Aris knew something was wrong. While she was disturbed by the way Mind chose to present herself and the constantly shifting dreamscape area they were in was unnerving, there was a strange kind of ‘rightness’ to it. Like that was what Mind and Body intended to show her.
But now the air rippled with white hot fury and the shifting environment grew erratic. It made Aris grow queasy trying to make sense of the space around her - one moment it was stone benches around a circular platform, the next it was a dirt mountainside overlooking a field. Mind’s hands moved just as erratically over the harp-like viscera between the split halves of her body, the strumming seemingly spitting out venomous words.
“AND TO THINK ALL OF YOU EXPECT THINGS FROM US. ALL THIS TIME. ALWAYS. YOU TAKE AND YOU TAKE AND YOU TAKE AND YOU TAKE! NOT ONCE WAS HER LOVE RECIPROCATED. IT ONLY GREW WORSE IN HER ABSENCE. HOW DARE YOU AS MORTALS THINK YOU’RE OWED ANYTHING!”
Aris looked over at Body who simply did not react to anything Mind was saying. He barely seemed to register the crazily shifting dreamscape, keeping a stoic expression as he stared back at Aris.
Before she could ask for his help, the ground tumbled down from under her and she found herself on her hands and knees. The ground was solid beneath her but also didn’t look to be made of anything but darkness. She unsteadily stood up and looked around, shocked to be suddenly next to two struggling people.
One man had another grappled onto the ground. The man on top clutched a dagger in his hand, the one on the ground thrashed and squirmed to get away. Aris could see the man’s face when he twisted his upper body to her direction and she saw eyes with no pupil or eye whites, just a strange green that shimmered and moved as if it was liquid. Aris staggered back as the Part on the ground was brutally murdered by the man on top of him. She tried to look away, but it seemed like every time she turned her head the scene shifted so it was still right in front of her. Blood stained the non-existent floor, the dying gasp of the Part rang in her ears.
“Stop,” she cried out to Mind.
To her surprise, it did stop… only to be replaced by a different scene. This time three men ganged up on one woman. She seemed to have some measure of manus abilities as she was able to wrestle one of them off, but in the end the three men overpowered her. Aris’s stomach turned violently as she was forced to watch two men hold her down and the third one stripped her.
“STOP IT!” she screamed.
A third scene came. Then a fourth. A fifth. Aris desperately tried to run away from the twisted recreation of murders after murders of Parts. Some were able to kill them alone. Others needed help. It was some morbid marathon of ways of killing and Aris couldn’t run away from it. It followed her every time she tried to run, glued to her peripherals by some twisted magic.
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Was this what Mind thought about every single day?
A sixth scene. This time it was her. Aris watched a woman who looked a lot like herself overpower a man she didn’t recognize onto the ground and gouge his eyes out. The man screamed in agony, blood and a strange green liquid spilling out of his eye sockets. Aris blinked and suddenly she was in the scenario herself. She was the murderer. She looked down to see her hands covered in blood. Shaking, she looked up expecting to see an eyeless man but then started when she stared back at Body’s face. His liquid black eyes were still very much intact. She looked back at her hands and they were suddenly clean.
“Wha - ”
Body sharply shook his head as if to signal her to stop talking, grabbed her wrist, then seemingly plunged them into the dark formless ground. His grip on her wrist suddenly disappeared and she was left flailing, disoriented in the dark. Her stomach lurched as her brain tried to make sense of her surroundings - if the ground didn’t exist and she was pulled through, then she must be falling…
No, she was lying on solid ground again. Aris blinked and hoisted herself up to a sitting position and looked around. Body stood three paces by her, a dimly lit stretch of smooth tiled floor between them. It was a welcomed sight after wandering around a floorless dreamscape.
Then Aris saw shelves. Shelves of every shape, form, color and material jammed themselves into the space around her. The intensity of how tightly packed they were gave the illusion that there wasn’t that much space, but as she craned her neck up to try to look over she could see the space stretched out far beyond what she could see. On each shelf, neatly spaced out from its neighbor was a curious object. A tiny sign was placed near each object - the sign was written in characters Aris didn’t recognize.
There was no rhyme or reason to the objects. One was a tiny glass vial filled with some clear liquid. The next was a plain green vase the size of her hand. Aris spotted a small notebook written in standard Gaian with the words ‘Love Poems’ scrawled on the cover with ink. Each of them were carefully placed and labeled in some unknown language, but the sheer volume and density of the shelving threw the space into chaos.
It reminded her a little of the Library back at the Academy. With a lot less books, of course. She glanced back at the ‘Love Poems’ notebook.
“This is my collection of items… my inventory of things,” Body said before she could speak. “No, you may not touch anything. No, I will not explain what any of it is for.”
Aris glanced over at the nearest shelf. When she looked around, it seemed like each shelf barely had space to fit a single person between them, even if the person was particularly lean and shifted sideways to fit through. But then when she approached a shelf or walked between the shelves herself, the aisle mysteriously had enough space for both her and Body to walk abreast of each other.
“Alright, fine,” Aris said. “Will you tell me why you brought me here? I’m getting sick of being spirited into one space after another for no reason.”
“Did you miss how Mind is throwing a tantrum? I brought you here before she drove you mad.”