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Psychoprotective (Youjo Senki/Psychonauts)

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Really wonder what kinda status quo and changes will have form by time canon rolls around and Raz shows up. We've already got multiple major changes do to her.

So one wonders how this will all affect Raz own journey
 
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Chapter 2.06
  • Threadmarks
    • "Why this pose?" Agent Nein asked. He was holding Tanya up by her Psychonauts jumpsuit, the slack provided by the oversized garment allowing her to hang a whole foot below his hand.

    "Give her a stern glare." The art director said. "Like she just got into some mischief and needs scolding." He pointed to Tanya. "Give me a nice sheepish look."

    Simple enough. Tanya gave her best 'shounen idiot' grin, as if a wide enough smile would make Agent Nein less angry. Hand behind her head included. "Perfect!" The art director said. "Sasha, be sterner. Let's say… she just crashed the jet. It's totaled. You're frustrated. It's her fault."

    After Sasha adjusted his expression, the artists began their drawings in earnest. They had been sketching rough lines while the director made small adjustments, but their energy picked up when they were given official sanction to begin.

    "How's your arm, Sasha?" Mom asked from the sidelines after several minutes of boredom. She was maintaining a psychic link so they could speak without moving their expressions.

    "With reinforcement, I can maintain this pose for at least an hour." Agent Nein replied, a hint of pride entering his mental voice. "I hope you're not too uncomfortable, Tanya."

    "You've got me hanging by my center of mass, this is surprisingly comfortable." Tanya explained calmly. "I'm tempted to fit in a nap."

    They continued telepathically joking around until the art director nodded in approval at all five artist's sketches of the scene at various angles. "Okay, now hold her up by the front of her jumpsuit." He said. "If you're going to be wearing such a baggy outfit, we can get some physical comedy by letting you hang."

    Tanya nodded, and negated her weight for Sasha to flip her. After a second or two of adjusting his grip to minimize discomfort, she let herself fall into the pose. "What's my motivation?" She asked the director.

    "Something's just exploded and you're hanging from a random cliff, concussed." The director replied.

    After assuming a facial expression that she hoped conveyed 'delirious' and not something untoward, she continued her discussion with Mom and Agent Nein. "How many poses did they make you two do?" She asked. The director allowed the artists to pick up the pace without telling her to change what she was doing.

    "Enough to fill an art book." Mom replied. "Twenty-five to thirty, in total."

    "Twenty-eight." Agent Nein sent. "Thirty-one if you count this session too." So, in other words, they had over ten to go. Irritating, but given that it was supposed to be comprehensive, it seemed like a reasonable amount.

    "At least the artists have all been… polite." Tanya sent, changing the subject. She expected at least one of them to crack a nude model joke, at the very least.

    "Yes, I had a word with them before you arrived." Agent Nein replied. "I reminded them what your writing stipulations implied when it came to your image priorities, and how that impacted their own work."

    "I appreciate that." Tanya replied. "They can make me as childish or cute as they want. But I don't want to give the fans any untoward ideas." Ideally, it would lead her fans to want to 'protect her innocence', rather than more gauche examples of fandom, like a countdown until she hits 18. Granted, such measures may be excessive, but she's perfectly willing to be seen as paranoid, as long as the outcome she guards against does not come to pass.

    "I was thinking of having them increase the size of your eyes a bit." The art director cut in. Oh, she forgot he was part of this conversation. While many of the artists were not psychic, pretty much every management role was filled by one.

    "That does sound like it would make her look cuter." Mom agreed. It would also make her more anime-esque, which Tanya approved of.

    They spent a little bit more time discussing various little touches that could be used to characterize the True Psychic Tales version of Tanya, both things that she actually did and things that were more exaggerated. "Okay." The art director said out loud. "That should be plenty of you in your uniform. We'll need a few drawings in other outfits. Did you bring what we asked for?"

    "Swimsuit, two sets of casual wear, and pajamas, yes." Tanya said, counting them off of her fingers as she floated back down to the ground.

    "Pick one to do first and change into it." The director instructed.

    At least she only needs to do this once…

    ---------------------

    "Thank you for watching him." Tanya said as she accepted PSI King's mobility capsule.

    Mary eagerly took the five dollars Tanya held out to her. "Pleasure doing business with you." She said, pleased with herself. Tanya resisted the impulse to correct her grammar. She definitely wasn't going to make fun of how appreciative Mary was of such a small amount of money. A small signing bonus was standard among Psychonauts employees, an extra paycheck's worth, so she was flush with cash, by a teenager's standard.

    "We had fun." PSI King said. "Did you know I speak Swedish?"

    Mary interrupted: "Not very much of it. Also, not very well."

    "My umlauts are perfect, though." PSI King insisted. Mary didn't disagree. He continued: "Hey, we saw a poster about a rock concert that's this weekend, can we go?" Mary had a distinct tendency to like anything that got a moral panic in the news from the church-going crowd. It was a little odd, given how devout she still was, but the arguments against the things were always stupid. Tanya was just always a little surprised when Mary did something rational, unprompted anyway.

    "Where is it?" Tanya asked as she walked into the lab, Mary following at her heels. She technically didn't have authorization to be here, but as long as she was with Tanya, Mom, or Agent Nein, she could go anywhere they can, as a registered guest.

    "Just in the city." Mary said. In Mystery, referring to "the city" meant only one place: Springfield, the state's second largest city. It wasn't that far; Massachusetts was pretty small. Even going to the other side of the state to Boston was do-able as a commute, particularly by flying car. Really, owning a flying car made anything within two hundred miles a reasonable commute.

    "Ask Mom." Tanya said as she hooked up the mobility capsule with the fluid cycler. "I'll manage without you for the day, PSI King." She could spend the day wargaming instead.

    "She said we could only go if you took us there." Mary said immediately.

    Drat. "Who's playing?" Tanya asked as she watched the fluid cycler drain the capsule, the hydrokinetic pump much gentler on the brain inside than one that used a pressure differential.

    "Van Halen." Mary replied, grinning.

    They weren't bad, if a bit loud. PSI King would benefit from a high-stress test that he would want to enjoy, probably. "If we can get tickets, sure. We'll go." Tanya said. Mom was always insisting that she be "a loving big sister" and "form fond memories that will last lifetimes", which was a rather large concern for an immortal like herself.

    PSI King and Mary cheered at the news. "Mom said she'd take care of it if you said yes." Mary said after they finished celebrating.

    Tanya immediately connected to Mom's mind. "Are you sure you can get tickets to that concert?" She sent. If Mom was confused as to what she meant, it meant that Mary was lying. She hasn't tried to fool Tanya in over a year, but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't be vigilant.

    "Don't worry darling, I have ways." That confirmed Mary's side of the story. "We'll go to that water park again on Sunday, when I'm not working." Mom sent back. Now that sounded fun. Water Whizz opened earlier that year, and the grand opening was a good time. "Thanks for doing this for Mary, I love you."

    "I love you too." Tanya replied before cutting the connection. She slotted PSI King's capsule into the prototype of the APES. "Mary, that's where the transport network is. Go inside and go home." She said, pointing at the lid in question before projecting into PSI King's head.

    "Let's get those drums."

    ---------------------

    PSI King's brain was brighter than normal. As in, Tanya could see, as if it was a normal night with the stars shining.

    Audie O was present at the top of the cliff Tanya had arrived at. After a moment, PSI King's primary consciousness joined them. "Nothing much like being high like this." He commented.

    "You know it, PSI King." Audie O said, nodding as he looked over the wilderness scene lit by starlight. He offered an odd mushroom to the ball of light. "Mushroom?"

    "Ugh, no thanks." PSI King said. "You know I don't like mushrooms."

    "Yeah, I know." Audie O replied. "But now you do too."'

    PSI King paused. "You're right! Thanks, Audie. Love ya."

    "I love you too." Audie O said solemnly, hugging the ball of light close. Tanya furrowed her brow. Was this relevant? Or just a sign of PSI King going insane?

    After giving them a moment to luxuriate in the embrace (they would do the same for her, she was sure), Tanya snapped her fingers. "I believe we have a search to go through?" She asked.

    "Oh, yes." PSI King said, embarrassed. "Let's take a look around? I guess?"

    "How big are these drums?" Tanya asked.

    Audie O took a moment to think on that question. "You know, I can't rightly remember." He said. "But you were right, I haven't checked my ear canal. Could you take a look?"

    Now that it was the subject at hand, Tanya could feel… something off about Audie O's mouth/ear canal. It was subtle, but that was good enough for Tanya to indulge the silly request and follow through with her earlier sarcasm.

    When she looked into the ear canal, she felt herself being drawn in through a spatial tunnel. As this was probably where she needed to go, she relaxed and let it happen. The tunnel had the appearance of a kaleidoscope, colors and patterns shifting before her eyes until she ended up laying face first on the ground with no recollection of colliding with it.

    Standing up, she took a look around. Unlike every other part of PSI King's mind, this place was intensely colorful. Every single surface was painted brightly, with no rhyme or reason as to what was colored what.

    After a moment, she did start to make out some sort of pattern. Mostly, a lot of the environment was ear-shaped, and most of those were the same shade of blue as Audie O's skin.

    Otherwise, the place was littered with sound equipment, the kind you'd see at proper concerts. Tanya started humming a few bars that Mary started earlier. "Running with the devil~" She sang softly as she started to explore. She didn't memorize the lyrics to that one.

    There were actually a few figments in this portion of PSI King's mind, which was new. They were mostly music-related, but there was one person: It was a little difficult to make out the features exactly, given all of the visual noise it was among, but she got a full understanding of its shape when she absorbed it. Was that what the PSI King looked like? Or was it someone he knew? The figment was depicting the man sitting on a picnic blanket, smiling widely.

    She feels like she may have seen this man before. That full beard was rather generic, and he wasn't dressed in a distinctive way… Perhaps a picture?

    "Hey." PSI King said in greeting while Tanya was busy thinking.

    Startling, Tanya brought up her full barrier before realizing that it was just the mind's owner. "Don't do that."

    "What are you doing?" He asked.

    Tanya frowned. Ah, she lost the mental image of the figment. "I was trying to gain clues from your figments as to your identity."

    "Any luck?"

    "No." Tanya replied. "I hope this environment won't be overstimulating you."

    "It's fine." The PSI King said quickly. It didn't sound fine. "Just… maybe sing a little? DIstract me?"

    Tanya started to hum the introduction to I Will Survive. If he's heard it before, it won't be as stressful to hear. Eventually, she found something of interest: A golden microphone. "Oh, a nugget of wisdom." She said, surprised.

    "...Oh!" PSI King said, as if he was just remembering. "I know what that is! Do you want it?" He does? Now that's interesting.

    "I already know how to sing." Tanya replied. "Also, our vocal ranges are likely way off from each other. That matters, I wouldn't be able to learn much from you. Save it for someone else." Agent Nein lost a bit of those combat skills in translation, as unlike her he can't automatically assume that all of his enemies are significantly larger than him and can also fly. She supposes it isn't impossible that there could be singing-adjacent psychic skills mixed in there, but if he turns out to know a lot about obscure telepathic techniques, she can always change her mind later. What she didn't want to add was that she wasn't sure how the loss of mental energy may affect him in his fragile state. It might be helpful… but it might also be harmful. She doesn't know.

    "Yes, that's a good point." PSI King said, disappointed. "Who taught you, anyway?"

    "A former opera singer." Tanya replied. "She taught a church choir I was forced into." She cleared her throat and sang the scales, holding each discrete note for about three seconds each. It was actually rather surprising at times how easy it was to transfer skills learned in one life to the next, even muscle memory. Then again, her second and third lives had a lot in common, build-wise. Was it even possible for her to reincarnate as anything other than a blonde haired, blue-eyed slavic girl? Two data points are not sufficient to say for sure. "Sister Lotte could manage to shatter a wine glass with the resonant frequency, but she never let us try to do so ourselves, so I don't know how to do it." It would be a pretty cool party trick.

    "Yeah, that's a cool trick." PSI King replied cheerfully, implying that he knew how to do it. Maybe she should take the nugget... "So, where are those drums?"

    Ah, right. Good question. "I arrived from there… so my best guess would be as far from there as possible." Tanya said, pointing to the entrance to this section. Ugh, looking around is giving her a headache. So bright… She thinks there may be some noise above or below her hearing range, too. Or she was just suffering from minor tinnitus. Given that she's a mental projection, it was likely not that. She started flying at high speed, crossing well over a mile in seconds.

    Oh, right, she's supposed to be singing. "Go on now, go, walk out the door…" Ah, that seems to be counteracting whatever infrasonic or ultrasonic hazard the place was putting out. "Just turn around now…" Tanya picked up speed as she flew around and through some obstacles. "'Cause you're not welcome anymore!"
    '
    On cue, censors descended on Tanya. One of the things that kind of annoyed Tanya about navigating mental worlds was that flying just meant that all of the mental entities started to fly as well. Fish trailing rainbows flew towards her, with censors riding their backs.

    "Who are those guys?" PSI King asked. "Are they friends?"

    "No." One of the censors said as it leapt from the fish to hit Tanya with its stamp. A flick of telekinetic force pulped the entity, causing it to explode in mental energy. After destroying the lot, she started to fly more.

    "Censors are forces of order, in your mind. They're what stop thoughts that should not be from propagating." Tanya explained. This was doing nothing… she sighed and landed on a random platform. "Foreign intruders in your mind qualify as thoughts that should not be in your head, so your mind makes token attempts to oust me." It was actually a good sign that his mind was active enough to muster any kind of resistance. "Don't worry, they're utterly disposable."

    Having deliberately made herself somewhat vulnerable, censors flooded the area as the not-quite audible noise intensified. They were easy to dispatch, but the acts of violence seemed to distress the PSI King.

    "This is too bright…" He whined. The world rumbled as his stress built up. Streaks of darkness broke up the technicolor landscape, and Tanya could feel a distinct dampness in the air. "No… nononono. Not her… GET AWAY!"

    Two panic attacks manifested as a shroud of noise and light encompassed the area, and that was a lot more difficult to defeat than just one. Each one covered for the other as Tanya built up aggressive energy to destroy them with, whichever she was better placed to attack became the one staying on the defensive and transitioned to offense whenever she switched her focus.

    Well, she'll just have to take things up a notch. Bringing forth the unpleasant memories of frantic combat, Tanya invoked one of the more curious psychic powers: Time Warp. Most people who knew it used it to slow down time, using it offensively on others. Tanya couldn't quite manage that. Instead, she just sped herself up, which was stressful and exhausting.

    The world around her slowed down to a crawl, even the panic attacks moved as if play-acting rather than seriously fighting. Anything of lesser speed might as well not be moving at all. The aggressive energy that was building up to a PSI blast instead formed into a blade, wickedly sharp with her lethal intent. In less than two non-accelerated seconds, the panic attacks were in three pieces each, Tanya taking deep breaths to recover from the potent psychic technique. Fortunately, it was only a quarter as stressful when used in a mental realm in comparison to the physical, so such a small amount of use was easily handled.

    "Woah." PSI King said, dumbfounded as the mental entities dissolved. "You're pretty strong, aren't you?"

    "I've been told that." Tanya said, deflecting the attention with humility. "Your mental defenses aren't very powerful, except when you draw upon hysterical strength to create panic attacks." Fundamentally, drawing upon unsustainable amounts of power, enough to be harmful to the users, was why panic attacks and nightmares were so powerful in comparison to other mental entities. It was the one advantage to having an empowered survival drive, the ability to invoke that strength at will.

    Happily, PSI King had no such empowerment at his fingertips. Now that the shroud of sensory overload had abated, the seemingly-infinite terrain had changed, instead showing a grand shrine dedicated to Audie O. Well, it wasn't so much a shrine as a giant statue of the entity that was seated and in a guru pose. In the statue's lap, a full drum set sat, with flourishes that made it better resemble internal ear anatomy. "Here we are."

    "...How did you know you needed to stop here?" PSI King asked.

    "I didn't." Tanya replied. "But I flew for four miles with no discernible change in the terrain. I suspected a trick." Her ability to sense the terrain was, apparently, able to be fooled. She was hardly an experienced Psychonaut, so while it was the first time that's happened, it's not surprising that she was learning new things.

    When PSI King touched the drums, the entire region collapsed, warping their location back to… a stage?

    "Oh jeez, it's been so long…" Audie O said, as he sat at the drum set, which was properly moved to the stage. "What do I play?"

    Tanya looked around. There wasn't an audience, and there were figments scattered around the stage, outlines of people holding instruments. One was actually of Audie O, so the other five… Were probably the other senses. The one with the hand-like head was the only one that she could definitely trace to a specific sense, touch of course. DIdn't Audie O mention a "Dr. Touch" at some point? The only other one she could guess at was the one with the head that looked vaguely lip-shaped, perhaps that one was taste. Which of the other three was sight, smell, or proprioception/balance/whatever it represents, she couldn't say.

    Nevertheless, she gathered the figments to herself, recovering a small portion of the significant amounts of mental energy she had expended. "What is this place, anyway?" PSI King asked.

    Tanya actually knew the answer to this. "This feels like an exit to your mind." She said. "But it's not at the edge of your mind."

    "Yeah, that sounds right." PSI King said, bobbing up and down.

    "There's very few places in your mind that lead out without being the edge. Given everything, there is only one possibility: This is where your sensory input enters the rest of your mind." Tanya said, taking a lecturing tone. "In fact… now that I know this is here, I may be able to properly align the artificial senses of the mobility capsule."

    "You think?" Audie O said. "It'd be nice to see the rest of the band. Dr. Touch, Tasty, Sniffles…" after a moment, he nodded to himself. "-even Vision." Wait, that was only four of the five. Was the last one… a silhouette of PSI King's actual body? She'd wouldn't dispute someone calling that tall and broad bear of a man as a 'mighty oak', after all.

    "If it wasn't for Vision, I wouldn't be half the man I became." PSI King asserted. "He brought everyone together, after all."

    "I know…" Audie O said despondently. "But does he have to be such a diva about it?" He asked, "He can't handle the crowd on his own, after all.."

    "For now, let's see if we can turn the bandwidth of your hearing up to normal levels." Tanya said, reaching out telepathically to the mobility capsule's psitanium technology. She did know, from the documentation, that this part basically involved her acting as if she was linking herself to it, and because she was inside the brain, it would just link up through there. Easy. The issue was, she never actually did that before.

    After a moment, she gave up on linking up to the systems and turning them on from inside. Instead, she instructed her archetype to turn the hearing on, and once that tiny connection was opened, it was a simple matter to open it up further and to adjust it. "Okay… I think I've done it." She announced as floating ears started to wander into the empty audience section. "Play them a beat that they can dance to." She instructed.

    "Okay." Audie O said, before doing just that. Drums weren't usually seen as an instrument that had good solo performances, but he did a reasonable job of creating a beat that the crowd seemed to appreciate. They didn't seem unhappy, at least.

    "Huh." PSI King said contemplatively. "That music you're playing outside… It's cool."

    "It's Otto's." Tanya explained. "He likes Metal music, and his record player is what was around." She could probably get some disco tracks if she raided Jerry's office, if needed.

    "It's great." PSI King said, bouncing to the beat that Audie O was now copying. "I bet this kind of music will last a long time. "

    "It's actually being largely supplanted by punk rock, to my understanding." Tanya said idly. That's what that newspaper article said, anyway.

    "They'll fail!" Prophesied PSI King. "And be stricken down." He must be in a joking mood, if he's going full music snob. "The Metal will live on."

    Tanya checked her watch. Ah, she does not have time to do anything intensive here. "That'll have to do for today. Otto won't miss his records before he returns to work, so you can listen to them back home."

    "I appreciate all that you're doing for me, Tanya." PSI King said seriously. "I'll pay you back, no matter what it takes."

    Tanya flushed at the outpouring of gratitude. It was a little early to be bandying out oaths like that, wasn't it? "Thank you." She managed to squeak out before breaking out the smelling salts.

    ---------------------

    After a simple but delicious dinner of fried rice with miso-marinated cabrito; an unusual combination but the meat was locally sourced, there was not much else to do but to watch some TV as a family until bedtime. PSI King was there too.

    "Man, being in the military sounds like a laugh riot." PSI King said as they watched a popular show about an army hospital in the Korean war. Unlike before, his new mastery over his sense of hearing allowed him to somehow manage to alter the voice in the speakers to match his own. Tanya wasn't entirely certain how he was pulling it off. Perhaps she should have taken that nugget of wisdom…

    "At times." Tanya agreed, cuddled up to her mother's side. "Few things can get as bored as a low ranking soldier that's not getting shot at." She chuckled. "Their creativity can cause more damage than the enemy, if they're particularly inventive." The Salamander Kampfgruppe provided many anecdotes of that nature.

    "If you're important, can do things others can't, they'll let you do anything." Mary said solemnly. "No matter how bad of a soldier you are. They'll just yell and bluster."

    Mom's smile vanished at the sudden downturn of the mood. "Don't be so gloomy, Mary. It's still summer vacation for another couple of weeks, no frowns allowed." She poked Mary a few times in the side, provoking a giggle. Mary was incredibly ticklish, so it didn't take much effort.

    "Am I missing something?" PSI King asked, confused.

    "Don't worry about it." Tanya replied dismissively. "Just listen to the show." Unexpectedly, fingers ghosted up and down her torso, provoking a burst of laughter. Mary was not the only ticklish one on the couch.

    All subtlety was abandoned, as Mom used one hand each to mercilessly tickle both of her daughters. "Mom!" Mary shouted insincerely between giggles. "I'll get you!"

    Tanya just laughed, not resisting the assault one bit. Telepathically, she sent a wordless impression to explain what was going on to PSI King, as she did when the TV had an excessively visual gag that he would be confused over.

    PSI King's control over his voice slipped, the original synthesized voice rendering his laughter in an emotionless deadpan. "Ha. Ha. Hahaha. Ha." Ah, she must have sent too much of the sensation of being tickled along the telepathic link. Re-asserting that control, he mimed taking deep breaths, which supposedly actually helped, according to 'So you're a brain in a jar', a book that Mary managed to find in Mystery's public library the day before. After Mary claimed that she was about to wet herself, Mom let up her tickling assault. PSI King chuckled once more as Mary dashed to the restroom. "That was a trip. Think your monkey machine can have a tickling thing?"

    Monkey machine? Oh, the APES. "I usually reserve simple playbacks with little required input for my dream player." She replied, noting that there was a commercial on so she could safely ignore the television. "It works fine, I already filed the patent now that my employment contract clarifies the ownership of things." She also sent initial FDA paperwork, but she can't actually afford to make a proper clinical trial of it, so that's a long term concern. It was safe enough that she didn't mind occasionally using it herself, but she was just a bit cautious when it came to side-effects of long-term use. "I suppose I could adjust the hunting scenario's defensive mode's code, make something where you're a child that's getting chased by a tickle-happy parent. It's not like games where losing is part of the fun would be unprecedented…" Perhaps difficulty levels that adjust the user's effective age, and thus the relative size of everything else?

    "Losing sucks, though." Mary said as she sat back down on the couch. Oh… it would be unprecedented. That was more of an advanced video game design concept… right?

    "That does sound fun." PSI King agreed. "Not quite what I was thinking, but fun." His puerile giggle gave away what he meant.

    Tanya just rolled her eyes at the joke. She'd like to say that she wasn't looking forward to when her work was inevitably turned into a vehicle for pornography, but she intended to fully capitalize, becoming very rich when that occurred. Until then, the public would just have to settle for the device that just nudges your otherwise ordinary dreams in whatever arbitrary direction you want.

    Sex sells, after all.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Lorddarkrai2 said:
    didn't he meet the devil in that? I knew it but the name escaped me before you reminded me.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    That's from the song "the best song in the world tribute", or whatever the proper name of the song is. The reference was for the song "The Metal", which I also didn't double check if that was the proper name of the song.

    Tenacious D is a band... If you could call two musicians collaborating under a single name a band.
     
    The song is just called "Tribute". They also actually meet the Devil in "Beelzeboss" instead of just having a tall tale.
     
    Chapter 2.07
  • Threadmarks
    • It was a point of pride for Tanya that despite all of these demands on her time, she kept up her job duties at reasonable efficiency. Well, reasonable by her, admittedly high, standards. By the standard set by the tradesmen who normally performed these maintenance tasks, she was putting them to shame.

    There was a reason the maintenance department was weeks behind schedule, and it was largely because of mismatches between the actual efficiency of the workers and what the budget thinks that efficiency should be. Still, given the shortage of psychic engineers, it is understandable that the Motherlobe is stuck with substandard workers.

    Perhaps they would let her organize a 'boot camp' to improve departmental efficiency… She should probably wait to ask until she has some more experience under her belt. Maybe in a few years.

    There were four hundred and seven security checkpoints operated by thinkerprint scanners within the greater Motherlobe complex. When the device has no issues, after a learning curve, the disassembly process takes three minutes and change. It takes about two minutes to cordon off the checkpoint and to reverse the process. It averages about ninety seconds to move from one checkpoint to the next. Theoretically, she could clear eight doors in an hour, eight hours per day, putting the total time to completion to about seven business days.

    Given how many doors have some sort of issue that would take additional time to resolve, this would take about ten, by Tanya's estimate. Given that the security perimeter amounted to enough that she couldn't get even that much done before the weekend, that was unacceptable.

    Which is why she bullied Jerry into assigning her a pair of tradesmen to assist her. With them handling the cordoning off and disassembly, she doubled her efficiency, as they were also quite helpful when it came to dealing with the warehouse.

    There was a bit of a 'breaking in' period that slowed down the afternoon, but Tanya asked Jerry for the ex-military types for a reason. "Clean up!" She barked out as she finished affixing the scanner into place.

    "Yes sir!" Replied Technician Ngyuen. He was a 24 year old freshly certified electrician. Also a veteran Comm-PSI from the Vietnam war. Tanya spent a few weeks in a paranoid spiral when she learned that there was actually a draft for psychics, although they never went to the point of recruiting underage ones. Fortunately, she doesn't need to worry about that until they change the rules, as with the current ones, Psychonauts are exempt from the draft.

    Tanya left the man to do the last assembly steps followed by opening up the passage. He knows where he's supposed to go next after he is done. "Ready?" Tanya asked her other assistant.

    "Yes sir!" Replied Technician Dubois. His story was broadly similar to Ngyuen, Vietnam veteran, certified electrician. He was older, at 31, and he was a D-PSI, as in, someone who fought in combat using psychic powers. In his case, he specialized in pyrokinesis, which is far more precise of a weapon than napalm.

    Needless to say, the Psychonauts' excellent mental health care was a big draw to them in accepting their current positions.

    With the door partially disassembled, Tanya immediately got to extracting and inspecting the scanner. Another sabotaged one. "Code Yellow this one." She said, depositing it into the bin that was floating behind them. Tanya double-checked the map. This door didn't lead anywhere particularly important, past this point was mostly meditation chambers for the usage of various esoteric psychic powers. That was something of a pattern, the doors that were compromised were distributed fairly randomly, which was promising: it meant that it was unlikely that the people behind this had compromised anything important.

    Accepting the replacement that Dubois had passed her, she briefly scanned it to check that it was clean and slotted it back in, securing the connections before starting to float away. "Clean up!"

    "Yes sir!"

    And so it went. Tanya called it a day at the hundredth scanner, as it was close enough to the quitting time that it wasn't worth squeezing in one or two more doors. "Pack up, we'll take those commies by storm first thing in the morning." Tanya said to her subordinates. She picked up the bin of compromised scanners. Twelve of them. "This is why we're working to the best of our ability: without our vigilance, who knows what the commies could slip past security? You've done good work, soldiers, I expect to see one hundred percent tomorrow, with no hesitation!"

    "Sir, yes sir!" Both of them said before packing up the various materials required for the job. Tanya took the Code Yellow bin with her as she walked to the maintenance department.

    On the way, one of the only Psychonauts shorter than her synchronized his pace to hers. "That was some impressive leadership, soldier." Agent Oleander said gruffly, before continuing in a much gentler, nervous tone. "But… How did you get them to listen to you like that? Give you respect? The ex-military types all laugh at me when I try to boss them around. Even if I actually am their boss at the time." While Agent Oleander's eccentricities were well known, he was actually one of the most senior Psychonauts, having joined up in the initial recruitment drive when the Psychonauts were forming into what they are today. In fact, he was handpicked by Bob Zanotto to lead teams, back during the time when he was competent at his job.

    At least, that was what Agent Nein explained secondhand, as he joined the Psychonauts about six years ago, and learned all of that from Agent Mentalis.

    "I understand how soldiers think." Tanya explained. "Soldiers, and this goes double for veterans like those two, all have a finely honed sense for when someone is talking out of the wrong end." Tanya liked to think that she gained a much more complete understanding of her soldiers, after reviewing all of her memories of them. It was still rather baffling, how they would rather die uselessly than see her play along with Loria's farce, but short of that utter madness, she thought she understood them. "If you give them a reason to stand up and work hard, they will. If you waste time demanding respect, you lose it."

    "Really?" Agent Oleander said, a little incredulously. "It can't be that simple."

    "It isn't." Tanya agreed. "It is important, when you are a direct report, to be seen as being in the same overall position as the workers. To be one of them. The military is no different. The squad leader is the squad leader because he's the one the higher ups yell at. He is otherwise just another one of the team." She gestured to the bin she was pushing. "I wasn't commanding them to do everything, I was telling them to work together with me to accomplish a necessary task."

    "Doors can't be that important." Agent Oleander grumbled, frowning. He moved to Tanya's other side to let another Agent, one that looked hurried, pass. "I mean, how often are they supposed to do that? Twice a year?" Try twelve. Psitanium erosion was a serious problem, thirty of the doors broke and needed complete replacements over the ten weeks since they were previously maintained, according to the records.

    "Everything's relative." Tanya said flippantly. The security issue was on a need to know basis, and he didn't need to know. "Keeping the security up to date saves lives, after all. My point is, they got to do the easy part, where they didn't need to think much, while I got to do the hard part, where if something goes wrong it's my fault. " The most important lesson a soldier learns in basic training is the relative value of physical effort versus mental effort. Specifically, that physical effort where you held little to no responsibility was generally desirable over making decisions where lives could be on the line. "They get paid the same either way, after all."

    Agent Oleander seemed baffled at the explanation. Damn armchair generals. No understanding of the fundamentals of esprit de corps. "But how did you get them to listen to you? You're a little girl, half their size."

    Tanya frowned. She wasn't that small, she wasn't even a full foot shorter than them! By weight, probably about right. She got their buy-in by telling them about the sabotage she found, so… "There's nothing like a good speech to rile up the troops." She eventually said. It was her favorite part of leading troops, honestly. It wasn't dangerous unless you really screwed it up, it made you feel important, and she got to fit in some occasional blasphemy, as a treat to herself. "I could go over what makes a good speech for hours, it's difficult to put into words, ironically." They had gotten a lot more enthusiastic about the job once they actually found a compromised scanner and Tanya let them examine it. They may not be engineers, but they understood enough to notice the differences, even if they probably wouldn't know what those differences did without Tanya telling them, or demonstrating that you could get a random bird to open the door. From there, it was just a matter of leading from the front, metaphorically, and acting the part of the commander. Their familiarity with following orders did the rest. "Tone helps. They can sense weakness." It was absolutely vital, when commanding troops as a young girl, to completely reject the possibility that they won't obey you. Show no weakness.

    Oleander didn't respond, deep in thought as Tanya entered the maintenance department's normal entrance. Taking a bin full of delicate-ish psitanium parts through the rapid transit tunnels was a bad idea. As parts rather than full devices, they weren't in any kind of protective casing, and while psitanium wasn't exactly fragile, it wasn't particularly durable, either.

    "Huh, don't come by here much." Agent Oleander commented as he realized where he had followed her to. "Last time was when I was filling out paperwork for the camp." Requisitions, presumably.

    "How is that going, by the way?" Tanya asked, to be polite. "Mom likes helping with it, but she's not really involved with the nuts and bolts." Tanya specifically was banned, after being the one to cause the test session to be canceled. She didn't particularly want to go, so beyond getting a little lonely at home by herself when Mary and Mom were there it was no big deal.

    "Oh, it's going great!" Agent Oleander said happily. "I've got some ideas that I'm going to run by Hollis in a few weeks. Really whip the little troopers into shape." The season was over, so he had plenty of time.

    "I'm sure Lili would like that news." Tanya said neutrally as she started on her exit paperwork. She has complained about how boring the camp gets for someone who's already done it all.

    "Yeah, the program's not really set up for repeat campers." Agent Oleander admitted as he rubbed his chin. "But I'm not going to tell Truman not to do it." Wise. If Lili can't get him to stop sending her to camp, no one will. "But I'm sure we'll have the budget for my robot army. The kids will love it."

    Tanya paused. "The engineering corps is too overworked right now. There's no way you could get robots. It's not happening next year even if Hollis liked the idea." Training robots does sound kind of cool, though… "If I have time in a few months, I could help you design robots that you could make mental copies of for your course. Making them real will have to wait."

    Agent Oleander doesn't seem to like the idea. "Can't take over the world with mental robots…" He grumbled as Tanya finished filling out the necessary paperwork she needed to end her shift. "I guess it's a good plan C." He eventually admitted. "Talk to you later, soldier. Keep up the good work."

    Tanya rolled her eyes at the dismissal. Sure, Agent Oleander was experienced and one of the most senior Psychonauts, but he was also the kind of higher up that thought they were funny when they definitely were not.

    Still, spending the day commanding a pair of soldiers was nostalgic. It was time to attend to her personal projects.

    ---------------------

    Tanya growled as she destroyed yet another panic attack. "PSI King, how could you be so overstimulated? It's just water!" Needing something visually interesting for PSI King to use for his visual calibration, Tanya had instructed Mary to show off while Tanya handled the internal parts. She had decided to do a little water show, taking a kiddie pool and using hydrokinesis to make it move around. At least, that was what her archetype reported as she sat in a lawn chair. There was a tiny "park" between two of the on-base housing apartments where they had set up, mostly because Mary was already here when Tanya found her and PSI King. Two dozen feet away, a few other children played with jump rope, including Lili.

    "It was scary!" PSI KIng shouted defensively. "All the swirling and the screaming and the snakes!"

    Hrm. That sounded more like a flashback than overstimulation. Given that he was definitely brought to the Heptadome by Ford, who had just dealt with Lucrecia… it's entirely possible that PSI King was traumatized by the Deluge of Grulovia. She wonders…

    Time for a test. While by default, anything said inside a mind was automatically translated unless absolutely no common language existed, and languages with common roots could get at least a little across, it was possible to speak in a specific language if you tried. "What is the purpose of your visit?" Tanya asked in Grulovian. "Do you have your visa?"

    PSI King paused. "I think I understood that." He said. "You're asking me what I'm doing, right? And if I have… something. What's a visa? I don't think I have one."

    So he does know Grulovian, but not fluently. More evidence for the pilot theory. "I was just testing your fluency." Tanya said. "That was Grulovian, which is clearly not your native language, but one you know a few words in." Well, it was also possible that she just used an incredibly archaic term, but Augustus didn't say she sounded strange when she asked him to rate her fluency, so probably not. "I said something that didn't make sense in context, so you could only understand it if you knew the language."

    "Oh." PSI King said. "Well, okay then."

    "Still, I expected that more visual stimulation would summon some sort of entity similar to Audie O." Tanya said, thinking out loud.

    "Yeah, where is Vision Quest?" Audie said from his position, seated at his drumset. "I thought he'd come running when…" He paused, suddenly shuddering in fear. "Well, I thought he'd show up by now too."

    "Maybe he's looking for his violin?" PSI King offered.

    "It's nowhere!" Shouted a new voice. Tanya jumped in surprise. Was that… Agent Cruller's voice?

    Much like Audie O, the entity that showed up was dressed for marching band. Also like Audie O, the entity had a giant sensory organ for a head and a fancy hat. The differences were that he had a giant green eye for a head, that color extended to his overall appearance, and he had swept back eyelashes as hair. "I've looked everywhere in the concert grounds. Can't find it! How am I supposed to sweep the crowd if I don't have my violin?"

    Well, this essentially confirmed Tanya's deduction that the one that put PSI King's brain there was Agent Cruller. "It's rather dark, maybe you missed it?" Tanya offered. She focused on the entity, trying to feel out if there was another spatial tunnel like Audie O had. "What does it look like?" She assumed green, but it was so much easier to work within a mind if you manipulated it rather than forcing things.

    "Funny, I can't quite remember." Vision said. "I'd know it when I saw it, though." He hurriedly added.

    Tanya sent a message to her archetype to turn the vision on. All the way on. The audio system was already on full blast.

    In the crowd, the ear-people who were patiently waiting for the show were joined by eye-people, and both started demanding some music from the band. Tanya felt that tiny connection inside Vision's eye. "How about now?" Tanya asked.

    "I think…" He said, nervous at the increasingly energetic crowd. "That I can't look now." He turned towards Tanya, making direct eye contact. "If you think you're so great, how about an encore of your earlier performance?" With that, Tanya felt the tug from that connection, and projected herself through as she felt herself get sucked into Vision's pupil.

    ---------------------

    There wasn't actually a whole lot to talk about, when it came to the interior of Vision's section of PSI King's mind. It was a place of massive visual noise, with energetic but futile attempts to stop Tanya from accomplishing her goal.

    Light beam puzzles opened the way, the reconstruction of the rainbow allowed her to play a small tune on a giant xylophone, and it was capped off with an extra-powerful panic attack that was capable of hydrokinesis, forming clones of water instead of illusion to distract Tanya from destroying it. It required some usage of Time Warp to defeat, but most Psychonauts needed either that or Confusion to defeat panic attacks so that was nothing shameful.

    Once the violin was retrieved, the floating microphone that PSI King manifested as changed to a floating eyeball with ears. Both of them sang a song on PSI King's stage along with his two functional senses, and Tanya stepped outside of the mind at the song's conclusion.

    "How are you feeling?" Tanya asked PSI King when she was back in her own body.

    "Groovy." PSI King said, his brain spinning inside of his capsule. "I can finally see you clearly… I thought you said you were an adult?" Tanya had wondered just how PSI King could see inside his mind fine when his visual processing was screwed up, but as someone who had plenty of experience sensing things mentally, she should have known that the answer was 'he wasn't actually seeing things in reasonable resolutions'.

    Tanya scoffed. "I said I had a Master's degree. Which I do."

    Mary giggled. "She's sixteen." She added helpfully, idly splashing while relaxing in the kiddie pool. "Are you a bit disappointed that she's too young for you? Were you getting a bit of a crush?"

    "Nah." PSI King said easily. "Just didn't expect a kid to be so strong." His brain started turning around slowly, and the integrated camera followed along, maneuvering around the ball to stay in front of his optical lobe. "What is this place?"

    "This is one of the public areas of the on-base housing for Psychonauts headquarters." Tanya explained. "You'll find off-duty Psychonauts and their families here. Like Technician Dubois over there, playing catch with his son."

    "Woah, Dad bod alert!" PSI King said, keenly interested as the aforementioned ex-soldier lifted up his shirt to wipe away his sweat. Technician Dubois was fairly muscular, but he was also hairy with a prominent gut. "I wonder if he's a trade…"

    Mary and Tanya stared at the brain floating in the mobility capsule. Okay, PSI King was apparently gay. And into hairy fat guys. Mary looked at Technician Dubois. "Ew!" She shuddered in disgust. "He's fat and old!"

    "All the more to love, girl!" PSI King retorted. "I'm in no condition to cruise for tricks, though." Tanya wondered if Mom was up to date on gay slang… Wait, being up to date would likely be counterproductive. The only old gay guy she sort of knows is Bob… No, going through the trouble of getting introduced to him would be too much of a bother. It's times like this that she misses the internet. Back in her first life, she'd be able to find random information like that easily.

    "At least you'll be able to fully enjoy the concert, now that your primary senses are restored." Tanya pointed out.

    "Aw yeah, gonna bring the thunder!" He declared. Tanya checked her watch. Still an hour until dinner…

    "The next step would be to get you mobile." Tanya said. "Now that you can sense the world around you, you should be able to use telekinesis in order to move your mobility capsule." It was called a mobility capsule for a reason, after all. The outer gyroscope was specifically designed to be easily caught by telekinesis, and to minimize the jostling of the brain inside when moving.

    "Great. How do I do that?" PSI King said.

    "Just imagine picking up your head and moving it forward." Mary offered.

    "With what?" PSI King asked.

    Mary held out her hands. "You know, with your hands." To demonstrate, Mary placed her hands at the sides of her head and tugged at her neck.

    "RIght, hands." PSI King said. "I totally remember having those." He sat quietly, unmoving. "Tanya, can we use your machine? I had hands then."

    "We have some time." Tanya said, nodding in agreement. "Mary, clean up the kiddie pool and go see if Mom wants help with dinner." To help her out, Tanya used hydrokinesis to lift all of the water out of the pool and spread it all over the grass.

    Off to the transit tunnels.

    ---------------------

    "Okay, hands." PSI King said, looking closely at the fake ones the APES imposed on him. He flexed them, but they glitched as he did so, clipping into themselves. "AH!" He said as he fell backwards, hitting his head on the tree that was behind him in the forest scenario. "Ow."

    "How's the pain, by the way?" Tanya asked as she fiddled with her dev tools. Link looked pretty strange when she gave him more of a sumo build, but she was touching up the edited copy of the file she made before using it as PSI King's avatar. In this case, her tools manifested as a pottery wheel in which she was adjusting a clay model. "Realistic? It's meant to be toned down, but I'm not sure if I left it too sensitive."

    PSI King huffed as he rubbed the back of his avatar's head. "I don't really remember pain like this." He said. "It doesn't seem too bad though."

    "Good to hear." Tanya said as she sliced a little off of the clay model's stomach. What next…

    "You should make the biceps bigger." Agent Mentalis suggested with a soft tone. "Maybe add some handsome facial hair."

    Tanya followed the suggestion, the mental toolkit making such changes much faster than it would be if they were real clay. That did look better, yes. Now, how much of a mustache would be appropriate? She put on one that seemed balanced with the short hairstyle.

    "That looks silly." Critiqued Agent Mentalis. "It needs longer hair. Here, let me." Wait a minute. What was… Tanya leapt away from the unexpected intruder on the APES environment.

    The pottery wheel was now being shaped by a new mental entity, wearing a red coat with pink flourishes, brown pants, and an orange turtleneck sweater, humming exactly as Agent Mentalis would as he gently shaped the burlier Link model with two of his three hands. The last one was his head, where a face was drawn on the palm.

    "Dr. Touch?" PSI King asked. "Oh man, it's good to see you again. I could sure use a hand or two here with this."

    "Well, I'm without my organ, so I've not much better to do than help with this." He said as he put the finishing touches. Surprisingly, it still looked distinctly like a burlier Link instead of like someone else, the hair grown to mid-back, flowing freely and widely with the green hat changed to look more like a knit cap rather than a leather one. Tanya assumed that he couldn't get the facial hair to look right with such a delicate elfin jaw, so skipped over it.

    "It looks good." Tanya said approvingly. She dismissed the dev tools, saving the changes as a new asset. Then she checked her watch. "But I'm late for dinner." She herded everyone out of the simulated mental environment, shut down the APES, and brought out her smelling salts. "I'll leave you to…" Did he say organ? "Explore yourself."

    PSI King giggled.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 2.08
  • Threadmarks
    • "That was fun." PSI King said as they started packing up.

    "Playing with a floating brain was super-weird." James said. "But you're a cool dude."

    Parson snorted. "He flirted with every single NPC that didn't have weapons drawn." And a few that did, yes.

    "What can I say?" PSI King said. "I've a lot of love to give."

    "Eighteen charisma is bullshit." Asha complained.

    "Parson's expression every time was hilarious." James said. "Come on Ashna, we gotta get home."

    Nathan stood up as well, leaving with a wave. He didn't need to say anything, everyone knew his precarious living situation.

    With the others gone, Parson turned on PSI King. "I have to say, I've never seen one of those brain balls up close before." True Psychic Tales did feature them as background characters, whenever a scene was set in the Nerve Center. There were not many Psychonauts that were disembodied brains, but there were a few. "It's a lot more high tech than the comics make them look."

    "Yeah, I miss having a body." PSI King said. "But this ball thing is pretty cool."

    "It took Agent Mentalis twelve years of work to make the modern mobility capsule." Tanya offered an interesting fact. "His goal was to make it possible for someone to live bodiless so as to escape the infirmities of old age. He fully plans on placing his own brain in one, once his health dips below a certain standard."

    "I mean, you can't eat anything. Or make sweet love. " PSI King said. "So I don't think he's done yet."

    Tanya shrugged. "As an incidental benefit, my own work will allow that particular issue to be addressed. Both of them."

    "Wait, you're going to make porn games?" Parson asked, shocked.

    "Of course not." Tanya said. The closest thing she'd ever make would be the things like the breakfast scenario she already created. Scenarios with no real game to them, just a pleasant sensory experience that is meant to be enjoyed for its own sake. There were quite a few exotic experiences that she'd like to be able to enjoy whenever she wanted, even ignoring the ones that would be otherwise impossible. "But I've explained my end goal: to create development tools that can be used by artists and non-psychics to create games and other entertainment without needing my input. Some of that is going to end up as pornography." As long as she gets her cut, she was fine with it.

    "Still, it's weird to hear you talk about porn." Parson said. "You always get so grossed out when the nerds hit on you."

    Tanya shuddered. "Don't remind me. But even with my currently completed model, the device that helps you fall asleep and lets you guide your dreams, can be used for such matters."

    "Oh yeah, you talked about that thing." Parson said, looking into the middle distance as he recalled the conversation. "My first thought when you described it was wondering if I could ask it to make me dream about sleeping with Carrie Fisher."

    PSI King seemed intrigued by this topic. "Hey, can I have a go with that device?"

    Tanya shook her head. "No, the FDA has the only functional devices right now." She could make another, sure, but she was busy… also she didn't want to risk using it herself long-term without knowing the results of those tests. "Also Parson, there's nothing stopping you from using the device like that." Except the part where it stops you from waking up at night for anything short of shocks on par with smelling salts, which could have undesirable side-effects. Tanya was still working on that aspect. "Beyond the lack of possession of it."

    "What did you usually use it for?" Parson asked, curious. PSI King hummed curiously as well.

    Tanya blushed. She shouldn't say… it's weird… oh, she also set it to let her spend more time with Visha. "Ah, I had a friend; over a decade ago. She's a world away now. When testing, I usually did something with her that I never had the chance to." Like cuddling, or going to the beach with the men. She always stayed out of things when she left them to enjoy themselves, not wanting her authority to put a damper on things, as she was told in Officer's school was the proper way to do things. It was one of the few things she regretted on how she handled the 203rd, she should have acted closer to the Japanese way of things. "Beach trips and the like. Normal things." Definitely never replaying those months of indolence when she was in recovery.

    "Makes sense." Parson said after a moment, treating the moment delicately. "Have you ever considered getting back in touch?"

    Tanya winced. "Ah, as you know, I am a firm believer in reincarnation. When I said 'world away'..." She let the implications settle in. Visha was probably still alive, happy with a family of her own. Or dead with a mountain of Nazi corpses at her feet, bit of a tossup. Did they even take power?

    "Oh. I'm sorry, that was dumb of me." Parson said. Tanya didn't like telling people about her previous lives, but she had mentioned to the RPG group that she firmly believed that everyone reincarnated after death, but in a completely different world. Conversation during mealtimes could get philosophical at times.

    "I better go fetch Mary from the arcade." Tanya said, sighing as she rose from her seat. "She feels cheated if she doesn't run out of money before closing." Even when it was entirely due to her spending hours on the pinball machine to get her spot at the top of the high score list back. Mary liked to attribute it to her natural talent and hard work, but she also liked forgetting that one of Being X's blessings was literally talent in all things, on top of nigh immortality and incredible magical/psychic power.

    Needless to say, only Agent Nein and Mom knew about that bit.

    ---------------------

    Ah, Saturday. The day that Tanya gets to sleep in… if her circadian rhythm didn't wake her up thirty minutes earlier than usual for no particular reason. Each of her three lives had their own little biological quirks, even if Being X declined to deliberately saddle her with one of the many, many possible genetic disorders just to make her life difficult. She assumed it was because despite everything, he had a sense of fair play that prevented him from cheating quite so egregiously.

    As the first one up, Tanya took to cooking breakfast for everyone after her morning grooming. With plenty of energy, she decided to put in a bit more effort than usual. The full honey pepper pancake stacker, with the original honey pepper boar bacon instead of regular bacon. This will require a quick trip to the commissary, as they were out of bacon.

    She started jogging, activating the psychic resistance formula to let the trip double as exercise. As she exited the building, a voice called out: "Morning Tanya!" Lili shouted.

    The seven year old was, as usual, in the garden from dawn to whenever she's needed elsewhere. Tanya had encouraged her to develop her family's inborn affinity of herbaphony in an attempt to curb her pyromaniac tendencies, and it worked wonderfully. This time, both of her parents were in the dirt with her, a rarity. "Good Morning, Lili." Tanya replied, diverting her route to the quarter-acre plot that was dedicated to the Zanotto family's horticultural whims. "Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Zanotto."

    Grand Head Zanotto was in fine form, dressed in his flannel shirt and jeans as he coaxed his existing plants to clear a space for the seeds he was planting in their place. "Good Morning, Tanya." Grand Head Zanotto said. "Just planting the pumpkins for Halloween. The more time I give them, the better off the soil will be." Herbaphony allowed for magical levels of plant growth… but soil depletion was still an issue. Bob Zanotto invented the field of psychic horticulture, and by now there was a fairly large body of knowledge about how to do so effectively. It wasn't suitable for industrial scale farming, but for personal gardens of an acre at the largest, a psychic or two could perform wonders.

    Mrs. Zanotto was a pleasant woman, plump and quick to offer people food at all hours of the day. It was a little mystifying to Tanya why such a domestic soul didn't become a full time homemaker instead of keeping up her work as a real estate agent, but it wasn't any of Tanya's business. Then again… she was rather skilled at hydrokinesis… That usually required an iron will and an aggressive approach… "Oh Tanya, do you want some strawberries? We cleared the bushes so we have plenty." Another useful application of herbaphony is to cannibalize the plant to reduce the soil stress when forcing the production of fruit.

    Lili was grinning like a loon as she plucked more strawberries from the withering plant, each one fat and juicy-looking. Her mother sent water slowly into the soil as Lili worked, helping the process along. She was dressed identically to her mother, a denim dress with flowers embroidered for decoration, capped with a floppy straw hat that had living plants added. Lili's hat had dandelions, while her mother's had small sunflowers.

    "I would love some, thank you." Tanya said, telekinetically accepting four strawberries that Mrs. Zanotto washed on the spot for her. "I'm picking up some ingredients for breakfast at the commissary, so I'm in a bit of a hurry."

    "Are they open?" Mrs. Zanotto asked, confused.

    "That's not going to stop me." Tanya shouted back as she left.

    The Psychonauts, as they are quick to remind people, are fundamentally an organization about scientific research. This means that a rather large portion of their administrative staff are gigantic technophiles. Was it practical to set up a psitanium-controlled self-checkout that could use thinkerprint authorization to put your purchase on a tab that's deducted from your next paycheck? No. Did Agent Mentalis invent and install one so he could satisfy his midnight snacking desires? Yes.

    Technicians could open the door to the commissary even if it was closed, and it was a simple matter to swipe the ingredients, use the aforementioned self checkout to pay for them, and then lock the door behind her, without anyone important caring about the blatant abuse of power. People with high enough clearance could open those doors too, after all.

    On her way back, Tanya was sure to compliment the now-eaten strawberries, accepting a small basket of them that Mrs. Zanotto prepared while Tanya was shopping. Lili preened under the praise, happily gardening with her family.

    ---------------------

    "...I'm starting to remember." PSI King said as Tanya busied herself in the kitchen. While he still needed sleep as an isolated brain, he tended to sleep fitfully, napping throughout the day rather than a full night of rest.

    "Oh? That's good news." Tanya said, whisking the pancake batter. "Why do you sound so despondent about it?"

    "I'm remembering his face…" PSI King elaborated, radiating grief. "How he never took good care of his glasses, or himself, unless I made him of course." He sounded like he was describing a deceased brother… or lover. "But what was his name? What was mine?" He sobbed, his skill with telepathy easily sufficient to project that even without a face. "He's dead now, anyway. I remember trying to save him… but I just threw my life away for nothing."

    Tanya winced. Yeah, she saw things like that quite a bit during the war. From the enemy, mostly. Her soldiers knew that they were not allowed to die. Until…

    "Hey, you okay?" PSI KIng asked, his self-pity melting away to concern. "I know I'm being a Gloomy Gus here but you seem more angry, and not at me."

    "Just… it's nothing." Tanya deflected. "That matter is long dead." While she doesn't have any memory of actually killing Loria, she had no doubt of his death.

    "I'm sorry for bringing up bad memories, Tanya." PSI King sent, using telepathy rather than his mobility capsule's voice. "Mary told me that you had a bad time, in the last life you two had."

    Great. Of course she talked about it. "No one had a good time then." Tanya replied somberly. "Even in this timeline, World War I was a horrific waste."

    "If you ever want to talk about it, I'll keep it safe like a roadie: unseen and unheard." PSI King offered.

    "Thank you, but I've put all that well behind me with plenty of therapy. There's no need to speak any more on the subject." Tanya replied, her tone short and clipped. "Mary likes talking about it to those inclined to believe her-" Which she's thankfully smart enough to keep a secret from her schoolmates. "-because it makes her special, 'God's chosen', with a divine mandate and blessings from heaven." Which, given the literal miracle of healing that she can show off on demand, is fundamentally accurate. "I, on the other hand, don't like talking about it. No one wins misery poker." She actually didn't like talking about herself in general. Even if her anxiety had been more or less removed, many of the habits and preferences she developed from living with it remained.

    "Just thought I'd offer. Hey, where did you learn about this recipe?" PSI King asked as Tanya started to plate the first pancake stacker, layering the pancakes, bacon, butter, and syrup as the recipe dictated.

    "Agent Boole." Tanya replied flippantly. "I helped out his friend, so he offered to teach me to cook. This was one of that friend's favorite meals from a local diner, so he reverse-engineered it twenty years ago. Why?"

    "I know it's the thing you made for me in the monkey machine, but… I think I've had it before." He said. "Something about how you're making it… it rings a bell."

    Curious, she was using telekinetic constructs nearly exclusively, a very unusual but also very sanitary way to prepare food. "We don't need to rush things." Tanya eventually said. "Your memories are returning slowly, we'll dust off the cobwebs soon enough." Actually, perhaps they could use one of Agent Mentalis' memory boosting… ah, right, he's still on his vacation. She can't check them out as she's not an Agent, and without Agent Mentalis around to make an exception or to loan her one of his functioning prototypes…

    Mom entered the dining area, prepared for the day. It was the weekend, so that meant she was dressed for a day with Agent Nein, attending some psychiatric conference in Chicago, only technically work. Not something you brought small children to, so it did explain why Mom was so eager to get Tanya to commit to a specific activity with Mary. "Good morning darling! I see someone's in a good mood!" Tanya hummed in agreement, even if the morbid topic kind of spoiled it. She opened the freezer, looking through the varied selection of frozen fruit juices. "I'll take care of this part, do you have a preference?"

    She left that part for Mom specifically because she didn't have one, but… "Pineapple." Tanya said, picking the first one her eyes focused on when she glanced at the freezer door. Mom gets… let's say stressed when she doesn't feel like she's doing enough for her daughters. It was easier to just pick something and let her feel like she's indulging them rather than play the politeness game. It was yet another thing that made Tanya feel more like an American.

    After all three plates were finished and on the table, Mary stumbled into the room, still tired but drooling at the prospect of the special breakfast. Between bites, Mary asked: "So Mom, did you get the tickets?"

    After swallowing her own bite, Mom telekinetically brought out a set of three tickets. "I said I have ways, darlings. I even got you VIP passes, so you can meet them backstage." Tanya immediately decided to not question this.

    "You even got a ticket for me? Aw shucks." PSI King gushed.

    "The Springfield Civic Center has a standing policy that brains in capsules get discounted handicapped tickets." Milla explained. "It's the closest major music venue to the Motherlobe, so it wouldn't be the first one they've seen."

    Ah, right. "There's a handful of Agents that debrain themselves when it's convenient for them." Like on leg day, or if they're hungover enough that Medical decides that they'd be more productive if their body was comatose in the infirmary while they went about their day.

    "Weird." PSI King said, contemplating that information as everyone else ate.

    Once Tanya finished her breakfast, she started listing off the day's itinerary: "As a weekend concert, it's much earlier than you'd see during the week: The doors open at three. That gives us about five hours to see if we can get you able to move that capsule on your own before we have to leave." They had VIP tickets, no waiting in line required.

    Mom winced. "I really should be helping… but it seems like you're doing an excellent job, Tanya. I need to get to the jet for that conference soon, though." She checked the time, glancing at the wall clock. She accelerated her consumption of breakfast, not even half done.

    "I have things well in hand." Tanya said, waving her off. "It wouldn't sit well with me if I didn't see things through."

    Mom paused, eyes narrowing. She was clearly thinking about what happened the last time Tanya decided to do actual Psychonauts things, with Agent Cruller.

    Before she could say anything, Tanya added: "PSI King's mental defenses are pitiful in comparison to Agent Cruller. I can handle anything he's got."

    "Hey…" PSI King whined, offended.

    After a moment of thought, Mom accepted this reasoning and continued eating. Psychics did eat more than non-psychics, so she was able to polish off the rich meal without much in the way of problems. "I should get going, have fun, love you all!" She then floated out to the apartment's balcony, flying off to the jet rather than bothering with the transport network.

    Mary was still eating, her having long unlearned that particular facet of military discipline. "I'm gonna watch Super Friends. Have fun in PSI King's head." Naturally, Mary loved Saturday morning cartoons. What surprised Tanya was that she liked them more than she liked entering people's minds.

    Hrm. Maybe she just lost her enthusiasm over it after what happened before.

    ---------------------

    "Why Dr. Touch?" Was the first question Tanya had when the embodied sense had introduced himself again.

    Dr. Touch chuckled, the sound like something that would come out of Agent Mentalis' mouth, but soft and gentle where the real Agent Mentalis was playful and bombastic. It pretty much made sense to Tanya, odds are while PSI King had heard the man's voice, he knew very little about what the man was actually like. "Well, I did consider a few other stage names." He said, using a wry tone that sounded much more like Agent Mentalis when he was joking around. "What do you think of 'Organ Master'? Or 'Finger Dude? I liked 'Mr. Handy' too, but Vision saw right through me when I tried to slip that one around him."

    Tanya turned to the floating eyeball with ears. "Your mind is a filthy place." She deadpanned. Turning back, she sighed. "Dr. Touch it is."

    "That's for the best." PSI King said in agreement.

    "Now, where should we start looking for your organ?" Tanya asked. She couldn't sense anything from his head…

    "I go where the love is." Dr. Touch said cryptically. "Just follow your heart."

    Tanya's eye twitched. "Vision? Do you have any input?"

    "Well," Vision Quest said from where he was tuning his violin, "Last time I saw that overengineered pile of scrap was…" Dr. Touch harrumphed at the acerbic jab. Apparently, the personality that PSI King associated with Agent Cruller's cranky voice was incredibly prickly, taking every opportunity to make verbal potshots at the other senses. "It was dark, and cold. The dang thing kept seizing up, trying to bring out one last chord for Sniffles to play off of and take us home." As he spoke, a chill started to appear, and the air took a distinct dampness. PSI King started shivering. Tanya created a small but powerful fire in her hand, warding away both environmental effects.

    That… made absolutely zero sense. "Where was this?" Tanya asked.

    "It was an eternity ago!" Vision snapped. "How am I supposed to know that?"

    "Ah." Dr. Touch said, in a way that made clear the sinking feeling that he was feeling. "Yes… I remember that." He looked down at his own hands, shivering and miming… it looked like he was using smelling salts, actually. He took a deep breath from his nonexistent nose, and nodded to himself, the fingers of his head clenching into a fist before relaxing. "They'll be down in The Dumps." He said sadly.

    Normally, Tanya would question this. But she was inside someone's mind, so she just assumed that phrase was just being literal. "Let's get going then."

    "Audie?" Dr. Touch asked, "You're the expert, what's the fastest way there?"

    "Thanks for that." The ear man said, annoyed. "Come on, we'll take the Feelmobile." Where did she hear that name before?

    The 'Feelmobile' was a pretty generic hippie van, like one would see in cartoons about amateur detectives and their psychic pet, although the memory of it was obviously corrupted: many of the identifying features were blurred, and it had slashes that viewed the night sky breaking up its colorful design. It was also bigger on the inside, like an exceptionally mobile memory vault. Or that was just the night sky aesthetics making her think of the one she crawled out of a few delves ago.

    Audie O was driving, while the rest of them waited in the oddly spacious back. Upon review, it resembled the Heptadome, absent the central device, which Tanya had since learned was called the Astralathe. It was, as Tanya had thought, the precursor to the psychoportal, and was immensely powerful, capable of feats of mental alteration and damage beyond the capabilities of a normal psychic.

    Needless to say, that explained a lot. "Don't sit there." Vision said. "That's Sniffles' spot." Tanya sighed and moved to the adjacent one. "No, that one's Tasty's."

    "Where should I sit, then?" Tanya asked.

    "Hrm." Vision looked around, then pointed to a visibly soaked pillow right next to him. "This one." He said, "Better you than me."

    PSI King shuddered. "No, not that one." He shouted towards where one of the entrances to the Heptadome would be, where Audie O was driving. "Hey, can Tanya use your spot?"

    At the ear man's assent, Tanya settled down right next to PSI King. It was even closer to him than the damp one was to Vision. Hrm, this was… odd. Such specificity… it probably meant something. She had gathered that PSI King was afflicted with a bit of hydrophobia, presumably from the Deluge of Grulovia, but… a damp beanbag? Why was it damp?

    Before Tanya could puzzle out more about this mystery, the Feelmobile stopped, and the other exit, replaced with a set of van doors, opened up. Tanya filed out with PSI King floating behind, but the others remained inside.

    "The Dumps" was a place of darkness and cold, wet air. It was raining so thickly that Tanya felt like she could drown, but a shield insulated her from both. The sky, what little could be seen, had a sun that resembled more a spotlight shining from a broken roof than an actual celestial body, and the place smelled… a bit like black pepper, actually. It irritated her nose.

    The figments were of particularly aggressive snakes, storms, that man who was likely PSI King's lover… and tentacles. Not real ones, with suckers and all of that, but more the shapes of them. One of the figments had PSI King's lover in a daring pose, his hand to his forehead as he commanded the tentacles psychically.

    …She's seen this before. She knows she has. But even combing through her memory using psychonauts techniques, it clearly wasn't something she felt was important enough to put effort into remembering. Who was PSI King? Well, currently he was screaming and going back into the Feelmobile.

    Censors came out in a flood, wearing comically old timey swimsuits as they brandished their stamps, and unlike before, they were accompanied by proper mental defenses: a Judge, some Regrets, and, as usual, a Panic Attack.

    After she killed the mental entities, PSI King returned. "I'm sorry about that." He said.

    "It's fine." Tanya said, waving off the apology. "As I've mentioned before, mental defenses will attack anyone inside your mind. It's possible to stop them, but you're not in complete control of your faculties yet." That's what they're here to fix, after all.

    Looking around, Tanya found… a tomb of ice. She could barely make out a silhouette, one that vaguely matched the one in pride of place on that stage. Was this what happened to PSI King's body? If it was frozen… wouldn't it be theoretically possible to revive it? She didn't exactly know anything about cryonics, but she remembered reading about it in the newspaper last year… Something about a genuine Neanderthal that was unfrozen? Agent Nein was excited about it, in his usual reserved manner. What ended up happening to that guy?

    She looked back up at the "sun". Wait… there was something up there. Tanya smirked. Of course, there's never a sun unless it's important. Flying up there, she looked over the frozen landscape. The rain was gone, all the water limited to below the ice.

    "Huh, deja vu…" Tanya said, confused. Was that a figment of a brain, just a little bit away from the hole in the ice? Where has she seen that before? Has she seen this frozen lake before?

    "You find it yet?" Vision shouted from a distance. Logically, she shouldn't be able to hear him, but logic can go hang.

    Wait. She did see this before. In Agent Cruller's head. Right before she went into the hole, and found that pile of bodies, there was a figment of a brain right outside of it. That was where Ford found PSI King's brain! The timeline matched up… but the question remains: who was he?

    The organ was almost disappointingly obvious in its placement. A distinctive rock formation had it on top, one that Tanya did recall from Agent Cruller's version of the scene as well. It was just a few meters away from the hole, after all. The figments continued, but included a few other odd ones: a tidal wave of animal figments, all cold-weather types, and letters that swarmed like bees. Also, music notes.

    Tanya got the distinct impression that she is going to think herself such a fool when she finally finds out PSI King's name. Hopefully it's because he was just some guy and she was fooling herself into thinking she could deduce it.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • I barely even know what to say. Tanya is absolutely on the money in every regard, especially that she will feel like a fool when she realizes how absurdly obvious the answer is. I think the only reason she hasn't figured it out is that the chain of coincidences that led to this is too bizarre to be credible. Who would seriously believe that Helmut Fullbear was never lost and has just been sitting in a bubble in possession of his dearest friends for decades?

    Actually, what is the timeline anyway? Less than in the game, certainly, but not by much. The war in Grulovia and the shattering of the Psychic Seven was in 1962... if Lili is 7 now I guess it's probably 1978? So 16 years vs. 20. Better but still not ideal.
     
    Chapter 2.09
  • Threadmarks
    • "Good effort, guys!" PSI King said, complimenting his current senses on their performance. "That was a good rehearsal." He gave the band a thumbs up with the hand that was now hanging down from the floating eyeball with ears that was his astral self.

    "It's just not the same." Audie O complained.

    Dr. Touch nodded in agreement, bringing his fingers together as was his habit. "Without Tasty's bass licks and Sniffles picking out notes on the guitar, the Feast just isn't complete." Tanya snorted at the puns.

    "I'll see what I can do tomorrow." Tanya said idly from her position at the back of the stage. She got off of the speaker she was sitting on, dusting off her clothes. "For now, let's see if this works." She brought out her smelling salts and exited PSI King's mind.

    --------------------

    The first thing Tanya did when she returned to her body was check the time. That took three hours? Sounds about right. "How are you feeling, PSI King?" Tanya asked, with a wry grin as she emphasized the pun.

    PSI King's mobility capsule floated upwards from its position in Tanya's lap and turned to face her. "Kind of awkward, actually." He said, "I mean, I know I was a brain in a jar, but now I can actually feel how light I am, how round…" He paused as he floated around. "Not a fan."

    "That's the dysphoria." Tanya explained. "You're beginning to remember what it was like to have a body, so the fact that you don't have one is unsettling on a fundamental level." Tanya vaguely recalled reading about therapies that could assist with this in the mobility capsule manual, but that kind of thing was outside her expertise. "You'd experience something similar if you were placed into a body that wasn't your own."

    "This sucks." PSI King concluded.

    Tanya nodded sympathetically. "I'd like to say that it goes away eventually, and it does in my similar experience… but it took me a little over ten years for that to pass." Even then, she could only comment on gender dysphoria, not mutilation-related dysphoria. Unless… No, Mary would never agree to that.

    "Yikes." PSI King replied.

    Mary glanced back at them from her cartoon about a distaff counterpart to a popular superhero. "Oh, PSI King can move on his own now. Cool." She observed, before turning her attention back to her cartoon.

    Reminding herself that Mary acting her age was a good thing, Tanya started to stretch. "Time for some exercise, I think." She said, not bothering to specifically call out Mary. "I'm spending too much time sitting around inside people's heads lately."

    "Sorry." PSI King said.

    "It's fine." Tanya said, "I have some time to catch up now." She'd like to say that she'd be inside her own head or the dead brain's head… but if she was doing that, she could task an archetype to exercise, as she wouldn't need her full power to deal with PSI King's mental defenses. With her attention and power split on actually doing something, they would not be nearly as simple to deal with.

    PSI King decided to watch Mary's cartoon. "So what's with this chick in that crazy outfit?"

    Tanya tuned out the superhero discussion. The whole concept was silly, if you asked her. But it was popular, and will continue to be popular.

    Just as long as she's left out of it.

    ---------------------

    The concert was a lot more entertaining than Tanya thought it would be. It wasn't her favorite genre of music, but the crowd… The unified enjoyment of the performance created a secondary undercurrent to the music that was pleasing to Tanya's psychic senses. It was easy to let the power of unified action flow through her, giving her a feeling of belonging that was rather novel.

    It reminded her of battle, actually. Specifically, battle with her 203rd behind and around her, acting as extensions of her will. It was an easy feeling to disrupt, with the chaos of actual battle, but the first parts of most engagements, when everything was going to plan… that's what being one with this crowd of eight thousand felt like. She felt that it would be easy to nudge the crowd however she wanted… and she tested it by getting everyone to sing a line of the chorus in a way that actually harmonized with the band, which visibly surprised the lead singer. "Take a chance you're old enough to Dance the night away!"

    "Yeah, that's the best feeling." PSI King telepathically commented right after she led the chorus. "You're only nudging the ones who have given themselves to the music, but in a crowd like this that's still most of them. It's a good crowd."

    "This is the best concert ever!" Mary shouted at the top of her lungs.

    Tanya laughed. "I love music!" She replied, shouting at the same volume.

    ---------------------

    Ugh… her head. The concert was over, and they used their VIP passes to attend the small afterparty backstage. She was sipping some water after popping some painkillers that she always keeps on hand, just in case.

    "I should have warned you about that." PSI King said, laughing. "Being one with the crowd's a bit of a transcendent experience… but it's also going to give you a pounding headache if you do it for the whole concert."

    "Are you alright?" Mr. Roth, the lead vocalist, asked with a concerned look.

    "She'll be fine." PSI King assured him. "Just opened up her mind a bit too long during the concert. Psychic thing."

    "That's good." Mr. Roth said, "Now, Agent Vodello mentioned that you don't remember who you are?" Ah, Mom got in contact with the band directly. That made sense.

    "Nope." PSI King replied, "I'm remembering more every day, but I still don't remember my name."

    "I've gathered enough evidence that I could narrow it down." Tanya said while still rubbing her temples. "But it would require me getting access to classified documents." Pretty much everything official about the Deluge of Grulovia was classified at the highest level. Personnel files, debriefings, after action reports, all of it. So while she was confident she could pick out who he was, or a small group of possibilities, if she read a proper sequence of events, as it would involve him being tossed into freezing water, she had absolutely no idea who fit that description. The only people she even knew for sure were there were the Psychic Seven themselves, and all of them are accounted for. One confirmed dead, the rest alive. If she didn't know what happened to Lucrecia, she would have guessed it belonged to her, but that doesn't hold up even a little bit when examining the mind.

    "Well come on and enjoy some of the food, you'll feel better." Mr. Roth offered, lightly tugging on Tanya's arm towards the rest of the party with a wide smile. Was he flirting with her? You know what they say about musicians…

    The party was fairly casual, the presence of a ten year old making them limit the amount of drugs that they were doing. Mary still looked incredibly out of place, but she was enjoying some of the candy they had as part of the snack table. Tanya telekinetically grabbed some chocolate covered pretzels and sat next to her sister. PSI King settled in to her opposite side, floating himself there and engaging the drummer, one of the brothers the band was named for, in conversation.

    Her head still hurt, but it had ebbed a bit, so she was ignoring it. "Are you enjoying yourself, Mary?" She asked.

    Mary nodded furiously. "I've never been to a party like this before, it's great." Tanya glanced at the other band members, who were either engaged in conversation about music with PSI King or being fawned over by the other VIP ticket holders, at least one of them making out with the bassist. Mr. Roth had rejoined the groupies after Tanya had positioned herself next to Mary.

    Taking a bottle of fruity soda, Tanya poured them both a cup and settled back. "It's a bit novel to be sober at one of these, I'll admit." She said, glancing at the many open bottles of beer. "I convinced myself to stay out of these when my men had leave, so as to not rain on the parade. Also, they never let me drink the few times I tried." It put a bit of a damper on things. She thought about joining them after she hit sixteen in the hopes they'd change their stance on that, but… she never did. One more regret. "I was never invited to the officer's club parties either." She didn't even know they existed until a few months before she died, which was… yeah.

    "It's hard to picture you as a party girl." Mary said softly.

    Tanya shrugged. She had figured out a while ago that Mary never picked up on the fact that Tanya was a man in her first life, but she always spiraled whenever she contemplated her next life, and being reborn as a man was not a possibility Tanya wanted Mary to ruminate over. "You need to have essentially zero social life in order to get through college without attending parties." She said, "Furthermore, drinking and partying is a surprisingly large part of Japanese corporate culture. If you don't have beers with the boss, you're not getting promoted when positions open up. Networking matters, even here in America. It's not what you know, but who you know." Both were important, but you could rise higher as a well-connected incompetent than you could as a highly-skilled recluse.

    Mary hummed in acknowledgement, thinking on the subject as she drank the soda. "You never talk about your first life." It's more accurate to say that she never talks about it with Mary, and for good reason.

    Tanya shrugged, but nodded to the question. "It's not something I like talking about." She admitted. "You also tend to get upset when you're reminded of our circumstances."

    "No I don't." Mary insisted wrongly. "I talk about my first life all the time."

    "Not what I meant." Tanya elaborated, "I meant when you think about your third life."

    "...oh." Mary whispered.

    "Last time, when I told you how I died in the twenty-first century, you had nightmares for the following week about being born in the neolithic era." That was, admittedly, the kindest interpretation of those particular nightmares. "Let sleeping dogs lie."

    They lapsed to silence, eating more junk food while idly listening to PSI King's conversation. "Hey, I think Eddie listens to psycho." Said the drummer. "Hey Eddie!"

    A burly man with a soul patch dropped his invisibility power, which startled Tanya. She wasn't really keeping an eye out for danger… "Yeah boss?" He asked. His voice was surprisingly similar to PSI King, actually.

    "PSI King, this is Eddie, our best roadie." The drummer explained. "Eddie, this is PSI King. He's a psychic musician from twenty-ish years ago. Ring any bells?"

    "Hi." PSI King said.

    "Aw man, Psycho-core wasn't even around back then." Eddie said, "It wasn't until about thirteen years ago that the genre started picking up, and even now it's pretty unappreciated by the larger music community." Oh? "The only one even trying that kind of music back then was the inventor of the stuff, and he was never really appreciated like he should have. He was ahead of his time."

    "Who?" PSI King asked, enraptured. "Do you have a record?"

    "Nah, man." Eddie said, "No records exist of his music, the man insisted that it could only be properly experienced live. The only reason it's as big as it is is because someone invented psitanium cassettes, and those are usually recorded by fans and distributed just to spread the word. It's anti-corporate as hell." He sniffed, his words causing him to tear up. "It's beautiful. But people only make covers of the Psychoddesy, so that's the closest you'll get to hearing Helmut Fullbear's music. He got killed by Maligula, so there's nothing else."

    Wait. Tanya reviewed what she knows about PSI King. Was Audie O… That man in the figments… Bob Zanotto? She never really met the man, only saw him from afar, after he had let himself go in his grief, and even then only a few times… The broad strokes of the images matched, glasses, full beard… She was always just told that Helmut Fullbear died… but how certain was that death? Was it ever confirmed? She assumed it was, but…

    She shouldn't be hasty. If she gave Bob Zanotto even a single ray of hope, he would be crushed if it didn't pan out. He's waited this long, he can wait long enough for verification. She should… talk to Agent Boole. Or Agent O'Peia. Confirm things. It would be healthier if Helmut remembered that he was himself before arranging that meeting, anyway.

    "Helmut Fullbear…" PSI King said to himself. "Is that… my name?" He went silent, but he emanated pain telepathically, a groan of pain truer than any performative one he deliberately unleashed. Eddie, Mary, and Tanya all winced at the psychic emanations.

    Tanya took a psychoportal out of her jacket, slotting it into the mobility capsule. "If you'll excuse me." She said as she pulled the capsule into her lap and threw her mind into it.

    ---------------------

    It was cold, and storming. Tanya appeared in the stage, where there were two additional mental entities panicking with the rest: presumably Sniffles and Tasty, given the shapes of their heads.

    "What do we do?" Tasty said, with Agent Boole's voice. "She's on a rampage!" Like Agent Boole, he was short, a literal dwarf. Like the other entities, he was dressed for marching band, and distinctly his, he was yellow and had a head that was just a big pair of lips.

    "We just need to make her remember who she is!" Declared Sniffles, with Agent O'Peia's voice. "Who we are!" Sniffles was tall, purple, and had a nose for a head. She was also dressed for marching band, completing the set.

    "We tried that, don't you remember?" Vision groused. "Remember how that ended?"

    PSI King moaned in pain. "It's too much! It's all coming back to me, but it's too much!"

    Tanya looked around. Despite the storm and chill, whatever nightmare entity that represented Maligula wasn't actually present at this time. Strange…

    "We need to all pull together." Audie O said calmly.

    "Only by everyone working in unison can we form a full fist." Dr. Touch added.

    "Where are your instruments?" Tanya snapped off, automatically affecting the growl that she added to command her men. Each of the entities quickly fetched their instruments, Sniffles and Tasty panicking at their absence. "Where are they?" She asked again.

    "I don't know!" Tasty said, sobbing like Agent Boole would whenever someone raised their voice to him. Yep, definitely Helmut Fullbear. Now, to defuse this meltdown.

    Sniffles was a little on the ball. "I think… I remember… I dropped it!" She declared, "It was spicy, too hot to handle!"

    Okay, a hot place. "Where's the hottest place here?" Tanya asked, before immediately regretting it.

    Audie O immediately replied: "PSI King's mouth." Ew. But her attention on the two entities without instruments paid off, as she felt a spatial tunnel open up in Tasty's mouth.

    Ugh. The things she does for tactical advantages. "I'll be quick!" She shouted as she dived head first into the disgusting abyss.

    ---------------------

    The place she was warped to was still wet and smelled of blood and black pepper. But unlike earlier, where it was bitingly cold, here it was oppressively hot. She never really had the chance to visit a place that was this hot while also being this humid before… It sucked. Wait, no, there was Cook Ford's mind, it had a few places that were this damp.

    Still, she wandered around, dodging flailing tongues and the occasional snot turret, Helmut's state of agitation causing the terrain to become more subtly hostile. Censors roamed the place, but were easily dispatched. What was annoying about them was that a swarm of other mental entities came out whenever they noticed her, and becoming invisible simply did not help.

    Tanya sneezed again, the irritation of the pepper-infused air bothering her sinuses. "Ugh, worst side-quest ever." Ugh, she spends too much time thinking about her hypothetical video games. It keeps infesting her thoughts. Her eyes were starting to water too, and her shield was doing approximately nothing about the stinging pain.

    Admittedly, it did give her an idea about using that one time she got exposed to tear gas unprotected on the Eastern Front as a mental defense… magical healing managed to save her delicate tissues, fortunately. Aerial Mages got top priority from the Medical Mages. Damn NKVD saboteurs.

    Still, the instruments were actually fairly obvious in their location this time: there was a honey-coated shrine where giant statues of both Sniffles and Tasty were holding hands, the pair of string instruments just floating there.

    Right before she could reach them, the screams of panic attacks intercepted her, launching water snakes at her that glowed with an inner light. After dodging, the two snakes curved around each other and became a waterspout, a copy of Maligula emerging from it. Fissures leaking hellish red light occasionally opened and closed on the copy, the calling card of Nightmares.

    Like most entities of this coherence, it spoke: "Stop wasting your time with this useless lump." Maligula said, hydrokinetically pulling water snakes from the stormclouds that were hanging over the area and letting them fall like rain.

    "No." Tanya said simply as she danced in the air between the snakes. Telekinetic power wreathed her arms, and the instant a snake deviated from its natural trajectory, she splattered it. The panic attacks were standing back, not yet contributing, but when that changed, she'll need to deal with them.

    "Why not? He's been abandoned by everyone else." Maligula said haughtily. "He threw his life away uselessly, killing both himself and his lover by my hand. His so-called friends didn't help him for thousands of years, leaving him in a random jar! Even now, when they've had a week to learn of him, they do nothing!"

    Ah. One common factor in stories that Agent Nein and Mom said about their adventures inside people's heads is that when a mental entity is talking, you should always at least hear it out. Even the worst parts of someone's mind are still fundamentally part of them, so nightmares tended to talk about people's worst fears as if they are fact, as an example.

    This was a relatively straightforward example, in Tanya's amateur opinion. "You're wrong." She said, "Bob's alive. He's drowning in grief, even now, seventeen years hence."

    The rain stopped. "...What?" Maligula whispered, in Helmut's voice.

    "Lucretia Mux." Tanya rattled off. She had read some of Otto's experimental files from back then, specifically to better understand The Argent. "Born Lucretia Galochio, you experimented with the Psychonauts in Green Needle Gulch. Among other experiments, you sought to increase your hydrokinetic power by deepening your well of aggression, your will to force water to move according to your intent." Tanya recalled the rush, the pleasure of fighting. No amount of reminding herself of the horror ever could get her to deny… that it was amazing. The drug-like rush of the combat analgesic formula… The raw thrill she felt in the middle of battle… "It worked too well, making your survival drive more active than most. When you experienced the exquisite joys of violence, your mind rebelled from the horrors you were experiencing, triggering a schism that allowed your survival drive to glut itself on your mind, creating an alternative personality that thrived on violence and domination." Most of this was quoted from Otto's infamous research paper, but Maligula seemed entranced.

    Helmut never knew exactly why Maligula was created, what happened to Lucy. As such, the incarnation of Helmut's memories and nightmares of the woman hungered for this information. To understand. "Essentially, she became stuck in a waking nightmare, her mind constantly tearing itself apart to generate more and more hydrokinetic power." Tanya shuddered, "But you're not the only one who can do that."

    Inside her mind's eye, the memory tomb started to open up, the silver cap atop of the pyramid sliding aside, leading directly to the deepest pit in her mind. From those dark depths, came power. "For short periods." She shouted at the top of her lungs as her mental projection's outfit became a psychonauts uniform. Her hat, the officer's cap that was always too large, sat upon her head, and her body tingled as the lines of her fractured psyche, filled in with gold and polished until they gleamed, manifested on her skin. "It's perfectly safe!" Her heartbeat, the constant drone that one's mind filtered out of awareness, ceased as the organ was replaced with solid gold.

    She felt… warm. The telekinetic energy wreathing her hands compressed until they seemed like solid steel, gleaming silver fists whose every line and edge was sharp enough to cut with the barest twitch of them.

    Tanya was not an experienced, or even a highly trained, psychonaut. She heard about Agent Nein's lecture on how he subdued the Devil of the Rhine with words instead of force, but she wasn't speaking to Maligula. Merely the nightmare caused by her actions. "The world has not forgotten Helmut Fullbear!" Tanya shouted. "It will welcome him with open arms! Your nightmare…"

    Maligula roared as the ocean of water snakes burst from the ground and flew to her, and the panic attacks roared as they rushed to expel her from the mind.

    "...is over." Tanya declared as she raked her gauntlets through the bodies of the panic attacks, parting their unstable bodies like smoke before summoning an anti-material rifle, sighting it towards the nightmare while the water snakes crashed into her reinforced astral body.

    Maligula drew the massive quantities of water to herself, a tidal wave of water interposing itself between Tanya and the nightmare, an iceberg forming as a shield.

    Tanya just shot right through it. She had never tested this state in the real world, merely once or twice in secret to make sure she could use it if needed. The ice parted like water, and the water turned to vapor from the power of Tanya's PSI blast. Behind the barrier, Maligula's body exploded apart, banished to the recesses of Helmut's mind, for now.

    Now for the hard part. Tanya was overcome with a giggling fit as her enemy died by her hand. Ah, it was too short, but it was as sweet as she remembered, facing danger and defeating it with wit and her will to survive. Well, that and her killing intent. Infamously, one of the most controversial little facts in 'True Psychic Tales' is that innately sharp telekinetic constructs or particularly potent PSI blasts were considered a strong indicator of being a psychopath. It even made it into True Psychic Tales… indirectly. They didn't use the word psychopath, but it was used in reference to a literal serial killer as a sign of his mental unwellness.

    Still, after a moment of focusing, she was able to shut The Argent away, the transformation burning away from her with a golden flame. In hindsight, using it was probably overkill… but she really wanted to try out her super-mode in real conditions. It was a weakness borne of her memories of being a Japanese boy.

    The string instruments flew to her, and the entire area dissolved as she clutched each one, a few chords playing in celebration.

    Time to face the music, then.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Really? It's somehow safe to let the Devil of the Rhine out of her cage?

    Requiem_Jeer said:
    Still, after a moment of focusing, she was able to shut The Argent away, the transformation burning away from her with a golden flame. In hindsight, using it was probably overkill… but she really wanted to try out her super-mode in real conditions. It was a weakness borne of her memories of being a Japanese boy.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    :rofl:
     
    The limitations for safe use are:

    1. There has to be enemies she's willing to use lethal force on.
    2. They have to be strong enough that Tanya feels at least some fear of their power.
    3. Mary isn't there
    4. She doesn't take any damage past her barriers

    If all of those are true, she can keep herself on task and under control while invoking the Argent's power. She needs to immediately start suppressing herself if one of those conditions aren't true.

    Needless to say, it's a LOT safer to use when in a mental world. For short periods.
     
    Nice super saiyan transform! Also I love that we've resolved the main PSI king mystery.
     
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