 Which relationship best describes the dynamic between the prisoners and the figures controlling them?
Their captors had no idea of how a woven design should behave. Eudalia had been a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and brought through. It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven walls of the roofless chamber. Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. Somehow it brings things closer...." This was so with all of their foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell, living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.
 The prisoners serve as entertainment for the figures, who seem to have made a game out of snatching up humans and manipulating their thoughts and behaviors.
 The prisoners are being groomed to serve as future collaborators in an intergalactic sex trafficking stint, carried out through the fourth dimension.  The prisoners serve as entertainment for the figures, who seem to have made a game out of snatching up humans and manipulating their thoughts and behaviors.  The prisoners have committed some sort of Earthly crime, and their punishment -- in order to avoid the death penalty -- is to spend a sentence in a labor camp operated by the figures.  The prisoners have volunteered to be part of the figures' experiment for a specific time period, under the agreement that they will be returned to Earth in the condition they left it.