all the buttons, there were those squares to contend with.
The object's artistic rendering made it all the more tangled, and the number grunted as it struggled to unwind the moist netting from it.
At least the cash register was still moving, even made a sound.

The number paused, pulling back briefly when the stranger began to twist its polygonal shapes around, managing to both untangle and twist itself up in the netting all at once.
Fascinating...it had forgotten what some of these, er, more painted persons could do.
...It had forgotten even the word for them, assuming there were any.

Golly, how long HAD it been in reality?
It simply lost track of the time.

As it turned its polygons around, the number began to pull and lift at the net to try and help it along, carefully eyeing the tangles and tossing them aside with each turn.
The squids continued to bounce and slap away at the stone as the two worked to get rid of the knots and tangles.

The number sat back when all was finally said and done, tossing the net aside and pulling the lamp over--dragging some net with it, until it untangled THAT thing, too.

It pushed itself upright and began to swing the lamp the around, pacing the floor in search of something interesting, something that WASN'T just a flat piece of stony ground.
After a moment something poked into the circle of light, and the number stole closer for a better look.

There was old wood and dusty silver, carefully lain together in a straight line...a rail?
It followed it for a short ways in both directions.
On the first try the rails ended in a series of frayed copper wires, while along the other way they stretched for a good distance, before the number itself felt the need to return, just in case the cash register wasn't quite up to bouncing yet.

"Guess we got dragged elsewhere," said the number, with a mixture of curiosity and excitement lacing its tone.
It was finally somewhere different, after all, some place that WASN'T the charcoal town or an endless expanse of chalk desert and ink ocean.
It wondered if whatever had dragged them down here was still around.
Save for the dripping of ink from their bodies, which didn't seem to echo in the slightest, there was no indication of anything else.

It pointed to the rail.
Probably led SOMEwhere, it figured --and hopefully not back to the town.
"Can you walk?"

After a moment, the number reformed itself into something of a more human shape, hooked the lantern around its waist, and lifted the net full of squid, slinging it over its shoulders, and using the empty net to tie it under and around the paired arms like some sort of weird backpack.
If it wasn't going to leave the register behind, then why anything else?
It was a bit disappointed that no fishing rods had fallen in with them--or the boat!
What would they do if they found a river of ink, or a puddle of water?

It was ready to follow the rails with the object trailing after it, or pick the cash register up and carry it around should it find itself unable to move very well.

Was it a cave?
Or perhaps a mine?

The narrow rails seemed to go on for a good, long way.
Eventually, the number gave up on legs and a stable form entirely, and settled for drifting onwards as a cloud of smoke, the net full of squid falling into the upper layers of its shadowy figure, and the lantern held out on a dense tendril of black.

It thought something sounded different in the darkness, but couldn't quite pick out that it was the register's own rhythmic footsteps that had altered their beat.
At some point, however, it did manage to catch a slight, more noticeable shift in the object's steps.

The number came to a pause, the smoke winding about around itself, swinging the lantern around.
Hm...something definitely seemed different.
It turned and twisted about, the smoke drifting apart as it extended its senses outwards, moving the lantern this way and that.

Let's see...HERE, the lantern's light shone stark, but over THERE it didn't seem so bright.
Hm...oh!

"Hey, look!" said the number at last, motioning towards a light separate from the lantern's own.

It was off to the side from the rails, bright but seeming a bit distant, and the number hesitated.
If they left the rails now, then they might not be able to return to them, even if, say, they moved only in straight lines, or left the lantern behind so that they wouldn't lose sight of it.

Surreality had a way about itself when it came to making things difficult.
Eh...was that what pulled the number so to reality?
Ehh....

EHHH WHO CARES

The number, keeping an eye on the object so that it wouldn't be left all by its lonesome, began to move off towards the light.
It wanted to head elsewhere, didn't it?
Perhaps the rails didn't even have an end, so screw 'em!

Holding the lantern out, a wall eventually came into view to the side of them.
It was stone, but the stone was clearly artificial, carefully carved out and then piled up in a series of bricks.
It led in the direction of the light, which was slowly growing brighter, bigger, and revealing itself in a whole new light.

The number's senses drifted towards it.
There was a buzzing, humming noise, the light flickering every so often, casting a neon blue glow.
The smoke stretched itself forward, before suddenly springing back into a vaguely spherical form up ahead, where the light managed even to cast a thin, light shadow upon the cavern floor.

It was a sign!
Hey...the number knew what this was!

It glanced back down and around, searching for the object, letting a crescent grin spread upwards across its shadow, moving itself aside so that the cash register could see.

The sign spelled out:

    ^
    |
И30B3VL##*
    |
    v

"Great, great," the number muttered to itself in its excitement.

The sign was placed beside a hole in the stone brick wall--a very dark and somewhat narrow hole, narrow enough that the average human would need to turn and sidle through it.
By the sign's light and that of the lantern, one could see that a carpet in a geometric pattern of blacks, blues, and reds began at the entrance, and continued to stretch on into the darkness.

Should it have spotted the object, it would make a gesture for the other to head into the tunnel.
"I don't know if you've been there before," the number would say, "but it's a sweet city."
FINALLY...: somewhere different!

...Assuming the sign wasn't lying, of course.

Cloud of smoke still, the splitting "grin" upon the number's shadow rotated to follow the cash register as it pinged and squeezed its way into the narrow corridor, swinging its lever out to take up the lantern from it.
The number followed after, keeping a firm hold on their little procession's middle, with the net of inky water-squirting squids taking up the rear.
It didn't take long at all for the darkness to surround them; save for the stony brick walls, there was nothing in sight, not even a ceiling.

For a few minutes of walking, the path would remain narrow, the carpet unchanged; but after those few minutes were up, the enclosing brick walls would appear to end, and the carpet's patterns would seem to gradually brighten in hue the further they ventured into the darkness, eventually coming to a point where the colors "popped" off the rug, even began to glow, although the light they produced was hardly any brighter than the lantern's.
The lines that made up the patterns would simply, and soon enough rise right off from the floor, and stepping through them would cause them to flicker in a haze of silent black noise, but otherwise hold little other effects.
The carpet, a solid black lighted only by the lantern and the lines by that point, remained at the same width as the narrow hall they'd come from, straight and stubborn upon its route.

Shining the light into the darkness that surrounded them would reveal nothing at all, and the number, who began to drift a little as the lines would allow the pair to maintain a somewhat greater distance without losing sight of the other, would tell the register not to step off the rug--at least if it wanted to see the city up ahead.
As the number slowly widened the gap between the register and itself, at some point it would soon come bouncing back into closer proximity, lest a black space be left between the two, allowing the rug to subtly shift its angle should it so desire, and thus send the duo splitting off into two entirely different locations.

Should all go well, eventually the walls would return around them, appearing up ahead as suddenly as they had disappeared.
"Man," said the number, once the walls had closed back in around them, "long tunnel."

The carpet didn't return to normal, and in fact the black rug underneath them would appear to disappear entirely, in that its surface no longer seemed to interact with any of the lights around it, leaving only the colored lines of blue and red, twisting and turning together, glitching out whenever they were touched.
In fact, the wall wasn't the same anymore, either; it was brick, but no longer stone, and, in fact, the bricks themselves could technically not be seen; instead, it was only the mortar that was visible, as dim white lines crisscrossing against the darkness.
Although the light of the lantern and glowing floor lines would neither be absorbed nor reflected by the apparently invisible bricks, they were very much as real as the wall from before, preventing anything but the most incorporeal of spirits from passing through them.

Entering this new hall, there would be a gradual slope to the ground now, no more steep than a long ramp built for wheelchairs.
At the end of the hall the slope would flatten out into a three foot by three foot square, and there would be a door right on its edge; like the bricks, the door itself seemed simply to be yet another part of the darkness, with only its doorknob and hinges visible as dull silver outlines--not even colored in--and a bright collage of vivid lights shining in through the crack at its bottom.

The number would lean itself above and over the cash register to turn the door's knob and push it open, revealing a wireframe city in glowing neon lines upon an empty expanse of darkness; it was, for the most part, a modern-looking, medium-sized city, and was structured in much the same manner.
Quiet music, like distant jazz, drifted through the air, and, if one pressed an ear to them, would find that it seemed to be coming from the very lines themselves.
A sparse array of stars rested in the sky above, tiny and very slowly marching onward, the same as the Earth's own night sky would; there were also "stars" that seemed to be more colorful and moving faster than the others in groups of four to six, aircraft that soared above the rooftops at different altitudes.

"By the way," the number would say as they stepped out onto a sidewalk of white-edged borders and cracks, its current gaseous form readily refracting the spacious kaleidoscope of ambient lighting, "where ARE you from?"
After the answer back in the graphite town's seaside district, it simply assumed that the cash register wasn't from that town or its surrounding areas at all.

The number had almost been dreading asking the object any more questions after the initial how-do-you-dos; turning numbers into letters wasn't exactly its forte, for it was an old dialect that it hadn't had any use for in a long, long time, and so it was rather rusty on those matters.
The smoke drifted close to the sidewalk's "invisible" surface, a small nub reaching forward, the tip glowing silvery white as it prepared having to physically transliterate, just in case the register's answer wasn't a simple single worded one.

The single lane streets, which were completely unmarked, were alive with vehicles built of lines themselves, each one passing by at regular intervals; the sidewalks, meanwhile, were crowded on only one side of the street with similarly line- and wireframe-based citizens in a variety of shapes in either two, three, or four dimensions, from animal or human to abstract and geometrical.
The opposite sidewalk was completely empty, which just so happened to be the one that they had arrived on.

Heheh...the number subdued a chortle, suppressing a bit of sadness at the realization that it had broken the object's cheerful reverie before it could even break out into a full-on dance number, leapin' and-a flyin' and-a clickin' around like some polygonal disco ball.
The stranger seemed to struggle for a moment with answering the question, and, in the course of it, the number found itself unsurprised.
Origins were often difficult for a surreal to pinpoint.
Why, if the number itself had been asked--well, but that was besides the point!

The glowing appendage was pushed against the sidewalk as it leaned forward, smoke writhing just short of the register's polygons.
It was pointing at something...a logo!
Interesting--the number was still for a moment, trying to memorize the color, the name, the shape.
It could be something fake, or it could be something real, something it could one day track down to the source.

The extended column bobbed as though in a nod, before suddenly pulling back on itself, retreating into a dense smoky sphere.
The white light began to extend around it, and, with a leap and a spin, the number landed upon the sidewalk as something else entirely, something more suited for this neon city; grown four tall legs, pointed ears, and a docked tail, the number had turned itself into a figure not unlike that of a great dane.
Its body was completely empty, comprised merely of a few simple lines to draw out the polygonal shapes it now took on; lines that were at first white and glowing, but soon dimmed to a reflective black, allowing the ambient lights to once more refract all around it.
Tied around a line that separated abdomen and neck, the net of squids fell right through its back, dragging across the ground.

The framed dog nosed the sidewalk at the object's "feet", cropped ears offering up a happy twitch.
"Why don't you pick where we go next?" it suggested.
The number had been leading the way this whole time (save the tunnel, which was really only [sorta] one way anyhow), and a bit of Russian roulette with this rustic register didn't sound too bad of an idea; in fact, it was rather curious as to where the stranger might go, what it might choose or find.

Had it a brow or lips at that moment, the number might have quirked them up when the cash register hopped, pinged, popped a ten in its display.
Its head swung around briefly, wondering what had happened to prod such a reaction, but seeing nothing of particular note.

Well, no matter; the object was off!
The lined canine loped after the register, ears pricked to the music and eyeless head watching the polygonal vehicles as they passed silently through the singing streets.
Once in a while its nose tilted upwards to stare at a passing aircraft, all the while thinking in the back of its mind that it really needed to try one of those sometime, pick a random one and find out just where it might end up.

Although it was familiar with the city, the route they had taken to get there was not such a recognizable one; the neighborhood the door had happened to open out into was not one that it knew well, or perhaps at all.
Gaze casually scanned the surroundings on occasion during their fast walk through the city, gradually forming a mental map in its head of all the twists and turns the register took.

After a while it realized that the music was growing louder, and it seemed as though the second that recognition took place, was the same second that all the noise suddenly stopped, and their footsteps stopped with it.

The silence was deafening.

The number let its gaze drift ahead, staring at the display of lights as they appeared to be refracted through an invisible lens.
Ahead of them, the buildings seemed to have disappeared, leaving room for an enormous expanse of empty space.
The light bent around its edges, blurred, twisted into drifting, shifting shapes.

Was it the edge of the dream?
It hadn't known that this city even had one!
Who knows where it might go.

The number gazed at the scene with perhaps less awe, but no less wonder than the cash register.
After a few moments it briefly turned its nose down, speaking to the register with an inwards grin;
"After you."

The doberman's reflective lines offered up a thoughtful, wondering flicker of black noise when the beyond-the-fringes seemed to , catching the briefest glimpses of it and the apparent tremble that the cash register appeared to give up.

It watched as the object began to back away, waiting until--wait...hey!
The canine stepped alongside the edges, slowing as it neared where the register had dropped out of sight, toes feeling for an invisible lip, eyes searching for--uh, well, somethin' different or off.
Despite its careful sidling, the number wasn't free from falling itself.

It gave a sharp bark as it, too, slipped into the hole, splatting into a spray of glassy obsidian shards once it hit ground--or the register, should it be unable to move out of the way.
It would take a few seconds, but the number would soon enough pull itself together, the shards retreating into a dense sphere as it returned to the smudged smoke that it had elected to wear throughout its duration in the graphite town, swirling around and extending planes of itself to feel around and see just what was up--or down.
A split second after it started, it became suddenly still, the smoke drifting in slow, listless whorls.

The number fell silent, staring at the curious, varying reflections of the polygonal object, and the complete lack of its own.

After a while the number jolted back, and turned to follow the object.
Once more the net of squids was being dragged behind it, an item to which it finally began to wonder why it was bothering to haul it around in the first place.
Well...why stop now?

The smoke gradually closed the grown distance between the cubic entity and itself, watching how the world developed with every step they took.
Strict silence turned into a meandering quietness.
The jagged walls smoothed out into clear mirrors, and then to decorative wooden reliefs.
Polished magony to either side, marble floor lined by crimson carpet underneath.
The light grew brighter until finally the corridor opened up into a great chamber, the ceiling so high that even a giraffe might have to strain its neck to see.

Like the rumbling hiss of a horizon ocean, there was a muffled wash of human-seeming voices echoing beyond, or perhaps within, the walls of the vast chamber.

The number stared around, gazing upwards at the twisted metallic trees and their many thousands of bulbs, finding itself, far from the first time that evening (or whatever time it was, who ever knew in this strange world?), holding something of an awe-inspired wonder for the spectacles of this surreality, built on by ancient memories it had long since forgotten.

Drifting short of the uneven ground, eyes caught by those trees, the number wasn't exactly paying attention to what path it picked (nor did it think to care); for the most part it followed the object's steps, but would take shortcuts when it could--if it could.
The poor squids had to endure a bumpy ride, the net itself having to hope it wouldn't get caught on anything and rip apart.