- Location
- USA
If I had to guess, Being X took those memories before her first reincarnation.
That or she's a simulacrum of a Japanese soul being used by that thing to train his sub-par marketing skills.
Psychoprotective (Youjo Senki/Psychonauts)
- Thread starter Requiem_Jeer
- Start date
That or she's a simulacrum of a Japanese soul being used by that thing to train his sub-par marketing skills.
- Location
- Ohio
I mean, she's not wrong. A decent number of children learning dangerous psychic techniques? With only two adults? (Crueller barely counts) And this is the very first time such a summer camp is being attempted?
Tanya has good reason to be concerned.
Pffthahahaha!
Jesus, Tanya! Don't phrase it like that!
Hmm, figments are usually exaggerated, so I can't say for sure. The important is that Sasha thinks Tanya is that cute!
I am concerned that he didn't mention the idea of multiple children learning how to wield a firearm instantly, as another reason to not let the other campers find this nugget.
It's only a padded room for crazy people if all of the cushions are white!
Yes. Definitely not. There is no way that being in a dark, cramped space could make Tanya feel uncomfortable.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.
Darn! We won't get to see Sasha and Milla's blackboards until they do!
I bet this is a more sophisticated version of Lili's 'fire'ing range.
Maybe one of The Salaryman's parents was a fan?
Tanya, why is that in air quotes? She adopted you officially. There's documentation to prove it!
Is Tanya reminding herself of how to act like a child, or is she remembering how she wants to react, rather than how she needs to act?
Is that how certain mental patients initiate emotional responses? By taking a split second to remember how the emotions they are feeling are supposed to be outwardly projected?
To be fair, the lie would be less effective if there were no children at this summer camp.
Tanya hasn't said that she hates any of that~!
Sure, but doing that could make Sasha more suspicious.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Calling her Agent Hollis instead of Agent Forsythe is something that Hollis tells Tanya to do, but it's not something Tanya should instruct other people to address her as.
Chapter 7
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
The names of all of the stations were pretty ominous, but 'The School of Missed Chances' was… less so. There were plenty of things that Tanya regretted over their lives, and this sounded like it would collect them.
When Tanya left the train station, they emerged into a place that looked primarily like the War College. As they saw such a building from the overhead view of this section of her mind, it was likely that they were in that very place. Visha followed her, silent as Tanya contemplated her surroundings.
The caricatures here were depictions of various members of the 203rd. Not the flight commanders, but the more ordinary mages among the cream of the crop, no doubt luminaries of their respective basic training blocks, but unable to secure notoriety when among the best of the best like Weiss, Neumann, Koenig, Grantz, and Visha.
Tanya knew well the feeling of being good but not great, succeeding only by dint of hard work and yet unable to achieve the highest echelons. While it was right and proper for an HR manager and direct military superior to learn the names of their subordinates, Tanya always made sure to remember both their given and family names, in solidarity of their unfortunate situation.
Tanya wandered the halls of the school, noting that each 'classroom', each reached from a portal in the hallways to a sub-dimension that usually held very little resemblance to a classroom, seemed to mostly torture the students rather than actually teach them. Well, Tanya knew that their methods were harsh, but it only took seconds of observation to note where educational value was deliberately sabotaged in order to inflict more pain.
Tanya would like to say she was surprised at seeing this… but she wasn't. Tanya never really understood why their training methods seemed to give her battalion such a positive opinion of her. Sure, she pointed them where they could kill to their heart's desire… but then why did they…
It wasn't important. They're not around to ask. Eventually, Tanya found something curious. Instead of some kind of portal, it was an ordinary classroom. It was one that Tanya knew well, but the real curiosity was the metal dog that was bounding around the room, excited to see people.
Upon closer inspection, the 'dog', despite acting like one, was actually a safe. It had legs, it bounded around, and the sound of it panting in joy was very dog-like. But the face was replaced with a door that held a combination lock. Recalling Agent Nein's brief overview of mental entities, Tanya realized this must be a memory vault.
Tanya whistled for the dog-vault, and it immediately halted and ran up to her, presenting its contents: a tablet, with a slideshow program already open. Distressingly modern depiction aside, Tanya picked up the tablet and set the program to play the slideshow.
The title slide said 'It was/n't my fault!', an ominous beginning. The first slide depicted Tanya in class, with the blackboard saying 'Military Law' rather than having anything specific about the curriculum. The second slide showed Tanya presenting her paper on how to prove that the enemy left you no choice but to shell a city. The professor looked intensely interested. The third slide showed the exact same presentation being given to the General Staff. The forth slide showed panicked General Staff considering a map labeled 'Arenne'. General Zettour was the only one calm, presenting a file labeled 'Tanya's plan'. Already knowing where this was going, Tanya pressed on. The fifth slide showed Tanya engaging the Francois partisans, a burning city around her.
…There was a smile on her face. A large cracking sound echoed from outside, and the now-open window showed the sky in even worse shape than before. The cracks had doubled, and the golden light had tripled in intensity, creating a beacon shining into the sky visible even from here. The laughter of a madwoman drifted in on the wind.
"...Major?" Visha asked.
Tanya jumped in surprise, launching a PSI blast to the surprise stimulus. Visha used a barrier of her own to block the blast.
"I'm sorry for startling you, Major." Visha said. She took the tablet from Tanya's hands, placing it back into the vault and closing it. "Come on, let's move on. You've seen enough here, I think." Tanya nodded silently, and allowed Visha to pick her up and carry her to the train station.
By the time the station had opened up to the next area, Tanya had regained their equilibrium, and the sky looked less broken. It still had many glowing cracks, an unsettling metaphor if there ever was one, but it had recovered mostly from the damage it had sustained. "Visha? What do those cracks mean?" Tanya asked.
Visha hummed. "...It means exactly what you think it means, Major." Ah. Of course. The type 95. "Come on, the Generals are waiting. They're expecting you." Of course they are.
The office was a little off when compared to the real Military headquarters, mostly by possessing a splash of anachronistic modernity here and there. A set of desks that used to be an open plan now had cubicles, the carpet in one hallway was a gray polyester, and the water cooler was plastic instead of the glass one that Ugar was so excited about when it was installed. "I'll make you some coffee while you're meeting with the Generals, Major." Visha said when they finally approached the office, ducking away to another room.
"Thank you, Visha." Tanya said. After a beat, Tanya took a deep breath and shoved the doors to the office open, striding into the room like she owned the place. After all, she did.
"If we order a flanking maneuver here-"
"That's too obvious!"
"They'll never see it coming if we attack from this direction. Deus Vult!"
"No one ever expects the full frontal assault… except EVERYONE!"
"We should encircle them first!"
"With what bait to lure them in?"
"Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya."
The General staff was rendered as five hand-puppets, crowding around a tactical board as they bickered and hit each other with sticks.
The puppets were of Zettour, Rudersdorf, Lergen, Grand Head Zanotto, and Agent Nein. The board they were debating tactics on seemed to be depicting the bloody battlefield Tanya had passed through on the way here.
"Tanya." Said the Agent Nein puppet. "It's a good thing you're here."
"The battlefield is a bloody stalemate." The Rudersdorf puppet continued.
"As usual." Snarked the Lergen puppet.
"But with your help, change can be made!" Announced the Zettour puppet.
"It will be dangerous." The Grand Head's puppet commented.
"Blood and Glory are your only rewards." The Rudersdorf puppet said solemnly.
"No pay." Added the Agent Nein puppet.
"You know, the things you love." Finished the Lergen puppet.
Tanya frowned. "I hate war." She insisted.
"Nonsense. You're the Devil of the Rhine." Retorted the Lergen puppet.
"You've done it more than anything else." Pointed out the Zettour puppet.
"For very little pay." The Agent Nein puppet reiterated.
"With a smile on your face and a prayer in your heart." Added the Grand Head puppet.
"Now be a good little monster…" Sang the Rudersdorf puppet.
"AND GO KILL!" Shouted all five at once, with voices like artillery and eyes glowing with death.
The force of the declaration flung Tanya back out of the room, through the office, and back into the train. The lever immediately turned itself back to the start of the rail line, and it started to go, the sound of the train starting interrupted only by the sound of shattering glass.
"No…" Tanya whispered. "No, no… nonono." She gripped the lever, trying to pull it back away from the bloody battlefield. The laughter of a madwoman echoed through the tunnel. Organ music started to play, with a choir accompaniment. "I'm not a monster." Tanya whispered to herself. "It was the rational path." She insisted. "I want to go back, I want to see Japan again."
Tanya continued to frantically pull at the lever, glancing at the train's lights indicating which station was next. "Already halfway there…" She said with horror, redoubling efforts to pull the lever. "I want to see my first life! I want to see…" Blank. "I want to hear…" Another blank. "I want to see my parents again!" She's forgotten their faces. "I want to see my friends!" What friends? Did she have any?
The woman's laughter redoubled, as it became accompanied by the sounds of explosions and screams. The choir sang battle hymns as the organ music intensified. "I want to see my face!" Tanya shouted at the top of her lungs as she focused her entire being, mind, body, and soul, to pull that fucking lever.
The lever gave way. It went all the way to the other extreme, breaking off with the force of Tanya's will. The Train stopped immediately, sending Tanya flying with the broken lever in a death grip, landing head first at the back of the train. "Ow…" Tanya whined.
The train, unlike when going the other direction, continually sped up, never slowing down as the lights in the tunnel passed by faster and faster. The force of the acceleration kept Tanya on the back of the train car, as flames started to manifest around the train. The metal slowly turned red hot, then steadily shifted up the thermal scale as the speed increased ever more.
Then, suddenly, with a cheery ding, the train stopped. Tanya's body was flung forward, blowing through the front of the train and into the realm ahead… at the End of the Line.
----------------
Pain. One of the pettier details of Being X's reincarnation shtick is that he made sure that the transition was exactly as painful as one would imagine getting run over by a train would be. Forget the fact that she should have been dead so fast that she shouldn't have felt a thing, enjoy the sensation of every single pain receptor screaming at the soup that their surroundings had become, let the pain echo through a shattered nervous system, just unload it upon whatever spiritual existence that allowed Tanya to inhabit an infant's wetware without melting it with her adult thoughts.
In hindsight, such an experience was probably a big reason why they were able to fight that first battle over Norden despite serious injury. It didn't hold a candle to dying.
Of course, by now pain and Tanya are old coworkers. Pain was something that they understood better than any one of their subordinates, and giving it more work to do among others was their primary job task, both in training and on the field.
Even without that, the echo of that first death… it wasn't so bad, when compared with the second. It was because of that that Tanya was able to stand, trembling, shortly after recollecting the memory of that impact.
The End of the Line was another train station. The train had restored itself from the damage inflicted by Tanya flying out of it. The cracks in the sky were repeated here, but unlike them, there was no golden light within these, but instead a cloying darkness. It reminded Tanya of the echo of her first life, back in the bed of her first memories.
There was some resistance to separating from the wall, but after literally peeling themselves from the inexplicable brick wall, the splatter of blood and viscera faded and the pain that Tanya felt went with it… mostly. Her intuition noted that the wall wasn't hiding anything behind it, it was just a wall.
The train stations before each had some of those caricatures, each positioned in exactly the same way. This one… didn't. Well, it had one.
Tanya's murderer, faceless and unkempt, stood with his arms outstretched, pushing an absent Salaryman into the front of the train. What was his name? It's not important. "Being X stole your thunder, I suppose." Tanya said, taking a moment to consider doing something petty. It's not worth bothering with.
Tanya took the steps upwards from the station. The sky was black nothingness. The ground was absent, the station just a single platform among a void. Mental Cobwebs suspended it in the air, trailing off into the darkness anchored on nothing. Figments occasionally flickered into existence, depicting all kinds of old things. Mascots, computers, fistfuls of dice… Japanese food. Each one layered itself onto one of the cobwebs, reinforcing them as they were forgotten.
Footsteps. Tanya turned around, and saw a sad little memory vault walk around the entrance to the train station, going straight to Tanya and looking up with sad little eyes. It opened up, and a tablet with a cracked screen, a collection of memory sticks beside it.
Tanya picked up the tablet and inserted one of the memory sticks at random. The slideshow began, titled 'Damn you, Being X!'. The slideshow was as expected for Tanya's first death. Unsettlingly, the Salaryman was headless, as was his murderer, the display's pixels dying as they tried to render it before fixing themselves as the slide progressed.
Tanya took out the memory stick and inserted another one. This slideshow was titled 'I Cannot Win.' It showed… her childhood. Her first one. The parents were simply not shown above the shoulders, their faces out of frame. It showed academic rankings, with the name obscured but highlighted in the blatancy of the concealment, it showed a ranking pedestal on at least three sports. It showed a list of rankings for an academic competition. Each time, the Salaryman placed second or third.
"...Looking at it like this…" Tanya said to herself. "That's not bad. Achieving high marks both physically and academically… on national stages even…" Then the last two slides showed themselves. The first showed university major selections. Even without the face visible, the Salaryman was the very picture of fear and exhaustion. The final slide showed the Salaryman leaving Todai with an economics degree, walking straight into a building labeled 'Modest, Safe Career'. The trash can in the foreground held other documents, labeled 'Engineering', 'Law', 'Medicine', and 'Sports'. Hrm.
There were two more sticks. One was in excellent condition, shining like new. The other… was not. It was in the poorest condition, the connector slightly tilting as repeated insertion accumulated damage from clumsy handling. Selecting the pristine one, Tanya inserted it into the tablet. This one held a familiar sequence. It wasn't a real set of memories, but instead 'Lies and Torture', a sequence of fantasies that Being X taunted Tanya with at one point during their second life. It showed the Salaryman's face this time, smiling as accolades were sprinkled upon them, as the Salaryman found someone to grow old with. In hindsight, the fact that Visha was the wife and Tanya's own physical form was the daughter proved that it was just more lies from Being X.
The face, though… did she wear glasses? Figments spun into existence before settling into the cobwebs as Tanya tried to remember wearing glasses. After a moment of recollection, she mimed adjusting glasses to settle better on her face, and eventually experienced a jolt of familiarity after a few tries. She did wear glasses! She mimed adjusting her glasses again. Yes, this was definitely how she did it back then.
But the fact that it took that long to remember even that much… The face was that of a stranger. A handsome stranger, to be sure… was that even what she looked like? Tanya wouldn't put it past Being X to inflate her ideas of how attractive she was. She would have liked to look as imposing and dignified as the salaryman in the fantasy did. He must have had all sorts of women flirt with him… which Tanya remembers zero of. But was that because they were never that handsome, or because they just don't remember it?
Taking the memory stick out, Tanya inserted the last one. The slideshow program on the tablet glitched, error messages piling on before the tablet visibly rebooted. After waiting for the reboot, the slideshow's title card was displayed: 'This is it'.
The resulting scenes were disjointed and incomplete. Tanya remembered each one vaguely, but they had no rhyme or reason to be grouped together. There was a slide of wargaming, with a familiar-looking man the only one with a visible face of the five or so people in the slide. There was a slide of one of Tanya's college professors, the one that had explained the Chicago school of economics to the class. There was an image of an after-work drinking outing, with one or two visible faces that also felt like she recognized them. There was a picture of Tanya's old office, a man in full dogeza begging to keep his job. Firing someone in corporate Japan was a big step, due to both laws and custom, so Tanya didn't feel any pity despite not really remembering why she had fired him. Tanya only ever fired people after exhausting every alternative… except for one time where they brought shame onto an executive, but she was just the messenger that time. She wasn't the one who fired him. The pictures weren't even in chronological order, and when Tanya went backwards to compare some of the images, the order had changed.
After a few minutes of reviewing the odd scenes, Tanya realized why it was called what it was. "This is it." She said out loud. "This is all that's left." The reason why Tanya couldn't find locations associated with their first life… was because they were gone. The scraps scattered around the other two mental realms were the last vestiges of memory, with this vault containing the very last strings of memory remaining, hidden in this memory of death.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Sarcastic applause from behind Tanya startled her, Tanya throwing the tablet aside as they took a combat stance, mage blades forming around her hands. The memory vault ran after the tablet, catching it in mid-air.
Tanya's killer was there, smug as they stepped up from the underground train station. As Tanya examined him, he melted away to reveal a different appearance underneath the facade. "She finally understands!" Shouted Tanya's voice out of the being. It resembled Tanya's own appearance, but it was a metal facsimile. It seemed to be some kind of furnace robot, the torso and mouth being a grate rather than a solid panel. The interior was filthy, covered in but otherwise completely empty. The design brought special attention to the approximate location of the heart, showcasing the empty space. "You say that you're not a monster." The robot taunted.
"I'm not!" Tanya snapped.
"I say that question is a matter of perspective." The machine continued, ignoring Tanya's response. "Specifically, who are you to say what you are and are not?"
Tanya's frowned at the question. What kind of freshman-level philosophic nonsense was that? "I'm me!" She said. "My name is…" Tanya trailed off. That wasn't right… No, that also wasn't right… What was her name? It was definitely not Tanya, that was just used as a convenience because she couldn't very well go by… what?
"You are no one." The doll accused. "You have never, not once in any life, been anyone that could be called 'yourself'."
"Bullshit!" Tanya shouted.
"Recall the basics of Signal Theory." The machine said, now using the voice of that college lecturer. "It does not matter who you are, only what others see you to be." And!? That doesn't mean those opinions do not exist! "Of course it does." The machine said, addressing Tamya's internal monologue just like Being X did. Using that bastard's voice, the machine continued. "You have never accomplished a single second of true self-reflection, coveting the sense of purpose that continuously escaped you no matter how hard you toiled to create one in yourself."
Tanya tried to retort, but could not summon her voice. The machine laughed as it walked closer to Tanya. Tanya stepped backwards, slowing but not stopping the distance between them shrinking.
"Even the shattered Agent Cruller has a greater sense of who he is than you. He feels, even if he does not remember the pain that agonizes him." The machine said in the aging man's voice. "You've based everything you are on a ghost, someone who does not exist, and even in life, that man was just a shell, everything resembling hopes or ideals having left him long before the train destroyed even that sad remnant." She shook her head, tutting at the tragedy. "Even in this life, you cling to that void just as strongly as you try to throw away Tanya von Degurechaff." Why wouldn't Tanya want to leave that behind? It was terrible! "What makes one past so much greater than the other?" It was the first! "Was it because you liked it? You liked being an empty husk that could only summon an echo of motivation when it came to seeking something as base as money?" Money isn't base!
The machine had finally entered arm's reach. Tanya tried to step back, but she was already at the edge. She willed herself to attack, to break this doll who spewed only lies, but remained fixed in place. "Don't worry." The machine said in Miss Milla's voice. "I'll take care of you." She continued. "You'll be much happier if you look at the world with a smile." She quoted once more, with the grill on her mouth warping into a macabre smile. "Just open your mind and you'll see."
The machine gripped Tanya's throat, and opened up the furnace that was her torso. While she did so, Tanya could not move a single muscle. "I'm sure your inside is just as beautiful as your outside." Miss Milla's voice quoted one last time before rents opened up in the metal, glowing fire–red as tendrils made of a flowing purple substance shot out and grabbed Tanya, dragging her into the too-small space within the machine's body.
"I am You, the Heartless Machine." Was the last thing Tanya heard before everything melted into incomprehensible chaos.
When Tanya left the train station, they emerged into a place that looked primarily like the War College. As they saw such a building from the overhead view of this section of her mind, it was likely that they were in that very place. Visha followed her, silent as Tanya contemplated her surroundings.
The caricatures here were depictions of various members of the 203rd. Not the flight commanders, but the more ordinary mages among the cream of the crop, no doubt luminaries of their respective basic training blocks, but unable to secure notoriety when among the best of the best like Weiss, Neumann, Koenig, Grantz, and Visha.
Tanya knew well the feeling of being good but not great, succeeding only by dint of hard work and yet unable to achieve the highest echelons. While it was right and proper for an HR manager and direct military superior to learn the names of their subordinates, Tanya always made sure to remember both their given and family names, in solidarity of their unfortunate situation.
Tanya wandered the halls of the school, noting that each 'classroom', each reached from a portal in the hallways to a sub-dimension that usually held very little resemblance to a classroom, seemed to mostly torture the students rather than actually teach them. Well, Tanya knew that their methods were harsh, but it only took seconds of observation to note where educational value was deliberately sabotaged in order to inflict more pain.
Tanya would like to say she was surprised at seeing this… but she wasn't. Tanya never really understood why their training methods seemed to give her battalion such a positive opinion of her. Sure, she pointed them where they could kill to their heart's desire… but then why did they…
It wasn't important. They're not around to ask. Eventually, Tanya found something curious. Instead of some kind of portal, it was an ordinary classroom. It was one that Tanya knew well, but the real curiosity was the metal dog that was bounding around the room, excited to see people.
Upon closer inspection, the 'dog', despite acting like one, was actually a safe. It had legs, it bounded around, and the sound of it panting in joy was very dog-like. But the face was replaced with a door that held a combination lock. Recalling Agent Nein's brief overview of mental entities, Tanya realized this must be a memory vault.
Tanya whistled for the dog-vault, and it immediately halted and ran up to her, presenting its contents: a tablet, with a slideshow program already open. Distressingly modern depiction aside, Tanya picked up the tablet and set the program to play the slideshow.
The title slide said 'It was/n't my fault!', an ominous beginning. The first slide depicted Tanya in class, with the blackboard saying 'Military Law' rather than having anything specific about the curriculum. The second slide showed Tanya presenting her paper on how to prove that the enemy left you no choice but to shell a city. The professor looked intensely interested. The third slide showed the exact same presentation being given to the General Staff. The forth slide showed panicked General Staff considering a map labeled 'Arenne'. General Zettour was the only one calm, presenting a file labeled 'Tanya's plan'. Already knowing where this was going, Tanya pressed on. The fifth slide showed Tanya engaging the Francois partisans, a burning city around her.
…There was a smile on her face. A large cracking sound echoed from outside, and the now-open window showed the sky in even worse shape than before. The cracks had doubled, and the golden light had tripled in intensity, creating a beacon shining into the sky visible even from here. The laughter of a madwoman drifted in on the wind.
"...Major?" Visha asked.
Tanya jumped in surprise, launching a PSI blast to the surprise stimulus. Visha used a barrier of her own to block the blast.
"I'm sorry for startling you, Major." Visha said. She took the tablet from Tanya's hands, placing it back into the vault and closing it. "Come on, let's move on. You've seen enough here, I think." Tanya nodded silently, and allowed Visha to pick her up and carry her to the train station.
By the time the station had opened up to the next area, Tanya had regained their equilibrium, and the sky looked less broken. It still had many glowing cracks, an unsettling metaphor if there ever was one, but it had recovered mostly from the damage it had sustained. "Visha? What do those cracks mean?" Tanya asked.
Visha hummed. "...It means exactly what you think it means, Major." Ah. Of course. The type 95. "Come on, the Generals are waiting. They're expecting you." Of course they are.
The office was a little off when compared to the real Military headquarters, mostly by possessing a splash of anachronistic modernity here and there. A set of desks that used to be an open plan now had cubicles, the carpet in one hallway was a gray polyester, and the water cooler was plastic instead of the glass one that Ugar was so excited about when it was installed. "I'll make you some coffee while you're meeting with the Generals, Major." Visha said when they finally approached the office, ducking away to another room.
"Thank you, Visha." Tanya said. After a beat, Tanya took a deep breath and shoved the doors to the office open, striding into the room like she owned the place. After all, she did.
"If we order a flanking maneuver here-"
"That's too obvious!"
"They'll never see it coming if we attack from this direction. Deus Vult!"
"No one ever expects the full frontal assault… except EVERYONE!"
"We should encircle them first!"
"With what bait to lure them in?"
"Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya." "Tanya."
The General staff was rendered as five hand-puppets, crowding around a tactical board as they bickered and hit each other with sticks.
The puppets were of Zettour, Rudersdorf, Lergen, Grand Head Zanotto, and Agent Nein. The board they were debating tactics on seemed to be depicting the bloody battlefield Tanya had passed through on the way here.
"Tanya." Said the Agent Nein puppet. "It's a good thing you're here."
"The battlefield is a bloody stalemate." The Rudersdorf puppet continued.
"As usual." Snarked the Lergen puppet.
"But with your help, change can be made!" Announced the Zettour puppet.
"It will be dangerous." The Grand Head's puppet commented.
"Blood and Glory are your only rewards." The Rudersdorf puppet said solemnly.
"No pay." Added the Agent Nein puppet.
"You know, the things you love." Finished the Lergen puppet.
Tanya frowned. "I hate war." She insisted.
"Nonsense. You're the Devil of the Rhine." Retorted the Lergen puppet.
"You've done it more than anything else." Pointed out the Zettour puppet.
"For very little pay." The Agent Nein puppet reiterated.
"With a smile on your face and a prayer in your heart." Added the Grand Head puppet.
"Now be a good little monster…" Sang the Rudersdorf puppet.
"AND GO KILL!" Shouted all five at once, with voices like artillery and eyes glowing with death.
The force of the declaration flung Tanya back out of the room, through the office, and back into the train. The lever immediately turned itself back to the start of the rail line, and it started to go, the sound of the train starting interrupted only by the sound of shattering glass.
"No…" Tanya whispered. "No, no… nonono." She gripped the lever, trying to pull it back away from the bloody battlefield. The laughter of a madwoman echoed through the tunnel. Organ music started to play, with a choir accompaniment. "I'm not a monster." Tanya whispered to herself. "It was the rational path." She insisted. "I want to go back, I want to see Japan again."
Tanya continued to frantically pull at the lever, glancing at the train's lights indicating which station was next. "Already halfway there…" She said with horror, redoubling efforts to pull the lever. "I want to see my first life! I want to see…" Blank. "I want to hear…" Another blank. "I want to see my parents again!" She's forgotten their faces. "I want to see my friends!" What friends? Did she have any?
The woman's laughter redoubled, as it became accompanied by the sounds of explosions and screams. The choir sang battle hymns as the organ music intensified. "I want to see my face!" Tanya shouted at the top of her lungs as she focused her entire being, mind, body, and soul, to pull that fucking lever.
The lever gave way. It went all the way to the other extreme, breaking off with the force of Tanya's will. The Train stopped immediately, sending Tanya flying with the broken lever in a death grip, landing head first at the back of the train. "Ow…" Tanya whined.
The train, unlike when going the other direction, continually sped up, never slowing down as the lights in the tunnel passed by faster and faster. The force of the acceleration kept Tanya on the back of the train car, as flames started to manifest around the train. The metal slowly turned red hot, then steadily shifted up the thermal scale as the speed increased ever more.
Then, suddenly, with a cheery ding, the train stopped. Tanya's body was flung forward, blowing through the front of the train and into the realm ahead… at the End of the Line.
----------------
Pain. One of the pettier details of Being X's reincarnation shtick is that he made sure that the transition was exactly as painful as one would imagine getting run over by a train would be. Forget the fact that she should have been dead so fast that she shouldn't have felt a thing, enjoy the sensation of every single pain receptor screaming at the soup that their surroundings had become, let the pain echo through a shattered nervous system, just unload it upon whatever spiritual existence that allowed Tanya to inhabit an infant's wetware without melting it with her adult thoughts.
In hindsight, such an experience was probably a big reason why they were able to fight that first battle over Norden despite serious injury. It didn't hold a candle to dying.
Of course, by now pain and Tanya are old coworkers. Pain was something that they understood better than any one of their subordinates, and giving it more work to do among others was their primary job task, both in training and on the field.
Even without that, the echo of that first death… it wasn't so bad, when compared with the second. It was because of that that Tanya was able to stand, trembling, shortly after recollecting the memory of that impact.
The End of the Line was another train station. The train had restored itself from the damage inflicted by Tanya flying out of it. The cracks in the sky were repeated here, but unlike them, there was no golden light within these, but instead a cloying darkness. It reminded Tanya of the echo of her first life, back in the bed of her first memories.
There was some resistance to separating from the wall, but after literally peeling themselves from the inexplicable brick wall, the splatter of blood and viscera faded and the pain that Tanya felt went with it… mostly. Her intuition noted that the wall wasn't hiding anything behind it, it was just a wall.
The train stations before each had some of those caricatures, each positioned in exactly the same way. This one… didn't. Well, it had one.
Tanya's murderer, faceless and unkempt, stood with his arms outstretched, pushing an absent Salaryman into the front of the train. What was his name? It's not important. "Being X stole your thunder, I suppose." Tanya said, taking a moment to consider doing something petty. It's not worth bothering with.
Tanya took the steps upwards from the station. The sky was black nothingness. The ground was absent, the station just a single platform among a void. Mental Cobwebs suspended it in the air, trailing off into the darkness anchored on nothing. Figments occasionally flickered into existence, depicting all kinds of old things. Mascots, computers, fistfuls of dice… Japanese food. Each one layered itself onto one of the cobwebs, reinforcing them as they were forgotten.
Footsteps. Tanya turned around, and saw a sad little memory vault walk around the entrance to the train station, going straight to Tanya and looking up with sad little eyes. It opened up, and a tablet with a cracked screen, a collection of memory sticks beside it.
Tanya picked up the tablet and inserted one of the memory sticks at random. The slideshow began, titled 'Damn you, Being X!'. The slideshow was as expected for Tanya's first death. Unsettlingly, the Salaryman was headless, as was his murderer, the display's pixels dying as they tried to render it before fixing themselves as the slide progressed.
Tanya took out the memory stick and inserted another one. This slideshow was titled 'I Cannot Win.' It showed… her childhood. Her first one. The parents were simply not shown above the shoulders, their faces out of frame. It showed academic rankings, with the name obscured but highlighted in the blatancy of the concealment, it showed a ranking pedestal on at least three sports. It showed a list of rankings for an academic competition. Each time, the Salaryman placed second or third.
"...Looking at it like this…" Tanya said to herself. "That's not bad. Achieving high marks both physically and academically… on national stages even…" Then the last two slides showed themselves. The first showed university major selections. Even without the face visible, the Salaryman was the very picture of fear and exhaustion. The final slide showed the Salaryman leaving Todai with an economics degree, walking straight into a building labeled 'Modest, Safe Career'. The trash can in the foreground held other documents, labeled 'Engineering', 'Law', 'Medicine', and 'Sports'. Hrm.
There were two more sticks. One was in excellent condition, shining like new. The other… was not. It was in the poorest condition, the connector slightly tilting as repeated insertion accumulated damage from clumsy handling. Selecting the pristine one, Tanya inserted it into the tablet. This one held a familiar sequence. It wasn't a real set of memories, but instead 'Lies and Torture', a sequence of fantasies that Being X taunted Tanya with at one point during their second life. It showed the Salaryman's face this time, smiling as accolades were sprinkled upon them, as the Salaryman found someone to grow old with. In hindsight, the fact that Visha was the wife and Tanya's own physical form was the daughter proved that it was just more lies from Being X.
The face, though… did she wear glasses? Figments spun into existence before settling into the cobwebs as Tanya tried to remember wearing glasses. After a moment of recollection, she mimed adjusting glasses to settle better on her face, and eventually experienced a jolt of familiarity after a few tries. She did wear glasses! She mimed adjusting her glasses again. Yes, this was definitely how she did it back then.
But the fact that it took that long to remember even that much… The face was that of a stranger. A handsome stranger, to be sure… was that even what she looked like? Tanya wouldn't put it past Being X to inflate her ideas of how attractive she was. She would have liked to look as imposing and dignified as the salaryman in the fantasy did. He must have had all sorts of women flirt with him… which Tanya remembers zero of. But was that because they were never that handsome, or because they just don't remember it?
Taking the memory stick out, Tanya inserted the last one. The slideshow program on the tablet glitched, error messages piling on before the tablet visibly rebooted. After waiting for the reboot, the slideshow's title card was displayed: 'This is it'.
The resulting scenes were disjointed and incomplete. Tanya remembered each one vaguely, but they had no rhyme or reason to be grouped together. There was a slide of wargaming, with a familiar-looking man the only one with a visible face of the five or so people in the slide. There was a slide of one of Tanya's college professors, the one that had explained the Chicago school of economics to the class. There was an image of an after-work drinking outing, with one or two visible faces that also felt like she recognized them. There was a picture of Tanya's old office, a man in full dogeza begging to keep his job. Firing someone in corporate Japan was a big step, due to both laws and custom, so Tanya didn't feel any pity despite not really remembering why she had fired him. Tanya only ever fired people after exhausting every alternative… except for one time where they brought shame onto an executive, but she was just the messenger that time. She wasn't the one who fired him. The pictures weren't even in chronological order, and when Tanya went backwards to compare some of the images, the order had changed.
After a few minutes of reviewing the odd scenes, Tanya realized why it was called what it was. "This is it." She said out loud. "This is all that's left." The reason why Tanya couldn't find locations associated with their first life… was because they were gone. The scraps scattered around the other two mental realms were the last vestiges of memory, with this vault containing the very last strings of memory remaining, hidden in this memory of death.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Sarcastic applause from behind Tanya startled her, Tanya throwing the tablet aside as they took a combat stance, mage blades forming around her hands. The memory vault ran after the tablet, catching it in mid-air.
Tanya's killer was there, smug as they stepped up from the underground train station. As Tanya examined him, he melted away to reveal a different appearance underneath the facade. "She finally understands!" Shouted Tanya's voice out of the being. It resembled Tanya's own appearance, but it was a metal facsimile. It seemed to be some kind of furnace robot, the torso and mouth being a grate rather than a solid panel. The interior was filthy, covered in but otherwise completely empty. The design brought special attention to the approximate location of the heart, showcasing the empty space. "You say that you're not a monster." The robot taunted.
"I'm not!" Tanya snapped.
"I say that question is a matter of perspective." The machine continued, ignoring Tanya's response. "Specifically, who are you to say what you are and are not?"
Tanya's frowned at the question. What kind of freshman-level philosophic nonsense was that? "I'm me!" She said. "My name is…" Tanya trailed off. That wasn't right… No, that also wasn't right… What was her name? It was definitely not Tanya, that was just used as a convenience because she couldn't very well go by… what?
"You are no one." The doll accused. "You have never, not once in any life, been anyone that could be called 'yourself'."
"Bullshit!" Tanya shouted.
"Recall the basics of Signal Theory." The machine said, now using the voice of that college lecturer. "It does not matter who you are, only what others see you to be." And!? That doesn't mean those opinions do not exist! "Of course it does." The machine said, addressing Tamya's internal monologue just like Being X did. Using that bastard's voice, the machine continued. "You have never accomplished a single second of true self-reflection, coveting the sense of purpose that continuously escaped you no matter how hard you toiled to create one in yourself."
Tanya tried to retort, but could not summon her voice. The machine laughed as it walked closer to Tanya. Tanya stepped backwards, slowing but not stopping the distance between them shrinking.
"Even the shattered Agent Cruller has a greater sense of who he is than you. He feels, even if he does not remember the pain that agonizes him." The machine said in the aging man's voice. "You've based everything you are on a ghost, someone who does not exist, and even in life, that man was just a shell, everything resembling hopes or ideals having left him long before the train destroyed even that sad remnant." She shook her head, tutting at the tragedy. "Even in this life, you cling to that void just as strongly as you try to throw away Tanya von Degurechaff." Why wouldn't Tanya want to leave that behind? It was terrible! "What makes one past so much greater than the other?" It was the first! "Was it because you liked it? You liked being an empty husk that could only summon an echo of motivation when it came to seeking something as base as money?" Money isn't base!
The machine had finally entered arm's reach. Tanya tried to step back, but she was already at the edge. She willed herself to attack, to break this doll who spewed only lies, but remained fixed in place. "Don't worry." The machine said in Miss Milla's voice. "I'll take care of you." She continued. "You'll be much happier if you look at the world with a smile." She quoted once more, with the grill on her mouth warping into a macabre smile. "Just open your mind and you'll see."
The machine gripped Tanya's throat, and opened up the furnace that was her torso. While she did so, Tanya could not move a single muscle. "I'm sure your inside is just as beautiful as your outside." Miss Milla's voice quoted one last time before rents opened up in the metal, glowing fire–red as tendrils made of a flowing purple substance shot out and grabbed Tanya, dragging her into the too-small space within the machine's body.
"I am You, the Heartless Machine." Was the last thing Tanya heard before everything melted into incomprehensible chaos.
Darik29
Verified Delicious
Well damn. Tanya's got enough mental issues for three lifetimes all knocking around inside her, and now her inner demon just took control. Like the other members of Crullers cohort, Tanya is now a prisoner of her own psychosis.
It will be Fascinating to see how this plays out in the real world. Will she walk out of the lobe like a functional, normal person? Will she be able to reveal her inner world and have all the unnecessary bits hidden away to prevent discovery by the Agents?
Really, your doing an excellent job with this boss. I could see Tanya as her own damn DLC.
It will be Fascinating to see how this plays out in the real world. Will she walk out of the lobe like a functional, normal person? Will she be able to reveal her inner world and have all the unnecessary bits hidden away to prevent discovery by the Agents?
Really, your doing an excellent job with this boss. I could see Tanya as her own damn DLC.
Chapter 8
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
[Camilla "Milla" Vodello, Psychonauts Agent]
Milla was worried for Tanya.
This was not an unusual situation, mind you. Even without a blood connection, Milla considered Tanya her precious daughter and nothing could change that. It's a mother's prerogative to worry for their children, particularly when they're so… troubled.
But unlike most of those other times, Milla's worries were very specific as to what kind of trouble Tanya could find herself in. Going through one's own mind was a routine task for a veteran psychonaut… but the first time one explores that frontier was always the riskiest.
Sure, getting stuck in a nightmare is only some temporary suffering, but no mother wishes that on their children.
Of course, that's the usual danger. Someone like Tanya? There could be something more extreme lurking in her thoughts that could cause a greater problem. Minor mental problems can branch out to new, exciting diagnoses when psychic power comes into the picture, and while Sasha was correct in how simple it was to resolve such issues… he downplayed the intensity of them.
These worries were compounded, when one considered that Tanya had a distressing tendency to hide all of her problems. When she was a baby, she rarely cried. She called out whenever she needed something, learning words at a pace that was frightening before Milla knew that it was just because she was telepathic. But even when in the throes of night terrors, she didn't usually cry.
Milla knew of them nevertheless, as she had always possessed a strong sense of empathy. It was only after raising Tanya that she realized that it was empathy in the 'psychic powers' sense, sensitive enough to Tanya's pain that whenever she awoke from them, Milla did as well. She knew that Tanya was psychic for just as long; it was no coincidence that the few times Tanya did cry, it was shortly after Milla wondered why she wasn't.
Baby Tanya was in a constant state of fear and stress, tormented by things that only she could see. The only thing that seemed to banish those specters boiled down to direct care and attention. Any time that she was left to her thoughts invited the return of whatever tormented her so. Even with that reprieve, Milla could never say definitively that Tanya was ever happy about… anything. There were times where Milla thought she could feel happiness from Tanya, usually when she was eating good food, but it was so faint in comparison to the shining joy the other children radiated that she wasn't entirely sure whether or not she was imagining it. Eventually, Milla learned how to pick up surface thoughts, developing her psychic senses so she could better take care of her charges. She thought that if she knew what was causing Tanya such pain, she could better console her and let her sleep peacefully for once.
She was wrong. Tanya's stress only increased when she figured out that Milla could listen to her thoughts. The precise worries Milla caught before Tanya twigged to that escape her foggy memory, but they were mostly about how she was sure that she would be taken away and locked up, with a side of intense anxiety about Milla potentially turning her over if she was anything but the perfect compliant child. She started her habit of repeating a mantra of her name and age whenever she suspected Milla was listening to her thoughts, ironically projecting those thoughts to those who were psychically sensitive and nearby.
Eventually, Tanya managed to figure out how to keep her thoughts inside, simultaneously learning how to use her burgeoning psychic powers to protect herself from physical injury as well. Ever since? Milla had only vague guesses as to what was going inside that girl's head. Milla always felt very guilty about how much of that stress vanished after she ascertained the truth of that immunity to telepathy. Tanya said it was because she learned how to shut out the thoughts of others, but Milla knew by that point that Tanya only ever said what she thought Milla wanted to hear. It might have been true, but… It was distressing.
Once the… unfortunate accident occurred, Tanya had regressed a bit when it came to handling her night terrors. They never really went away, near as Milla could tell, but having something real and tangible to have nightmares about was not helpful to Tanya's mental health.
Despite this worsening, however… it wasn't really that different. Tanya devoured the psychic instruction that Sasha gave her when Milla was undergoing the Psychonauts agent training, as much as she devoured whatever books the group home had. She even branched out to learning languages, mastering them with a level of ease that Sasha mentioned indicated a fantastic talent towards telepathy and clairvoyance… which she refused to allow herself to use for fear it would be turned against her.
Whenever Milla tried to discuss her concerns with the more medically inclined psychonauts, they always tried to point to a guilt complex, centered around accidentally killing her pseudo-siblings. While she probably did harbor guilt about that, Milla knew that it was a bigger problem, because she was just… like that.
Dr. Boole's idea seemed the most plausible, as he theorized that Tanya possessed the rarest of psychic disciplines in addition to her other talents, that of precognition. The nightmares she constantly suffered from could be dire portents to the future, and she was so used to suppressing and ignoring them that she didn't even understand that it was what they were. She didn't change much from before and after the trauma because she was already suffering from visions of her burning down the group home. Milla had tried to coax Tanya into opening up to her on the matter… but it never worked.
So when Milla knocked on the Psychoisolation chamber, she expected all sorts of things to have gone wrong. On the most extreme end, she feared that Tanya had become locked in some kind of fight-or-flight response, which could be incredibly dangerous. Even if that dire situation wasn't realized, she could still end up consumed by her paranoia, refusing to leave the chamber so as to bunker down versus some invisible threat. Or, less violently but no less concerningly, Tanya could have become obsessively consumed by the pleasure of some kind of stress-relieving activity and decide to pursue it with single-minded devotion.
Normally, that just led to a dehydration risk, but given recent events? Milla made sure to bring a varied selection of supplies for that situation. Tanya was stressed by discussing the subject, but when it came to the dirty details, safe from prying eyes, she was as placid as she was as a baby, relaxed and docile. Not happy, but relaxed was as good as it gets, most days. Despite the oddity, becoming excessively dependent was one of the more likely scenarios, in Milla's mind. It was certainly more likely than Milla's wildest hope: That Tanya would end up realizing how silly some of her paranoid fears were and to open up, at least to Milla. Unrealistic and against what her Psychonauts training would lead her to expect, but not impossible. Milla had ended up on the wrong side of a few of those scenarios during her Psychonauts training, although protocol usually demanded continued Psychoislation until the derangement passes. That's not really viable for the miniature chamber, so out she goes. Only if it was completely unavoidable would she remain in that tiny padded box.
The door opened shortly after Milla's knock, Tanya emerged with a smile on her face. "Mom!" She exclaimed, swiftly getting out and giving Milla a hug. A quick sniff proved that the psychoisolation chamber really needed some air conditioning, but did not bring any other concerns to her attention.
"Tanya!" Milla said in return, immediately returning the affection. She locked away her concerns within her mind reflexively, spinning off an Archetype from her professionalism within her mind to process her worries while she kept a happy front for Tanya.
After all, while the probable reason for her sudden change of heart on addressing Milla as 'Mom' rather than the more polite 'Miss Milla' that she had requested the children of the group home use oh so long ago was probably due to some mental snarl Tanya had gotten caught up in, there was a distinct possibility that she just came to realize that it suited their relationship better.
"Did you finish exploring your mind?" Milla asked guilelessly.
"Mm-hmm!" Tanya replied, grinning with pride. "I'm just me!" She said happily. Oddly, there was a faint buzzing, like television static. Milla's agent archetype quickly identified the source of this scrambled psychic broadcast as Tanya's head.
"That's great, Tanya." Milla said sincerely. Her agent archetype telepathically probed Tanya's mind, finding the barrier that was constantly there completely absent.
who am iI am Tanya Dosva, Mom's precious daughter.that's not right
As the agent archetype digested that bit of information, Milla led Tanya back to the dining hall without a trace of suspicion bleeding into her emotions or thoughts. She split off a second archetype, personifying her curiosity to keep track of Tanya's now-open thoughts, so they could catch any problems. With luck, this was just her being overcautious.
Tanya's thoughts repeated the mantra she had picked out, which was concerning. She couldn't quite make out the other, more rapid thoughts surrounding the primary one, but that was hardly unusual. The emotions around her thoughts were even emptier than usual, which was a tell-tale sign of the mantra method of telepathic defense. Tanya used that method to block telepathy before she learned to block it completely, although she had somehow managed to vastly improve her technique. The only difference now was that Milla was deliberately trying to see past it, so she's sure Tanya will slip up eventually. When Tanya eagerly approached Ford to get her dinner, the primary thought shifted to something different.
be quietI am a hungry camper who needs plenty of meat.wait, who am i?
Milla's agent archetype instantly theorized that the relevant stimulus was focusing on someone else, and to keep an awareness of whenever Tanya focused on someone else, and to see if she shifted behavior as a result.
oh no it's herI am Tanya, Lili's cool big sis.avoid the bloody valkyrie
Tanya's demeanor shifted after she sat down to eat with Lili, becoming less joyful or eager, and more calm and collected. She ate quickly but without dedicating much attention to the task, talking idly with the smaller girl. Lili eagerly took the opportunity to talk to Tanya, and after a moment earned herself a pat on the head from Tanya, preening at the affection.
could be worseI am Tanya, the mysterious beautystill, retreat
Adam approached their table, once again attempting to impress Tanya by bragging about his accomplishments in the shooting gallery. He was genuinely skilled at the PSI blast, but Milla didn't think Tanya would care much. Except that she turned to face him, acted impressed at the appropriate time, and even twirled a lock of hair in her hand as Adam recounted the tale.
The agent archetype considered this enough evidence to deduce that Tanya had somehow managed to force herself to become whatever the person she was focused on wanted her to be rather than be herself. Milla was only about seventy-five percent sure that such a move was an accident rather than her trying to do something she shouldn't have. People-pleasing was certainly something Tanya did a lot…
Sasha's telepathic voice interrupted her musings. "Is there something wrong?"
"Yes." Milla sent back. "Tanya's acting strangely, and by now I'm pretty sure it's some kind of temporary insanity."
"Ah." Sasha sent back. "Well, that sounds like it will keep until she can be put to bed."
"You're probably right." Milla replied. "But letting her flirt with Adam like that seems like a bad idea." In a deeper, wordless layer of telepathic communication, her agent archetype filled Sasha in on their deduction.
"Oh dear." Sasha sent back. "Yes, separating her from the campers may be advisable. In the worst case… Oh no." Sasha's sense of dread washed over Milla as they saw Mary approach Tanya, a stubborn expression on her face.
What could… Sasha sent his understanding of Mary's delusions as they related to Tanya, from their brief conversation within his mind. Oh no.
NO! STAY AWAY! I am Tanya von Degurechaff, the Devil of the Rhine DAMN YOU!
Tanya's flirty expression melted into a completely different one. It was not a smile, but a showing of teeth. Her eyes started to glow golden and she started to float upwards, her hair untying itself and flowing freely. Before the situation could explode, possibly literally, Milla focused her psychic energies and tossed a bundle of telepathic nonsense at the group. Colloquially known as a 'confusion grenade', it tended to be something of a soft reset of someone's mental faculties, clearing the mind of telepathic suggestions and shorting out a few seconds of memory. It wasn't a nice thing to do, and Milla didn't really think it would work on Tanya's problem as a whole, but given the situation it seemed appropriate.
Adam was the first to blurt out something under the influence of telepathic scrambling. "Did I miss tea time? No wonder everything's all wibbly."
Lili spoke up next. "BURN ALL CLOTHES! FREEDOM!" She announced at the top of her lungs. Fortunately, it's a rare psychic indeed that can manage any kind of manifestation while confused. Hopefully she won't repeat her brief nudism phase from four months ago. Toddlers are cute, but this is not the time.
Mary was the next person to speak. "God? Where did you go? I found her!" Also concerning, but not something that can be handled now.
Tanya, on the other hand, reacted quite strangely. "What? Who am I?" Well, that part was pretty normal for a confusion grenade, but instead of standing around, she ran at full speed out the door, directly away from Mary. Milla left Sasha to handle the aftermath of the confusion grenade so she could pursue Tanya.
Fortunately, she didn't get far. Tanya had tripped on a random stone, falling down about fifteen feet from the dining hall. The discordant chaos the grenade caused in Tanya's mind leveled out by the time Milla telekinetically lifted Tanya back up, repeating a mantra once more.
This is betterI am Tanya Dosva, Mom's precious daughter.who am i
Well, Milla knew the odds were low of a confusion grenade being enough to shake this mental unbalance. Still, best to keep Tanya focused on her, until a dream cycle restores her mental equilibrium. "I think it would be nice if you slept with me tonight, Tanya. Doesn't that sound nice?" Milla's archetypes allowed her to keep her thoughts positive and clear of suspicion or plotting, portraying only a sense of longing for simpler times as mother and daughter.
Tanya smiled widely as she leapt into Milla's arms in a big hug, shifting her grip to make it clear that she had no intention of walking back to the cabin. At least she reduced her weight with levitation…
who am i I am Tanya Dosva, Mommy's precious baby.what is happening
Ah, she laid it on a bit too thick. Whoops.
----------------
Fortunately, the hard reset of a dream cycle did, as expected, resolve the problem. Tanya's mind had once again closed, metaphorical steel doors blocking off all telepathic access.
What a relief. She never thought she'd say that about Tanya's shield before.
"What… happened last night, Miss Milla?" Tanya asked as Milla ran a washcloth up and down her arms.
"Hm, what do you remember, darling?" Milla said, lathering up even more soap and continuing to clean her daughter.
"...Not much." She admitted. "I recall seeing the last portion of my mind, then… I woke up here." She paused for a moment. "I had a dream about something terrible happening, but that couldn't be true." The conviction with which she said it gave Milla the impression that the followup to that was 'because nothing is on fire'.
Hm. Expected, but still a little disappointing. "Well, you ran into a little problem in your mind." Milla explained. "It made you a little loopy for a bit, but a good night's sleep fixed you right up."
"So… Nothing terrible happened?" Tanya asked with hope.
Milla debated telling Tanya the truth or not. Eh, she's old enough for at least some honesty about grisly matters. "Something terrible almost happened." Milla admitted. "But Sasha and I were prepared and were able to stop it."
"That's good." Tanya said, a little distant. "Is there anything I should know?" She asked after a minute of silence.
"Well, you flirted with Adam a bit." Milla said, which didn't seem to cause a reaction one way or the other. Did she not like boys? Or was she just not at that age yet? Milla was certainly interested at her age. "But other than that, it wasn't very obvious." Milla grinned as she started to wash Tanya's hair. "That's not so bad, right? You're always so very considerate, that part of you was just amplified for a little bit."
Tanya hummed absently. "Ah, that's one way to describe it." She demurred. Milla suspected she knew more about what happened than she was letting on, but let it slide.
The two of them fell into a comfortable silence, before Milla decided to broach a delicate subject as she dried Tanya with a towel. "...Tanya, do you think I'm being overbearing?"
Tanya reflexively shook her head, denying it immediately. "No, of course not."
Milla hummed. How to phrase this? "I've just been thinking. When I was your age, I wouldn't have been taking…" Milla waved vaguely at Tanya. "This, nearly so calmly. The idea of being bathed by my mother alone would have been intolerable, much less the other stuff." Really, the only reason she did it today was so they could have this conversation before Tanya blew up the lost time all out of proportion. If it wasn't for the Mary interaction, it was the kind of issue that every psychonaut had a story told about them when they accidentally scrambled their brains for a few hours.
Tanya shrugged. "It's not a big deal." She said, waiting patiently as Milla brushed her hair. "Little is more childish than denying your preferences in the name of maturity." That was…surprisingly insightful. Also an admission that she likes getting doted on. "I'll master psychic construction soon enough, and we can put this chapter behind us. Until then, there's no need to make things even more difficult. Caretaking makes you happy, and that's reason enough to cooperate."
Milla hummed in agreement. Tanya had always been rather light on complaints, even when she did resist something Milla had decided on, she only gave the most token objections, never pressing the issue. Milla had thought that it was because of her paranoia, wanting to make sure that Milla had no complaints about her conduct. But perhaps it was more of this kind of thing? Where she accepted whatever reason Milla had and didn't see the point in arguing? When did one become the other?
"...Agent Cruller." Tanya said out of the blue. Milla gave a short questioning sound. "Have the Psychonauts even attempted to apply psychic therapy to him?"
Milla chuckled at the naive question. Still a child, after all. "Of course we have, darling. Ford's mind is… dangerous. Still in a conventional sense, so the most you risk is getting kicked out harshly, but it's like a hurricane in there." That did undersell things a little, but you didn't become a psychonaut without a few nosebleeds along the way. Nothing a sick day off work couldn't fix. "Worse, each of his personae are so separated from each other that each one has their own mental world." Milla sighed as she recalled the disastrous attempts to calm the chaos that was Ford's fractured mind shortly after she officially became a psychonaut, which was apparently the third attempt. "No psychonaut exists with the mental fortitude and psychic strength to survive there long enough to accomplish anything." Otto claimed it was even worse in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Grulovia, the first attempt, so they still held out hope that he could be helped… eventually. Camp Whispering Rock was supposed to speed that along somehow, but Milla didn't really understand the underlying rationale. Something about the psitanium?
Tanya frowned at the story, although what part of it caused that reaction was something Milla didn't know. Was she frustrated at the impossibility? Did the defeatist attitude bother her? Did she catch the implication that she might be Ford's only hope, with her extraordinary psychic strength? "...I think that I'd like to see it for myself." She eventually said.
…Milla didn't expect to hear that. "Shouldn't you master astral projection first?" She asked. Sasha had mentioned the day before that the full effects of overinvesting in an astral projection were not entirely clear, but it would probably increase the power the projection had to bear. They assumed the effects of being forcibly ejected would also be intensified somehow, but they didn't know that for sure.
Tanya nodded in agreement. "Probably. We'll see."
Milla wondered, not for the first time, just how far Tanya would go if she felt the need. Tanya had always been very cavalier about physical dangers, utterly assured that she was the most dangerous person in any room. It was rather disconcerting when seeing her unimpressed face whenever she had the opportunity to witness the drill instructors during psychonauts training do their work, but it was downright worrisome when she scares away lions and bears, psychics ones even, with an unhesitating and thoroughly dangerous demonstration of psychic might.
…Milla should ask Sasha more about Mary's claims on Tanya.
Milla was worried for Tanya.
This was not an unusual situation, mind you. Even without a blood connection, Milla considered Tanya her precious daughter and nothing could change that. It's a mother's prerogative to worry for their children, particularly when they're so… troubled.
But unlike most of those other times, Milla's worries were very specific as to what kind of trouble Tanya could find herself in. Going through one's own mind was a routine task for a veteran psychonaut… but the first time one explores that frontier was always the riskiest.
Sure, getting stuck in a nightmare is only some temporary suffering, but no mother wishes that on their children.
Of course, that's the usual danger. Someone like Tanya? There could be something more extreme lurking in her thoughts that could cause a greater problem. Minor mental problems can branch out to new, exciting diagnoses when psychic power comes into the picture, and while Sasha was correct in how simple it was to resolve such issues… he downplayed the intensity of them.
These worries were compounded, when one considered that Tanya had a distressing tendency to hide all of her problems. When she was a baby, she rarely cried. She called out whenever she needed something, learning words at a pace that was frightening before Milla knew that it was just because she was telepathic. But even when in the throes of night terrors, she didn't usually cry.
Milla knew of them nevertheless, as she had always possessed a strong sense of empathy. It was only after raising Tanya that she realized that it was empathy in the 'psychic powers' sense, sensitive enough to Tanya's pain that whenever she awoke from them, Milla did as well. She knew that Tanya was psychic for just as long; it was no coincidence that the few times Tanya did cry, it was shortly after Milla wondered why she wasn't.
Baby Tanya was in a constant state of fear and stress, tormented by things that only she could see. The only thing that seemed to banish those specters boiled down to direct care and attention. Any time that she was left to her thoughts invited the return of whatever tormented her so. Even with that reprieve, Milla could never say definitively that Tanya was ever happy about… anything. There were times where Milla thought she could feel happiness from Tanya, usually when she was eating good food, but it was so faint in comparison to the shining joy the other children radiated that she wasn't entirely sure whether or not she was imagining it. Eventually, Milla learned how to pick up surface thoughts, developing her psychic senses so she could better take care of her charges. She thought that if she knew what was causing Tanya such pain, she could better console her and let her sleep peacefully for once.
She was wrong. Tanya's stress only increased when she figured out that Milla could listen to her thoughts. The precise worries Milla caught before Tanya twigged to that escape her foggy memory, but they were mostly about how she was sure that she would be taken away and locked up, with a side of intense anxiety about Milla potentially turning her over if she was anything but the perfect compliant child. She started her habit of repeating a mantra of her name and age whenever she suspected Milla was listening to her thoughts, ironically projecting those thoughts to those who were psychically sensitive and nearby.
Eventually, Tanya managed to figure out how to keep her thoughts inside, simultaneously learning how to use her burgeoning psychic powers to protect herself from physical injury as well. Ever since? Milla had only vague guesses as to what was going inside that girl's head. Milla always felt very guilty about how much of that stress vanished after she ascertained the truth of that immunity to telepathy. Tanya said it was because she learned how to shut out the thoughts of others, but Milla knew by that point that Tanya only ever said what she thought Milla wanted to hear. It might have been true, but… It was distressing.
Once the… unfortunate accident occurred, Tanya had regressed a bit when it came to handling her night terrors. They never really went away, near as Milla could tell, but having something real and tangible to have nightmares about was not helpful to Tanya's mental health.
Despite this worsening, however… it wasn't really that different. Tanya devoured the psychic instruction that Sasha gave her when Milla was undergoing the Psychonauts agent training, as much as she devoured whatever books the group home had. She even branched out to learning languages, mastering them with a level of ease that Sasha mentioned indicated a fantastic talent towards telepathy and clairvoyance… which she refused to allow herself to use for fear it would be turned against her.
Whenever Milla tried to discuss her concerns with the more medically inclined psychonauts, they always tried to point to a guilt complex, centered around accidentally killing her pseudo-siblings. While she probably did harbor guilt about that, Milla knew that it was a bigger problem, because she was just… like that.
Dr. Boole's idea seemed the most plausible, as he theorized that Tanya possessed the rarest of psychic disciplines in addition to her other talents, that of precognition. The nightmares she constantly suffered from could be dire portents to the future, and she was so used to suppressing and ignoring them that she didn't even understand that it was what they were. She didn't change much from before and after the trauma because she was already suffering from visions of her burning down the group home. Milla had tried to coax Tanya into opening up to her on the matter… but it never worked.
So when Milla knocked on the Psychoisolation chamber, she expected all sorts of things to have gone wrong. On the most extreme end, she feared that Tanya had become locked in some kind of fight-or-flight response, which could be incredibly dangerous. Even if that dire situation wasn't realized, she could still end up consumed by her paranoia, refusing to leave the chamber so as to bunker down versus some invisible threat. Or, less violently but no less concerningly, Tanya could have become obsessively consumed by the pleasure of some kind of stress-relieving activity and decide to pursue it with single-minded devotion.
Normally, that just led to a dehydration risk, but given recent events? Milla made sure to bring a varied selection of supplies for that situation. Tanya was stressed by discussing the subject, but when it came to the dirty details, safe from prying eyes, she was as placid as she was as a baby, relaxed and docile. Not happy, but relaxed was as good as it gets, most days. Despite the oddity, becoming excessively dependent was one of the more likely scenarios, in Milla's mind. It was certainly more likely than Milla's wildest hope: That Tanya would end up realizing how silly some of her paranoid fears were and to open up, at least to Milla. Unrealistic and against what her Psychonauts training would lead her to expect, but not impossible. Milla had ended up on the wrong side of a few of those scenarios during her Psychonauts training, although protocol usually demanded continued Psychoislation until the derangement passes. That's not really viable for the miniature chamber, so out she goes. Only if it was completely unavoidable would she remain in that tiny padded box.
The door opened shortly after Milla's knock, Tanya emerged with a smile on her face. "Mom!" She exclaimed, swiftly getting out and giving Milla a hug. A quick sniff proved that the psychoisolation chamber really needed some air conditioning, but did not bring any other concerns to her attention.
"Tanya!" Milla said in return, immediately returning the affection. She locked away her concerns within her mind reflexively, spinning off an Archetype from her professionalism within her mind to process her worries while she kept a happy front for Tanya.
After all, while the probable reason for her sudden change of heart on addressing Milla as 'Mom' rather than the more polite 'Miss Milla' that she had requested the children of the group home use oh so long ago was probably due to some mental snarl Tanya had gotten caught up in, there was a distinct possibility that she just came to realize that it suited their relationship better.
"Did you finish exploring your mind?" Milla asked guilelessly.
"Mm-hmm!" Tanya replied, grinning with pride. "I'm just me!" She said happily. Oddly, there was a faint buzzing, like television static. Milla's agent archetype quickly identified the source of this scrambled psychic broadcast as Tanya's head.
"That's great, Tanya." Milla said sincerely. Her agent archetype telepathically probed Tanya's mind, finding the barrier that was constantly there completely absent.
As the agent archetype digested that bit of information, Milla led Tanya back to the dining hall without a trace of suspicion bleeding into her emotions or thoughts. She split off a second archetype, personifying her curiosity to keep track of Tanya's now-open thoughts, so they could catch any problems. With luck, this was just her being overcautious.
Tanya's thoughts repeated the mantra she had picked out, which was concerning. She couldn't quite make out the other, more rapid thoughts surrounding the primary one, but that was hardly unusual. The emotions around her thoughts were even emptier than usual, which was a tell-tale sign of the mantra method of telepathic defense. Tanya used that method to block telepathy before she learned to block it completely, although she had somehow managed to vastly improve her technique. The only difference now was that Milla was deliberately trying to see past it, so she's sure Tanya will slip up eventually. When Tanya eagerly approached Ford to get her dinner, the primary thought shifted to something different.
Milla's agent archetype instantly theorized that the relevant stimulus was focusing on someone else, and to keep an awareness of whenever Tanya focused on someone else, and to see if she shifted behavior as a result.
Tanya's demeanor shifted after she sat down to eat with Lili, becoming less joyful or eager, and more calm and collected. She ate quickly but without dedicating much attention to the task, talking idly with the smaller girl. Lili eagerly took the opportunity to talk to Tanya, and after a moment earned herself a pat on the head from Tanya, preening at the affection.
Adam approached their table, once again attempting to impress Tanya by bragging about his accomplishments in the shooting gallery. He was genuinely skilled at the PSI blast, but Milla didn't think Tanya would care much. Except that she turned to face him, acted impressed at the appropriate time, and even twirled a lock of hair in her hand as Adam recounted the tale.
The agent archetype considered this enough evidence to deduce that Tanya had somehow managed to force herself to become whatever the person she was focused on wanted her to be rather than be herself. Milla was only about seventy-five percent sure that such a move was an accident rather than her trying to do something she shouldn't have. People-pleasing was certainly something Tanya did a lot…
Sasha's telepathic voice interrupted her musings. "Is there something wrong?"
"Yes." Milla sent back. "Tanya's acting strangely, and by now I'm pretty sure it's some kind of temporary insanity."
"Ah." Sasha sent back. "Well, that sounds like it will keep until she can be put to bed."
"You're probably right." Milla replied. "But letting her flirt with Adam like that seems like a bad idea." In a deeper, wordless layer of telepathic communication, her agent archetype filled Sasha in on their deduction.
"Oh dear." Sasha sent back. "Yes, separating her from the campers may be advisable. In the worst case… Oh no." Sasha's sense of dread washed over Milla as they saw Mary approach Tanya, a stubborn expression on her face.
What could… Sasha sent his understanding of Mary's delusions as they related to Tanya, from their brief conversation within his mind. Oh no.
NO! STAY AWAY! I am Tanya von Degurechaff, the Devil of the Rhine DAMN YOU!
Tanya's flirty expression melted into a completely different one. It was not a smile, but a showing of teeth. Her eyes started to glow golden and she started to float upwards, her hair untying itself and flowing freely. Before the situation could explode, possibly literally, Milla focused her psychic energies and tossed a bundle of telepathic nonsense at the group. Colloquially known as a 'confusion grenade', it tended to be something of a soft reset of someone's mental faculties, clearing the mind of telepathic suggestions and shorting out a few seconds of memory. It wasn't a nice thing to do, and Milla didn't really think it would work on Tanya's problem as a whole, but given the situation it seemed appropriate.
Adam was the first to blurt out something under the influence of telepathic scrambling. "Did I miss tea time? No wonder everything's all wibbly."
Lili spoke up next. "BURN ALL CLOTHES! FREEDOM!" She announced at the top of her lungs. Fortunately, it's a rare psychic indeed that can manage any kind of manifestation while confused. Hopefully she won't repeat her brief nudism phase from four months ago. Toddlers are cute, but this is not the time.
Mary was the next person to speak. "God? Where did you go? I found her!" Also concerning, but not something that can be handled now.
Tanya, on the other hand, reacted quite strangely. "What? Who am I?" Well, that part was pretty normal for a confusion grenade, but instead of standing around, she ran at full speed out the door, directly away from Mary. Milla left Sasha to handle the aftermath of the confusion grenade so she could pursue Tanya.
Fortunately, she didn't get far. Tanya had tripped on a random stone, falling down about fifteen feet from the dining hall. The discordant chaos the grenade caused in Tanya's mind leveled out by the time Milla telekinetically lifted Tanya back up, repeating a mantra once more.
Well, Milla knew the odds were low of a confusion grenade being enough to shake this mental unbalance. Still, best to keep Tanya focused on her, until a dream cycle restores her mental equilibrium. "I think it would be nice if you slept with me tonight, Tanya. Doesn't that sound nice?" Milla's archetypes allowed her to keep her thoughts positive and clear of suspicion or plotting, portraying only a sense of longing for simpler times as mother and daughter.
Tanya smiled widely as she leapt into Milla's arms in a big hug, shifting her grip to make it clear that she had no intention of walking back to the cabin. At least she reduced her weight with levitation…
Ah, she laid it on a bit too thick. Whoops.
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Fortunately, the hard reset of a dream cycle did, as expected, resolve the problem. Tanya's mind had once again closed, metaphorical steel doors blocking off all telepathic access.
What a relief. She never thought she'd say that about Tanya's shield before.
"What… happened last night, Miss Milla?" Tanya asked as Milla ran a washcloth up and down her arms.
"Hm, what do you remember, darling?" Milla said, lathering up even more soap and continuing to clean her daughter.
"...Not much." She admitted. "I recall seeing the last portion of my mind, then… I woke up here." She paused for a moment. "I had a dream about something terrible happening, but that couldn't be true." The conviction with which she said it gave Milla the impression that the followup to that was 'because nothing is on fire'.
Hm. Expected, but still a little disappointing. "Well, you ran into a little problem in your mind." Milla explained. "It made you a little loopy for a bit, but a good night's sleep fixed you right up."
"So… Nothing terrible happened?" Tanya asked with hope.
Milla debated telling Tanya the truth or not. Eh, she's old enough for at least some honesty about grisly matters. "Something terrible almost happened." Milla admitted. "But Sasha and I were prepared and were able to stop it."
"That's good." Tanya said, a little distant. "Is there anything I should know?" She asked after a minute of silence.
"Well, you flirted with Adam a bit." Milla said, which didn't seem to cause a reaction one way or the other. Did she not like boys? Or was she just not at that age yet? Milla was certainly interested at her age. "But other than that, it wasn't very obvious." Milla grinned as she started to wash Tanya's hair. "That's not so bad, right? You're always so very considerate, that part of you was just amplified for a little bit."
Tanya hummed absently. "Ah, that's one way to describe it." She demurred. Milla suspected she knew more about what happened than she was letting on, but let it slide.
The two of them fell into a comfortable silence, before Milla decided to broach a delicate subject as she dried Tanya with a towel. "...Tanya, do you think I'm being overbearing?"
Tanya reflexively shook her head, denying it immediately. "No, of course not."
Milla hummed. How to phrase this? "I've just been thinking. When I was your age, I wouldn't have been taking…" Milla waved vaguely at Tanya. "This, nearly so calmly. The idea of being bathed by my mother alone would have been intolerable, much less the other stuff." Really, the only reason she did it today was so they could have this conversation before Tanya blew up the lost time all out of proportion. If it wasn't for the Mary interaction, it was the kind of issue that every psychonaut had a story told about them when they accidentally scrambled their brains for a few hours.
Tanya shrugged. "It's not a big deal." She said, waiting patiently as Milla brushed her hair. "Little is more childish than denying your preferences in the name of maturity." That was…surprisingly insightful. Also an admission that she likes getting doted on. "I'll master psychic construction soon enough, and we can put this chapter behind us. Until then, there's no need to make things even more difficult. Caretaking makes you happy, and that's reason enough to cooperate."
Milla hummed in agreement. Tanya had always been rather light on complaints, even when she did resist something Milla had decided on, she only gave the most token objections, never pressing the issue. Milla had thought that it was because of her paranoia, wanting to make sure that Milla had no complaints about her conduct. But perhaps it was more of this kind of thing? Where she accepted whatever reason Milla had and didn't see the point in arguing? When did one become the other?
"...Agent Cruller." Tanya said out of the blue. Milla gave a short questioning sound. "Have the Psychonauts even attempted to apply psychic therapy to him?"
Milla chuckled at the naive question. Still a child, after all. "Of course we have, darling. Ford's mind is… dangerous. Still in a conventional sense, so the most you risk is getting kicked out harshly, but it's like a hurricane in there." That did undersell things a little, but you didn't become a psychonaut without a few nosebleeds along the way. Nothing a sick day off work couldn't fix. "Worse, each of his personae are so separated from each other that each one has their own mental world." Milla sighed as she recalled the disastrous attempts to calm the chaos that was Ford's fractured mind shortly after she officially became a psychonaut, which was apparently the third attempt. "No psychonaut exists with the mental fortitude and psychic strength to survive there long enough to accomplish anything." Otto claimed it was even worse in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Grulovia, the first attempt, so they still held out hope that he could be helped… eventually. Camp Whispering Rock was supposed to speed that along somehow, but Milla didn't really understand the underlying rationale. Something about the psitanium?
Tanya frowned at the story, although what part of it caused that reaction was something Milla didn't know. Was she frustrated at the impossibility? Did the defeatist attitude bother her? Did she catch the implication that she might be Ford's only hope, with her extraordinary psychic strength? "...I think that I'd like to see it for myself." She eventually said.
…Milla didn't expect to hear that. "Shouldn't you master astral projection first?" She asked. Sasha had mentioned the day before that the full effects of overinvesting in an astral projection were not entirely clear, but it would probably increase the power the projection had to bear. They assumed the effects of being forcibly ejected would also be intensified somehow, but they didn't know that for sure.
Tanya nodded in agreement. "Probably. We'll see."
Milla wondered, not for the first time, just how far Tanya would go if she felt the need. Tanya had always been very cavalier about physical dangers, utterly assured that she was the most dangerous person in any room. It was rather disconcerting when seeing her unimpressed face whenever she had the opportunity to witness the drill instructors during psychonauts training do their work, but it was downright worrisome when she scares away lions and bears, psychics ones even, with an unhesitating and thoroughly dangerous demonstration of psychic might.
…Milla should ask Sasha more about Mary's claims on Tanya.
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- Location
- United States
Wooo An Update! I can't wait for more.
Darik29
Verified Delicious
Well, looks like it wasn't permanent at least. But damn does that dig up one massive bucket of mental trauma for Tanya.
Who is she really, and can she even ask that question of herself without the Machine dragging it out of her?
You have some amazing ideas for this story boss. Absolutely mind blowing.
Keep up the excellent work!
Who is she really, and can she even ask that question of herself without the Machine dragging it out of her?
You have some amazing ideas for this story boss. Absolutely mind blowing.
Keep up the excellent work!
- Location
- Ohio
Tanya's mind has been in that state... probably since halfway through her first life, when the salaryman truly understood the cutthroat nature of modern business.
Tanya has been like that for a long time.
That would explain why she enjoyed combat so much in her second life.
I like to think that, rather than paper cutouts shaped like herself, Milla's archetypes are mannequin versions of herself wearing different clothes. Her agent archetype is dressed in a black catsuit, while her detective archetype is dressed like Sherlock Holmes or a Noir detective. Milla's archetypes snap to different poses depending on what they are doing.
I guess a single, minor mental hiccup wouldn't be enough for Tanya to open up even a little.
I'm surprised Tanya didn't groan or cringe. Not even a sigh!
Chapter 9
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Happy Thanksgiving! Bonus holiday update for you all.
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Tanya didn't know what was worse. The idea that she had just narrowly escaped subsumption by a deranged manifestation of… what even was it? With only "not obvious" changes to their behavior while something else was in the driver's seat of her body… Or that such a horrible fate was considered a "minor threat" on the scale of things that psychic tampering can accomplish. Then again… there was that one day during Miss Milla's psychonauts training… Was that merely an equivalent problem for her? Tanya had to cuddle with her in one of the Psychoisolation chambers to soothe her obsessiveness and encourage her to eat and sleep… which was, essentially, exactly what Miss Milla did to resolve the issue, according to her explanation.
Of course, weighing such matters was just a distraction. The memories of the Salaryman were mostly gone. The foundation on which Tanya had built herself was ash and dust. Ironically, the main question before her was one that assailed many budding teenagers: Who was Tanya Dosva?
The question of identity was normally fairly simple. You were who you were, and who that was was your list of preferences, informed by your experiences. But objectively, that person no longer existed in any meaningful fashion. His name, gone. His face… theoretically preserved, but it was a reproduction from an untrustworthy source. His touch was everywhere in Tanya's mind, but it was a legacy, not a continuation.
So that meant that the more noticeable foundation for Tanya Dosva… was Tanya von Degurechaff. A horrible thing to contemplate, really. The Great War was a blight on history, death and violence on a scale never seen before. Even if the blame and culpability of being thrown into war was fundamentally on Being X, by putting Tanya in a situation where they would have no choice but to participate… Her plan of becoming an officer was sound. Tanya had even met conscripts on the Eastern front that were younger than her. She would no doubt be within their ranks if she had waited… but was there another way? What would have happened if she had surrendered to those first Legadonian soldiers? Was there an opportunity to go into a safer posting that she had missed? How much was Being X tipping the scales to get her killed? Or worse, how much was he tipping to scales to ensure she lived?
Hindsight was the great burden of survival, Tanya had found. Even if they technically didn't survive. This was not the first time Tanya had contemplated her second life, nor will it be the last.
But… one thing that they had decided, when thinking back to that life of violence, was that Tanya would no longer be a coward when it came to physical danger. The power and skills that she held were bought and paid for by metaphorical rivers of blood, and she would apply them where appropriate. Besides, there's no reason to believe that this is her last life, anyway. Protecting the children from the wildlife was a good example of an appropriate use of her strength.
Protecting them from Ford Cruller? That duty was less clear. He was unexploded ordinance, but was it wise to attempt defusal? Could she succeed where veteran Psychonauts failed? It was thoughts like this that filled Tanya's head as she ate mechanically.
"Okay children, " Miss Milla began. "Remember the previous announcements regarding Mr. Cook, Park Ranger, and Janitor. All of you have managed to learn, if not master, the basic psychic techniques of being a Psychonaut." There was a collection of cheers. "For the remaining week and a half, we'll be engaging in fun games and activities with your new psychic powers, and if anyone wishes to volunteer, we could all have fun taking a look at one of your minds!" She pointed towards Sam. "Sam, I believe you mentioned you wanted to volunteer?"
"Yep." Sam said, a dopey grin on her face. "It'll be cool. I have lions, goats, and a whale! Her name's Esmerelda." Apparently Sam had already had the chance to examine her own mind.
"We'll do that after one more trip into my mind, where I'll go over the various things you'll find in mental worlds." Miss Milla said. "You've seen censors with Sasha, but there's plenty more to learn."
As the group started to leave, Agent Nein pulled Tanya aside. "We've already gone over this lesson. Follow me."
Tanya followed Agent Nein to the Psychoisolation chamber, which once more stank of cleaning chemicals rather than sweat and the resulting bacterial growths. While they aired it out, Agent Nein gave more instruction on the matter of Psychic construction. "Now, to use psychic construction, the first step is to know the shape of your mind. This you have done. The second step is to learn concept materialization. Did you manage it?" Tanya nodded. "Good. Now, I'm sure you've tried to change small things in your mind, trying to shape it even without knowing how." Tanya shook her head. "Really? Well, that's not how you do it."
Agent Nein created a field of telekinetic force shaped like a cube. "Now, the key to using psychic construction to organize your mind is not to make small changes, but large ones." To demonstrate, tiny sections started to rise out of the cube, but jerked back as if stuck. Then, he changed the cube into a torus and back easily. "There are some rules you need to follow, but within those rules, the key is to identify each discrete area and then stack them in a way that makes sense to you. You can designate a 'front' area that will naturally attract any mental guests, and from there it is a matter of connecting the sections of your mind in a way that makes sense to you. If you wish to make smaller changes to the environment, there are methods, but those are more advanced techniques."
Tanya hummed. "Do you have any suggestions on how I should try to do so?"
Agent Nein smacked his lips as he stopped himself from going for a cigarette. "Without knowing what dynamics already exist, I can only give vague advice. Towers, tunnels, and mazes can be useful metaphors. The most important thing to keep in mind is that elevation matters. Downward directions are associated with the subconscious, as well as the most primal parts of the psyche. It would be best to keep anything… unpleasant to you as deep into your design as possible." After a moment, he added: "The design of a building is also a fine method. More than one Psychonaut has organized their mind to resemble the Motherlobe, using the existing structure to help sort their experiences."
Tanya blinked incredulously at the suggestion. "It already looks like that." She said, lying indirectly. It was what she was planning on using to cover up everything else.
"Then re-arranging some rooms and hallways should be relatively simple." Agent Nein replied. "Now, you can go anywhere you like in your mind, you just need to focus on whichever part you're going to when you meditate. When you wish to reshape your mind, you need to put yourself somewhat separate from the rest of your mind. For you, I would recommend picking the entranceway and stepping right outside of it, floating just barely within the borders of your mind." He fished out his pocket watch and passed it to her, the chain floating out and wrapping around Tanya's neck to secure itself. "I've set the bell to ring in half an hour. That should be all the time we have."
"Understood." Tanya said, brandishing the chunk of psitanium she used as a meditation aid. She telekinetically shut the psychoisolation chamber, before laying down and placing the chunk on her forehead.
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Tanya had a few ideas on how to arrange their mind to be somewhat innocuous. The motherlobe facsimile was good, but it was also… too complete. It wasn't that large of a facility, when one gets right down to it. The Psychonauts numbered somewhere between one and two thousand psychics, but the majority of those were support staff in local branches, not in the main hub. When your infrastructure relied on psychics, only the most menial job roles were not psychically active. Like that new fellow in the mailroom, Nick. Now that was an employee that knew how to kiss ass. He will go far, in Tanya's estimate.
No, that will not suffice. In the end, Tanya figured that she had a fair amount of leeway when it came to architectural influences. So it was a matter of thinking of things like level design in a video game. There were two 'hubs', in Berun and the Motherlobe, with a connecting zone between them, the bloody battlefield. The Motherlobe's hub had a spoke design, with each area going off of the central room, much like the real one. Berun, on the other hand, had the rail system, more of a linear spine design. Further, the battlefield could be considered a third hub, even if Tanya didn't look at exactly what was within those whirlpools of blood. There were… quite a few.
That was… quite the complex design. Tanya may or may not be over sixty, so that did make some level of sense… What could be used to bind them together?
Bound together… who said they had to be bound together? If they were instead separated into many disparate pieces… Tanya could pass a smaller number of pieces as her mind, while concealing the entrances to the other pieces.
Further, instead of trying to make something that could be derived from this life… the other influences could instead be concealed by making their surroundings obviously fantastical.
Yes, that did make sense. Tanya immediately focused on the bloody battlefield, stepping into her mind as easily as she did the last time. The stench of war filled her senses as memories of the carnage formed around her. As instructed, she flew away from the battlefield until she crossed the invisible wall at the edges. There still appeared to be ground beneath her, but she knew that it was an optical illusion.
With a thought, each of the bloody whirlpools flowed upward, turning into churning spheres of crimson that left the battlefield behind as the ground beneath them fractured, shattering under the influence of Tanya's new vision. Some of the fragments were absorbed by the bloody spheres, but most vanished like the filler it was. Even the glowing pit, the Devil's domain, was tucked into its own little glowing marble.
In the distance, a similarly apocalyptic event occurred as the stations of her second life each congealed into their own spheres, concrete and steel twisting as they started to float back to Tanya. In the other direction, the Motherlobe tore itself apart as the contents were sorted according to Tanya's design.
In moments, all that was left was a void filled with glowing golden cracks as Tanya's will gripped and contained the entirety of her mind within the dozens of spheres. Even the cobweb-wrapped End of the Line was among their number. "This is easy." Tanya said, marveling at the technique. Passively, she could still feel the connections between each sphere. Immediately, she knew that despite the drama, all she needed to do to reverse the destruction was to simply let go, and it would reassemble itself. No actual changes had yet to occur.
She did not. She sorted through each sphere, determining which ones held acceptable memories and which held ones that could not be allowed to be exposed. With slight adjustments, cutting away objectionable memories from mostly-okay spheres and moving them to compatible ones elsewhere, she eventually had eight spheres out of forty ready to be assembled into her new fake mind. After some additional thought, one of the bloody spheres, the one that boiled with heat, was added to the collection.
Tanya checked the time. Twenty-two minutes had passed. "I need to hurry." She murmured to herself. Taking the nine spheres, it was a simple matter to assemble them into an interconnected web that manifested itself as a classic fantasy setting: a castle in the sky. The exterior was nothing, merely an entranceway that served as the first line of Tanya's mental defense. The other memories were formed into near-identical castles, three of them, grouped in a way similar to how they were before, and then Tanya layered all four on top of each other, intersecting the matter and separating them into distinct realms, using a set of magic mirrors to allow movement between the layers. Mirrors that were placed in fortified locations. 'Mirror world' isn't exactly an original idea, but Tanya didn't have time to fully conceptualize something novel. It will have to do.
With her last moments before time ran out, Tanya named each castle in accordance with their nature: Tatemae Castle for the thoughts that were safe to think, Honne Castle for the ones that weren't, Yomi Castle for the blood-soaked scars that cannot be removed, and Kyomu Castle as a final resting place for what she no longer was. With that act, a tremor passed through Tanya's mind, shaking the very space that she inhabited as she floated above the castle. It was finished, set in stone.
The bell on Agent Nein's psychic watch dinged merrily, proving that Tanya finished her task right on time. Turning away, Tanya willed herself out without bothering with the smelling salts.
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Tanya walked out of the psychoisolation chamber, accepting a bottle of sports drink from Agent Nein to rehydrate from the sweltering temperatures experienced within. "Mission accomplished." She reported, making sure to smile.
"Did you manage to change the layout, then?" Agent Nein asked.
"It's a castle now." Tanya said, leaving out the existence of the other castles.
"Good choice." Agent Nein said. "Very defensible." Tanya got the distinct impression that he was just humoring her with that statement. Sometimes she missed being surrounded by subordinates that feared her the proper amount. Then she promptly buried that monstrous sentiment back down where it belongs. "Now, you should be able to open your mind to telepathy without broadcasting every thought, now that you've organized it. You did make sure to designate an opening, an entranceway, correct?"
Tanya nodded. "Yes, any entrance will have to pass the drawbridge to get anywhere."
"Perhaps a test, then." Agent Nein said as he ambled towards the rest of the campers. "Think of two numbers: One at the forefront of your mind, and a second one behind your defenses. Then, read my mind: What number am I thinking of?"
Tanya suspected that the exercise he was proposing was significantly more difficult then he implied, but to someone who had to command, fight, and operate a computation orb simultaneously, it was a simple matter. It had been years since Tanya deliberately listened for the thoughts of another, but it wasn't anything new. "Thirteen." Tanya said after picking it up.
"Very good. All I could pick up was the number 21." Agent Nein said. "If that was the one you intended to broadcast, then you've picked up the benefits of constructed mental defenses as fast as you have most other things."
Tanya gave a small smile at her success. She'd need to verify the effectiveness with someone who doesn't have as good of a poker face, but even Agent Nein would likely have reacted if he picked up on the secondary thought she imagined alongside the number 19, that of burning the forest to the ground.
As they entered the 'classroom', the first of the campers were leaving Miss Milla's mind, the rest following suit over the next minute. Tanya took a moment to readjust to once more hearing and feeling the subtle sensations of children's thoughts, a dull murmur that was easy enough to ignore, but still represented some noise that Tanya had spent years not having to deal with.
"Ah, Tanya!" Miss Milla's telepathic voice was instantly recognizable as both being from her and not being actual sound. "Come, sit, join us."
It was a sensation Tanya wasn't used to, but it wasn't that different from a radio formula, so Tanya sent back an acknowledgement. "Copy that." Ah, perhaps she should have said something more casual. Miss Milla giggled out loud at Tanya's misstep.
"Okay children, now that we've all had the chance to experience the kinds of things you'd find in a mind less controlled than Sasha's and mine, it's time to go exploring!" She glanced over to Sam. "Are you still willing to volunteer, Sam?"
"Yup!" She said, a goofy smile on her face. "Esmerelda's excited to see y'all!" She gestured at the Psychoportal, floating it to her forehead. "Everyone get in!"
Unlike the last time Tanya went into someone else's mind, Tanya did not lie down, instead reaching out towards the Psychoportal while remaining seated on one of the cushions. As promised, the portal pulled Tanya within easily, now that she wasn't blocking its influence.
It really was that easy, huh? Still, when one considers the consequences of waiting until she has mastered psychic construction before doing it the correct way… worth it.
----------------
Sam's mind was pretty much exactly like one would expect: a series of environments populated by her favorite animals (all of them), each of them completely obedient to her every whim.
The animals in question each had names and personalities, and Sam was eager to introduce everyone to each and every one. "This is Robespierre." Sam said, picking the lemur up and presenting him to the tour group. The lemur waved.
That wasn't to say that Sam's introduction of her animal friends was interesting. It was dreadfully boring. One by one, interest waned in the group as they only pretended to be interested in whatever exotic animal Sam had incarnated some aspect of her psyche into.
"Hey, weren't there supposed to be, like, censors and stuff?" The first one to speak up on this subject was LIzzie, although about half of the group murmured discontented agreement.
Sam chuckled. "Yeah, I'm keeping those guys out." She explained. "Grandpa showed me how to do it. He said that if you want people out of your head, you can't let your censor energy trickle out like it wants to, you have to let it build up a bit first. Distract them, you know." She gave an evil grin. "Time to kick all your butts!" She declared, and a flurry of censor doors opened around the savannah environment.
Along with them, red light bulbs appeared in empty spaces, exploding into little blue monsters that vaguely resemble cats with a bunch of other red light bulbs sticking out of their back. Their appearance indicated that Sam acknowledged that this was a bad idea, but was going through with it anyway.
The next few minutes were filled with the familiar chaos of combat, Tanya picking off the Bad Ideas with PSI blasts and telekinetic redirection of their explosive projectiles. When a pair of Judges appeared, their massive gavels poised to flatten the children, Mary roared in glee as she called on the curse of Being X. Needless to say, the Judges didn't last long against the melee assault of the Bloody Valkyrie, glowing golden fists manhandling them like they were the small child and she was the towering figure as she sang hymns in Legadonian at the top of her lungs. The rest of the children gleefully killed off the actual censors.
Miss Milla patiently waited for the chaos to settle. "Samantha, that was a mean thing to do." Sam winced at Miss Milla using her actual name rather than the nickname. "I'm not disappointed that you tried to boot the other campers out of your mind." She said, which perked Sam up. "You had no chance of success with me and Tanya here. I'm disappointed that you felt the need to surprise us with it, when I'm sure there would have been plenty of volunteers to fight whatever you could muster."
Sam nodded obediently at the scolding. "Yes ma'am. I'm sorry ma'am. I'll ask next time, ma'am."
"Okay, now, break out the smelling salts, children! We're leaving now." Miss Milla instructed. Okay, moment of truth. Tanya tried to pull herself back to her body without it, but failed. Shrugging, Tanya pulled out the wooden vial and brought it to her nose, opening it for just long enough to smell.
Tanya got the impression of being yanked a large distance, although instead of the sane 'everywhere' tug that flight formulas could manage, using smelling salts felt like getting yanked hundreds of meters by the nose. After that disorienting sensation, Tanya recovered her wits and looked around. She wasn't lying down!
Everyone seemed to recover fairly swiftly from leaving Sam's mind, getting used to the experience. All in all, a smashing success. Miss Milla smiled at everyone, as she was wont to do. "Okay children, while that didn't quite go as I expected, we do have time for a second volunteer."
"I believe Mary mentioned that she was going to volunteer." Tanya said out loud before anyone else could.
Neither Mary nor Miss Milla liked that suggestion. Apparently Mary was just spewing hot air. "Ah, perhaps someone else?" Miss Milla said hesitantly. "I wouldn't want Mary to feel pressured into it."
After Lizzie volunteered and tried to smash everyone with her own mental defenses, it was decided that there would be no more journeys into the minds of the other campers.
Miss Milla claimed that it was because of how boring everyone complained it was, but Tanya suspected that it was an excuse to avoid Mary from volunteering for real.
Thus, the campers were all released from formalized activities and instructed to enjoy themselves.
Tanya, on the other hand… knew where Agent Nein stashed the spare Psychoportals. There were four on the premises. Agent Cruller was unexploded ordnance. Tanya managed to live through more of the Great War than she had any right to, and part of that was knowing when attacking was the safest option. Ignoring this problem was unacceptable, and she was already prepared for failure, so it was time to do some recon in force.
"Where are you going, Devil?" Mary said after flying to catch up with her.
Tanya grunted in acknowledgement. "To deal with a problem."
Mary let a trace of fear enter her voice as she responded. "W-what kind of problem? The cougar didn't hurt anyone." What cougar? Did it try to set one of the children on fire? Again?
"I'll deal with that later." Tanya grumbled. "Actually, your assistance would make this easier. Come along."
"What? How? Nothing around here's anywhere close to your power, much less mine." Mary asked, confused but continued following along.
"Not necessarily true." Tanya replied. "Ignoring your delusions and arrogance for a moment." Mary's temper flared at that, and the sensation of feeling the indignant rage instead of just seeing or hearing it threw Tanya off for an instant. "Agent Cruller was widely considered, in his heyday, to be the world's most powerful psychic. The only one to bother contesting the title was Maligula, the Deluge of Grulovia, a hydrokinetic so powerful that the entirety of the Psychic Six was deployed against her." Tanya shook her head sadly. "Half of them never recovered from the battle. One died, another drowned in grief, and the last… was Agent Cruller." Bob Zanotto's grief was not handled in anything resembling a healthy way, given his alcoholism, but one could directly trace the cause of it to that one battle.
"...the old guy?" Mary questioned. "What's the problem with him, anyway?"
"No one really knows for sure." Tanya said. "His mind was shattered by the battle, and it manifests in his bizarre set of multiple personalities." Tanya held up the Psychoportal. "But I'm going to find out."
Mary's eyes widened. "Woah!" She exclaimed. "You're going to get in so much trouble!" She whispered in childish awe.
Tanya just stared at Mary. "...Are you sure that you're really an adult? Because you're doing a fantastic job of pretending to be six if you are."
Mary glared at Tanya. "This is your fault, you know." She spat, accusingly. "If it wasn't for you escaping hell, God wouldn't have sent me to find you."
Tanya stumbled at the directness. "What!?" That first idea was right? It wasn't the only theory Tanya had come up with to explain her presence, but still…
"It's true." Mary said, nodding seriously. "God sent me on a sacred mission of mercy." She pointed dramatically at Tanya. "While you deserve eternal damnation for your many, many sins, God is merciful, and will allow you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven if you repent in this life and accept His Light into your heart." Yeah… that sounded like Being X. At least, after you cut the bullshit it sounded like him.
"He told you that Degurechaff had escaped from him." Tanya asked, cutting straight to the point.
"Yes." Mary replied.
"How did he know where to send you if she had escaped?" Tanya asked, both to 'poke holes' in her story and to figure out Being X's angle.
Mary smiled at this, like a schoolgirl happy that they knew the answer to the teacher's question. "I asked him about that! He said that as my murderer, my soul could find yours across any distance!" She looked Tanya up and down. "Apparently it took a while for my soul to track yours down."
"At least your delusions are consistent." Tanya commented, just to keep deniability. "So I assume you reported success in your mission to find this Tanya von Degurechaff?"
Mary nodded. 'In my evening prayers." She shrugged. "He hasn't said anything about it, so I bet he's just busy. In the meantime, you need to accept the truth in your heart: God is good."
Tanya snorted at the half-assed conversion attempt. "I'd say over my dead body, but you're quite convinced that's not enough, " Tanya had, at one point, argued that the threat of total annihilation would not sway her resolve… but she was finding herself rather short of it, right now. "So instead I'll ask a different question: What was it like being a baby with an adult's mind?" In Tanya's experience, it was long stretches of boredom interspersed with excessive amounts of physical affection, which was drug-like in its addictiveness. Fortunately, it became less overwhelming as the body aged. Apparently one of the few medical contributions Helmut Fullbear made as a Psychonaut was positing 'touch hunger' as an actual physiological need. Tanya was pretty sure that was one of the differences between worlds, an influence of psychic energy adding to human needs. They never needed anything like that in their first two lives. It would also explain why this body seems to need so much of it.
Mary scratched her nose. "Ah, it was… a thing. God helped me out there… I think. Whenever I relaxed and just… it's hard to explain. I stopped thinking and I just… automatically acted like my supposed age." Well, wasn't that convenient. She was clearly the isekai protagonist here, with a cheat like that. "I would have gone crazy if I had to go through that normally." There was nothing normal about this!
"Well, if it requires you to stop thinking, no wonder that it keeps popping up." Tanya said, seizing on the verbal opening Mary presented to needle her a bit more.
The girl pouted before changing the subject. "Where is the old guy, anyway?" Mary asked.
Tanya looked around. Agent Cruller was nowhere to be seen. "We'll have to summon him." Tanya decided before pointing to a random spot off the path. "Step on that patch of grass."
Mary looked at Tanya strangely. "...okay." She very deliberately stepped on the designated blades of grass. They were fine examples, very straight and level. Until she stepped on them.
Suddenly, Agent Cruller, or "Mr. Park Ranger' appeared. Normally, you'd see some kind of sign that he had used psychic powers to bend space, but even with his shattered mind, he still held the skill to simply not be there one moment, and then be there the next with absolutely no sign of his presence. "Stay on the trail!" He shouted at Mary, who shrieked and leapt back onto the trail at the sudden command.
"I tried to warn her, sir." Tanya lied. She telekinetically maneuvered the Psychoportal behind Agent Cruller's head as he carefully restored the previous condition of the grass. "In apology for my failure, I'll put some things in order for you. I know you're very busy."
"Will you? That'd be nice, Missy." Agent Cruller said idly as he used a ruler on the patch of grass. "I swear, no one appreciates the value of everything being just so."
Before the psychoportal drew her into its swirling depths, Tanya spared Mary one last look. "Just keep any wild animals away while I'm occupied, please."
Mary startled at the request. "Really? But… why would you think…" As Tanya's focus on the real world waned, the last thing she heard from Mary was full of conviction: "Vade com deo!"
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Tanya didn't know what was worse. The idea that she had just narrowly escaped subsumption by a deranged manifestation of… what even was it? With only "not obvious" changes to their behavior while something else was in the driver's seat of her body… Or that such a horrible fate was considered a "minor threat" on the scale of things that psychic tampering can accomplish. Then again… there was that one day during Miss Milla's psychonauts training… Was that merely an equivalent problem for her? Tanya had to cuddle with her in one of the Psychoisolation chambers to soothe her obsessiveness and encourage her to eat and sleep… which was, essentially, exactly what Miss Milla did to resolve the issue, according to her explanation.
Of course, weighing such matters was just a distraction. The memories of the Salaryman were mostly gone. The foundation on which Tanya had built herself was ash and dust. Ironically, the main question before her was one that assailed many budding teenagers: Who was Tanya Dosva?
The question of identity was normally fairly simple. You were who you were, and who that was was your list of preferences, informed by your experiences. But objectively, that person no longer existed in any meaningful fashion. His name, gone. His face… theoretically preserved, but it was a reproduction from an untrustworthy source. His touch was everywhere in Tanya's mind, but it was a legacy, not a continuation.
So that meant that the more noticeable foundation for Tanya Dosva… was Tanya von Degurechaff. A horrible thing to contemplate, really. The Great War was a blight on history, death and violence on a scale never seen before. Even if the blame and culpability of being thrown into war was fundamentally on Being X, by putting Tanya in a situation where they would have no choice but to participate… Her plan of becoming an officer was sound. Tanya had even met conscripts on the Eastern front that were younger than her. She would no doubt be within their ranks if she had waited… but was there another way? What would have happened if she had surrendered to those first Legadonian soldiers? Was there an opportunity to go into a safer posting that she had missed? How much was Being X tipping the scales to get her killed? Or worse, how much was he tipping to scales to ensure she lived?
Hindsight was the great burden of survival, Tanya had found. Even if they technically didn't survive. This was not the first time Tanya had contemplated her second life, nor will it be the last.
But… one thing that they had decided, when thinking back to that life of violence, was that Tanya would no longer be a coward when it came to physical danger. The power and skills that she held were bought and paid for by metaphorical rivers of blood, and she would apply them where appropriate. Besides, there's no reason to believe that this is her last life, anyway. Protecting the children from the wildlife was a good example of an appropriate use of her strength.
Protecting them from Ford Cruller? That duty was less clear. He was unexploded ordinance, but was it wise to attempt defusal? Could she succeed where veteran Psychonauts failed? It was thoughts like this that filled Tanya's head as she ate mechanically.
"Okay children, " Miss Milla began. "Remember the previous announcements regarding Mr. Cook, Park Ranger, and Janitor. All of you have managed to learn, if not master, the basic psychic techniques of being a Psychonaut." There was a collection of cheers. "For the remaining week and a half, we'll be engaging in fun games and activities with your new psychic powers, and if anyone wishes to volunteer, we could all have fun taking a look at one of your minds!" She pointed towards Sam. "Sam, I believe you mentioned you wanted to volunteer?"
"Yep." Sam said, a dopey grin on her face. "It'll be cool. I have lions, goats, and a whale! Her name's Esmerelda." Apparently Sam had already had the chance to examine her own mind.
"We'll do that after one more trip into my mind, where I'll go over the various things you'll find in mental worlds." Miss Milla said. "You've seen censors with Sasha, but there's plenty more to learn."
As the group started to leave, Agent Nein pulled Tanya aside. "We've already gone over this lesson. Follow me."
Tanya followed Agent Nein to the Psychoisolation chamber, which once more stank of cleaning chemicals rather than sweat and the resulting bacterial growths. While they aired it out, Agent Nein gave more instruction on the matter of Psychic construction. "Now, to use psychic construction, the first step is to know the shape of your mind. This you have done. The second step is to learn concept materialization. Did you manage it?" Tanya nodded. "Good. Now, I'm sure you've tried to change small things in your mind, trying to shape it even without knowing how." Tanya shook her head. "Really? Well, that's not how you do it."
Agent Nein created a field of telekinetic force shaped like a cube. "Now, the key to using psychic construction to organize your mind is not to make small changes, but large ones." To demonstrate, tiny sections started to rise out of the cube, but jerked back as if stuck. Then, he changed the cube into a torus and back easily. "There are some rules you need to follow, but within those rules, the key is to identify each discrete area and then stack them in a way that makes sense to you. You can designate a 'front' area that will naturally attract any mental guests, and from there it is a matter of connecting the sections of your mind in a way that makes sense to you. If you wish to make smaller changes to the environment, there are methods, but those are more advanced techniques."
Tanya hummed. "Do you have any suggestions on how I should try to do so?"
Agent Nein smacked his lips as he stopped himself from going for a cigarette. "Without knowing what dynamics already exist, I can only give vague advice. Towers, tunnels, and mazes can be useful metaphors. The most important thing to keep in mind is that elevation matters. Downward directions are associated with the subconscious, as well as the most primal parts of the psyche. It would be best to keep anything… unpleasant to you as deep into your design as possible." After a moment, he added: "The design of a building is also a fine method. More than one Psychonaut has organized their mind to resemble the Motherlobe, using the existing structure to help sort their experiences."
Tanya blinked incredulously at the suggestion. "It already looks like that." She said, lying indirectly. It was what she was planning on using to cover up everything else.
"Then re-arranging some rooms and hallways should be relatively simple." Agent Nein replied. "Now, you can go anywhere you like in your mind, you just need to focus on whichever part you're going to when you meditate. When you wish to reshape your mind, you need to put yourself somewhat separate from the rest of your mind. For you, I would recommend picking the entranceway and stepping right outside of it, floating just barely within the borders of your mind." He fished out his pocket watch and passed it to her, the chain floating out and wrapping around Tanya's neck to secure itself. "I've set the bell to ring in half an hour. That should be all the time we have."
"Understood." Tanya said, brandishing the chunk of psitanium she used as a meditation aid. She telekinetically shut the psychoisolation chamber, before laying down and placing the chunk on her forehead.
----------------
Tanya had a few ideas on how to arrange their mind to be somewhat innocuous. The motherlobe facsimile was good, but it was also… too complete. It wasn't that large of a facility, when one gets right down to it. The Psychonauts numbered somewhere between one and two thousand psychics, but the majority of those were support staff in local branches, not in the main hub. When your infrastructure relied on psychics, only the most menial job roles were not psychically active. Like that new fellow in the mailroom, Nick. Now that was an employee that knew how to kiss ass. He will go far, in Tanya's estimate.
No, that will not suffice. In the end, Tanya figured that she had a fair amount of leeway when it came to architectural influences. So it was a matter of thinking of things like level design in a video game. There were two 'hubs', in Berun and the Motherlobe, with a connecting zone between them, the bloody battlefield. The Motherlobe's hub had a spoke design, with each area going off of the central room, much like the real one. Berun, on the other hand, had the rail system, more of a linear spine design. Further, the battlefield could be considered a third hub, even if Tanya didn't look at exactly what was within those whirlpools of blood. There were… quite a few.
That was… quite the complex design. Tanya may or may not be over sixty, so that did make some level of sense… What could be used to bind them together?
Bound together… who said they had to be bound together? If they were instead separated into many disparate pieces… Tanya could pass a smaller number of pieces as her mind, while concealing the entrances to the other pieces.
Further, instead of trying to make something that could be derived from this life… the other influences could instead be concealed by making their surroundings obviously fantastical.
Yes, that did make sense. Tanya immediately focused on the bloody battlefield, stepping into her mind as easily as she did the last time. The stench of war filled her senses as memories of the carnage formed around her. As instructed, she flew away from the battlefield until she crossed the invisible wall at the edges. There still appeared to be ground beneath her, but she knew that it was an optical illusion.
With a thought, each of the bloody whirlpools flowed upward, turning into churning spheres of crimson that left the battlefield behind as the ground beneath them fractured, shattering under the influence of Tanya's new vision. Some of the fragments were absorbed by the bloody spheres, but most vanished like the filler it was. Even the glowing pit, the Devil's domain, was tucked into its own little glowing marble.
In the distance, a similarly apocalyptic event occurred as the stations of her second life each congealed into their own spheres, concrete and steel twisting as they started to float back to Tanya. In the other direction, the Motherlobe tore itself apart as the contents were sorted according to Tanya's design.
In moments, all that was left was a void filled with glowing golden cracks as Tanya's will gripped and contained the entirety of her mind within the dozens of spheres. Even the cobweb-wrapped End of the Line was among their number. "This is easy." Tanya said, marveling at the technique. Passively, she could still feel the connections between each sphere. Immediately, she knew that despite the drama, all she needed to do to reverse the destruction was to simply let go, and it would reassemble itself. No actual changes had yet to occur.
She did not. She sorted through each sphere, determining which ones held acceptable memories and which held ones that could not be allowed to be exposed. With slight adjustments, cutting away objectionable memories from mostly-okay spheres and moving them to compatible ones elsewhere, she eventually had eight spheres out of forty ready to be assembled into her new fake mind. After some additional thought, one of the bloody spheres, the one that boiled with heat, was added to the collection.
Tanya checked the time. Twenty-two minutes had passed. "I need to hurry." She murmured to herself. Taking the nine spheres, it was a simple matter to assemble them into an interconnected web that manifested itself as a classic fantasy setting: a castle in the sky. The exterior was nothing, merely an entranceway that served as the first line of Tanya's mental defense. The other memories were formed into near-identical castles, three of them, grouped in a way similar to how they were before, and then Tanya layered all four on top of each other, intersecting the matter and separating them into distinct realms, using a set of magic mirrors to allow movement between the layers. Mirrors that were placed in fortified locations. 'Mirror world' isn't exactly an original idea, but Tanya didn't have time to fully conceptualize something novel. It will have to do.
With her last moments before time ran out, Tanya named each castle in accordance with their nature: Tatemae Castle for the thoughts that were safe to think, Honne Castle for the ones that weren't, Yomi Castle for the blood-soaked scars that cannot be removed, and Kyomu Castle as a final resting place for what she no longer was. With that act, a tremor passed through Tanya's mind, shaking the very space that she inhabited as she floated above the castle. It was finished, set in stone.
The bell on Agent Nein's psychic watch dinged merrily, proving that Tanya finished her task right on time. Turning away, Tanya willed herself out without bothering with the smelling salts.
----------------
Tanya walked out of the psychoisolation chamber, accepting a bottle of sports drink from Agent Nein to rehydrate from the sweltering temperatures experienced within. "Mission accomplished." She reported, making sure to smile.
"Did you manage to change the layout, then?" Agent Nein asked.
"It's a castle now." Tanya said, leaving out the existence of the other castles.
"Good choice." Agent Nein said. "Very defensible." Tanya got the distinct impression that he was just humoring her with that statement. Sometimes she missed being surrounded by subordinates that feared her the proper amount. Then she promptly buried that monstrous sentiment back down where it belongs. "Now, you should be able to open your mind to telepathy without broadcasting every thought, now that you've organized it. You did make sure to designate an opening, an entranceway, correct?"
Tanya nodded. "Yes, any entrance will have to pass the drawbridge to get anywhere."
"Perhaps a test, then." Agent Nein said as he ambled towards the rest of the campers. "Think of two numbers: One at the forefront of your mind, and a second one behind your defenses. Then, read my mind: What number am I thinking of?"
Tanya suspected that the exercise he was proposing was significantly more difficult then he implied, but to someone who had to command, fight, and operate a computation orb simultaneously, it was a simple matter. It had been years since Tanya deliberately listened for the thoughts of another, but it wasn't anything new. "Thirteen." Tanya said after picking it up.
"Very good. All I could pick up was the number 21." Agent Nein said. "If that was the one you intended to broadcast, then you've picked up the benefits of constructed mental defenses as fast as you have most other things."
Tanya gave a small smile at her success. She'd need to verify the effectiveness with someone who doesn't have as good of a poker face, but even Agent Nein would likely have reacted if he picked up on the secondary thought she imagined alongside the number 19, that of burning the forest to the ground.
As they entered the 'classroom', the first of the campers were leaving Miss Milla's mind, the rest following suit over the next minute. Tanya took a moment to readjust to once more hearing and feeling the subtle sensations of children's thoughts, a dull murmur that was easy enough to ignore, but still represented some noise that Tanya had spent years not having to deal with.
"Ah, Tanya!" Miss Milla's telepathic voice was instantly recognizable as both being from her and not being actual sound. "Come, sit, join us."
It was a sensation Tanya wasn't used to, but it wasn't that different from a radio formula, so Tanya sent back an acknowledgement. "Copy that." Ah, perhaps she should have said something more casual. Miss Milla giggled out loud at Tanya's misstep.
"Okay children, now that we've all had the chance to experience the kinds of things you'd find in a mind less controlled than Sasha's and mine, it's time to go exploring!" She glanced over to Sam. "Are you still willing to volunteer, Sam?"
"Yup!" She said, a goofy smile on her face. "Esmerelda's excited to see y'all!" She gestured at the Psychoportal, floating it to her forehead. "Everyone get in!"
Unlike the last time Tanya went into someone else's mind, Tanya did not lie down, instead reaching out towards the Psychoportal while remaining seated on one of the cushions. As promised, the portal pulled Tanya within easily, now that she wasn't blocking its influence.
It really was that easy, huh? Still, when one considers the consequences of waiting until she has mastered psychic construction before doing it the correct way… worth it.
----------------
Sam's mind was pretty much exactly like one would expect: a series of environments populated by her favorite animals (all of them), each of them completely obedient to her every whim.
The animals in question each had names and personalities, and Sam was eager to introduce everyone to each and every one. "This is Robespierre." Sam said, picking the lemur up and presenting him to the tour group. The lemur waved.
That wasn't to say that Sam's introduction of her animal friends was interesting. It was dreadfully boring. One by one, interest waned in the group as they only pretended to be interested in whatever exotic animal Sam had incarnated some aspect of her psyche into.
"Hey, weren't there supposed to be, like, censors and stuff?" The first one to speak up on this subject was LIzzie, although about half of the group murmured discontented agreement.
Sam chuckled. "Yeah, I'm keeping those guys out." She explained. "Grandpa showed me how to do it. He said that if you want people out of your head, you can't let your censor energy trickle out like it wants to, you have to let it build up a bit first. Distract them, you know." She gave an evil grin. "Time to kick all your butts!" She declared, and a flurry of censor doors opened around the savannah environment.
Along with them, red light bulbs appeared in empty spaces, exploding into little blue monsters that vaguely resemble cats with a bunch of other red light bulbs sticking out of their back. Their appearance indicated that Sam acknowledged that this was a bad idea, but was going through with it anyway.
The next few minutes were filled with the familiar chaos of combat, Tanya picking off the Bad Ideas with PSI blasts and telekinetic redirection of their explosive projectiles. When a pair of Judges appeared, their massive gavels poised to flatten the children, Mary roared in glee as she called on the curse of Being X. Needless to say, the Judges didn't last long against the melee assault of the Bloody Valkyrie, glowing golden fists manhandling them like they were the small child and she was the towering figure as she sang hymns in Legadonian at the top of her lungs. The rest of the children gleefully killed off the actual censors.
Miss Milla patiently waited for the chaos to settle. "Samantha, that was a mean thing to do." Sam winced at Miss Milla using her actual name rather than the nickname. "I'm not disappointed that you tried to boot the other campers out of your mind." She said, which perked Sam up. "You had no chance of success with me and Tanya here. I'm disappointed that you felt the need to surprise us with it, when I'm sure there would have been plenty of volunteers to fight whatever you could muster."
Sam nodded obediently at the scolding. "Yes ma'am. I'm sorry ma'am. I'll ask next time, ma'am."
"Okay, now, break out the smelling salts, children! We're leaving now." Miss Milla instructed. Okay, moment of truth. Tanya tried to pull herself back to her body without it, but failed. Shrugging, Tanya pulled out the wooden vial and brought it to her nose, opening it for just long enough to smell.
Tanya got the impression of being yanked a large distance, although instead of the sane 'everywhere' tug that flight formulas could manage, using smelling salts felt like getting yanked hundreds of meters by the nose. After that disorienting sensation, Tanya recovered her wits and looked around. She wasn't lying down!
Everyone seemed to recover fairly swiftly from leaving Sam's mind, getting used to the experience. All in all, a smashing success. Miss Milla smiled at everyone, as she was wont to do. "Okay children, while that didn't quite go as I expected, we do have time for a second volunteer."
"I believe Mary mentioned that she was going to volunteer." Tanya said out loud before anyone else could.
Neither Mary nor Miss Milla liked that suggestion. Apparently Mary was just spewing hot air. "Ah, perhaps someone else?" Miss Milla said hesitantly. "I wouldn't want Mary to feel pressured into it."
After Lizzie volunteered and tried to smash everyone with her own mental defenses, it was decided that there would be no more journeys into the minds of the other campers.
Miss Milla claimed that it was because of how boring everyone complained it was, but Tanya suspected that it was an excuse to avoid Mary from volunteering for real.
Thus, the campers were all released from formalized activities and instructed to enjoy themselves.
Tanya, on the other hand… knew where Agent Nein stashed the spare Psychoportals. There were four on the premises. Agent Cruller was unexploded ordnance. Tanya managed to live through more of the Great War than she had any right to, and part of that was knowing when attacking was the safest option. Ignoring this problem was unacceptable, and she was already prepared for failure, so it was time to do some recon in force.
"Where are you going, Devil?" Mary said after flying to catch up with her.
Tanya grunted in acknowledgement. "To deal with a problem."
Mary let a trace of fear enter her voice as she responded. "W-what kind of problem? The cougar didn't hurt anyone." What cougar? Did it try to set one of the children on fire? Again?
"I'll deal with that later." Tanya grumbled. "Actually, your assistance would make this easier. Come along."
"What? How? Nothing around here's anywhere close to your power, much less mine." Mary asked, confused but continued following along.
"Not necessarily true." Tanya replied. "Ignoring your delusions and arrogance for a moment." Mary's temper flared at that, and the sensation of feeling the indignant rage instead of just seeing or hearing it threw Tanya off for an instant. "Agent Cruller was widely considered, in his heyday, to be the world's most powerful psychic. The only one to bother contesting the title was Maligula, the Deluge of Grulovia, a hydrokinetic so powerful that the entirety of the Psychic Six was deployed against her." Tanya shook her head sadly. "Half of them never recovered from the battle. One died, another drowned in grief, and the last… was Agent Cruller." Bob Zanotto's grief was not handled in anything resembling a healthy way, given his alcoholism, but one could directly trace the cause of it to that one battle.
"...the old guy?" Mary questioned. "What's the problem with him, anyway?"
"No one really knows for sure." Tanya said. "His mind was shattered by the battle, and it manifests in his bizarre set of multiple personalities." Tanya held up the Psychoportal. "But I'm going to find out."
Mary's eyes widened. "Woah!" She exclaimed. "You're going to get in so much trouble!" She whispered in childish awe.
Tanya just stared at Mary. "...Are you sure that you're really an adult? Because you're doing a fantastic job of pretending to be six if you are."
Mary glared at Tanya. "This is your fault, you know." She spat, accusingly. "If it wasn't for you escaping hell, God wouldn't have sent me to find you."
Tanya stumbled at the directness. "What!?" That first idea was right? It wasn't the only theory Tanya had come up with to explain her presence, but still…
"It's true." Mary said, nodding seriously. "God sent me on a sacred mission of mercy." She pointed dramatically at Tanya. "While you deserve eternal damnation for your many, many sins, God is merciful, and will allow you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven if you repent in this life and accept His Light into your heart." Yeah… that sounded like Being X. At least, after you cut the bullshit it sounded like him.
"He told you that Degurechaff had escaped from him." Tanya asked, cutting straight to the point.
"Yes." Mary replied.
"How did he know where to send you if she had escaped?" Tanya asked, both to 'poke holes' in her story and to figure out Being X's angle.
Mary smiled at this, like a schoolgirl happy that they knew the answer to the teacher's question. "I asked him about that! He said that as my murderer, my soul could find yours across any distance!" She looked Tanya up and down. "Apparently it took a while for my soul to track yours down."
"At least your delusions are consistent." Tanya commented, just to keep deniability. "So I assume you reported success in your mission to find this Tanya von Degurechaff?"
Mary nodded. 'In my evening prayers." She shrugged. "He hasn't said anything about it, so I bet he's just busy. In the meantime, you need to accept the truth in your heart: God is good."
Tanya snorted at the half-assed conversion attempt. "I'd say over my dead body, but you're quite convinced that's not enough, " Tanya had, at one point, argued that the threat of total annihilation would not sway her resolve… but she was finding herself rather short of it, right now. "So instead I'll ask a different question: What was it like being a baby with an adult's mind?" In Tanya's experience, it was long stretches of boredom interspersed with excessive amounts of physical affection, which was drug-like in its addictiveness. Fortunately, it became less overwhelming as the body aged. Apparently one of the few medical contributions Helmut Fullbear made as a Psychonaut was positing 'touch hunger' as an actual physiological need. Tanya was pretty sure that was one of the differences between worlds, an influence of psychic energy adding to human needs. They never needed anything like that in their first two lives. It would also explain why this body seems to need so much of it.
Mary scratched her nose. "Ah, it was… a thing. God helped me out there… I think. Whenever I relaxed and just… it's hard to explain. I stopped thinking and I just… automatically acted like my supposed age." Well, wasn't that convenient. She was clearly the isekai protagonist here, with a cheat like that. "I would have gone crazy if I had to go through that normally." There was nothing normal about this!
"Well, if it requires you to stop thinking, no wonder that it keeps popping up." Tanya said, seizing on the verbal opening Mary presented to needle her a bit more.
The girl pouted before changing the subject. "Where is the old guy, anyway?" Mary asked.
Tanya looked around. Agent Cruller was nowhere to be seen. "We'll have to summon him." Tanya decided before pointing to a random spot off the path. "Step on that patch of grass."
Mary looked at Tanya strangely. "...okay." She very deliberately stepped on the designated blades of grass. They were fine examples, very straight and level. Until she stepped on them.
Suddenly, Agent Cruller, or "Mr. Park Ranger' appeared. Normally, you'd see some kind of sign that he had used psychic powers to bend space, but even with his shattered mind, he still held the skill to simply not be there one moment, and then be there the next with absolutely no sign of his presence. "Stay on the trail!" He shouted at Mary, who shrieked and leapt back onto the trail at the sudden command.
"I tried to warn her, sir." Tanya lied. She telekinetically maneuvered the Psychoportal behind Agent Cruller's head as he carefully restored the previous condition of the grass. "In apology for my failure, I'll put some things in order for you. I know you're very busy."
"Will you? That'd be nice, Missy." Agent Cruller said idly as he used a ruler on the patch of grass. "I swear, no one appreciates the value of everything being just so."
Before the psychoportal drew her into its swirling depths, Tanya spared Mary one last look. "Just keep any wild animals away while I'm occupied, please."
Mary startled at the request. "Really? But… why would you think…" As Tanya's focus on the real world waned, the last thing she heard from Mary was full of conviction: "Vade com deo!"
- Location
- Ohio
I hope this doesn't flag me for necromancy...
Then again, Lili probably thinks about burning the forest all the time.
Man, Raz really did have insane psychic potential.
This sounds like something Ford tried to use to compartmentalize his grief, but the number of things that made him think of Maligula and his own psychic power caused it to go away too far.
That's a pretty neat strategy. If anyone asks why something looks like it belongs in a hellscape, Tanya could claim she saw it in a heavy metal album cover she saw in a store window.
Let's see here... Tate means shield, but I have no clue what the other words mean.
I think he's trying humor in general. It made me smile, which means he's doing a good job!
I was about to be alarmed until I realized that Tanya was probably using this thought as an example, rather than a thought she has regularly.
Then again, Lili probably thinks about burning the forest all the time.
It is shockingly easy to forget that there are aggressive, psychic animals casually living around the psychic summer camp.
Jesus, Tanya! You've only been in... three minds. The exact same number of minds Raz went through, excluding the brain tumbler experiment, before using a paychoportal by himself.
Man, Raz really did have insane psychic potential.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Tatenae and Honne are mirrored concepts in Japanese culture that can't be precisely translated into English. Tatenae is something like 'Polite facade' or 'public face', while Honne is 'true feelings' or 'honest face'.
It was a test thought she used in an attempt to provoke Sasha, in case he could read past her defenses. She expected him to lie about it if he could see.
Four minds and her own, actually. Sam and Lizzie both volunteered to try and break the other campers with their psychic defenses. They really wanted to laugh at their victims for wetting themselves. They failed miserably.
Really, though, Tanya heard about the conditions in Ford's mind and thought: "Couldn't be worse than dodging AA fire". Also, as noted, she's prepared for failure.
Chapter 10
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Tanya wasn't terribly experienced with Astral projection, but she had a few minimum expectations. Like being on something resembling solid ground. The sky was filled with floating debris, and the world beneath was a shattered island floating in the void. It was heavily wooded, and from the lake at the edge combined with one or two of the larger rocks, she could discern that the shape of the Park Ranger's mind was, as expected, Camp Whispering Rock.
Tanya easily navigated the shrapnel as she dived through the hazardous entrance, each piece attempting to strike Tanya as she passed. If it wasn't for her excellent shield and dogfighting experience, she suspected her projection would be critically damaged by the time she reached the bottom.
"Tanya?" Mary's voice echoed. "Can you hear me? I can see you!" Ah. That could be a problem. "His mind… it's so broken…"
"Yes, it is." Tanya agreed. Idly, she noted that the void that constituted the sky was in perfect condition, without the cracks that Tanya noticed in her own mind. Odd, what made the type 95 different from whatever happened to Agent Cruller?
Tanya found a figment… it was a heart. Not an anatomical one, mind you, but the shape. Nevertheless, she had used up a fair amount of psychic energy just approaching the place, so she tapped it and absorbed the residual power.
With nothing else to do, Tanya explored Ford's mind, picking up more figments of hearts, grass, trees, a boat, gardening shears, two squirrels kissing, and a ruler. There was the occasional piece of landscape that pelted Tanya with shrapnel, but mage shells were exceptionally good at dealing with that.
Tanya could make out faint music, an unpleasant mishmash of elevator music, something romantic with violins, and most strangely, the occasional sound of bowling pins being knocked down. After a few more figments collected, Tanya could make out the sound of weeping, but unlike the other sounds, she could tell that it had a distinct source… there!
Emboldened by the sound of something animate, Tanya skipped up, dodging a few stray branches that decided to attack the invader, and went to… a purse?
Sobbing with all the drama of the theater, a purse sat on a random broken stump, ignoring the hundreds of pointy parts. Floating in the air was the rest of the tree in defiance of gravity, itself also frozen in the middle of shattering into at least… seven pieces. There was a detail that drew the eye, however: between two pieces of the tree and the stump, there was a carved heart with two sets of initials. Taking a moment to reconstruct the broken art, Tanya determined that it said "FC +LMMA", vertically. Curiously, the fracture was centered on the 'FC', and the others were discolored so much that Tanya had to discern the letters by feel.
"Well that's a thing." Tanya said to herself… and Mary. "Looks like I'm neck-deep in the memories of his experiences with dating." Clearly it's 'Ford Cruller' and 'Lucrecia Mux'... but who is 'MA'? A second girlfriend?
"Really?" Mary asked, interested. "Oh, I bet their dates are going to be so cute!" Tanya took a moment to remind herself that Mary was still a teenage girl. She knew better than most that being treated as a child tended to have an atrophying effect on maturity, at times. The idea that Mary would have gotten more mature isn't even worth considering.
Tanya poked the weeping purse, and determined that despite appearances, its location was as immutable as the stump's was. "This must be emotional baggage." Tanya concluded. It was baggage, and it was certainly emotional, at least.
"Oh!" Mary said. "Sasha Nein explained that! Somewhere else in the mind we should be able to find a tag, and you need to take it and bring it back to the matching baggage."
Agent Nein used more technical language when discussing it with Tanya, but that was close enough. "Yes, we need to find another memory and forge a connection between this and that to allow Agent Cruller to more easily resolve the emotional hurdle." Idly, Tanya wondered which spots in her mind held emotional baggage of their own.
"I think that's everything on this segment." Tanya said, taking to the air once more and going into evasive maneuvers to handle the increase in danger the further away she was from a semi-stable section.
"You're really good at dodging mid-air shrapnel." Mary observed, her tone suspicious. "Almost like you've spent years doing it."
Or years of danmaku games as youthful diversions. "I'm trying to focus, May." Tanya said, annoyed. "I'm only avoiding maybe half of them, anyway. If not for my shield, I'd be dead." Tanya eventually resorted to using an active shield after going over the next section, waiting in darkness for ten seconds before releasing it.
"It's Mary!" Mary insisted. "You had a shield back then too."
"Whatever you say, Miss Daye." Tanya said, which made Mary squawk. She looked around, noting more figments themed after woodlands or romance. Ah! That one was different. It was a figment that "concealed" a small cave.
The figment was of curtains, patterned in… Maybe tie-dye? The interior of the cave was cramped, and appeared to be the inside of a van, drug paraphernalia scattered about. More figments populated the place, the front seats had a viking helmet and a shrub, with a heart figment between them. There was also… a figment of a woman wearing a headscarf, only the garment was askew, half off and frumpled.
"I'm honestly surprised that there aren't any stray underpants lying around, given the memory referenced here." Tanya said as she absorbed the figments.
"What's that bit of stained glass doing there?" Mary pointed out.
"Eh?" Tanya said, looking around. Indeed, right in the middle of the beanbag chair in the back of the van, there was a shard of stained glass. Well, calling it a shard seemed a little inappropriate. It was roughly rectangular, with the angles offset in a presumably artistic way, depicting an eye with a swirling pattern in the middle. "Hm. I'll take it with me." Tanya decided. As it was a mental construct, it easily shrank enough to be placed within one of the many pockets in Tanya's cargo shorts. She was currently wearing her third set of athletic clothes, as she had brought all four sets she owned with her to the camp. It was more or less identical to the other sets.
Idly, Tanya realized that she didn't see any laundry machines or even drying lines in the camp. Did they just forget? Well, fortunately Tanya knew a thing or two about using magic to handle laundry. She's done it before with hydrokinesis, even if Miss Milla didn't seem to appreciate her efforts to that effect.
After confirming that there wasn't anything else interesting on this chunk of land, Tanya took off and once more endured the hellish skies of Agent Cruller's mind, this time immediately dropping with a full shield at the earliest possible moment. It seemed effective.
After releasing the shield, Tanya once more looked around. Nothing new, figment-wise, although there was a surprisingly large amount of bee figments. That probably mattered. Tanya walked carefully, collecting more figments and keeping an eye on the trees for any beehives or honey. Eventually, she found another piece of stained glass art. It was too abstract for Tanya to see anything in particular, but the wavy bits… maybe fire?
Sensing a trap, Tanya examined the area surrounding the shard. The shard was on a stump, but on further inspection it was curiously box-like. The figments were also somewhat strange, with a book on one side, and the other… It was a massive figment depicting a wave of animals, all sent forth in an organized mass. "Odd." She commented, for Mary's sake.
"The stump looks a little like a beehive." Mary said, being helpful for once. "The kind my aunt used back in the Unified States."
"United States, Mary. The country where we currently live." Tanya corrected as she absorbed the figments. They were quite useful in recovering the energy spent moving from segment to segment. Not seeing any way for a trap to manifest, she shrugged and just took the shard.
On cue, pandemonium broke out. A swarm of Regrets manifested, little goblin things with massive jowls to emphasize their depressed expression and insect wings carrying heavy weights. In addition to them, a pair of imps wearing marching band uniforms and wielding a parade leader's baton erupted with the sound of trumpets. Enablers, if Tanya was remembering her crash course on hostile mental entities correctly.
The very first thing the enablers did was use their protective chants on each other. "Go you! Go me! We will win and they will flee!" Lovely.
Mary was even more distraught by this occurrence. "Wait, if they're both invulnerable… How are you supposed to beat them!? I didn't know they could do that!"
Tanya didn't have time for that. With a focused effort, Tanya launched a PSI blast that curved and overpenetrated, going through eight Regrets before impacting a piece of rubble that was destroyed by the blast. Telekinetically grabbing the two weights that were above her at the time, they were launched at two more sets of regrets that were lined up, killing five more.
Quickly, the battle whittled down to Tanya, the two enablers, and six Regrets that they managed to protect before Tanya could kill them.
"Read my book, that's the way! Without a look, you'll pass away!" Chanted one of the enablers in their excited, high pitched voice as Tanya telekinetically divested the regrets from their weapons and let the weights crumble against the barrier. Come to think of it… they have different voices. Is that important?
"Take a nap, relax a spell," sang the other in a softer, calmer, more masculine voice. "You seem tapped, you're sure you're well?"
Tanya decided, in lieu of trying to tear the pair apart, to instead flee to another part of the mind. If she finds herself there again, she'll make sure to kill one of the enablers before they have a chance to encourage each other.
In the new section, Tanya found the Psychoisolation chamber. Unlike the model in Camp Whispering rock, it was significantly larger, with the entrance being blocked by very large grass. That isn't to say it was merely scaled up, it also had some other structures attached, like what was clearly some kind of air circulator and a small office/laboratory. The figments in this area included the forest themes as well as gears, question marks, and rocks that were probably psitanium. Curiously, the romantic figments were absent here.
"Why does it look different?" Mary questioned.
Tanya scoffed. "It must be one he's more familiar with than the one at the camp." He was one of the Psychic Six, perhaps it was the first one created. Looking inside the office, she noticed something very unexpected to find: a shining gold rose.
"A nugget of wisdom…" Tanya whispered.
"A what?" Mary asked.
They didn't learn about those? "It's an accumulation of knowledge." Tanya explained. "I'll demonstrate." She braced herself for the influx of psionic power and reached out for the golden rose.
As the psionic power flowed into Tanya, she received much vaguer visions than the ones when she absorbed Agent Nein's marksmanship knowledge. Visions of maintenance of the camp, of how to assess the health of plants and ward away the wildlife, even some details of herbaphony and zoolingualism that they didn't print in books. But there were large swathes of the visions that were just confusing and scrambled, creating phantom sensations all over but without much understanding. The only thing that Tanya managed to grasp amounted to a handful of tips on how to properly kiss someone.
Tanya would like to say that she already knew how to do that from their first life… but it was clearly one of the bits that had been lost to time. Not that Tanya remembered anyone she would have kissed in that life either. The similarities must be why she managed to decrypt it.
"What did you do!?" Shouted Mary's telepathic voice, panicked.
"I consulted the wisdom of our elders." Tanya said sarcastically. "Nuggets of wisdom can be used to pass on knowledge, in this case, it was mostly about gardening." Mary didn't need to know about the details there.
Herbaphony was kind of an odd psychic discipline. Plants didn't really have a mind, but they were alive, and thus produced and contained a small but perceptible amount of mental energy. Herbaphony was the psychic discipline of empathically linking your mind with that pool of energy, and as plants didn't have any sort of will, you extended a tendril of your own mind into the plant in order to put that energy into order, commanding it as one would their limbs. The psychic power you infuse supports and strengthens the plant, allowing it to bend and flex like muscle in accordance to your will as well as accelerate its growth. Tanya used that knowledge to seize control of the grass that obstructed the way, and used it to forcefully open the entrance to the Psychoisolation Chamber, the patch separating into two hand-like groups and wrenching the stuck entrance open as Tanya mimed the motions the grass needed to take.
Sure, she could have just burned the grass and ripped it open with her hands, but practice is important when it comes to new skills. Also, Tanya knew to never trust the flammability of the environment when inside a mind.
As expected, inside the chamber was a sub-chamber that contained the actual prison cell part, much like the chambers near the Motherlobe. The figments inside the structure included more animals and machines, along with a concerningly large figment of fire. Within the sub-chamber was yet another bit of stained glass. This one was also too abstract for Tanya to definitively say what it depicted, but her best guess was that the circular bit towards one corner was supposed to be the sun. Collecting it, Tanya moved on.
"Question." Mary asked suddenly as Tanya left the sub-chamber. "Do you hear that giggling noise that's been going on, or is that just me?"
Tanya rolled her eyes at the question. "Yes, Mary, I hear the giggling. We've established that a good chunk of this section of Agent Cruller's mind is focused on him practicing that 'free love' that was so popular in the sixties." It was always the same woman giggling, and Tanya was sure at this point she'd recognize the woman just by that puerile giggle. The sound emanated from the locations where the romance-associated figments were, although they were sparse in this particular place, they still existed. "I know you're a blushing young maiden stripped of the hormones that would usually point this out to you, but please learn to distinguish a perverted giggle from other kinds."
Mary sent a distinct impression of huffing, which was an advancement in her telepathic skills, but said nothing.
Tanya, freshly empowered by the nugget of wisdom, shot towards the next chunk with very little trouble. "Hm. There were fewer projectiles that time. Was it because of my speed? Or is it a side-effect of absorbing such a large amount of Agent Cruller's psychic energy?" Agent Nein did mention something about attunement…
The next few segments were largely empty, just a few figments and inconsequential memories, along with a few more ambushes from mental defenses. Eventually, Tanya found herself at the part of the forest that corresponded with the parking lot. There wasn't any such thing here, of course, but there was a single car. Around that car was a familiar sight: a memory vault.
Memory vaults were far from difficult prey, so Tanya quickly found herself with a round wheel of slides and a little binocular thing that was used to view them. Briefly, Tanya wondered what they would manifest as in someone like Mary, whose mind predates these.
Still, Tanya loaded the slideshow and looked into the binoculars. The first slide was the title: 'Ford and Lucy's first date'. The second showed a younger Agent Mentalis introducing a woman, presumably 'Lucrecia Mux' or 'Lucy', to Agent Cruller. The third showed Lucy showing off her hydrokinetic abilities. The rest showed pretty much what one would expect, them going on a romantic walk, them sneaking away from… a dome with a stained glass exterior. Noted. The actual first date was apparently bowling, where they cheated relentlessly, ending the slideshow with a kiss.
"That's so cute…" Mary cooed after Tanya put the slideshow back. Apparently she could see it too. "Wasn't that adorable, Tanya? Their first date is one of his most precious memories…"
Tanya shrugged. Precious? That's not the criteria in Tanya's experience. This answered some questions, but raised others. If Lucrecia Mux was a psychic and a contemporary with the Psychic Six… what happened to her? Why doesn't anyone know about her?
Tanya suspected that the answer to that was in that third slide. While it was possible that it was just a coincidence… Maligula was a hydrokinetic that was contemporary to the Psychic Six. In her first two lives, a name like Maligula would be blatantly fake, but she wasn't so sure when it came to some of the strange names you saw in this one. Was the reason Lucrecia was persona non grata because of the crimes that caused Maligula to be fought with by the Psychic Six?
…Tanya wondered how the Argent Silver would be remembered, after the war. Would she be scrubbed from the history books as too much of a monster to be remembered as a person? Was the Devil of the Rhine all that will remain?
"Tanya?" Mary asked. "Are you… crying?"
Blinking, Tanya shook her head. "No. Is there another stained glass fragment?" Tanya discreetly wiped her eyes, but found no tears. Her chest did not heave, her muscles did not tremble. Her breathing was even and unobstructed. There was not a single physiological sign of tears. …Why wasn't there? Such a tragedy, and she was not moved a single bit.
"Yes." Mary replied. "It's in the back seat of the car."
Fetching the glass, she easily killed the resulting ambush of regrets, censors, bad ideas, doubts (which were little ambulatory bits of flammable goo), and the thankfully singular enabler. The next few sections were a bit sparse, but eventually Tanya found herself at a place that was distinguished from the rest by having many exotic plants, ones not usually found in this climate. The new plants stank of alcohol, but mostly just served as additional herbaphony practice as she opened up the dense foliage and retrieved the stained glass within.
"How many of these are there?" Mary asked.
"No clue." Tanya replied. "But there's not much left that I haven't gone to. The only places left are the lake and the central island." The center had a much denser debris cloud than the previous areas, so Tanya had been circling around it to see if there was some opening. So far, no luck. "So I would guess no more than two."
The lake had more vigorous debris than the other places, and Tanya found herself quite exhausted by the time she reached the broken section of bridge that served as a dock for a canoe. Glancing at the swirling debris above the lake, and the reflection of the moon on the lake which may or may not conceal another bit of stained glass, Tanya instead elected to step on the canoe and propel it with telekinesis.
As she approached the moon, Tanya could barely make out garbled whispers. They were clearly memories, but they were not coherent enough for Tanya to make them out. She did recognize some of the voices, each of the three people that starred in the memory vault, but could not understand the content of their speech.
"Aw, your reflection is Ford and Lucy kissing again on a boat ride. So romantic…" Mary sighed. Big deal.
As Tanya had guessed, the reflection of the moon in the center of the lake was, in fact, a disc floating on the surface of it. Tanya used telekinesis to flip it, and retrieved the now-revealed stained glass. "Seven, now." She said out loud as she moved the canoe to collect more figments. She'll need every scrap of strength she can get in order to get into the last area.
"Do you have no romance in your heart, Degurechaff?" Mary said, annoyed.
Tanya did not say her first impulsive response, which was 'what heart?'. That disturbing thought aside, Tanya made sure to sound angrier than she was when she scolded Mary. "Some of us have to focus on not getting hit by shrapnel, Mary! Also, stop calling me that, it's not my name!"
"You're not going to fool me." Mary replied coldly. "You haven't even bothered pretending to be twelve here. I've seen you fight, you're the Devil of the Rhine."
"Delusion and confirmation bias." Tanya retorted. Bringing her along was a terrible idea… "You see what you want to see, and nothing more."
Tanya decided to launch herself like a cannonball through the debris field this time. It should work. Flying forward rapidly and upward to pick up speed, Tanya brought up her full powered shield. Her ability to discern what happens outside of her shield is limited unless she deliberately weakens it, but she could feel it when she changed direction, so when she felt that she bounced off of a floor, she released the shield.
Debris tore through her mental projection as the few that were still incoming destroyed her passive barrier and shot into her astral body like the shrapnel it was. Pain blossomed in her gut, but it wasn't enough to eject Tanya, so she soldiered on, re-asserting her passive barrier with a moment of focus. "Ow." She said, for Mary's benefit.
The central area roughly corresponding to the cafeteria, as well as Agent Cruller's trailer. It was the only spot in camp where all three of his personalities could be found, although none at the same time of course. None of these structures were present, of course, but there was an area that was clear of plant life, a rather large circular area…
Tanya felt her shorts get tugged by an invisible force, and with a thought opened up all of the pockets that contained the stained glass and allowed them to automatically assemble themselves into a seven-sided dome, with the stained glass pieces unfolding into larger sections to complete the structure.
Wait, seven-sided dome? That rang a bell… The Heptadome! Tanya did, at one point, read the full collection of True Psychic Tales that the Motherlobe had in their small library. Supposedly, it was the nerve center of the original Psychonauts, where the Psychic Six 'explored the frontier of the human mind'.
Taya entered the dome from one of the three entrances, and looked upon the beanbag chairs within. From the prominent hookah between a set of four bags, it looked like they primarily used drugs to do that exploration.
The center of the structure had an odd device in the middle. After a moment of examining it, Tanya deduced that the odd drill was an incomplete device. It was an adjustable chair, and at the head level of someone when they were sitting in the chair, a giant dull drill was placed about half a foot away, pointing directly at the occupant's head. From the orientation of the chair, it was pointing at the left half of the head. There was no kind of switch, button, lever, or wheel to operate the device, and the base seemed to extend curiously far to the right of the chair. As such, it was clearly only a portion of the true device.
What truly drew the attention, however, was the odd little tag in one of the beanbags. It was a large one, and it definitely had the sound of that damned giggle coming from it. It wasn't very large, but it had a certain presence to it that drew the eye. Kind of like being shiny, but it wasn't actually shiny.
"That's a purse tag!" Mary exclaimed. "You need to reunite it with that purse we found earlier!"
"Yeah, yeah." Tanya said, dismissing her 'advice' as she snatched up the tag. She wasn't sure she would be capable of going through that debris field again. Should she try another time? Risk getting killed and just coming back if she doesn't make it?
…Come to think of it, it would be useful to experience being forcibly ejected from a mind. It was difficult to imagine safer circumstances. Miss Milla would not be likely to endorse exposing Tanya to pain like that, so there's also not going to be a whole lot of opportunity.
Decision made, Tanya went to charge right back through the debris field around the central area. Only to, after leaving the Heptadome, stop and marvel at the terrain.
The debris field was still there, but it was vastly diminished. The chunks of mind matter were creating bridges between the sections, and while a lot of trees and other parts were still quite broken, enough were now patched together that it was startling the difference the changes made.
Tanya just… walked to the purse's location, watching the mental world repair itself as she went. The tree was still shattered, but the purse perked up when Tanya approached, tag in hand. It presented one side, inviting Tanya to attach the tag. She did so, and then the emotional baggage dissolved into psychic energy, just as Tanya was told.
The psychic energy flooding into Tanya's astral form, however, was very much NOT like it was implied. Foreign emotions overwhelmed Tanya, attraction and desire that Tanya had never before experienced or even understood, followed by gut-wrenching tragedy that, while more familiar, was much more powerful than any grief that Tanya had ever felt. Rather than be absorbed as power, Tanya choked on the connection, feeling ill as tears flowed freely and the power, having been rebuffed, proceeded to try and enter Tanya again, but even more violently.
"What is happening?" Mary asked, panicked. "Your body is thrashing!"
Tanya felt the psychic power tear into her form, unable to enter through the usual channels and instead making their own. The power refreshed her slightly slower than it damaged her, and after a timeless moment of agonizing pain, blacked out.
----------------
Tanya woke back up in her body, every single nerve ending tingling. Mary was there, slapping Tanya's face lightly. At Tanya's groan, Mary smiled. "You're back!"
"My entire body seems to have fallen asleep." Tanya said. It wasn't quite the same kind of pain that she was used to ignoring, but Tanya proceeded to flex her fingers and toes nonetheless to help restore feeling.
"Yes, darling, that's normal." Miss Milla's voice said. "For getting your astral projection destroyed, at least." Ah. They got caught. "I told you that Ford's mind was dangerous, Tanya."
Mary stood up in Tanya's defense. "But she did it!" She argued. "You should have seen how it was pulling itself together when Tanya was done with it!"
Miss Milla raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Oh? Then how did she get destroyed? You didn't do that on purpose, did you Tanya?"
Well, she was probably going to on the way out… "The emotional baggage." Tanya croaked. "It didn't properly integrate into my astral form, and instead destroyed it."
"Really?" Miss Milla replied. "I've never heard of that happening before… But then again, I'm far from the most experienced or academic Psychonaut. I'll ask Agent Boole about it." She picked up Tanya's numb form and started walking back to camp. "You'll be right as rain in a few minutes, but there's been some rather hefty clouds forming in the sky, so we're moving everyone inside just in case. The weather here can be a bit unpredictable."
"Are there rain barrels?" Tanya asked.
"Yes, but why?" Milla replied.
"We need to do laundry, and I haven't seen any machines for it anywhere." Tanya answered. "I was planning on purifying lake water, but rain is better."
Milla took a moment to think about that answer. "Ah, it appears we've overlooked something else. Good thinking, Tanya. I'll send Sasha to pick up some laundry soap if Ford doesn't have some stashed away somewhere."
"Where did you learn to wash clothes by hand?" Questioned Mary.
Miss Milla shrugged. "Tanya reads a lot of books. Wilderness survival was probably in there somewhere."
"Also, I'm not going to clean them by hand." Tanya retorted. "I'm going to use psychic powers to make a washing machine."
"Ah, that trick." Miss Mila said after a moment. "Just make sure to only use it for clothes. It's bad for your skin."
They only did that because the shower was broken. "I bet we could get 'Mr. Janitor' to do it for us if we demonstrate." If that doesn't work, Tanya figured his germaphobia would insist on doing things himself if the job was done deliberately poorly.
Mary hummed. "That actually sounds like it would be super-useful to know how to do. Back during the war, there were sometimes some troubles with getting clean clothes, and disease was rampant. Not so much for mages, but if I could have used my computation orb to wash my clothes, that would have been so useful." Tanya was well aware of this. Reprogramming the computation orb in the field to allow for non-standard adjustments in the spell formulas was difficult, but possible. Between her, Visha, and Tanyanen (mostly Tenyanen, honestly), they had managed to cobble together a combination of formulas that could be used to wash clothes if they had soap, water, and no artillery in range. Such actions were necessary on the Eastern Front, where the logistical personnel were frequently killed or replaced by NKVD saboteurs and hot water was at a premium.
"Well, then that sounds like a fun activity, learning how to use psychic powers in a new way." Miss Milla replied. "Exactly the kind of thing the camp is supposed to do."
Yes, well, hopefully Agent Cruller's park ranger persona will be more stable now.
Tanya easily navigated the shrapnel as she dived through the hazardous entrance, each piece attempting to strike Tanya as she passed. If it wasn't for her excellent shield and dogfighting experience, she suspected her projection would be critically damaged by the time she reached the bottom.
"Tanya?" Mary's voice echoed. "Can you hear me? I can see you!" Ah. That could be a problem. "His mind… it's so broken…"
"Yes, it is." Tanya agreed. Idly, she noted that the void that constituted the sky was in perfect condition, without the cracks that Tanya noticed in her own mind. Odd, what made the type 95 different from whatever happened to Agent Cruller?
Tanya found a figment… it was a heart. Not an anatomical one, mind you, but the shape. Nevertheless, she had used up a fair amount of psychic energy just approaching the place, so she tapped it and absorbed the residual power.
With nothing else to do, Tanya explored Ford's mind, picking up more figments of hearts, grass, trees, a boat, gardening shears, two squirrels kissing, and a ruler. There was the occasional piece of landscape that pelted Tanya with shrapnel, but mage shells were exceptionally good at dealing with that.
Tanya could make out faint music, an unpleasant mishmash of elevator music, something romantic with violins, and most strangely, the occasional sound of bowling pins being knocked down. After a few more figments collected, Tanya could make out the sound of weeping, but unlike the other sounds, she could tell that it had a distinct source… there!
Emboldened by the sound of something animate, Tanya skipped up, dodging a few stray branches that decided to attack the invader, and went to… a purse?
Sobbing with all the drama of the theater, a purse sat on a random broken stump, ignoring the hundreds of pointy parts. Floating in the air was the rest of the tree in defiance of gravity, itself also frozen in the middle of shattering into at least… seven pieces. There was a detail that drew the eye, however: between two pieces of the tree and the stump, there was a carved heart with two sets of initials. Taking a moment to reconstruct the broken art, Tanya determined that it said "FC +
"Well that's a thing." Tanya said to herself… and Mary. "Looks like I'm neck-deep in the memories of his experiences with dating." Clearly it's 'Ford Cruller' and 'Lucrecia Mux'... but who is 'MA'? A second girlfriend?
"Really?" Mary asked, interested. "Oh, I bet their dates are going to be so cute!" Tanya took a moment to remind herself that Mary was still a teenage girl. She knew better than most that being treated as a child tended to have an atrophying effect on maturity, at times. The idea that Mary would have gotten more mature isn't even worth considering.
Tanya poked the weeping purse, and determined that despite appearances, its location was as immutable as the stump's was. "This must be emotional baggage." Tanya concluded. It was baggage, and it was certainly emotional, at least.
"Oh!" Mary said. "Sasha Nein explained that! Somewhere else in the mind we should be able to find a tag, and you need to take it and bring it back to the matching baggage."
Agent Nein used more technical language when discussing it with Tanya, but that was close enough. "Yes, we need to find another memory and forge a connection between this and that to allow Agent Cruller to more easily resolve the emotional hurdle." Idly, Tanya wondered which spots in her mind held emotional baggage of their own.
"I think that's everything on this segment." Tanya said, taking to the air once more and going into evasive maneuvers to handle the increase in danger the further away she was from a semi-stable section.
"You're really good at dodging mid-air shrapnel." Mary observed, her tone suspicious. "Almost like you've spent years doing it."
Or years of danmaku games as youthful diversions. "I'm trying to focus, May." Tanya said, annoyed. "I'm only avoiding maybe half of them, anyway. If not for my shield, I'd be dead." Tanya eventually resorted to using an active shield after going over the next section, waiting in darkness for ten seconds before releasing it.
"It's Mary!" Mary insisted. "You had a shield back then too."
"Whatever you say, Miss Daye." Tanya said, which made Mary squawk. She looked around, noting more figments themed after woodlands or romance. Ah! That one was different. It was a figment that "concealed" a small cave.
The figment was of curtains, patterned in… Maybe tie-dye? The interior of the cave was cramped, and appeared to be the inside of a van, drug paraphernalia scattered about. More figments populated the place, the front seats had a viking helmet and a shrub, with a heart figment between them. There was also… a figment of a woman wearing a headscarf, only the garment was askew, half off and frumpled.
"I'm honestly surprised that there aren't any stray underpants lying around, given the memory referenced here." Tanya said as she absorbed the figments.
"What's that bit of stained glass doing there?" Mary pointed out.
"Eh?" Tanya said, looking around. Indeed, right in the middle of the beanbag chair in the back of the van, there was a shard of stained glass. Well, calling it a shard seemed a little inappropriate. It was roughly rectangular, with the angles offset in a presumably artistic way, depicting an eye with a swirling pattern in the middle. "Hm. I'll take it with me." Tanya decided. As it was a mental construct, it easily shrank enough to be placed within one of the many pockets in Tanya's cargo shorts. She was currently wearing her third set of athletic clothes, as she had brought all four sets she owned with her to the camp. It was more or less identical to the other sets.
Idly, Tanya realized that she didn't see any laundry machines or even drying lines in the camp. Did they just forget? Well, fortunately Tanya knew a thing or two about using magic to handle laundry. She's done it before with hydrokinesis, even if Miss Milla didn't seem to appreciate her efforts to that effect.
After confirming that there wasn't anything else interesting on this chunk of land, Tanya took off and once more endured the hellish skies of Agent Cruller's mind, this time immediately dropping with a full shield at the earliest possible moment. It seemed effective.
After releasing the shield, Tanya once more looked around. Nothing new, figment-wise, although there was a surprisingly large amount of bee figments. That probably mattered. Tanya walked carefully, collecting more figments and keeping an eye on the trees for any beehives or honey. Eventually, she found another piece of stained glass art. It was too abstract for Tanya to see anything in particular, but the wavy bits… maybe fire?
Sensing a trap, Tanya examined the area surrounding the shard. The shard was on a stump, but on further inspection it was curiously box-like. The figments were also somewhat strange, with a book on one side, and the other… It was a massive figment depicting a wave of animals, all sent forth in an organized mass. "Odd." She commented, for Mary's sake.
"The stump looks a little like a beehive." Mary said, being helpful for once. "The kind my aunt used back in the Unified States."
"United States, Mary. The country where we currently live." Tanya corrected as she absorbed the figments. They were quite useful in recovering the energy spent moving from segment to segment. Not seeing any way for a trap to manifest, she shrugged and just took the shard.
On cue, pandemonium broke out. A swarm of Regrets manifested, little goblin things with massive jowls to emphasize their depressed expression and insect wings carrying heavy weights. In addition to them, a pair of imps wearing marching band uniforms and wielding a parade leader's baton erupted with the sound of trumpets. Enablers, if Tanya was remembering her crash course on hostile mental entities correctly.
The very first thing the enablers did was use their protective chants on each other. "Go you! Go me! We will win and they will flee!" Lovely.
Mary was even more distraught by this occurrence. "Wait, if they're both invulnerable… How are you supposed to beat them!? I didn't know they could do that!"
Tanya didn't have time for that. With a focused effort, Tanya launched a PSI blast that curved and overpenetrated, going through eight Regrets before impacting a piece of rubble that was destroyed by the blast. Telekinetically grabbing the two weights that were above her at the time, they were launched at two more sets of regrets that were lined up, killing five more.
Quickly, the battle whittled down to Tanya, the two enablers, and six Regrets that they managed to protect before Tanya could kill them.
"Read my book, that's the way! Without a look, you'll pass away!" Chanted one of the enablers in their excited, high pitched voice as Tanya telekinetically divested the regrets from their weapons and let the weights crumble against the barrier. Come to think of it… they have different voices. Is that important?
"Take a nap, relax a spell," sang the other in a softer, calmer, more masculine voice. "You seem tapped, you're sure you're well?"
Tanya decided, in lieu of trying to tear the pair apart, to instead flee to another part of the mind. If she finds herself there again, she'll make sure to kill one of the enablers before they have a chance to encourage each other.
In the new section, Tanya found the Psychoisolation chamber. Unlike the model in Camp Whispering rock, it was significantly larger, with the entrance being blocked by very large grass. That isn't to say it was merely scaled up, it also had some other structures attached, like what was clearly some kind of air circulator and a small office/laboratory. The figments in this area included the forest themes as well as gears, question marks, and rocks that were probably psitanium. Curiously, the romantic figments were absent here.
"Why does it look different?" Mary questioned.
Tanya scoffed. "It must be one he's more familiar with than the one at the camp." He was one of the Psychic Six, perhaps it was the first one created. Looking inside the office, she noticed something very unexpected to find: a shining gold rose.
"A nugget of wisdom…" Tanya whispered.
"A what?" Mary asked.
They didn't learn about those? "It's an accumulation of knowledge." Tanya explained. "I'll demonstrate." She braced herself for the influx of psionic power and reached out for the golden rose.
As the psionic power flowed into Tanya, she received much vaguer visions than the ones when she absorbed Agent Nein's marksmanship knowledge. Visions of maintenance of the camp, of how to assess the health of plants and ward away the wildlife, even some details of herbaphony and zoolingualism that they didn't print in books. But there were large swathes of the visions that were just confusing and scrambled, creating phantom sensations all over but without much understanding. The only thing that Tanya managed to grasp amounted to a handful of tips on how to properly kiss someone.
Tanya would like to say that she already knew how to do that from their first life… but it was clearly one of the bits that had been lost to time. Not that Tanya remembered anyone she would have kissed in that life either. The similarities must be why she managed to decrypt it.
"What did you do!?" Shouted Mary's telepathic voice, panicked.
"I consulted the wisdom of our elders." Tanya said sarcastically. "Nuggets of wisdom can be used to pass on knowledge, in this case, it was mostly about gardening." Mary didn't need to know about the details there.
Herbaphony was kind of an odd psychic discipline. Plants didn't really have a mind, but they were alive, and thus produced and contained a small but perceptible amount of mental energy. Herbaphony was the psychic discipline of empathically linking your mind with that pool of energy, and as plants didn't have any sort of will, you extended a tendril of your own mind into the plant in order to put that energy into order, commanding it as one would their limbs. The psychic power you infuse supports and strengthens the plant, allowing it to bend and flex like muscle in accordance to your will as well as accelerate its growth. Tanya used that knowledge to seize control of the grass that obstructed the way, and used it to forcefully open the entrance to the Psychoisolation Chamber, the patch separating into two hand-like groups and wrenching the stuck entrance open as Tanya mimed the motions the grass needed to take.
Sure, she could have just burned the grass and ripped it open with her hands, but practice is important when it comes to new skills. Also, Tanya knew to never trust the flammability of the environment when inside a mind.
As expected, inside the chamber was a sub-chamber that contained the actual prison cell part, much like the chambers near the Motherlobe. The figments inside the structure included more animals and machines, along with a concerningly large figment of fire. Within the sub-chamber was yet another bit of stained glass. This one was also too abstract for Tanya to definitively say what it depicted, but her best guess was that the circular bit towards one corner was supposed to be the sun. Collecting it, Tanya moved on.
"Question." Mary asked suddenly as Tanya left the sub-chamber. "Do you hear that giggling noise that's been going on, or is that just me?"
Tanya rolled her eyes at the question. "Yes, Mary, I hear the giggling. We've established that a good chunk of this section of Agent Cruller's mind is focused on him practicing that 'free love' that was so popular in the sixties." It was always the same woman giggling, and Tanya was sure at this point she'd recognize the woman just by that puerile giggle. The sound emanated from the locations where the romance-associated figments were, although they were sparse in this particular place, they still existed. "I know you're a blushing young maiden stripped of the hormones that would usually point this out to you, but please learn to distinguish a perverted giggle from other kinds."
Mary sent a distinct impression of huffing, which was an advancement in her telepathic skills, but said nothing.
Tanya, freshly empowered by the nugget of wisdom, shot towards the next chunk with very little trouble. "Hm. There were fewer projectiles that time. Was it because of my speed? Or is it a side-effect of absorbing such a large amount of Agent Cruller's psychic energy?" Agent Nein did mention something about attunement…
The next few segments were largely empty, just a few figments and inconsequential memories, along with a few more ambushes from mental defenses. Eventually, Tanya found herself at the part of the forest that corresponded with the parking lot. There wasn't any such thing here, of course, but there was a single car. Around that car was a familiar sight: a memory vault.
Memory vaults were far from difficult prey, so Tanya quickly found herself with a round wheel of slides and a little binocular thing that was used to view them. Briefly, Tanya wondered what they would manifest as in someone like Mary, whose mind predates these.
Still, Tanya loaded the slideshow and looked into the binoculars. The first slide was the title: 'Ford and Lucy's first date'. The second showed a younger Agent Mentalis introducing a woman, presumably 'Lucrecia Mux' or 'Lucy', to Agent Cruller. The third showed Lucy showing off her hydrokinetic abilities. The rest showed pretty much what one would expect, them going on a romantic walk, them sneaking away from… a dome with a stained glass exterior. Noted. The actual first date was apparently bowling, where they cheated relentlessly, ending the slideshow with a kiss.
"That's so cute…" Mary cooed after Tanya put the slideshow back. Apparently she could see it too. "Wasn't that adorable, Tanya? Their first date is one of his most precious memories…"
Tanya shrugged. Precious? That's not the criteria in Tanya's experience. This answered some questions, but raised others. If Lucrecia Mux was a psychic and a contemporary with the Psychic Six… what happened to her? Why doesn't anyone know about her?
Tanya suspected that the answer to that was in that third slide. While it was possible that it was just a coincidence… Maligula was a hydrokinetic that was contemporary to the Psychic Six. In her first two lives, a name like Maligula would be blatantly fake, but she wasn't so sure when it came to some of the strange names you saw in this one. Was the reason Lucrecia was persona non grata because of the crimes that caused Maligula to be fought with by the Psychic Six?
…Tanya wondered how the Argent Silver would be remembered, after the war. Would she be scrubbed from the history books as too much of a monster to be remembered as a person? Was the Devil of the Rhine all that will remain?
"Tanya?" Mary asked. "Are you… crying?"
Blinking, Tanya shook her head. "No. Is there another stained glass fragment?" Tanya discreetly wiped her eyes, but found no tears. Her chest did not heave, her muscles did not tremble. Her breathing was even and unobstructed. There was not a single physiological sign of tears. …Why wasn't there? Such a tragedy, and she was not moved a single bit.
"Yes." Mary replied. "It's in the back seat of the car."
Fetching the glass, she easily killed the resulting ambush of regrets, censors, bad ideas, doubts (which were little ambulatory bits of flammable goo), and the thankfully singular enabler. The next few sections were a bit sparse, but eventually Tanya found herself at a place that was distinguished from the rest by having many exotic plants, ones not usually found in this climate. The new plants stank of alcohol, but mostly just served as additional herbaphony practice as she opened up the dense foliage and retrieved the stained glass within.
"How many of these are there?" Mary asked.
"No clue." Tanya replied. "But there's not much left that I haven't gone to. The only places left are the lake and the central island." The center had a much denser debris cloud than the previous areas, so Tanya had been circling around it to see if there was some opening. So far, no luck. "So I would guess no more than two."
The lake had more vigorous debris than the other places, and Tanya found herself quite exhausted by the time she reached the broken section of bridge that served as a dock for a canoe. Glancing at the swirling debris above the lake, and the reflection of the moon on the lake which may or may not conceal another bit of stained glass, Tanya instead elected to step on the canoe and propel it with telekinesis.
As she approached the moon, Tanya could barely make out garbled whispers. They were clearly memories, but they were not coherent enough for Tanya to make them out. She did recognize some of the voices, each of the three people that starred in the memory vault, but could not understand the content of their speech.
"Aw, your reflection is Ford and Lucy kissing again on a boat ride. So romantic…" Mary sighed. Big deal.
As Tanya had guessed, the reflection of the moon in the center of the lake was, in fact, a disc floating on the surface of it. Tanya used telekinesis to flip it, and retrieved the now-revealed stained glass. "Seven, now." She said out loud as she moved the canoe to collect more figments. She'll need every scrap of strength she can get in order to get into the last area.
"Do you have no romance in your heart, Degurechaff?" Mary said, annoyed.
Tanya did not say her first impulsive response, which was 'what heart?'. That disturbing thought aside, Tanya made sure to sound angrier than she was when she scolded Mary. "Some of us have to focus on not getting hit by shrapnel, Mary! Also, stop calling me that, it's not my name!"
"You're not going to fool me." Mary replied coldly. "You haven't even bothered pretending to be twelve here. I've seen you fight, you're the Devil of the Rhine."
"Delusion and confirmation bias." Tanya retorted. Bringing her along was a terrible idea… "You see what you want to see, and nothing more."
Tanya decided to launch herself like a cannonball through the debris field this time. It should work. Flying forward rapidly and upward to pick up speed, Tanya brought up her full powered shield. Her ability to discern what happens outside of her shield is limited unless she deliberately weakens it, but she could feel it when she changed direction, so when she felt that she bounced off of a floor, she released the shield.
Debris tore through her mental projection as the few that were still incoming destroyed her passive barrier and shot into her astral body like the shrapnel it was. Pain blossomed in her gut, but it wasn't enough to eject Tanya, so she soldiered on, re-asserting her passive barrier with a moment of focus. "Ow." She said, for Mary's benefit.
The central area roughly corresponding to the cafeteria, as well as Agent Cruller's trailer. It was the only spot in camp where all three of his personalities could be found, although none at the same time of course. None of these structures were present, of course, but there was an area that was clear of plant life, a rather large circular area…
Tanya felt her shorts get tugged by an invisible force, and with a thought opened up all of the pockets that contained the stained glass and allowed them to automatically assemble themselves into a seven-sided dome, with the stained glass pieces unfolding into larger sections to complete the structure.
Wait, seven-sided dome? That rang a bell… The Heptadome! Tanya did, at one point, read the full collection of True Psychic Tales that the Motherlobe had in their small library. Supposedly, it was the nerve center of the original Psychonauts, where the Psychic Six 'explored the frontier of the human mind'.
Taya entered the dome from one of the three entrances, and looked upon the beanbag chairs within. From the prominent hookah between a set of four bags, it looked like they primarily used drugs to do that exploration.
The center of the structure had an odd device in the middle. After a moment of examining it, Tanya deduced that the odd drill was an incomplete device. It was an adjustable chair, and at the head level of someone when they were sitting in the chair, a giant dull drill was placed about half a foot away, pointing directly at the occupant's head. From the orientation of the chair, it was pointing at the left half of the head. There was no kind of switch, button, lever, or wheel to operate the device, and the base seemed to extend curiously far to the right of the chair. As such, it was clearly only a portion of the true device.
What truly drew the attention, however, was the odd little tag in one of the beanbags. It was a large one, and it definitely had the sound of that damned giggle coming from it. It wasn't very large, but it had a certain presence to it that drew the eye. Kind of like being shiny, but it wasn't actually shiny.
"That's a purse tag!" Mary exclaimed. "You need to reunite it with that purse we found earlier!"
"Yeah, yeah." Tanya said, dismissing her 'advice' as she snatched up the tag. She wasn't sure she would be capable of going through that debris field again. Should she try another time? Risk getting killed and just coming back if she doesn't make it?
…Come to think of it, it would be useful to experience being forcibly ejected from a mind. It was difficult to imagine safer circumstances. Miss Milla would not be likely to endorse exposing Tanya to pain like that, so there's also not going to be a whole lot of opportunity.
Decision made, Tanya went to charge right back through the debris field around the central area. Only to, after leaving the Heptadome, stop and marvel at the terrain.
The debris field was still there, but it was vastly diminished. The chunks of mind matter were creating bridges between the sections, and while a lot of trees and other parts were still quite broken, enough were now patched together that it was startling the difference the changes made.
Tanya just… walked to the purse's location, watching the mental world repair itself as she went. The tree was still shattered, but the purse perked up when Tanya approached, tag in hand. It presented one side, inviting Tanya to attach the tag. She did so, and then the emotional baggage dissolved into psychic energy, just as Tanya was told.
The psychic energy flooding into Tanya's astral form, however, was very much NOT like it was implied. Foreign emotions overwhelmed Tanya, attraction and desire that Tanya had never before experienced or even understood, followed by gut-wrenching tragedy that, while more familiar, was much more powerful than any grief that Tanya had ever felt. Rather than be absorbed as power, Tanya choked on the connection, feeling ill as tears flowed freely and the power, having been rebuffed, proceeded to try and enter Tanya again, but even more violently.
"What is happening?" Mary asked, panicked. "Your body is thrashing!"
Tanya felt the psychic power tear into her form, unable to enter through the usual channels and instead making their own. The power refreshed her slightly slower than it damaged her, and after a timeless moment of agonizing pain, blacked out.
----------------
Tanya woke back up in her body, every single nerve ending tingling. Mary was there, slapping Tanya's face lightly. At Tanya's groan, Mary smiled. "You're back!"
"My entire body seems to have fallen asleep." Tanya said. It wasn't quite the same kind of pain that she was used to ignoring, but Tanya proceeded to flex her fingers and toes nonetheless to help restore feeling.
"Yes, darling, that's normal." Miss Milla's voice said. "For getting your astral projection destroyed, at least." Ah. They got caught. "I told you that Ford's mind was dangerous, Tanya."
Mary stood up in Tanya's defense. "But she did it!" She argued. "You should have seen how it was pulling itself together when Tanya was done with it!"
Miss Milla raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Oh? Then how did she get destroyed? You didn't do that on purpose, did you Tanya?"
Well, she was probably going to on the way out… "The emotional baggage." Tanya croaked. "It didn't properly integrate into my astral form, and instead destroyed it."
"Really?" Miss Milla replied. "I've never heard of that happening before… But then again, I'm far from the most experienced or academic Psychonaut. I'll ask Agent Boole about it." She picked up Tanya's numb form and started walking back to camp. "You'll be right as rain in a few minutes, but there's been some rather hefty clouds forming in the sky, so we're moving everyone inside just in case. The weather here can be a bit unpredictable."
"Are there rain barrels?" Tanya asked.
"Yes, but why?" Milla replied.
"We need to do laundry, and I haven't seen any machines for it anywhere." Tanya answered. "I was planning on purifying lake water, but rain is better."
Milla took a moment to think about that answer. "Ah, it appears we've overlooked something else. Good thinking, Tanya. I'll send Sasha to pick up some laundry soap if Ford doesn't have some stashed away somewhere."
"Where did you learn to wash clothes by hand?" Questioned Mary.
Miss Milla shrugged. "Tanya reads a lot of books. Wilderness survival was probably in there somewhere."
"Also, I'm not going to clean them by hand." Tanya retorted. "I'm going to use psychic powers to make a washing machine."
"Ah, that trick." Miss Mila said after a moment. "Just make sure to only use it for clothes. It's bad for your skin."
They only did that because the shower was broken. "I bet we could get 'Mr. Janitor' to do it for us if we demonstrate." If that doesn't work, Tanya figured his germaphobia would insist on doing things himself if the job was done deliberately poorly.
Mary hummed. "That actually sounds like it would be super-useful to know how to do. Back during the war, there were sometimes some troubles with getting clean clothes, and disease was rampant. Not so much for mages, but if I could have used my computation orb to wash my clothes, that would have been so useful." Tanya was well aware of this. Reprogramming the computation orb in the field to allow for non-standard adjustments in the spell formulas was difficult, but possible. Between her, Visha, and Tanyanen (mostly Tenyanen, honestly), they had managed to cobble together a combination of formulas that could be used to wash clothes if they had soap, water, and no artillery in range. Such actions were necessary on the Eastern Front, where the logistical personnel were frequently killed or replaced by NKVD saboteurs and hot water was at a premium.
"Well, then that sounds like a fun activity, learning how to use psychic powers in a new way." Miss Milla replied. "Exactly the kind of thing the camp is supposed to do."
Yes, well, hopefully Agent Cruller's park ranger persona will be more stable now.
- Location
- United States
Park Ranger will be busy giving the bear picnic baskets.
- Location
- new york
I think she may have done more than that. the emotional bag might have left a mark on her mind even after she was kicked out. she'll likely find out in her next 'mental sorting' session
I wanna thank you for making a Youjo Senki fic I can actually read. The others out there are usually written great and their stories end up nice, but focus so much on self delusion of Tanya that it lessens the impact of her interactions with the crossover medium. But this just hits right for me. Awesome Story.
- Location
- United States
This timing does not seem coincidental, probably gonna have to do some more work on Cruller before he floods everything.
Chapter 11
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
True to Miss Milla's words, it took about four minutes for Tanya to be able to stand, and three more for the pins and needles sensation to fully fade. Which was enough time for a quick change of clothes and trip back to the cafeteria for lunch.
Agent Cruller's cook persona didn't seem notably affected by the work Tanya put in on his other self, but he also didn't seem as twitchy as he was in the aftermath of the park ranger's fit.
"Now that we've all eaten, " Miss Milla announced at the end of lunch, "-what we do is going to depend on the weather." On cue, thunder sounded out, followed by the staccato patter of rain. "Well, that answers that." She said, not missing a beat. "Don't worry, children. We did prepare for rainy days. We have a full library of True Psychic Tales, six sets of it. We'll go get it, and you can all pass the time by reading up on the thrilling adventures of the Psychic Six, and even some of the adventures me and Sasha have gotten up to." She looked at Agent Cruller, who was busying himself by cleaning his workstation. "We'll be going to the cabins for that, however."
Most of the children seemed to deem this activity acceptable, and Tanya worked in tandem with Miss Milla and Agent Nein to create a tunnel that was protected from the rain that everyone used levitation to float through without getting mud on their shoes. Lili had to be restrained from jumping into the mud, but no one else dared to.
After everyone was at their beds and the copies of the comic book were distributed, Milla returned to the counselor's room in the girl's cabin, and Tanya followed her. "I'm going to call Agent Boole, darling. He'll know what to do about this."
Taking out the psychoportal, she placed it on her own forehead. "If you want to come along, come inside and we'll speak with him."
Tanya quickly sat on the beanbag chair while Miss Mila sat on her bed. Like before, Tanya reached out towards the psychoportal and felt herself getting pulled in.
----------------
After going into Miss Milla's mind, she pulled Tanya's astral form outside of the mental world, eventually ending up in a pure void with naught but stars visible.
"This… is the Collective Subconscious." Miss Milla declared. "It is the space between minds that can only be measured through emotional distance, not physical distance." With a wave of her hand, a door appeared in front of her. "This is an entrance to Agent Boole's mind. We won't be barging in though, it's rude." She tapped on the door with her knuckles, doing a precise sequence that was clearly code of some kind.
The door, after a moment, opened up and the aforementioned Agent Boole walked out. He was a short man, balding but with a lot of care and attention put into his beard and what remained of his hair. His voice was soft and timid as he addressed the pair. "Ah, Camilla. I've been expecting your call. Come in, come in."
Agent Boole's mind was, oddly enough, a cooking game show. It was currently empty, without any mental constructs populating it. It was very strange. Noticing her confusion, Agent Boole spoke up. "Ah, this is a mental construct I've created to help me manage my anxiety." He explained. "Back in the sixties, we did all sorts of experimental procedures on ourselves to expand our minds, both to increase our psychic powers and to improve our understanding of the human mind. Most of us still carry some scars from that time. For example, I can't shut out my telepathy anymore, and as a result I can get easily overwhelmed. It's why I sleep in Psychoisolation."
That explained… not enough. "Why a game show?" Tanya asked.
"Well, if my anxiety and sensitivity gets to be too much, Cassie comes in and helps me complete the game show, and after that, it's so much easier to handle things. It's very therapeutic. She did so just this morning, in fact." He smiles widely. "In return, I help her out whenever one of her archetypes starts to act up. Now, what was it you wanted to speak to me about?"
This was fascinating. Could it be used to help her develop a psychic videogame? "I went into Agent Cruller's mind." She blurted out.
Agent Boole's expression became even more concerned. "Oh no, are you okay? Ford's mind is hostile at the best of times."
"I'm fine." Tanya said. "I managed to do… something there. It looked a lot better after I was done than when I began."
"That's excellent news." Replied Agent Boole, voice still steady but with a little more energy than normal. "You have my personal thanks for helping my friend. Would you like to learn how to cook? I could teach you." A glittering golden cooking whisk floated into his hand. "Do you know what this is?"
"That's a nugget of wisdom." Tanya replied. "But I didn't come here seeking a reward." As much as Tanya would love to absorb more knowledge, it wouldn't do to seem too greedy.
Miss Milla cut in at that point. "We're here to seek your advice about an odd problem."
"Another time, then. The offer's open, Tanya." Agent Boole said, tossing the whisk away carelessly. It vanished after two bounces. "What can old Compton do for you?"
"You're not that old, Agent Boole." Miss Milla flattered before getting to the point. "Apparently, when Tanya attempted to resolve some of Ford's emotional baggage, the psychic energy destroyed her astral form rather than being properly absorbed." She turned to Tanya. "Is that about right?" Tanya nodded.
Agent Boole hissed at the explanation. "Ah, that's a troublesome problem." He glanced at something that Tanya didn't notice. "The good news is that I have seen that problem before." Uh oh.
"And the bad news?" Miss Milla asked.
Agent Boole braced himself before answering. "The only other time I've seen such a thing is with Bob." After a pause, he added: "and thus, I don't know for sure how to fix it."
Miss Milla repeated Agent Boole's hiss. "Only one other case?" She asked.
With a sympathetic nod, Agent Boole continued. "Well, we don't have a habit of having our patients resolve some other person's emotional baggage for them." He said. "So we could only ever see the problem in our agents, which is a very small sample pool." That was a sensible explanation. "You see, emotional baggage is reasonably literal in how it functions. It's a buildup of emotional energy that has not been disposed of properly, such as through a good cry. It snarls up and eventually has a negative effect on the mind inside. What a psychonaut does is siphon the emotional energy into themselves, which is quite helpful in strengthening your astral form to handle any powerful manifestations within the mind. As a result, the normally overwhelming emotions are dulled, made more manageable for the patient."
Tanya nodded along to the explanation, which was presumably for her benefit. "So I made a mistake?" She asked.
"Oh no." Agent Boole said quickly. "There's not really a process to doing it, it's automatic. It's rarely a pleasant experience, but if it damages your astral form, that means there was something that interfered with the normal state of things."
"But what could do such a thing?" Miss Milla asked.
"That's where we move from well established psychic phenomena to speculation." Agent Boole replied. "My hypothesis is that there's some form of block in Tanya's mind. Bob wouldn't allow us inside to help him; he was too angry about having lost his job to accept help. He was already in trouble, but after he lost the ability to do his job at all… Truman couldn't keep covering for him." Something about that story filled Tanya with dread. He cleared his throat. "Ah, moving on. Tell me, Tanya. When's the last time you remember getting angry?"
Tanya blinked. Why ask that? "...I suppose it would be when I heard that the Grand Head decided to put children near an unstable lunatic."
"How angry were you?" He asked calmly. "Did you feel like yelling at him? Or hitting him? Or perhaps setting him on fire with your pyrokinesis?"
What kind of question was that!? "Of course not. I'm not a violent maniac."
Agent Boole hummed at that response. Was she getting psychoanalyzed? Crap. "If the Grand Head showed up here, right now, what would you say to him?" He brought out a little hand puppet of the Grand Head, but as a goat. Out of the puppet's mouth, Grand Head Zanotto's voice came out. "I'm Tincan Zanotto, and I'm here to brag about the horrible things I'm going to put you through for money!" He chuckled to himself. "Let it all out."
That was actually pretty funny. Yet, Tanya couldn't even muster a chuckle. Angry rants were easy back during the war, so she can do something, yeah. Clearing her throat, Tanya pointed rudely at the hand puppet. "What were you thinking, you underqualified crony!" She spat. "You not only put a bunch of children within range of that unstable madman that used to be safely contained, but you even put your own granddaughter in his path! I do not work for you, and I do not appreciate having to be the one to clean up your mess!" Hrm. She used to be better at this.
After a moment, Tanya cleared her throat. "Yes, something like that."
Agent Boole hummed again. "That's it? You didn't hold anything back?"
What? "No, I didn't." Tanya replied. It wasn't her best work, but it was plenty angry. Right?
"Hm, I see. Tell me, Tanya:" Agent Boole continued. "Have you ever been angry enough to want to hit someone, or scream at the top of your lungs? Have you ever been so happy that you cried? Have you ever felt so sad that you didn't want to do anything at all?"
Yes, yes, and yes… but only in her second life. After the war, everything in this life just seems so… petty and small. She assumes there were moments like that in her first life, but of course she didn't remember any. So… "No." She lied.
"Hm, I see." Agent Boole said. "I would need to take a look to be sure, but when combined with those nightmares I've been hearing about, " Tanya looked at Miss Milla, who refused to look Tanya in the eye. "I suspect that much like Bob, you've refused, subconsciously or not, to feel emotion in order to avoid the unpleasant ones that are ever present. Grief, guilt, terror… You can't shut off only the unpleasant emotions without also deadening yourself to more positive ones. This is something a psychonaut can help with, but only if you want us to." He cleared his throat. "I can understand if you'd rather remain as you are. Change can be scary, after all. And this would be life-changing, if it works."
"If you're not comfortable with Agent Boole, darling," Miss Milla said soothingly. "-we could just take that tour you mentioned earlier, just me and you, and just have a look around. Maybe it's something simple and obvious." Not likely.
Well, this has quickly spiraled out of control. But… Tanya pictured Being X. Thought about the injustices he laid upon her, both petty and grave offenses. Recalled the type 95; his poison pill. In her last life, such thoughts would be a surefire way to get herself spitting mad, unable to contain her anger and requiring her to sequester herself to calm down. But now? She just… didn't care.
Oh no. Was this Being X's plan? Wear down her conviction through apathy and let his little minion Mary scoop her up? It seemed far-fetched, even for him. Too intelligent. This… couldn't be allowed to continue. "Let's take that tour." She said quietly. She could already picture how this will go wrong.
But… she has no choice. How did it come to this?
----------------
They withdrew from Agent Boole's mind, the man promising to keep himself available for the rest of the day in case Miss Milla wanted to call him in. "Hollis will understand." He explained. "And Truman will support anything if it has a chance of helping Bob." He added.
Returning to their own bodies, Miss Milla telekinetically lifted the psychoportal from its position on the floor. "Are you ready, Tanya?" She asked quietly.
Tanya looked at the small door floating in front of her, scenarios flashing through her mind of how this could go wrong. "No." She said, before seizing the door and placing it on her forehead. One tap, and it opened up, Miss Milla's astral form leaving her body and going into the psychorportal. Once it closed, Tanya focused on entering her own mind, falling into the void outside of Tatemae castle with ease.
Miss Milla was staring at the cracks in the sky, still glowing with golden light. What sort of meaning was she drawing from it? With an exertion of effort, the cracks vanished as Tanya moved the damage to Yomi castle's sky. She knew she should have reviewed the place before allowing the inspector, but… too late now. "Let's go." Tanya said, willing the drawbridge to open and walking inside.
The interior of the castle was a combination of classical architecture, the imposed design, and the futuristic aesthetic that the Motherlobe favored. The place was populated by anime-faced guards and courtiers, the former taking the form of animal-people, the stuffed animal regiment she owned as a child, and the latter by the random psychonauts that the Motherlobe segment was originally populated with.
Front and center in the entranceway was the mural that had provided some stress when she had viewed it, but as the design intended, it did not depict anything sensitive. The center held an image of Tanya, while the supplementary places were held by Agent Mentalis, Agent Hollis, Miss Mila, Agent Nein, and Grand Head Zanotto. Excellent.
Miss Milla mostly remained silent as Tanya showed her the various rooms filled with harmless information, from the filing room filled with her mental dossiers on various people, to the library of translation.
"What's that room?" Miss Milla asked suddenly as they passed one room.
Tanya looked at it. Ah, it was the nursery memory she ended up in on her first journey within her mind. With the split, it had completely taken on the appearance of the room where Tanya first woke up in this life, so it wasn't terribly incriminating. "Ah, that's where I keep childhood memories." She explained. "Before… you know." She deflected, alluding to the incident with the fire. "Ah, be careful, that bed has hypnotic properties. I haven't had the chance to investigate."
Miss Milla hummed. "Right." She plucked something invisible from the crib and turned back around, gathering the infantile figments in the area as she went. "Let's move on, darling."
"Right." Tanya replied, leading her past the hallway that led to Yomi castle. It was sealed shut by a steel door, without any way of entering from this side.
"What's in there?" Miss Milla predictably asked.
"You don't want to know." Tanya insisted. "Unpleasant things."
"I wanna see!" Shouted… Lili? How long has she been following them?
"Lili, you shouldn't be in here." Miss Milla said, picking the small girl up and preventing her from attempting to break down the barricade.
Tanya thought about forcing Lili out of her mind. Eh… Whatever. She won't understand whatever she finds anyway.
"It's dark in here." Lili said out of the blue.
What? "No it isn't." Tanya replied. Sure, the lights weren't LEDs or even fluorescents, but there were plenty of lamps in the castle.
"She doesn't mean lights, Tanya." Miss Milla corrected. "The colors here are… washed out. In most mental worlds, lights are brighter than reality, colors are sharper, closer to an idealization of themselves."
Tanya frowned. "Agent Nein's mind is monochrome." She pointed out.
"That's a deliberate design choice." Miss Milla retorted. "Also, even the whites here are… a little dingy, and it's rather cold in here." Tanya supposed that her superior cryokinesis in comparison to her pyrokinesis had to manifest somehow.
"Tanya has a dirty mind!" Teased Lili. Miss Milla snorted in laughter before recovering, politely pretending she didn't hear the accidental euphemism.
Tanya sighed. "I don't know what you're talking about. This is a normal level of color. True, it's not brighter th an reality, but that doesn't mean anything. I pay attention to things." Were colors brighter during the war? They might have been. Was it just a difference between the two bodies? She did need glasses in her first life, she couldn't assume that her visual abilities would be the same between the second and third.
Miss Milla hummed, dropping the subject. Tanya proceeded to give a harmless tour, with Lili continually gathering whatever figments were present as they went. After going through the kitchen, they passed the passage to Honne castle. Unlike Yomi castle, it was instead protected by twelve guards, who moved their rifle-halberds to block passage when Lili tried to get in.
"Hey!" Lili whined. "Let me in!"
"No unauthorized entry." Insisted the wolf-man that resembled Koenig, his full plate armor clanking as he gestured. The two-headed dragon of the Empire was depicted on his tabard, but that wouldn't mean anything to them. "This is a restricted area."
Lili immediately attempted to use her inherent cuteness to get her way. "Please Tanya?"
"No." Tanya said, shutting the little girl down. She was immune to the kawaii eyes. "That room is private." Was it lying to imply that it was a room instead of a whole layer of the mind? Yes. Was she going to keep up the pretense? Also yes.
Miss Milla continued to observe the areas, examining things intently as they proceeded through the castle. Occasionally, she went somewhere and plucked something that Tanya couldn't see. What was she doing?
Finally, they came to the 'throne room', a place that represented Tanya's plans for the future. Petitioners each held representations of the various video game ideas she had, patiently waiting for Tanya to sit on the throne and contemplate the merits of each one.
"What's this place?" Miss Milla asked, looking at the various weapons, tools, and outfits each of the petitioners had with interest.
"Ah, this is my… creative room." Tanya explained. "All of those are ideas I have. Your obstacle courses gave me an idea on making things like that with a psychic machine, creating games inside a person's head for an immersive entertainment experience."
"I see." Miss Milla said, slightly confused. "So… the weapons?"
"Adventure game." Tanya replied. "Slay dragons and stuff."
"The bats?" Miss Milla asked.
"Sports game." Tanya replied. To shortcut future questions, she started pointing at each one. "Cooking game, fighting game, beast taming game, hunting game, dancing game… I have all kinds of ideas for future games, I just need to work out the technical aspects." Hm, would she be able to adapt the technology for the handheld market? Doubtful.
Miss Milla hummed. "So this is what you'd like to do when you grow up?"
Tanya didn't particularly like that phrasing, but… "Yes." She replied. "My entertainment empire will make me a billionaire if I can make it work. It would be physically impossible to create a gaming system more immersive than something that's beamed directly into your mind." Well, Tanya was worried about the cost per unit, but if the only economically viable path was to create VR arcades that charged per life or per hour or whatever… Then that's what she'll do.
Whatever Miss Milla was expecting from Tanya, she clearly didn't get it. "Well, is that everywhere?" She asked, a wry grin on her face.
Lili's voice rang out from behind the throne. Oh no. "Hey! The guard here's asleep! There's a cool mirror here!"
Tanya ran towards the entrance to Kyomu castle. If she encountered the Heartless Machine… Tanya didn't know what would happen.
Indeed, Lili had gone around the corner of the hallway behind the throne, normally supposed to be as heavily guarded as the entrance to Honne castle, and witnessed the ephemeral darkness of Kyomu castle. From this end, all that could be seen was the cobweb-riddled hallway that led deeper in, but the instant Tanya rounded the corner, Lili leapt into it.
Leaping in after her, Tanya turned back towards the mirror on the other side, and quickly exerted her will to make the entrances two-way, instead of the default method that allowed easy travel between the layers by offsetting it by one. Lili getting into Kyomu castle was bad enough, but if she walked into Yomi… she would be lucky if all that happened was her violent ejection.
"This place is so cool!" Lili exclaimed. "It's like a shadow puzzle! This is definitely a desk, it's like Dad's!" What?
Tanya faintly registered Miss Mina following after her as she turned the corner herself and looked at the throne room's reflection. Much like the place was originally, the walls were made out of darkness, with only very faint lights allowing the brief perception of distinct silhouettes. The halls were freezing cold, mist condensing from each person's exhalations. The place was decorated primarily with mental cobwebs, a massive snarl of them suspended above the 'desk' that took the place of the throne. It was coating something…
"Welcome home, Major!" Visha's voice called out in German, tinged with a very familiar mechanical edge. The Heartless Machine walked into the room, its pitiless gaze taking in the three people present. Agent Nein's voice was next. "It appears that you've decided to move on to productive work." The machine transitioned to using Mary's voice. "You've revealed your true colors, showing no feelings in your heart!" The sound quality of Mary's voice clipped, obviously spliced together to Tanya's ears.
"Who are you?" Lili asked, fear creeping into her voice.
"I'm Tanya!" The machine declared using Tanya's voice. "Her true face, the Heartless Machine." She switched to Miss Milla's voice. "Now, on to business! Smile, Tanya!" The glowing red rifts opened up as the machine opened their hollow chest once more. Tanya prepared to fend off the tentacles as they approached… but the machine shot them out towards LIli instead.
"No!" Tanya shouted as she telekinetically grabbed Lili and pulled her away from the grasping tentacles. With that distraction, the tentacles diverted back to Tanya, seizing her once more. Curses!
The Heartless Machine pulled Tanya back into its chest cavity. "Tanya, no!" Miss Milla shouted, extending a telekinetic hand in an attempt to grab Tanya and pull her out, but the machine shut, locking her inside.
Tanya's head swam as chaos erupted outside of the machine's body. Colors faded away and sharp images became blurs. "I'm fine… it's not important… it's nothing…" Tanya mumbled as consciousness slipped away.
Agent Cruller's cook persona didn't seem notably affected by the work Tanya put in on his other self, but he also didn't seem as twitchy as he was in the aftermath of the park ranger's fit.
"Now that we've all eaten, " Miss Milla announced at the end of lunch, "-what we do is going to depend on the weather." On cue, thunder sounded out, followed by the staccato patter of rain. "Well, that answers that." She said, not missing a beat. "Don't worry, children. We did prepare for rainy days. We have a full library of True Psychic Tales, six sets of it. We'll go get it, and you can all pass the time by reading up on the thrilling adventures of the Psychic Six, and even some of the adventures me and Sasha have gotten up to." She looked at Agent Cruller, who was busying himself by cleaning his workstation. "We'll be going to the cabins for that, however."
Most of the children seemed to deem this activity acceptable, and Tanya worked in tandem with Miss Milla and Agent Nein to create a tunnel that was protected from the rain that everyone used levitation to float through without getting mud on their shoes. Lili had to be restrained from jumping into the mud, but no one else dared to.
After everyone was at their beds and the copies of the comic book were distributed, Milla returned to the counselor's room in the girl's cabin, and Tanya followed her. "I'm going to call Agent Boole, darling. He'll know what to do about this."
Taking out the psychoportal, she placed it on her own forehead. "If you want to come along, come inside and we'll speak with him."
Tanya quickly sat on the beanbag chair while Miss Mila sat on her bed. Like before, Tanya reached out towards the psychoportal and felt herself getting pulled in.
----------------
After going into Miss Milla's mind, she pulled Tanya's astral form outside of the mental world, eventually ending up in a pure void with naught but stars visible.
"This… is the Collective Subconscious." Miss Milla declared. "It is the space between minds that can only be measured through emotional distance, not physical distance." With a wave of her hand, a door appeared in front of her. "This is an entrance to Agent Boole's mind. We won't be barging in though, it's rude." She tapped on the door with her knuckles, doing a precise sequence that was clearly code of some kind.
The door, after a moment, opened up and the aforementioned Agent Boole walked out. He was a short man, balding but with a lot of care and attention put into his beard and what remained of his hair. His voice was soft and timid as he addressed the pair. "Ah, Camilla. I've been expecting your call. Come in, come in."
Agent Boole's mind was, oddly enough, a cooking game show. It was currently empty, without any mental constructs populating it. It was very strange. Noticing her confusion, Agent Boole spoke up. "Ah, this is a mental construct I've created to help me manage my anxiety." He explained. "Back in the sixties, we did all sorts of experimental procedures on ourselves to expand our minds, both to increase our psychic powers and to improve our understanding of the human mind. Most of us still carry some scars from that time. For example, I can't shut out my telepathy anymore, and as a result I can get easily overwhelmed. It's why I sleep in Psychoisolation."
That explained… not enough. "Why a game show?" Tanya asked.
"Well, if my anxiety and sensitivity gets to be too much, Cassie comes in and helps me complete the game show, and after that, it's so much easier to handle things. It's very therapeutic. She did so just this morning, in fact." He smiles widely. "In return, I help her out whenever one of her archetypes starts to act up. Now, what was it you wanted to speak to me about?"
This was fascinating. Could it be used to help her develop a psychic videogame? "I went into Agent Cruller's mind." She blurted out.
Agent Boole's expression became even more concerned. "Oh no, are you okay? Ford's mind is hostile at the best of times."
"I'm fine." Tanya said. "I managed to do… something there. It looked a lot better after I was done than when I began."
"That's excellent news." Replied Agent Boole, voice still steady but with a little more energy than normal. "You have my personal thanks for helping my friend. Would you like to learn how to cook? I could teach you." A glittering golden cooking whisk floated into his hand. "Do you know what this is?"
"That's a nugget of wisdom." Tanya replied. "But I didn't come here seeking a reward." As much as Tanya would love to absorb more knowledge, it wouldn't do to seem too greedy.
Miss Milla cut in at that point. "We're here to seek your advice about an odd problem."
"Another time, then. The offer's open, Tanya." Agent Boole said, tossing the whisk away carelessly. It vanished after two bounces. "What can old Compton do for you?"
"You're not that old, Agent Boole." Miss Milla flattered before getting to the point. "Apparently, when Tanya attempted to resolve some of Ford's emotional baggage, the psychic energy destroyed her astral form rather than being properly absorbed." She turned to Tanya. "Is that about right?" Tanya nodded.
Agent Boole hissed at the explanation. "Ah, that's a troublesome problem." He glanced at something that Tanya didn't notice. "The good news is that I have seen that problem before." Uh oh.
"And the bad news?" Miss Milla asked.
Agent Boole braced himself before answering. "The only other time I've seen such a thing is with Bob." After a pause, he added: "and thus, I don't know for sure how to fix it."
Miss Milla repeated Agent Boole's hiss. "Only one other case?" She asked.
With a sympathetic nod, Agent Boole continued. "Well, we don't have a habit of having our patients resolve some other person's emotional baggage for them." He said. "So we could only ever see the problem in our agents, which is a very small sample pool." That was a sensible explanation. "You see, emotional baggage is reasonably literal in how it functions. It's a buildup of emotional energy that has not been disposed of properly, such as through a good cry. It snarls up and eventually has a negative effect on the mind inside. What a psychonaut does is siphon the emotional energy into themselves, which is quite helpful in strengthening your astral form to handle any powerful manifestations within the mind. As a result, the normally overwhelming emotions are dulled, made more manageable for the patient."
Tanya nodded along to the explanation, which was presumably for her benefit. "So I made a mistake?" She asked.
"Oh no." Agent Boole said quickly. "There's not really a process to doing it, it's automatic. It's rarely a pleasant experience, but if it damages your astral form, that means there was something that interfered with the normal state of things."
"But what could do such a thing?" Miss Milla asked.
"That's where we move from well established psychic phenomena to speculation." Agent Boole replied. "My hypothesis is that there's some form of block in Tanya's mind. Bob wouldn't allow us inside to help him; he was too angry about having lost his job to accept help. He was already in trouble, but after he lost the ability to do his job at all… Truman couldn't keep covering for him." Something about that story filled Tanya with dread. He cleared his throat. "Ah, moving on. Tell me, Tanya. When's the last time you remember getting angry?"
Tanya blinked. Why ask that? "...I suppose it would be when I heard that the Grand Head decided to put children near an unstable lunatic."
"How angry were you?" He asked calmly. "Did you feel like yelling at him? Or hitting him? Or perhaps setting him on fire with your pyrokinesis?"
What kind of question was that!? "Of course not. I'm not a violent maniac."
Agent Boole hummed at that response. Was she getting psychoanalyzed? Crap. "If the Grand Head showed up here, right now, what would you say to him?" He brought out a little hand puppet of the Grand Head, but as a goat. Out of the puppet's mouth, Grand Head Zanotto's voice came out. "I'm Tincan Zanotto, and I'm here to brag about the horrible things I'm going to put you through for money!" He chuckled to himself. "Let it all out."
That was actually pretty funny. Yet, Tanya couldn't even muster a chuckle. Angry rants were easy back during the war, so she can do something, yeah. Clearing her throat, Tanya pointed rudely at the hand puppet. "What were you thinking, you underqualified crony!" She spat. "You not only put a bunch of children within range of that unstable madman that used to be safely contained, but you even put your own granddaughter in his path! I do not work for you, and I do not appreciate having to be the one to clean up your mess!" Hrm. She used to be better at this.
After a moment, Tanya cleared her throat. "Yes, something like that."
Agent Boole hummed again. "That's it? You didn't hold anything back?"
What? "No, I didn't." Tanya replied. It wasn't her best work, but it was plenty angry. Right?
"Hm, I see. Tell me, Tanya:" Agent Boole continued. "Have you ever been angry enough to want to hit someone, or scream at the top of your lungs? Have you ever been so happy that you cried? Have you ever felt so sad that you didn't want to do anything at all?"
Yes, yes, and yes… but only in her second life. After the war, everything in this life just seems so… petty and small. She assumes there were moments like that in her first life, but of course she didn't remember any. So… "No." She lied.
"Hm, I see." Agent Boole said. "I would need to take a look to be sure, but when combined with those nightmares I've been hearing about, " Tanya looked at Miss Milla, who refused to look Tanya in the eye. "I suspect that much like Bob, you've refused, subconsciously or not, to feel emotion in order to avoid the unpleasant ones that are ever present. Grief, guilt, terror… You can't shut off only the unpleasant emotions without also deadening yourself to more positive ones. This is something a psychonaut can help with, but only if you want us to." He cleared his throat. "I can understand if you'd rather remain as you are. Change can be scary, after all. And this would be life-changing, if it works."
"If you're not comfortable with Agent Boole, darling," Miss Milla said soothingly. "-we could just take that tour you mentioned earlier, just me and you, and just have a look around. Maybe it's something simple and obvious." Not likely.
Well, this has quickly spiraled out of control. But… Tanya pictured Being X. Thought about the injustices he laid upon her, both petty and grave offenses. Recalled the type 95; his poison pill. In her last life, such thoughts would be a surefire way to get herself spitting mad, unable to contain her anger and requiring her to sequester herself to calm down. But now? She just… didn't care.
Oh no. Was this Being X's plan? Wear down her conviction through apathy and let his little minion Mary scoop her up? It seemed far-fetched, even for him. Too intelligent. This… couldn't be allowed to continue. "Let's take that tour." She said quietly. She could already picture how this will go wrong.
But… she has no choice. How did it come to this?
----------------
They withdrew from Agent Boole's mind, the man promising to keep himself available for the rest of the day in case Miss Milla wanted to call him in. "Hollis will understand." He explained. "And Truman will support anything if it has a chance of helping Bob." He added.
Returning to their own bodies, Miss Milla telekinetically lifted the psychoportal from its position on the floor. "Are you ready, Tanya?" She asked quietly.
Tanya looked at the small door floating in front of her, scenarios flashing through her mind of how this could go wrong. "No." She said, before seizing the door and placing it on her forehead. One tap, and it opened up, Miss Milla's astral form leaving her body and going into the psychorportal. Once it closed, Tanya focused on entering her own mind, falling into the void outside of Tatemae castle with ease.
Miss Milla was staring at the cracks in the sky, still glowing with golden light. What sort of meaning was she drawing from it? With an exertion of effort, the cracks vanished as Tanya moved the damage to Yomi castle's sky. She knew she should have reviewed the place before allowing the inspector, but… too late now. "Let's go." Tanya said, willing the drawbridge to open and walking inside.
The interior of the castle was a combination of classical architecture, the imposed design, and the futuristic aesthetic that the Motherlobe favored. The place was populated by anime-faced guards and courtiers, the former taking the form of animal-people, the stuffed animal regiment she owned as a child, and the latter by the random psychonauts that the Motherlobe segment was originally populated with.
Front and center in the entranceway was the mural that had provided some stress when she had viewed it, but as the design intended, it did not depict anything sensitive. The center held an image of Tanya, while the supplementary places were held by Agent Mentalis, Agent Hollis, Miss Mila, Agent Nein, and Grand Head Zanotto. Excellent.
Miss Milla mostly remained silent as Tanya showed her the various rooms filled with harmless information, from the filing room filled with her mental dossiers on various people, to the library of translation.
"What's that room?" Miss Milla asked suddenly as they passed one room.
Tanya looked at it. Ah, it was the nursery memory she ended up in on her first journey within her mind. With the split, it had completely taken on the appearance of the room where Tanya first woke up in this life, so it wasn't terribly incriminating. "Ah, that's where I keep childhood memories." She explained. "Before… you know." She deflected, alluding to the incident with the fire. "Ah, be careful, that bed has hypnotic properties. I haven't had the chance to investigate."
Miss Milla hummed. "Right." She plucked something invisible from the crib and turned back around, gathering the infantile figments in the area as she went. "Let's move on, darling."
"Right." Tanya replied, leading her past the hallway that led to Yomi castle. It was sealed shut by a steel door, without any way of entering from this side.
"What's in there?" Miss Milla predictably asked.
"You don't want to know." Tanya insisted. "Unpleasant things."
"I wanna see!" Shouted… Lili? How long has she been following them?
"Lili, you shouldn't be in here." Miss Milla said, picking the small girl up and preventing her from attempting to break down the barricade.
Tanya thought about forcing Lili out of her mind. Eh… Whatever. She won't understand whatever she finds anyway.
"It's dark in here." Lili said out of the blue.
What? "No it isn't." Tanya replied. Sure, the lights weren't LEDs or even fluorescents, but there were plenty of lamps in the castle.
"She doesn't mean lights, Tanya." Miss Milla corrected. "The colors here are… washed out. In most mental worlds, lights are brighter than reality, colors are sharper, closer to an idealization of themselves."
Tanya frowned. "Agent Nein's mind is monochrome." She pointed out.
"That's a deliberate design choice." Miss Milla retorted. "Also, even the whites here are… a little dingy, and it's rather cold in here." Tanya supposed that her superior cryokinesis in comparison to her pyrokinesis had to manifest somehow.
"Tanya has a dirty mind!" Teased Lili. Miss Milla snorted in laughter before recovering, politely pretending she didn't hear the accidental euphemism.
Tanya sighed. "I don't know what you're talking about. This is a normal level of color. True, it's not brighter th an reality, but that doesn't mean anything. I pay attention to things." Were colors brighter during the war? They might have been. Was it just a difference between the two bodies? She did need glasses in her first life, she couldn't assume that her visual abilities would be the same between the second and third.
Miss Milla hummed, dropping the subject. Tanya proceeded to give a harmless tour, with Lili continually gathering whatever figments were present as they went. After going through the kitchen, they passed the passage to Honne castle. Unlike Yomi castle, it was instead protected by twelve guards, who moved their rifle-halberds to block passage when Lili tried to get in.
"Hey!" Lili whined. "Let me in!"
"No unauthorized entry." Insisted the wolf-man that resembled Koenig, his full plate armor clanking as he gestured. The two-headed dragon of the Empire was depicted on his tabard, but that wouldn't mean anything to them. "This is a restricted area."
Lili immediately attempted to use her inherent cuteness to get her way. "Please Tanya?"
"No." Tanya said, shutting the little girl down. She was immune to the kawaii eyes. "That room is private." Was it lying to imply that it was a room instead of a whole layer of the mind? Yes. Was she going to keep up the pretense? Also yes.
Miss Milla continued to observe the areas, examining things intently as they proceeded through the castle. Occasionally, she went somewhere and plucked something that Tanya couldn't see. What was she doing?
Finally, they came to the 'throne room', a place that represented Tanya's plans for the future. Petitioners each held representations of the various video game ideas she had, patiently waiting for Tanya to sit on the throne and contemplate the merits of each one.
"What's this place?" Miss Milla asked, looking at the various weapons, tools, and outfits each of the petitioners had with interest.
"Ah, this is my… creative room." Tanya explained. "All of those are ideas I have. Your obstacle courses gave me an idea on making things like that with a psychic machine, creating games inside a person's head for an immersive entertainment experience."
"I see." Miss Milla said, slightly confused. "So… the weapons?"
"Adventure game." Tanya replied. "Slay dragons and stuff."
"The bats?" Miss Milla asked.
"Sports game." Tanya replied. To shortcut future questions, she started pointing at each one. "Cooking game, fighting game, beast taming game, hunting game, dancing game… I have all kinds of ideas for future games, I just need to work out the technical aspects." Hm, would she be able to adapt the technology for the handheld market? Doubtful.
Miss Milla hummed. "So this is what you'd like to do when you grow up?"
Tanya didn't particularly like that phrasing, but… "Yes." She replied. "My entertainment empire will make me a billionaire if I can make it work. It would be physically impossible to create a gaming system more immersive than something that's beamed directly into your mind." Well, Tanya was worried about the cost per unit, but if the only economically viable path was to create VR arcades that charged per life or per hour or whatever… Then that's what she'll do.
Whatever Miss Milla was expecting from Tanya, she clearly didn't get it. "Well, is that everywhere?" She asked, a wry grin on her face.
Lili's voice rang out from behind the throne. Oh no. "Hey! The guard here's asleep! There's a cool mirror here!"
Tanya ran towards the entrance to Kyomu castle. If she encountered the Heartless Machine… Tanya didn't know what would happen.
Indeed, Lili had gone around the corner of the hallway behind the throne, normally supposed to be as heavily guarded as the entrance to Honne castle, and witnessed the ephemeral darkness of Kyomu castle. From this end, all that could be seen was the cobweb-riddled hallway that led deeper in, but the instant Tanya rounded the corner, Lili leapt into it.
Leaping in after her, Tanya turned back towards the mirror on the other side, and quickly exerted her will to make the entrances two-way, instead of the default method that allowed easy travel between the layers by offsetting it by one. Lili getting into Kyomu castle was bad enough, but if she walked into Yomi… she would be lucky if all that happened was her violent ejection.
"This place is so cool!" Lili exclaimed. "It's like a shadow puzzle! This is definitely a desk, it's like Dad's!" What?
Tanya faintly registered Miss Mina following after her as she turned the corner herself and looked at the throne room's reflection. Much like the place was originally, the walls were made out of darkness, with only very faint lights allowing the brief perception of distinct silhouettes. The halls were freezing cold, mist condensing from each person's exhalations. The place was decorated primarily with mental cobwebs, a massive snarl of them suspended above the 'desk' that took the place of the throne. It was coating something…
"Welcome home, Major!" Visha's voice called out in German, tinged with a very familiar mechanical edge. The Heartless Machine walked into the room, its pitiless gaze taking in the three people present. Agent Nein's voice was next. "It appears that you've decided to move on to productive work." The machine transitioned to using Mary's voice. "You've revealed your true colors, showing no feelings in your heart!" The sound quality of Mary's voice clipped, obviously spliced together to Tanya's ears.
"Who are you?" Lili asked, fear creeping into her voice.
"I'm Tanya!" The machine declared using Tanya's voice. "Her true face, the Heartless Machine." She switched to Miss Milla's voice. "Now, on to business! Smile, Tanya!" The glowing red rifts opened up as the machine opened their hollow chest once more. Tanya prepared to fend off the tentacles as they approached… but the machine shot them out towards LIli instead.
"No!" Tanya shouted as she telekinetically grabbed Lili and pulled her away from the grasping tentacles. With that distraction, the tentacles diverted back to Tanya, seizing her once more. Curses!
The Heartless Machine pulled Tanya back into its chest cavity. "Tanya, no!" Miss Milla shouted, extending a telekinetic hand in an attempt to grab Tanya and pull her out, but the machine shut, locking her inside.
Tanya's head swam as chaos erupted outside of the machine's body. Colors faded away and sharp images became blurs. "I'm fine… it's not important… it's nothing…" Tanya mumbled as consciousness slipped away.
- Location
- USA
Heck yea I've been looking forward to this confrontation from the start. Can't wait to see more.
- Location
- United States
I would very much like to see this. Because while it sound like Tanya made amazing strides, she is still new to mind shaping. It would not surprise me at all if her work was slapdash. It looks right to her, but everyone else can see the paint is still wet and the cracks are poorly hidden.
Still, a lot of psychonaughts was inference. Just general speculation will be interesting.