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I wonder if she'll enjoy the music... Jack Black plays Helmut in the game.
Psychoprotective (Youjo Senki/Psychonauts)
- Thread starter Requiem_Jeer
- Start date
I wonder if she'll enjoy the music... Jack Black plays Helmut in the game.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
General rule of thumb for future chapters (I think chapter 3 is when Tanya first goes into that brain?): When Harry/PSI King/Helmut says something weird, it's a Jack Black reference.
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Chapter 2.02
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Tanya did not appear in the same place as before. Most entrants into Agent Mentalis' mind were directed to the central database; as nothing the Psychonauts had access to was more capable of storing and retrieving massive amounts of information than a mind; once server storage increases in utility she'll be sure to encourage them to switch before Agent Mentalis starts losing information to senility.
Instead, the area was dark and organic, the rounded terrain and struts reminding her more of a mineshaft than a hallway. Walls of brain matter were held back by surgical retractors, turning a simple walk into a neurosurgical spelunking trip.
After a relatively short but too long walk, a door that looked like the top of a complete brain blocked the path. In the center, a thinkerprint scanning device activated and verified her authorization, the two hemispheres of the brain-door splitting open with a wet ripping sound.
Tanya felt vaguely ill about the whole experience. Perhaps she had stored some of her more grisly memories a bit too deeply, if this bothered her so much. But then again, such things probably should provoke disgust, and being accustomed to gore and human viscera was not necessarily something desirable.
On the other side of the pink barrier was her destination: the dark archives. It was, as per the name, swallowed in darkness. Not only that, but it was cold, a bone-deep chill hanging in the air, lending it a thickness that made it difficult to breathe. It was simple to fix: she created a spark of fire and maintained it, a tiny bright star illuminating the room and providing warmth in equal measure.
The archives were a disorganized mess, hundreds of cages piled to create a maze,with dozens of memory vaults trapped within. Each vault had a rodent's water bottle and a similar bottle of food pellets.
Well, in comparison to the database or Tanya's own memories it was disorganized. In comparison to regular mental memory archives, it wasn't exceptionally so.
As Tanya walked through the halls of cages, the skittering of albino lab mice was the primary sound, always in the corner of her eye or at the edge of her auditory perception. "Okay, where would…" It occurred to her that unless Agent Mentalis literally labeled everything, she was going to have to dig through the memories until she did or did not find something related to 'Harry Heptadome'.
From Agent Mentalis' instructions, there has to be some kind of sorting system she could discern. She'll start by relying on her extra-sensory perception. Despite the appearance of her mental projection, she wasn't really seeing or hearing things in the same way that she would in the physical world. These were the senses that her experiences were filtered through so she could make sense of them, but the underlying data was not light and sound, but telepathic formations.
It was why a Psychonaut that understood this could discern the shape of a mind to locate hidden alcoves, or discern how much of a mind they had reviewed. She closed her eyes and kept walking, the shape of the maze still filtering into her knowledge despite theoretically having no way of determining it.
Ah, that explained why there were so many. Not all of the memory vaults were real. Some of them were decoys, traps for intruders who seek Agent Mentalis' designs. The nugget of wisdom that he allowed her to use as a graduation present provided everything she would need to know about those designs, the underlying principles that would be useful to her, so even if she found the secrets he was protecting she would ignore them.
Ignoring the vaults for now, not that she was sure how to open the doorless cages, whose design was secretly solid, she examined the rest of the area. Past the cage maze was an area with blackboards for walls, covered in data garbled into uselessness, only there for the aesthetic rather than containing any information. Within the area was a series of school desks. Peeking inside one of them, she found… several explosives, detonators, and a manifesto about the beauty of explosions. The book was supposedly authored by Adam, who was one of the other technicians, which made perfect sense. This must be where Agent Mentalis keeps his unflattering opinions of people. Adam was definitely going to blow up something he shouldn't one day.
As much as Tanya was tempted to try and find which of these dozens of desks represented her, she moved on. This wasn't what she was looking for. The next region was a crossroads, with three other areas to peruse. The first one, straight ahead, was some kind of machine with a hopper, the menace surrounding it seeming… sort of familiar? Tanya wasn't quite sure what it reminded her of.
The second region, to the left, was a place that was even more foreboding. Blood-stained hallways were papered over and blocked with mental cobwebs, but something about them immediately struck Tanya as fake. Was it the color? The thread count? The pattern? No, it looked exactly correct. While it wasn't entirely reliable, Tanya nevertheless trusted her psychic intuition on the matter.
The final region, to the right, instead depicted the hallways of a home, the walls littered with crayon drawings and paintings. Those must be childhood memories. Agent Mentalis was always very… artistic with his attitude towards the creation of new technologies, so seeing a focus on his artistic endeavors as a child made sense. That's not what she's looking for, though.
The best choice is likely past the fake cobwebs. Some lazy pyrokinesis burned them away as easily as paper, when real cobwebs would require a substantially more complex execution in order to clear.
Through the hallways was not the scent of blood, but instead the sterile smell of hospitals or laboratories. It seemed pretty normal, but then it occurred to Tanya that Agent Mentalis insisted on scented cleaning agents for his workstations. He didn't even care what kind, just that it smelled like anything but the smell she was experiencing right now. As someone who's overheard him arguing with procurement over that point, he felt quite strongly about that.
Voices echo out, barely within Tanya's perception. "Well I think it's an interesting experiment." Agent Mentalis said defensively. Tanya paused in her journey, paying close attention.
"It's cruel." Agent Boole retorted. "The same reason he's using rhesus monkeys specifically is exactly why he shouldn't do it. Social interaction is critical!"
"But how critical is it? What parts are important and which aren't?" Agent Mentalis said, imploring his audience to see what he sees.
"There's enough cruelty in the world we can learn from, we don't need to be adding to it." Insisted Agent Boole.
"Compton's right." Came the irascible voice of Agent Cruller. "This ain't the kind of thing you mess with."
"I've half a mind to pay them a visit and personally show them the error of their ways." Lucrecia's voice added.
"The knowledge that could be gained, though!" Agent Mentalis said, not backing down. "They're just monkeys, and this could be useful in treating feral children!"
"It's not worth it." Agent O'Peia retorted. "I see where you're coming from, Otto. I'll admit I'm a little split on the matter myself, but if Boolie thinks it's a step too far, I agree with him."
"Bob? Helmut?" Otto asked. "Are you on their side too?" Silence passed as, presumably, the two answered nonverbally. "...Fine. I won't say any more about it."
After a moment of silence, Tanya figured the memory was over and resumed walking. The mention of rhesus monkeys made Tanya think of the famous psychological experiment she read about when studying Mom's books on the subject. It was an experiment in social isolation, and it was very informative on matters of child development. Tanya didn't dispute that it was cruel to the monkeys in question, but… she wasn't entirely sure whether it was fair to call it worth it. On one hand, she has the benefit of hindsight, and the experiments were very informative. But without that context… Unlike some other famous psychological experiments, the scientific methodology was sound, the cruelty was literally the only complaint against it. Some parts could be argued to have been unnecessarily cruel, but that too benefits from hindsight.
Given the timelines… they matched up to when the Psychic Seven would have been at the Green Needle Gulch, performing their own unrelated experiments. Well, Helmut Fullbear's research into sensory requirements for mental health did intersect a fair bit with that work, but that was a tangent that Tanya didn't need right now.
Tanya turned the corner in the hallway and found a medical-themed torture chamber, with a man howling in pain as Agent Mentalis examined his removed brain, which was attached to his body via some kind of psychic tether. "This is really quite insightful." Agent Mentalis said in lightly accented Russian with a sadistic grin on his face. "So many tiny lines of energy exchange…
"Monster!" The man shouted back in the same language, much more comfortable with the tongue.
"Sacrifices must be made for science to advance." Agent Mentalis said, lightly changing his cadence to make it clear he was quoting someone. "That's what your Director said, when my friends confronted him about Project Hydrophobia." Agent Mentalis telekinetically brought a cattle prod to shock the man's foot. The pain signals visibly crackled through the psychic tether to the disembodied brain. "You agreed with that. You, personally, executed the project's tortures. It's not so fun when you're the one who has to make the sacrifices, isn't it?" After a pause, Agent Mentalis angrily repeated: "ISN'T IT?"
"N-no!" The man cried, the activity on the psychic tether spiking and warbling chaotically.
"You took my work, my friend's condition, my warning to the world, and used it as an INSTRUCTION MANUAL!" Agent Mentalis shouted. It was deeply disturbing to see such a calm and rational, if whimsical at times, individual lost in the throes of rage. "But, then again… one of the cornerstones of science is independent corroboration…" He chuckled darkly as the memory faded away.
Before Tanya's eyes, a piece of emotional baggage, a suitcase, formed. Censors came out of nowhere, the mental entities looking more like janitors than auditors. They picked the bag up and rushed past Tanya, who followed them.
Back at the crossroads, the censors were joined by their fellows, and the half dozen or so mental guards busied themselves tossing the baggage into the hopper of the mysterious machine. It promptly started spewing fire and making sounds like a wood chipper, clearly tearing the emotional baggage apart.
If Tanya was more than a talented amateur, she might have been able to guess what this represented. As it stood, she had no idea what in the world was happening. The censors ignored her, not even holding stamps as they patted each other on the back for a job well done. Bewildered, Tanya went back past the two other memories.
There weren't any other active memories that played without prompting, but the back rooms of this area included another massive computer, a match in model to the ones in the artificial memory storage that was the Psychonauts database. When she removed the punch card from the machine, the memory that had produced the emotional baggage faded away.
Focusing on the library of cards, Tanya queried the group with the concept of 'Harry Heptadome'. Five punch cards came out. Unable to discern accurately what each one did, Tanya had no choice but to review them one by one.
As expected, the first card brought out a memory of the Heptadome. Specifically, outside of it. "Ford?" Came Agent Mentalis' voice.
Agent Cruller appeared, and his image… glitched. He mumbled and stumbled out of the Heptadome. Agent Mentalis appeared beside him, eating a wrapped fast food hamburger. "We've been wondering where you've been. The funeral's today, you know. For Helmut?" Agent Mentalis asked. "I'm just here to pick up one of Helmut's hats, it's in less than an hour."
"Funeral?" Agent Cruller said, confused. "Right, yes, bodies to bury, eulogies to say." He nodded to himself, standing taller as his madness found something to fixate on. He teleported away, light warping strangely as he did.
"Ford? We never recovered… Oh forget it." Agent Mentalis said, huffing and taking another bite out of his hamburger. Tanya remembered that she probably should have gotten some food before entering Agent Mentalis' mind. "Hrm?" Agent Mentalis said after walking into the Heptadome, his mouth was too full for words.
Inside the dome was a glass jar, not one of the preservation capsules that they used today, but just a glass jar filled with what was presumably nutrient fluid, or whatever they used in place of that seventeen years ago. Agent Mentalis picked up the jar, checked his watch, and jogged away from the Heptadome, picking up the pace of his breakfast as he brought the jar to what was presumably the precursor of his current brain storage machine: a simple table with glass jars, instruments attached to each one giving readings on the status. Agent Mentalis opened one of the empty jars and placed Harry's brain inside, finishing his task by pouring some fresh fluid inside. "...I don't have time for this." He said before dashing outside of his office, checking his watch again.
The memory faded, with one more line from Agent Mentalis: "How could I have been so blind?"
Just like the last one, some emotional baggage spontaneously formed in the space the memory used to occupy, which was taken away by censors. What in the world? In the distance, the machine loudly started to tear the new baggage apart.
Still, she had four more cards. Hopefully she won't have to go through all five. This one was helpful in that it pinpointed the exact day that the brain was found, but it still didn't show the results of the tests.
The next memory was in the same lab that Harry was stored. Agent Mentalis had an extra-large batch of nutrient fluid in a pot that he was using to fill the familiar-looking spherical preservation capsules, before putting one of the two dozen or so brains he had into one, pouring the old fluid into what appeared to be a recycling machine. Agent O'Peia was there, handling the movement of the various capsules and jars. "Thanks for the assistance, Cassie." Agent Mentalis said. "These new capsules are much better than the primitive jars. Lighter, stronger, with integrated instruments and filters. Pretty soon, with enough data and with some of the other things I'm working on, I think I can set one up to work as a long-term body replacement."
Agent O'Peia hummed. "Your brain collection is creepy, but at least they're not awake in here. I'd be able to sense it."
"Definitely not." Agreed Agent Mentalis as he detached a small psitanium token from one jar and placed it in a slot the capsule had. "I made sure that each of these was ethically sourced, and had no higher brain functions. These tokens make sure I keep them straight, too. Honestly, I'm not sure the current setup could sustain them without some kind of sensory linkup. Which I'm still working on."
"I knew that working in medicine rather than writing would include some gross parts." Agent O'Peia admitted. "But… that one doesn't have a token." She said, pointing to one of the jars. "The one that has a little more mental energy than the others."
"Oh?" Agent Mentalis said, before inspecting the jar himself. "Oh no." He muttered, realizing the error. "Well, I suppose we should… look for one?" he said as he took out a flashlight and searched the area. "Maybe it just fell off. Wouldn't be the first time." In a slightly different cadence, quieter and softer, he added: "Although it's never happened without me noticing before."
After a quick search where they found nothing, Agent O'Paira huffed. "We don't have time to be turning things inside out. Check the rest of them to narrow it down and make a new one from your records."
"Right." Agent Mentalis replied. After checking all of the ones in the capsules, he continued transferring the brains, checking each tag as he moved them. When Harry was the only one left, he realized which one this was "Oh, this must be the John Doe I found." He said, having a realization.
"You found it?" Agent O'Peia asked, disgusted.
"It was in a jar in the Heptadome. If we didn't already check that Ford's brain was still in his body I'd have guessed it was his." Agent Mentalis said jokingly. "I don't quite remember the results of the testing, so I'll just name him… Harry. Harry Heptadome."
"You don't remember?" Agent O'Peia asked incredulously. "Or did you forget to do it in the first place? He could have been alive when you found him."
The memory shuddered at that accusation. "Cassie? But…" Agent Mentalis was speechless. "I'm sure I checked. Why wouldn't I have checked?"
"You could check right now." She asked. "Now that I'm paying attention, I think I might hear something from it."
"We don't have time for that." Agent Mentalis deflected. "You're imagining things, I'm sure. Even if he was alive when I found him… It's untested. The research would indicate that the mind would shut down under such extreme sensory deprivation. It's been months."
"Hrm. Do it as soon as you can, then." Agent O'Peia said, accepting his logic. "Now let's get out of here and move these to your new lab. We can send the grunts to pick up the rest of the brain juice."
The memory faded, with one more comment from Agent Mentalis. "I did check Harry, right? I must have. But… there was no tag. I would have made a tag if I checked. It just got lost. I definitely checked."
Tanya frowned. Was that enough information? She watched as yet again, censors came and carted the nascent emotional baggage into the machine that… processed it somehow. How did Agent Mentalis make his censors like that? She'll have to ask.
…She should watch the other ones.
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Tanya stretched as she returned to her mind. Her stomach grumbled at her blatant mistreatment of it.
"Did you find it?" Agent Mentalis asked as he put the finishing touches on some strange dog-like machine.
"Yes and no." Tanya replied. "...what is that?"
"Ah, I got distracted." He said sheepishly. He turned it on, and the dog robot started snarling and running around, biting invisible enemies. "Inventing calms me down, and I think you stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest in there."
"...So what is it?" Tanya asked.
"Ah, it's an aggression processor." Agent Mentalis replied. "I got pretty frustrated with the Communists out of nowhere, which made sense, they're the ones who did the things that made the government want this failsafe." Ah, that was Tanya's fault then. "So I channeled that anger productively. In a few hours, it'll finish processing that mental energy and it'll have a nice chunk of psitanium for me. It's very therapeutic."
"So whenever you feel an inconvenient emotion you just… stick it in a machine so you don't need to deal with it?" Tanya asked. It sounded so convenient.
"That's right. It's very convenient." Agent Mentalis said, echoing her thoughts. "Some people paint, some people shape clay to destress, but my way is more efficient. I've been thinking about making stress balls that can literally absorb your stress," Tanya immediately pictured how catastrophic it would be to have someone literally put their negative emotions in a rock that tended to broadcast those emotions and strengthen them in others. "but I'd need to figure out a way to make it not cascade into a feedback loop." Ah, he does see the problem.
"Right." Tanya said. "Well, you never did the initial scan on him." Tanya explained. "I found four separate memories of you realizing you forgot to do it." It was horrifically tragic, what happened to Harry… but it was also entirely in line with the Psychonaut's general incompetence, even if Agent Mentalis was usually an exception.
Agent Mentalis paused. "Oh no." He said, echoing his memories. "Are you sure?"
"You initially forgot because you had other business to get to." Tanya said. "You found it on the day of Helmut Fullbear's funeral."
Agent Mentlais was silent as he processed that information. "Yes, I remember that day now." Or manually retrieving the memory. "We spent that entire week figuring out what was wrong with Ford." Agent Mentalis leaned back as he told the story, the psychic focus he wore as an amulet flashing as he brought the data to mind. "We left him alone with Lucy to let him mourn while we searched for Helmut's body, and I didn't see him again until the day of the funeral. We knew he took a plane back home while we were still looking, but after three days we went back too and held the funeral." He winced at the next memory he retrieved. "He ran the funeral like he was a priest, then started tending to Cassie and Compton's bees and Bob's plants like a hired gardener." He said. "Eventually we worked up the courage to dive into his mind, but…" He shook his head. 'It was too dangerous. We gave up after… several attempts."
Tanya didn't blame them. The only reason she was able to make the man halfway stable was because of her experience with hazardous environments. If you didn't have the ability to dodge shrapnel, create barriers, or block intense heat all the while fighting his fully functional mental defenses… Even that assumes that his mind didn't settle down after thirteen years; chances were it was even harder to delve back then. Of course now he created a persona that was self-aware enough to acknowledge the other personalities, making it closer to sane than anything else, convinced that he was an administrator for the Psychonauts as a spy organization as long as he kept to his spy cave, despite the fact that he never held such a position.
Admittedly, according to Mom he actually does a good job from his office/spy cave. Insanity aside, the man was still the intelligent man that brought the other Psychonauts together and kept them more or less on one track for years.
"I'm not surprised that the stray brain got lost in the shuffle after a week like that." Agent Mentalis admitted. "I couldn't even remember my own name for an hour after my third attempt." He sighed ruefully. "It's been seventeen years, so if ol' Harry was alive, he'd have to be an incredibly willful and powerful telepath to still have higher brain function after that much sensory deprivation." He waved Tanya away. "Go ahead and use him, just do the assessment first. It's filed under 'Brain Donation Onboarding' in the database." He telekinetically fetched a more elaborate brain capsule from his storage room. "He's in a storage capsule now, this is a fully functional mobility capsule. Use the high-energy formulation of the nutrient fluid before you do the assessment. You'll need the sensory inputs to be linked up properly for your device, if you want to make your test as close to real conditions as possible. Check out the files on the mobility capsule before you begin."
His instructions finished, Agent Mentalis stood up and stretched his back, grunting and moaning as old men tended to do. "I'm going to call it early tonight, I think. Maybe visit Bob." Tanya knew that as a euphemism the Psychonauts used around children for 'go get drunk', although with one of the members of the Psychic Six, it might include an actual visit to Bob Zanotto. Either way, alcohol will be involved.
Well, time to get to work.
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According to the instructions, the assessment test, when the brain didn't wake up just from the stimulating nutrient formula the mobility capsule used, was best done in an environment that, in the event of cognition, would not panic the disembodied brain. Not knowing where any such place would be within the Motherlobe or attached facilities, Tanya decided to bring Harry home with her. It was time for dinner, after all. '
"Hey Tanya." Mary said, waving from the dinner table. Three of her friends were also at the table, enjoying slices of the lasagna that Mom prepared before she left and chorusing with their own greetings. "What's with the brain?"
"...is Mom home?" Tanya asked, sending out psychic feelers in the direction of Mom's room.
"No. She called though, and said she'd be back tomorrow. I totally thought you'd be home before now." Mary said. "We're having a sleepover!"
Tanya checked the clock. Yeah, it was far too late to send the girls home. Only one of them lived on base, after all. Sighing, Tanya looked at the dish on the stove. "You didn't leave any for me." She groused, glaring at the collected ten year old girls.
"Vicky wanted seconds!" Protested Mary. The aforementioned girl glared at Mary for throwing her under the bus. She was sensitive about her appetite, but Tanya saw her parents; She was admirably thin in comparison.
Tanya sighed, debating whether or not she felt like cooking something properly. Deciding against it, she put some water on for low-effort salt ramen, or as the Americans called it, ramen. Instead of using the stove, she used pyrokinesis to bring it to a boil extremely quickly. She repeated the feat on a pair of hard-boiled eggs that were in the fridge, warming them evenly to room temperature to enjoy. Finally, she poured herself a glass of milk, lacing it with a squirt of chocolate syrup for flavor. Hydrokinesis handled the stirring.
Within two minutes, she was sitting at the table with Mary's friends eating the unhealthy meal. "So, how was your day?" She asked.
"It was fine." Mary said. "What's with the brain?" She asked, pointing at Harry, who was currently in the sixth and final chair around the dinner table.
"That's Harry." Tanya explained unhelpfully, biting one of the eggs in half, chewing and swallowing before continuing. "He's going to be helping me test my Artificial Psychic Environment Simulation." The APES was kind of a silly acronym, but she'll think of something better when it comes time to market it.
"...is he alive?" Crystal asked. She was dressed fashionably and was the only one currently wearing makeup, which Tanya knew was a temporary state; she noticed the makeup kit on the way to the kitchen.
"Probably not." Tanya replied, taking a moment to slurp up more noodles. "Agent Mentalis lost his paperwork."
Amy, the third and final one of Mary's friends, blinked behind her thick glasses. "...How do you know his name is Harry then?" She asked.
"I don't." Tanya said simply, eating the other half of the hard boiled egg. "Agent Mentalis thought 'John Doe' was too impersonal."
"Okay… now why did you bring him home?" Mary asked.
"I was hungry." Tanya said. "Also, I needed a non-threatening environment to do the pre-testing assessment. Agent Mentalis' laboratory is… not that." There were a few meditation rooms in the Motherlobe that would be better, now that she thinks about it, but there wasn't food there.
Finishing off her meal, Tanya telekinetically took all the dishes and started to wash them over the sink. The Citizen was an excellent archetype to delegate menial tasks to, even if doing so made the rest of her a little lazier as a side-effect of isolating her own sense of responsibility into a separate partition of her mind. "Right, all of you, go change into your pajamas. Lights out at ten." Mary scrambled to her room, her friends going for the backpacks they had filled with supplies for the sleepover, along with the sleeping bags. Mary came out with Tanya's futon, which only existed because Mom thought it wise to have an alternative to Tanya's psychoisolation bed, if the air cycler broke or if Tanya just felt like not using it.
Once the dishes were put away and the girls were occupied playing around with Crystal's makeup kit, Tanya sat on her recliner and put Harry's capsule in her lap. "I'll be psychically occupied, Mary." She informed them. "I'll leave an archetype behind to pay attention if there's an emergency, you know the drill." Specifically, she knows how displeased Tanya would be if she got interrupted for anything short of an emergency. Tanya split the Soldier out to stay alert and placed a psychoportal in the mobility capsule's slot for one.
Projecting herself inside, Tanya had a feeling that this was not going to be as simple as Agent Mentalis implied.
Instead, the area was dark and organic, the rounded terrain and struts reminding her more of a mineshaft than a hallway. Walls of brain matter were held back by surgical retractors, turning a simple walk into a neurosurgical spelunking trip.
After a relatively short but too long walk, a door that looked like the top of a complete brain blocked the path. In the center, a thinkerprint scanning device activated and verified her authorization, the two hemispheres of the brain-door splitting open with a wet ripping sound.
Tanya felt vaguely ill about the whole experience. Perhaps she had stored some of her more grisly memories a bit too deeply, if this bothered her so much. But then again, such things probably should provoke disgust, and being accustomed to gore and human viscera was not necessarily something desirable.
On the other side of the pink barrier was her destination: the dark archives. It was, as per the name, swallowed in darkness. Not only that, but it was cold, a bone-deep chill hanging in the air, lending it a thickness that made it difficult to breathe. It was simple to fix: she created a spark of fire and maintained it, a tiny bright star illuminating the room and providing warmth in equal measure.
The archives were a disorganized mess, hundreds of cages piled to create a maze,with dozens of memory vaults trapped within. Each vault had a rodent's water bottle and a similar bottle of food pellets.
Well, in comparison to the database or Tanya's own memories it was disorganized. In comparison to regular mental memory archives, it wasn't exceptionally so.
As Tanya walked through the halls of cages, the skittering of albino lab mice was the primary sound, always in the corner of her eye or at the edge of her auditory perception. "Okay, where would…" It occurred to her that unless Agent Mentalis literally labeled everything, she was going to have to dig through the memories until she did or did not find something related to 'Harry Heptadome'.
From Agent Mentalis' instructions, there has to be some kind of sorting system she could discern. She'll start by relying on her extra-sensory perception. Despite the appearance of her mental projection, she wasn't really seeing or hearing things in the same way that she would in the physical world. These were the senses that her experiences were filtered through so she could make sense of them, but the underlying data was not light and sound, but telepathic formations.
It was why a Psychonaut that understood this could discern the shape of a mind to locate hidden alcoves, or discern how much of a mind they had reviewed. She closed her eyes and kept walking, the shape of the maze still filtering into her knowledge despite theoretically having no way of determining it.
Ah, that explained why there were so many. Not all of the memory vaults were real. Some of them were decoys, traps for intruders who seek Agent Mentalis' designs. The nugget of wisdom that he allowed her to use as a graduation present provided everything she would need to know about those designs, the underlying principles that would be useful to her, so even if she found the secrets he was protecting she would ignore them.
Ignoring the vaults for now, not that she was sure how to open the doorless cages, whose design was secretly solid, she examined the rest of the area. Past the cage maze was an area with blackboards for walls, covered in data garbled into uselessness, only there for the aesthetic rather than containing any information. Within the area was a series of school desks. Peeking inside one of them, she found… several explosives, detonators, and a manifesto about the beauty of explosions. The book was supposedly authored by Adam, who was one of the other technicians, which made perfect sense. This must be where Agent Mentalis keeps his unflattering opinions of people. Adam was definitely going to blow up something he shouldn't one day.
As much as Tanya was tempted to try and find which of these dozens of desks represented her, she moved on. This wasn't what she was looking for. The next region was a crossroads, with three other areas to peruse. The first one, straight ahead, was some kind of machine with a hopper, the menace surrounding it seeming… sort of familiar? Tanya wasn't quite sure what it reminded her of.
The second region, to the left, was a place that was even more foreboding. Blood-stained hallways were papered over and blocked with mental cobwebs, but something about them immediately struck Tanya as fake. Was it the color? The thread count? The pattern? No, it looked exactly correct. While it wasn't entirely reliable, Tanya nevertheless trusted her psychic intuition on the matter.
The final region, to the right, instead depicted the hallways of a home, the walls littered with crayon drawings and paintings. Those must be childhood memories. Agent Mentalis was always very… artistic with his attitude towards the creation of new technologies, so seeing a focus on his artistic endeavors as a child made sense. That's not what she's looking for, though.
The best choice is likely past the fake cobwebs. Some lazy pyrokinesis burned them away as easily as paper, when real cobwebs would require a substantially more complex execution in order to clear.
Through the hallways was not the scent of blood, but instead the sterile smell of hospitals or laboratories. It seemed pretty normal, but then it occurred to Tanya that Agent Mentalis insisted on scented cleaning agents for his workstations. He didn't even care what kind, just that it smelled like anything but the smell she was experiencing right now. As someone who's overheard him arguing with procurement over that point, he felt quite strongly about that.
Voices echo out, barely within Tanya's perception. "Well I think it's an interesting experiment." Agent Mentalis said defensively. Tanya paused in her journey, paying close attention.
"It's cruel." Agent Boole retorted. "The same reason he's using rhesus monkeys specifically is exactly why he shouldn't do it. Social interaction is critical!"
"But how critical is it? What parts are important and which aren't?" Agent Mentalis said, imploring his audience to see what he sees.
"There's enough cruelty in the world we can learn from, we don't need to be adding to it." Insisted Agent Boole.
"Compton's right." Came the irascible voice of Agent Cruller. "This ain't the kind of thing you mess with."
"I've half a mind to pay them a visit and personally show them the error of their ways." Lucrecia's voice added.
"The knowledge that could be gained, though!" Agent Mentalis said, not backing down. "They're just monkeys, and this could be useful in treating feral children!"
"It's not worth it." Agent O'Peia retorted. "I see where you're coming from, Otto. I'll admit I'm a little split on the matter myself, but if Boolie thinks it's a step too far, I agree with him."
"Bob? Helmut?" Otto asked. "Are you on their side too?" Silence passed as, presumably, the two answered nonverbally. "...Fine. I won't say any more about it."
After a moment of silence, Tanya figured the memory was over and resumed walking. The mention of rhesus monkeys made Tanya think of the famous psychological experiment she read about when studying Mom's books on the subject. It was an experiment in social isolation, and it was very informative on matters of child development. Tanya didn't dispute that it was cruel to the monkeys in question, but… she wasn't entirely sure whether it was fair to call it worth it. On one hand, she has the benefit of hindsight, and the experiments were very informative. But without that context… Unlike some other famous psychological experiments, the scientific methodology was sound, the cruelty was literally the only complaint against it. Some parts could be argued to have been unnecessarily cruel, but that too benefits from hindsight.
Given the timelines… they matched up to when the Psychic Seven would have been at the Green Needle Gulch, performing their own unrelated experiments. Well, Helmut Fullbear's research into sensory requirements for mental health did intersect a fair bit with that work, but that was a tangent that Tanya didn't need right now.
Tanya turned the corner in the hallway and found a medical-themed torture chamber, with a man howling in pain as Agent Mentalis examined his removed brain, which was attached to his body via some kind of psychic tether. "This is really quite insightful." Agent Mentalis said in lightly accented Russian with a sadistic grin on his face. "So many tiny lines of energy exchange…
"Monster!" The man shouted back in the same language, much more comfortable with the tongue.
"Sacrifices must be made for science to advance." Agent Mentalis said, lightly changing his cadence to make it clear he was quoting someone. "That's what your Director said, when my friends confronted him about Project Hydrophobia." Agent Mentalis telekinetically brought a cattle prod to shock the man's foot. The pain signals visibly crackled through the psychic tether to the disembodied brain. "You agreed with that. You, personally, executed the project's tortures. It's not so fun when you're the one who has to make the sacrifices, isn't it?" After a pause, Agent Mentalis angrily repeated: "ISN'T IT?"
"N-no!" The man cried, the activity on the psychic tether spiking and warbling chaotically.
"You took my work, my friend's condition, my warning to the world, and used it as an INSTRUCTION MANUAL!" Agent Mentalis shouted. It was deeply disturbing to see such a calm and rational, if whimsical at times, individual lost in the throes of rage. "But, then again… one of the cornerstones of science is independent corroboration…" He chuckled darkly as the memory faded away.
Before Tanya's eyes, a piece of emotional baggage, a suitcase, formed. Censors came out of nowhere, the mental entities looking more like janitors than auditors. They picked the bag up and rushed past Tanya, who followed them.
Back at the crossroads, the censors were joined by their fellows, and the half dozen or so mental guards busied themselves tossing the baggage into the hopper of the mysterious machine. It promptly started spewing fire and making sounds like a wood chipper, clearly tearing the emotional baggage apart.
If Tanya was more than a talented amateur, she might have been able to guess what this represented. As it stood, she had no idea what in the world was happening. The censors ignored her, not even holding stamps as they patted each other on the back for a job well done. Bewildered, Tanya went back past the two other memories.
There weren't any other active memories that played without prompting, but the back rooms of this area included another massive computer, a match in model to the ones in the artificial memory storage that was the Psychonauts database. When she removed the punch card from the machine, the memory that had produced the emotional baggage faded away.
Focusing on the library of cards, Tanya queried the group with the concept of 'Harry Heptadome'. Five punch cards came out. Unable to discern accurately what each one did, Tanya had no choice but to review them one by one.
As expected, the first card brought out a memory of the Heptadome. Specifically, outside of it. "Ford?" Came Agent Mentalis' voice.
Agent Cruller appeared, and his image… glitched. He mumbled and stumbled out of the Heptadome. Agent Mentalis appeared beside him, eating a wrapped fast food hamburger. "We've been wondering where you've been. The funeral's today, you know. For Helmut?" Agent Mentalis asked. "I'm just here to pick up one of Helmut's hats, it's in less than an hour."
"Funeral?" Agent Cruller said, confused. "Right, yes, bodies to bury, eulogies to say." He nodded to himself, standing taller as his madness found something to fixate on. He teleported away, light warping strangely as he did.
"Ford? We never recovered… Oh forget it." Agent Mentalis said, huffing and taking another bite out of his hamburger. Tanya remembered that she probably should have gotten some food before entering Agent Mentalis' mind. "Hrm?" Agent Mentalis said after walking into the Heptadome, his mouth was too full for words.
Inside the dome was a glass jar, not one of the preservation capsules that they used today, but just a glass jar filled with what was presumably nutrient fluid, or whatever they used in place of that seventeen years ago. Agent Mentalis picked up the jar, checked his watch, and jogged away from the Heptadome, picking up the pace of his breakfast as he brought the jar to what was presumably the precursor of his current brain storage machine: a simple table with glass jars, instruments attached to each one giving readings on the status. Agent Mentalis opened one of the empty jars and placed Harry's brain inside, finishing his task by pouring some fresh fluid inside. "...I don't have time for this." He said before dashing outside of his office, checking his watch again.
The memory faded, with one more line from Agent Mentalis: "How could I have been so blind?"
Just like the last one, some emotional baggage spontaneously formed in the space the memory used to occupy, which was taken away by censors. What in the world? In the distance, the machine loudly started to tear the new baggage apart.
Still, she had four more cards. Hopefully she won't have to go through all five. This one was helpful in that it pinpointed the exact day that the brain was found, but it still didn't show the results of the tests.
The next memory was in the same lab that Harry was stored. Agent Mentalis had an extra-large batch of nutrient fluid in a pot that he was using to fill the familiar-looking spherical preservation capsules, before putting one of the two dozen or so brains he had into one, pouring the old fluid into what appeared to be a recycling machine. Agent O'Peia was there, handling the movement of the various capsules and jars. "Thanks for the assistance, Cassie." Agent Mentalis said. "These new capsules are much better than the primitive jars. Lighter, stronger, with integrated instruments and filters. Pretty soon, with enough data and with some of the other things I'm working on, I think I can set one up to work as a long-term body replacement."
Agent O'Peia hummed. "Your brain collection is creepy, but at least they're not awake in here. I'd be able to sense it."
"Definitely not." Agreed Agent Mentalis as he detached a small psitanium token from one jar and placed it in a slot the capsule had. "I made sure that each of these was ethically sourced, and had no higher brain functions. These tokens make sure I keep them straight, too. Honestly, I'm not sure the current setup could sustain them without some kind of sensory linkup. Which I'm still working on."
"I knew that working in medicine rather than writing would include some gross parts." Agent O'Peia admitted. "But… that one doesn't have a token." She said, pointing to one of the jars. "The one that has a little more mental energy than the others."
"Oh?" Agent Mentalis said, before inspecting the jar himself. "Oh no." He muttered, realizing the error. "Well, I suppose we should… look for one?" he said as he took out a flashlight and searched the area. "Maybe it just fell off. Wouldn't be the first time." In a slightly different cadence, quieter and softer, he added: "Although it's never happened without me noticing before."
After a quick search where they found nothing, Agent O'Paira huffed. "We don't have time to be turning things inside out. Check the rest of them to narrow it down and make a new one from your records."
"Right." Agent Mentalis replied. After checking all of the ones in the capsules, he continued transferring the brains, checking each tag as he moved them. When Harry was the only one left, he realized which one this was "Oh, this must be the John Doe I found." He said, having a realization.
"You found it?" Agent O'Peia asked, disgusted.
"It was in a jar in the Heptadome. If we didn't already check that Ford's brain was still in his body I'd have guessed it was his." Agent Mentalis said jokingly. "I don't quite remember the results of the testing, so I'll just name him… Harry. Harry Heptadome."
"You don't remember?" Agent O'Peia asked incredulously. "Or did you forget to do it in the first place? He could have been alive when you found him."
The memory shuddered at that accusation. "Cassie? But…" Agent Mentalis was speechless. "I'm sure I checked. Why wouldn't I have checked?"
"You could check right now." She asked. "Now that I'm paying attention, I think I might hear something from it."
"We don't have time for that." Agent Mentalis deflected. "You're imagining things, I'm sure. Even if he was alive when I found him… It's untested. The research would indicate that the mind would shut down under such extreme sensory deprivation. It's been months."
"Hrm. Do it as soon as you can, then." Agent O'Peia said, accepting his logic. "Now let's get out of here and move these to your new lab. We can send the grunts to pick up the rest of the brain juice."
The memory faded, with one more comment from Agent Mentalis. "I did check Harry, right? I must have. But… there was no tag. I would have made a tag if I checked. It just got lost. I definitely checked."
Tanya frowned. Was that enough information? She watched as yet again, censors came and carted the nascent emotional baggage into the machine that… processed it somehow. How did Agent Mentalis make his censors like that? She'll have to ask.
…She should watch the other ones.
---------------------
Tanya stretched as she returned to her mind. Her stomach grumbled at her blatant mistreatment of it.
"Did you find it?" Agent Mentalis asked as he put the finishing touches on some strange dog-like machine.
"Yes and no." Tanya replied. "...what is that?"
"Ah, I got distracted." He said sheepishly. He turned it on, and the dog robot started snarling and running around, biting invisible enemies. "Inventing calms me down, and I think you stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest in there."
"...So what is it?" Tanya asked.
"Ah, it's an aggression processor." Agent Mentalis replied. "I got pretty frustrated with the Communists out of nowhere, which made sense, they're the ones who did the things that made the government want this failsafe." Ah, that was Tanya's fault then. "So I channeled that anger productively. In a few hours, it'll finish processing that mental energy and it'll have a nice chunk of psitanium for me. It's very therapeutic."
"So whenever you feel an inconvenient emotion you just… stick it in a machine so you don't need to deal with it?" Tanya asked. It sounded so convenient.
"That's right. It's very convenient." Agent Mentalis said, echoing her thoughts. "Some people paint, some people shape clay to destress, but my way is more efficient. I've been thinking about making stress balls that can literally absorb your stress," Tanya immediately pictured how catastrophic it would be to have someone literally put their negative emotions in a rock that tended to broadcast those emotions and strengthen them in others. "but I'd need to figure out a way to make it not cascade into a feedback loop." Ah, he does see the problem.
"Right." Tanya said. "Well, you never did the initial scan on him." Tanya explained. "I found four separate memories of you realizing you forgot to do it." It was horrifically tragic, what happened to Harry… but it was also entirely in line with the Psychonaut's general incompetence, even if Agent Mentalis was usually an exception.
Agent Mentalis paused. "Oh no." He said, echoing his memories. "Are you sure?"
"You initially forgot because you had other business to get to." Tanya said. "You found it on the day of Helmut Fullbear's funeral."
Agent Mentlais was silent as he processed that information. "Yes, I remember that day now." Or manually retrieving the memory. "We spent that entire week figuring out what was wrong with Ford." Agent Mentalis leaned back as he told the story, the psychic focus he wore as an amulet flashing as he brought the data to mind. "We left him alone with Lucy to let him mourn while we searched for Helmut's body, and I didn't see him again until the day of the funeral. We knew he took a plane back home while we were still looking, but after three days we went back too and held the funeral." He winced at the next memory he retrieved. "He ran the funeral like he was a priest, then started tending to Cassie and Compton's bees and Bob's plants like a hired gardener." He said. "Eventually we worked up the courage to dive into his mind, but…" He shook his head. 'It was too dangerous. We gave up after… several attempts."
Tanya didn't blame them. The only reason she was able to make the man halfway stable was because of her experience with hazardous environments. If you didn't have the ability to dodge shrapnel, create barriers, or block intense heat all the while fighting his fully functional mental defenses… Even that assumes that his mind didn't settle down after thirteen years; chances were it was even harder to delve back then. Of course now he created a persona that was self-aware enough to acknowledge the other personalities, making it closer to sane than anything else, convinced that he was an administrator for the Psychonauts as a spy organization as long as he kept to his spy cave, despite the fact that he never held such a position.
Admittedly, according to Mom he actually does a good job from his office/spy cave. Insanity aside, the man was still the intelligent man that brought the other Psychonauts together and kept them more or less on one track for years.
"I'm not surprised that the stray brain got lost in the shuffle after a week like that." Agent Mentalis admitted. "I couldn't even remember my own name for an hour after my third attempt." He sighed ruefully. "It's been seventeen years, so if ol' Harry was alive, he'd have to be an incredibly willful and powerful telepath to still have higher brain function after that much sensory deprivation." He waved Tanya away. "Go ahead and use him, just do the assessment first. It's filed under 'Brain Donation Onboarding' in the database." He telekinetically fetched a more elaborate brain capsule from his storage room. "He's in a storage capsule now, this is a fully functional mobility capsule. Use the high-energy formulation of the nutrient fluid before you do the assessment. You'll need the sensory inputs to be linked up properly for your device, if you want to make your test as close to real conditions as possible. Check out the files on the mobility capsule before you begin."
His instructions finished, Agent Mentalis stood up and stretched his back, grunting and moaning as old men tended to do. "I'm going to call it early tonight, I think. Maybe visit Bob." Tanya knew that as a euphemism the Psychonauts used around children for 'go get drunk', although with one of the members of the Psychic Six, it might include an actual visit to Bob Zanotto. Either way, alcohol will be involved.
Well, time to get to work.
---------------------
According to the instructions, the assessment test, when the brain didn't wake up just from the stimulating nutrient formula the mobility capsule used, was best done in an environment that, in the event of cognition, would not panic the disembodied brain. Not knowing where any such place would be within the Motherlobe or attached facilities, Tanya decided to bring Harry home with her. It was time for dinner, after all. '
"Hey Tanya." Mary said, waving from the dinner table. Three of her friends were also at the table, enjoying slices of the lasagna that Mom prepared before she left and chorusing with their own greetings. "What's with the brain?"
"...is Mom home?" Tanya asked, sending out psychic feelers in the direction of Mom's room.
"No. She called though, and said she'd be back tomorrow. I totally thought you'd be home before now." Mary said. "We're having a sleepover!"
Tanya checked the clock. Yeah, it was far too late to send the girls home. Only one of them lived on base, after all. Sighing, Tanya looked at the dish on the stove. "You didn't leave any for me." She groused, glaring at the collected ten year old girls.
"Vicky wanted seconds!" Protested Mary. The aforementioned girl glared at Mary for throwing her under the bus. She was sensitive about her appetite, but Tanya saw her parents; She was admirably thin in comparison.
Tanya sighed, debating whether or not she felt like cooking something properly. Deciding against it, she put some water on for low-effort salt ramen, or as the Americans called it, ramen. Instead of using the stove, she used pyrokinesis to bring it to a boil extremely quickly. She repeated the feat on a pair of hard-boiled eggs that were in the fridge, warming them evenly to room temperature to enjoy. Finally, she poured herself a glass of milk, lacing it with a squirt of chocolate syrup for flavor. Hydrokinesis handled the stirring.
Within two minutes, she was sitting at the table with Mary's friends eating the unhealthy meal. "So, how was your day?" She asked.
"It was fine." Mary said. "What's with the brain?" She asked, pointing at Harry, who was currently in the sixth and final chair around the dinner table.
"That's Harry." Tanya explained unhelpfully, biting one of the eggs in half, chewing and swallowing before continuing. "He's going to be helping me test my Artificial Psychic Environment Simulation." The APES was kind of a silly acronym, but she'll think of something better when it comes time to market it.
"...is he alive?" Crystal asked. She was dressed fashionably and was the only one currently wearing makeup, which Tanya knew was a temporary state; she noticed the makeup kit on the way to the kitchen.
"Probably not." Tanya replied, taking a moment to slurp up more noodles. "Agent Mentalis lost his paperwork."
Amy, the third and final one of Mary's friends, blinked behind her thick glasses. "...How do you know his name is Harry then?" She asked.
"I don't." Tanya said simply, eating the other half of the hard boiled egg. "Agent Mentalis thought 'John Doe' was too impersonal."
"Okay… now why did you bring him home?" Mary asked.
"I was hungry." Tanya said. "Also, I needed a non-threatening environment to do the pre-testing assessment. Agent Mentalis' laboratory is… not that." There were a few meditation rooms in the Motherlobe that would be better, now that she thinks about it, but there wasn't food there.
Finishing off her meal, Tanya telekinetically took all the dishes and started to wash them over the sink. The Citizen was an excellent archetype to delegate menial tasks to, even if doing so made the rest of her a little lazier as a side-effect of isolating her own sense of responsibility into a separate partition of her mind. "Right, all of you, go change into your pajamas. Lights out at ten." Mary scrambled to her room, her friends going for the backpacks they had filled with supplies for the sleepover, along with the sleeping bags. Mary came out with Tanya's futon, which only existed because Mom thought it wise to have an alternative to Tanya's psychoisolation bed, if the air cycler broke or if Tanya just felt like not using it.
Once the dishes were put away and the girls were occupied playing around with Crystal's makeup kit, Tanya sat on her recliner and put Harry's capsule in her lap. "I'll be psychically occupied, Mary." She informed them. "I'll leave an archetype behind to pay attention if there's an emergency, you know the drill." Specifically, she knows how displeased Tanya would be if she got interrupted for anything short of an emergency. Tanya split the Soldier out to stay alert and placed a psychoportal in the mobility capsule's slot for one.
Projecting herself inside, Tanya had a feeling that this was not going to be as simple as Agent Mentalis implied.
- Location
- United States
Time to dive into the brain of an old soviet scientist.
- Location
- Argentina
Yeah, poor brain guy.
Jiopaba
Eat Lightning; Crap Success.
No...? Time to go visit an old traveling musician. That's Helmut Fullbear's mind.
- Location
- United States
I'm just disappointed that they don't end up slapping his old helmet onto the mobility jar he's in at the end of the game. It would be such a neat piece of comedic effect and a character identifying piece so you don't just need to rely on who he's next to in order to recognize him on sight. Imagine Tanya bring the jar up to Mentalis after this and it has his helmet and a Groucho Marx style glasses with his mustache on it.
Chapter 2.03
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Darkness. Tanya wasn't entirely certain what to expect, but she expected the sensory input that the capsule should be sending to the brain to have some kind of effect. Perhaps… Harry had some kind of sensory disorder? It would mean the automatic synchronization wouldn't function, and would require some additional assistance. From the inside of the brain.
Lovely, she'll have to figure out how to hypnotize a corpse brain to reach out and link with the capsule. Unless… step 1 of the cognitive assessment: announce yourself. "Hello?" She shouted out into the void. "Is anyone here?"
Wait, was that a source of light? …Behind! Tanya spun around and beheld… a small ball of light. About the size of an eyeball, if she had to guess. Maybe a bit larger. "Greetings." She said to the… consciousness? She'll act as if it is, as if it isn't, no one is here to see her embarrass herself. "Can you speak?" She asked.
The ball seemed to flicker in response to her words, as if they provoked some tiny amount of neural activity. After several seconds of observing it flickering, she opened her mouth to say something more but was interrupted by the ball suddenly beginning to make noise.
It was gibberish at first, but after about twenty seconds it started to become somewhat intelligible. "Slippity, sloppity slaw, slow, suh- SORRY!" He eventually got out, his voice masculine as he wheezed in effort at the accomplishment. "Sorry, it's just been so long since I've said anything." The ball of light explained, abashed for his rudeness. This didn't last long, as his attention span was completely exhausted by that feat, and he immediately moved to blithering on about literally everything. "Is that my voice? Is that what I sound like? Why do you sound so much different than me? Who are you?"
"I am Tanya Dosva." Tanya said formally. "Psychonauts technician. Who are you?"
"Words? You're saying WORDS to me?" The ball of light said in wonder. "This is amazing! Haha ha!" He startled at his own laugh. "What was that non-word sound I just made?" Oh boy. "Am I dying?" After a pause, he chuckled again. "No, I feel alive, very alive!"
The ball of light continued to blather on, ignoring Tanya in his own contemplations. 'Who are you? Who am I? Am I everything? Am I god?"
"Absolutely not." Tanya said loudly, shutting down his monologue. "You are a previously unidentified brain in possession of the Psychonauts." She explained.
"I am not ready for words that big yet." The ball of light said, cringing back at Tanya's vehemence. "But I am definitely feeling like the universe, or some kind of cosmic oneness." Well, given that this brain was unbodied in the early sixties, the fact that it was a hippie really shouldn't surprise her.
"You're suffering from extreme sensory deprivation." Tanya deadpanned. "Fortunately, you should have access to some sensory data soon. Allow me." She plucked the ball of light from the air, and placed it on her forehead. Slowly, a bit at a time, she passed on the instructions on how to link up to the mobility capsule's sensorium.
"Woah, that's trippy." The ball of light said. "Now that's some cosmic oneness."
"If you link up with the mobility capsule now, you'll see that the universe is much larger than this mental void." Tanya said tiredly. Did he have to put it that way?
"Right, right. Now…" He paused. "You know, you'd make a kick-ass soprano." He said. Oh? Was he musically inclined?
"I've only ever been a treble." Tanya explained. "I haven't sung in any kind of formal context in over a decade." The last time she sang in a non-shower, non-karaoke context was in the church choir, twenty-five years ago.
"That's a damn shame." The ball of light said sadly. "You sound like you'd have an awesome range, too." He wasn't wrong…
"I'll tell you what." Tanya said, irritated with the distractions. "If you manage to link up to the ball, I'll help you test your hearing with a nice song." She knows a few…
"Sounds like a plan!" He said gleefully. Idly, Tanya instructed her archetype to minimize the sensitivity of the artificial senses.
The darkness suddenly lit up slowly, streaks of color appearing in the sky before melting into a blanket of stars. Each streak of color was accompanied by a clear note of music, with the stars heralded by what may or may not have been a guitar solo but with wind chimes. "Woah…" The ball of light said. "Where am I?"
"You're in my home." Tanya explained. "That's vision…" and sound?
"Okay, next is…" He paused. Nothing else changed. "It's not working!" He cried in despair.
"Try the next one." Tanya instructed.
"Right." The ball of light said. After about two minutes, he trembled again. "Nothing!"
"Let's get back to that later." Tanya said. "What do you see?"
"Colors." The ball of light said immediately. "Trippy ones. Yellows and oranges and pinks… is that a bit of blue?" As he named the colors, sounds echoed around his mind, and the mention of blue created a scent that Tanya couldn't quite identify.
Hrm. "It appears that your vision is not calibrated properly." Tanya suggested. "If we resolve that issue, perhaps other senses will become available."
"Vision!" The ball said angrily. "Always bossing everyone around." After a moment, he grumpily added: "Although he did always get everyone pointed in the same direction: Forwards."
Tanya looked around. Wait, was that… a silhouette? It was blobby and indistinct, but it was clearly something, rather than the nothing everything else was. A memory? Upon further review, there were several such blobs. Interesting… "I don't have a lot of time left until I need to go to bed." Tanya said, checking her watch. Nine-thirty… She'll definitely need to prompt them if they're going to go to sleep on time. "I'm going to try turning up the visual sensitivity; remain calm while I do so." She issued appropriate instructions to her archetype.
The stars in the sky flashed, colors spilling around the sky, with musical tones echoing with each burst. More than that, Tanya felt the textures of the colors and experienced the flavor and odor of each one, all five of her basic senses stimulated by what should be purely visual information. Wait, wasn't there that neurological disorder around senses getting mixed up? Synesthesia? That could be what's happening. Was this natural, or a side-effect of the isolation causing some crossed wires?
"Ah! Bright!" The ball of light shouted ironically. "Loud! I'm not ready for this, nononono!" Quickly, Tanya ordered her archetype to shut off the ball's psitanium camera.
"Remain calm." Tanya ordered. "You are experiencing sensory overload. I'm shutting it off now. Do not…"It was too late. The riotous lights and cacophonous sounds manifested into a beast made of an animal skull puppeted around by a body that sparked and fuzzed like television static, trailed by an aura that shifted into all the colors of the visual spectrum. "...have a panic attack."
Panic attacks were, by and large, considered the most dangerous mental entities of the 'standard' varieties. That is, the ones that didn't have any kind of logos backing them; they were pure emotion, not the manifestation of nightmares or anything more hazardous. Bad Moods and Judges competed with them, but of the three, the panic attacks were the hardest to deal with for the 'average' psychonaut.
For Tanya? It was just a matter of waiting for it to commit to an attack so she could blow its head off with a PSI blast that she charged up while waiting. They were fast enough to dodge them, but they couldn't do that and attack. Her passive barrier handled the projectile without much issue, although she'd rate the strength of the impact as equivalent to some twelve gauge buckshot. Reasonably powerful, but not enough to break her shield.
Like a slap to the face, or perhaps a splash of water, the ball of light immediately calmed down when the panic attack was dealt with, his fear fizzling out without the entity sustaining it. The mental environment was dark again. "This is nice." He said in a whisper. "Quiet." That was a sentiment she could sympathize with. Her psychoisolation bed beckoned her.
Tanya brought her own voice to a whisper. "I think that's enough for tonight."
"You're leaving?" The ball of light replied, panicked. "But… when will you come back? It's been thousands of years since I've last spoken to someone!" Ah, of course. His sense of time should be all out of sorts.
"Actually, it's been closer to seventeen years." Tanya corrected. "That's when your brain was found, and I doubt you were removed from your body for more than a few days before then." Tanya assumed Agent Cruller had brought him there, from the evidence. Why the man decided to bring a brain to the Heptadome before effectively committing suicide Tanya didn't know, but given that the nutrient fluid was only accessible to the Psychic Six at that time, there weren't any other suspects.
Really, it could have been anyone. The pilot of the plane he took, perhaps? Was Agent Cruller attempting to silence a witness to the fact that he brought Lucrecia home? That lined up, if you assume the reason Agent Cruller went incommunicado was because he was trying to conceal Lucrecia's survival from the other members of the Psychic Six.
It's not important. What is… "I'll give you my watch." Tanya conceded. "It's linked up psychically to a real one, so it will inform you of the objective passing of time." There was no theoretical limit as to how many psychic links the pocket watch could maintain, but it had range limits in the real world. "Do your best to remember things, I'll check in in the morning but I also have work to do. Once that's over, we'll try and get your vision re-aligned."
"But, but… how will I survive?" The ball of light asked.
"If you'd like, I could turn the vision back on at a low setting so you could attempt to re-align it overnight." Tanya offered.
"NO!" The ball of light said, panicked. "No, that's fine. This is good. Quiet."
"I'll talk in the morning, then." Tanya said as she brought out her smelling salts. She's far past the need to have a physical copy of them on her person, although naturally she still had some stashed away.
Ugh, it stinks…
---------------------
"Truth or dare?" Were the first words that Tanya heard once she was back in the physical world.
Mary seemed torn. "Uh… dare!"
Amy adjusted her glasses and chuckled darkly. "I dare you… to kiss your sister!" She declared, pointing straight at Tanya's recliner.
"Not in three lifetimes." Tanya said immediately, starting to stand up and stretch.
"Aw, she's awake." Crystal said, disappointed.
Mary sighed in relief. "Ah, did your thing go well?"
Tanya shook her head. "His sensorium is not functioning properly; that is a necessity for my tests." She explained, deliberately leaving out the part where 'Harry' was actually alive. Mary would want to get involved, otherwise. "I'll need to do some intensive work on it tomorrow." She took her pocket watch out of her jacket pocket and placed it on top of the mobility capsule. "In the meantime, don't think I didn't notice that you all neglected to brush your teeth when you changed clothes." Tanya gave one of her officer grins to the collected girls. "Here I was thinking you all were responsible enough to stay up a little later than ten. Shows what I know."
The girls whined and moaned at the accusation, but Tanya pointed at the bathroom. "Wipe that grease off of your faces while you're at it. You don't want to sleep with makeup on." Tanya can't actually say this from experience, but it was one of the tips that Mom gave her when she insisted that Tanya at least know how to use the stuff. Even if the thought of prettying up properly still made her chest seize in a complicated knot of emotion that even the best therapy the Psychonauts had couldn't, or rather wouldn't, fully excise.
…Did her men ever notice how wide of a berth she always gave the fronts of trains? She knew Visha noticed; it was in one of the memories she had to file away.
Once the girls were properly ready for bed, Tanya did her own evening routine, changing into her kitsune pajamas, brushing her teeth, and checking on the condition of her psychoisolation bed's air recycler. Mary called her regular checks paranoid, but prudence and caution were not negative personality traits, as long as they didn't get out of hand. Tanya could never get to sleep without checking on the device that ensured that she wasn't going to wake up suffocating in the middle of the night. Or worse, wake up far away from this life, from her family and friends.
It was a strange thought, to consider that there probably would never be a 'never wake up'. Only the next life. It was a bit existentially terrifying, but she was as safe as was possible: important enough to be protected, not vulnerable to random actors, but also not important enough to be deliberately targeted. Strong enough that only organized efforts on large scales or actions by a limited number of powerful people could threaten her. She had time to come to terms with that reality.
Settling Harry's capsule down on Mary's bed (she wasn't using it tonight, after all) and disabling all of the mobility features was a simple matter, and Tanya sequestered herself within her psychoisolation bed after one last broadcast of love to Mom, with only thoughts such as these to keep her company.
---------------------
"What an unusual dream…" Tanya muttered as she opened her psychoisolation box. It was like a tie-dye wonderland, a song and dance number with the details slipping from her awareness and memory as she thought of them. She still caught herself being surprised at having non-nightmare dreams in this life, but this was odd even by her standards.
Connecting to the mobility capsule telepathically, she sent a message to the mysterious 'Harry Heptadome'. "Good morning. I hope the night wasn't too harsh on you."
A feeling of shock echoed back from the telepathic link. After a few moments, a reply arrived just as Tanya finished stuffing her still-clean bedding back inside the confined space she had just left. "I don't know whether to be relieved that you're real or worried that you wake up on your own at seven in the morning." He replied, half-jokingly.
Tanya sent her incredulity over the link. "Have you ever had a proper job? Or even went to school?" Hopefully, the conversation will prove to be mentally stimulating to him, and make her job easier down the road.
"...I don't remember." He admitted. "Are you sure I'm not God?"
"Extremely." Tanya deadpanned. "I've met self-proclaimed gods before, you're much more pleasant company. Also, as I may have explained, you are a brain in a jar. If I wasn't busy in the shower, I could look at it and see how ordinary your pink matter is." One of the many differences in neurology in this world in comparison to the others was the fact that brains were pink instead of gray, and the vocabulary reflected this.
"Oh." After a moment of digesting Tanya's comment, he replied in a much better mood. "Thanks!" It was flattery, but flattery is one of the best tools one can use to cultivate connections, if wielded properly. "I guess I am just a guy with a spotty memory, huh?"
"The fact that you can still think at all is impressive at this point." Tanya assured him. "Once we've straightened out your sensorium, it will be much easier for your associative network to start triggering connections and start bringing the rest of your mind online." One of the things that kind of disturbed Tanya about psychic therapy is just how little knowledge was actually required to help. It was why the Psychonauts could work wonders in mental health just from a training course that was less than a year long. Mom's nursing certification took longer than that.
With that context, the fact that True Psychic Tales distinctly avoided showing the inner workings of telepathic intrusion made perfect sense.
"I'm not sure I like the idea of being straightened out." Harry sent, his unease apparent in his tone. "Has a bad vibe."
Really? What an odd word association. Well, she supposes she shouldn't throw stones about such things. Time for some rhetorical repackaging. "We just need to get all your senses on the same wavelength. Get you into the groove of things." Tanya sent back.
That worked; the unease vanished. "Now that's more like it!" Harry replied. "When can we start?"
"Not for a while." Tanya admitted. "I have to go to work, and while I can maybe squeeze in a half hour helping you beforehand, I suspect I'll need more time than that." Wait… she forgot to exercise yesterday. Drat.
"Oh." Harry replied, disappointed. "What do you do? Maybe I can help?"
"What do you know about psitanium?" Tanya asked idly as she finished drying off and moved on to brushing her hair.
"Don't lick it." Was Harry's immediate reply. Well, he wasn't wrong… psitanium tended to break down into mental energy in the presence of bodily fluids, including skin oils. Gloves are preferred when handling, even if it isn't strictly necessary. The list of which hydrocarbons did or did not count was actually fairly interesting.
"This may be outside of your expertise." Tanya said, letting the man down gently. "I have a long day of thinkerprint scanner maintenance today." Well, and maintenance on the brainframe, but that shouldn't take longer than thirty minutes.
"Yeah, I have no idea how to do that." Harry said. Nervously, he added: "I could sing while you work?"
Ah, now she understood. "I'll take you along, don't worry." Tanya assured him. "I'm used to holding telepathic conversations while working." Mostly with Mom, but they were both perfectly capable of splitting their focus while remaining productive. Routine maintenance tasks won't need her undivided attention.
Tanya had time to finish her morning preparations before he replied. "That's good." Harry sent, calmer.
"Now if you'll excuse me, I have some ten year old girls to wrangle." Tanya sent as well as said out loud, turning her attention away from the telepathic link and leaving the bedroom. As expected, all four of the girls were still in their sleeping bags on the living room floor in states of varying amounts of dignity. "Good morning, girls!" She shouted, causing the collected schoolchildren to all jump out of bed in fright, screaming. Well, except Mary. She just sat up and glared at Tanya for causing the ear-piercing wail. Worse than artillery sirens…
"You are a devil!" Accused Mary. "Repent for your sins!" Tanya laughed. If Being X hasn't answered her prayers yet, he wasn't going to. Unless, she supposed, there was some temporal delay in the transmission measured in years. But if it was that, Being X might have very well just given up in the face of having to travel that distance, much like how one would rather go without soy sauce instead of bothering to go to the conbini for more. He did seem like the lazy type…
"Get clean and dressed, I'm making pancakes." Tanya said as she put on the apron. Crystal, Vicky, and Amy all cheered at this news, and even Mary conceded her position and went about her morning ablutions.
With that handled, Tanya started mixing up some batter. It wasn't difficult, like true Americans this household used pancake mix. Like all people who knew how to actually cook, they edited the crappy pancake recipe on the box to provide better results. Does she need to make some for Mom? Some quick scanning determined that she had snuck in at night and was still in her room, although she was clearly not asleep. Ah, the screams must have awoken her. "Do you want some pancakes?" Tanya asked her telepathically.
Mom's reply was hazy and muffled, signs of her presumably extreme fatigue. "That would be nice, Tanya. I got in at three in the morning, so thank you for handling your sister and her friends." Four hours of sleep, quite unpleasant. But workable.
"I would have been more circumspect if I noticed you were sleeping." Tanya sent back. "I apologize for the abrupt awakening. Would you like some coffee or will you be going back to sleep afterwards?"
"Coffee." Mom sent. "9AM debriefing." Truly, the life of a Psychonauts agent is fraught with hardship. Tanya remembered having to go to debriefings on four hours of sleep. It was terrible, so she sent some sympathy. Mom knew that she knew what that was like, so there was a mutual understanding that nothing more needed to be said.
Despite many attempts, Tanya never could make coffee that matched Visha's own work, but operating the machine was trivial to add to her task list in comparison to the pancakes, bacon, eggs, and frozen juice that she was simultaneously preparing for a proper breakfast. It was more work than she ever used for food in either of her previous lives, but psychic powers made it a much more manageable task. As such, despite being lesser in raw power than the magic of her second life, she found that she vastly preferred the convenience and utility of psychic powers.
By the time each of the girls finished their morning primping, there was a plate ready for them. When Mom came in after they did, she was to all appearances perfectly put together. That didn't mean she didn't immediately drink the whole cup of coffee Tanya had prepared for her and then prepare a second one to drink more slowly, but she probably fooled the guests. Maybe Mary.
Setting an archetype to clean the kitchen, Tanya sat down with her own breakfast, keeping her eyes pointed towards the mess so her archetype could see what she's doing. She should get one of those psitanium cameras to provide extra eyes… "This is really good, Tanya." Vicky said, humming in pleasure.
"Did you have fun with your sleepover?" Mom asked the girls. She received wordless but positive replies. "That's nice. I remember having sleepovers when I was a girl. Games, talking about boys…" Tanya was glad she missed that part. "We always went to Maria's house because she was the only one with a color television. Those were new in the fifties."
"Really?" Crystal asked, amazed. Mary snorted in laughter. Mom, as usual, seemed to be enjoying telling tales to actual children.
Bored, Tanya tuned out the conversation and reconnected to Harry. "I'll leave for work early so we can speak to an expert before I clock in. I'm almost done with breakfast."
"Aw man, I don't remember ever having breakfast." Harry replied. "Does it taste good? What about the texture? Can't forget the visuals."
"Once we get you back into the swing of perception, we could help each other on that subject." Tanya sent back.
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
"The reason I needed a spare brain was to test a device." Tanya sent over the link. "It should create a virtual recording that provides a full sensory experience." Which, incidentally, already had work done in the context of a psychic ability. The foundational work laid down by Helmut Fullbear's Psychoddesy was developed by Agent Colton and allowed Tanya to skip a few steps when it came to developing direct sensorium interaction. Psychic abilities weren't subject to patent law, fortunately for Tanya. Techniques were to a limited extent, but not the underlying science.
"That sounds like a feast for the senses." Harry replied. "I can't wait."
"That will have to wait until your senses are restored to functionality." Tanya sent ruefully. "Although… maybe not, that does give me an idea on how to illuminate your circumstances…" If the oppressive darkness of his mind prevented conventional exploration, could the artificial mental construction perform the same task? "I'm done eating, give me a few minutes."
Bringing her attention back to the conversation, which seemed to have continued throughout Tanya's lapse of attention, she moved her empty dishes to the sink. With Mom here, Mary won't be able to weasel out of doing them.
"You're a cool old lady, Mrs. Vodello." Vicky said, standing up to put her own dishes in the sink.
Failing to conceal her pain at the 'old lady' remark, Mom gently corrected the girl: "It's just Miss Vodello." Briefly, as she did every so often, Tanya thought about taking steps to nudge Agent Nein and Mom's relationship one way or the other. It was sort of her business… Nah.
"I need to speak to Agent Mentalis before work." Tanya announced. "I should get going if I want to have time." Getting up, she opened up the door to her room and fetched Harry's mobility capsule before stopping to give Mom a hug. "Love you." She said before speedily walking out.
"Have a good day, Tanya." Mom called out. "I love you too."
Despite the setbacks, Tanya was feeling good about today.
Lovely, she'll have to figure out how to hypnotize a corpse brain to reach out and link with the capsule. Unless… step 1 of the cognitive assessment: announce yourself. "Hello?" She shouted out into the void. "Is anyone here?"
Wait, was that a source of light? …Behind! Tanya spun around and beheld… a small ball of light. About the size of an eyeball, if she had to guess. Maybe a bit larger. "Greetings." She said to the… consciousness? She'll act as if it is, as if it isn't, no one is here to see her embarrass herself. "Can you speak?" She asked.
The ball seemed to flicker in response to her words, as if they provoked some tiny amount of neural activity. After several seconds of observing it flickering, she opened her mouth to say something more but was interrupted by the ball suddenly beginning to make noise.
It was gibberish at first, but after about twenty seconds it started to become somewhat intelligible. "Slippity, sloppity slaw, slow, suh- SORRY!" He eventually got out, his voice masculine as he wheezed in effort at the accomplishment. "Sorry, it's just been so long since I've said anything." The ball of light explained, abashed for his rudeness. This didn't last long, as his attention span was completely exhausted by that feat, and he immediately moved to blithering on about literally everything. "Is that my voice? Is that what I sound like? Why do you sound so much different than me? Who are you?"
"I am Tanya Dosva." Tanya said formally. "Psychonauts technician. Who are you?"
"Words? You're saying WORDS to me?" The ball of light said in wonder. "This is amazing! Haha ha!" He startled at his own laugh. "What was that non-word sound I just made?" Oh boy. "Am I dying?" After a pause, he chuckled again. "No, I feel alive, very alive!"
The ball of light continued to blather on, ignoring Tanya in his own contemplations. 'Who are you? Who am I? Am I everything? Am I god?"
"Absolutely not." Tanya said loudly, shutting down his monologue. "You are a previously unidentified brain in possession of the Psychonauts." She explained.
"I am not ready for words that big yet." The ball of light said, cringing back at Tanya's vehemence. "But I am definitely feeling like the universe, or some kind of cosmic oneness." Well, given that this brain was unbodied in the early sixties, the fact that it was a hippie really shouldn't surprise her.
"You're suffering from extreme sensory deprivation." Tanya deadpanned. "Fortunately, you should have access to some sensory data soon. Allow me." She plucked the ball of light from the air, and placed it on her forehead. Slowly, a bit at a time, she passed on the instructions on how to link up to the mobility capsule's sensorium.
"Woah, that's trippy." The ball of light said. "Now that's some cosmic oneness."
"If you link up with the mobility capsule now, you'll see that the universe is much larger than this mental void." Tanya said tiredly. Did he have to put it that way?
"Right, right. Now…" He paused. "You know, you'd make a kick-ass soprano." He said. Oh? Was he musically inclined?
"I've only ever been a treble." Tanya explained. "I haven't sung in any kind of formal context in over a decade." The last time she sang in a non-shower, non-karaoke context was in the church choir, twenty-five years ago.
"That's a damn shame." The ball of light said sadly. "You sound like you'd have an awesome range, too." He wasn't wrong…
"I'll tell you what." Tanya said, irritated with the distractions. "If you manage to link up to the ball, I'll help you test your hearing with a nice song." She knows a few…
"Sounds like a plan!" He said gleefully. Idly, Tanya instructed her archetype to minimize the sensitivity of the artificial senses.
The darkness suddenly lit up slowly, streaks of color appearing in the sky before melting into a blanket of stars. Each streak of color was accompanied by a clear note of music, with the stars heralded by what may or may not have been a guitar solo but with wind chimes. "Woah…" The ball of light said. "Where am I?"
"You're in my home." Tanya explained. "That's vision…" and sound?
"Okay, next is…" He paused. Nothing else changed. "It's not working!" He cried in despair.
"Try the next one." Tanya instructed.
"Right." The ball of light said. After about two minutes, he trembled again. "Nothing!"
"Let's get back to that later." Tanya said. "What do you see?"
"Colors." The ball of light said immediately. "Trippy ones. Yellows and oranges and pinks… is that a bit of blue?" As he named the colors, sounds echoed around his mind, and the mention of blue created a scent that Tanya couldn't quite identify.
Hrm. "It appears that your vision is not calibrated properly." Tanya suggested. "If we resolve that issue, perhaps other senses will become available."
"Vision!" The ball said angrily. "Always bossing everyone around." After a moment, he grumpily added: "Although he did always get everyone pointed in the same direction: Forwards."
Tanya looked around. Wait, was that… a silhouette? It was blobby and indistinct, but it was clearly something, rather than the nothing everything else was. A memory? Upon further review, there were several such blobs. Interesting… "I don't have a lot of time left until I need to go to bed." Tanya said, checking her watch. Nine-thirty… She'll definitely need to prompt them if they're going to go to sleep on time. "I'm going to try turning up the visual sensitivity; remain calm while I do so." She issued appropriate instructions to her archetype.
The stars in the sky flashed, colors spilling around the sky, with musical tones echoing with each burst. More than that, Tanya felt the textures of the colors and experienced the flavor and odor of each one, all five of her basic senses stimulated by what should be purely visual information. Wait, wasn't there that neurological disorder around senses getting mixed up? Synesthesia? That could be what's happening. Was this natural, or a side-effect of the isolation causing some crossed wires?
"Ah! Bright!" The ball of light shouted ironically. "Loud! I'm not ready for this, nononono!" Quickly, Tanya ordered her archetype to shut off the ball's psitanium camera.
"Remain calm." Tanya ordered. "You are experiencing sensory overload. I'm shutting it off now. Do not…"It was too late. The riotous lights and cacophonous sounds manifested into a beast made of an animal skull puppeted around by a body that sparked and fuzzed like television static, trailed by an aura that shifted into all the colors of the visual spectrum. "...have a panic attack."
Panic attacks were, by and large, considered the most dangerous mental entities of the 'standard' varieties. That is, the ones that didn't have any kind of logos backing them; they were pure emotion, not the manifestation of nightmares or anything more hazardous. Bad Moods and Judges competed with them, but of the three, the panic attacks were the hardest to deal with for the 'average' psychonaut.
For Tanya? It was just a matter of waiting for it to commit to an attack so she could blow its head off with a PSI blast that she charged up while waiting. They were fast enough to dodge them, but they couldn't do that and attack. Her passive barrier handled the projectile without much issue, although she'd rate the strength of the impact as equivalent to some twelve gauge buckshot. Reasonably powerful, but not enough to break her shield.
Like a slap to the face, or perhaps a splash of water, the ball of light immediately calmed down when the panic attack was dealt with, his fear fizzling out without the entity sustaining it. The mental environment was dark again. "This is nice." He said in a whisper. "Quiet." That was a sentiment she could sympathize with. Her psychoisolation bed beckoned her.
Tanya brought her own voice to a whisper. "I think that's enough for tonight."
"You're leaving?" The ball of light replied, panicked. "But… when will you come back? It's been thousands of years since I've last spoken to someone!" Ah, of course. His sense of time should be all out of sorts.
"Actually, it's been closer to seventeen years." Tanya corrected. "That's when your brain was found, and I doubt you were removed from your body for more than a few days before then." Tanya assumed Agent Cruller had brought him there, from the evidence. Why the man decided to bring a brain to the Heptadome before effectively committing suicide Tanya didn't know, but given that the nutrient fluid was only accessible to the Psychic Six at that time, there weren't any other suspects.
Really, it could have been anyone. The pilot of the plane he took, perhaps? Was Agent Cruller attempting to silence a witness to the fact that he brought Lucrecia home? That lined up, if you assume the reason Agent Cruller went incommunicado was because he was trying to conceal Lucrecia's survival from the other members of the Psychic Six.
It's not important. What is… "I'll give you my watch." Tanya conceded. "It's linked up psychically to a real one, so it will inform you of the objective passing of time." There was no theoretical limit as to how many psychic links the pocket watch could maintain, but it had range limits in the real world. "Do your best to remember things, I'll check in in the morning but I also have work to do. Once that's over, we'll try and get your vision re-aligned."
"But, but… how will I survive?" The ball of light asked.
"If you'd like, I could turn the vision back on at a low setting so you could attempt to re-align it overnight." Tanya offered.
"NO!" The ball of light said, panicked. "No, that's fine. This is good. Quiet."
"I'll talk in the morning, then." Tanya said as she brought out her smelling salts. She's far past the need to have a physical copy of them on her person, although naturally she still had some stashed away.
Ugh, it stinks…
---------------------
"Truth or dare?" Were the first words that Tanya heard once she was back in the physical world.
Mary seemed torn. "Uh… dare!"
Amy adjusted her glasses and chuckled darkly. "I dare you… to kiss your sister!" She declared, pointing straight at Tanya's recliner.
"Not in three lifetimes." Tanya said immediately, starting to stand up and stretch.
"Aw, she's awake." Crystal said, disappointed.
Mary sighed in relief. "Ah, did your thing go well?"
Tanya shook her head. "His sensorium is not functioning properly; that is a necessity for my tests." She explained, deliberately leaving out the part where 'Harry' was actually alive. Mary would want to get involved, otherwise. "I'll need to do some intensive work on it tomorrow." She took her pocket watch out of her jacket pocket and placed it on top of the mobility capsule. "In the meantime, don't think I didn't notice that you all neglected to brush your teeth when you changed clothes." Tanya gave one of her officer grins to the collected girls. "Here I was thinking you all were responsible enough to stay up a little later than ten. Shows what I know."
The girls whined and moaned at the accusation, but Tanya pointed at the bathroom. "Wipe that grease off of your faces while you're at it. You don't want to sleep with makeup on." Tanya can't actually say this from experience, but it was one of the tips that Mom gave her when she insisted that Tanya at least know how to use the stuff. Even if the thought of prettying up properly still made her chest seize in a complicated knot of emotion that even the best therapy the Psychonauts had couldn't, or rather wouldn't, fully excise.
…Did her men ever notice how wide of a berth she always gave the fronts of trains? She knew Visha noticed; it was in one of the memories she had to file away.
Once the girls were properly ready for bed, Tanya did her own evening routine, changing into her kitsune pajamas, brushing her teeth, and checking on the condition of her psychoisolation bed's air recycler. Mary called her regular checks paranoid, but prudence and caution were not negative personality traits, as long as they didn't get out of hand. Tanya could never get to sleep without checking on the device that ensured that she wasn't going to wake up suffocating in the middle of the night. Or worse, wake up far away from this life, from her family and friends.
It was a strange thought, to consider that there probably would never be a 'never wake up'. Only the next life. It was a bit existentially terrifying, but she was as safe as was possible: important enough to be protected, not vulnerable to random actors, but also not important enough to be deliberately targeted. Strong enough that only organized efforts on large scales or actions by a limited number of powerful people could threaten her. She had time to come to terms with that reality.
Settling Harry's capsule down on Mary's bed (she wasn't using it tonight, after all) and disabling all of the mobility features was a simple matter, and Tanya sequestered herself within her psychoisolation bed after one last broadcast of love to Mom, with only thoughts such as these to keep her company.
---------------------
"What an unusual dream…" Tanya muttered as she opened her psychoisolation box. It was like a tie-dye wonderland, a song and dance number with the details slipping from her awareness and memory as she thought of them. She still caught herself being surprised at having non-nightmare dreams in this life, but this was odd even by her standards.
Connecting to the mobility capsule telepathically, she sent a message to the mysterious 'Harry Heptadome'. "Good morning. I hope the night wasn't too harsh on you."
A feeling of shock echoed back from the telepathic link. After a few moments, a reply arrived just as Tanya finished stuffing her still-clean bedding back inside the confined space she had just left. "I don't know whether to be relieved that you're real or worried that you wake up on your own at seven in the morning." He replied, half-jokingly.
Tanya sent her incredulity over the link. "Have you ever had a proper job? Or even went to school?" Hopefully, the conversation will prove to be mentally stimulating to him, and make her job easier down the road.
"...I don't remember." He admitted. "Are you sure I'm not God?"
"Extremely." Tanya deadpanned. "I've met self-proclaimed gods before, you're much more pleasant company. Also, as I may have explained, you are a brain in a jar. If I wasn't busy in the shower, I could look at it and see how ordinary your pink matter is." One of the many differences in neurology in this world in comparison to the others was the fact that brains were pink instead of gray, and the vocabulary reflected this.
"Oh." After a moment of digesting Tanya's comment, he replied in a much better mood. "Thanks!" It was flattery, but flattery is one of the best tools one can use to cultivate connections, if wielded properly. "I guess I am just a guy with a spotty memory, huh?"
"The fact that you can still think at all is impressive at this point." Tanya assured him. "Once we've straightened out your sensorium, it will be much easier for your associative network to start triggering connections and start bringing the rest of your mind online." One of the things that kind of disturbed Tanya about psychic therapy is just how little knowledge was actually required to help. It was why the Psychonauts could work wonders in mental health just from a training course that was less than a year long. Mom's nursing certification took longer than that.
With that context, the fact that True Psychic Tales distinctly avoided showing the inner workings of telepathic intrusion made perfect sense.
"I'm not sure I like the idea of being straightened out." Harry sent, his unease apparent in his tone. "Has a bad vibe."
Really? What an odd word association. Well, she supposes she shouldn't throw stones about such things. Time for some rhetorical repackaging. "We just need to get all your senses on the same wavelength. Get you into the groove of things." Tanya sent back.
That worked; the unease vanished. "Now that's more like it!" Harry replied. "When can we start?"
"Not for a while." Tanya admitted. "I have to go to work, and while I can maybe squeeze in a half hour helping you beforehand, I suspect I'll need more time than that." Wait… she forgot to exercise yesterday. Drat.
"Oh." Harry replied, disappointed. "What do you do? Maybe I can help?"
"What do you know about psitanium?" Tanya asked idly as she finished drying off and moved on to brushing her hair.
"Don't lick it." Was Harry's immediate reply. Well, he wasn't wrong… psitanium tended to break down into mental energy in the presence of bodily fluids, including skin oils. Gloves are preferred when handling, even if it isn't strictly necessary. The list of which hydrocarbons did or did not count was actually fairly interesting.
"This may be outside of your expertise." Tanya said, letting the man down gently. "I have a long day of thinkerprint scanner maintenance today." Well, and maintenance on the brainframe, but that shouldn't take longer than thirty minutes.
"Yeah, I have no idea how to do that." Harry said. Nervously, he added: "I could sing while you work?"
Ah, now she understood. "I'll take you along, don't worry." Tanya assured him. "I'm used to holding telepathic conversations while working." Mostly with Mom, but they were both perfectly capable of splitting their focus while remaining productive. Routine maintenance tasks won't need her undivided attention.
Tanya had time to finish her morning preparations before he replied. "That's good." Harry sent, calmer.
"Now if you'll excuse me, I have some ten year old girls to wrangle." Tanya sent as well as said out loud, turning her attention away from the telepathic link and leaving the bedroom. As expected, all four of the girls were still in their sleeping bags on the living room floor in states of varying amounts of dignity. "Good morning, girls!" She shouted, causing the collected schoolchildren to all jump out of bed in fright, screaming. Well, except Mary. She just sat up and glared at Tanya for causing the ear-piercing wail. Worse than artillery sirens…
"You are a devil!" Accused Mary. "Repent for your sins!" Tanya laughed. If Being X hasn't answered her prayers yet, he wasn't going to. Unless, she supposed, there was some temporal delay in the transmission measured in years. But if it was that, Being X might have very well just given up in the face of having to travel that distance, much like how one would rather go without soy sauce instead of bothering to go to the conbini for more. He did seem like the lazy type…
"Get clean and dressed, I'm making pancakes." Tanya said as she put on the apron. Crystal, Vicky, and Amy all cheered at this news, and even Mary conceded her position and went about her morning ablutions.
With that handled, Tanya started mixing up some batter. It wasn't difficult, like true Americans this household used pancake mix. Like all people who knew how to actually cook, they edited the crappy pancake recipe on the box to provide better results. Does she need to make some for Mom? Some quick scanning determined that she had snuck in at night and was still in her room, although she was clearly not asleep. Ah, the screams must have awoken her. "Do you want some pancakes?" Tanya asked her telepathically.
Mom's reply was hazy and muffled, signs of her presumably extreme fatigue. "That would be nice, Tanya. I got in at three in the morning, so thank you for handling your sister and her friends." Four hours of sleep, quite unpleasant. But workable.
"I would have been more circumspect if I noticed you were sleeping." Tanya sent back. "I apologize for the abrupt awakening. Would you like some coffee or will you be going back to sleep afterwards?"
"Coffee." Mom sent. "9AM debriefing." Truly, the life of a Psychonauts agent is fraught with hardship. Tanya remembered having to go to debriefings on four hours of sleep. It was terrible, so she sent some sympathy. Mom knew that she knew what that was like, so there was a mutual understanding that nothing more needed to be said.
Despite many attempts, Tanya never could make coffee that matched Visha's own work, but operating the machine was trivial to add to her task list in comparison to the pancakes, bacon, eggs, and frozen juice that she was simultaneously preparing for a proper breakfast. It was more work than she ever used for food in either of her previous lives, but psychic powers made it a much more manageable task. As such, despite being lesser in raw power than the magic of her second life, she found that she vastly preferred the convenience and utility of psychic powers.
By the time each of the girls finished their morning primping, there was a plate ready for them. When Mom came in after they did, she was to all appearances perfectly put together. That didn't mean she didn't immediately drink the whole cup of coffee Tanya had prepared for her and then prepare a second one to drink more slowly, but she probably fooled the guests. Maybe Mary.
Setting an archetype to clean the kitchen, Tanya sat down with her own breakfast, keeping her eyes pointed towards the mess so her archetype could see what she's doing. She should get one of those psitanium cameras to provide extra eyes… "This is really good, Tanya." Vicky said, humming in pleasure.
"Did you have fun with your sleepover?" Mom asked the girls. She received wordless but positive replies. "That's nice. I remember having sleepovers when I was a girl. Games, talking about boys…" Tanya was glad she missed that part. "We always went to Maria's house because she was the only one with a color television. Those were new in the fifties."
"Really?" Crystal asked, amazed. Mary snorted in laughter. Mom, as usual, seemed to be enjoying telling tales to actual children.
Bored, Tanya tuned out the conversation and reconnected to Harry. "I'll leave for work early so we can speak to an expert before I clock in. I'm almost done with breakfast."
"Aw man, I don't remember ever having breakfast." Harry replied. "Does it taste good? What about the texture? Can't forget the visuals."
"Once we get you back into the swing of perception, we could help each other on that subject." Tanya sent back.
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
"The reason I needed a spare brain was to test a device." Tanya sent over the link. "It should create a virtual recording that provides a full sensory experience." Which, incidentally, already had work done in the context of a psychic ability. The foundational work laid down by Helmut Fullbear's Psychoddesy was developed by Agent Colton and allowed Tanya to skip a few steps when it came to developing direct sensorium interaction. Psychic abilities weren't subject to patent law, fortunately for Tanya. Techniques were to a limited extent, but not the underlying science.
"That sounds like a feast for the senses." Harry replied. "I can't wait."
"That will have to wait until your senses are restored to functionality." Tanya sent ruefully. "Although… maybe not, that does give me an idea on how to illuminate your circumstances…" If the oppressive darkness of his mind prevented conventional exploration, could the artificial mental construction perform the same task? "I'm done eating, give me a few minutes."
Bringing her attention back to the conversation, which seemed to have continued throughout Tanya's lapse of attention, she moved her empty dishes to the sink. With Mom here, Mary won't be able to weasel out of doing them.
"You're a cool old lady, Mrs. Vodello." Vicky said, standing up to put her own dishes in the sink.
Failing to conceal her pain at the 'old lady' remark, Mom gently corrected the girl: "It's just Miss Vodello." Briefly, as she did every so often, Tanya thought about taking steps to nudge Agent Nein and Mom's relationship one way or the other. It was sort of her business… Nah.
"I need to speak to Agent Mentalis before work." Tanya announced. "I should get going if I want to have time." Getting up, she opened up the door to her room and fetched Harry's mobility capsule before stopping to give Mom a hug. "Love you." She said before speedily walking out.
"Have a good day, Tanya." Mom called out. "I love you too."
Despite the setbacks, Tanya was feeling good about today.
Jiopaba
Eat Lightning; Crap Success.
There's a delightful irony in Tanya unknowingly helping Helmut Fullbear with work derived from his original Psychodyssey. She found the perfect primary source who will almost certainly be 100% on board with helping her accomplish her ambition in this regard, and neither of them knows it yet.
It's a very Original Flavor feeling thing for both settings, honestly. Psychonauts weirdness and Tanya's bizarre misunderstanding field that has her eternally communicating at cross purposes.
It's a very Original Flavor feeling thing for both settings, honestly. Psychonauts weirdness and Tanya's bizarre misunderstanding field that has her eternally communicating at cross purposes.
Ya and something that will probably have a number of side applications
Hey @Requiem_Jeer , is it okay if I post a link to literary and artistic analyses of the various minds of the characters of Psychonauts? I will just update this post if you are fine with it.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
It's fine, it hasn't been posted here yet if you're talking about Gaming University's series. If you're talking about something else, I might be interested in seeing it myself. I just got a little annoyed when the same thing was posted three times.
Thought Bubble:
View: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLajsQ-GLmZX6wZ6SSsy_8SMm482muhWrC
Gaming University:
View: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpxGcAs6OTOTLFDeOZZDyYp4vCUlf1HZ3
Kevin Help Us Psychonauts:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3f7NLftaw0
Kevin Help Us Psychonauts 2:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R0fz0gb8jc
View: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLajsQ-GLmZX6wZ6SSsy_8SMm482muhWrC
Gaming University:
View: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpxGcAs6OTOTLFDeOZZDyYp4vCUlf1HZ3
Kevin Help Us Psychonauts:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3f7NLftaw0
Kevin Help Us Psychonauts 2:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R0fz0gb8jc
Last edited:
Chapter 2.04
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
"Agent Mentalis took a vacation?" Tanya asked, incredulous.
"Yep." Said Jerimaiah 'Call me Jerry' Lewitz, her actual supervisor. The technicians tended to fall into two categories: engineers who could fabricate the artisanal psycho-reactive technology that the Psychonauts rely on for their work, and tradesmen who could maintain and fix both the ordinary technology and the psychic technology. Jerry was an engineer, so unlike the tradesmen he was an unathletic man who nevertheless towered over Tanya. Pretty typical IT guy, if Tanya had to describe him. "Wanda from HR called me early so I could do Otto's work before my normal job starts. Even got Hollis to approve the overtime." This was serious. "The way she told the story, Otto called in sick, and she persuaded him to take the whole week off. Then he decided to just fuck off until the new guys come in next Wednesday so he can train them."
"That's not like him…" Taya said.
"Nope." Jerry agreed. "I asked about it, and she thinks he was hung over."
Didn't Agent Mentalis mention he was going to 'visit Bob'? Well, that checked out. Still, if she couldn't consult the premier expert on the interface… "How much do you know about mobility capsules?"
He seemed like he was about to boast, but then paused. "Is there a brain currently inside of the one you're having problems with?" He asked, looking directly at Harry's capsule as it floated behind her, carried by a telekinetic hand.
"Yes." Tanya replied.
"You're going to want to talk to Medical." Jerry said, nodding to himself. "I can and have made those things from scratch, but once the wetware gets involved? Not my department." He checked his watch. "You've got some time to talk to them before your shift starts. Get changed beforehand so you can get straight to work. Did Angela tell you what you've been assigned?"
Tanya nodded. "The thinkerprint scanners, yes. Agent Mentalis made sure I was properly trained for that yesterday. Further, he assigned me the Brainframe maintenance, and trained me for that, too."
Jerry smiled. "Good ma- wait, good gi- no, that's even worse." He paused awkwardly. "Good." He settled on. "You know what to do then."
Tanya politely ignored her superior's flub and walked to the transit tunnel. "Goodbye, Jerry."
---------------------
Agent Jolene Colton was one of the research-oriented Psychonauts, with a particular focus on continuing Helmut Fullbear's work on the senses and on the necessity of stimulation for mental health. She also worked in Medical, diagnosing and treating the various maladies of the brain that Psychonauts tended to get to. Most importantly, she was enough of a workaholic to be around thirty minutes before her shift so she could read the latest scientific literature.
Tanya wasn't entirely clear why, but it was custom to not refer to the doctors in the Psychonauts by their title. She's heard of weirder corporate culture rules, so it was no big deal.
"So the sensorium won't properly connect to the capsule's prosthetics?" Agent Colton asked as she examined Harry's capsule for damage. "That's not surprising, these things are finicky as hell. The brain inside has to do most of the work. It's why you only see psychic brains in one of these things."
"Is there a solution?" Tanya asked.
"That depends." Agent Colton said, hedging. "The easiest way would be to find a donor body, real sensory organs are way better at adapting the brain to them, it's practically automatic."
"What are the drawbacks of that option?" Tanya asked, intrigued by the option. "Further, are there any loaners available?"
"To your second question, no." Agent Colton said bluntly. "The main drawback is that it takes some pretty aggressive psychic meddling in order to resolve the sensory overload if you use a real body. It's not the safest way to treat sensory deprivation." She waved her hand vaguely. "That isn't to say that it doesn't work, but it's risky."
"What would you recommend?" Tanya asked, getting straight to the point.
Agent Colton snorted. "If I could wave a wand and make it happen, I'd recommend you admit him as a patient instead of attempting to fix him yourself." That did seem fairly reasonable… "But as you may not be aware of, we can't just take random brains off the street and start treating them as patients. He's in a bad spot, but not 'immediate danger to himself and others' bad. Hollis wouldn't stand for it." Right, this was still America. The Psychonauts are still beholden to American law when working on their citizens. Without knowing who Harry was… "So what you need to do is to go inside the brain and fiddle with the controls yourself. Any kind of mental stimulation should let him open up, allowing you to do what you need to do."
"I'll figure something out." Tanya said.
"It's nearing time for us to clock in, so that's all I can do to help. Bye!" Agent Colton said, getting up and walking towards the punch clock next to the transit tunnel.
Well, back to work.
---------------------
"I just think that making you handle the brain machine on your second day is just a bit overboard." Harry asserted as Tanya finished with the final sanitation procedure for the Brainframe's maintenance.
"If I was in charge, I'd make sure every new recruit got a turn on the brain machine." Tanya countered. "It's a valuable lesson on how dirty the important jobs are." While Tanya's tolerance for disgusting viscera was certainly much lower than it was before her mental restructuring, she was hardly some delicate flower who needed to be spared the sight of blood. Brains were nothing. Regular brains anyway. Not brainmeat tunnels. Those were gross.
"How old are you again?" Harry asked.
"Old enough to have a master's degree." Tanya deflected, chuckling. "You've made excellent progress, by the way." Tanya added. "Do you think you can handle some visual input again?"
"All right, hit me." He said. Tanya adjusted the psitanium camera, turning it on at a low intensity before pointing it at a wall that had a crack on it from a stray PSI blast.
Meanwhile, Tanya disabled the door to Agent Mentalis' laboratory, removed and disassembled the thinkerprint scanner with her tools, and examined the internals. Seeing no fault, she infused the psitanium with additional mental energy as per the instruction manual to allow it to function properly without cannibalizing itself. Task complete, she re-assembled the scanner and re-installed it in the door. As the final step, she set it to test mode and had it scan her.
"Welcome, Technician Dosva." The synthesized voice of the scanner said in greeting.
Well, that was done. It only took her ten minutes. Hopefully she'll be able to cut it down once she gets more used to the assembly of the device. "One down, four hundred and six to go." There was a reason Angela said this would take over a week to do. "How's vision coming along?" She sent in Harry's direction.
"It's loud, bright, and smells like bacon." Harry replied, clearly frustrated with the weakness his ordeal had given him. Relatable.
"Well, it's time to move." Tanya sent, informing him before he could panic. "There's four more scanners in this section before we need to move to a different one."
"Thanks for the warning."
---------------------
Tanya had always enjoyed optimization. The pursuit of perfection, only attainable in limited forms as one toiled and failed. It was why they tended to enjoy the more complex, simulationist games as they grew up.
What was the best way to accomplish this task? Under what conditions is this step unnecessary? What parts of the task can be automated? This process served her well in her second life, allowing her to see the fatal flaws in the Empire's aerial mage doctrine. Even now, she remembered that mission fondly, correcting her subordinate's useless evasive maneuvers against the Dacian formations, foes that could not hurt them.
One lesson that Tanya learned well in the military was that frequently, the best defense was a decisive offense. This process was no different. Many of the disassembly steps for the thinkerprint scanners can be done in tandem, multitasking techniques used to their full effect. What at first took her ten minutes quickly went down to five by lunch, and by the end of the day a scanner in good working order could be fully disassembled, assessed, recharged, and re-assembled in two hundred seconds.
That said, there were plenty of drags on that productivity. "The door is down for maintenance." Tanya asserted.
The agent that was bothering her wasn't one she recognized, but he was exactly the kind of man that Tanya would expect to be harassing the staff. Given that he was trying to get into the mailroom instead of getting his mail delivered, he likely wasn't particularly important. "Just let me through. The door is mostly open, I'll just squeeze-"
"No." Tanya said, interrupting him. "Security protocol is that no one gets through a door that's down for maintenance."
"What if there was a fire?" Asked the nameless agent.
"Emergency protocols override security protocols when applicable." Tanya replied, glaring at the man who tried to violate procedure when she ignored him. She couldn't resume her task until he was gone. "Now go away and come back after I'm done."
"You're not the only one working here, girl." The agent whined. "I need to get Grand Head Zanotto's mail. He's expecting a package."
Hrm, if he was telling the truth, that could be problematic. "Then I'm sure he'll appreciate that you took the time to prepare him some coffee while you were out." Tanya said. Take the suggestion… "I've seen him drink it black."
"Hey, what's going on here?" A gentle voice came from the other side of the door.
"Hey Nick." The man said. "Look, you know me, I'm just here for Truman's mail."
"Ah, Tim, was it?" Nick Johnsmith replied.
The now named Tim smiled. It was a greasy smile, assured that he was important when he definitely wasn't. "That's right. Tell this girl that I can go through."
Nick's aristocratic features peeked out from the slightly open door. "Oh, Tanya!" He said, smiling. "I see you got the job, good work."
"Yes, thank you." Tanya said. "Security protocol is quite clear: No one goes through the doors when the scanner is getting maintenance done."
"You don't want me to call Truman over this. You're going to lose that new job." Tim threatened. Given how the last time Tanya had seen Grand Head Zanotto, he was saying standard 'my kid is always talking about you' parent-babysitter pleasantries, somehow Tanya didn't think that nepotism is going to be on Tim's side here.
…Unless he decided that having a job was impairing Tanya's ability to babysit. With some thought, she put that at a 30% probability. Truman Zanotto was more professional than that, his habit of coming into work in a bathrobe on days without outside meetings notwithstanding. "You're one more threat away from me reporting you as an enemy spy." Tanya retorted. "Insisting on the violation of security protocols is exactly what a spy would do."
"Woah, let's all calm down here." Nick said, pre-empting Tim's next outburst. "How about I just go get Truman's mail and pass it through the door? The packages are already scanned, after all."
"Thank you!" Tim exclaimed, his relief palpable. "Finally we have someone talking sense around here."
While it was theoretically possible for this to be some kind of nefarious scheme, at least it wouldn't be her fault if it was. "That is acceptable." Tanya said. "Now back off and let me do my job."
After spending a few seconds pretending to work, Tanya double checked that the man was remaining still and not trying to bypass the door. Satisfied, Tanya proceeded to finish the disassembly of the thinkerprint scanner and inspected it.
…What was this? The psitanium device was wrong. It looked more or less the same, but there was a distinct difference in the segments that checked with the brainframe's database. It wouldn't link to anything at all, in fact. But wouldn't that mean it couldn't open? She saw it open fine right before she put it into maintenance mode.
…The segment that received the signal from the brainframe was also compromised. It would open no matter who tried to go through, while still looking like it worked. But it still says the person's name, she heard it.
Even that segment was nonstandard. It used the thinkerprint to generate the name and title based on a standard ask-and-answer telepathy prompt, the same thing that she had suggested the 'under-18' safeguard operated on. It would just announce whoever goes through, whoever they are, and you could get it to say whatever you wanted if you knew the door was compromised.
This was definitely sabotage. Three flaws that worked together to make a seemingly functional lock while being nothing of the sort? The probability of a coincidence was astronomical. How long ago was this thing inspected?
Tanya glanced at Harry's mobility capsule. He's been quiet for a while… "Can you make out what it says yet?" Tanya asked him. She had given him a sticky note to read, it said 'Can you see me?'.
"No." He replied despondently. "I give up. It's just… yellow, with blurry bits of black." That actually sounds like progress. He didn't describe any sounds or tastes that time.
"Perhaps we could try hearing again?" Tanya proposed. "Just for a change of pace."
"That sounds nice." Harry replied, emphasizing 'sound' to make the joke clear.
"We'll work on your sense of humor later." Tanya sent back flippantly, smiling at her own joke. She turned off the mobility capsule's camera and turned on the microphone.
"Hey, I found the package." Nick said, deferential as usual. He pushed the door open a bit and sent it through.
"Thanks a bunch Nick." Tim replied, telekinetically lifting the package and walking off. "This midget works slower than molasses. Newbies."
"Say hello to Truman for me!" Nick shouted after him. Turning to Tanya, he got a worried look on his face. "Um, Tanya? Is there something wrong with the door?"
"Yes, actually." Tanya replied. "Do you happen to know off the top of your head who I'm supposed to bring security concerns to?"
"Security concerns?" Nick said, frightened. "Is… is it the Russians?"
"Perhaps." Tanya said. "I'll just contact Jerry, I suppose." When you don't know what to do, talk to your immediate supervisor. It's their job to tell you what to do. Reaching out with her mind, she contacted the telepathy "switchboard": "Agent Osec, I need to speak to Lead Technician Lewitz." Along with the message, she sent her authentication code, which was the smell of chocolate and coffee.
"You got it. Technician Dosva." Agent Osec replied, accompanying the message with the sound of bubblegum popping and the smell of cherries. The authentication codes were irritating, at times.
After a moment, Jerry's own code, the greasy texture of WD-40 and the sound of tearing duct tape, was sent. "What's up, Tanya? I've been hearing that you've been pretty busy today."
"You have?" Tanya asked, surprised.
"It's your first day of actual work, of course I'm going to keep tabs on you." He replied. Yeah, that made sense. "You've been doing a bit too great, actually. Have you been skipping any of the procedures?"
"Of course not!" Tanya sent back, offended. "I may be a bit overqualified for this kind of task, but I wouldn't dream of not doing anything but my utmost at any of my duties." She really was. You didn't generally need an engineer to compare the crystal structures to the documentation and confirm that everything was in line with expectations. She was even finishing the replacement while she talked, it was such a simple task by now.
…Of course, that may be why no one noticed the subtle sabotage on this one. "I'm afraid I noticed something disturbing." Tanya sent, getting to the point. "One of the doors was modified to allow anyone through while appearing to function perfectly."
Alarm bled through Jerry's telepathic link. "Where?" He asked.
"The mail room door." Tanya replied.
"At least it's not a secure area…" Jerry's reply was rough, and a touch panicked. The undercurrent of 'why isn't Agent Mentalis here to handle this' was clear in his tone. "What's the most secure area you've checked so far?" He asked.
"Agent Mentalis' laboratory, but it was clean." Tanya sent back. "As per procedures, I'm going in order of clearance level per facility." It would take over a week just to handle all of the low-security doors. They outnumbered the higher-security ones four to one.
"I'm almost there, show me." He sent, before cutting the switchboard-moderated link.
When Jerry arrived, Tanya showed him the modifications, comparing it to one of the three spares she had in the large floating toolbox she had following her around the Motherlobe. Well, two now, after she swapped one into the mailroom door. Finally, she scanned Harry. "Welcome, H3([^]()7 :=()((8=4}{" Both of them winced at the discordant screeching sound that was in place of a name. But the detached scanner gave a checkmark and sent the 'open' signal nonetheless.
"Yeah, this was done by an expert." Jerry confirmed, scowling. "The Soviets could have pulled this off, but how long ago did they do it? I wouldn't trust any of the tradesmen to notice anything more subtle than cracked psitanium, and you're probably the first engineer to look at this scanner since it was built."
"Do you think we have a mole in the engineer corps?" Tanya asked.
Jerry shook his head. "No, it'd be easier for them to just sneak the compromised ones into the warehouse. If they stole an equal number of scanners when they left them, we'd have no way of noticing if we didn't catch them in the act." He turned the scanner in his hands idly as he thought more about possibilities. "You checked the Brainframe too, right? You probably didn't skip checking for tampering on that, either."
"You are correct on both counts." Tanya said carefully. "Everything was as expected."
"Yeah, if we had an engineer tampering with stuff, they'd definitely have done something to that." Jerry said, nodding to himself. "Their penetration of the facility isn't quite that deep yet." He sighed tiredly. "Well, we'll keep this quiet, for now. I'll talk to Truman. In the meantime, just… keep going. Replace any you find and put the tampered ones in one of the empty women's lockers for later. If you need any further instructions, I'll tell you when I can, or Truman will backchannel it to you." In this case, 'backchannel' referred to unofficial personal communication, either telling her directly while talking about other matters or using Lili or Mom as a messenger. "I'll put in an order for extra scanners, it's not that weird to need to replace more than usual after a skipped maintenance cycle or two." He sighed again, his voice becoming something of a whine: "I'm going to need to ask Hollis for more overtime budget…" Tanya suspected that she'll be voluntold to take some of those hours to handcraft more scanners.
"Understood." Tanya said. Why did this have to happen in her first week on the job? How did it come to this?
Resigned, Tanya put Harry's mobility capsule back on the floating toolbox and trudged off to the next door.
---------------------
Back at the orphanage in her second life, Tanya was in the choir. She didn't want to be the choir, but the nuns were quick to resort to spanking if they felt that the children were not sufficiently deferential to their authority. It was a bit of a shock the first time it happened, honestly.
As it turned out, she actually had something of a talent for singing. She initially assumed that it was a plot by Being X… but after going through all of her first life memories, she couldn't entirely rule out the possibility that she always had that talent. She was complimented at times for her karaoke skills, in fact. She always thought herself barely proficient, which was automatically above average by karaoke standards, but she was barely proficient with absolutely no training or even that much effort. Mom was sure to point this out when they went over those memories.
Further, one of the nuns was a former opera singer, so she spent quite a bit of time training the choir in actual vocal skills. Skills that Tanya learned. So when Tanya tested Harry's hearing by singing a C note, she was confident that she was actually singing one rather than belting out some random pitch as long as possible.
"I think I can hear it." Harry sent through the telepathic link she was maintaining. There was no way Harry wasn't a telepath, if he was still cognizant after so long as a brain, but he was unable to reach out on his own. "That sounds like a C note all right."
"Then what's this?" Tanya replied, taking a breath and singing an A note instead. It wasn't the highest note she could hold, but it was close.
"Woah!" Harry sent back. "That's a nice high note. That's a low A, right?"
"It was a normal A." Tanya said after stopping. She paused. Did he hear her?
"...You said it was a normal A?" Harry sent, unsure. He did.
"I did." Tanya confirmed. "It appears your hearing is aligned better than your vision is, at least." It made sense, the technology of the psitanium hearing aids that were incorporated into the ball was more mature than the psitanium cameras. It was a less complex signal.
"I love hearing." Harry gushed. "Just thinking about audio makes me feel like a blushing schoolgirl." After a pause. "You know, at the School of Rock and Roll."
Well, that was a very strange sentence. She walked out of the testing room into the rest of Agent Mentalis' workshop, telekinetically carrying Harry's mobility capsule behind her. "Hm, Jerry's gone off somewhere."
"So… you promised me a song." Harry sent. "If I figured out hearing."
Tanya winced. "Yes, I suppose I did."
"If you sing it, I'll help you with your thing. You said it might hurt me?" Harry offered.
"If I did everything right, it should be harmless." Tanya responded. "But there's a reason I wanted to use a brain that I thought was already dead for the first activation."
"Give me the numbers, doc." Harry replied.
She was very good at estimating risk, but… "I'd give it a 70% chance of working without complication, twenty with minor complication, and ten with serious damage to your mental world."
"I'm feeling lucky." Harry said. "Sing a popular song! One you like."
Tanya did, in fact, like one particular song, a very popular one, that came out late last year. It was a break up song; she didn't usually like romance-related music, but she liked a lot of the lyrics, imagining Being X as the ex-boyfriend in question provided a certain feeling of empowerment. "Alright." It was probably one of the only songs she had sung enough in the shower to be confident in her performance.
The singer in question had a deeper voice than Tanya did, so after a deep breath she pitched herself lower as she started to sing. "At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking that I could never live without you by my side." She definitely couldn't have survived the orphanage without spite for Being X. If she remembered her first life without knowing why? "I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, and I grew strong!"
As she continued to sing, Harry's emotions roiled through a tapestry of feeling, totally absorbed in the song as the telepathic link expanded through his intense focus.
"Go on now! Go, walk out the door! Just turn around now 'cause you're not welcome anymore!" Tanya's muscles twitched to the beat in her head as her memory of listening to the song over the radio. As no one was around, she let those twitches guide her in a dance as she allowed the foreign emotions to direct her steps. "Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye? You think I'd crumble? You think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive!"
As expected, Harry started singing along to the chorus when she repeated it. Towards the end, he seemed to have recovered some of his telepathic talent as he started singing along to the whole song, without a single stumble in the lyrics despite having never heard the song before. At its conclusion, his mental voice was bursting with emotion. "That was beautiful!" He said. "So fresh, such affirmation after heartbreak!"
"I'm not a fan of the love-related parts of it." Tanya said, to prevent the brain from getting the wrong idea. "But I do like the overall message."
"...I completely understand." Harry said, before backpedaling. "Well, I'm not sure what I understand yet, but I feel ya, right here." If he was in a body, Tanya imagined he would be tapping his chest right now.
"Now to test the prototype." Tanya said, wanting to be talking about anything else. "I altered the test memory when you were calibrating, so it should allow you to experience a nice breakfast."
"Hook me up!" Harry said gleefully, still in a good mood from hearing the first music he's heard in seventeen years.
"Yep." Said Jerimaiah 'Call me Jerry' Lewitz, her actual supervisor. The technicians tended to fall into two categories: engineers who could fabricate the artisanal psycho-reactive technology that the Psychonauts rely on for their work, and tradesmen who could maintain and fix both the ordinary technology and the psychic technology. Jerry was an engineer, so unlike the tradesmen he was an unathletic man who nevertheless towered over Tanya. Pretty typical IT guy, if Tanya had to describe him. "Wanda from HR called me early so I could do Otto's work before my normal job starts. Even got Hollis to approve the overtime." This was serious. "The way she told the story, Otto called in sick, and she persuaded him to take the whole week off. Then he decided to just fuck off until the new guys come in next Wednesday so he can train them."
"That's not like him…" Taya said.
"Nope." Jerry agreed. "I asked about it, and she thinks he was hung over."
Didn't Agent Mentalis mention he was going to 'visit Bob'? Well, that checked out. Still, if she couldn't consult the premier expert on the interface… "How much do you know about mobility capsules?"
He seemed like he was about to boast, but then paused. "Is there a brain currently inside of the one you're having problems with?" He asked, looking directly at Harry's capsule as it floated behind her, carried by a telekinetic hand.
"Yes." Tanya replied.
"You're going to want to talk to Medical." Jerry said, nodding to himself. "I can and have made those things from scratch, but once the wetware gets involved? Not my department." He checked his watch. "You've got some time to talk to them before your shift starts. Get changed beforehand so you can get straight to work. Did Angela tell you what you've been assigned?"
Tanya nodded. "The thinkerprint scanners, yes. Agent Mentalis made sure I was properly trained for that yesterday. Further, he assigned me the Brainframe maintenance, and trained me for that, too."
Jerry smiled. "Good ma- wait, good gi- no, that's even worse." He paused awkwardly. "Good." He settled on. "You know what to do then."
Tanya politely ignored her superior's flub and walked to the transit tunnel. "Goodbye, Jerry."
---------------------
Agent Jolene Colton was one of the research-oriented Psychonauts, with a particular focus on continuing Helmut Fullbear's work on the senses and on the necessity of stimulation for mental health. She also worked in Medical, diagnosing and treating the various maladies of the brain that Psychonauts tended to get to. Most importantly, she was enough of a workaholic to be around thirty minutes before her shift so she could read the latest scientific literature.
Tanya wasn't entirely clear why, but it was custom to not refer to the doctors in the Psychonauts by their title. She's heard of weirder corporate culture rules, so it was no big deal.
"So the sensorium won't properly connect to the capsule's prosthetics?" Agent Colton asked as she examined Harry's capsule for damage. "That's not surprising, these things are finicky as hell. The brain inside has to do most of the work. It's why you only see psychic brains in one of these things."
"Is there a solution?" Tanya asked.
"That depends." Agent Colton said, hedging. "The easiest way would be to find a donor body, real sensory organs are way better at adapting the brain to them, it's practically automatic."
"What are the drawbacks of that option?" Tanya asked, intrigued by the option. "Further, are there any loaners available?"
"To your second question, no." Agent Colton said bluntly. "The main drawback is that it takes some pretty aggressive psychic meddling in order to resolve the sensory overload if you use a real body. It's not the safest way to treat sensory deprivation." She waved her hand vaguely. "That isn't to say that it doesn't work, but it's risky."
"What would you recommend?" Tanya asked, getting straight to the point.
Agent Colton snorted. "If I could wave a wand and make it happen, I'd recommend you admit him as a patient instead of attempting to fix him yourself." That did seem fairly reasonable… "But as you may not be aware of, we can't just take random brains off the street and start treating them as patients. He's in a bad spot, but not 'immediate danger to himself and others' bad. Hollis wouldn't stand for it." Right, this was still America. The Psychonauts are still beholden to American law when working on their citizens. Without knowing who Harry was… "So what you need to do is to go inside the brain and fiddle with the controls yourself. Any kind of mental stimulation should let him open up, allowing you to do what you need to do."
"I'll figure something out." Tanya said.
"It's nearing time for us to clock in, so that's all I can do to help. Bye!" Agent Colton said, getting up and walking towards the punch clock next to the transit tunnel.
Well, back to work.
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"I just think that making you handle the brain machine on your second day is just a bit overboard." Harry asserted as Tanya finished with the final sanitation procedure for the Brainframe's maintenance.
"If I was in charge, I'd make sure every new recruit got a turn on the brain machine." Tanya countered. "It's a valuable lesson on how dirty the important jobs are." While Tanya's tolerance for disgusting viscera was certainly much lower than it was before her mental restructuring, she was hardly some delicate flower who needed to be spared the sight of blood. Brains were nothing. Regular brains anyway. Not brainmeat tunnels. Those were gross.
"How old are you again?" Harry asked.
"Old enough to have a master's degree." Tanya deflected, chuckling. "You've made excellent progress, by the way." Tanya added. "Do you think you can handle some visual input again?"
"All right, hit me." He said. Tanya adjusted the psitanium camera, turning it on at a low intensity before pointing it at a wall that had a crack on it from a stray PSI blast.
Meanwhile, Tanya disabled the door to Agent Mentalis' laboratory, removed and disassembled the thinkerprint scanner with her tools, and examined the internals. Seeing no fault, she infused the psitanium with additional mental energy as per the instruction manual to allow it to function properly without cannibalizing itself. Task complete, she re-assembled the scanner and re-installed it in the door. As the final step, she set it to test mode and had it scan her.
"Welcome, Technician Dosva." The synthesized voice of the scanner said in greeting.
Well, that was done. It only took her ten minutes. Hopefully she'll be able to cut it down once she gets more used to the assembly of the device. "One down, four hundred and six to go." There was a reason Angela said this would take over a week to do. "How's vision coming along?" She sent in Harry's direction.
"It's loud, bright, and smells like bacon." Harry replied, clearly frustrated with the weakness his ordeal had given him. Relatable.
"Well, it's time to move." Tanya sent, informing him before he could panic. "There's four more scanners in this section before we need to move to a different one."
"Thanks for the warning."
---------------------
Tanya had always enjoyed optimization. The pursuit of perfection, only attainable in limited forms as one toiled and failed. It was why they tended to enjoy the more complex, simulationist games as they grew up.
What was the best way to accomplish this task? Under what conditions is this step unnecessary? What parts of the task can be automated? This process served her well in her second life, allowing her to see the fatal flaws in the Empire's aerial mage doctrine. Even now, she remembered that mission fondly, correcting her subordinate's useless evasive maneuvers against the Dacian formations, foes that could not hurt them.
One lesson that Tanya learned well in the military was that frequently, the best defense was a decisive offense. This process was no different. Many of the disassembly steps for the thinkerprint scanners can be done in tandem, multitasking techniques used to their full effect. What at first took her ten minutes quickly went down to five by lunch, and by the end of the day a scanner in good working order could be fully disassembled, assessed, recharged, and re-assembled in two hundred seconds.
That said, there were plenty of drags on that productivity. "The door is down for maintenance." Tanya asserted.
The agent that was bothering her wasn't one she recognized, but he was exactly the kind of man that Tanya would expect to be harassing the staff. Given that he was trying to get into the mailroom instead of getting his mail delivered, he likely wasn't particularly important. "Just let me through. The door is mostly open, I'll just squeeze-"
"No." Tanya said, interrupting him. "Security protocol is that no one gets through a door that's down for maintenance."
"What if there was a fire?" Asked the nameless agent.
"Emergency protocols override security protocols when applicable." Tanya replied, glaring at the man who tried to violate procedure when she ignored him. She couldn't resume her task until he was gone. "Now go away and come back after I'm done."
"You're not the only one working here, girl." The agent whined. "I need to get Grand Head Zanotto's mail. He's expecting a package."
Hrm, if he was telling the truth, that could be problematic. "Then I'm sure he'll appreciate that you took the time to prepare him some coffee while you were out." Tanya said. Take the suggestion… "I've seen him drink it black."
"Hey, what's going on here?" A gentle voice came from the other side of the door.
"Hey Nick." The man said. "Look, you know me, I'm just here for Truman's mail."
"Ah, Tim, was it?" Nick Johnsmith replied.
The now named Tim smiled. It was a greasy smile, assured that he was important when he definitely wasn't. "That's right. Tell this girl that I can go through."
Nick's aristocratic features peeked out from the slightly open door. "Oh, Tanya!" He said, smiling. "I see you got the job, good work."
"Yes, thank you." Tanya said. "Security protocol is quite clear: No one goes through the doors when the scanner is getting maintenance done."
"You don't want me to call Truman over this. You're going to lose that new job." Tim threatened. Given how the last time Tanya had seen Grand Head Zanotto, he was saying standard 'my kid is always talking about you' parent-babysitter pleasantries, somehow Tanya didn't think that nepotism is going to be on Tim's side here.
…Unless he decided that having a job was impairing Tanya's ability to babysit. With some thought, she put that at a 30% probability. Truman Zanotto was more professional than that, his habit of coming into work in a bathrobe on days without outside meetings notwithstanding. "You're one more threat away from me reporting you as an enemy spy." Tanya retorted. "Insisting on the violation of security protocols is exactly what a spy would do."
"Woah, let's all calm down here." Nick said, pre-empting Tim's next outburst. "How about I just go get Truman's mail and pass it through the door? The packages are already scanned, after all."
"Thank you!" Tim exclaimed, his relief palpable. "Finally we have someone talking sense around here."
While it was theoretically possible for this to be some kind of nefarious scheme, at least it wouldn't be her fault if it was. "That is acceptable." Tanya said. "Now back off and let me do my job."
After spending a few seconds pretending to work, Tanya double checked that the man was remaining still and not trying to bypass the door. Satisfied, Tanya proceeded to finish the disassembly of the thinkerprint scanner and inspected it.
…What was this? The psitanium device was wrong. It looked more or less the same, but there was a distinct difference in the segments that checked with the brainframe's database. It wouldn't link to anything at all, in fact. But wouldn't that mean it couldn't open? She saw it open fine right before she put it into maintenance mode.
…The segment that received the signal from the brainframe was also compromised. It would open no matter who tried to go through, while still looking like it worked. But it still says the person's name, she heard it.
Even that segment was nonstandard. It used the thinkerprint to generate the name and title based on a standard ask-and-answer telepathy prompt, the same thing that she had suggested the 'under-18' safeguard operated on. It would just announce whoever goes through, whoever they are, and you could get it to say whatever you wanted if you knew the door was compromised.
This was definitely sabotage. Three flaws that worked together to make a seemingly functional lock while being nothing of the sort? The probability of a coincidence was astronomical. How long ago was this thing inspected?
Tanya glanced at Harry's mobility capsule. He's been quiet for a while… "Can you make out what it says yet?" Tanya asked him. She had given him a sticky note to read, it said 'Can you see me?'.
"No." He replied despondently. "I give up. It's just… yellow, with blurry bits of black." That actually sounds like progress. He didn't describe any sounds or tastes that time.
"Perhaps we could try hearing again?" Tanya proposed. "Just for a change of pace."
"That sounds nice." Harry replied, emphasizing 'sound' to make the joke clear.
"We'll work on your sense of humor later." Tanya sent back flippantly, smiling at her own joke. She turned off the mobility capsule's camera and turned on the microphone.
"Hey, I found the package." Nick said, deferential as usual. He pushed the door open a bit and sent it through.
"Thanks a bunch Nick." Tim replied, telekinetically lifting the package and walking off. "This midget works slower than molasses. Newbies."
"Say hello to Truman for me!" Nick shouted after him. Turning to Tanya, he got a worried look on his face. "Um, Tanya? Is there something wrong with the door?"
"Yes, actually." Tanya replied. "Do you happen to know off the top of your head who I'm supposed to bring security concerns to?"
"Security concerns?" Nick said, frightened. "Is… is it the Russians?"
"Perhaps." Tanya said. "I'll just contact Jerry, I suppose." When you don't know what to do, talk to your immediate supervisor. It's their job to tell you what to do. Reaching out with her mind, she contacted the telepathy "switchboard": "Agent Osec, I need to speak to Lead Technician Lewitz." Along with the message, she sent her authentication code, which was the smell of chocolate and coffee.
"You got it. Technician Dosva." Agent Osec replied, accompanying the message with the sound of bubblegum popping and the smell of cherries. The authentication codes were irritating, at times.
After a moment, Jerry's own code, the greasy texture of WD-40 and the sound of tearing duct tape, was sent. "What's up, Tanya? I've been hearing that you've been pretty busy today."
"You have?" Tanya asked, surprised.
"It's your first day of actual work, of course I'm going to keep tabs on you." He replied. Yeah, that made sense. "You've been doing a bit too great, actually. Have you been skipping any of the procedures?"
"Of course not!" Tanya sent back, offended. "I may be a bit overqualified for this kind of task, but I wouldn't dream of not doing anything but my utmost at any of my duties." She really was. You didn't generally need an engineer to compare the crystal structures to the documentation and confirm that everything was in line with expectations. She was even finishing the replacement while she talked, it was such a simple task by now.
…Of course, that may be why no one noticed the subtle sabotage on this one. "I'm afraid I noticed something disturbing." Tanya sent, getting to the point. "One of the doors was modified to allow anyone through while appearing to function perfectly."
Alarm bled through Jerry's telepathic link. "Where?" He asked.
"The mail room door." Tanya replied.
"At least it's not a secure area…" Jerry's reply was rough, and a touch panicked. The undercurrent of 'why isn't Agent Mentalis here to handle this' was clear in his tone. "What's the most secure area you've checked so far?" He asked.
"Agent Mentalis' laboratory, but it was clean." Tanya sent back. "As per procedures, I'm going in order of clearance level per facility." It would take over a week just to handle all of the low-security doors. They outnumbered the higher-security ones four to one.
"I'm almost there, show me." He sent, before cutting the switchboard-moderated link.
When Jerry arrived, Tanya showed him the modifications, comparing it to one of the three spares she had in the large floating toolbox she had following her around the Motherlobe. Well, two now, after she swapped one into the mailroom door. Finally, she scanned Harry. "Welcome, H3([^]()7 :=()((8=4}{" Both of them winced at the discordant screeching sound that was in place of a name. But the detached scanner gave a checkmark and sent the 'open' signal nonetheless.
"Yeah, this was done by an expert." Jerry confirmed, scowling. "The Soviets could have pulled this off, but how long ago did they do it? I wouldn't trust any of the tradesmen to notice anything more subtle than cracked psitanium, and you're probably the first engineer to look at this scanner since it was built."
"Do you think we have a mole in the engineer corps?" Tanya asked.
Jerry shook his head. "No, it'd be easier for them to just sneak the compromised ones into the warehouse. If they stole an equal number of scanners when they left them, we'd have no way of noticing if we didn't catch them in the act." He turned the scanner in his hands idly as he thought more about possibilities. "You checked the Brainframe too, right? You probably didn't skip checking for tampering on that, either."
"You are correct on both counts." Tanya said carefully. "Everything was as expected."
"Yeah, if we had an engineer tampering with stuff, they'd definitely have done something to that." Jerry said, nodding to himself. "Their penetration of the facility isn't quite that deep yet." He sighed tiredly. "Well, we'll keep this quiet, for now. I'll talk to Truman. In the meantime, just… keep going. Replace any you find and put the tampered ones in one of the empty women's lockers for later. If you need any further instructions, I'll tell you when I can, or Truman will backchannel it to you." In this case, 'backchannel' referred to unofficial personal communication, either telling her directly while talking about other matters or using Lili or Mom as a messenger. "I'll put in an order for extra scanners, it's not that weird to need to replace more than usual after a skipped maintenance cycle or two." He sighed again, his voice becoming something of a whine: "I'm going to need to ask Hollis for more overtime budget…" Tanya suspected that she'll be voluntold to take some of those hours to handcraft more scanners.
"Understood." Tanya said. Why did this have to happen in her first week on the job? How did it come to this?
Resigned, Tanya put Harry's mobility capsule back on the floating toolbox and trudged off to the next door.
---------------------
Back at the orphanage in her second life, Tanya was in the choir. She didn't want to be the choir, but the nuns were quick to resort to spanking if they felt that the children were not sufficiently deferential to their authority. It was a bit of a shock the first time it happened, honestly.
As it turned out, she actually had something of a talent for singing. She initially assumed that it was a plot by Being X… but after going through all of her first life memories, she couldn't entirely rule out the possibility that she always had that talent. She was complimented at times for her karaoke skills, in fact. She always thought herself barely proficient, which was automatically above average by karaoke standards, but she was barely proficient with absolutely no training or even that much effort. Mom was sure to point this out when they went over those memories.
Further, one of the nuns was a former opera singer, so she spent quite a bit of time training the choir in actual vocal skills. Skills that Tanya learned. So when Tanya tested Harry's hearing by singing a C note, she was confident that she was actually singing one rather than belting out some random pitch as long as possible.
"I think I can hear it." Harry sent through the telepathic link she was maintaining. There was no way Harry wasn't a telepath, if he was still cognizant after so long as a brain, but he was unable to reach out on his own. "That sounds like a C note all right."
"Then what's this?" Tanya replied, taking a breath and singing an A note instead. It wasn't the highest note she could hold, but it was close.
"Woah!" Harry sent back. "That's a nice high note. That's a low A, right?"
"It was a normal A." Tanya said after stopping. She paused. Did he hear her?
"...You said it was a normal A?" Harry sent, unsure. He did.
"I did." Tanya confirmed. "It appears your hearing is aligned better than your vision is, at least." It made sense, the technology of the psitanium hearing aids that were incorporated into the ball was more mature than the psitanium cameras. It was a less complex signal.
"I love hearing." Harry gushed. "Just thinking about audio makes me feel like a blushing schoolgirl." After a pause. "You know, at the School of Rock and Roll."
Well, that was a very strange sentence. She walked out of the testing room into the rest of Agent Mentalis' workshop, telekinetically carrying Harry's mobility capsule behind her. "Hm, Jerry's gone off somewhere."
"So… you promised me a song." Harry sent. "If I figured out hearing."
Tanya winced. "Yes, I suppose I did."
"If you sing it, I'll help you with your thing. You said it might hurt me?" Harry offered.
"If I did everything right, it should be harmless." Tanya responded. "But there's a reason I wanted to use a brain that I thought was already dead for the first activation."
"Give me the numbers, doc." Harry replied.
She was very good at estimating risk, but… "I'd give it a 70% chance of working without complication, twenty with minor complication, and ten with serious damage to your mental world."
"I'm feeling lucky." Harry said. "Sing a popular song! One you like."
Tanya did, in fact, like one particular song, a very popular one, that came out late last year. It was a break up song; she didn't usually like romance-related music, but she liked a lot of the lyrics, imagining Being X as the ex-boyfriend in question provided a certain feeling of empowerment. "Alright." It was probably one of the only songs she had sung enough in the shower to be confident in her performance.
The singer in question had a deeper voice than Tanya did, so after a deep breath she pitched herself lower as she started to sing. "At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking that I could never live without you by my side." She definitely couldn't have survived the orphanage without spite for Being X. If she remembered her first life without knowing why? "I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, and I grew strong!"
As she continued to sing, Harry's emotions roiled through a tapestry of feeling, totally absorbed in the song as the telepathic link expanded through his intense focus.
"Go on now! Go, walk out the door! Just turn around now 'cause you're not welcome anymore!" Tanya's muscles twitched to the beat in her head as her memory of listening to the song over the radio. As no one was around, she let those twitches guide her in a dance as she allowed the foreign emotions to direct her steps. "Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye? You think I'd crumble? You think I'd lay down and die? Oh no, not I, I will survive!"
As expected, Harry started singing along to the chorus when she repeated it. Towards the end, he seemed to have recovered some of his telepathic talent as he started singing along to the whole song, without a single stumble in the lyrics despite having never heard the song before. At its conclusion, his mental voice was bursting with emotion. "That was beautiful!" He said. "So fresh, such affirmation after heartbreak!"
"I'm not a fan of the love-related parts of it." Tanya said, to prevent the brain from getting the wrong idea. "But I do like the overall message."
"...I completely understand." Harry said, before backpedaling. "Well, I'm not sure what I understand yet, but I feel ya, right here." If he was in a body, Tanya imagined he would be tapping his chest right now.
"Now to test the prototype." Tanya said, wanting to be talking about anything else. "I altered the test memory when you were calibrating, so it should allow you to experience a nice breakfast."
"Hook me up!" Harry said gleefully, still in a good mood from hearing the first music he's heard in seventeen years.
- Location
- Askew to the British Isles
Music, it soothes the soul.
- Location
- new york
School of Rock, 2003 Jack Black family film.
- Location
- Europe
So he had, a role at the School of Rock, you could say.
Chapter 2.05
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
Remember, patrons get 4 advance chapters! This week, on Thursday, as a bonus, there will also be a chapter of To Be a Hero (in my snippet thread) posted on the patron. Or you could wait until next week for that.
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Despite Tanya's reservations, there were a few things she could do to mitigate the risk to Harry's mentality. Mostly, it involved personally moderating the psychic connection and actions. It didn't quite ruin the usability of the tests, but it did it no favors. If it would have gone catastrophically wrong without her intervention, she probably would be able to tell even without letting it actually go wrong. It just means she'll need more tests, which is hardly the worst hardship.
She was back inside the darkness of Harry's mind. It was not quite as oppressive as before, she could make out some blobs in the darkness that might have been the remnants of memories. Further, the floating ball of light was now a ball of glowing white wire, a microphone without a handle. Progress.
"The first thing we need to do is to locate the exterior of your mind." Tanya said, looking at the prototype's scanner readout. She had it mirrored to a tablet, which she could carry a copy inside someone's mind. It was another piece of technology she couldn't take credit for, it was one of Agent Mentalis' inventions. Being able to look at his machine readouts when inside someone's mind was too useful for him not to do. "According to the scanner, this segment of your mind is pretty deep inside, these memories we're surrounded by are probably rather important ones." Also probably very traumatic ones, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
"Oh." Harry said, uncomfortable. "So… we need to move?"
"Indeed." Tanya confirmed. She felt out with her psychic senses. The structure of this place seemed fairly linear, actually. Like the back of a cave. The only way to go was… This way. She started walking, the light of Harry's body lighting the way. As they passed the blobs of memory, she noticed that multiple ones were roughly the same shape. If she assumed it was an image of Harry's real body, he must have been a rather large man, broad in both shoulder and stomach. The tall memory was clearly some kind of nightmare, or something else he was scared of. Or Harry was just really short. The blobs were much bigger than her, though, so it would require a truly absurd sense of scale for that to be the case.
"...I think this is the way forward." Tanya said, pointing to a piece of darkness that was visually indistinguishable from the rest. She didn't want to describe it as this section's weak point, but honestly it was the best way to describe her sense of it. It was the best place to breach. "Can you open it?"
"I'll try." Harry replied, floating towards the patch of darkness. Tanya waited.
…and waited.
"I can't." Harry said after what Tanya estimated was about five minutes of staring at the darkness.
Tanya manifested a massive telekinetic construct of a hand, pushing intently at the wall. With no change, she tried a different tactic: She knocked.
"Who's there?" Said a voice. It wasn't Harry's voice, it was rougher, lacking the musical smoothness that Harry's voice had.
Harry gasped in recognition. "Audie!" He shouted. "It's me!"
The wall opened up like a gigantic door, revealing an absolutely massive blue person who had a giant ear as a head. He was dressed as a member of a marching band and had fronds coming out of his hat. "PSI King?" He asked. "Is it really you?" The ear-man sniffed, his voice wracked with sobs. "I've missed you so much…" Well, that's a better thing to call him than 'Harry', at least. Was that his stage name? Or perhaps an affectionate nickname? Usually, when something in a mind has a different voice, it's because it represents someone that person knows.
"I've missed you too, buddy." PSI King replied, shooting himself out the door into Audie's chest. The giant stepped back, and Tanya flew through the now-free passage.
Immediately when she stuck her head through the threshold, the scale changed, and Tanya had to shuffle and crawl out of… a Memory Vault? Interesting. Fortunately, she was still very svelte, so while it took a little wiggling to get her hips through the tiny door, the rest of her came out without much trouble.
Looking around, Tanya noticed that the place was… a campground? Well, sort of. There was a tent, and trees. The place was rather dark, although Tanya's psychic senses gave her something resembling vision of the area.
"So who's the girl?" Audie asked.
"That's Tanya." PSI King said, "She's the one who found my brain. We're going to test one of her devices, it might help us." Or hurt them.
"Maybe I should get Dr. Touch in here, feel things out." Audie said worriedly.
"Can you?" PSI King asked hopefully.
"...No." Audie admitted despondently.
"...I think that way would be the best place to activate the APES prototype." Tanya announced, pointing towards what she sensed was the closest external border of the mental world. "Let's go."
---------------------
As it turned out, there was a lot of empty space in PSI King's mind. All of the various segments of it had drifted apart, and the space between was some kind of lightly forested terrain. It was pure filler, exactly the kind of thing the prototype needed to do its thing.
"I'm activating the APES!" Tanya shouted as she sent instructions to the archetype she had piloting her body.
After a few seconds, the portion of the PSI King's mind that Tanya had designated transformed into a box as the Artificial Psychic Enviroment Simulator did its work. It was a box with lines noting every decimeter, like graphing paper, deliberately designed to be obviously artificial. "Walk inside the box and the simulation will begin." Tanya instructed. She walked through the box's borders, there wasn't really a door so you could enter from any of the walls.
Inside the simulation, Tanya sat at the simple breakfast table, breathing deeply through her nose to get the full olfactory experience. She was going to enjoy this.
It took PSI King a minute or two to work up the courage to enter the simulation, but he did show up… still as a ball of light. "Wow!" He said, impressed by the spread of rich American breakfast food. "But… how am I supposed to…" He trailed off.
"There's a function for that." Tanya assured him. "I'll activate it now." One of the goals of the device was to be able to impose rules on the user, to create a fair-ish gaming experience. As a part of that, this included the ability to set models for the user's avatar. While there was certainly a level of appeal to being able to accomplish things that you couldn't ordinarily… there was also a market for people who simply do not like what they look like and would not be able to enjoy themselves unless they could imagine themselves as someone else. Also, being unable to alter the avatar's clothes would be… problematic. Particularly if diapers did end up being necessary equipment, which was probably not going to happen but she couldn't completely rule it out.
The glowing, floating microphone transformed before her eyes, as she activated the pre-set default appearance… which she set to look like Link, because it amused her. Legend of Zelda isn't even out for another seven years. She should know, she played that one when it was new.
"Woah…" PSI King said, looking at his new hands. The environment tinted green as he marveled at them. Those hands then fondled his ears. "...Why am I an elf?" The environment brightened, which was a bit of a worrying sign.
"Because you look like whatever I programmed in." Tanya replied. "My initial testing idea was some kind of elf hunter tracking a deer. Simplistic, but it pays close attention to the sensory experience." Tanya smiled pleasantly, to put the man at ease. "Now, you have one hell of a fast to break. Hop to it."
She put on a confident front, but in reality, she was paying close attention to the integrity of the simulation, ready to disengage if things start going crazy. It should be less intense than normal sensory experiences, but it's still the first time he's used most of those senses since he lost his body…
PSI King the Link cosplayer sat down at the table and grabbed the honey pepper pancake stacker. He giggled at the novelty of doing so, took a deep sniff of the food. The simulation tinted itself purple as he did so, and Tanya quickly clamped down on the mental energy flow. "That's good, but… shouldn't it smell stronger?" He complained.
"I turned everything down so as to not overwhelm you." Tanya said, a little misleadingly. "I might have gone overboard." She pretended to turn it back up. "Try again."
He sniffed the pancakes some more, and it seemed to be less disruptive the second time, the purple tinting of the environment was subtler. "That's better." He said happily. He cut a portion of the food out without trouble and ate a bite. The simulation started to turn yellow as he absorbed himself in the flavor.
Tanya tried to be gentler in her throttling of the sensation, but she had overcorrected: the simulation melted into a riotous combination of sensation. To make things worse, Tanya could detect that the PSI King's mental defenses had decided that the foreign box was something that needed to be destroyed, censors pounding the weakened simulation with their stamps.
His expression was uncomfortable, and he tried to hold it together, but… "It's too much!" He shouted. "It's loud, and spicy, and feels like honey!" The PSI King groaned. She really had her work cut out for her, didn't she?
Fortunately, he calmed down after Tanya tore the panic attack apart, the accompanying tiny censors easily dispatched. "Did you enjoy it, at least?" Tanya asked.
"Yes, thank you." He replied, having turned back into the ball of light. "I just… realized how much I've been missing out on." He said despondently.
"Hey now, don't feel sad." Audie said, suddenly appearing. "That's my job."
The PSI King chuckled at the ear-man's joke. "I know, Audie O." Was that part of this entity's name, or was that just him rhyming for no reason?
Tanya checked the time. "I could transition it back to the original scenario, if you wish?"
"I don't like hunting." PSI King objected. "Animals can talk, if you know how to listen." Tanya did know, but most animals were, put bluntly, assholes. She regretted many things about how many people she had killed, but the fact that she killed people at all was never among their number.
"...Give me five minutes to adjust it to be nonviolent." Tanya promised him. Hunting and hide and seek aren't that different.
"Deal."
---------------------
"It's so fluffy!" PSI King said, utterly pleased as the simulation tinted itself pink. He was sitting down in the Link cosplay, petting the copy of Rudersdorf's dog that Tanya had imported to the simulation. "Seems kind of… stupid though." He said after watching the memory bolt away to the reset point.
"It was a rush job." Tanya said defensively. "The deer is much more carefully programmed."
"Well, it works." PSI King pointed out. "Now what?"
"Now, we turn it off and see if there's any lingering influence." Tanya explained, walking out of the simulation. When the ball was outside of the box, Tanya sent the instruction to her archetype and the box shrank to nothingness. There didn't appear to be any changes to the area it used to occupy… wait. Was it… brighter?
Tanya looked around. No, everywhere was a little brighter. It was still dark, but now she could discern shapes without needing as much focus. "I choose to believe this is a good sign." She declared. Honestly, she was mostly hoping that positive affirmations would have a placebo effect at this point.
"The show must go on!" PSI King declared. "Wait, what show?"
"The Feast of the Senses." Audie O answered. "Remember? …Not like it matters. No one's in the audience." Hm, has she heard this voice before? It's probably her imagination.
"That's nothing new." The PSI King said before pausing, thinking on the ear-man's words. "...Maybe we could have a rehearsal?" He proposed.
"You sure?" Audie O asked. PSI King bobbed up and down. "I don't even remember where I left my drums."
"Did you try your ear canal?" Tanya asked, smirking at her joke. Of course the ear man is the drummer.
"Vision's not here to check down there." Audie O said, shaking his head. "Could you?"
Tanya checked her watch. "No time. I don't want to miss dinner." Mom said she was going to cook steak to celebrate her getting the job. Tanya loved steak. "We'll pick this back up tomorrow."
---------------------
"Tanya, why do you have a brain ball?" Was Mom's first question when she arrived at home, a little late but before the food got cold.
"It's called a mobility capsule, technically." Tanya corrected as she cut her steak. "But this is the brain I'm using to test my machine."
"You brought it home… why?" Mom asked.
"I didn't want him to get lonely." Tanya replied, before eating the delicious red meat.
"Hello." PSI King said out of the ball's speaker system. It was immature technology, it couldn't yet emulate someone's voice. Instead, it used the generic, vaguely feminine tones that the other psychic technology used. Apparently, it was synthesized from a combination of Agent O'Peia and Mentalis' voices.
Mom leapt out of her seat in surprise. "He's awake in there?" She asked, vaguely horrified. "Otto let you use a living brain?"
"Agent Mentalis didn't know he was alive." Tanya said. "He… didn't take the news well." It was hard to do worse than 'immediately go on a drinking binge', short of literal suicide. He didn't even get the news that PSI King was still alive, just that he had forgotten to test it. "He took a week's vacation pretty much immediately rather than deal with it."
"I don't remember much." PSI King explained. "But Tanya's device lets me pretend to eat. It's been ages since I've been able to do that."
Mom's expression softened and she sat back down. "Is there anything I can do to help?" She asked. Mary seemed keenly interested in the orb now, although she was still more occupied with her own meal.
"When the weekend comes, some deep delving into the dark corners of his mind may be useful." Tanya allowed. "But if you could secure a donor body we could pop the brain in for a few hours, Agent Colton said that could be an effective, if risky, treatment." Given that the capsule only had effective sight and hearing, although it could theoretically provide a combination smell/taste sense. Either way, it would be necessary to activate touch.
"Sasha might be able to spare something." Mom said idly. "I'll ask."
Tanya put some of the marinated carrots in her mouth. The sweetness was an excellent complement to the steak. "We're not in a rush. The bigger concern is the sabotaged thinkerprint scanners I found today."
"Sabotage? On your second day? Tell me more." Mom said, a note of excitement in her voice.
"Bull!" Mary said, pointing her fork at Tanya. "You're not that great, why wasn't it caught sooner?"
Tanya chuckled and started to explain. She probably shouldn't break opsec like this, but this is more of securing some backchannel support in case someone was to try to use the bureaucracy against her. The Soviets probably haven't penetrated the Motherlobe to that extent, but it was prudent to hedge her risk portfolio.
"It doesn't seem too dangerous, at least." Mom concluded. "I agree with Jerry. It's best if things are kept quiet until the vulnerability is caught." Tanya relaxed at her mother's ruling. "But I'll ask Hollis for some time off from missions, so I can be available at the Motherlobe. I still need to catch up with the True Psychic Tales people, go over some scripts." One of the stipulations of the comic's agreement with the relevant agents was making sure they knew what the comic was saying about them so they wouldn't be caught off guard if a random fan managed to ask them questions about it.
"Ah, I still need to meet them as well to play art model." Tanya said. She wasn't particularly looking forward to that. It was yet another thing piled on her metaphorical desk. At least she already met with the writers and clarified all of the various minutiae on what she would and would not be depicted doing.
Mom winced. "They were very professional when I did it." She said, although she didn't seem very sincere. "Even for the swimsuit." She probably meant that most of them were professional. No matter. If she couldn't intimidate some pencil-necked artist into politeness, she doesn't deserve her rank. "We can go together, sometime tomorrow."
Mary laughed. "Tanya? As a model?"
"Art model." Tanya corrected. "If I'm going to be a character in True Psychic Tales, they need to know what I look like, which is particularly important if they intend to freeze my age like they have Mom." According to True Psychic Tales, she was 28 years old. This was accurate when she was introduced, but naturally, that number has gone up over time. "So I'll need to let them draw me in various poses, outfits, and expressions so they can be used as references for the actual comic."
"I'm a little confused." PSI King said, startling Mary. "What's all this about?"
Tanya just focused on her meal. Let him interact with someone else for a bit. Mary stepped up to the plate. "Ah, the Psychonauts are super-spy-psychics. They have a comic book where they tell everyone how cool they are."
"Brilliant." was PSI King's opinion on the propaganda. "Can I have a comic book? I'm pretty cool. Even if I'm not God."
Mary scowled at the brain in a pod. "Certainly not!" She shouted. "God doesn't sound anything like you!"
"Full disclosure: This pod makes me sound pretty weird." PSI King said. "My voice is normally way sexier."
Mom glared at PSI King, but decided to not raise a fuss. Mary wasn't actually ten, after all. "Eat your dinner, Mary darling." Mom said scoldingly.
Mary paused. "Wait, don't brains still need food?"
"I gave him fresh nutrient fluid before I left the office." Tanya replied. "The high energy formulation for active brains needs to be changed out every day." The not-quite-starvation rations that the long-term preservation formula put PSI King on either helped him stay sane by forcing him into some long hibernation cycles, or exacerbated things by making him suffer. She wasn't entirely clear if disembodied brains could feel hunger. It was probably the former. Yet another thing a body would fix.
"That green stuff?" Mary asked. "It looks gross."
"It's actually edible." Tanya said. "It's mostly glucose; sugar." Assuming that you drink it fresh out of the pot, it's actually kind of tasty… if you diluted it. She spent some time tinkering with the flavor early in the year, when she was still a student. "Assuming you ignored me when I told you not to drink the green stuff I put in the fridge, you've even had some." Mary paused at that, and from her expression, Tanya knew that she did, indeed, drink the diluted nutrient fluid.
The meal concluded with Mary bashfully avoiding the topic of brain juice.
"Great, dinner's done, now what?" PSI King asked.
"Now it's time for some light exercise." Tanya said. "I forgot yesterday, and it's good for digestion."
Mary groaned from her position, washing the dishes with Mom. "Do we have to?"
"Yes." Mom said. "It's healthy, and Tanya's method is quite useful."
"I miss exercise." PSI King said. "I was a mighty oak of a man, you know." What an odd turn of phrase.
Still, it was a simple matter to move inconvenient furniture aside and to dress down to their exercise clothing. "Uh… should we be dressed like this in front of…" Mary pointed out after she had halfway undressed.
"He can't see." Tanya explained. "Only his hearing currently works, and the camera in the mobility capsule is currently off."
"Don't mind me." PSI King said cheerily. "I'll just busy myself rewriting the lyrics of that song Tanya sang for me."
Once all three women were ready, Tanya called out "Form One!" and they all kneeled onto the carpet, careful as they moved steadily into the starting position. Even that simple motion was difficult, as she used her not-so-secret training technique.
The primary obstacle when it came to exercising, to reverse the issue she had accidentally caused herself when she used psychic reinforcement to cut short learning to walk, was that she needed to completely focus on not enhancing her muscles in order to not accidentally ruin whatever task she put herself to.
To fix this, Tanya instead developed what she referred to as the psychic resistance formula. Instead of telekinetically assisting the motion of every muscle and movement, it does the opposite: telekinetically impeding those motions. At first, the amount of resistance was negligible, but it was impossible to simultaneously assist and impede her motion, so as long as she impeded her motions at least a little bit, she could be assured that she wasn't wasting her effort by leaning on her telekinesis to reduce the physical stress.
Granted, there were a few embarrassing hiccups during development, as there were muscles that could handle being strengthened without side effects beyond not needing to work as hard, but the opposite was not true. By now, she was notably strong for someone of her size and weight, her meat-rich American diet going a long way to assisting that endeavor. It still wasn't anything impressive, as she could lean on her psychic powers if she needed to actually lift anything, but her muscles now become visible when she flexes, which is good enough for her.
The actual routine was just a handful of aikido kata she had cribbed from an instruction book that the Psychonauts had on hand as training materials. They didn't quite exercise every muscle, but they came close, and it wasn't that big of a deal to add a few supplementary exercises to ensure that, as an example, her fingers were capable of supporting her weight, if needed.
She had initially thought to use Levitation to make herself heavier, but anime lies: gravity training was a good way to cripple yourself, and it wouldn't exercise your muscles evenly. All you needed to train a muscle was resistance, and all exercises were just to aim that resistance to specific muscles. No exercise equipment could possibly be superior to the simplicity of directly applying that resistance to every muscle all at once, then trying to move. It was an innovation that she wished she could have used to improve the 203rd's physical conditioning, but she didn't have the authority to tinker with novel spell formulas back then.
Mary, of course, didn't appreciate efficiency in this, and instead preferred to call it 'torture', but Tanya had administered counter-interrogation training, she knew what torture looked like. This didn't make the cut.
It felt like doing the exercises underwater, without the normal buoyancy you would feel. She was supposed to do this twice a day for twenty minutes each, but now that she has a job, she's been lazy about it. No matter, it's just a matter of self-discipline.
Despite her easy third life, where she regularly indulges in emotional whims, discipline is still something she has in ample supply.
---------------------------
Despite Tanya's reservations, there were a few things she could do to mitigate the risk to Harry's mentality. Mostly, it involved personally moderating the psychic connection and actions. It didn't quite ruin the usability of the tests, but it did it no favors. If it would have gone catastrophically wrong without her intervention, she probably would be able to tell even without letting it actually go wrong. It just means she'll need more tests, which is hardly the worst hardship.
She was back inside the darkness of Harry's mind. It was not quite as oppressive as before, she could make out some blobs in the darkness that might have been the remnants of memories. Further, the floating ball of light was now a ball of glowing white wire, a microphone without a handle. Progress.
"The first thing we need to do is to locate the exterior of your mind." Tanya said, looking at the prototype's scanner readout. She had it mirrored to a tablet, which she could carry a copy inside someone's mind. It was another piece of technology she couldn't take credit for, it was one of Agent Mentalis' inventions. Being able to look at his machine readouts when inside someone's mind was too useful for him not to do. "According to the scanner, this segment of your mind is pretty deep inside, these memories we're surrounded by are probably rather important ones." Also probably very traumatic ones, but she wasn't going to tell him that.
"Oh." Harry said, uncomfortable. "So… we need to move?"
"Indeed." Tanya confirmed. She felt out with her psychic senses. The structure of this place seemed fairly linear, actually. Like the back of a cave. The only way to go was… This way. She started walking, the light of Harry's body lighting the way. As they passed the blobs of memory, she noticed that multiple ones were roughly the same shape. If she assumed it was an image of Harry's real body, he must have been a rather large man, broad in both shoulder and stomach. The tall memory was clearly some kind of nightmare, or something else he was scared of. Or Harry was just really short. The blobs were much bigger than her, though, so it would require a truly absurd sense of scale for that to be the case.
"...I think this is the way forward." Tanya said, pointing to a piece of darkness that was visually indistinguishable from the rest. She didn't want to describe it as this section's weak point, but honestly it was the best way to describe her sense of it. It was the best place to breach. "Can you open it?"
"I'll try." Harry replied, floating towards the patch of darkness. Tanya waited.
…and waited.
"I can't." Harry said after what Tanya estimated was about five minutes of staring at the darkness.
Tanya manifested a massive telekinetic construct of a hand, pushing intently at the wall. With no change, she tried a different tactic: She knocked.
"Who's there?" Said a voice. It wasn't Harry's voice, it was rougher, lacking the musical smoothness that Harry's voice had.
Harry gasped in recognition. "Audie!" He shouted. "It's me!"
The wall opened up like a gigantic door, revealing an absolutely massive blue person who had a giant ear as a head. He was dressed as a member of a marching band and had fronds coming out of his hat. "PSI King?" He asked. "Is it really you?" The ear-man sniffed, his voice wracked with sobs. "I've missed you so much…" Well, that's a better thing to call him than 'Harry', at least. Was that his stage name? Or perhaps an affectionate nickname? Usually, when something in a mind has a different voice, it's because it represents someone that person knows.
"I've missed you too, buddy." PSI King replied, shooting himself out the door into Audie's chest. The giant stepped back, and Tanya flew through the now-free passage.
Immediately when she stuck her head through the threshold, the scale changed, and Tanya had to shuffle and crawl out of… a Memory Vault? Interesting. Fortunately, she was still very svelte, so while it took a little wiggling to get her hips through the tiny door, the rest of her came out without much trouble.
Looking around, Tanya noticed that the place was… a campground? Well, sort of. There was a tent, and trees. The place was rather dark, although Tanya's psychic senses gave her something resembling vision of the area.
"So who's the girl?" Audie asked.
"That's Tanya." PSI King said, "She's the one who found my brain. We're going to test one of her devices, it might help us." Or hurt them.
"Maybe I should get Dr. Touch in here, feel things out." Audie said worriedly.
"Can you?" PSI King asked hopefully.
"...No." Audie admitted despondently.
"...I think that way would be the best place to activate the APES prototype." Tanya announced, pointing towards what she sensed was the closest external border of the mental world. "Let's go."
---------------------
As it turned out, there was a lot of empty space in PSI King's mind. All of the various segments of it had drifted apart, and the space between was some kind of lightly forested terrain. It was pure filler, exactly the kind of thing the prototype needed to do its thing.
"I'm activating the APES!" Tanya shouted as she sent instructions to the archetype she had piloting her body.
After a few seconds, the portion of the PSI King's mind that Tanya had designated transformed into a box as the Artificial Psychic Enviroment Simulator did its work. It was a box with lines noting every decimeter, like graphing paper, deliberately designed to be obviously artificial. "Walk inside the box and the simulation will begin." Tanya instructed. She walked through the box's borders, there wasn't really a door so you could enter from any of the walls.
Inside the simulation, Tanya sat at the simple breakfast table, breathing deeply through her nose to get the full olfactory experience. She was going to enjoy this.
It took PSI King a minute or two to work up the courage to enter the simulation, but he did show up… still as a ball of light. "Wow!" He said, impressed by the spread of rich American breakfast food. "But… how am I supposed to…" He trailed off.
"There's a function for that." Tanya assured him. "I'll activate it now." One of the goals of the device was to be able to impose rules on the user, to create a fair-ish gaming experience. As a part of that, this included the ability to set models for the user's avatar. While there was certainly a level of appeal to being able to accomplish things that you couldn't ordinarily… there was also a market for people who simply do not like what they look like and would not be able to enjoy themselves unless they could imagine themselves as someone else. Also, being unable to alter the avatar's clothes would be… problematic. Particularly if diapers did end up being necessary equipment, which was probably not going to happen but she couldn't completely rule it out.
The glowing, floating microphone transformed before her eyes, as she activated the pre-set default appearance… which she set to look like Link, because it amused her. Legend of Zelda isn't even out for another seven years. She should know, she played that one when it was new.
"Woah…" PSI King said, looking at his new hands. The environment tinted green as he marveled at them. Those hands then fondled his ears. "...Why am I an elf?" The environment brightened, which was a bit of a worrying sign.
"Because you look like whatever I programmed in." Tanya replied. "My initial testing idea was some kind of elf hunter tracking a deer. Simplistic, but it pays close attention to the sensory experience." Tanya smiled pleasantly, to put the man at ease. "Now, you have one hell of a fast to break. Hop to it."
She put on a confident front, but in reality, she was paying close attention to the integrity of the simulation, ready to disengage if things start going crazy. It should be less intense than normal sensory experiences, but it's still the first time he's used most of those senses since he lost his body…
PSI King the Link cosplayer sat down at the table and grabbed the honey pepper pancake stacker. He giggled at the novelty of doing so, took a deep sniff of the food. The simulation tinted itself purple as he did so, and Tanya quickly clamped down on the mental energy flow. "That's good, but… shouldn't it smell stronger?" He complained.
"I turned everything down so as to not overwhelm you." Tanya said, a little misleadingly. "I might have gone overboard." She pretended to turn it back up. "Try again."
He sniffed the pancakes some more, and it seemed to be less disruptive the second time, the purple tinting of the environment was subtler. "That's better." He said happily. He cut a portion of the food out without trouble and ate a bite. The simulation started to turn yellow as he absorbed himself in the flavor.
Tanya tried to be gentler in her throttling of the sensation, but she had overcorrected: the simulation melted into a riotous combination of sensation. To make things worse, Tanya could detect that the PSI King's mental defenses had decided that the foreign box was something that needed to be destroyed, censors pounding the weakened simulation with their stamps.
His expression was uncomfortable, and he tried to hold it together, but… "It's too much!" He shouted. "It's loud, and spicy, and feels like honey!" The PSI King groaned. She really had her work cut out for her, didn't she?
Fortunately, he calmed down after Tanya tore the panic attack apart, the accompanying tiny censors easily dispatched. "Did you enjoy it, at least?" Tanya asked.
"Yes, thank you." He replied, having turned back into the ball of light. "I just… realized how much I've been missing out on." He said despondently.
"Hey now, don't feel sad." Audie said, suddenly appearing. "That's my job."
The PSI King chuckled at the ear-man's joke. "I know, Audie O." Was that part of this entity's name, or was that just him rhyming for no reason?
Tanya checked the time. "I could transition it back to the original scenario, if you wish?"
"I don't like hunting." PSI King objected. "Animals can talk, if you know how to listen." Tanya did know, but most animals were, put bluntly, assholes. She regretted many things about how many people she had killed, but the fact that she killed people at all was never among their number.
"...Give me five minutes to adjust it to be nonviolent." Tanya promised him. Hunting and hide and seek aren't that different.
"Deal."
---------------------
"It's so fluffy!" PSI King said, utterly pleased as the simulation tinted itself pink. He was sitting down in the Link cosplay, petting the copy of Rudersdorf's dog that Tanya had imported to the simulation. "Seems kind of… stupid though." He said after watching the memory bolt away to the reset point.
"It was a rush job." Tanya said defensively. "The deer is much more carefully programmed."
"Well, it works." PSI King pointed out. "Now what?"
"Now, we turn it off and see if there's any lingering influence." Tanya explained, walking out of the simulation. When the ball was outside of the box, Tanya sent the instruction to her archetype and the box shrank to nothingness. There didn't appear to be any changes to the area it used to occupy… wait. Was it… brighter?
Tanya looked around. No, everywhere was a little brighter. It was still dark, but now she could discern shapes without needing as much focus. "I choose to believe this is a good sign." She declared. Honestly, she was mostly hoping that positive affirmations would have a placebo effect at this point.
"The show must go on!" PSI King declared. "Wait, what show?"
"The Feast of the Senses." Audie O answered. "Remember? …Not like it matters. No one's in the audience." Hm, has she heard this voice before? It's probably her imagination.
"That's nothing new." The PSI King said before pausing, thinking on the ear-man's words. "...Maybe we could have a rehearsal?" He proposed.
"You sure?" Audie O asked. PSI King bobbed up and down. "I don't even remember where I left my drums."
"Did you try your ear canal?" Tanya asked, smirking at her joke. Of course the ear man is the drummer.
"Vision's not here to check down there." Audie O said, shaking his head. "Could you?"
Tanya checked her watch. "No time. I don't want to miss dinner." Mom said she was going to cook steak to celebrate her getting the job. Tanya loved steak. "We'll pick this back up tomorrow."
---------------------
"Tanya, why do you have a brain ball?" Was Mom's first question when she arrived at home, a little late but before the food got cold.
"It's called a mobility capsule, technically." Tanya corrected as she cut her steak. "But this is the brain I'm using to test my machine."
"You brought it home… why?" Mom asked.
"I didn't want him to get lonely." Tanya replied, before eating the delicious red meat.
"Hello." PSI King said out of the ball's speaker system. It was immature technology, it couldn't yet emulate someone's voice. Instead, it used the generic, vaguely feminine tones that the other psychic technology used. Apparently, it was synthesized from a combination of Agent O'Peia and Mentalis' voices.
Mom leapt out of her seat in surprise. "He's awake in there?" She asked, vaguely horrified. "Otto let you use a living brain?"
"Agent Mentalis didn't know he was alive." Tanya said. "He… didn't take the news well." It was hard to do worse than 'immediately go on a drinking binge', short of literal suicide. He didn't even get the news that PSI King was still alive, just that he had forgotten to test it. "He took a week's vacation pretty much immediately rather than deal with it."
"I don't remember much." PSI King explained. "But Tanya's device lets me pretend to eat. It's been ages since I've been able to do that."
Mom's expression softened and she sat back down. "Is there anything I can do to help?" She asked. Mary seemed keenly interested in the orb now, although she was still more occupied with her own meal.
"When the weekend comes, some deep delving into the dark corners of his mind may be useful." Tanya allowed. "But if you could secure a donor body we could pop the brain in for a few hours, Agent Colton said that could be an effective, if risky, treatment." Given that the capsule only had effective sight and hearing, although it could theoretically provide a combination smell/taste sense. Either way, it would be necessary to activate touch.
"Sasha might be able to spare something." Mom said idly. "I'll ask."
Tanya put some of the marinated carrots in her mouth. The sweetness was an excellent complement to the steak. "We're not in a rush. The bigger concern is the sabotaged thinkerprint scanners I found today."
"Sabotage? On your second day? Tell me more." Mom said, a note of excitement in her voice.
"Bull!" Mary said, pointing her fork at Tanya. "You're not that great, why wasn't it caught sooner?"
Tanya chuckled and started to explain. She probably shouldn't break opsec like this, but this is more of securing some backchannel support in case someone was to try to use the bureaucracy against her. The Soviets probably haven't penetrated the Motherlobe to that extent, but it was prudent to hedge her risk portfolio.
"It doesn't seem too dangerous, at least." Mom concluded. "I agree with Jerry. It's best if things are kept quiet until the vulnerability is caught." Tanya relaxed at her mother's ruling. "But I'll ask Hollis for some time off from missions, so I can be available at the Motherlobe. I still need to catch up with the True Psychic Tales people, go over some scripts." One of the stipulations of the comic's agreement with the relevant agents was making sure they knew what the comic was saying about them so they wouldn't be caught off guard if a random fan managed to ask them questions about it.
"Ah, I still need to meet them as well to play art model." Tanya said. She wasn't particularly looking forward to that. It was yet another thing piled on her metaphorical desk. At least she already met with the writers and clarified all of the various minutiae on what she would and would not be depicted doing.
Mom winced. "They were very professional when I did it." She said, although she didn't seem very sincere. "Even for the swimsuit." She probably meant that most of them were professional. No matter. If she couldn't intimidate some pencil-necked artist into politeness, she doesn't deserve her rank. "We can go together, sometime tomorrow."
Mary laughed. "Tanya? As a model?"
"Art model." Tanya corrected. "If I'm going to be a character in True Psychic Tales, they need to know what I look like, which is particularly important if they intend to freeze my age like they have Mom." According to True Psychic Tales, she was 28 years old. This was accurate when she was introduced, but naturally, that number has gone up over time. "So I'll need to let them draw me in various poses, outfits, and expressions so they can be used as references for the actual comic."
"I'm a little confused." PSI King said, startling Mary. "What's all this about?"
Tanya just focused on her meal. Let him interact with someone else for a bit. Mary stepped up to the plate. "Ah, the Psychonauts are super-spy-psychics. They have a comic book where they tell everyone how cool they are."
"Brilliant." was PSI King's opinion on the propaganda. "Can I have a comic book? I'm pretty cool. Even if I'm not God."
Mary scowled at the brain in a pod. "Certainly not!" She shouted. "God doesn't sound anything like you!"
"Full disclosure: This pod makes me sound pretty weird." PSI King said. "My voice is normally way sexier."
Mom glared at PSI King, but decided to not raise a fuss. Mary wasn't actually ten, after all. "Eat your dinner, Mary darling." Mom said scoldingly.
Mary paused. "Wait, don't brains still need food?"
"I gave him fresh nutrient fluid before I left the office." Tanya replied. "The high energy formulation for active brains needs to be changed out every day." The not-quite-starvation rations that the long-term preservation formula put PSI King on either helped him stay sane by forcing him into some long hibernation cycles, or exacerbated things by making him suffer. She wasn't entirely clear if disembodied brains could feel hunger. It was probably the former. Yet another thing a body would fix.
"That green stuff?" Mary asked. "It looks gross."
"It's actually edible." Tanya said. "It's mostly glucose; sugar." Assuming that you drink it fresh out of the pot, it's actually kind of tasty… if you diluted it. She spent some time tinkering with the flavor early in the year, when she was still a student. "Assuming you ignored me when I told you not to drink the green stuff I put in the fridge, you've even had some." Mary paused at that, and from her expression, Tanya knew that she did, indeed, drink the diluted nutrient fluid.
The meal concluded with Mary bashfully avoiding the topic of brain juice.
"Great, dinner's done, now what?" PSI King asked.
"Now it's time for some light exercise." Tanya said. "I forgot yesterday, and it's good for digestion."
Mary groaned from her position, washing the dishes with Mom. "Do we have to?"
"Yes." Mom said. "It's healthy, and Tanya's method is quite useful."
"I miss exercise." PSI King said. "I was a mighty oak of a man, you know." What an odd turn of phrase.
Still, it was a simple matter to move inconvenient furniture aside and to dress down to their exercise clothing. "Uh… should we be dressed like this in front of…" Mary pointed out after she had halfway undressed.
"He can't see." Tanya explained. "Only his hearing currently works, and the camera in the mobility capsule is currently off."
"Don't mind me." PSI King said cheerily. "I'll just busy myself rewriting the lyrics of that song Tanya sang for me."
Once all three women were ready, Tanya called out "Form One!" and they all kneeled onto the carpet, careful as they moved steadily into the starting position. Even that simple motion was difficult, as she used her not-so-secret training technique.
The primary obstacle when it came to exercising, to reverse the issue she had accidentally caused herself when she used psychic reinforcement to cut short learning to walk, was that she needed to completely focus on not enhancing her muscles in order to not accidentally ruin whatever task she put herself to.
To fix this, Tanya instead developed what she referred to as the psychic resistance formula. Instead of telekinetically assisting the motion of every muscle and movement, it does the opposite: telekinetically impeding those motions. At first, the amount of resistance was negligible, but it was impossible to simultaneously assist and impede her motion, so as long as she impeded her motions at least a little bit, she could be assured that she wasn't wasting her effort by leaning on her telekinesis to reduce the physical stress.
Granted, there were a few embarrassing hiccups during development, as there were muscles that could handle being strengthened without side effects beyond not needing to work as hard, but the opposite was not true. By now, she was notably strong for someone of her size and weight, her meat-rich American diet going a long way to assisting that endeavor. It still wasn't anything impressive, as she could lean on her psychic powers if she needed to actually lift anything, but her muscles now become visible when she flexes, which is good enough for her.
The actual routine was just a handful of aikido kata she had cribbed from an instruction book that the Psychonauts had on hand as training materials. They didn't quite exercise every muscle, but they came close, and it wasn't that big of a deal to add a few supplementary exercises to ensure that, as an example, her fingers were capable of supporting her weight, if needed.
She had initially thought to use Levitation to make herself heavier, but anime lies: gravity training was a good way to cripple yourself, and it wouldn't exercise your muscles evenly. All you needed to train a muscle was resistance, and all exercises were just to aim that resistance to specific muscles. No exercise equipment could possibly be superior to the simplicity of directly applying that resistance to every muscle all at once, then trying to move. It was an innovation that she wished she could have used to improve the 203rd's physical conditioning, but she didn't have the authority to tinker with novel spell formulas back then.
Mary, of course, didn't appreciate efficiency in this, and instead preferred to call it 'torture', but Tanya had administered counter-interrogation training, she knew what torture looked like. This didn't make the cut.
It felt like doing the exercises underwater, without the normal buoyancy you would feel. She was supposed to do this twice a day for twenty minutes each, but now that she has a job, she's been lazy about it. No matter, it's just a matter of self-discipline.
Despite her easy third life, where she regularly indulges in emotional whims, discipline is still something she has in ample supply.
- Location
- Argentina
This will be quite useful if her powers are blocked or weakened for some reason.
I'm more interested at the bit at the end. Tanya having administered counter-interrogation is going to be important. The memory of doing so could easily be used as a mental defense if nothing else.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
That's just youjo senki canon. She literally tortured the 203rd during their training as part of her 'get them to drop out' plan.
Also, memories of torturing people would not be an effective psychic defense. Memories of being tortured, however, would.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
It's not called a mobility capsule as a joke you know. It is, however, telekinetically operated. Helmut cannot currently operate it. He needs Dr. Touch for that.