[Camilla Vodello, Psychonauts Agent]
The Psychonauts had always suffered a bit from poor leadership. The modern Psychonauts didn’t really form until after the Maligula incident, and of the founders, the Psychic Six… half of them were rendered unable to contribute properly by the fight, and of the other half, Otto was not the administrative type. Still, Dr. Boole was a capable administrator, even if he was considered somewhat unreliable with his need for frequent mental health days. There was a reason Truman was the Grand Head, and not him, after all.
“This is all very troubling, Camilla. I’m glad you came to me about this.” Agent Boole said, smiling shyly.
Milla smiled back widely. “Mary’s mind… I’ve never seen anything like it. Initially, I agreed with Sasha’s theory about her story being fabricated by a hodgepodge of other people’s memories… but now?”
“Yes, Agent Nein has always been too enamored with the power of rationality.” Dr. Boole said. “There have always been people who claim to have lived another life before their own, but those claims have common hallmarks that this case lacks.” Milla wasn’t entirely familiar with those, but there were a few case studies of people thinking they were reincarnated Jesus Christ or roman emperors or other famous figures. “One of the more outlandish theories in Psycho-planar studies was that of multiverse theory. You mentioned that her memories were all very consistent and coherent?”
Milla nodded. “Yes, while her perspective was a little warped by the fact that she was supposedly only nineteen when she died, limited in scope, the sociopolitical details that she did manage to dredge up of her past life were more or less consistent with human nature.” After a moment, she added: “She even admitted confusion and ignorance on a lot of the whys, even for the parts that did make sense, which is not something that would happen for an invented narrative.”
“So, with the probable ruled out,” Dr. Boole observed, paraphrasing the famous quote, “-the impossible remains.”
“But if she is correct…” Milla said, her smile vanishing. “...then that means Tanya is…”
“Ah. Well, let’s entertain that possibility for a moment.” Dr. Boole said as he sipped at the tea he had prepared for the two of them. It was just a memory of tea, but that made it exceptionally delicious. “Let’s say that Mary’s past life really happened, and that Tanya did everything that Mary accused her of.” Milla frowned, but nodded in assent. “In that context, let us think of Tanya not as a child, but instead as a war veteran. Major von Degurechaff, suffers from terrible nightmares, habitual paranoia, exceptionally withdrawn, unable to form strong emotional attachments, even with family members. What is our conclusion?”
“Guilt.” Concluded Milla. “Combat fatigue, too.”
“Precisely.” Dr. Boole confirmed. “If we look at Tanya’s mysterious behavior through that lens… much more of her begins to make sense. The continual insistence to her mental privacy, the maturity beyond her years, her response to the unfortunate tragedy…”
“But not everything.” Milla pointed out. “Mary isn’t exactly an unbiased source, after all. There’s aspects to this we’re not seeing.”
“Indeed. In cases as complex as this, we cannot assume that problems spring from a single source. We must assume that treatment would be a multi-layered process.” Dr. Boole stroked his beard for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. “Nevertheless, this allegation by Mary that Tanya is connected to whatever the source of her memories are is still just that, an allegation. Let’s move on to other possibilities.”
“Sasha’s new theory is some kind of programming for psychic assassins.” Milla mentioned offhandedly. It really was a silly thought. Who would do that?
“Ah. That dirty business.” Dr. Boole said. What? “I see you haven’t heard the story. About nine years ago, Cassie, Hollis and I were investigating a Russian black site hidden in the Grulovian hills. It wasn’t an attempt to create sleeper agents with psychic conditioning, but instead psychic commandos.” How horrible! “Young children, plucked from their homes on the basis of their psychic potential and inundated with aggressive psychic construction until they thought whatever their handlers wanted them to think, with the training to be incredibly dangerous to anyone.” He sighed. “Otto was devastated that his published work was used to commit such atrocities.”
“What?” Milla said out loud. “What work?”
Dr. Boole frowned. “Ah, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Well, it’s a bit of a long story, but I suppose it may be relevant to Tanya’s case, so I’ll get into it.” He took off his hat and worried at the brim, taking a moment to gather his courage before telling the tale.
“You don’t have to if you feel uncomfortable, Agent Boole.” Milla said soothingly. As one of the few psychonauts with a doctorate in psychiatry, Dr. Boole was due a great amount of respect for his wisdom. However, apparently it caused some significant discontent, so he just insists that people refer to him as Agent Boole instead, just like everyone else. Dr. Forscythe followed his lead in this.
“No, it’s relevant, so I should say it.” Dr. Boole retorted, taking a deep breath before beginning his tale. “Now, the first thing I must say is that the Psychic Six… was once the Psychic Seven.”
What? But even death and disgrace hasn’t removed members from being considered the Psychic Six… wait. The torch. “Lucretia Mux.” Milla whispered.
“Yes.” Dr. Boole said, not bothering to ask how she knew that name. “Lucy was a very dear friend, but about seventeen years ago, Grulovia was invaded by a Soviet puppet state. In that war, her husband died.” He chuckled a bit, wiping a tear from his eye while sniffing. “She fled the country, becoming an exotic dancer under the stage name ‘Wet Wanda’. Otto and Ford found her, and invited her to join them in their Psitanium mining scheme slash research commune.” He said, smiling to himself as he recalled what were no doubt fond memories. “The war was not going well for Grulovia. Lucy was Grulovian, and she still had family there, so… after a year and a half of research… she left us.”
“To do what?” Milla prompted, fear pooling in her gut as she started to connect to why this could be relevant to Tanya’s case.
“To fight.” Dr. Boole said, his voice grim. “She used her powerful hydrokinesis at the direction of the Gzar to defeat the invaders, suppress rebellion, and otherwise kill the enemies of the state.” He took out a handkerchief out of nowhere and blew on it. “I’ve mentioned before how we all had psychic scars from our experimentation?” He asked, to Milla’s nod. “Lucy’s mind was vulnerable, she tended to have mood swings even before she left from the side effects of the Astralathe. The stress of war, and the burden of her position in the Grulovian army… it broke her. I don’t know as many details as I’d like on the specifics of what she experienced in Grulovia, but I was plugging away at my thesis at the time. According to Otto, the primal parts of her mind, the fight or flight response, incarnated itself as a powerful archetype that took over her mind whenever she felt threatened, and as you can imagine, an archetype of violence in the hands of a hydrokinetic of Lucy’s caliber did not end well for anyone, Lucy included.”
“Maligula…” Milla whispered. “So that’s the story.”
“The Maligula we fought was a madwoman, who took joy in the suffering of others and with complete self-assurance of her importance in the world. Everyone who opposed her was a mere peasant to be washed away, and that arrogance was the only reason we stood a chance against her.” He sighed deeply, taking a moment to contemplate that dark day. “Cassie and Helmut were able to stir her true feelings, but it wasn’t enough. I’m sorry to say that no matter what they write in the history books, the battle with the Deluge of Grulovia was a catastrophic defeat for the Psychonauts and everything they stand for.”
How poetic. Still, he didn’t answer her question. “So how does this relate to Otto?”
“Right, right.” Dr. Boole said, bringing the conversation back on track. “Afterwards, Otto wrote a paper about traumatic situations and the unconscious formation of damaging archetypes. With psychic power, one can take normal stress responses and create a sub-personality that can not only handle the stress, but thrive on it. He called it ‘The Monster’. The Russians took this paper, and instead of using it as intended, to help understand and help people who have been hurt, used it in an attempt to create more Maligulas. He hasn’t published a single thing since that mission.”
Milla felt a familiar burning feeling, bile attempting to escape her throat. The Soviets always seemed to find new lows in the name of spreading communism across the world.
“Have some tea.” Advised Dr. Boole. Milla sipped at the memory once more, and her stomach settled. “It’s quite possible that Mary and even Tanya were products of such a program. There are flaws with that idea, of course, most prominent among those being that they were carelessly allowed to come to our attention.”
“How would we tell the difference?” Milla asked.
“Well, external brainwashing can make a mind very fragile.” Dr. Boole explained. “The children in question all had one symptom in common: cracks in the sky within their mental worlds. The ones closest to personality death had extensive damage in this way. Every time they subsumed themselves to the imposed alternate personality, the damage increased. According to the records of the program, a given child could withstand approximately two thousand hours total before breaking all conditioning and reverting to an animalistic mentality, attacking their guards with fearless abandon until killed.” He took another sip. ”Here’s one of the interesting parts: One of their top spies, still imprisoned in The Vault, was able to use the knowledge on his own, and had no such damage. It’s only damaging if it’s externally imposed.” He sipped at his tea. “Did Mary have any such damage?”
Milla thought back. “I… don’t think so.” She said. There were a lot of wide open spaces… She would have noticed, right? “I would need to double check.”
“One of the survivors is a psychonaut.” Dr. Boole said. “On his last checkup with me, the damage had recovered a small amount, after nine years, but it wasn’t even half gone. If Tanya or Mary have suffered from that particular variety of brainwashing in the past, that is, the forcible creation of an alternate personality like Maligula, the damage should still be visible.” He left the possibility of their youth allowing for that healing unspoken.
“I’ll check Mary again today or tomorrow.” Milla promised. Distantly, she felt that her caretaker archetype was sending an alert. Something was going on at the camp, and it was related to Tanya! Dr. Boole noticed, of course. “I should go.” She said, standing up and placing the teacup on the table that Dr. Boole manifested for their talk.
“I do hope that things turn out well.” Dr. Boole said as he waved goodbye.
----------------
The first thing inside Tanya’s mind that Milla noticed was the glowing cracks in the sky. Just as Dr. Boole warned. Glowing was something he would have mentioned, so that was probably new. Milla was never exactly sure how old Tanya was when she was placed at the steps of the converted church that was the group home, but the doctors she took Tanya to after her arrival estimated that she was six months old. With poor nutrition or premature birth, there was some wiggle room, but she declared Tanya’s birthday to be six months to the day from that time.
The implications were horrible. Tanya recognized that it was something odd, possibly by sensing Milla’s not-entirely-hidden emotional reaction, and somehow… closed them. Was it a facade? Did she just move them to the other side of the castle? Dr. Boole didn’t go into much detail on the symptoms, so she wasn’t sure what that meant, that Tanya could remove the cracks.
Tanya’s mind was constructed by her into a castle, a classic symbol of fortification and defense. The tour was awkward and stilted, but whenever Milla spotted an emotional baggage tag, she made sure to pluck it for later. The existence of such baggage is an excellent sign of Milla’s ability to resolve Tanya’s emotional block. She probably doesn’t even need to resolve all of it.
The small details of the castle were pretty interesting. You need to be really good at psychic construction in order to control those, so Milla trusted them to be more honest than Tanya’s words. The guards had a coat of arms, of a two-headed dragon. Their faces were stylized in a very odd way, with a massive focus on their eyes. Tanya never had any trouble looking people in the eye, and in fact had a tendency to have a rather unnerving gaze, making it difficult for the other children to meet her eyes. Their weapons were, instead of the classical fantasy options of spears or halberds, were instead long rifles that had extraordinarily large bayonets that held an axe head, making them heavily resemble halberds without being them. The weapons seemed functional, if strange. The carpet was the kind that Milla usually saw in office buildings, rather than any carpet Tanya would have regular contact with, as the Psychonauts offices had a different kind of office carpet.
The most interesting part, of course, was all the Japanese. One of the more obscure things about mental worlds that you learn as a psychonaut is that you can’t obscure information very effectively by using a different language, as long as you and the psychic reading it understands at least one language in common. By looking at one of the Japanese kanji, she instantly understands what it means in English, to the extent of Tanya’s understanding of the translation. What makes the kanji above the entrance of the castle so interesting is that the translation was inexact and loaded with cultural connotations that just flew straight over Milla’s head, but was still present. That’s not something you usually see in people’s non-native languages, although as a polyglot, Tanya does get a little leeway here. Still, why did Tanya name her mind’s castle ‘Polite Castle’? Why does it have a name at all? It was a mystery.
Another interesting bit was how Tanya’s childhood memory room seemed to use her crib and nursery rather than the bedroom she shared with the other girls, which she did for many years more than that. Milla couldn’t be entirely certain… but she was pretty sure that the rest of the room matched what it was when Tanya was using it, too. Under normal circumstances, minds usually held scenes like living spaces portrayed as they were during the first six months to a year of habitation, with only small reflections of changes sticking beyond that. That didn’t usually apply to nurseries, though, as memories from that time dissolve into uselessness as the infant’s mind develops to be capable of holding onto long-term memories. Psychic children could retain more, but it was so detailed... Did it mean something deeper about Tanya’s preferences? Was this a reflection of her desire to be doted on? She probably shouldn’t take this room literally if that’s the case… but she’ll keep this in mind.
Still, Milla got a bit nervous when she got to the fourth emotional baggage tag without seeing any emotional baggage. Even when she strained her ears, not a hint of the crying manifestations could be detected. A typical mind in a healthy state usually had a few bits of emotional baggage, about two or three. One that’s more unsettled or stressed can get four to six. According to scuttlebutt, the record amount of emotional baggage recorded in one mind was eight. Yet another obscure fact about being a psychonaut is that once you’ve been in a few minds, you get a sense of the size of the mental world, an idea of how much is left for you to do.
When Lili showed up, they had only gone through about ten percent. Still, the kanji on the very top of that barricaded door was pretty telling… ‘Hell’. Well, the cultural context that Milla couldn’t quite understand was still present, so she knew not to read too much into it… but it was probably close enough.
They continued on, and Milla gathered even more baggage tags. The hallway labeled ‘True’ that Lili tried to get into was definitely something to explore… but it was not yet time to push the issue.
By the time Tanya had made it to the ‘last’ room, Milla had collected a keychain of no less than six emotional baggage tags… without a single weeping baggage in sight. That last room though… Milla had no idea that Tanya was this… creative. Tanya never seemed terribly interested in the arcade’s offerings, considered them ‘simplistic and boring’, but despite that, saw immediate potential in the little shooting galley that Sasha had created for her. According to him, she laughed with genuine joy while fighting the censors he had sent against her.
…In hindsight, that’s another point towards Mary’s allegations.
But with only one quarter of her mind exposed, Lili seemed to discover an entirely new section through a magic mirror. When she followed Tanya's mad dash after her, she immediately understood what design Tanya used to conceal the thoughts she wanted to hide from Milla’s prying eyes.
Behind that mirror labeled ‘Oblivion’ was an entirely different layer, a castle with what she bet is an identical floorplan to the one she had just gone through. If the layers were of equal sizes, she bet those other two blocked off locations were mirrors just like this one. This place was also very cold, reflecting the fact that for all of Tanya’s affinity with pyrokinesis, she mastered the use of cryokinesis at a much faster pace.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Then came the nightmare manifestation. She fully expected to find multiple nightmares, so she was prepared.
It was a nightmare, no question. Those tentacles are a dead giveaway. The name, the ‘Heartless Machine’... it’s never a good sign when a nightmare manifestation makes claims such as being the true face of the mind, but it appears that Tanya knew all along that she didn’t feel emotions in the same way as other people.
Milla’s first act after the nightmare consumed Tanya, pulling her into its hollow chest cavity was to grip Lili and bring out her smelling salts to eject her from Tanya’s mind. There was very little chance that Lili was going to stay out, but Milla didn’t have time to do more than that. She knew she should have left an archetype behind in her body! But she knew she’d need all the power she can muster to deal with Tanya’s issues, however they manifested.
She spun out her combat archetypes, the colors on her dress fading as her agent archetype manifested in a green dress and her caretaker archetype manifested in a red dress. Her own dress, previously a pleasing mixture of red, green, and orange, was now only orange.
“Tanya!” Shouted her caretaker archetype with concern before igniting her fists with the flames of passionate rage and throwing herself at the Heartless Machine as a distraction.
“Those mental cobwebs.” Observed her agent archetype. “There’s some emotional baggage trapped within.” Milla looked up at the hanging lump of webs that was above the mysterious desk. What? But… it’s not crying.
Mental cobwebs were… a little weird. Much like emotional baggage, they were things that represented loose psychic energy buildup. Also like emotional baggage, it was not exactly easy to get rid of. Otto has made quite a few iterations of devices intended to extract them, but they were fairly unreliable; Milla didn’t have one. The ‘traditional’ method is usually pyrokinesis, but the trick was that you needed to tune the release of flame to something complementary or directly opposed to the psychic cobweb. This was typically an annoyingly difficult task, as psychic cobwebs usually populated the lost and forgotten segments of a mind, and did not easily convey what their natures were.
In a place like this? Where everything was so forgotten that only the barest silhouette was discernible? Nigh impossible. Milla decided to delegate. “Investigate.” She commanded her agent archetype while tossing it her keychain of baggage tags before going to join her caretaker archetype in combat.
The mental construct known as the Heartless Machine had retreated deeper into Oblivion Castle, Tanya in tow. There was not a single spot in the place where you could not see a stretch of psychic cobwebs, even if the dense clusters were less frequent. She made sure to note the location of each of such clusters, as it could be important later.
Eventually, the running battle of her caretaker archetype and the Heartless Machine led Milla to a hidden passage within the childhood room’s equivalent. The bedroom’s silhouette was still recognizably a bedroom, even through the dense cobwebs. It was not, however, recognizably a bedroom that Tanya had ever possessed. The desk chair was more appropriate to an executive’s office, and the majority of the desk space was taken up by something that reminded her of an oddly shaped television. The dresser was sterile and utilitarian, rather than the artful oak piece that Milla had found in a garage sale. The closet had a sliding door, and everything was designed to be as economical with space as possible. It reminded her more of a college dorm room rather than the room of a little girl. Or perhaps military barracks.
Inside the secret tunnel was an endless void, the stairs leading back to the bedroom having vanished from sight as she stepped onto the platform. The first two steps were still there, but the rest had vanished behind a veil of darkness.
On the platform floating in the void, there was another set of stairs down, to an underground area. Following the sense she had of her caretaker archetype, she flew down in search of Tanya.
The underground area was a train station, instantly recognizable as such by the presence of a train in silhouette. One set of cobwebs, a much thinner clump than before, wrapped around some emotional baggage in the form of a steamer trunk with dead eyes, utterly silent. Tear tracks were there, thick gouges worn there by erosion and frozen over. What in the world…
…it was situated right in front of the train, the cobwebs scattered in a pattern that reminded Milla of blood splatter.
The Heartless machine was locked in combat with a heavily damaged projection of Milla’s caretaker archetype. Tanya’s face was displayed prominently within its chest, but she was dead to the world with eyes emptier than Milla had ever seen in her. They matched the steamer trunk.
Suddenly, without a single twitch in her eyelids, the Tanya within the machine put out her arms for a hug. “Mom.” She said tonelessly, robotically. “I love you.”
Milla’s overwhelming disgust with the dissonance of the action paralyzed her, and her caretaker archetype reacted even more strongly, exploding with psychic energy as it couldn’t hold its damaged shape together in the face of such a dirty tactic.
If Milla had any doubts that this was the psychic entity that caused Tanya’s episode the previous night, they were gone now. The Heartless Machine turned to Milla calmly. “Now, you’re not supposed to be in here.” It explained, using Otto’s voice. “That room is private” It said in Tanya’s voice, repeating the statement she said before. After a second, she realized that Tanya’s lips were moving with every word.
Could it only project emotion when it was parroting lines? Milla felt sick as she remembered which line didn’t have any emotion. Something unsaid and unheard. For a horrifying instant, she had to scramble for a memory of her own of her saying ‘I love you’ to Tanya, but calmed when she found it. Just this morning. Still, she was a Psychonaut. That title deserves respect in a place like this. “Well, I suppose you’re right.” She conceded. “But it would be ignoring my duties if I was to leave that unattended.” She explained as she slowly walked towards the cobweb-coated luggage.
The Heartless Machine interposed itself between Milla and the luggage. “This is a restricted area.” The machine repeated using the voice of that guard. “Stay away from that or I’ll tan your hide so badly you’ll be on your knees praying for salvation, you little apostate!” She said in the hate-filled voice of Dr. Forscythe’s mother. Well, she’s never babysitting again.
Milla manifested Psychic Fists and started attacking the machine in close combat, avoiding strikes to the torso where Tanya would put at risk but testing the resilience of the entity.
As expected, the machine was more or less invulnerable to her strikes. Tanya’s psychic strength was too great for a psychic of Milla’s caliber to overpower her psychic entities, so she’ll need to resort to her more useful skill sets to deal with this. Understanding… and empathy.
Milla recalled her agent archetype and unleashed a confusion grenade, stunning the machine and allowing her to walk around to the webbed-up steamer trunk.
She plucked the appropriate tag, the one she recalled having picked up from the crib, and attempted to join it to the trunk. Emotional energy flooded Milla’s astral form, a greater amount than she had ever seen from any luggage before.
Panic. A sense of falling. An odd tonal sound she couldn’t identify. The fear of death. Pain. So much pain. It hurts. A flash of image, of the train as it approached. Another, of a radiant man, old and wizened. Anger, derision. Fear. Death. Eclipsing all of this, an unfathomably large well of… Spite. A promise, ironclad conviction backed by unending, suffocating spite.
Idly, she noticed the cobwebs burst into flames, and a small amount of detail bled into the train station. She was on fire, but the burning sensation she felt was not the flames, but a pale reflection of hate, a desire for revenge so powerful that epics were written to catch a fraction of its potency. The frost that caked the scene melted instantly at her presence.
She already wanted it to end, to stop. What was this? She didn’t understand how this level of hostile emotion could be possible. She split off her caretaker and agent archetypes again, to engage the Heartless Machine while she struggled to stand.
After she managed to bring herself back to the matter at hand, she looked at the machine, who was idly deflecting her archetype’s attacks without any interest at all. One of the flaws of most mental constructs is that they generally weren’t very smart, and had very limited emotional profiles. The Heartless Machine represented Tanya’s apathy… artificial or otherwise, so it was, as a result, fairly apathetic. It wouldn’t go for the kill quickly like a more aggressive construct would. As long as it had something to fight, it would fight.
Milla noted that she was still on fire, a nimbus of emotional energy that she couldn’t completely absorb. Well, Tanya could probably use a bit of this, anyway. She pointed her finger at the Machine. “Tanya, darling?” She asked, smiling sweetly.
The imprisoned Tanya talked again, still a puppet to the machine that held her captive. “Yes, Miss Milla?”
“Burn.” She said, unleashing a fraction of the energy to augment her pyrokinesis. This was just a test to see if it would work, after all. Wasting a resource like this could be the difference between victory and defeat.
The Heartless Machine went red-hot, but the interior remained curiously dark, Tanya was left unharmed by Milla’s attack. That was interesting, she did attempt to spare her, but she expected a small amount of collateral heat to reach her there. The machine retreated to a different part of Oblivion castle, outpacing her archetypes at least twice over.
Milla frowned as she rejoined her mind into one and started pursuit. It could have escaped her at any time… troubling. Her musings were interrupted by a very high pitched scream. Ah, there’s Lili.
Milla rushed through the castle, following the scream, and ended up back at the room with the desk that was just inside the entrance. Lilli was running away from the Heartless Machine, which was calmly power-walking in her direction while occasionally lashing out with a nightmare tendril.
“Lili!” Milla commanded. “Go over the desk and out the door!” Lili, not having any better ideas, immediately produced a levitation ball to bounce over the desk, barely going under the cobwebs suspended above, and then ran back to the exit. When the Heartless Machine moved to vault over the desk to pursue, Milla unleashed the full force of her pyrokinesis, fueling it with the powerful emotion she released from the baggage.
A column of flame erupted, completely covering the desk and incinerating the cobwebs that contained the briefcase hanging above the desk, which promptly dropped on top of the machine, pinning it with its massive burden. Walking up to it, briefcase tag in hand, Milla took the hand of the machine and joined it with the emotional baggage, unleashing the emotional energy into both of them.
Success. Fulfillment. Happiness. Frustration, disappointment, derision. A flash of a Japanese man’s face, contorted in fear. A jolt in the back, as if pushed. Horror. Fear. Rage. Pain.
The machine screamed mechanically as the emotional energy tore at them. This time, Milla deliberately saved half of what went into her as an aura of passionate fire. Tanya, within the chest of the monster, regained life into her eyes and looked around in confusion. She was awake!
“Tanya.” Milla said hurriedly. “I can’t get you out of there. Only you can! I’ll clear your path the best I can, but only you can walk it.” They were relatively generic platitudes, but Milla didn’t know how much time she had, so she had to get to the point quickly. Good thing too, as the machine stabbed Milla in the gut by turning its mechanical hand into a wicked series of knives… but as this was just a mental projection, Milla was launched backwards rather than actually ran through.
Tanya’s eyes blanked out once more, as her lips moved with the machine’s voice. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Vodello!” it said with Agent Forscythe’s voice. Milla didn’t realize that Tanya had overheard that argument. “There are some boxes that are best left… unopened.” It intoned in Otto’s dramatic storyteller voice.
With the emotional baggage dealt with, Milla could make out a few more details of the desk, even if the rest of the office seemed too spartan to note anything but the shape of the room. It seemed rather nice, with a small screen that was far too thin to be functional on the surface, with a typewriter keyboard in front of it and an unknown device at the right of it, each connected to each other by wires. The desk chair was quite nice, and much larger than the one in the mysterious bedroom. Milla imagined that the chair would be comically large on anyone who wasn’t over six feet tall.
The machine sat in the oversized chair, relaxing into it as if it was made for them. “You’re fired.” It said with a firm, deep, masculine voice that Milla didn’t recognize. “Security will escort you out.”
The room flooded with dozens of full sized censors, including multiple heavies. Milla split off her archetypes again to fight the massive army of mental defenses.
“Yeah! Violence!” Lili shouted in glee as she burst back into the room, psychic fists swinging. The Heartless Machine twitched at Lili’s arrival, but remained seated as the censors continued their best efforts.
One of the little-appreciated facts is that children were actually a lot better at fighting in a mental world than they have any right to be. They’re no longer held back by their clumsy, still-growing bodies, and their immense imagination is a potent asset… although only the most powerful child psychics could muster up enough strength to be able to dispatch any but the smallest censors. So despite being three years old, the high amounts of psitanium in the area allowed Lili to bat censors aside and set them aflame with ease, although Milla assigned her caretaker archetype to watch Lili’s back during the fight.
After the final censor was destroyed, the Heartless Machine stood back up, having reshaped itself during the battle. Now large enough to fit well inside that oversized chair, with broad shoulders, long legs, and a masculine gait that kept it moving quickly outside the room. For some reason Tanya, still unconscious within its chest, now had glasses. Her lips moved with that same masculine voice. “You are required for a meeting regarding your future in this company. Follow me.” Who was it emulating? This didn’t make any sense.
Milla took a deep breath as her caretaker archetype used Lili’s smelling salts to send her back outside. “The most important tool for a psychonaut is an open mind.” She reminded herself as she followed the machine. Mary’s accusations and Dr. Boole’s theories are distracting her from discovering the truth. This didn’t resemble anything in Mary’s mind, there was no battlefield or anything like there was in Mary’s mind…
…Wait. That man from the first vision… didn’t it look an awful lot like Mary’s ‘vision of God’? Milla wished she got more than a tiny glimpse into it, but emotional baggage needed a lot of energy to convey anything resembling a memory, and all of the mental cobwebs in the area meant that any figments that found their way here quickly got absorbed.
The Heartless Machine led her to another section, corresponding to the room depicting Milla’s office in Polite Castle. There was another bundle of cobwebs here. The silhouettes indicated items on shelves, large and kind of round. Urns? Vases? The machine spoke through Tanya’s lips again: “Your performance is lacking. At this rate, it won’t be long until you bring shame on us all. Step back from your current course, and go-.” The voice cut off, but it seemed deliberate, mangling the quote in order to convey a different idea.
The room flooded with purple goop, ensnaring Milla’s feet. Doubts? The Heartless Machine manifested a giant hammer, revealing itself to be a nightmare-infected Judge. That… made perfect sense. Doubts were, fortunately, extremely flammable, so she took a fraction of the flames she had stored from the last emotional baggage and burned away the entire swarm of them before ducking the wide swing of the machine’s hammer.
The machine was much more relentless than a normal Judge, and resisted any attempt to steal their hammer away, but after some rapid dodging Milla noticed that it fought completely differently this way than it did when it was using Tanya’s shape. It fought a lot more like a regular Judge, just with far more aggression, which was… weird.
She wasn’t able to maneuver well enough to get past the oddly competent Judge, they usually paused in their attacks for long enough that you could get basically anywhere, but Milla instead led the Heartless Machine to a different cluster of cobwebs, the one in the bedroom.
“This is unacceptable.” The machine said using that same masculine voice. “Don’t forget, the nail that sticks up…” The judge’s wargavel went up and Tanya’s body started glowing with psychic power. “...gets hammered DOWN!” The Heartless Machine tripled in speed and charged Milla, easily vaulting over the cluster of cobwebs she had put between them.
Milla unleashed the flames of emotion on the machine, causing it to writhe in pain as its metal became orange hot, the barest hints of red metal in the interior of it. The emotional baggage in this room was a backpack, so she took out the backpack tag and once more shoved it into the machine’s hand and forced it to connect to the waiting baggage, clear of the mental cobwebs that now burned to fuel her pyrokinesis.
As before, the emotional energy tore through the steel of the machine’s body, its strong association with being emotionless causing the already volatile power to destructively interfere with it. That isn’t to say that Milla didn’t still make sure that she got enough to repeat the feat for the next cluster of cobwebs… it was effective, and it let her clean up the emotional baggage while she was at it.
Determination. Hard work. Accomplishment. Pride. Love. Confusion. Disappointment. Resolve. Hard work. Accomplishment. Not enough. Hard work. Not enough. Not enough. Never enough. Despair.
Tanya’s eyes regained life again, but then closed in pain as she didn’t like the emotions any better than Milla did. Well, that did confirm that she was taking in some of the emotional energy as well. She murmured to herself without acknowledging Milla’s presence. It was in Japanese, but her intent dribbled into Milla’s mind as she paid attention to the words, even if they should ordinarily be too quiet to hear.
“Mom, Dad… Why? I see it now…” Okay… Tanya’s eyes shot open and she tried to move. The room had gained a little definition. The device on the first desk was on this one as well, but the TV-like screen was bulkier, more reasonable for a television; although it was still smaller than Milla expected for such a screen. The bed was neat, and there was a poster of some kind of… war movie? It looked like… a boy’s room.
“You’re no better than X, you machine! Pretender!” Tanya shouted, which seemed to offend the Heartless Machine, as it rose back up and flung itself onto the bed.
“I am a mirror into your true self!” Retorted the machine with each word in a different voice, too quickly for Milla to identify exactly which was which, now smaller, but still larger than when it was emulating Tanya. “You, the greatest pretender of them all! The number one FAKER!”
Ah, it was always awkward to watch someone yelling at themselves, even when you knew that it was valuable progress. Milla slipped just outside the room, double-checking where the other cobwebbed up emotional baggage was. She could probably clear some out while Tanya was beating herself up, but…
Milla always kind of knew that Tanya’s problem was some flavor of impostor syndrome, but the truth that was being hidden… Milla still couldn’t quite understand it. This castle’s aesthetics conformed to what you’d see if you delved into memories long forgotten, and clearing up the emotional baggage seemed to allow Tanya some additional recollection of them, which was in the same ballpark as normal… But the memories themselves didn’t make any sense. They were memories of someone completely different than Mary led Milla to believe would be here.
It must be exactly that. Tanya had lived before… and still carried the scars of that life, and of their death. They were embedded thoroughly enough that it frankly didn’t matter whether the memories were real or not. She must have spent her entire life suppressing these memories… Well, mental scars were something of a Psychonaut specialty.