Tanya wasn’t terribly experienced with Astral projection, but she had a few minimum expectations. Like being on something resembling solid ground. The sky was filled with floating debris, and the world beneath was a shattered island floating in the void. It was heavily wooded, and from the lake at the edge combined with one or two of the larger rocks, she could discern that the shape of the Park Ranger’s mind was, as expected, Camp Whispering Rock.
Tanya easily navigated the shrapnel as she dived through the hazardous entrance, each piece attempting to strike Tanya as she passed. If it wasn’t for her excellent shield and dogfighting experience, she suspected her projection would be critically damaged by the time she reached the bottom.
“Tanya?” Mary’s voice echoed. “Can you hear me? I can see you!” Ah. That could be a problem. “His mind… it’s so broken…”
“Yes, it is.” Tanya agreed. Idly, she noted that the void that constituted the sky was in perfect condition, without the cracks that Tanya noticed in her own mind. Odd, what made the type 95 different from whatever happened to Agent Cruller?
Tanya found a figment… it was a heart. Not an anatomical one, mind you, but the shape. Nevertheless, she had used up a fair amount of psychic energy just approaching the place, so she tapped it and absorbed the residual power.
With nothing else to do, Tanya explored Ford’s mind, picking up more figments of hearts, grass, trees, a boat, gardening shears, two squirrels kissing, and a ruler. There was the occasional piece of landscape that pelted Tanya with shrapnel, but mage shells were exceptionally good at dealing with that.
Tanya could make out faint music, an unpleasant mishmash of elevator music, something romantic with violins, and most strangely, the occasional sound of bowling pins being knocked down. After a few more figments collected, Tanya could make out the sound of weeping, but unlike the other sounds, she could tell that it had a distinct source… there!
Emboldened by the sound of something animate, Tanya skipped up, dodging a few stray branches that decided to attack the invader, and went to… a purse?
Sobbing with all the drama of the theater, a purse sat on a random broken stump, ignoring the hundreds of pointy parts. Floating in the air was the rest of the tree in defiance of gravity, itself also frozen in the middle of shattering into at least… seven pieces. There was a detail that drew the eye, however: between two pieces of the tree and the stump, there was a carved heart with two sets of initials. Taking a moment to reconstruct the broken art, Tanya determined that it said “FC + LMMA”, vertically. Curiously, the fracture was centered on the ‘FC’, and the others were discolored so much that Tanya had to discern the letters by feel.
“Well that’s a thing.” Tanya said to herself… and Mary. “Looks like I’m neck-deep in the memories of his experiences with dating.” Clearly it’s ‘Ford Cruller’ and ‘Lucrecia Mux’... but who is ‘MA’? A second girlfriend?
“Really?” Mary asked, interested. “Oh, I bet their dates are going to be so cute!” Tanya took a moment to remind herself that Mary was still a teenage girl. She knew better than most that being treated as a child tended to have an atrophying effect on maturity, at times. The idea that Mary would have gotten more mature isn’t even worth considering.
Tanya poked the weeping purse, and determined that despite appearances, its location was as immutable as the stump’s was. “This must be emotional baggage.” Tanya concluded. It was baggage, and it was certainly emotional, at least.
“Oh!” Mary said. “Sasha Nein explained that! Somewhere else in the mind we should be able to find a tag, and you need to take it and bring it back to the matching baggage.”
Agent Nein used more technical language when discussing it with Tanya, but that was close enough. “Yes, we need to find another memory and forge a connection between this and that to allow Agent Cruller to more easily resolve the emotional hurdle.” Idly, Tanya wondered which spots in her mind held emotional baggage of their own.
“I think that’s everything on this segment.” Tanya said, taking to the air once more and going into evasive maneuvers to handle the increase in danger the further away she was from a semi-stable section.
“You’re really good at dodging mid-air shrapnel.” Mary observed, her tone suspicious. “Almost like you’ve spent years doing it.”
Or years of danmaku games as youthful diversions. “I’m trying to focus, May.” Tanya said, annoyed. “I’m only avoiding maybe half of them, anyway. If not for my shield, I’d be dead.” Tanya eventually resorted to using an active shield after going over the next section, waiting in darkness for ten seconds before releasing it.
“It’s Mary!” Mary insisted. “You had a shield back then too.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Daye.” Tanya said, which made Mary squawk. She looked around, noting more figments themed after woodlands or romance. Ah! That one was different. It was a figment that “concealed” a small cave.
The figment was of curtains, patterned in… Maybe tie-dye? The interior of the cave was cramped, and appeared to be the inside of a van, drug paraphernalia scattered about. More figments populated the place, the front seats had a viking helmet and a shrub, with a heart figment between them. There was also… a figment of a woman wearing a headscarf, only the garment was askew, half off and frumpled.
“I’m honestly surprised that there aren’t any stray underpants lying around, given the memory referenced here.” Tanya said as she absorbed the figments.
“What’s that bit of stained glass doing there?” Mary pointed out.
“Eh?” Tanya said, looking around. Indeed, right in the middle of the beanbag chair in the back of the van, there was a shard of stained glass. Well, calling it a shard seemed a little inappropriate. It was roughly rectangular, with the angles offset in a presumably artistic way, depicting an eye with a swirling pattern in the middle. “Hm. I’ll take it with me.” Tanya decided. As it was a mental construct, it easily shrank enough to be placed within one of the many pockets in Tanya’s cargo shorts. She was currently wearing her third set of athletic clothes, as she had brought all four sets she owned with her to the camp. It was more or less identical to the other sets.
Idly, Tanya realized that she didn’t see any laundry machines or even drying lines in the camp. Did they just forget? Well, fortunately Tanya knew a thing or two about using magic to handle laundry. She’s done it before with hydrokinesis, even if Miss Milla didn’t seem to appreciate her efforts to that effect.
After confirming that there wasn’t anything else interesting on this chunk of land, Tanya took off and once more endured the hellish skies of Agent Cruller’s mind, this time immediately dropping with a full shield at the earliest possible moment. It seemed effective.
After releasing the shield, Tanya once more looked around. Nothing new, figment-wise, although there was a surprisingly large amount of bee figments. That probably mattered. Tanya walked carefully, collecting more figments and keeping an eye on the trees for any beehives or honey. Eventually, she found another piece of stained glass art. It was too abstract for Tanya to see anything in particular, but the wavy bits… maybe fire?
Sensing a trap, Tanya examined the area surrounding the shard. The shard was on a stump, but on further inspection it was curiously box-like. The figments were also somewhat strange, with a book on one side, and the other… It was a massive figment depicting a wave of animals, all sent forth in an organized mass. “Odd.” She commented, for Mary’s sake.
“The stump looks a little like a beehive.” Mary said, being helpful for once. “The kind my aunt used back in the Unified States.”
“United States, Mary. The country where we currently live.” Tanya corrected as she absorbed the figments. They were quite useful in recovering the energy spent moving from segment to segment. Not seeing any way for a trap to manifest, she shrugged and just took the shard.
On cue, pandemonium broke out. A swarm of Regrets manifested, little goblin things with massive jowls to emphasize their depressed expression and insect wings carrying heavy weights. In addition to them, a pair of imps wearing marching band uniforms and wielding a parade leader’s baton erupted with the sound of trumpets. Enablers, if Tanya was remembering her crash course on hostile mental entities correctly.
The very first thing the enablers did was use their protective chants on each other. “Go you! Go me! We will win and they will flee!” Lovely.
Mary was even more distraught by this occurrence. “Wait, if they’re both invulnerable… How are you supposed to beat them!? I didn’t know they could do that!”
Tanya didn’t have time for that. With a focused effort, Tanya launched a PSI blast that curved and overpenetrated, going through eight Regrets before impacting a piece of rubble that was destroyed by the blast. Telekinetically grabbing the two weights that were above her at the time, they were launched at two more sets of regrets that were lined up, killing five more.
Quickly, the battle whittled down to Tanya, the two enablers, and six Regrets that they managed to protect before Tanya could kill them.
“Read my book, that’s the way! Without a look, you’ll pass away!” Chanted one of the enablers in their excited, high pitched voice as Tanya telekinetically divested the regrets from their weapons and let the weights crumble against the barrier. Come to think of it… they have different voices. Is that important?
“Take a nap, relax a spell,” sang the other in a softer, calmer, more masculine voice. “You seem tapped, you’re sure you’re well?”
Tanya decided, in lieu of trying to tear the pair apart, to instead flee to another part of the mind. If she finds herself there again, she’ll make sure to kill one of the enablers before they have a chance to encourage each other.
In the new section, Tanya found the Psychoisolation chamber. Unlike the model in Camp Whispering rock, it was significantly larger, with the entrance being blocked by very large grass. That isn’t to say it was merely scaled up, it also had some other structures attached, like what was clearly some kind of air circulator and a small office/laboratory. The figments in this area included the forest themes as well as gears, question marks, and rocks that were probably psitanium. Curiously, the romantic figments were absent here.
“Why does it look different?” Mary questioned.
Tanya scoffed. “It must be one he’s more familiar with than the one at the camp.” He was one of the Psychic Six, perhaps it was the first one created. Looking inside the office, she noticed something very unexpected to find: a shining gold rose.
“A nugget of wisdom…” Tanya whispered.
“A what?” Mary asked.
They didn’t learn about those? “It’s an accumulation of knowledge.” Tanya explained. “I’ll demonstrate.” She braced herself for the influx of psionic power and reached out for the golden rose.
As the psionic power flowed into Tanya, she received much vaguer visions than the ones when she absorbed Agent Nein’s marksmanship knowledge. Visions of maintenance of the camp, of how to assess the health of plants and ward away the wildlife, even some details of herbaphony and zoolingualism that they didn’t print in books. But there were large swathes of the visions that were just confusing and scrambled, creating phantom sensations all over but without much understanding. The only thing that Tanya managed to grasp amounted to a handful of tips on how to properly kiss someone.
Tanya would like to say that she already knew how to do that from their first life… but it was clearly one of the bits that had been lost to time. Not that Tanya remembered anyone she would have kissed in that life either. The similarities must be why she managed to decrypt it.
“What did you do!?” Shouted Mary’s telepathic voice, panicked.
“I consulted the wisdom of our elders.” Tanya said sarcastically. “Nuggets of wisdom can be used to pass on knowledge, in this case, it was mostly about gardening.” Mary didn’t need to know about the details there.
Herbaphony was kind of an odd psychic discipline. Plants didn’t really have a mind, but they were alive, and thus produced and contained a small but perceptible amount of mental energy. Herbaphony was the psychic discipline of empathically linking your mind with that pool of energy, and as plants didn’t have any sort of will, you extended a tendril of your own mind into the plant in order to put that energy into order, commanding it as one would their limbs. The psychic power you infuse supports and strengthens the plant, allowing it to bend and flex like muscle in accordance to your will as well as accelerate its growth. Tanya used that knowledge to seize control of the grass that obstructed the way, and used it to forcefully open the entrance to the Psychoisolation Chamber, the patch separating into two hand-like groups and wrenching the stuck entrance open as Tanya mimed the motions the grass needed to take.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Sure, she could have just burned the grass and ripped it open with her hands, but practice is important when it comes to new skills. Also, Tanya knew to never trust the flammability of the environment when inside a mind.
As expected, inside the chamber was a sub-chamber that contained the actual prison cell part, much like the chambers near the Motherlobe. The figments inside the structure included more animals and machines, along with a concerningly large figment of fire. Within the sub-chamber was yet another bit of stained glass. This one was also too abstract for Tanya to definitively say what it depicted, but her best guess was that the circular bit towards one corner was supposed to be the sun. Collecting it, Tanya moved on.
“Question.” Mary asked suddenly as Tanya left the sub-chamber. “Do you hear that giggling noise that’s been going on, or is that just me?”
Tanya rolled her eyes at the question. “Yes, Mary, I hear the giggling. We’ve established that a good chunk of this section of Agent Cruller’s mind is focused on him practicing that ‘free love’ that was so popular in the sixties.” It was always the same woman giggling, and Tanya was sure at this point she’d recognize the woman just by that puerile giggle. The sound emanated from the locations where the romance-associated figments were, although they were sparse in this particular place, they still existed. “I know you’re a blushing young maiden stripped of the hormones that would usually point this out to you, but please learn to distinguish a perverted giggle from other kinds.”
Mary sent a distinct impression of huffing, which was an advancement in her telepathic skills, but said nothing.
Tanya, freshly empowered by the nugget of wisdom, shot towards the next chunk with very little trouble. “Hm. There were fewer projectiles that time. Was it because of my speed? Or is it a side-effect of absorbing such a large amount of Agent Cruller’s psychic energy?” Agent Nein did mention something about attunement…
The next few segments were largely empty, just a few figments and inconsequential memories, along with a few more ambushes from mental defenses. Eventually, Tanya found herself at the part of the forest that corresponded with the parking lot. There wasn’t any such thing here, of course, but there was a single car. Around that car was a familiar sight: a memory vault.
Memory vaults were far from difficult prey, so Tanya quickly found herself with a round wheel of slides and a little binocular thing that was used to view them. Briefly, Tanya wondered what they would manifest as in someone like Mary, whose mind predates these.
Still, Tanya loaded the slideshow and looked into the binoculars. The first slide was the title: ‘Ford and Lucy’s first date’. The second showed a younger Agent Mentalis introducing a woman, presumably ‘Lucrecia Mux’ or ‘Lucy’, to Agent Cruller. The third showed Lucy showing off her hydrokinetic abilities. The rest showed pretty much what one would expect, them going on a romantic walk, them sneaking away from… a dome with a stained glass exterior. Noted. The actual first date was apparently bowling, where they cheated relentlessly, ending the slideshow with a kiss.
“That’s so cute…” Mary cooed after Tanya put the slideshow back. Apparently she could see it too. “Wasn’t that adorable, Tanya? Their first date is one of his most precious memories…”
Tanya shrugged. Precious? That’s not the criteria in Tanya’s experience. This answered some questions, but raised others. If Lucrecia Mux was a psychic and a contemporary with the Psychic Six… what happened to her? Why doesn’t anyone know about her?
Tanya suspected that the answer to that was in that third slide. While it was possible that it was just a coincidence… Maligula was a hydrokinetic that was contemporary to the Psychic Six. In her first two lives, a name like Maligula would be blatantly fake, but she wasn’t so sure when it came to some of the strange names you saw in this one. Was the reason Lucrecia was persona non grata because of the crimes that caused Maligula to be fought with by the Psychic Six?
…Tanya wondered how the Argent would be remembered, after the war. Would she be scrubbed from the history books as too much of a monster to be remembered as a person? Was the Devil of the Rhine all that will remain?
“Tanya?” Mary asked. “Are you… crying?”
Blinking, Tanya shook her head. “No. Is there another stained glass fragment?” Tanya discreetly wiped her eyes, but found no tears. Her chest did not heave, her muscles did not tremble. Her breathing was even and unobstructed. There was not a single physiological sign of tears. …Why wasn’t there? Such a tragedy, and she was not moved a single bit.
“Yes.” Mary replied. “It’s in the back seat of the car.”
Fetching the glass, she easily killed the resulting ambush of regrets, censors, bad ideas, doubts (which were little ambulatory bits of flammable goo), and the thankfully singular enabler. The next few sections were a bit sparse, but eventually Tanya found herself at a place that was distinguished from the rest by having many exotic plants, ones not usually found in this climate. The new plants stank of alcohol, but mostly just served as additional herbaphony practice as she opened up the dense foliage and retrieved the stained glass within.
“How many of these are there?” Mary asked.
“No clue.” Tanya replied. “But there’s not much left that I haven’t gone to. The only places left are the lake and the central island.” The center had a much denser debris cloud than the previous areas, so Tanya had been circling around it to see if there was some opening. So far, no luck. “So I would guess no more than two.”
The lake had more vigorous debris than the other places, and Tanya found herself quite exhausted by the time she reached the broken section of bridge that served as a dock for a canoe. Glancing at the swirling debris above the lake, and the reflection of the moon on the lake which may or may not conceal another bit of stained glass, Tanya instead elected to step on the canoe and propel it with telekinesis.
As she approached the moon, Tanya could barely make out garbled whispers. They were clearly memories, but they were not coherent enough for Tanya to make them out. She did recognize some of the voices, each of the three people that starred in the memory vault, but could not understand the content of their speech.
“Aw, your reflection is Ford and Lucy kissing again on a boat ride. So romantic…” Mary sighed. Big deal.
As Tanya had guessed, the reflection of the moon in the center of the lake was, in fact, a disc floating on the surface of it. Tanya used telekinesis to flip it, and retrieved the now-revealed stained glass. “Seven, now.” She said out loud as she moved the canoe to collect more figments. She’ll need every scrap of strength she can get in order to get into the last area.
“Do you have no romance in your heart, Degurechaff?” Mary said, annoyed.
Tanya did not say her first impulsive response, which was ‘what heart?’. That disturbing thought aside, Tanya made sure to sound angrier than she was when she scolded Mary. “Some of us have to focus on not getting hit by shrapnel, Mary! Also, stop calling me that, it’s not my name!”
“You’re not going to fool me.” Mary replied coldly. “You haven’t even bothered pretending to be twelve here. I’ve seen you fight, you’re the Devil of the Rhine.”
“Delusion and confirmation bias.” Tanya retorted. Bringing her along was a terrible idea… “You see what you want to see, and nothing more.”
Tanya decided to launch herself like a cannonball through the debris field this time. It should work. Flying forward rapidly and upward to pick up speed, Tanya brought up her full powered shield. Her ability to discern what happens outside of her shield is limited unless she deliberately weakens it, but she could feel it when she changed direction, so when she felt that she bounced off of a floor, she released the shield.
Debris tore through her mental projection as the few that were still incoming destroyed her passive barrier and shot into her astral body like the shrapnel it was. Pain blossomed in her gut, but it wasn’t enough to eject Tanya, so she soldiered on, re-asserting her passive barrier with a moment of focus. “Ow.” She said, for Mary’s benefit.
The central area roughly corresponding to the cafeteria, as well as Agent Cruller’s trailer. It was the only spot in camp where all three of his personalities could be found, although none at the same time of course. None of these structures were present, of course, but there was an area that was clear of plant life, a rather large circular area…
Tanya felt her shorts get tugged by an invisible force, and with a thought opened up all of the pockets that contained the stained glass and allowed them to automatically assemble themselves into a seven-sided dome, with the stained glass pieces unfolding into larger sections to complete the structure.
Wait, seven-sided dome? That rang a bell… The Heptadome! Tanya did, at one point, read the full collection of True Psychic Tales that the Motherlobe had in their small library. Supposedly, it was the nerve center of the original Psychonauts, where the Psychic Six ‘explored the frontier of the human mind’.
Taya entered the dome from one of the three entrances, and looked upon the beanbag chairs within. From the prominent hookah between a set of four bags, it looked like they primarily used drugs to do that exploration.
The center of the structure had an odd device in the middle. After a moment of examining it, Tanya deduced that the odd drill was an incomplete device. It was an adjustable chair, and at the head level of someone when they were sitting in the chair, a giant dull drill was placed about half a foot away, pointing directly at the occupant’s head. From the orientation of the chair, it was pointing at the left half of the head. There was no kind of switch, button, lever, or wheel to operate the device, and the base seemed to extend curiously far to the right of the chair. As such, it was clearly only a portion of the true device.
What truly drew the attention, however, was the odd little tag in one of the beanbags. It was a large one, and it definitely had the sound of that damned giggle coming from it. It wasn’t very large, but it had a certain presence to it that drew the eye. Kind of like being shiny, but it wasn’t actually shiny.
“That’s a purse tag!” Mary exclaimed. “You need to reunite it with that purse we found earlier!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Tanya said, dismissing her ‘advice’ as she snatched up the tag. She wasn’t sure she would be capable of going through that debris field again. Should she try another time? Risk getting killed and just coming back if she doesn’t make it?
…Come to think of it, it would be useful to experience being forcibly ejected from a mind. It was difficult to imagine safer circumstances. Miss Milla would not be likely to endorse exposing Tanya to pain like that, so there’s also not going to be a whole lot of opportunity.
Decision made, Tanya went to charge right back through the debris field around the central area. Only to, after leaving the Heptadome, stop and marvel at the terrain.
The debris field was still there, but it was vastly diminished. The chunks of mind matter were creating bridges between the sections, and while a lot of trees and other parts were still quite broken, enough were now patched together that it was startling the difference the changes made.
Tanya just… walked to the purse’s location, watching the mental world repair itself as she went. The tree was still shattered, but the purse perked up when Tanya approached, tag in hand. It presented one side, inviting Tanya to attach the tag. She did so, and then the emotional baggage dissolved into psychic energy, just as Tanya was told.
The psychic energy flooding into Tanya’s astral form, however, was very much NOT like it was implied. Foreign emotions overwhelmed Tanya, attraction and desire that Tanya had never before experienced or even understood, followed by gut-wrenching tragedy that, while more familiar, was much more powerful than any grief that Tanya had ever felt. Rather than be absorbed as power, Tanya choked on the connection, feeling ill as tears flowed freely and the power, having been rebuffed, proceeded to try and enter Tanya again, but even more violently.
“What is happening?” Mary asked, panicked. “Your body is thrashing!”
Tanya felt the psychic power tear into her form, unable to enter through the usual channels and instead making their own. The power refreshed her slightly slower than it damaged her, and after a timeless moment of agonizing pain, blacked out.
----------------
Tanya woke back up in her body, every single nerve ending tingling. Mary was there, slapping Tanya’s face lightly. At Tanya’s groan, Mary smiled. “You’re back!”
“My entire body seems to have fallen asleep.” Tanya said. It wasn’t quite the same kind of pain that she was used to ignoring, but Tanya proceeded to flex her fingers and toes nonetheless to help restore feeling.
“Yes, darling, that’s normal.” Miss Milla’s voice said. “For getting your astral projection destroyed, at least.” Ah. They got caught. “I told you that Ford’s mind was dangerous, Tanya.”
Mary stood up in Tanya’s defense. “But she did it!” She argued. “You should have seen how it was pulling itself together when Tanya was done with it!”
Miss Milla raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Oh? Then how did she get destroyed? You didn’t do that on purpose, did you Tanya?”
Well, she was probably going to on the way out… “The emotional baggage.” Tanya croaked. “It didn’t properly integrate into my astral form, and instead destroyed it.”
“Really?” Miss Milla replied. “I’ve never heard of that happening before… But then again, I’m far from the most experienced or academic Psychonaut. I’ll ask Agent Boole about it.” She picked up Tanya’s numb form and started walking back to camp. “You’ll be right as rain in a few minutes, but there’s been some rather hefty clouds forming in the sky, so we’re moving everyone inside just in case. The weather here can be a bit unpredictable.”
“Are there rain barrels?” Tanya asked.
“Yes, but why?” Milla replied.
“We need to do laundry, and I haven’t seen any machines for it anywhere.” Tanya answered. “I was planning on purifying lake water, but rain is better.”
Milla took a moment to think about that answer. “Ah, it appears we’ve overlooked something else. Good thinking, Tanya. I’ll send Sasha to pick up some laundry soap if Ford doesn’t have some stashed away somewhere.”
“Where did you learn to wash clothes by hand?” Questioned Mary.
Miss Milla shrugged. “Tanya reads a lot of books. Wilderness survival was probably in there somewhere.”
“Also, I’m not going to clean them by hand.” Tanya retorted. “I’m going to use psychic powers to make a washing machine.”
“Ah, that trick.” Miss Mila said after a moment. “Just make sure to only use it for clothes. It’s bad for your skin.”
They only did that because the shower was broken. “I bet we could get ‘Mr. Janitor’ to do it for us if we demonstrate.” If that doesn’t work, Tanya figured his germaphobia would insist on doing things himself if the job was done deliberately poorly.
Mary hummed. “That actually sounds like it would be super-useful to know how to do. Back during the war, there were sometimes some troubles with getting clean clothes, and disease was rampant. Not so much for mages, but if I could have used my computation orb to wash my clothes, that would have been so useful.” Tanya was well aware of this. Reprogramming the computation orb in the field to allow for non-standard adjustments in the spell formulas was difficult, but possible. Between her, Visha, and Tanyanen (mostly Tenyanen, honestly), they had managed to cobble together a combination of formulas that could be used to wash clothes if they had soap, water, and no artillery in range. Such actions were necessary on the Eastern Front, where the logistical personnel were frequently killed or replaced by NKVD saboteurs and hot water was at a premium.
“Well, then that sounds like a fun activity, learning how to use psychic powers in a new way.” Miss Milla replied. “Exactly the kind of thing the camp is supposed to do.”
Yes, well, hopefully Agent Cruller’s park ranger persona will be more stable now.