User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Chapter 382: Alegria, Review./@comment-24277053-20140428202858/@comment-7418318-20140429075759

I agree that both abilities are variations of the same thing, but I've been thinking of Cube as a living being (or something close to a living being) from the start. That it started shaking, maybe in excitement, from Face being unsealed further strengthened this believe.

Furthermore Mard Geer only noticed Lucy wasn't sucked in at the same time as the others due to her magic power. If he was controlling the whole curse, shouldn't he have been aware of his failure to capture Lucy right away, rather than needing to feel her magic?

He also said that the Cube was a big prison, not that he just made it into one, which further leaves me to believe that Cube had this ability already embedded into it, before Mard Geer cast this curse.

It's quite likely that Mard Geer was the one to create Cube and gave it this ability, but I think he did that long before the chapter and only activated it's dormant powers now.

While it's entirely possible that Mard Geer has the ability to give (probably temporary) life to inanimate matter and had this absorbtion-process running on auto-pilot (so to say) without controlling it and thus didn't notice Lucy not being sucked in, I still think that my theory is more likely.

I also thought of the possibility of Mard Geer and Cube actually being a single being, but then Kyouka wouldn't have needed to approach the throne room to speak to him, so that's extremely unlikely.