- Location
- Actually pretty lost
On the one hand, I can totally understand the benefit of cutting down plotlines to only leave the best bits, and an author's dissatisfaction with their work not measuring up to their own expectations.
On the other hand:
Psychoprotective (Youjo Senki/Psychonauts)
- Thread starter Requiem_Jeer
- Start date
On the other hand:
As Deathbunnies said, we're here every time you drop a new chapter. I did notice the change in quality, though honestly it's not as bad as you seem to think and certainly still fun and worth reading.
You're still dropping in new lore, new scenarios and you're showing off how Tanya is handling it. Perhaps she's been a little slow on the uptake, but now with this discovery that's behind her and her paranoia can have a little more pull! (Or not, it's your story and I'll certainly be here either way!)
However you end it, I'm glad for the opportunity to have read it and seen where things ended up. You're doing well, and your audience is happy to have joined you for this adventure.
If it's almost over, then thank you for having us along for the ride! Please let us know if you have more stories in the future as well, or if there's any additional bits with Tanya and the Psychonauts.
Cheers!
You're still dropping in new lore, new scenarios and you're showing off how Tanya is handling it. Perhaps she's been a little slow on the uptake, but now with this discovery that's behind her and her paranoia can have a little more pull! (Or not, it's your story and I'll certainly be here either way!)
However you end it, I'm glad for the opportunity to have read it and seen where things ended up. You're doing well, and your audience is happy to have joined you for this adventure.
If it's almost over, then thank you for having us along for the ride! Please let us know if you have more stories in the future as well, or if there's any additional bits with Tanya and the Psychonauts.
Cheers!
- Location
- United States
And so the shoe finally drops for Tanya and she realizes the truth, albeit it took Rasputin blurting out classified knowledge to do so but, eh, he's said worse things. I will enjoy the coming schandenfreud that Tanya will experience when Raz finds out his Nono is a war criminal.
We Just Write
Blatantly Plural
- Location
- New England
- Pronouns
- Plural
Z: FINALLY!
Chapter 3.09
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
It makes perfect sense. Kidnap the head of the Psychonauts, swap the brains, and then use the Psychonaut's own classified information precautions against them.
Every little discrepancy and oddity was reviewed, and she could see the lines where he bluffed. He clearly had done his homework at least a little bit, or else he would have been tripped up by Tanya's unusually high security clearance compared to her rank.
How did he fake thinkerprints? Easy, he had a fake overlay made. The thinkerprint scanners were never as secure as they told people they were, because it was a LOT harder to gain access to the material for a copy then it would be for, say, a DNA related security measure. But with their access to his brain? Given the technology reported to be at the Rhombus of Ruin blacksite, it would have been simple.
Okay, so… there were a few things she needed to account for. First, Razputin. "Razputin, when I said, in your earshot, that I knew where Lucrecia was, why did you not ask about it?"
Razputin shuffled his feet. "He told me not to tell anyone about what I was looking for. He said that anyone could be a Deluginist spy. Even you. I was the only one who the Deluginists couldn't have gotten to, the only one he can trust."
Tanya sighed. "Did you think that Truman didn't know that I knew where she was?" Tanya asked rhetorically. Razputin looked confused. "That wasn't Truman, it was someone else's brain in his body."
"What!?" Lili shouted, panicked. "Where's my dad's brain!"
Ah, crap. She hadn't gotten around to thinking about that yet. "Well, the last place we know it was was within the Rhombus of Ruin." Tanya said, "So unless you just coincidentally smuggled it on the Pelican…"
Lili was staring right at 'Truman's lunchbox'. Which was found literally chained to Truman's unconscious body. "...Before this all started, when was the last time you knew your dad used that lunchbox?" Tanya asked.
"Day before I left for camp." Lili said immediately. So, less than a week.
…Damnit, she should have noticed how weird that was. She dug into her pocket. "I have the key right here." She said, jamming it straight into the keyhole. "Hm, kind of stuck…" After a small struggle with the lock, it opened up to reveal… a brain. "Lucky." Tanya said faintly, as she processed the caliber of the bullet she just dodged. From experience, she'd say that this felt like a 25mm 72-K Russy anti-air gun.
"Dad!" Lili shouted happily, tears flowing. She took the Psychoportal off the ground where it fell off of Ford and started to move it, but Tanya stopped her. "Hold on, that was just on the floor." Tanya said, "Use this one." She brought out her own, emphasizing the cleanliness aspect by taking out a packet of cleaning wipes and running it over the back surface, placing it gently on probably-Truman.
Okay, let's check out the damage.
---------------------------------
Truman's external mind was that of a jungle, with a heavily fortified compound in the middle of it. "This look right to you, Lili?" Tanya asked.
"...I've never actually been inside Dad's mind before." Lili admitted, but started to shout. "DAD! IT'S ME! I LOVE YOU!"
A carnivorous plant burst that looked vaguely like a velociraptor out from the foliage, but Tanya snatched up Lili and used pyrokinesis to destroy the plant, letting the burning debris pass through the space Lili formerly occupied. "Hm, it looks like he's not conscious anymore." Not unreasonable, given the hours of psychoisolation and total sensory deprivation. It didn't take that long for things like the passage of time to become… agonizing. Helmut's case was extreme, but this wasn't anything different from that.
"Okay, let's set things on fire, then!" Lili shouted, putting word to deed.
Wait… what was that crashing noise? Acting on instinct, Tanya held onto Lili tighter and burst through the burning foliage, right before a giant root system slammed into the place they used to be. "Looks like it's an arborsaurus." Tanya mused, making up a name for the long-necked tree dinosaur. She manifested a giant telekinetic fist to bat away the razor-sharp flower at the end of a long stem that constituted the neck and head of the long-necked dinosaur-plant fusion. "Okay Lili, we need to find a way to wake your father up. Any ideas?"
Lili scrambled onto Tanya's back and wrapped her arms and legs around Tanya's neck and chest. "Go deeper!" She suggested.
It was the obvious answer, but that didn't make it any less viable. The outer layers of psychic defenses could be rather insensitive, blindly lashing out without much perception of what it was attacking. Deeper in, the defenses would need to be more precise, and thus more discerning.
It wasn't that difficult to reach the fort inside the jungle, and the gates grew over with vines and bulbs, easily destroyed and-
EUGH!
---------------------------------
Tanya blinked as she was propelled back into her mind. "Did he… weaponize smelling salts?" Tanya asked incredulously. It was so simple… and genius.
"Dad's got the best mental defenses in the world!" Lili said proudly, even as she massaged her own nostrils. "That stuff was strong."
Mary's wheezing laughter died down. "You actually failed?" She asked, grinning. "Guess you can't do everything, huh?"
Tanya snorted, rubbing her nose. "Well, I'd say that's pretty definitively Truman, which is all we needed to confirm." She said, closing the brain vault. "We need to confront the fake." But first… "Let's go to Otto's workshop for tools."
"Okay!" Razputin said excitedly.
"You are still on thin ice, Razputin." Tanya said warningly. "Keep in mind, the only reason I let you come was because Truman told me to… and that wasn't Truman."
"Oh…" Razputin said despondently.
"I want you where I can see you, though." Tanya said, "I'm tired of you finding trouble the instant I can't."
"Okay…" Razputin said, trudging along as Tanya walked to the transit station.
---------------------------------
They didn't stop in Otto's workshop for long: just enough to get Truman's mind in a brain ball, juiced up with fresh nutrient fluid with extra caffeine to help him wake up. On top of that, Tanya grabbed some super sneezing powder, put the psychoportal that Mary had in Otto's junk drawer, and most importantly: a funnel.
Thus armed, they went straight to Truman's office. After waving her entourage to stay back, she plastered a militaristic expression on her face then marched into the office. "Sir! There's been a complication." She barked out with crisp military cadence, saluting.
Now, if this was the real Truman, he would be looking at her with a confused expression at best. This Truman instead smiled, pleased at the display. "Is Ford restored?" He asked.
"Negative!" Tanya replied, "All known instances of Ford Cruller have been eliminated. We suspect he fled, seeking the subject of his obsession."
"Obsession?" Not-Truman asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Lucrecia, sir." Tanya clarified, "You know, the love of his life before she…" Tanya twirled her finger around her ear, condensing a little bit of water from the air and making it into a snake.
"Do you know where he's going?" Not-Truman asked, "Was where she was in his mind?"
Tanya pretended to be confused. "...Sir? He can teleport. He doesn't need to know where she is to go to her. He just goes through astral space."
"Damnit!" Not-Truman exclaimed, smashing his fist on his desk. "He was the only one who knew!"
"Sir, you were the only one who knew." Tanya lied.
Not-Truman snarled. "I told you not to test me, Dosva!" He shouted, standing up and walking up to Tanya, looming his height. "I know damn well that isn't true!"
"That's correct, sir." Tanya replied, seizing the man's shirt and dragging him down to eye level. "Because I'm the only one who knows. Which the real Truman knew."
Not-Truman's eyes widened as he realized the position he was in. He attempted to reach into a pocket, but Tanya telekinetically seized his hands. "You're not even a psychic." Tanya said, "That's why you used so much psilirium in your plot: you're immune. It explains all of the strange readings, and the non-psychic mental defense."
Quickly, she searched the man's pockets, finding a small jewelry box that contained a sizable chunk of psilirium. "Here it is." She snapped the insulated box shut, still protected by her anti-telepathy shield. Finding nothing else of note, she fished out the sneezing powder. "This is your last chance to cooperate." Tanya said, "Who are you, and why did you do this? Where's Hollis?"
"Unhand me, peasant!" Not-Truman said, his cadence shifting to a different, whinier tone.
"Suit yourself." Tanya said, holding her breath and cracking open the container of sneezing powder.
The instant the man caught a whiff, Not-Truman's face twisted as he tried to relieve his nostrils, but his hands were still restrained by Tanya's telekinesis. After a few seconds, he sneezed, launching his brain out his nose and impacting the wall wetly.
Quickly, they put Truman's brain back in his head (a task Tanya delegated to the children) and put the infiltrator's brain into the brain ball. Tanya ran the boot sequence of the diagnostic tools, as she had made sure to grab the latest model that had them. "Non-psychic confirmed, but with enough mental defenses that the biography's auto-fill feature isn't working. Lovely." Otto put in significant effort into improving his laboratory's record-keeping after Helmut's recovery, and a small feature that displayed a basic form with fields like 'name' and 'mental integrity' was one of them. Unfortunately, that feature was not tuned to be an effective interrogation tool.
"Dad! Wake up!" LIli said, slapping her father's face. Truman remained comatose, breathing steadily. "Tanya! I need smelling salts!"
Tanya tossed the ten year old the requested chemicals. Reaching out with her mind, she spoke with the imposter. "Okay, so now that you're completely at my mercy, will you be revealing your plot willingly, or will we be stripping them from you neuron by neuron?"
"I command you to return me to my body!" The imposter demanded. "If I am to be taken prisoner, I must be treated with all due respect afforded to my station. It's in that box right over there."
"I'm vaguely aware of the niceties given to diplomatic prisoners." Tanya replied, "-but I'll need a name and title if you're claiming diplomatic immunity. Without that, you get the due of an enemy spy."
"I am Gzar Gristol Malik of Grulovia, peasant!" Gristol thought imperiously. The brain ball registered the name for him.
Hm. If he wasn't lying, and while he could be, she wasn't terrible at sniffing out lies in telepathic conversation, so she was leaning 'honest', he might actually have political asylum. It helped that she was well aware that a man by that name and rank was associated with the Deluginists.
"...Alright, I'll play your game." Tanya said slowly. "You'll be remanded to our most comfortable secure cell and I'll let Truman decide what to do with you." Was it convenient that she could pass the buck to not only her superior, but also the man the prisoner personally wronged? Yes. Will it end well for Gristol? No. No one uses the rules against her and gets away with it.
Besides, she's not paid enough to make decisions that have political implications. She went to the designated box, and opened it up. "...You know, when I first heard the name 'Nick Johnsmith', I immediately thought that it was a name a foreigner would make up." Tanya said idly, broadcasting the thought to her captive. "I now have zero faith in the Psychonauts' internal investigators."
Indeed, the body of Nick Johnsmith, senior mailroom clerk, was within the box. "TeeVee?" The body asked. A common symptom of brainlessness was, surprisingly, being in a complete coma. Due to the fact that brains in this world functioned on a three-part system, with the two normal hemispheres and an overdeveloped brainstem that held some redundant functions, a brainless body was capable of activity up to the level of a particularly lethargic toddler: a vocabulary of a few dozen words at most, typically a series of wants, and an instinctive understanding of them needing other people to care for them. It wasn't a perfect comparison, but it got the idea roughly across. Child-proofing the body's surroundings was essential.
Intriguingly, there was actually a negative correlation between psychic strength and the functionality of the brainless body. Tanya never lost her brain, but Mary wanted to know what it was like, and when they tried it her body was particularly helpless.
"Hm, looks like you kept it clean, at least." Tanya commented, although the compliment was begrudging. "Getting it shipped to Truman's office was smart."
"Of course, it was my Master Plan!" Gristol boasted. Hm, she's never played both the good cop and the bad cop against the same person before. Well, with such a small gap of time between them anyway.
After checking the spy's pockets for any weapons, Tanya brought the ol' funnel back out. Why brains could be inserted this way was beyond her, but at least this world balanced how easy it was to lose one's brain with it being equally simple to put it back.
Ah, she almost forgot. Tanya put her fingers to her temple and called the switchboard. "This is Agent Sawyer on switch, make it snappy." was the gruff tone paired with the smell of unsmoked tobacco and the feeling of well-oiled leather.
"Caught the enemy infiltrator." Tanya reported, sending her own authentication scents, "It was Nick."
"Great, so I gotta talk to Truman, then?" Agent Sawyer asked.
"No, he was Truman. Swapped brains. They're back now. What I need from you is to-" Tanya immediately started speaking out loud, so Gristol will hear this, "- revoke Nick's permissions and flag him an enemy spy, in case he escapes. Authorize lethal force," Tanya went back to purely telepathic communication. "-if you can manage it."
"With pleasure." Agent Sawyer replied, transmitting his wide grin. "Always thought he was a pansy. What was it that Truman called him?"
"An obsequious lickspittle, I believe." Tanya sent. It was to Truman's credit that despite having such a negative opinion of one of his employees, he didn't let that opinion extend to official action. Even if, coincidentally, it would have been for the best in this case.
"The boss man's got a way with words, he does. Sawyer out." The telepathic connection ended.
Pretending that what she said out loud was the only thing she said, Tanya turned back to the familiar aristocratic features of Nick or rather, Gristol. He was holding himself differently than the anxious people-pleaser that was his Nick Johnsmith persona, prouder and imperious. "If you're not secured and found anywhere by anyone, you die." Tanya said bluntly. She brought out her bundle of zip ties, always useful when dealing with wiring, and restrained Gristol's hands behind his back. "There, now those aren't exactly very secure, but no one's going to shoot you if you're wearing them and accompanied by a Psychonaut. Do you understand?" To his perception, Tanya's eyes glowed as she spoke, a bit of extra flair to her subtle hypnosis.
Gristol had paled, but nodded. If he took the time to think it through logically, the odds of finding one of the psychonauts that were both willing to resort to lethal force and were bad enough at nonlethal subdual that they couldn't capture him was vanishingly small. The odds of running into one of the psychonauts that were battle maniacs who eagerly used the most amount of force they were allowed to use was probably higher, but still not good.
But logical reasoning was for people who weren't hypnotized into compliance.
Truman had been hugging Lili while having a whispered conversation, both sets of eyes wet with tears. Tactfully ignoring that, she cleared her throat when their conversation paused. "Welcome back, sir. The perpetrator, Gristol Malik, is secure." She telepathically transmitted relevant details to him.
Truman scowled at Gristol. "Thank you, Tanya." He said, glancing at her before turning back to Gristol. "Now, what am I going to do with you?"
"Razputin, we're going." Tanya said, subtly tapping Lili on the shoulder and gesturing for her to follow.
"Yes ma'am!" Razputin said nervously. "Should we really leave them alone?"
"Even minutes out of a coma, Truman won't be in any danger from a thoroughly disarmed non-psychic." Tanya said assuredly.
"That wasn't what I was worried about…" Razputin said, but didn't slow down and followed her into the hallway into the Motherlobe proper.
---------------------------------
Still, there was one more Ford. Given how difficult the third to last one was, Tanya really didn't want to tackle what was probably Ford Cruller's full psychic strength alone. So… to Green Needle Gulch.
"We've got the Astralathe all ready to go." Otto said. The sane members of the Psychic Seven were seated around the large device, sitting on their bean bag chairs. "We just need Ford and Lucy."
"What's the Astralathe?" Razputin asked.
Otto grinned as he got the chance to brag. 'The Astralathe is my finest, most powerful invention." He summarized, "You may be familiar with the large psychic machines that the Psychonauts use to increase the potency and precision of their telepathic probes. Interrogations, meditation, etcetera."
"Like Sasha's brain tumbler?" Razputin asked.
"Exactly." Otto confirmed, "The Astralathe is the prototype to that technology, far more expensive. The only problem was, I made it too powerful. As it turns out, you pretty much never need to be able to toss six minds at the same problem in concert. It just causes problems."
"Cool…" Razputin said, smiling. "But wait, why are you going to use it?"
"Ford used the Astralathe to both break himself and to conceal Lucy's identity from herself." Tanya explained, "While I wouldn't say it's impossible to reverse it without the Astralathe, it'll be far safer to bring a similar level of force to bear, particularly because they'll need to secure the Maligula identity again after releasing it."
"Most importantly, the Astralathe has the strongest psychic restraints at our disposal." Compton added, "We'll need those for Lucy."
"Uh… one more thing:" Razputin asked, "Maligula cursed my family to die by water. Do you think you can, you know, break it with the Astralathe?" Oh, there's a good excuse.
"A curse?" Otto asked, confused. "You must be-"
"I am one hundred percent certain we can, Razputin." Tanya said, stepping forward and drawing attention. "In fact, while we get ready, you should bring your entire family over, from Nona to Queepie, so we can cure that curse of yours."
"Really?" Razputin asked, excited. "I'll go right away!"
"I'm going too!" Lili volunteered. Already meeting the parents? She works fast. Heh.
"Otto, authorize the use of the jet." Tanya requested. "They've met Mom, so go send her too. Get Dad to fly it. I'll call ahead."
Otto looked at her strangely, but after checking with his peers, he nodded back. "Alright, if you insist." He got on his psychic phone and started issuing orders.
After Razputin and Lili left into the tram, Helmut spoke first: "So, we gotta go get Lucy now, right?" He asked.
"Taken care of." Tanya said easily. "She'll be here in a few hours."
"When did you have time to do that?" Bob asked.
Of the group, Cassie was the first to connect the dots. "That boy is Lucy's family, isn't he?" She asked.
Tanya grinned. "What better way to keep Maligula contained than with induced hydrophobia?" She asked rhetorically. "Ford left her with family, convincing her that she was her own dead sister, to raise her nephew as her own son. Then he brought them to America, and the rest? Is history." Tanya's smile dimmed. "I've never confirmed, but I suspect that Ford's hypnosis became sort of… contagious. Lucy believed in the curse, and infected her family with the same suggestion with her own telepathy, turning their own hydrokinesis against them. It should be relatively simple to fix."
"That's clever." Helmut commented, "Getting Lucy over here without anyone suspecting a thing, because no one outside this room knows you're ever getting her."
"I have my moments." Tanya said humbly, "Now, I'd like some backup for Ford's final mind fragment. It'll have his full psychic power behind it, so who's with me?"
"I'm still rather weak from the psilirium." Compton admitted.
"I'm pooped from dealing with Cassie's berserk bees." Bob said. So that's what was happening.
"I've been running around all day, I need a break." Otto complained.
"I'm barely holding together." Cassie admitted, "I'll need all the strength I have left to help with Lucy."
"I'll help ya, Tanya." Helmut said, flexing. "These old timers need a nap, but these younger bones are still hale and hearty."
"There will be no heavy lifting." Tanya said sarcastically.
"I'm out, then." Helmut said, sitting back down. Tanya slapped her own face, running her hand down her face slowly. "Ah, I'm just kidding you. Let's go."
Tanya smirked at the comedy bit. "I'll need to borrow your phone before we leave." She said to Helmut. Fortunately, one of the many benefits of having psychic powers was being very good at memorizing phone numbers.
"Got it, right over here."
Every little discrepancy and oddity was reviewed, and she could see the lines where he bluffed. He clearly had done his homework at least a little bit, or else he would have been tripped up by Tanya's unusually high security clearance compared to her rank.
How did he fake thinkerprints? Easy, he had a fake overlay made. The thinkerprint scanners were never as secure as they told people they were, because it was a LOT harder to gain access to the material for a copy then it would be for, say, a DNA related security measure. But with their access to his brain? Given the technology reported to be at the Rhombus of Ruin blacksite, it would have been simple.
Okay, so… there were a few things she needed to account for. First, Razputin. "Razputin, when I said, in your earshot, that I knew where Lucrecia was, why did you not ask about it?"
Razputin shuffled his feet. "He told me not to tell anyone about what I was looking for. He said that anyone could be a Deluginist spy. Even you. I was the only one who the Deluginists couldn't have gotten to, the only one he can trust."
Tanya sighed. "Did you think that Truman didn't know that I knew where she was?" Tanya asked rhetorically. Razputin looked confused. "That wasn't Truman, it was someone else's brain in his body."
"What!?" Lili shouted, panicked. "Where's my dad's brain!"
Ah, crap. She hadn't gotten around to thinking about that yet. "Well, the last place we know it was was within the Rhombus of Ruin." Tanya said, "So unless you just coincidentally smuggled it on the Pelican…"
Lili was staring right at 'Truman's lunchbox'. Which was found literally chained to Truman's unconscious body. "...Before this all started, when was the last time you knew your dad used that lunchbox?" Tanya asked.
"Day before I left for camp." Lili said immediately. So, less than a week.
…Damnit, she should have noticed how weird that was. She dug into her pocket. "I have the key right here." She said, jamming it straight into the keyhole. "Hm, kind of stuck…" After a small struggle with the lock, it opened up to reveal… a brain. "Lucky." Tanya said faintly, as she processed the caliber of the bullet she just dodged. From experience, she'd say that this felt like a 25mm 72-K Russy anti-air gun.
"Dad!" Lili shouted happily, tears flowing. She took the Psychoportal off the ground where it fell off of Ford and started to move it, but Tanya stopped her. "Hold on, that was just on the floor." Tanya said, "Use this one." She brought out her own, emphasizing the cleanliness aspect by taking out a packet of cleaning wipes and running it over the back surface, placing it gently on probably-Truman.
Okay, let's check out the damage.
---------------------------------
Truman's external mind was that of a jungle, with a heavily fortified compound in the middle of it. "This look right to you, Lili?" Tanya asked.
"...I've never actually been inside Dad's mind before." Lili admitted, but started to shout. "DAD! IT'S ME! I LOVE YOU!"
A carnivorous plant burst that looked vaguely like a velociraptor out from the foliage, but Tanya snatched up Lili and used pyrokinesis to destroy the plant, letting the burning debris pass through the space Lili formerly occupied. "Hm, it looks like he's not conscious anymore." Not unreasonable, given the hours of psychoisolation and total sensory deprivation. It didn't take that long for things like the passage of time to become… agonizing. Helmut's case was extreme, but this wasn't anything different from that.
"Okay, let's set things on fire, then!" Lili shouted, putting word to deed.
Wait… what was that crashing noise? Acting on instinct, Tanya held onto Lili tighter and burst through the burning foliage, right before a giant root system slammed into the place they used to be. "Looks like it's an arborsaurus." Tanya mused, making up a name for the long-necked tree dinosaur. She manifested a giant telekinetic fist to bat away the razor-sharp flower at the end of a long stem that constituted the neck and head of the long-necked dinosaur-plant fusion. "Okay Lili, we need to find a way to wake your father up. Any ideas?"
Lili scrambled onto Tanya's back and wrapped her arms and legs around Tanya's neck and chest. "Go deeper!" She suggested.
It was the obvious answer, but that didn't make it any less viable. The outer layers of psychic defenses could be rather insensitive, blindly lashing out without much perception of what it was attacking. Deeper in, the defenses would need to be more precise, and thus more discerning.
It wasn't that difficult to reach the fort inside the jungle, and the gates grew over with vines and bulbs, easily destroyed and-
EUGH!
---------------------------------
Tanya blinked as she was propelled back into her mind. "Did he… weaponize smelling salts?" Tanya asked incredulously. It was so simple… and genius.
"Dad's got the best mental defenses in the world!" Lili said proudly, even as she massaged her own nostrils. "That stuff was strong."
Mary's wheezing laughter died down. "You actually failed?" She asked, grinning. "Guess you can't do everything, huh?"
Tanya snorted, rubbing her nose. "Well, I'd say that's pretty definitively Truman, which is all we needed to confirm." She said, closing the brain vault. "We need to confront the fake." But first… "Let's go to Otto's workshop for tools."
"Okay!" Razputin said excitedly.
"You are still on thin ice, Razputin." Tanya said warningly. "Keep in mind, the only reason I let you come was because Truman told me to… and that wasn't Truman."
"Oh…" Razputin said despondently.
"I want you where I can see you, though." Tanya said, "I'm tired of you finding trouble the instant I can't."
"Okay…" Razputin said, trudging along as Tanya walked to the transit station.
---------------------------------
They didn't stop in Otto's workshop for long: just enough to get Truman's mind in a brain ball, juiced up with fresh nutrient fluid with extra caffeine to help him wake up. On top of that, Tanya grabbed some super sneezing powder, put the psychoportal that Mary had in Otto's junk drawer, and most importantly: a funnel.
Thus armed, they went straight to Truman's office. After waving her entourage to stay back, she plastered a militaristic expression on her face then marched into the office. "Sir! There's been a complication." She barked out with crisp military cadence, saluting.
Now, if this was the real Truman, he would be looking at her with a confused expression at best. This Truman instead smiled, pleased at the display. "Is Ford restored?" He asked.
"Negative!" Tanya replied, "All known instances of Ford Cruller have been eliminated. We suspect he fled, seeking the subject of his obsession."
"Obsession?" Not-Truman asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Lucrecia, sir." Tanya clarified, "You know, the love of his life before she…" Tanya twirled her finger around her ear, condensing a little bit of water from the air and making it into a snake.
"Do you know where he's going?" Not-Truman asked, "Was where she was in his mind?"
Tanya pretended to be confused. "...Sir? He can teleport. He doesn't need to know where she is to go to her. He just goes through astral space."
"Damnit!" Not-Truman exclaimed, smashing his fist on his desk. "He was the only one who knew!"
"Sir, you were the only one who knew." Tanya lied.
Not-Truman snarled. "I told you not to test me, Dosva!" He shouted, standing up and walking up to Tanya, looming his height. "I know damn well that isn't true!"
"That's correct, sir." Tanya replied, seizing the man's shirt and dragging him down to eye level. "Because I'm the only one who knows. Which the real Truman knew."
Not-Truman's eyes widened as he realized the position he was in. He attempted to reach into a pocket, but Tanya telekinetically seized his hands. "You're not even a psychic." Tanya said, "That's why you used so much psilirium in your plot: you're immune. It explains all of the strange readings, and the non-psychic mental defense."
Quickly, she searched the man's pockets, finding a small jewelry box that contained a sizable chunk of psilirium. "Here it is." She snapped the insulated box shut, still protected by her anti-telepathy shield. Finding nothing else of note, she fished out the sneezing powder. "This is your last chance to cooperate." Tanya said, "Who are you, and why did you do this? Where's Hollis?"
"Unhand me, peasant!" Not-Truman said, his cadence shifting to a different, whinier tone.
"Suit yourself." Tanya said, holding her breath and cracking open the container of sneezing powder.
The instant the man caught a whiff, Not-Truman's face twisted as he tried to relieve his nostrils, but his hands were still restrained by Tanya's telekinesis. After a few seconds, he sneezed, launching his brain out his nose and impacting the wall wetly.
Quickly, they put Truman's brain back in his head (a task Tanya delegated to the children) and put the infiltrator's brain into the brain ball. Tanya ran the boot sequence of the diagnostic tools, as she had made sure to grab the latest model that had them. "Non-psychic confirmed, but with enough mental defenses that the biography's auto-fill feature isn't working. Lovely." Otto put in significant effort into improving his laboratory's record-keeping after Helmut's recovery, and a small feature that displayed a basic form with fields like 'name' and 'mental integrity' was one of them. Unfortunately, that feature was not tuned to be an effective interrogation tool.
"Dad! Wake up!" LIli said, slapping her father's face. Truman remained comatose, breathing steadily. "Tanya! I need smelling salts!"
Tanya tossed the ten year old the requested chemicals. Reaching out with her mind, she spoke with the imposter. "Okay, so now that you're completely at my mercy, will you be revealing your plot willingly, or will we be stripping them from you neuron by neuron?"
"I command you to return me to my body!" The imposter demanded. "If I am to be taken prisoner, I must be treated with all due respect afforded to my station. It's in that box right over there."
"I'm vaguely aware of the niceties given to diplomatic prisoners." Tanya replied, "-but I'll need a name and title if you're claiming diplomatic immunity. Without that, you get the due of an enemy spy."
"I am Gzar Gristol Malik of Grulovia, peasant!" Gristol thought imperiously. The brain ball registered the name for him.
Hm. If he wasn't lying, and while he could be, she wasn't terrible at sniffing out lies in telepathic conversation, so she was leaning 'honest', he might actually have political asylum. It helped that she was well aware that a man by that name and rank was associated with the Deluginists.
"...Alright, I'll play your game." Tanya said slowly. "You'll be remanded to our most comfortable secure cell and I'll let Truman decide what to do with you." Was it convenient that she could pass the buck to not only her superior, but also the man the prisoner personally wronged? Yes. Will it end well for Gristol? No. No one uses the rules against her and gets away with it.
Besides, she's not paid enough to make decisions that have political implications. She went to the designated box, and opened it up. "...You know, when I first heard the name 'Nick Johnsmith', I immediately thought that it was a name a foreigner would make up." Tanya said idly, broadcasting the thought to her captive. "I now have zero faith in the Psychonauts' internal investigators."
Indeed, the body of Nick Johnsmith, senior mailroom clerk, was within the box. "TeeVee?" The body asked. A common symptom of brainlessness was, surprisingly, being in a complete coma. Due to the fact that brains in this world functioned on a three-part system, with the two normal hemispheres and an overdeveloped brainstem that held some redundant functions, a brainless body was capable of activity up to the level of a particularly lethargic toddler: a vocabulary of a few dozen words at most, typically a series of wants, and an instinctive understanding of them needing other people to care for them. It wasn't a perfect comparison, but it got the idea roughly across. Child-proofing the body's surroundings was essential.
Intriguingly, there was actually a negative correlation between psychic strength and the functionality of the brainless body. Tanya never lost her brain, but Mary wanted to know what it was like, and when they tried it her body was particularly helpless.
"Hm, looks like you kept it clean, at least." Tanya commented, although the compliment was begrudging. "Getting it shipped to Truman's office was smart."
"Of course, it was my Master Plan!" Gristol boasted. Hm, she's never played both the good cop and the bad cop against the same person before. Well, with such a small gap of time between them anyway.
After checking the spy's pockets for any weapons, Tanya brought the ol' funnel back out. Why brains could be inserted this way was beyond her, but at least this world balanced how easy it was to lose one's brain with it being equally simple to put it back.
Ah, she almost forgot. Tanya put her fingers to her temple and called the switchboard. "This is Agent Sawyer on switch, make it snappy." was the gruff tone paired with the smell of unsmoked tobacco and the feeling of well-oiled leather.
"Caught the enemy infiltrator." Tanya reported, sending her own authentication scents, "It was Nick."
"Great, so I gotta talk to Truman, then?" Agent Sawyer asked.
"No, he was Truman. Swapped brains. They're back now. What I need from you is to-" Tanya immediately started speaking out loud, so Gristol will hear this, "- revoke Nick's permissions and flag him an enemy spy, in case he escapes. Authorize lethal force," Tanya went back to purely telepathic communication. "-if you can manage it."
"With pleasure." Agent Sawyer replied, transmitting his wide grin. "Always thought he was a pansy. What was it that Truman called him?"
"An obsequious lickspittle, I believe." Tanya sent. It was to Truman's credit that despite having such a negative opinion of one of his employees, he didn't let that opinion extend to official action. Even if, coincidentally, it would have been for the best in this case.
"The boss man's got a way with words, he does. Sawyer out." The telepathic connection ended.
Pretending that what she said out loud was the only thing she said, Tanya turned back to the familiar aristocratic features of Nick or rather, Gristol. He was holding himself differently than the anxious people-pleaser that was his Nick Johnsmith persona, prouder and imperious. "If you're not secured and found anywhere by anyone, you die." Tanya said bluntly. She brought out her bundle of zip ties, always useful when dealing with wiring, and restrained Gristol's hands behind his back. "There, now those aren't exactly very secure, but no one's going to shoot you if you're wearing them and accompanied by a Psychonaut. Do you understand?" To his perception, Tanya's eyes glowed as she spoke, a bit of extra flair to her subtle hypnosis.
Gristol had paled, but nodded. If he took the time to think it through logically, the odds of finding one of the psychonauts that were both willing to resort to lethal force and were bad enough at nonlethal subdual that they couldn't capture him was vanishingly small. The odds of running into one of the psychonauts that were battle maniacs who eagerly used the most amount of force they were allowed to use was probably higher, but still not good.
But logical reasoning was for people who weren't hypnotized into compliance.
Truman had been hugging Lili while having a whispered conversation, both sets of eyes wet with tears. Tactfully ignoring that, she cleared her throat when their conversation paused. "Welcome back, sir. The perpetrator, Gristol Malik, is secure." She telepathically transmitted relevant details to him.
Truman scowled at Gristol. "Thank you, Tanya." He said, glancing at her before turning back to Gristol. "Now, what am I going to do with you?"
"Razputin, we're going." Tanya said, subtly tapping Lili on the shoulder and gesturing for her to follow.
"Yes ma'am!" Razputin said nervously. "Should we really leave them alone?"
"Even minutes out of a coma, Truman won't be in any danger from a thoroughly disarmed non-psychic." Tanya said assuredly.
"That wasn't what I was worried about…" Razputin said, but didn't slow down and followed her into the hallway into the Motherlobe proper.
---------------------------------
Still, there was one more Ford. Given how difficult the third to last one was, Tanya really didn't want to tackle what was probably Ford Cruller's full psychic strength alone. So… to Green Needle Gulch.
"We've got the Astralathe all ready to go." Otto said. The sane members of the Psychic Seven were seated around the large device, sitting on their bean bag chairs. "We just need Ford and Lucy."
"What's the Astralathe?" Razputin asked.
Otto grinned as he got the chance to brag. 'The Astralathe is my finest, most powerful invention." He summarized, "You may be familiar with the large psychic machines that the Psychonauts use to increase the potency and precision of their telepathic probes. Interrogations, meditation, etcetera."
"Like Sasha's brain tumbler?" Razputin asked.
"Exactly." Otto confirmed, "The Astralathe is the prototype to that technology, far more expensive. The only problem was, I made it too powerful. As it turns out, you pretty much never need to be able to toss six minds at the same problem in concert. It just causes problems."
"Cool…" Razputin said, smiling. "But wait, why are you going to use it?"
"Ford used the Astralathe to both break himself and to conceal Lucy's identity from herself." Tanya explained, "While I wouldn't say it's impossible to reverse it without the Astralathe, it'll be far safer to bring a similar level of force to bear, particularly because they'll need to secure the Maligula identity again after releasing it."
"Most importantly, the Astralathe has the strongest psychic restraints at our disposal." Compton added, "We'll need those for Lucy."
"Uh… one more thing:" Razputin asked, "Maligula cursed my family to die by water. Do you think you can, you know, break it with the Astralathe?" Oh, there's a good excuse.
"A curse?" Otto asked, confused. "You must be-"
"I am one hundred percent certain we can, Razputin." Tanya said, stepping forward and drawing attention. "In fact, while we get ready, you should bring your entire family over, from Nona to Queepie, so we can cure that curse of yours."
"Really?" Razputin asked, excited. "I'll go right away!"
"I'm going too!" Lili volunteered. Already meeting the parents? She works fast. Heh.
"Otto, authorize the use of the jet." Tanya requested. "They've met Mom, so go send her too. Get Dad to fly it. I'll call ahead."
Otto looked at her strangely, but after checking with his peers, he nodded back. "Alright, if you insist." He got on his psychic phone and started issuing orders.
After Razputin and Lili left into the tram, Helmut spoke first: "So, we gotta go get Lucy now, right?" He asked.
"Taken care of." Tanya said easily. "She'll be here in a few hours."
"When did you have time to do that?" Bob asked.
Of the group, Cassie was the first to connect the dots. "That boy is Lucy's family, isn't he?" She asked.
Tanya grinned. "What better way to keep Maligula contained than with induced hydrophobia?" She asked rhetorically. "Ford left her with family, convincing her that she was her own dead sister, to raise her nephew as her own son. Then he brought them to America, and the rest? Is history." Tanya's smile dimmed. "I've never confirmed, but I suspect that Ford's hypnosis became sort of… contagious. Lucy believed in the curse, and infected her family with the same suggestion with her own telepathy, turning their own hydrokinesis against them. It should be relatively simple to fix."
"That's clever." Helmut commented, "Getting Lucy over here without anyone suspecting a thing, because no one outside this room knows you're ever getting her."
"I have my moments." Tanya said humbly, "Now, I'd like some backup for Ford's final mind fragment. It'll have his full psychic power behind it, so who's with me?"
"I'm still rather weak from the psilirium." Compton admitted.
"I'm pooped from dealing with Cassie's berserk bees." Bob said. So that's what was happening.
"I've been running around all day, I need a break." Otto complained.
"I'm barely holding together." Cassie admitted, "I'll need all the strength I have left to help with Lucy."
"I'll help ya, Tanya." Helmut said, flexing. "These old timers need a nap, but these younger bones are still hale and hearty."
"There will be no heavy lifting." Tanya said sarcastically.
"I'm out, then." Helmut said, sitting back down. Tanya slapped her own face, running her hand down her face slowly. "Ah, I'm just kidding you. Let's go."
Tanya smirked at the comedy bit. "I'll need to borrow your phone before we leave." She said to Helmut. Fortunately, one of the many benefits of having psychic powers was being very good at memorizing phone numbers.
"Got it, right over here."
I can't help but feel like leaving Nick with his hands tied but otherwise unrestrained is going to go badly somehow, especially since Tanya didn't destroy that chunk of psilirium. Not that he has any right to accomplish anything in that state, of course, but that kind of describes a lot of his plan.
You know, I've always wondered how Gristol got his brainless body to babble about mail instead of caviar in canon.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Gristol's brainless babbling were all phrases that work for both mail and being a spoiled noble brat. Like 'first-class'.
Hmm. I went to YouTube to check, and it looks like it's actually a mixture (though caviar is conspicuously absent). Like, there's "I'm telling my dad", but also "air mail" and "flat rate". I guess that does make sense; he has been working in the mail room for years.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Flat rate is also a tax term, it does work as a double entendre. That said, yeah air mail is kind of specific. I was more repeating something I read on tvtropes.
- Location
- United States
wrong story, very wrong story.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Man, I haven't thought about Erfworld in years. I kept waiting for the reveal that this was a video game or something though.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Whoops, I don't even crosspost that story on here. My bad.
It would be rude to not post the link, so here it is for those who were not previously aware. Summon Perfect Warlady (Youjo Senki/Erfworld)
It would be rude to not post the link, so here it is for those who were not previously aware. Summon Perfect Warlady (Youjo Senki/Erfworld)
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Why don't you crosspost that one, anyway?
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Laziness. Even this one rarely gets traffic.
Chapter 3.10
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Last she heard, the 'Admiral' persona has made his way to the parking garages, washing all the cars.
On arrival, she found her least favorite intern, Adam Gette. He had decided that today was warm enough to take off his shirt as he joined the Admiral persona in washing the cars. Ford's nautical personality seemed to delight in ordering around the british boy, which was certainly one way to keep the man busy.
"I want that hull sparkling, sailor!" Admiral Ford barked out.
"Sir, yes sir!" Adam shouted before going back to waxing… hey, they were washing her car!
"Good job distracting him, but I want my car finished before you leave, Adam." Tanya said as they walked up. "I would have been fine with it not getting washed, but getting it half-washed would be infuriating."
"Hey, we're here to get Ford put to rights." Helmut explained, waving to the young man.
"It's alright, I understand." Adam said easily. "But I think I deserve a little-"
"I'll give you five dollars." Tanya said, interrupting whatever flirtatious thing he was going to say.
Adam frowned, but nodded. "That'll work." Heh. Still an easily bribed teenager. Idly, Tanya took out a dream fluff and popped it in her mouth. She's gonna need the boost.
Helmut walked up to Ford. "Hey Ford, you remember me?"
Ford's eye twitched. "You were a man overboard." He said uneasily. "Have you come on behalf of Davy Jones to drag my carcass to its watery grave?"
"No, we're just here to help you. You don't want to miss Lucy when she gets here." Helmut said softly. "She's on her way."
"Who?" Ford asked, eyes wide. "I don't know anyone like that, no sir. My only love is the sea, you see."
Helmut frowned. "You need to get your head back on solid land, man. Come on, let us help."
"...No." Ford said, "Now go away, I'm busy."
Helmut turned back to Tanya. "Well, that's my try."
…Really? "You said you could handle getting his cooperation." Tanya said, disappointed. "I do not want to try and wrestle his mind down at its full strength. I barely succeeded when it was being split two or three ways."
"What do you want me to do? Do a song and dance number?" Helmut asked heatedly.
"Yes!" Tanya shouted. Finally he gets it. "Look, we're the best available."
"And to be the best, we gotta pass the test." Helmut started to sing, "We gotta make it all the way, to the top of the mountain!" As he sang the last word at the top of his lungs, a telepathic bond established itself. "We can do it again!"
A strumming guitar backed by a hectic drum solo rang in her head. "To feel the high, we got to learn to fly, we got to take it to the sky, on the wings of an eagle!" She sang, already pumped up. "We're the best in the world!" She held out her hand and let Helmut grab it and fling her around in a dance.
Helmut picked the song back up, turning straight to Ford as Tanya spun on a levitation bubble under his hand. "You are the best, but you say you don't know. You got the touch, now come on let it show!"
"You call the shots, but you know that you got to believe in…" Tanya sang, "The things that you dream in!" Helmut tossed her up in the air, and she floated there.
Both of them sang at Ford, who flinched back at the music. "Your search for new meaning, is very revealing…" Finally, the telepathic link of advanced clairvoyance opened up, allowing Ford to get the full experience of the performance. "The power of being, is what you're feeling, you gotta believe!"
Suddenly, the psychoportal in Tanya's hand flung itself onto the Admiral's head, and they left their astral forms and followed the link through the door.
---------------------------------
The Admiral's head was, as expected, a fleet of ships on a churning ocean, in the middle of a storm. There wasn't a single giant Ford effigy, tower, or robot in sight. "Well, this is bad." She said, "Where-"
"What?" Helmut shouted, having difficulty communicating over the wind.
Damn. The environment is inflicting telepathic interference. "There's no clear destination!" She shouted at him. "We'll need to search!"
"We'll feed the church?" Helmut shouted back.
Tanya immediately summoned a tablet from her memories and willed it to display, in big letters on a bright white background, "We'll need to search."
"Okay!" He shouted before looking over the fleet. "Let's go below decks here first!" he made his way
Tanya followed him down, and found that the interior of this ship was an amphitheater with… the Psychic Six all with instruments, playing the song that Tanya and Helmut had seen him. "...can Compton and Cassie actually play those guitars?" Both Helmut and Ford's minds had them using those instruments.
"Yeah, they can." Hemlut replied. "They're not exactly going to be doing any bitching solos, but they can play along."
"Let's just do a quick check for any sign of Ford's last mirror shard, but I don't think this is going to be fruitful." Tanya said before going about collecting figments. The Psychic Six, a few of Lucy, instruments, music notes… nothing unusual. There was an emotional baggage tag, underneath the bleachers with a disheveled Lucy figment, so she snapped that up too.
"Did you find anything?" Helmut asked, strumming an air guitar when Tanya came back.
"Nothing I'd consider a lead." Tanya replied. They went back outside and reviewed the other ships in the fleet.
"Let's try that one!" Helmut shouted, pointing to a miniature aircraft carrier. That is, it was the size of the other ships instead of far larger.
Tanya gave him a thumbs up and flew towards the landing strip, triggering Ford's mind to lash out at the intruders with a wave of censors, personal demons, regrets, and some bad ideas for flavor.
"I got em!" Helmut shouted, using Time Bubble to effectively paralyze clusters of enemies while Tanya tore them apart with her PSI blades and the occasional PSI blast.
"Much easier than killing them alone, thank you Helmut." Tanya shouted, not even breathing heavily.
"Yeah, gotta be careful of those little orange ones, but I had your back." Helmut replied with equal volume, before walking below decks of the aircraft carrier.
Tanya followed. "I see you're adapting to the wind." She commented.
"Yeah, Audie O's picking up the tempo, keeping me in tune with your words." Helmut replied, a little proudly. Translating that from band-speak, he must be using a dedicated archetype to listen carefully to her words.
As before, the way down transitioned into a completely different terrain, which was mundane for psychotravel. This time it was a giant table floating in a void, with a giant version of Ford and Compton playing chess with each other.
"I told you, no." The Ford said.
"Come now, Ford." The giant Compton said, "You've been hiding long enough. It's time to go outside."
"I've been in here for twenty years. I'm going to stay like this until I finally die." Ford insisted, "It's the least that I deserve."
"Ouch." Helmut said, wincing.
"It's the coward's way out, but he's not wrong." Tanya replied, "While I can sympathize with his motivations, the actions he took were reprehensible. Dying without making things worse would be the bare minimum of consideration."
"Tanya, that's terrible." Helmut said scoldingly.
"Unfortunately for him, the bare minimum is unacceptable." Tanya continued. Helmut snorted at her tiny joke. "We'll be dragging him back to sanity kicking and screaming if necessary."
"That's the spirit!" Helmut said.
"Ford, you know that we all still care about you." The giant Compton continued, "We can work through this together."
"I told you, no." the giant Ford said, in the exact same cadence as the beginning.
"Ah, it's looped." Tanya said, "I think I understand what's going on here. Each of the ships contains a train of thought, something that he's avoiding thinking about by cramming it in its own little world. From the song we sang, getting it stuck in his head, to the knowledge that he's just being stubborn and not accepting the help that's being offered."
"Sounds right." Helmut agreed, "Let's check the next one."
---------------------------------
"How many more are there?" Tanya asked, annoyed. By now, they had managed to forge a telepathic bond that withstood the interference of the "storm" in Ford's mind. "That was, what, number eight? Nine?"
"Uh… twenty?" Helmut guessed, looking out on the horizon.
"If he was doing this on purpose, I'd be complimenting his strategy when it came to protecting his important thoughts." Tanya groused. "...Then again, he might be collected enough to be doing this on purpose."
The next ship was a giant motorboat; as in, it was the same size as all the other ships, with the entrance being the oversized cargo compartment. It led to… "Damn it he's shuffling them!" Tanya shouted in frustration. "We've already been here!"
'Here' in this case was a place representing Ford's horrified awareness of the impact his actions had on Helmut. It was a brig, where a copy of Helmut lay in the same bindings that Ford had used to restrain Maligula, with the addition of a sensory deprivation helmet.
"Hello? How much longer?" the copy Helmut asked.
"You'll get out when Doc Otto says you do." Ford, dressed as an Admiral, said. "Until then, it's total isolation."
This place had an emotional baggage, but as another one didn't suddenly appear, Tanya spun on her heel and trudged back up the stairs. "This isn't working." Tanya declared.
"I dunno, one repeat seems a bit quick of a conclusion to jump." Helmut said.
"No, the fact that it moves at all means that we won't get anywhere sensitive, the moment we get close a switch will happen." She made a grand gesture towards the other boats. "This is the mental equivalent of defense in depth. By conceding a large swathe of territory to the invaders, you permit your enemy to overextend and exhaust themselves chasing your defenders while minimizing your own losses. It's a form of asymmetric warfare that functions well even against peers. If you're willing to accept the territory, or in this case information, loss conceded to the invaders, you can more effectively defend and protect the most critical objectives."
"Ah, I get it. It's all flash, a shell game." Helmut said, understanding.
"...a what?" What does matching shells to each other have to do with this?
Helmut chuckled. "It's a carnival game." He explained. Ah, a con man's game. Her Japanese upbringing betrayed her. "You have three cups and a ball or token or whatever, and get someone to guess which cup the ball's under." Ah, she understands now. In Japan, it's known by a different name. Did she ever see it in the Empire? "The scam is that it's not in any of them, unless the barker's trying to make someone win to lure in more suckers."
"You seem to have grasped the core principle." Tanya said in agreement, "The key here is not in figuring out which boat has what we need, but Ford's defenses will hold as long as we still accept the premise that the boats are what we need to concern ourselves with."
"So where do we go?" Helmut asked.
Hm, the telepathic noise of the storm had been obscuring her ability to sense the topography of the mental realm, but… She's been compensating for it for a while now. "The Admiral even told us the way." She said, pointing down with her left hand. "His true love is the sea." Tanya snapped the fingers on her right hand, changing her mental projection's outfit to a swimsuit. It was her usual modest one piece, dark blue this time, with short sleeves and also went halfway down her thigh, but she added a set of matching swim trunks to it, mostly for the pockets. Even in this mental copy, her sealed plastic bags with important items were inside them. No way to spend money here, though, so it wasn't important. "See you at the bottom!" She backflipped into the water.
Underneath the sea, as Tanya suspected, was not some kind of deeper level of thought with less stable groundings and more powerful defenses, like most minds were underneath the churning 'floor' of setups that didn't float in a void. Instead, it was a well-lit aquatic wonderland, filled with colorful fish that Tanya almost suspected were about to go into a song and dance number, but that particular animated classic won't be around for a few more years.
"Huh, so it's the lost mind of Atlantis." Helmut said jokingly. He had transformed himself into a merman, naked but with his lower body replaced with a stout fish tail. He had gills on the side of his muscular chest, as he had also benefitted severely from his own fitness regimen that he and Bob collectively encouraged each other on.
"That's where what we need is located." Tanya declared, pointing straight at the tallest tower of the underwater castle, which didn't resemble Ford's head as much as some of the others, but that didn't mean the resemblance was zero.
"Hot damn, let's go swimming, then." Helmut replied, and he started moving, Tanya following while using her psychic powers to cheat as usual.
Fighting the inevitable censor assault (wearing old-timey swimsuits) was a bit more difficult in the aquatic environment, but not by enough to make a difference with Helmut's support. Focusing her PSI blasts into bullet-like sharpness took a bit more concentration, but with the temporal stasis she had plenty of time to line up a shot on each one right in the apricot, the heads exploding in gore before the entities vanished without a trace.
"You know, I didn't notice it before, but isn't it kind of weird that the censors actually bleed and fall apart when you kill them?" Helmut asked after the battle. "When I do it, they just fall down and poof."
"They still poof." Tanya pointed out. "Also, the blood vanishes when they do."
"Yes, but I asked around. That only happens when you do it." Helmut said.
Tanya tilted her head. Really? "I suppose I just didn't notice? Not many people can use PSI blades like I can. Maybe if I ask Dad…"
"I thought of that and used a sword as a test. Still doesn't happen." Helmut said, reminding her that he was, in fact, a scientist at times.
"I never thought it was weird." Tanya admitted. "I just saw it and thought 'yes, that's exactly what it looks like when you cut a man in two like that or shoot their heads off' and moved on with my life."
Helmut blinked as he realized that yes, she was, in fact, an experienced war veteran with a body count that would set a historical record if it was verifiable. Dad had done research and she was comfortably ahead of the Nazi that personally executed ten thousand undesirables with a pistol, the current record holder. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Mental worlds are like that." He said quickly before changing the subject. "Hey, look, it's a thing!"
In this case, the 'thing' was something of a prison work camp. A bunch of Fords stood on the ocean floor, wearing literal cement shoes, groaning while rowing oars, reminding Tanya of some depictions of a viking longship. Each one had their own second Ford, whipping them.
"It's just more self-flagellation, by the looks of things." Tanya commented. "Nothing new here."
"Man, he's really beating himself up." Helmut said, vaguely disgusted at the display.
"He deserves it!" Tanya insisted, "The man made a giant mess with his actions, causing incredible suffering, to you most of all." She may still be mad at him, but she was rational enough to realize that Helmut had a better reason to hate him and Lucy than most. It was telling that of the many people Ford had wronged, Tanya was still only… does she count the Curse of Galochio as one or for each Aquato? Bah.
"Does seeing this make you feel better?" Helmut asked heatedly.
"...No." Tanya said, looking away. "This isn't justice, or even comeuppance. It's just pointless suffering that he's putting himself through instead of doing anything to actually address the problems he's created. It makes me even angrier at him."
"...Jeez, when you put it that way, it kinda pisses me off too." Helmut said, conceding to her point. "Come on, let's go."
---------------------------------
The underwater castle was built reminiscent of the Grulovian Palace, which she had seen pictures of during that trip to Grulovia. Inside, thankfully, the underwater environment ended and they were back on… well, calling it 'dry' land was an exaggeration, it was still pretty muggy even after she used the innate shapeshifting of being a mental projection to dry herself and change back to her normal utility jumpsuit, but Helmut needed to turn back from being a merman.
The whole place was set up as a propaganda museum, portraying Ford as a great hero for slaying the evil Maligula, which probably would have had a really surprising twist for someone who didn't already know Ford as well as they did.
Tanya tore apart all of the displays that portrayed Maligula as the villain, revealing the lovey-dovey displays hidden underneath, which eventually opened the way up.
The final shard was guarded by a Ford wearing a naval uniform. "I'll go down with this ship before I give you what you want!" He shouted.
"Ford, what we want is for you to be better." Helmut said softly.
"We already know everything you could possibly tell us." Tanya added, "Lucy's on her way back, now get sane again so you don't embarrass yourself. Put on some cologne or something."
Ford proved once more that he was still fragmented, as he seemed flabbergasted at the thing that he had been told so many times. "She is? Oh man, does anyone have a breath mint? Where's my rowboat?"
Finally, this was over.
---------------------------------
Putting in the finishing touches of his mind, ensuring that it properly fit together, was simple and occurred with no complications. When they came back out of Ford's mind, Tanya looked at her car. Spic and span. "Good work, Adam." She said, fishing out her wallet. "As promised." She gave him the five dollars, and from his visible appreciation of the sum, she felt comfortable bringing her attention back to the elephant in the room.
Ford had removed the stupid hat, looking lost. "Oh no. Oh no."
"How much do you remember of what we have told you?" Tanya asked.
"You what?" He asked, confused. After a moment, his eyes widened. "She's really coming?"
"The Aquatos are on their way." Tanya said obliquely. "As far as they know, they're here to get the curse they have lifted, to die in water." She pointed straight at him. "It is the first mess of yours that you will need to clean up."
"How-" Ford's eyes narrowed, clearly thinking through the situation. Now this was the man that could spearhead research into a subject as esoteric as the mind, finally running on all cylinders for the first time in twenty years. "No, I see how that could have happened. The hydrophobia was a rush job, I put it in with some superstitious associations, so some kind of family curse… she could have hypnotically passed it on… Yes, I see what we need to do. We'll need the Astralathe, though."
"Otto should have it ready by the time they arrive." Tanya said.
"Good, good." Ford said, firming up his stance and looking at himself. "I'll need… a shower and a change of clothes."
Good to see that he has his priorities in order. Focusing on the things that he needs to do as part of the greater plan instead of taking charge is exactly what she needs from him.
"We'll take my car."
On arrival, she found her least favorite intern, Adam Gette. He had decided that today was warm enough to take off his shirt as he joined the Admiral persona in washing the cars. Ford's nautical personality seemed to delight in ordering around the british boy, which was certainly one way to keep the man busy.
"I want that hull sparkling, sailor!" Admiral Ford barked out.
"Sir, yes sir!" Adam shouted before going back to waxing… hey, they were washing her car!
"Good job distracting him, but I want my car finished before you leave, Adam." Tanya said as they walked up. "I would have been fine with it not getting washed, but getting it half-washed would be infuriating."
"Hey, we're here to get Ford put to rights." Helmut explained, waving to the young man.
"It's alright, I understand." Adam said easily. "But I think I deserve a little-"
"I'll give you five dollars." Tanya said, interrupting whatever flirtatious thing he was going to say.
Adam frowned, but nodded. "That'll work." Heh. Still an easily bribed teenager. Idly, Tanya took out a dream fluff and popped it in her mouth. She's gonna need the boost.
Helmut walked up to Ford. "Hey Ford, you remember me?"
Ford's eye twitched. "You were a man overboard." He said uneasily. "Have you come on behalf of Davy Jones to drag my carcass to its watery grave?"
"No, we're just here to help you. You don't want to miss Lucy when she gets here." Helmut said softly. "She's on her way."
"Who?" Ford asked, eyes wide. "I don't know anyone like that, no sir. My only love is the sea, you see."
Helmut frowned. "You need to get your head back on solid land, man. Come on, let us help."
"...No." Ford said, "Now go away, I'm busy."
Helmut turned back to Tanya. "Well, that's my try."
…Really? "You said you could handle getting his cooperation." Tanya said, disappointed. "I do not want to try and wrestle his mind down at its full strength. I barely succeeded when it was being split two or three ways."
"What do you want me to do? Do a song and dance number?" Helmut asked heatedly.
"Yes!" Tanya shouted. Finally he gets it. "Look, we're the best available."
"And to be the best, we gotta pass the test." Helmut started to sing, "We gotta make it all the way, to the top of the mountain!" As he sang the last word at the top of his lungs, a telepathic bond established itself. "We can do it again!"
A strumming guitar backed by a hectic drum solo rang in her head. "To feel the high, we got to learn to fly, we got to take it to the sky, on the wings of an eagle!" She sang, already pumped up. "We're the best in the world!" She held out her hand and let Helmut grab it and fling her around in a dance.
Helmut picked the song back up, turning straight to Ford as Tanya spun on a levitation bubble under his hand. "You are the best, but you say you don't know. You got the touch, now come on let it show!"
"You call the shots, but you know that you got to believe in…" Tanya sang, "The things that you dream in!" Helmut tossed her up in the air, and she floated there.
Both of them sang at Ford, who flinched back at the music. "Your search for new meaning, is very revealing…" Finally, the telepathic link of advanced clairvoyance opened up, allowing Ford to get the full experience of the performance. "The power of being, is what you're feeling, you gotta believe!"
Suddenly, the psychoportal in Tanya's hand flung itself onto the Admiral's head, and they left their astral forms and followed the link through the door.
---------------------------------
The Admiral's head was, as expected, a fleet of ships on a churning ocean, in the middle of a storm. There wasn't a single giant Ford effigy, tower, or robot in sight. "Well, this is bad." She said, "Where-"
"What?" Helmut shouted, having difficulty communicating over the wind.
Damn. The environment is inflicting telepathic interference. "There's no clear destination!" She shouted at him. "We'll need to search!"
"We'll feed the church?" Helmut shouted back.
Tanya immediately summoned a tablet from her memories and willed it to display, in big letters on a bright white background, "We'll need to search."
"Okay!" He shouted before looking over the fleet. "Let's go below decks here first!" he made his way
Tanya followed him down, and found that the interior of this ship was an amphitheater with… the Psychic Six all with instruments, playing the song that Tanya and Helmut had seen him. "...can Compton and Cassie actually play those guitars?" Both Helmut and Ford's minds had them using those instruments.
"Yeah, they can." Hemlut replied. "They're not exactly going to be doing any bitching solos, but they can play along."
"Let's just do a quick check for any sign of Ford's last mirror shard, but I don't think this is going to be fruitful." Tanya said before going about collecting figments. The Psychic Six, a few of Lucy, instruments, music notes… nothing unusual. There was an emotional baggage tag, underneath the bleachers with a disheveled Lucy figment, so she snapped that up too.
"Did you find anything?" Helmut asked, strumming an air guitar when Tanya came back.
"Nothing I'd consider a lead." Tanya replied. They went back outside and reviewed the other ships in the fleet.
"Let's try that one!" Helmut shouted, pointing to a miniature aircraft carrier. That is, it was the size of the other ships instead of far larger.
Tanya gave him a thumbs up and flew towards the landing strip, triggering Ford's mind to lash out at the intruders with a wave of censors, personal demons, regrets, and some bad ideas for flavor.
"I got em!" Helmut shouted, using Time Bubble to effectively paralyze clusters of enemies while Tanya tore them apart with her PSI blades and the occasional PSI blast.
"Much easier than killing them alone, thank you Helmut." Tanya shouted, not even breathing heavily.
"Yeah, gotta be careful of those little orange ones, but I had your back." Helmut replied with equal volume, before walking below decks of the aircraft carrier.
Tanya followed. "I see you're adapting to the wind." She commented.
"Yeah, Audie O's picking up the tempo, keeping me in tune with your words." Helmut replied, a little proudly. Translating that from band-speak, he must be using a dedicated archetype to listen carefully to her words.
As before, the way down transitioned into a completely different terrain, which was mundane for psychotravel. This time it was a giant table floating in a void, with a giant version of Ford and Compton playing chess with each other.
"I told you, no." The Ford said.
"Come now, Ford." The giant Compton said, "You've been hiding long enough. It's time to go outside."
"I've been in here for twenty years. I'm going to stay like this until I finally die." Ford insisted, "It's the least that I deserve."
"Ouch." Helmut said, wincing.
"It's the coward's way out, but he's not wrong." Tanya replied, "While I can sympathize with his motivations, the actions he took were reprehensible. Dying without making things worse would be the bare minimum of consideration."
"Tanya, that's terrible." Helmut said scoldingly.
"Unfortunately for him, the bare minimum is unacceptable." Tanya continued. Helmut snorted at her tiny joke. "We'll be dragging him back to sanity kicking and screaming if necessary."
"That's the spirit!" Helmut said.
"Ford, you know that we all still care about you." The giant Compton continued, "We can work through this together."
"I told you, no." the giant Ford said, in the exact same cadence as the beginning.
"Ah, it's looped." Tanya said, "I think I understand what's going on here. Each of the ships contains a train of thought, something that he's avoiding thinking about by cramming it in its own little world. From the song we sang, getting it stuck in his head, to the knowledge that he's just being stubborn and not accepting the help that's being offered."
"Sounds right." Helmut agreed, "Let's check the next one."
---------------------------------
"How many more are there?" Tanya asked, annoyed. By now, they had managed to forge a telepathic bond that withstood the interference of the "storm" in Ford's mind. "That was, what, number eight? Nine?"
"Uh… twenty?" Helmut guessed, looking out on the horizon.
"If he was doing this on purpose, I'd be complimenting his strategy when it came to protecting his important thoughts." Tanya groused. "...Then again, he might be collected enough to be doing this on purpose."
The next ship was a giant motorboat; as in, it was the same size as all the other ships, with the entrance being the oversized cargo compartment. It led to… "Damn it he's shuffling them!" Tanya shouted in frustration. "We've already been here!"
'Here' in this case was a place representing Ford's horrified awareness of the impact his actions had on Helmut. It was a brig, where a copy of Helmut lay in the same bindings that Ford had used to restrain Maligula, with the addition of a sensory deprivation helmet.
"Hello? How much longer?" the copy Helmut asked.
"You'll get out when Doc Otto says you do." Ford, dressed as an Admiral, said. "Until then, it's total isolation."
This place had an emotional baggage, but as another one didn't suddenly appear, Tanya spun on her heel and trudged back up the stairs. "This isn't working." Tanya declared.
"I dunno, one repeat seems a bit quick of a conclusion to jump." Helmut said.
"No, the fact that it moves at all means that we won't get anywhere sensitive, the moment we get close a switch will happen." She made a grand gesture towards the other boats. "This is the mental equivalent of defense in depth. By conceding a large swathe of territory to the invaders, you permit your enemy to overextend and exhaust themselves chasing your defenders while minimizing your own losses. It's a form of asymmetric warfare that functions well even against peers. If you're willing to accept the territory, or in this case information, loss conceded to the invaders, you can more effectively defend and protect the most critical objectives."
"Ah, I get it. It's all flash, a shell game." Helmut said, understanding.
"...a what?" What does matching shells to each other have to do with this?
Helmut chuckled. "It's a carnival game." He explained. Ah, a con man's game. Her Japanese upbringing betrayed her. "You have three cups and a ball or token or whatever, and get someone to guess which cup the ball's under." Ah, she understands now. In Japan, it's known by a different name. Did she ever see it in the Empire? "The scam is that it's not in any of them, unless the barker's trying to make someone win to lure in more suckers."
"You seem to have grasped the core principle." Tanya said in agreement, "The key here is not in figuring out which boat has what we need, but Ford's defenses will hold as long as we still accept the premise that the boats are what we need to concern ourselves with."
"So where do we go?" Helmut asked.
Hm, the telepathic noise of the storm had been obscuring her ability to sense the topography of the mental realm, but… She's been compensating for it for a while now. "The Admiral even told us the way." She said, pointing down with her left hand. "His true love is the sea." Tanya snapped the fingers on her right hand, changing her mental projection's outfit to a swimsuit. It was her usual modest one piece, dark blue this time, with short sleeves and also went halfway down her thigh, but she added a set of matching swim trunks to it, mostly for the pockets. Even in this mental copy, her sealed plastic bags with important items were inside them. No way to spend money here, though, so it wasn't important. "See you at the bottom!" She backflipped into the water.
Underneath the sea, as Tanya suspected, was not some kind of deeper level of thought with less stable groundings and more powerful defenses, like most minds were underneath the churning 'floor' of setups that didn't float in a void. Instead, it was a well-lit aquatic wonderland, filled with colorful fish that Tanya almost suspected were about to go into a song and dance number, but that particular animated classic won't be around for a few more years.
"Huh, so it's the lost mind of Atlantis." Helmut said jokingly. He had transformed himself into a merman, naked but with his lower body replaced with a stout fish tail. He had gills on the side of his muscular chest, as he had also benefitted severely from his own fitness regimen that he and Bob collectively encouraged each other on.
"That's where what we need is located." Tanya declared, pointing straight at the tallest tower of the underwater castle, which didn't resemble Ford's head as much as some of the others, but that didn't mean the resemblance was zero.
"Hot damn, let's go swimming, then." Helmut replied, and he started moving, Tanya following while using her psychic powers to cheat as usual.
Fighting the inevitable censor assault (wearing old-timey swimsuits) was a bit more difficult in the aquatic environment, but not by enough to make a difference with Helmut's support. Focusing her PSI blasts into bullet-like sharpness took a bit more concentration, but with the temporal stasis she had plenty of time to line up a shot on each one right in the apricot, the heads exploding in gore before the entities vanished without a trace.
"You know, I didn't notice it before, but isn't it kind of weird that the censors actually bleed and fall apart when you kill them?" Helmut asked after the battle. "When I do it, they just fall down and poof."
"They still poof." Tanya pointed out. "Also, the blood vanishes when they do."
"Yes, but I asked around. That only happens when you do it." Helmut said.
Tanya tilted her head. Really? "I suppose I just didn't notice? Not many people can use PSI blades like I can. Maybe if I ask Dad…"
"I thought of that and used a sword as a test. Still doesn't happen." Helmut said, reminding her that he was, in fact, a scientist at times.
"I never thought it was weird." Tanya admitted. "I just saw it and thought 'yes, that's exactly what it looks like when you cut a man in two like that or shoot their heads off' and moved on with my life."
Helmut blinked as he realized that yes, she was, in fact, an experienced war veteran with a body count that would set a historical record if it was verifiable. Dad had done research and she was comfortably ahead of the Nazi that personally executed ten thousand undesirables with a pistol, the current record holder. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Mental worlds are like that." He said quickly before changing the subject. "Hey, look, it's a thing!"
In this case, the 'thing' was something of a prison work camp. A bunch of Fords stood on the ocean floor, wearing literal cement shoes, groaning while rowing oars, reminding Tanya of some depictions of a viking longship. Each one had their own second Ford, whipping them.
"It's just more self-flagellation, by the looks of things." Tanya commented. "Nothing new here."
"Man, he's really beating himself up." Helmut said, vaguely disgusted at the display.
"He deserves it!" Tanya insisted, "The man made a giant mess with his actions, causing incredible suffering, to you most of all." She may still be mad at him, but she was rational enough to realize that Helmut had a better reason to hate him and Lucy than most. It was telling that of the many people Ford had wronged, Tanya was still only… does she count the Curse of Galochio as one or for each Aquato? Bah.
"Does seeing this make you feel better?" Helmut asked heatedly.
"...No." Tanya said, looking away. "This isn't justice, or even comeuppance. It's just pointless suffering that he's putting himself through instead of doing anything to actually address the problems he's created. It makes me even angrier at him."
"...Jeez, when you put it that way, it kinda pisses me off too." Helmut said, conceding to her point. "Come on, let's go."
---------------------------------
The underwater castle was built reminiscent of the Grulovian Palace, which she had seen pictures of during that trip to Grulovia. Inside, thankfully, the underwater environment ended and they were back on… well, calling it 'dry' land was an exaggeration, it was still pretty muggy even after she used the innate shapeshifting of being a mental projection to dry herself and change back to her normal utility jumpsuit, but Helmut needed to turn back from being a merman.
The whole place was set up as a propaganda museum, portraying Ford as a great hero for slaying the evil Maligula, which probably would have had a really surprising twist for someone who didn't already know Ford as well as they did.
Tanya tore apart all of the displays that portrayed Maligula as the villain, revealing the lovey-dovey displays hidden underneath, which eventually opened the way up.
The final shard was guarded by a Ford wearing a naval uniform. "I'll go down with this ship before I give you what you want!" He shouted.
"Ford, what we want is for you to be better." Helmut said softly.
"We already know everything you could possibly tell us." Tanya added, "Lucy's on her way back, now get sane again so you don't embarrass yourself. Put on some cologne or something."
Ford proved once more that he was still fragmented, as he seemed flabbergasted at the thing that he had been told so many times. "She is? Oh man, does anyone have a breath mint? Where's my rowboat?"
Finally, this was over.
---------------------------------
Putting in the finishing touches of his mind, ensuring that it properly fit together, was simple and occurred with no complications. When they came back out of Ford's mind, Tanya looked at her car. Spic and span. "Good work, Adam." She said, fishing out her wallet. "As promised." She gave him the five dollars, and from his visible appreciation of the sum, she felt comfortable bringing her attention back to the elephant in the room.
Ford had removed the stupid hat, looking lost. "Oh no. Oh no."
"How much do you remember of what we have told you?" Tanya asked.
"You what?" He asked, confused. After a moment, his eyes widened. "She's really coming?"
"The Aquatos are on their way." Tanya said obliquely. "As far as they know, they're here to get the curse they have lifted, to die in water." She pointed straight at him. "It is the first mess of yours that you will need to clean up."
"How-" Ford's eyes narrowed, clearly thinking through the situation. Now this was the man that could spearhead research into a subject as esoteric as the mind, finally running on all cylinders for the first time in twenty years. "No, I see how that could have happened. The hydrophobia was a rush job, I put it in with some superstitious associations, so some kind of family curse… she could have hypnotically passed it on… Yes, I see what we need to do. We'll need the Astralathe, though."
"Otto should have it ready by the time they arrive." Tanya said.
"Good, good." Ford said, firming up his stance and looking at himself. "I'll need… a shower and a change of clothes."
Good to see that he has his priorities in order. Focusing on the things that he needs to do as part of the greater plan instead of taking charge is exactly what she needs from him.
"We'll take my car."
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Too much work. It's a Monday, you guys get an update.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I have genuinely been jumping to the end of content to make sure it's not a trick, but then I go back and read anyway. I'm not mad about the joke, but I do get annoyed if I have to mentally retcon out content as apocrypha halfway through absorbing the chapter.
- Location
- United States
The April Fools part is the Gzar's Brain broke out of it's cell.
Evonix
Aspiring Lovecraft antagonist.
- Location
- Canada to 2 sigmas
I was thinking about the psychic watch and the operation orbs. This world doesn't have a place for the orbs the YS one but something similar could be a great idea for a product, psychic calculators, lets you perform calculations at the speed of thought. If there can't be a convenient psytanium-electric interface it could be a mechanical calculator, input via guided telekinesis, output being the same awareness as the watch.
Alternatively it could be a purely mental structure, like those pictures made by that psychocamera.
Alternatively it could be a purely mental structure, like those pictures made by that psychocamera.
Chapter 3.11
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Sorry for leaving you on a cliff like this before the 5-week break, but I miscounted the number of chapters before the break starts. Next chapter should be the last one before the Epilogue.
---------------------------------
Did Tanya anticipate having to drop two hundred dollars on reasonably fashionable clothing for an old man this morning? No. Was it money well spent, particularly as she got to have the pleasure of burning his old clothing for him? Yes. Did she have the spare money to do it? Also yes. She's going to get that money paid back once Ford's financial situation is resolved, but that was just the principle of the thing. The military contracts for the training APES alone have already made her a millionaire on paper, even if her liquid assets weren't significantly greater than that of any of her coworkers.
Digging into her many pockets, she took out a small bottle. "No, this is regular talcum powder…" It was useful to have in the damp environment of the Motherlobe, she put it on her feet before putting on her boots, but the scent of talcum powder wasn't what she needed. It was the perfume they put in baby powder specifically that called Mom. She put her hand back in the pocket, taking out the other tiny bottle of talcum powder. Twisting the cap, she sniffed at the baby powder.
Mom's psychic presence emerged into her awareness immediately. "Hello Darling, we're almost back. It took quite a bit of effort to convince them all to come."
"Excellent." Tanya replied, "We're ready to receive them. The Psychic Six have fully assembled and will be handling matters personally."
"...You're being sneaky." Mom sent along with tones of suspicion. "Do I need to warn Sasha of impending danger?"
"I mean, we've contained the infiltration." Tanya sent back, "The Deluginists don't have the manpower to disturb the procedure."
"Tanya…" Mom said warningly.
"Yes, there is a non-zero chance of incredible danger." Tanya admitted, "But we're taking every precaution. Now, this is very important: Did you bring Razputin's grandmother?"
"Yes, everyone's here. Razputin, both of his brothers, both of his sisters, his parents, and his grandmother." Mom sent with a hint of exasperation.
"Good, she's Patient Zero. We'll need her." Tanya sent with tones of relief. "ETA?"
"Ten minutes to get parked, maybe ten more to get everyone to the Heptadome."
"I'll meet you on arrival."
---------------------------------
"Well, you've certainly grown up into a fine young woman." Augustus said as he did his best to crush Tanya's ribs in a hug. Her passive reinforcement strained as his own rose in strength to match it, but he let go before anything cracked. "I hope Razputin hasn't been too much trouble."
"He's been an obscene amount of trouble, actually." Tanya replied icily, taking a moment to glare at the boy. "An object lesson on irresponsible psychic power use, even."
Augustus blinked in surprise. "Really?" He glanced at his son. "...How much trouble is he in?"
"It's nothing that wasn't fixed promptly, and he did make some positive contributions in addition to his disasters, so it's forgivable." Tanya explained, calming herself down. "But it's the kind of thing where if he was an adult, he'd be put before a judge." She sighed, "The grim truth of the matter is that as much as we sometimes pretend otherwise, the justice system does operate under 'no harm, no foul'." Tort law literally runs on that, but criminal charges theoretically didn't. "The boy's got talent, so despite his indiscretions, he still has a bright future in the Psychonauts ahead of him. He just needs to learn."
Augustus nodded along to her description. "That sounds like my Razputin alright. Good heart, but leaps before he looks." He chuckled, "He gets that from me."
"Hm, yes." Tanya said dryly. "Now if you'll follow me, there's a tram to the place where we'll be treating your psychic malady."
"You mean the curse?" Augustus asked.
"Yes." Tanya said, "It's literally powered by your own belief in its existence, so when we take out the source, it'll be an easy procedure to handle the rest of you."
Augustus frowned as he thought about her words. "Is it really that simple?"
Tanya barked out a laugh. "I apologize if I gave you the impression that this was going to be simple. No, this will be complex and painful for…" She paused, "Actually it'll only be painful for you and Razputin, probably. Definitely Nona."
Augustus narrowed his eyes. "...How much of this did you know, back then?"
"I theorized how to cure you even then." Tanya admitted, "You may recall that rebellious part of myself offering the solution to you." Augustus nodded, "Now I know for sure that I was, in theory, correct back then, but it would not have ended well if I had attempted to put it to practice. It's only recently that the pieces have come together-" Tanya huffed as she realized her accidental pun. "-in a way that I'm confident this can be done safely."
"...Alright." He said, before turning to his family, who were… stretching and doing some minor acrobatics. The plane ride wasn't that long… "Form up! We're going to get this curse broken!"
The Aquato family cheered and bounded towards them… except for Lucy, who shuffled along slowly. Tanya manifested a giant telekinetic hand for her to sit on, and floated the old woman down the tube to the tram.
As they went, Dion, Razputin's fifteen-year-old brother, sat down next to Tanya, giving her what he probably thought was a roguish grin. "Hey." He said, giving her a flirty upnod.
Tanya stared at him flatly. "Ew. No." She said, echoing her last words to him. From his poleaxed expression, he did not expect that… at least so quickly.
Frazie, the fourteen-year-old Aquato sibling, burst out laughing at her brother's shutdown. "I told you she was too old for you, Dion."
"There there, Dizzy…" Razputin's mom Donatella said, patting her oldest son on the back. Tanya snorted at the pet name. "There's plenty of fish in the sea." She gave Tanya an annoyed side-eye. "Politer ones. He just said hello."
"I remind you that I'm a telepath." Tanya said, sighing. "I knew exactly what he was thinking." Well, 'exactly' was a bit of an exaggeration, as she tended to automatically tune out coherent thoughts, but her subconscious picked up the essential parts to fuel her intuition.
"Now that sounds handy." Frazie commented.
"That sounds gross." Mirtala, Razputin's younger sister, said instead. "Boys are gross."
"Ah, just you wait, pui." Lucy said, using the Grulovian word for 'little one'. "You'll see the appeal eventually."
Tanya shrugged. "There's a balance to strike with telepathy, certainly. I had a lot of problems when I was very young from oversensitivity." She gave a glance to Lucy. "Also Nona, not necessarily. Sometimes the attraction never comes." Turning her attention back to Mirtala, she added: "Which is fine. No matter who you want to kiss when you grow up, even if it's no one, like me, it's all normal."
"Don't you be filling my daughter's head with that stuff!" Donatella said, overdramatically offended, "I want grandchildren!"
"You have five children." Tanya deadpanned, "You can afford some deviation from the norm." Dion seemed perfectly willing, if not necessarily capable yet. He's still young.
"Dear, calm down." Augustus said, keeping the peace. "That's something that we're still years off from needing to worry about." He gave his oldest son a stern look. "Right, Dion?"
"Definitely." Dion said immediately, nodding emphatically. The last Aquato child, Queepie, chuckled at his older brother.
"Well, we're here." Tanya said, bringing the tram to a stop. "Green Needle Gulch, the place where the original Psychonauts were founded." Razputin, despite having been here before, eagerly grinned in anticipation. "I'll help you up, Nona."
"Thank you." Lucy said, taking a seat on the telekinetic hand Tanya created for her.
---------------------------------
Tanya gently lifted the elderly woman out of the entrance to the underground tunnel, looking at everyone. Helmut had clearly taken the lead when it came to greeting the Aquatos, having herded them into the Heptadome quickly and seating them in a set of new mats and beanbags that had been placed for them.
Mom and Dad, having gone ahead immediately on arrival, were keeping an eye out for trouble. They spared a smile, wave, and empathic projection of love for her, which she returned, but then it was back to business.
The Psychic Six, on the other hand, were staring in wonder at Lucy as Tanya set her down. "Tanya, this place… it looks… familiar." Lucy whispered to her. "Also, who is that handsome man with my favorite flowers?" Which were yellow pansies, apparently. Wow, it's been years since she's gotten a memory flash from that herbaphony nugget.
"It's an apology bouquet." Tanya whispered back. "He's got a lot to be sorry for, but we're going to fix it today."
Lucy walked up to the other members of the Psychic Seven, looking at their faces intently as she tried to remember them. "I… know you people." She said slowly. "Your name is…" She frowned. "...Bob?"
"Actually, I'm Bob." Bob said, "That's Compton. Compton Boole."
"I'm sorry, Lucy." Ford said immediately.
Nona's face scrunched up in pain. "No, Lucy is my sister." She said as in on autopilot. Ah, a hypnotic compulsion.
"No, no she isn't." Ford said morosely. "That's why I'm sorry."
The Aquatos were just confused, but Augustus was deep in thought. Well, time to rip off the bandage. "Alright, enough sentimentality. We've got a lot to do and only…" Tanya fished her watch out of her pocket and glanced at it. "-as much time as we need to do it in." Pausing for the few chuckles to pass, she continued. "The truth is, Augustus, your mother… is not your original mother." She made sure to be very precise in her wording here. "Shortly after Marona Aquato nee Galochio died, her sister, Lucrecia Mux nee Galochio, was hypnotized into thinking she was her sister, and you were hypnotized into going along with it."
The Aquatos gasped, although Mirtala just looked confused. "Why would anyone do something like that!?" Augustus demanded. "Who?"
"He did it." Tanya said, jerking her thumb to Ford. "The reason, of course, was to hide Lucrecia so thoroughly no one could find her. He even shattered his own mind to ensure that not even he could remember things differently." She glared at Ford, "It was overkill, of course, but I can understand his reasoning." She shrugged, "As a nice side-effect, you got the chance to grow up without being an orphan, so keep that in mind before you try and kill him. Feel free to punch him in the face or something, he deserves it. But please wait until after matters have been settled, first."
"How does this relate to the curse?" Frazie asked, suspicious. Lucy had walked closer and sat down on a specific beanbag, one that was probably exactly where she used to sit, given the oddly specific positioning. She was paying rapt attention.
Tanya had been thinking on how to explain this for a while, so she had the story well prepared. "Ford may not have thought his plan through completely, but he wasn't completely reckless with it. He knew that he wouldn't be able to maintain the mental re-write, so he had to resort to drastic action to keep her from remembering who she was. Fortunately, there was only one thing that defined Lucrecia that was not replicated by Marona in any way, and from that, he had his answer: She was a psychic. Her specialty was hydrokinesis, so to prevent her from accessing that part of herself, Ford did something that's not often done: he made her fear water." Well, actually, giving people temporary phobias was actually a relatively frequent tool in the grislier toolbox of a Psychonaut, but that's a classified secret. "Unfortunately, psychics who don't exercise their abilities… tend to use them unconsciously instead. Her fear of water combined with her hydrokinesis to create… the Curse of Galochio"
"...But the Hand of Galochio showed up at the camp. I wasn't anywhere near Nona." Razputin said, thinking hard.
"As I explained to your father, the curse is powered by your own belief in it." Tanya elaborated, "You believe the Hand of Galochio is after you, so your own hydrokinesis creates it." She looked over to Donatella. "I suspect that if the non-psychic members of the family were to go a few miles away from the psychic ones, they wouldn't have any problem with water at all." She paused, "Beyond the conditioned fear response."
"Stay away from the water!" Lucy said compulsively. "Oops." She said after a beat.
"...Maligula." Frazie said suddenly. "You're saying Nona was Maligula."
Tanya nodded sadly. "The topic of that moniker is more complex than it would seem at first glance. Back then, no one knew about her condition, or how it worked. Her friends only saw their comrade act in ways they could not recognize as their friend, and knew that she was unwell. Hurt by the stress of war, of combat."
"Nona… was a founding member of the Psychonauts?" Razputin asked, in awe.
Tanya smirked ruefully. "Razputin, if that's your primary takeaway, you need to catch up." She turned to Lucy. "How are you feeling, Nona?"
"I'm fi… I'm confused, and a little scared." Lucy said, nervous. "If I'm not… me… then what happened to-"
"Marona died in the deluge, with her husband." Ford explained, sitting down in the beanbag right next to Lucy's.
"Your condition is much more well-understood nowadays." Tanya continued, "So the previous treatment, as kludged together as it was, can be replaced with a much less onerous alternative."
"...Yes, I'd like that." Lucy said, nodding slowly. "I'll still remember Gussy?" She asked, hopeful.
"You still spent the last twenty years with your family." Tanya said, staring right in her eyes adamantly. "You didn't have a choice in picking up where your sister left off, which was terrible, but the Lucy I saw in your friend's memories was someone who loved her family. Enough to kill for them." Anyone could say they were willing to die or kill for someone. Few had that mettle tested. "That Lucy would have taken in her nephew and raised him as her own in a heartbeat. Are you any different?"
"...No." Lucy said firmly. "No, if Gussy had a cousin back then, if I was to take in both of them… I'd do it. Family… family is the most important thing."
"Hold on to that." Tanya instructed her, deathly serious. "Because my family is here too, and I'm definitely ready to kill for them, if you lose control." To emphasize her point, she manifested her deadliest PSI blades along her fingers. Mom and Dad looked at her worriedly, but stayed out of things, turning their attention back to maintaining the perimeter.
Lucy's expression hardened. "...Good." She said, her expression melting as she looked at her family. "Let's begin." She set her shoulders and walked towards the center of the dome, where the Astralathe was waiting. For an instant, Tanya could see the bearing of General Maligula, the strength that she knew well from her time in the Empire.
"Augustus?" Tanya asked, "Would you like to come help?" His presence may act as a pacification, and he wouldn't be in any real danger that he wouldn't be in just from being near the place as they worked.
"Can I help?" Razputin immediately asked.
"Hehe." Ford laughed, "Sure, kid. Let's go." Tanya scowled at the man. Even if it was still pretty safe, particularly if she keeps an eye on him… Ugh, she's not the kid's mother, she shouldn't be the one deciding what he can't do because she thinks he needs to be punished. She gave Augustus a pleading look.
"You've done this more than I have, son." Augustus said instead. Damn it! "Go ahead and show your old man how it's done." Razputin beamed.
In short order, Lucy was strapped into the Astralathe, the psychic restraints turned on at full power. Each of the Psychic Six contributed psychic power into the device, with Otto taking point on the telepathic controls. A single psychoportal was placed on Lucy's head, and Ford, Augustus, Razputin, and Tanya all projected themselves into her head.
Once more, into the breach.
---------------------------------
The outer layer of Lucy's mind was the construct that Ford had created for it: a literal flea circus featuring her family, as in the fleas were wearing masks of her family members, with a giant flea wearing a Ford mask acting as the carnival barker, presenting everything.
Augustus looked around. "Yes, everything seems normal." He said. They had arrived somewhat violently, one of the fleas dying from someone landing on them. Ironically, it was the Razputin flea.
Tanya took a closer look at all of the death-defying stunts the fleas were making. "...Yes, I recall most of these." She says, thinking back to the week or two she spent in their company.
They had to quiet Lucy's anxiety by running through the routines, which Razputin took as an opportunity to gather figments. "So, do we need to dismantle this?" Tanya asked, turning to Ford, "Or will that be handled by the deeper work we plan on doing?" She spread out her senses, trying to find the entrance to the deeper layer. It was well-hidden.
Ford scratched his chin. "Well, uh…"
"I can show you the secret place." Lucy volunteered. "Come on, on the high dive." She leapt upwards, going all the way up to the aforementioned area in a single leap.
"Well, I guess she's been working with a flea circus." Razputin commented, "You pick stuff up."
Tanya took off into the air, while Augustus generated a levitation bouncy ball that he used to make a similar leap, taking three leaps to do so. Razputin snagged a telepathic tether on some stray thoughts and used them as grapples to travel upward. Ford just teleported.
"I don't often lose races." Tanya commented idly, "But pace yourselves, even if we're buoyed by the rest of the Psychic Six we shouldn't get careless." She was still basically allergic to outside power sources, but the psychic six knew this and specifically avoided augmenting her. Otto was handling the machine, Compton was augmenting him, Helmut was augmenting Razputin, Bob was augmenting Augustus, and Cassie was augmenting Ford. If any of them needed to do anything big, they were ready to switch it up, but that was the default formation they agreed to.
"Eh, it's fine." Ford said, "Now, Lucy, where's the inner chamber?"
Lucy giggled, and opened her mouth with a puerile grin. "Please refrain from bawdy jokes when there's a ten year old around." Tanya asked tiredly. Also, ew.
The old woman looked at Razputin, who was pouting at Tanya's request. "Fine, be that way." She gestured to the diving board. "It's down there."
Without hesitation, Tanya jumped down the board, head-first. The pool, true to the theme of 'flea circus' was actually just a teacup, although it was bone dry. The instant she hit the region within it, it transformed into cushioning, which she tore through and ended up in Lucy's true mind, beneath the construct.
It was… bright, and happy, and everything was quilted. The serenity, the waves of contented happiness… Tanya wiped away some stray tears as the other members of the expedition tore through the quilted sky, falling through a seam that sealed behind them.
"Wow…" Augustus said, just as awed as she was. "I never even suspected…"
.
"Limiting your mother's personality to have only the depth of a puddle was the largest of Ford's crimes." Tanya said, giving the man the side-eye again. "So you can be forgiven for falling for it."
"I never… this wasn't here before." Ford mumbled.
Tanya barked out a laugh. "Did you think that she would remain as she was?" Tanya asked rhetorically. "It's been twenty years. Even nuclear disasters can be reclaimed by nature in that amount of time." Well, depends on the disaster, but she distinctly recalled Chernobyl being turned into a nature preserve. "It is human nature to grow and change, to adapt in the face of adversity." She looked over at the bright fabric horizon. "I've never seen a happier mind."
"Thank you." Lucy said, wiping a tear from her eye. "Come on, we've got a bit of a walk ahead of us." She leapt forward, crossing hundreds of meters in one go.
They traveled deeper into Lucy's mind, picking up stray figments and seeing depictions of fond memories of hers rendered in needlepoint. "Hey, it's a nugget of wisdom!" Razputin announced, pointing to a golden spool of thread with a needle sticking out of it.
"What's that?" Lucy asked, confused. "Wait… it's coming back to me. It's… distilled knowledge and experience, right?"
"That's right." Ford said gently. "You can use that to teach someone how to sew, if you want. Either one of us can draw from it now or there's a trick you can learn to gift it to someone." It wasn't strictly necessary to use a nugget of wisdom when using that form of high-bandwidth telepathy, but it allowed for a much denser packet of information to be transferred if you did.
"Tanya, you should have it." Lucy said immediately. "Sewing is a great skill for a young lady to have. Have you practiced any since you stayed with us? I only had time to teach you the basics then." Nuggets of wisdom were also more effective if you had a baseline of knowledge that it could build on rather than learning it from scratch. Did she know that?
"Not much." Tanya admitted, "Once or twice a year, small things only." It wasn't nothing, but Mom did most of the sewing, and that was usually on sentimental items only, like her stuffed animal battalion. "I just buy new clothes if they get a big rip or something." Bluntly, she wasn't poor enough to wear clothes that were visibly mended, and no one in the household was skilled enough to make the mends unnoticeable, if they were large.
"Ah, what a waste." Lucy said disapprovingly. "Take it, you'll see how useful it can be."
Well, she wasn't going to say no to such a useful skill, even if it'll likely won't become useful until her next life. She accepted the golden spindle, and realized, as it was being absorbed, realized that referring to it as a spindle was inaccurate. "Thank you." Tanya said sincerely. "Maybe I could make my own cosplay…" Anime conventions weren't really a thing in America yet, but comic conventions were. She's gone to a big one in San Diego as her comic character, but that wasn't as an attendee, but instead to speak about True Psychic Tales.
"That's the spirit." Lucy said, smiling toothlessly.
With that finished, they kept going. There were a few mental defenses that Lucy didn't seem to be able to hold back, but with the level of force they brought to bear, it was easily handled. Tanya even held back, allowing Razputin to show Augustus how to fight in a mental world. They handled things quite well, although Augustus didn't seem to quite grasp how to focus killing intent for PSI blasts.
As they progressed, Razputin kept ducking away and finding emotional baggage tags, but they found no bags. Until, of course, they got to the end.
The place reminded Tanya of a dockyard more than anything, with a massive wall of emotional baggage chained up. "Ah, here we are." Tanya commented, looking around.
"Yep, this is where I stashed Maligula." Ford confirmed, "I'd recognize that construct anywhere."
"So how, exactly, is this supposed to work?" Augustus asked.
"Well, first we have to dismantle my previous work." Ford said, "Me and Otto will be handling that. When that's happened, the mental entity that represents the Maligula personality will be free and will, probably, attempt to take over."
"That's where we come in." Tanya added. "You, me, and Razputin will engage the Maligula personality in psychic combat, keeping it busy as the Psychic Six construct the new, much better prison for Lucy's empowered survival drive."
"Will we be enough?" Augustus asked worriedly. "I mean… Maligula."
"I am confident that I could handle her alone." Tanya said confidently. "While it's risky, I am capable of a controlled release of my own survival drive, and if you and Razputin fall, I will do so and ensure victory."
"...But wouldn't that mean you'd go crazy instead?" Augustus asked, immediately seeing through her.
"That would be why my parents are holding back." Tanya admitted, "They will handle that if I'm unable to stop myself. But I should be able to do so."
"We got this, Dad!" Razputin said boastfully.
She hopes so.
---------------------------------
Did Tanya anticipate having to drop two hundred dollars on reasonably fashionable clothing for an old man this morning? No. Was it money well spent, particularly as she got to have the pleasure of burning his old clothing for him? Yes. Did she have the spare money to do it? Also yes. She's going to get that money paid back once Ford's financial situation is resolved, but that was just the principle of the thing. The military contracts for the training APES alone have already made her a millionaire on paper, even if her liquid assets weren't significantly greater than that of any of her coworkers.
Digging into her many pockets, she took out a small bottle. "No, this is regular talcum powder…" It was useful to have in the damp environment of the Motherlobe, she put it on her feet before putting on her boots, but the scent of talcum powder wasn't what she needed. It was the perfume they put in baby powder specifically that called Mom. She put her hand back in the pocket, taking out the other tiny bottle of talcum powder. Twisting the cap, she sniffed at the baby powder.
Mom's psychic presence emerged into her awareness immediately. "Hello Darling, we're almost back. It took quite a bit of effort to convince them all to come."
"Excellent." Tanya replied, "We're ready to receive them. The Psychic Six have fully assembled and will be handling matters personally."
"...You're being sneaky." Mom sent along with tones of suspicion. "Do I need to warn Sasha of impending danger?"
"I mean, we've contained the infiltration." Tanya sent back, "The Deluginists don't have the manpower to disturb the procedure."
"Tanya…" Mom said warningly.
"Yes, there is a non-zero chance of incredible danger." Tanya admitted, "But we're taking every precaution. Now, this is very important: Did you bring Razputin's grandmother?"
"Yes, everyone's here. Razputin, both of his brothers, both of his sisters, his parents, and his grandmother." Mom sent with a hint of exasperation.
"Good, she's Patient Zero. We'll need her." Tanya sent with tones of relief. "ETA?"
"Ten minutes to get parked, maybe ten more to get everyone to the Heptadome."
"I'll meet you on arrival."
---------------------------------
"Well, you've certainly grown up into a fine young woman." Augustus said as he did his best to crush Tanya's ribs in a hug. Her passive reinforcement strained as his own rose in strength to match it, but he let go before anything cracked. "I hope Razputin hasn't been too much trouble."
"He's been an obscene amount of trouble, actually." Tanya replied icily, taking a moment to glare at the boy. "An object lesson on irresponsible psychic power use, even."
Augustus blinked in surprise. "Really?" He glanced at his son. "...How much trouble is he in?"
"It's nothing that wasn't fixed promptly, and he did make some positive contributions in addition to his disasters, so it's forgivable." Tanya explained, calming herself down. "But it's the kind of thing where if he was an adult, he'd be put before a judge." She sighed, "The grim truth of the matter is that as much as we sometimes pretend otherwise, the justice system does operate under 'no harm, no foul'." Tort law literally runs on that, but criminal charges theoretically didn't. "The boy's got talent, so despite his indiscretions, he still has a bright future in the Psychonauts ahead of him. He just needs to learn."
Augustus nodded along to her description. "That sounds like my Razputin alright. Good heart, but leaps before he looks." He chuckled, "He gets that from me."
"Hm, yes." Tanya said dryly. "Now if you'll follow me, there's a tram to the place where we'll be treating your psychic malady."
"You mean the curse?" Augustus asked.
"Yes." Tanya said, "It's literally powered by your own belief in its existence, so when we take out the source, it'll be an easy procedure to handle the rest of you."
Augustus frowned as he thought about her words. "Is it really that simple?"
Tanya barked out a laugh. "I apologize if I gave you the impression that this was going to be simple. No, this will be complex and painful for…" She paused, "Actually it'll only be painful for you and Razputin, probably. Definitely Nona."
Augustus narrowed his eyes. "...How much of this did you know, back then?"
"I theorized how to cure you even then." Tanya admitted, "You may recall that rebellious part of myself offering the solution to you." Augustus nodded, "Now I know for sure that I was, in theory, correct back then, but it would not have ended well if I had attempted to put it to practice. It's only recently that the pieces have come together-" Tanya huffed as she realized her accidental pun. "-in a way that I'm confident this can be done safely."
"...Alright." He said, before turning to his family, who were… stretching and doing some minor acrobatics. The plane ride wasn't that long… "Form up! We're going to get this curse broken!"
The Aquato family cheered and bounded towards them… except for Lucy, who shuffled along slowly. Tanya manifested a giant telekinetic hand for her to sit on, and floated the old woman down the tube to the tram.
As they went, Dion, Razputin's fifteen-year-old brother, sat down next to Tanya, giving her what he probably thought was a roguish grin. "Hey." He said, giving her a flirty upnod.
Tanya stared at him flatly. "Ew. No." She said, echoing her last words to him. From his poleaxed expression, he did not expect that… at least so quickly.
Frazie, the fourteen-year-old Aquato sibling, burst out laughing at her brother's shutdown. "I told you she was too old for you, Dion."
"There there, Dizzy…" Razputin's mom Donatella said, patting her oldest son on the back. Tanya snorted at the pet name. "There's plenty of fish in the sea." She gave Tanya an annoyed side-eye. "Politer ones. He just said hello."
"I remind you that I'm a telepath." Tanya said, sighing. "I knew exactly what he was thinking." Well, 'exactly' was a bit of an exaggeration, as she tended to automatically tune out coherent thoughts, but her subconscious picked up the essential parts to fuel her intuition.
"Now that sounds handy." Frazie commented.
"That sounds gross." Mirtala, Razputin's younger sister, said instead. "Boys are gross."
"Ah, just you wait, pui." Lucy said, using the Grulovian word for 'little one'. "You'll see the appeal eventually."
Tanya shrugged. "There's a balance to strike with telepathy, certainly. I had a lot of problems when I was very young from oversensitivity." She gave a glance to Lucy. "Also Nona, not necessarily. Sometimes the attraction never comes." Turning her attention back to Mirtala, she added: "Which is fine. No matter who you want to kiss when you grow up, even if it's no one, like me, it's all normal."
"Don't you be filling my daughter's head with that stuff!" Donatella said, overdramatically offended, "I want grandchildren!"
"You have five children." Tanya deadpanned, "You can afford some deviation from the norm." Dion seemed perfectly willing, if not necessarily capable yet. He's still young.
"Dear, calm down." Augustus said, keeping the peace. "That's something that we're still years off from needing to worry about." He gave his oldest son a stern look. "Right, Dion?"
"Definitely." Dion said immediately, nodding emphatically. The last Aquato child, Queepie, chuckled at his older brother.
"Well, we're here." Tanya said, bringing the tram to a stop. "Green Needle Gulch, the place where the original Psychonauts were founded." Razputin, despite having been here before, eagerly grinned in anticipation. "I'll help you up, Nona."
"Thank you." Lucy said, taking a seat on the telekinetic hand Tanya created for her.
---------------------------------
Tanya gently lifted the elderly woman out of the entrance to the underground tunnel, looking at everyone. Helmut had clearly taken the lead when it came to greeting the Aquatos, having herded them into the Heptadome quickly and seating them in a set of new mats and beanbags that had been placed for them.
Mom and Dad, having gone ahead immediately on arrival, were keeping an eye out for trouble. They spared a smile, wave, and empathic projection of love for her, which she returned, but then it was back to business.
The Psychic Six, on the other hand, were staring in wonder at Lucy as Tanya set her down. "Tanya, this place… it looks… familiar." Lucy whispered to her. "Also, who is that handsome man with my favorite flowers?" Which were yellow pansies, apparently. Wow, it's been years since she's gotten a memory flash from that herbaphony nugget.
"It's an apology bouquet." Tanya whispered back. "He's got a lot to be sorry for, but we're going to fix it today."
Lucy walked up to the other members of the Psychic Seven, looking at their faces intently as she tried to remember them. "I… know you people." She said slowly. "Your name is…" She frowned. "...Bob?"
"Actually, I'm Bob." Bob said, "That's Compton. Compton Boole."
"I'm sorry, Lucy." Ford said immediately.
Nona's face scrunched up in pain. "No, Lucy is my sister." She said as in on autopilot. Ah, a hypnotic compulsion.
"No, no she isn't." Ford said morosely. "That's why I'm sorry."
The Aquatos were just confused, but Augustus was deep in thought. Well, time to rip off the bandage. "Alright, enough sentimentality. We've got a lot to do and only…" Tanya fished her watch out of her pocket and glanced at it. "-as much time as we need to do it in." Pausing for the few chuckles to pass, she continued. "The truth is, Augustus, your mother… is not your original mother." She made sure to be very precise in her wording here. "Shortly after Marona Aquato nee Galochio died, her sister, Lucrecia Mux nee Galochio, was hypnotized into thinking she was her sister, and you were hypnotized into going along with it."
The Aquatos gasped, although Mirtala just looked confused. "Why would anyone do something like that!?" Augustus demanded. "Who?"
"He did it." Tanya said, jerking her thumb to Ford. "The reason, of course, was to hide Lucrecia so thoroughly no one could find her. He even shattered his own mind to ensure that not even he could remember things differently." She glared at Ford, "It was overkill, of course, but I can understand his reasoning." She shrugged, "As a nice side-effect, you got the chance to grow up without being an orphan, so keep that in mind before you try and kill him. Feel free to punch him in the face or something, he deserves it. But please wait until after matters have been settled, first."
"How does this relate to the curse?" Frazie asked, suspicious. Lucy had walked closer and sat down on a specific beanbag, one that was probably exactly where she used to sit, given the oddly specific positioning. She was paying rapt attention.
Tanya had been thinking on how to explain this for a while, so she had the story well prepared. "Ford may not have thought his plan through completely, but he wasn't completely reckless with it. He knew that he wouldn't be able to maintain the mental re-write, so he had to resort to drastic action to keep her from remembering who she was. Fortunately, there was only one thing that defined Lucrecia that was not replicated by Marona in any way, and from that, he had his answer: She was a psychic. Her specialty was hydrokinesis, so to prevent her from accessing that part of herself, Ford did something that's not often done: he made her fear water." Well, actually, giving people temporary phobias was actually a relatively frequent tool in the grislier toolbox of a Psychonaut, but that's a classified secret. "Unfortunately, psychics who don't exercise their abilities… tend to use them unconsciously instead. Her fear of water combined with her hydrokinesis to create… the Curse of Galochio"
"...But the Hand of Galochio showed up at the camp. I wasn't anywhere near Nona." Razputin said, thinking hard.
"As I explained to your father, the curse is powered by your own belief in it." Tanya elaborated, "You believe the Hand of Galochio is after you, so your own hydrokinesis creates it." She looked over to Donatella. "I suspect that if the non-psychic members of the family were to go a few miles away from the psychic ones, they wouldn't have any problem with water at all." She paused, "Beyond the conditioned fear response."
"Stay away from the water!" Lucy said compulsively. "Oops." She said after a beat.
"...Maligula." Frazie said suddenly. "You're saying Nona was Maligula."
Tanya nodded sadly. "The topic of that moniker is more complex than it would seem at first glance. Back then, no one knew about her condition, or how it worked. Her friends only saw their comrade act in ways they could not recognize as their friend, and knew that she was unwell. Hurt by the stress of war, of combat."
"Nona… was a founding member of the Psychonauts?" Razputin asked, in awe.
Tanya smirked ruefully. "Razputin, if that's your primary takeaway, you need to catch up." She turned to Lucy. "How are you feeling, Nona?"
"I'm fi… I'm confused, and a little scared." Lucy said, nervous. "If I'm not… me… then what happened to-"
"Marona died in the deluge, with her husband." Ford explained, sitting down in the beanbag right next to Lucy's.
"Your condition is much more well-understood nowadays." Tanya continued, "So the previous treatment, as kludged together as it was, can be replaced with a much less onerous alternative."
"...Yes, I'd like that." Lucy said, nodding slowly. "I'll still remember Gussy?" She asked, hopeful.
"You still spent the last twenty years with your family." Tanya said, staring right in her eyes adamantly. "You didn't have a choice in picking up where your sister left off, which was terrible, but the Lucy I saw in your friend's memories was someone who loved her family. Enough to kill for them." Anyone could say they were willing to die or kill for someone. Few had that mettle tested. "That Lucy would have taken in her nephew and raised him as her own in a heartbeat. Are you any different?"
"...No." Lucy said firmly. "No, if Gussy had a cousin back then, if I was to take in both of them… I'd do it. Family… family is the most important thing."
"Hold on to that." Tanya instructed her, deathly serious. "Because my family is here too, and I'm definitely ready to kill for them, if you lose control." To emphasize her point, she manifested her deadliest PSI blades along her fingers. Mom and Dad looked at her worriedly, but stayed out of things, turning their attention back to maintaining the perimeter.
Lucy's expression hardened. "...Good." She said, her expression melting as she looked at her family. "Let's begin." She set her shoulders and walked towards the center of the dome, where the Astralathe was waiting. For an instant, Tanya could see the bearing of General Maligula, the strength that she knew well from her time in the Empire.
"Augustus?" Tanya asked, "Would you like to come help?" His presence may act as a pacification, and he wouldn't be in any real danger that he wouldn't be in just from being near the place as they worked.
"Can I help?" Razputin immediately asked.
"Hehe." Ford laughed, "Sure, kid. Let's go." Tanya scowled at the man. Even if it was still pretty safe, particularly if she keeps an eye on him… Ugh, she's not the kid's mother, she shouldn't be the one deciding what he can't do because she thinks he needs to be punished. She gave Augustus a pleading look.
"You've done this more than I have, son." Augustus said instead. Damn it! "Go ahead and show your old man how it's done." Razputin beamed.
In short order, Lucy was strapped into the Astralathe, the psychic restraints turned on at full power. Each of the Psychic Six contributed psychic power into the device, with Otto taking point on the telepathic controls. A single psychoportal was placed on Lucy's head, and Ford, Augustus, Razputin, and Tanya all projected themselves into her head.
Once more, into the breach.
---------------------------------
The outer layer of Lucy's mind was the construct that Ford had created for it: a literal flea circus featuring her family, as in the fleas were wearing masks of her family members, with a giant flea wearing a Ford mask acting as the carnival barker, presenting everything.
Augustus looked around. "Yes, everything seems normal." He said. They had arrived somewhat violently, one of the fleas dying from someone landing on them. Ironically, it was the Razputin flea.
Tanya took a closer look at all of the death-defying stunts the fleas were making. "...Yes, I recall most of these." She says, thinking back to the week or two she spent in their company.
They had to quiet Lucy's anxiety by running through the routines, which Razputin took as an opportunity to gather figments. "So, do we need to dismantle this?" Tanya asked, turning to Ford, "Or will that be handled by the deeper work we plan on doing?" She spread out her senses, trying to find the entrance to the deeper layer. It was well-hidden.
Ford scratched his chin. "Well, uh…"
"I can show you the secret place." Lucy volunteered. "Come on, on the high dive." She leapt upwards, going all the way up to the aforementioned area in a single leap.
"Well, I guess she's been working with a flea circus." Razputin commented, "You pick stuff up."
Tanya took off into the air, while Augustus generated a levitation bouncy ball that he used to make a similar leap, taking three leaps to do so. Razputin snagged a telepathic tether on some stray thoughts and used them as grapples to travel upward. Ford just teleported.
"I don't often lose races." Tanya commented idly, "But pace yourselves, even if we're buoyed by the rest of the Psychic Six we shouldn't get careless." She was still basically allergic to outside power sources, but the psychic six knew this and specifically avoided augmenting her. Otto was handling the machine, Compton was augmenting him, Helmut was augmenting Razputin, Bob was augmenting Augustus, and Cassie was augmenting Ford. If any of them needed to do anything big, they were ready to switch it up, but that was the default formation they agreed to.
"Eh, it's fine." Ford said, "Now, Lucy, where's the inner chamber?"
Lucy giggled, and opened her mouth with a puerile grin. "Please refrain from bawdy jokes when there's a ten year old around." Tanya asked tiredly. Also, ew.
The old woman looked at Razputin, who was pouting at Tanya's request. "Fine, be that way." She gestured to the diving board. "It's down there."
Without hesitation, Tanya jumped down the board, head-first. The pool, true to the theme of 'flea circus' was actually just a teacup, although it was bone dry. The instant she hit the region within it, it transformed into cushioning, which she tore through and ended up in Lucy's true mind, beneath the construct.
It was… bright, and happy, and everything was quilted. The serenity, the waves of contented happiness… Tanya wiped away some stray tears as the other members of the expedition tore through the quilted sky, falling through a seam that sealed behind them.
"Wow…" Augustus said, just as awed as she was. "I never even suspected…"
.
"Limiting your mother's personality to have only the depth of a puddle was the largest of Ford's crimes." Tanya said, giving the man the side-eye again. "So you can be forgiven for falling for it."
"I never… this wasn't here before." Ford mumbled.
Tanya barked out a laugh. "Did you think that she would remain as she was?" Tanya asked rhetorically. "It's been twenty years. Even nuclear disasters can be reclaimed by nature in that amount of time." Well, depends on the disaster, but she distinctly recalled Chernobyl being turned into a nature preserve. "It is human nature to grow and change, to adapt in the face of adversity." She looked over at the bright fabric horizon. "I've never seen a happier mind."
"Thank you." Lucy said, wiping a tear from her eye. "Come on, we've got a bit of a walk ahead of us." She leapt forward, crossing hundreds of meters in one go.
They traveled deeper into Lucy's mind, picking up stray figments and seeing depictions of fond memories of hers rendered in needlepoint. "Hey, it's a nugget of wisdom!" Razputin announced, pointing to a golden spool of thread with a needle sticking out of it.
"What's that?" Lucy asked, confused. "Wait… it's coming back to me. It's… distilled knowledge and experience, right?"
"That's right." Ford said gently. "You can use that to teach someone how to sew, if you want. Either one of us can draw from it now or there's a trick you can learn to gift it to someone." It wasn't strictly necessary to use a nugget of wisdom when using that form of high-bandwidth telepathy, but it allowed for a much denser packet of information to be transferred if you did.
"Tanya, you should have it." Lucy said immediately. "Sewing is a great skill for a young lady to have. Have you practiced any since you stayed with us? I only had time to teach you the basics then." Nuggets of wisdom were also more effective if you had a baseline of knowledge that it could build on rather than learning it from scratch. Did she know that?
"Not much." Tanya admitted, "Once or twice a year, small things only." It wasn't nothing, but Mom did most of the sewing, and that was usually on sentimental items only, like her stuffed animal battalion. "I just buy new clothes if they get a big rip or something." Bluntly, she wasn't poor enough to wear clothes that were visibly mended, and no one in the household was skilled enough to make the mends unnoticeable, if they were large.
"Ah, what a waste." Lucy said disapprovingly. "Take it, you'll see how useful it can be."
Well, she wasn't going to say no to such a useful skill, even if it'll likely won't become useful until her next life. She accepted the golden spindle, and realized, as it was being absorbed, realized that referring to it as a spindle was inaccurate. "Thank you." Tanya said sincerely. "Maybe I could make my own cosplay…" Anime conventions weren't really a thing in America yet, but comic conventions were. She's gone to a big one in San Diego as her comic character, but that wasn't as an attendee, but instead to speak about True Psychic Tales.
"That's the spirit." Lucy said, smiling toothlessly.
With that finished, they kept going. There were a few mental defenses that Lucy didn't seem to be able to hold back, but with the level of force they brought to bear, it was easily handled. Tanya even held back, allowing Razputin to show Augustus how to fight in a mental world. They handled things quite well, although Augustus didn't seem to quite grasp how to focus killing intent for PSI blasts.
As they progressed, Razputin kept ducking away and finding emotional baggage tags, but they found no bags. Until, of course, they got to the end.
The place reminded Tanya of a dockyard more than anything, with a massive wall of emotional baggage chained up. "Ah, here we are." Tanya commented, looking around.
"Yep, this is where I stashed Maligula." Ford confirmed, "I'd recognize that construct anywhere."
"So how, exactly, is this supposed to work?" Augustus asked.
"Well, first we have to dismantle my previous work." Ford said, "Me and Otto will be handling that. When that's happened, the mental entity that represents the Maligula personality will be free and will, probably, attempt to take over."
"That's where we come in." Tanya added. "You, me, and Razputin will engage the Maligula personality in psychic combat, keeping it busy as the Psychic Six construct the new, much better prison for Lucy's empowered survival drive."
"Will we be enough?" Augustus asked worriedly. "I mean… Maligula."
"I am confident that I could handle her alone." Tanya said confidently. "While it's risky, I am capable of a controlled release of my own survival drive, and if you and Razputin fall, I will do so and ensure victory."
"...But wouldn't that mean you'd go crazy instead?" Augustus asked, immediately seeing through her.
"That would be why my parents are holding back." Tanya admitted, "They will handle that if I'm unable to stop myself. But I should be able to do so."
"We got this, Dad!" Razputin said boastfully.
She hopes so.
- Location
- new york
Good use of the nugget.
Lucy knew she would have a use for sewing. It occurred to me that she might have used 'sewing' in battlefield tactics. The least scariest is her turning someone clothes into a straightjacket with mental powers alone.
Chapter 3.12
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
All that's left is the Epilogues. How many are there going to be? Well, while I don't really like how they turned out, there'll only be two for this life, and then I'm going to do one or two more lives per epilogue chapter for at least one or two after that, then I'll be done for real.
-------------------
The blunt drill of the Astralathe emerged from the cloudy skies, as Ford put his hand to his temple and waved his arm to direct the large mental copy. "Look alive!" He shouted, the drill slowly winding up as it built up the psychic energy, dense enough to appear more as a stellar event than anything capable of being wrought by mortal hands.
"Oh dear." Lucy said, hands trembling as she saw the event. "I remember this part," She whispered, "-it hurt."
There wasn't a lot Tanya could do about that, but she grabbed Lucy's hand and gave it a supportive squeeze, and braced herself as well.
The energy of the Astralathe burst out, creating a giant gaping hole in the emotional damage bag. Several individual pieces that matched the tags they had collected on the way down scattered in front of them. "Tags!" Tanya shouted, quickly grabbing one of the ones she kept and placing it on the purse.
Anticipation. Excitement. A flash of a crowd, streamers of water around her. Pride. Exhilaration. Awe. Indignation. Annoyance. Attraction. Ford Cruller, in his youth. Embarrassment. Shame. Fear.
Quickly doing her mental exercises to process the emotions, absorbing the power and attuning herself to the local environment, she glanced at the other four people here. Lucy was staggered, clutching her head. Razputin finished absorbing the suitcase and moved on to the hat box. Ford was still handling the steamer trunk, while Augustus worked on the duffel bag.
Grabbing the sixth tag from her belt, Tanya moved on to the jewelry box, inserting the key-like tag right into the lock.
Worry. Her own hand running through her hair. Weakness. Dread. Hope. Happiness. Love.
Ugh. "Back-to-back romantic baggage…" Tanya whined, staggered by the foreign emotions. She looked over the many other pieces of emotional baggage. Razputin was already on his third.
But it was too late. A giant image of Maligula, with a distorted caricature of Lucy's face, emerged from behind the destroyed dam. How many baggages are left? There were a few duplicates that dissolved when the primary baggage was resolved, but… about five unattended? It looks like Ford was on his second, and Augustus was still recovering from his first.
It was a bit paradoxical that baggage provided more energy but still wore you out, but it once they manage to catch their metaphorical breath, they'll find themselves much more able to hurt Maligula.
It had started to rain.
"Watch out…" Maligula's sultry tone rang out, booming in volume. "A storm is coming." Water came and rushed towards Lucy, enveloping her in water and transforming her into another copy of Maligula. Everyone else leapt onto one of the surrounding pieces of wreckage, except for Ford who was thrown bodily onto a wall.
"Agent Ford!" Razputin shouted, concerned.
"I'm fine, kid!" Ford shouted back, standing back up. "It'll take more than a little water to take me out."
The water also changed the environment, the dam-like setting changing to a familiar set of buildings in Grulovian style: The Deluge of Grulovia. Tsunamis of water, stilled in time, marked the boundaries of the area, and even now, hands of water reached out of those ersatz walls to drag people into their depths.
"Looks like we won't have any other option than to suppress it." Tanya commented, charging a PSI blast on each finger.
"Yeah, the Astralathe's trying to keep her down, but Maligula's too strong. Just need to wear her down." Ford said in agreement. Which is good, because without that, Maligula can literally keep going until she dies.
"Okay!" Razputin said, leaping into action and landing on the large circular floor that Nona-turned-Maligula had been laughing in. The rain intensified. "I'm here to stop you, Maligula!" He announced, putting his goggles on to keep the rain out of his eyes.
"Oh, you poor boy. Thinking you stand a chance against the greatest psychic in history!" Maligula boasted, laughing. Snakes of water condensed from mid-air and launched themselves at the acrobatic kid, who danced around them while unleashing some weak but quick PSI blasts.
The larger Maligula loomed over the battlefield, eyes anrrowing at the nimble boy. That was her cue. Unleashing the focused killing intent in a barrage of powerful PSI blasts, the giant Maligula head exploded into water before reforming as a smaller, but still gigantic Maligula. Tanya flew after it, leaving the smaller one to the others.
"Hm, you're the threat, I see." Maligula commented, her tone cold and calculating. A very familiar tone, as Tanya's heard it often enough from her own thoughts. She formed a series of waterspouts and unleashed them, forcing Tanya to dodge as she fired more PSI blasts.
"This is going to take a long time…" Tanya commented, frowning. "There has to be a faster way…"
"You little gnat!" Maligula shouted in frustration. "I get my first taste of freedom and you're here to muck it up! I am the Deluge of Grulovia! Killer of thousands!"
Tanya snorted. "You don't want to get into that contest against me." She warned.
"Who do you think you ar-urk." Suddenly, Maligula's form shuddered, almost melting into water before firming back up. "What was that?"
Hm… from what her psychic senses were picking up… "That's guilt." Tanya replied, "Come on, let's have a chat." Tanya flew straight into the giant Maligula, coating herself in a barrier sharpened with intent and plunging straight into the heart of the giant construct.
---------------------------------
Inside the construct was another section of the mind, of course. It was a sewer, flooded and inundated with the smells of death.
"It's been a while." Tanya commented idly, walking forth without breaking stride once the waterlogged corpses came into view. "Good thing Razputin isn't here to see this."
Deep in the gore-filled sewers was Lucy, young again, gripping a particular corpse in grief. From the resemblance, this was presumably Marona. "Get up." Tanya commanded. "We need to get your faculties sorted out. The war you fought is long over, and it's time to settle back down into civilian life. But this time, with your eyes open."
"Why'd you wake me up?" Lucy said, in Nona's aged voice. "I was happier without knowing all of…" She gestured around to the corpses. "...this."
Tanya sighed. "Because what Ford did to you was wrong." She said firmly. "It was done in a rush, and with good intentions, without palatable alternatives… but just because you don't like doing something, because it was the least worst option, doesn't mean you're not culpable for the consequences of doing it." Even if those consequences are merely to suffer with that knowledge.
"Then why don't you kill me?" Lucy asked miserably.
Tanya smiled. "Because you deserve happiness." The list of people who don't are those who deserve death. Like Being X. "All who live deserve happiness." She elaborated.
"I had it." Lucy insisted, "But now? With so many deaths… the death of my sister?" She shuddered. "Who can say that I deserve happiness?"
"I do. You deserve happiness." Tanya repeated insistently.
"Why?" Lucy said, crying. "Why do you say such a thing?"
Tanya sighed sadly. "Because if you don't deserve happiness… then neither do I." She said, changing her form to a watered-down copy of her old demon. Her hands dripped with blood, her flight suit in tatters, and her body held together with cracks filled with solid gold.
Lucy looked over Tanya's form with confusion. "W-what? Of course you deserve happiness, dear."
"Do I?" Tanya asked rhetorically. "Otto worked out the numbers, you know. The Deluge itself killed two thousand, four hundred thirty-eight people, near as he can tell. Total casualties from your war record, while difficult to track, is estimated to be around five thousand enemy soldiers and two thousand civilians."
"Over nine thousand…" Lucy whispered to herself.
"The most conservative estimate of my own kill count is around twenty-six thousand. The most generous at around one hundred seventy thousand" Tanya continued, "But don't tell Razputin. I'm done with war." Augustus had an idea, if not the scale. "So I cannot believe that you don't deserve happiness. Not while retaining a will to live." Particularly as death wouldn't even help, in her case.
"H-how?" Lucy asked, confused and sad.
"That's not important." Tanya said, waving off the question. She snapped her bloodied fingers and restored her true appearance. "What is, is this: The past is the past. You cannot change the past, but at the same time, there's no justice in suffering. You were not in your right mind, nor did you understand what was happening. No one did. It's the threat that comes from pushing the cutting edge of science." Tanya poked Lucy in the forehead and transferred some of the knowledge she had hoarded on their mutual condition. "You were sick, and all you need to do is accept treatment, like I did. Then all will be well." It was a bit oversimplified, but that would suffice.
Lucy looked down at her sister's corpse. Gently, she closed the corpse's eyelids and stood up, looking around sadly. "You know…" She said, "The Deluge was an accident."
Oh? "I believe you." Tanya said immediately.
"The protests… I just made it rain. It dispersed them well enough." Lucy said, walking to the next room. "The dam broke without me doing anything more than that, over weeks of rain filling it up."
A memory vault ran up, and disgorged its contents to them. The memories were stored in needlepoint art stored in the form of a scarf, simplified but clear. Reading through it, the story was backed up. "Likely, the dam was poorly constructed." Tanya said softly. "Whether it was from incompetence or someone cutting corners on purpose to pocket the difference, we won't be able to know."
"That does make me feel a little better." Lucy admitted.
"See? It's good that you regret your actions." Tanya said consolingly. "I've plenty of regrets myself. But it does no one any good to beat yourself up about it. Most of all, your family wouldn't want that. They'd feel terrible, seeing you punish yourself."
That argument seemed to sway her. "Yes, you're right. I need to be there, for Gussie. Even if he's my nephew, he's still my son." As she spoke, she aged, her back bent by the ravages of time until she was back to her normal self.
"That's the spirit." Tanya said, giving Lucy a hug. "Now, let's join him in shutting down Maligula." Taking the old woman by the hand, Tanya used hydrokinesis to create a portal, and stepped through it.
---------------------------------
The battlefield that Tanya and Lucy jumped out into was chaotic, with Ford, Augustus, and Razputin scattered and injured. "NO!" Roared Maligula as the two of them escaped.
"Now, everyone pool their power on one of us!" Tanya shouted, before adding: "Not me!"
"I'll do it!" Razputin volunteered, and he suddenly started growing as Ford and Augustus added their strength to his, and so did everyone on the outside.
Lucy was now glowing an ethereal yellow, and hopped onto Razputin's now-massive shoulder. Maligula grew to match his size, but with so much psychic power on their side, including a not-insignificant portion of Lucy's own mind working against the mental entity, the survival drive was driven back into a deep pit, where it belonged.
"We did it!" Razputin said, grinning widely. "Did you see, Dad? I was all 'Bam' and 'Wham' and 'Roar, I am Goggolor!' It was awesome!"
Augustus looked at Tanya, mouthing 'Goggolor?'. Tanya shrugged. Turning back to the now-shrinking Razputin, Augustus gave a happy smile. "I saw it, Razputin. Good job." The boy beamed at the praise.
"How do you feel, Lucy?" Ford asked.
"I feel… okay." She said, "Like… everything's going to be okay."
Ford smiled. "That it will. That. It. Will."
---------------------------------
The aftermath of Lucy's restoration of herself and the final removal of Ford's psychic construction was pretty much as expected: Opening with a big group hug among the Psychic Seven, all together again. Some minor work was done on the rest of the Aquatos, forcefully severing the mental connections (something so ingrained was usually a dense collection of connections instead of a simple water-death one, although some clusters were larger than others) that cause the hydrophobia, and a few hours of exposure therapy with Lucy guiding the water to keep it that way.
In the end, Razputin was invited to intern again next year, 'properly this time', with an additional promise of being provided all educational materials that would permit him to join the accelerated training program and become a psychonaut proper the instant he turns 18, or when he gets his Bachelor's degree, whichever comes first. Plenty of Psychonauts continue their education after joining on the organization's dime, this was just an extension of that.
But as a punishment for all those rules he broke and the damage he inflicted on Hollis, he'll have to wait until next summer's internship program starts before he can do any of that. Which was, in Tanya's opinion, quite fair. She even cheated a little and provided Augustus the same homeschooling program materials she used to get her high school diploma early, which he'll need to do anyway in order to become a Psychonaut. The most boring part of the path ahead of him, without a single ounce of the fun psychic stuff.
If he manages to keep at it until the internship, he'll have earned the help.
Still, after flying the Aquatos back home, letting them end the day in their own beds, any remaining resolution was officially no longer Tanya's problem. All she needed to do was fix the secure archives, and that could be put off until tomorrow.
"Ah, home sweet home!" Mom exclaimed as they all entered the house. Eric giggled and laughed.
"Home! Homehomehomehome!" Visha shouted, barking wildly in happiness. She then crashed into her bed and promptly fell asleep before the bed even stopped moving from the impact. Tanya snorted. Silly dog…
"Worst summer camp ever!" Mary declared.
"Marceau's psychotic break was quite unfortunately timed, yes." Dad agreed, "It's a shame, I thought the fake villainous plot idea was quite innovative."
"Eh… there were problems with the idea even without Oleander ruining it." Tanya said, taking off her shoes and letting her feet sink into the carpet. "What's for dinner?"
"After a day like this?" Mom asked rhetorically, sitting down on the couch and tickling Eric. "Something delivered. Sasha darling, could you?"
"I think the Chinese place is still open." Mused Dad, walking to the phone in the kitchen. "The usual?"
"Teriyaki beef." Tanya said, "Extra egg rolls."
"Orange chicken!" Mary said from her position, laying upside down on the couch, flipping through the television channels.
"Kung Pao chicken." Mom said cheerily. "Extra spicy."
"Right." Dad said, but he looked towards Tanya. "Err… would you happen to remember-"
"Actually Spicy." Tanya said in Vietnamese, slowly enunciating it. The owners of Imperial Feast were not actually Chinese. America…
"Thank you." Dad said, somewhat embarrassed at still needing to ask.
Tanya settled onto the couch as well, laying her head on Mom's lap and laying her feet over Mary's stomach. "Anything good on?" She asked Mary.
"Just the Facts of Life." Mary commented idly, leaving it on that show. It was a sitcom about an all-girls private school. Tanya didn't particularly enjoy it, but when the alternative was getting up from the couch after a day like this and figuring out something to do… she'll watch it. Mary liked it fine, though.
Mom placed Eric on Tanya's stomach and started running her hand through Tanya's hair. "This is nice…"
Tanya started to hold Eric's hands and moved them about, eliciting another giggle from the one year old. "Dance time…" She murmured, smiling at the cutie.
They fell into a pleasant silence once Dad sat in his chair, waiting for food to come to them rather than needing to work for it, like true Americans.
Once the food had arrived and they had rearranged themselves into proper sitting positions, Visha woke back up. "Food!" She declared with a bark, immediately jumping up to Tanya's lap and turning her soulful eyes to beg for some. "Please, I'm starving. I love you…"
Tanya laughed. "I love you too."
---------------------------------
[1990, Age 26]
Finally, it was time to show off her hard work. Years of careful calculation and focusing for hours, painstakingly crafting the perfect telekinetic psitanium array to execute her vision.
This particular convention was known as PSY Con, and while it sounded like an industry convention, it was really more of a Psychonauts media fan convention that also dabbled in other speculative psychic fiction. It used a sports stadium, with temporary structures and a retractable roof with close attention paid to the weather. The stage that her panel was to be held on was visible from the air, as it took a solid fifth of the space. She wasn't the only one to have panels there, of course, but it was the biggest space.
Going at speeds that would be unsafe to the pilot if used in a traditional vehicle, Tanya flew from the cloud cover to right above the stage, slowing to a stop in far too little space. Her new car separated several sections as it unfolded into her masterpiece: a six meter tall mechanical walker powered by her will and a psitanium sand reserve for high-energy maneuvers like this one.
The crowd exploded in excitement. "Welcome!" She announced through the speaker system, already hooked up to the microphone attached to her clothes. "My name is Tanya Dosva, of True Psychic Tales fame, this is my panel, 'does psitanium make combat walkers practical?' and this is my transforming mecha, which I've named 'Ambition'!" The crowd's roars intensified. "Thank you, thank you."
Tanya turned on the stereo behind her and started dancing, the mecha synchronized to her movements and the music projecting to the speakers set up around the crowd. It wasn't quite as flexible as she was with her body in the prime of youth, but that just meant she couldn't get too fancy with her dance moves. Eventually, the crowd settled down, and she turned off the music. "The question on what constitutes an effective weapon of war has many facets to it," She began, "But in my opinion, the most important answer is 'how well does it operate in the conditions of the battlefield you have in front of you'? To that, we must look at recent wars. Due to the threat of nuclear exchanges, the scale of conflicts are smaller, typically rather asymmetric fights against technologically inferior enemies, from the perspective of the United States. Against such foes, psitanium powered armor and powered walkers are, bluntly, invincible when operating. Key words there: when operating." She sighed. "Unfortunately, the limits of the conflict show what the issue is: The psitanium supply is growing slower than psitanium demand, which means that if the military were to start fielding psitanium-based weapon platforms rather than the current system, where they're using specific psitanium-using modules on more mundane platforms, the demand will spike, and supplying that much would be… incredibly difficult for current infrastructure."
Tanya leapt from the stage, bouncing off the pylons as if they were actually capable of holding the weight of her mecha, using levitation to reduce her mass enough to make it work. "As you can see, mechas have the durability of tanks but with unmatched mobility, able to assume a position similar to an armored, infantry, or support fire unit. The costs, on the other hand…" Tanya shook her head, the head of the mecha copying the movement. "The convention's picking up the bill of one full tank of psitanium sand, and I've already eaten through a fifth of it." Most of that was from that show-offy instant stop at the start, mind you. Reinforcing everything enough to tolerate that level of G-forces was not cheap, she might as well have soaked a barrage from an anti-air autocannon.
Tanya continued her prepared speech, eventually wrapping it up with: "Bluntly, anything you would want to use a mecha for can be accomplished better by using more psychic soldiers in psitanium powered armor, no more than three meters tall. Any questions?" The first person to raise their hand was an academic-looking man, wearing a Sasha Nein cosplay. "Yes, you." Tanya said, pointing and using a telekinetic hand above him to mark him more accurately.
"Why did you make a transforming mecha?" He asked, "Wouldn't that introduce structural flaws? It already flies, what's the point?"
Tanya looked at the man strangely. "Because it's cool, obviously." She said, slowly so the fool would understand. "Who else has a real transforming mecha? No one. It's mine. Some people build project cars, I do this." She struck a pose. "I don't even have any weapons on this one. Well, no dedicated weapons. Just tools." There wasn't really any such thing as a tool that couldn't be used to kill people, if you needed to. "Next?" She asked, before pointing. "You, in the magical girl outfit."
The girl cleared her throat. "Yes, do you know that new character? Razputin?"
Tanya chuckled. Of course they were curious. "Yes, I do." She replied, "And yes, he's really seventeen, just like I was sixteen when I started." As it turned out, Razputin's extensive knowledge of psychology drawn from True Psychic Tales and a few supplementary books was not a form of savant-like obsession, but an indicator of him being a genuine child prodigy. As such, while he didn't manage to beat her record as the youngest psychonaut with a Master's degree, although for him it was in psychic therapies, with plans on trying for a doctorate after a few years as a Psychonaut, he came by the title honestly.
Naturally, the True Psychic Tales people were itching to include him. "Do you have another question about him?" Tanya asked, to be polite.
"Is he single?" The girl asked.
Tanya waved her hand vaguely, which triggered a 360 degree turn in the mecha's wrist. "I'm inclined to say no, but I don't think it's official." She said, "I don't really pay attention to that kind of gossip." She lied. Lili was shooting for a doctorate already, as she was extremely competitive and was determined to not let Razputin's abandoning of the race ruin her motivation. Whether they were actually dating? Tanya had no idea. "Okay, next question… you."
"How true is Razputin's tragic backstory?" Asked the curious teenager who was wearing some of Razputin's merchandise goggles.
"Eh… about… eighty percent of it?" Tanya said, thinking about it. "Maligula really was his great aunt," Now grandmother, "-and most of his extended family was wiped out in the Deluge, but a lot of the specifics were punched up a bit." Tanya shrugged, which she made sure her mecha was capable of. "Oh, and he really grew up in the circus. The Flying Aquatos are a little obscure, their circus isn't exactly world-famous, but they exist and are still performing. I believe they're somewhere in Kentucky right now?" Eh. "Next… you. Please make it something about mecha."
The woman wearing the Cassie cosplay flinched. "Oh, very well, one more. What do you want to know?" Tanya asked.
"Ah, the comics kept hinting that you were secretly good at fighting, most recently in the Independence Day issue last month." She began.
"Is there a question in there?" Tanya asked, annoyed.
"Who would win in a fight, you or Razputin?" She asked.
"Me." Tanya said immediately, before pausing. "Wait, do I get my mecha?" She waved the question off. "Of course I do, it's mine." After years of going to conventions, Tanya had mastered the art of deflecting inconvenient questions.
"What if Razputin had a mecha too?" The woman asked.
"Where's he going to get one?" Tanya retorted; "Irrelevant. Now, does anyone have any mecha-related questions? I worked very hard on Ambition so I could show him off to you all."
After the panel, Tanya grumbled to herself and reached out telepathically. Without a pre-set connection, it wasn't easy, but she was used to it by now. "Helmut?" She sent.
The aged musician sent back his own amusement. "What's up, Tanya?"
"You know how I laughed at you at your first con panel, where you wanted to talk about music but just had questions about me?" Tanya asked.
"Yeah?"
"Well, I know I've already apologized, but I just had the same thing happen to me. It sucked." Tanya explained.
Helmut's laughter was literally contagious, as Tanya burst out into laughter from the avalanche of emotion. "What was it you said? Welcome to being a supporting character?"
Tanya snorted. "I've always been a supporting character." She insisted, "Protaganists are supposed to be everymen, and as much progress as I've made, I'm still far from normal." She smiled, her mood vastly improved by the sympathetic laughter. "But normal is overrated. Give me the life of an eccentric billionaire inventor any day!"
"Damn straight!" Helmut declared, before cutting the connection.
Tanya settled her mecha down onto the pedestal set up for the display, opening it up and leaving so she can enjoy the convention. "Maybe I am a protagonist." She admitted to herself. "But if I am… I've earned my happily ever after.
-------------------
The blunt drill of the Astralathe emerged from the cloudy skies, as Ford put his hand to his temple and waved his arm to direct the large mental copy. "Look alive!" He shouted, the drill slowly winding up as it built up the psychic energy, dense enough to appear more as a stellar event than anything capable of being wrought by mortal hands.
"Oh dear." Lucy said, hands trembling as she saw the event. "I remember this part," She whispered, "-it hurt."
There wasn't a lot Tanya could do about that, but she grabbed Lucy's hand and gave it a supportive squeeze, and braced herself as well.
The energy of the Astralathe burst out, creating a giant gaping hole in the emotional damage bag. Several individual pieces that matched the tags they had collected on the way down scattered in front of them. "Tags!" Tanya shouted, quickly grabbing one of the ones she kept and placing it on the purse.
Anticipation. Excitement. A flash of a crowd, streamers of water around her. Pride. Exhilaration. Awe. Indignation. Annoyance. Attraction. Ford Cruller, in his youth. Embarrassment. Shame. Fear.
Quickly doing her mental exercises to process the emotions, absorbing the power and attuning herself to the local environment, she glanced at the other four people here. Lucy was staggered, clutching her head. Razputin finished absorbing the suitcase and moved on to the hat box. Ford was still handling the steamer trunk, while Augustus worked on the duffel bag.
Grabbing the sixth tag from her belt, Tanya moved on to the jewelry box, inserting the key-like tag right into the lock.
Worry. Her own hand running through her hair. Weakness. Dread. Hope. Happiness. Love.
Ugh. "Back-to-back romantic baggage…" Tanya whined, staggered by the foreign emotions. She looked over the many other pieces of emotional baggage. Razputin was already on his third.
But it was too late. A giant image of Maligula, with a distorted caricature of Lucy's face, emerged from behind the destroyed dam. How many baggages are left? There were a few duplicates that dissolved when the primary baggage was resolved, but… about five unattended? It looks like Ford was on his second, and Augustus was still recovering from his first.
It was a bit paradoxical that baggage provided more energy but still wore you out, but it once they manage to catch their metaphorical breath, they'll find themselves much more able to hurt Maligula.
It had started to rain.
"Watch out…" Maligula's sultry tone rang out, booming in volume. "A storm is coming." Water came and rushed towards Lucy, enveloping her in water and transforming her into another copy of Maligula. Everyone else leapt onto one of the surrounding pieces of wreckage, except for Ford who was thrown bodily onto a wall.
"Agent Ford!" Razputin shouted, concerned.
"I'm fine, kid!" Ford shouted back, standing back up. "It'll take more than a little water to take me out."
The water also changed the environment, the dam-like setting changing to a familiar set of buildings in Grulovian style: The Deluge of Grulovia. Tsunamis of water, stilled in time, marked the boundaries of the area, and even now, hands of water reached out of those ersatz walls to drag people into their depths.
"Looks like we won't have any other option than to suppress it." Tanya commented, charging a PSI blast on each finger.
"Yeah, the Astralathe's trying to keep her down, but Maligula's too strong. Just need to wear her down." Ford said in agreement. Which is good, because without that, Maligula can literally keep going until she dies.
"Okay!" Razputin said, leaping into action and landing on the large circular floor that Nona-turned-Maligula had been laughing in. The rain intensified. "I'm here to stop you, Maligula!" He announced, putting his goggles on to keep the rain out of his eyes.
"Oh, you poor boy. Thinking you stand a chance against the greatest psychic in history!" Maligula boasted, laughing. Snakes of water condensed from mid-air and launched themselves at the acrobatic kid, who danced around them while unleashing some weak but quick PSI blasts.
The larger Maligula loomed over the battlefield, eyes anrrowing at the nimble boy. That was her cue. Unleashing the focused killing intent in a barrage of powerful PSI blasts, the giant Maligula head exploded into water before reforming as a smaller, but still gigantic Maligula. Tanya flew after it, leaving the smaller one to the others.
"Hm, you're the threat, I see." Maligula commented, her tone cold and calculating. A very familiar tone, as Tanya's heard it often enough from her own thoughts. She formed a series of waterspouts and unleashed them, forcing Tanya to dodge as she fired more PSI blasts.
"This is going to take a long time…" Tanya commented, frowning. "There has to be a faster way…"
"You little gnat!" Maligula shouted in frustration. "I get my first taste of freedom and you're here to muck it up! I am the Deluge of Grulovia! Killer of thousands!"
Tanya snorted. "You don't want to get into that contest against me." She warned.
"Who do you think you ar-urk." Suddenly, Maligula's form shuddered, almost melting into water before firming back up. "What was that?"
Hm… from what her psychic senses were picking up… "That's guilt." Tanya replied, "Come on, let's have a chat." Tanya flew straight into the giant Maligula, coating herself in a barrier sharpened with intent and plunging straight into the heart of the giant construct.
---------------------------------
Inside the construct was another section of the mind, of course. It was a sewer, flooded and inundated with the smells of death.
"It's been a while." Tanya commented idly, walking forth without breaking stride once the waterlogged corpses came into view. "Good thing Razputin isn't here to see this."
Deep in the gore-filled sewers was Lucy, young again, gripping a particular corpse in grief. From the resemblance, this was presumably Marona. "Get up." Tanya commanded. "We need to get your faculties sorted out. The war you fought is long over, and it's time to settle back down into civilian life. But this time, with your eyes open."
"Why'd you wake me up?" Lucy said, in Nona's aged voice. "I was happier without knowing all of…" She gestured around to the corpses. "...this."
Tanya sighed. "Because what Ford did to you was wrong." She said firmly. "It was done in a rush, and with good intentions, without palatable alternatives… but just because you don't like doing something, because it was the least worst option, doesn't mean you're not culpable for the consequences of doing it." Even if those consequences are merely to suffer with that knowledge.
"Then why don't you kill me?" Lucy asked miserably.
Tanya smiled. "Because you deserve happiness." The list of people who don't are those who deserve death. Like Being X. "All who live deserve happiness." She elaborated.
"I had it." Lucy insisted, "But now? With so many deaths… the death of my sister?" She shuddered. "Who can say that I deserve happiness?"
"I do. You deserve happiness." Tanya repeated insistently.
"Why?" Lucy said, crying. "Why do you say such a thing?"
Tanya sighed sadly. "Because if you don't deserve happiness… then neither do I." She said, changing her form to a watered-down copy of her old demon. Her hands dripped with blood, her flight suit in tatters, and her body held together with cracks filled with solid gold.
Lucy looked over Tanya's form with confusion. "W-what? Of course you deserve happiness, dear."
"Do I?" Tanya asked rhetorically. "Otto worked out the numbers, you know. The Deluge itself killed two thousand, four hundred thirty-eight people, near as he can tell. Total casualties from your war record, while difficult to track, is estimated to be around five thousand enemy soldiers and two thousand civilians."
"Over nine thousand…" Lucy whispered to herself.
"The most conservative estimate of my own kill count is around twenty-six thousand. The most generous at around one hundred seventy thousand" Tanya continued, "But don't tell Razputin. I'm done with war." Augustus had an idea, if not the scale. "So I cannot believe that you don't deserve happiness. Not while retaining a will to live." Particularly as death wouldn't even help, in her case.
"H-how?" Lucy asked, confused and sad.
"That's not important." Tanya said, waving off the question. She snapped her bloodied fingers and restored her true appearance. "What is, is this: The past is the past. You cannot change the past, but at the same time, there's no justice in suffering. You were not in your right mind, nor did you understand what was happening. No one did. It's the threat that comes from pushing the cutting edge of science." Tanya poked Lucy in the forehead and transferred some of the knowledge she had hoarded on their mutual condition. "You were sick, and all you need to do is accept treatment, like I did. Then all will be well." It was a bit oversimplified, but that would suffice.
Lucy looked down at her sister's corpse. Gently, she closed the corpse's eyelids and stood up, looking around sadly. "You know…" She said, "The Deluge was an accident."
Oh? "I believe you." Tanya said immediately.
"The protests… I just made it rain. It dispersed them well enough." Lucy said, walking to the next room. "The dam broke without me doing anything more than that, over weeks of rain filling it up."
A memory vault ran up, and disgorged its contents to them. The memories were stored in needlepoint art stored in the form of a scarf, simplified but clear. Reading through it, the story was backed up. "Likely, the dam was poorly constructed." Tanya said softly. "Whether it was from incompetence or someone cutting corners on purpose to pocket the difference, we won't be able to know."
"That does make me feel a little better." Lucy admitted.
"See? It's good that you regret your actions." Tanya said consolingly. "I've plenty of regrets myself. But it does no one any good to beat yourself up about it. Most of all, your family wouldn't want that. They'd feel terrible, seeing you punish yourself."
That argument seemed to sway her. "Yes, you're right. I need to be there, for Gussie. Even if he's my nephew, he's still my son." As she spoke, she aged, her back bent by the ravages of time until she was back to her normal self.
"That's the spirit." Tanya said, giving Lucy a hug. "Now, let's join him in shutting down Maligula." Taking the old woman by the hand, Tanya used hydrokinesis to create a portal, and stepped through it.
---------------------------------
The battlefield that Tanya and Lucy jumped out into was chaotic, with Ford, Augustus, and Razputin scattered and injured. "NO!" Roared Maligula as the two of them escaped.
"Now, everyone pool their power on one of us!" Tanya shouted, before adding: "Not me!"
"I'll do it!" Razputin volunteered, and he suddenly started growing as Ford and Augustus added their strength to his, and so did everyone on the outside.
Lucy was now glowing an ethereal yellow, and hopped onto Razputin's now-massive shoulder. Maligula grew to match his size, but with so much psychic power on their side, including a not-insignificant portion of Lucy's own mind working against the mental entity, the survival drive was driven back into a deep pit, where it belonged.
"We did it!" Razputin said, grinning widely. "Did you see, Dad? I was all 'Bam' and 'Wham' and 'Roar, I am Goggolor!' It was awesome!"
Augustus looked at Tanya, mouthing 'Goggolor?'. Tanya shrugged. Turning back to the now-shrinking Razputin, Augustus gave a happy smile. "I saw it, Razputin. Good job." The boy beamed at the praise.
"How do you feel, Lucy?" Ford asked.
"I feel… okay." She said, "Like… everything's going to be okay."
Ford smiled. "That it will. That. It. Will."
---------------------------------
The aftermath of Lucy's restoration of herself and the final removal of Ford's psychic construction was pretty much as expected: Opening with a big group hug among the Psychic Seven, all together again. Some minor work was done on the rest of the Aquatos, forcefully severing the mental connections (something so ingrained was usually a dense collection of connections instead of a simple water-death one, although some clusters were larger than others) that cause the hydrophobia, and a few hours of exposure therapy with Lucy guiding the water to keep it that way.
In the end, Razputin was invited to intern again next year, 'properly this time', with an additional promise of being provided all educational materials that would permit him to join the accelerated training program and become a psychonaut proper the instant he turns 18, or when he gets his Bachelor's degree, whichever comes first. Plenty of Psychonauts continue their education after joining on the organization's dime, this was just an extension of that.
But as a punishment for all those rules he broke and the damage he inflicted on Hollis, he'll have to wait until next summer's internship program starts before he can do any of that. Which was, in Tanya's opinion, quite fair. She even cheated a little and provided Augustus the same homeschooling program materials she used to get her high school diploma early, which he'll need to do anyway in order to become a Psychonaut. The most boring part of the path ahead of him, without a single ounce of the fun psychic stuff.
If he manages to keep at it until the internship, he'll have earned the help.
Still, after flying the Aquatos back home, letting them end the day in their own beds, any remaining resolution was officially no longer Tanya's problem. All she needed to do was fix the secure archives, and that could be put off until tomorrow.
"Ah, home sweet home!" Mom exclaimed as they all entered the house. Eric giggled and laughed.
"Home! Homehomehomehome!" Visha shouted, barking wildly in happiness. She then crashed into her bed and promptly fell asleep before the bed even stopped moving from the impact. Tanya snorted. Silly dog…
"Worst summer camp ever!" Mary declared.
"Marceau's psychotic break was quite unfortunately timed, yes." Dad agreed, "It's a shame, I thought the fake villainous plot idea was quite innovative."
"Eh… there were problems with the idea even without Oleander ruining it." Tanya said, taking off her shoes and letting her feet sink into the carpet. "What's for dinner?"
"After a day like this?" Mom asked rhetorically, sitting down on the couch and tickling Eric. "Something delivered. Sasha darling, could you?"
"I think the Chinese place is still open." Mused Dad, walking to the phone in the kitchen. "The usual?"
"Teriyaki beef." Tanya said, "Extra egg rolls."
"Orange chicken!" Mary said from her position, laying upside down on the couch, flipping through the television channels.
"Kung Pao chicken." Mom said cheerily. "Extra spicy."
"Right." Dad said, but he looked towards Tanya. "Err… would you happen to remember-"
"Actually Spicy." Tanya said in Vietnamese, slowly enunciating it. The owners of Imperial Feast were not actually Chinese. America…
"Thank you." Dad said, somewhat embarrassed at still needing to ask.
Tanya settled onto the couch as well, laying her head on Mom's lap and laying her feet over Mary's stomach. "Anything good on?" She asked Mary.
"Just the Facts of Life." Mary commented idly, leaving it on that show. It was a sitcom about an all-girls private school. Tanya didn't particularly enjoy it, but when the alternative was getting up from the couch after a day like this and figuring out something to do… she'll watch it. Mary liked it fine, though.
Mom placed Eric on Tanya's stomach and started running her hand through Tanya's hair. "This is nice…"
Tanya started to hold Eric's hands and moved them about, eliciting another giggle from the one year old. "Dance time…" She murmured, smiling at the cutie.
They fell into a pleasant silence once Dad sat in his chair, waiting for food to come to them rather than needing to work for it, like true Americans.
Once the food had arrived and they had rearranged themselves into proper sitting positions, Visha woke back up. "Food!" She declared with a bark, immediately jumping up to Tanya's lap and turning her soulful eyes to beg for some. "Please, I'm starving. I love you…"
Tanya laughed. "I love you too."
---------------------------------
[1990, Age 26]
Finally, it was time to show off her hard work. Years of careful calculation and focusing for hours, painstakingly crafting the perfect telekinetic psitanium array to execute her vision.
This particular convention was known as PSY Con, and while it sounded like an industry convention, it was really more of a Psychonauts media fan convention that also dabbled in other speculative psychic fiction. It used a sports stadium, with temporary structures and a retractable roof with close attention paid to the weather. The stage that her panel was to be held on was visible from the air, as it took a solid fifth of the space. She wasn't the only one to have panels there, of course, but it was the biggest space.
Going at speeds that would be unsafe to the pilot if used in a traditional vehicle, Tanya flew from the cloud cover to right above the stage, slowing to a stop in far too little space. Her new car separated several sections as it unfolded into her masterpiece: a six meter tall mechanical walker powered by her will and a psitanium sand reserve for high-energy maneuvers like this one.
The crowd exploded in excitement. "Welcome!" She announced through the speaker system, already hooked up to the microphone attached to her clothes. "My name is Tanya Dosva, of True Psychic Tales fame, this is my panel, 'does psitanium make combat walkers practical?' and this is my transforming mecha, which I've named 'Ambition'!" The crowd's roars intensified. "Thank you, thank you."
Tanya turned on the stereo behind her and started dancing, the mecha synchronized to her movements and the music projecting to the speakers set up around the crowd. It wasn't quite as flexible as she was with her body in the prime of youth, but that just meant she couldn't get too fancy with her dance moves. Eventually, the crowd settled down, and she turned off the music. "The question on what constitutes an effective weapon of war has many facets to it," She began, "But in my opinion, the most important answer is 'how well does it operate in the conditions of the battlefield you have in front of you'? To that, we must look at recent wars. Due to the threat of nuclear exchanges, the scale of conflicts are smaller, typically rather asymmetric fights against technologically inferior enemies, from the perspective of the United States. Against such foes, psitanium powered armor and powered walkers are, bluntly, invincible when operating. Key words there: when operating." She sighed. "Unfortunately, the limits of the conflict show what the issue is: The psitanium supply is growing slower than psitanium demand, which means that if the military were to start fielding psitanium-based weapon platforms rather than the current system, where they're using specific psitanium-using modules on more mundane platforms, the demand will spike, and supplying that much would be… incredibly difficult for current infrastructure."
Tanya leapt from the stage, bouncing off the pylons as if they were actually capable of holding the weight of her mecha, using levitation to reduce her mass enough to make it work. "As you can see, mechas have the durability of tanks but with unmatched mobility, able to assume a position similar to an armored, infantry, or support fire unit. The costs, on the other hand…" Tanya shook her head, the head of the mecha copying the movement. "The convention's picking up the bill of one full tank of psitanium sand, and I've already eaten through a fifth of it." Most of that was from that show-offy instant stop at the start, mind you. Reinforcing everything enough to tolerate that level of G-forces was not cheap, she might as well have soaked a barrage from an anti-air autocannon.
Tanya continued her prepared speech, eventually wrapping it up with: "Bluntly, anything you would want to use a mecha for can be accomplished better by using more psychic soldiers in psitanium powered armor, no more than three meters tall. Any questions?" The first person to raise their hand was an academic-looking man, wearing a Sasha Nein cosplay. "Yes, you." Tanya said, pointing and using a telekinetic hand above him to mark him more accurately.
"Why did you make a transforming mecha?" He asked, "Wouldn't that introduce structural flaws? It already flies, what's the point?"
Tanya looked at the man strangely. "Because it's cool, obviously." She said, slowly so the fool would understand. "Who else has a real transforming mecha? No one. It's mine. Some people build project cars, I do this." She struck a pose. "I don't even have any weapons on this one. Well, no dedicated weapons. Just tools." There wasn't really any such thing as a tool that couldn't be used to kill people, if you needed to. "Next?" She asked, before pointing. "You, in the magical girl outfit."
The girl cleared her throat. "Yes, do you know that new character? Razputin?"
Tanya chuckled. Of course they were curious. "Yes, I do." She replied, "And yes, he's really seventeen, just like I was sixteen when I started." As it turned out, Razputin's extensive knowledge of psychology drawn from True Psychic Tales and a few supplementary books was not a form of savant-like obsession, but an indicator of him being a genuine child prodigy. As such, while he didn't manage to beat her record as the youngest psychonaut with a Master's degree, although for him it was in psychic therapies, with plans on trying for a doctorate after a few years as a Psychonaut, he came by the title honestly.
Naturally, the True Psychic Tales people were itching to include him. "Do you have another question about him?" Tanya asked, to be polite.
"Is he single?" The girl asked.
Tanya waved her hand vaguely, which triggered a 360 degree turn in the mecha's wrist. "I'm inclined to say no, but I don't think it's official." She said, "I don't really pay attention to that kind of gossip." She lied. Lili was shooting for a doctorate already, as she was extremely competitive and was determined to not let Razputin's abandoning of the race ruin her motivation. Whether they were actually dating? Tanya had no idea. "Okay, next question… you."
"How true is Razputin's tragic backstory?" Asked the curious teenager who was wearing some of Razputin's merchandise goggles.
"Eh… about… eighty percent of it?" Tanya said, thinking about it. "Maligula really was his great aunt," Now grandmother, "-and most of his extended family was wiped out in the Deluge, but a lot of the specifics were punched up a bit." Tanya shrugged, which she made sure her mecha was capable of. "Oh, and he really grew up in the circus. The Flying Aquatos are a little obscure, their circus isn't exactly world-famous, but they exist and are still performing. I believe they're somewhere in Kentucky right now?" Eh. "Next… you. Please make it something about mecha."
The woman wearing the Cassie cosplay flinched. "Oh, very well, one more. What do you want to know?" Tanya asked.
"Ah, the comics kept hinting that you were secretly good at fighting, most recently in the Independence Day issue last month." She began.
"Is there a question in there?" Tanya asked, annoyed.
"Who would win in a fight, you or Razputin?" She asked.
"Me." Tanya said immediately, before pausing. "Wait, do I get my mecha?" She waved the question off. "Of course I do, it's mine." After years of going to conventions, Tanya had mastered the art of deflecting inconvenient questions.
"What if Razputin had a mecha too?" The woman asked.
"Where's he going to get one?" Tanya retorted; "Irrelevant. Now, does anyone have any mecha-related questions? I worked very hard on Ambition so I could show him off to you all."
After the panel, Tanya grumbled to herself and reached out telepathically. Without a pre-set connection, it wasn't easy, but she was used to it by now. "Helmut?" She sent.
The aged musician sent back his own amusement. "What's up, Tanya?"
"You know how I laughed at you at your first con panel, where you wanted to talk about music but just had questions about me?" Tanya asked.
"Yeah?"
"Well, I know I've already apologized, but I just had the same thing happen to me. It sucked." Tanya explained.
Helmut's laughter was literally contagious, as Tanya burst out into laughter from the avalanche of emotion. "What was it you said? Welcome to being a supporting character?"
Tanya snorted. "I've always been a supporting character." She insisted, "Protaganists are supposed to be everymen, and as much progress as I've made, I'm still far from normal." She smiled, her mood vastly improved by the sympathetic laughter. "But normal is overrated. Give me the life of an eccentric billionaire inventor any day!"
"Damn straight!" Helmut declared, before cutting the connection.
Tanya settled her mecha down onto the pedestal set up for the display, opening it up and leaving so she can enjoy the convention. "Maybe I am a protagonist." She admitted to herself. "But if I am… I've earned my happily ever after.
- Location
- Argentina
And stop reading here if you want the happy ending.