Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective chapter 3.06
🕑 Added 2024-01-08 15:00:08 +0000 UTCAt first glance, the storm of paper that was Mailman Ford’s segment of the man’s shattered mind was just as chaotic as Park Ranger Ford’s, back in the day. But after a moment for the mind to comprehend what it sees, the differences were apparent: it was far more orderly, a series of routings and paths that emulated transitions without actually using them, giving the illusion of a complete mind within a single fragment.
Tanya glanced at some of the wooden shelves that the papers flew to and fro from. Well, perhaps it had one or two additional fragments with proper mental transitions, but it still gave an illusion of being vaster than it was.
In the center of the storm of giant letters, notes, postcards, and seals, was a giant mechanical Ford, using four limbs to sort, file, and stamp random papers, directing the flow of things with an unknown agenda.
“Cool…” Lili said, looking around in wonder.
“This is pretty crazy.” Raz said authoritatively. “Not even Coach Oleander had this much going on at once in his head. Linda came sort of close, I guess?”
“It's not so bad.” Tanya corrected him. “With Ford, having a safe zone at all isn't guaranteed.” They were inside a cubby hole, empty except for a single giant postcard. “I'll take dancing paper over a hurricane any day of the week.” Although it was easy to think that the flurry of papers were launched to and fro by intense winds, the auditory cues of the environment made it clear that the papers were moving on their own. Even the churning sea of paper below, which looked more like a mental defense blocking off the deeper recesses of Ford’s mind than anything else, clearly moved through forces more accurately described as tides and currents rather than stormy conditions.
“Hey now, this is a restricted area.” Said a picture of Ford, who was on a stamp on a gigantic envelope. “Only senior mailroom personnel can handle crunch time.”
“We’re here to help!” Raz said proudly. “What do you need?” That was one way to approach this…
“Are you? Well I suppose I could find something for an intern to do…” The letter Ford said. “We’ve been looking for a letter for a long time. Never sent it, you know.”
Tuning out their conversation, Tanya reached out with her senses to try and find an anchor she could use to draw on to reunify Ford’s mind, as instructed. Now that she’s expecting it, and if she brings some Psychic Six backup to the critical part, she should be able to avoid her previous fate. “Hmm… this is going to be harder than I thought.” She murmured as she found none.
“To the Dead Letter office!” Raz announced.
“Woo!” Lili shouted as she levitated into the paper storm. Raz went to keep her safe, while Tanya started to fly into the chaos.
“I’m going to check out the mecha.” Tanya said, “You go and find that letter or whatever.” There wasn’t anything actually dangerous in Ford’s individual minds, not with the protection of a psychoportal with the safeties on. Having an accident in one’s pants only happened if one tried too hard to hold onto one’s projection before getting evacuated by the safety features, and with that being the worst probable result, leaving them on their own to get mangled by papercuts or whatever wasn’t a big deal.
Also, this gives Razputin a chance to disobey her forbiddance of him using mental connection on people, and with no one Tanya cared about in the line of fire. She’ll get Lili to rat him out if he does.
Still, the internals of the mecha Ford were… interesting. The area that Tanya would, if she were feeling poetic, function as the heart was instead a gaping hole, with naught but some gears as a minor hazard. Reaching out with her senses, she couldn’t detect any sort of opening or hidden area, beyond the obvious entrance/exits to the pseudo-tunnel.
“Hm, this doesn’t have an address!” Proclaimed the mecha. Huh? It was holding a letter to its face, the metal lips frowning at what it saw. It moved, placing the mail in the giant typewriter. “Where is it supposed to go? I don’t… I don’t remember. I’ll figure it out later. Too much to do…”
Tanya flew down to the typewriter. Razputin bounded into view, beaming at his accomplishment. Admittedly, his reckless action probably worked out better than her careful consideration this time. “There are missing letters.” Tanya said, retrieving the two discarded keys nearby telekinetically. The letter was for ‘Grulovia’, and was from Ford.
She affixed the C and Y keys to the typewriter, leaving the only missing one to be… L. Of course. “If this were an ordinary typewriter, the lack of key isn’t much of a problem.” She telekinetically pushed the key anyway. “But this is a mental typewriter, so it’s necessary.”
“I saw some of Ford’s memories!” Razputin said proudly. “We definitely need to send this to Lucy!”
“I’m well aware of Lucrecia Mux’s romantic relationship with Ford, Razputin.” Tanya said, eyes searching the environment for the missing typewriter key. “Actually… I think I may have seen this exact letter before… unsent because of discontinued mail service, I believe.”
“That’s what was in the memory vault, yeah.” Lili added. “You’ve seen it?”
Ah, there it is. “It’s probably a little different, but close enough.” Tanya said, focusing on the L key that sat on a bulletin board. It was somewhat difficult to reach that far with telekinesis, but after a few seconds of focus, it started to shoot straight towards her. Catching it with a telekinetic hand, Tanya deposited the L key onto the proper spot on the typewriter and, with that same hand, typed out ‘LUCY’ on the letter.
She didn’t have any real expectations on what would happen when they fulfilled the obsession of this particular fragment of Ford, but ‘the Mecha’s next exploding, sending the head crashing next to them’ was not it. Razputin cheerily wandered into the back of the head, ripping out a glass shard out of a tiny brain inside the head.
Sensing the imminent collapse of the mental section, Tanya grabbed Lili and coated them both in a barrier. After a surprisingly gentle transition, they found themselves in… “Watch out!” Tanya shouted, telekinetic barriers springing to life. Deftly, she pickpocketed Lili’s smelling salts and discharged it in her face, warping her away.
“Woah there, Missy.” Ford’s voice came out from nowhere, exactly as before.
Tanya lashed out in the direction of the voice, launching a PSI blast to prevent his ambush.
“Hey! Stop!” Razputin shouted, throwing himself in the way of the PSI Blast and blocking it with a shield of his own. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s not catching me off guard again.” Tanya said, looking around for Ford’s projection. “Knew I should have grabbed Helmut or Bob first…” Maybe she should have taken the time to kick around Compton’s anxiety until his head was back on straight…
“What’s she talking about, Raz?” Ford’s voice said again. It was coming from… a shattered mirror held by a headless Ford.
“She said she tried to fix you, years ago. You hurt her when she got close.” He gulped. “I saw the aftermath. You hurt her bad.”
“Oh.” Ford said contemplatively. “Well, I don’t remember doing that, but… that’s no excuse. There’s too much I can’t remember for that to be an excuse.”
Tanya took a deep breath, and walked closer to the shattered mirror. Only two fragments were there. Tanya took another look around. Yes, this was the place Ford ambushed her. As she had guessed, he must have deliberately attacked himself after doing so, because it was in much shabbier condition than when she had seen it first form. Wooden splinters stood in mid-air, shrapnel paused in time from the explosion. “Do the words, ‘and now you know too much’ ring any bells?” Tanya asked rhetorically.
Ford winced. “No. But I’m sorry for whatever I did. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Tanya scowled. “No. You were thinking clearly.” She retorted. “That was the problem. There’s a reason I didn’t tell anyone about what you tried to keep a secret. It’s an important secret to keep.”
“Wait, you know who broke Ford’s mind?” Razputin blurted out.
“Of course I do.” Tanya said, barking out a laugh. “Ford did. He didn’t trust himself to keep Lucy’s location a secret, so he tried to wipe it from his memory.” Tanya gestured all around her. “Or rather, he tried to wipe Lucy out of his mind entirely. Not a good idea, removing something that’s wound itself so deeply in one’s mind.” That was the conclusion of the Psychic Six, anyway.
“So you know where she is?” Ford asked, shocked.
“I know exactly where she is, I tracked her down, she’s still alive.” Tanya replied. At least, assuming that the circus was still in the town she picked up Razputin at. “But the Deluginists still exist, so nothing good can come from revealing that information. She’s happy where she is.”
“Oh.” Ford said, thinking. “...That’s good. I’m glad.”
“So now we can fix Ford, right?” Razputin said, “Him staying crazy isn’t going to help if someone else knows.”
“Three people can keep a secret if two are dead.” Tanya said flatly. “But Truman ordered Ford restored to himself, and while I could refuse to assist, he’ll just tell Helmut or Compton or whoever to do it instead. Getting Ford moved from one place to another is difficult, and if he thinks the best way to resolve his madness obstructing the Motherlobe’s functions is to attempt to glue his brain back together, I’m not going to argue with the boss.” After all, Truman knows that Tanya knows where Maligula is, even if he accepted her reasoning behind not revealing that information, and that’s the only piece of valuable intelligence the broken man still has that Truman doesn’t already know. Heck, she’d have checked up on Nona if the man had asked her to. But wisely, he didn’t even hint at that information being known to anyone while security was compromised. “It’ll sure make the Psychic Six happy.” Tanya sighed. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“Right.”
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After they emerged from Mailman Ford’s head, the crazy man twitched and looked around, even more confused. “I… I feel… sad. But… also happy.” He said, murmuring. He vanished with a pop, teleporting away.
“In hindsight, it’s somewhat ironic that the one we did first was the one that was causing the least problems.” Tanya mused.
“Raz!” Lili said, hugging the boy before backing off with a blush. “Are you okay?”
“I was a bit hasty in ejecting you, Lili.” Tanya admitted, “Everything turned out okay.”
“Okay, one down, six to go!” Razputin said dramatically, before marching away.
They went outside, approaching the stairs to the parking lot underneath the landing pad, when Samantha was launched out of the water and onto the platform, presumably by levitation. She seemed panicked. “Tanya! Oh I’m so glad to see you! Grandpa’s going nuts!”
Oh dear. Compton didn’t meltdown very often, but when he did… probably psilirium. She’s rated to work with it… Tanya swiftly produced a scanner from her pocket and ran it over Sam’s head. “...How long were you with him?” Tanya asked.
“Like, twenty minutes?” Sam replied.
“Okay, so no active danger from whatever dosed him. May be unrelated to the current crisis.” Tanya said, nodding to herself. Sam didn’t have any sign of psilirium poisoning, any damage was below the ‘random noise’ threshold. Given she didn’t live with her grandfather, but instead her parents in town, this made sense. “Psychoisolation chambers?”
“Yeah!” Sam said.
“Razputin, stay here.” Tanya said authoritatively before taking off at full speed. Crossing the quarry to the psychoislation cells took seconds, and with her psychic defenses at full, she slipped into the doors, ready for anything.
Compton was hyperventilating, surrounded by ash and fire extinguisher foam. The extinguisher in question was laying on its side. “Compton?” Tanya stage whispered. “Are you feeling alright?”
Tanya’s shield flared up as the surrounding temperature spiked in time with the volume of her voice. Ouch, she’s only seen him this bad once…
Still, she used her scanner, modifying it on the fly to remove the “speaker” function. After a quick, silent search around Compton’s cell, she plucked a single psilirium shard out from an envelope in a pile of mail. He didn’t even get a chance to open it…
Tanya crushed the shard of psilirium. While the madness-inducing psitanium variant wasn’t exactly easy to destroy, she knew how, and such a small shard is simple enough to get rid of. Once fully dissolved and evaporated into mildly unpleasant mental energy, she turned to the elderly Psychonaut. “Come on, Cassie needs help.” Tanya whispered, ignoring the pyrokinetic attack as she floated the psychoportal to his head.
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Normally, when Compton’s anxieties become too overwhelming, resolving them was as simple as running him through a therapeutic mental construct that he had set up on the outermost layer of his mind.
Unfortunately, when it gets to the point where it gives him hypersensitivity that bad? Bad enough to reflexively attempt to burn anything that makes sound, not even exclusively psychic noise? ‘Normal’ treatment isn’t going to cut it.
“How did Sam set him off this badly?” Tanya asked incredulously. Compton didn’t actually interact much with his grandchildren, to her understanding, and the times he did was when he was in tip top shape, psychologically. From there, it was easy for her to imagine Sam doing something completely boneheaded and pushing him over the brink that the psilirium put him at.
But there was still a mystery as to the scale of the disaster. The game show was nowhere to be found, instead replaced by a prison yard, darkened with an orange sky denoting the time of day as dusk. How is she supposed to deal with this? Flashes of memory, of long hours at the hospital, of burning indignation, went through her head. Ah, that’s how. Thank you, Hollis.
The prison had alarms going off, searchlights roaming the grounds as they searched for escaped prisoners. Tanya exhaled a calming breath, fading from sight as she stalked towards the door, going deeper into Compton’s mind.
The hallways of the cell block were filled with animals, each one talking endlessly, to the point where it was difficult to pick out the words of any given animal. Some were thankful, enthusiastically praising whoever they were talking to, presumably Compton. Others were angry, aggressively berating their conversation partner for imagined slights. Still others just nattered about themselves, with no indication that they were speaking to anyone else at all.
Panic attacks roamed the halls, and Tanya destroyed each one the instant she noticed them, using the element of surprise to overpower them with a charged PSI blast, followed up with a PSI blade splitting their skulls in two as they attempted to reform. Each time, the panic attacks were reinforced by a pair of Judges, who were durable but not particularly threatening in Tanya’s (incredibly biased) opinion. Only after dealing with them was she able to resume her invisibility and proceed through the hallways to the next engagement.
The archetype she left in her body reported, after the tenth panic attack and twentieth judge was destroyed, reported that Compton had largely calmed down, although he was in a trance from the Psychoportal, so was unresponsive. Okay, with the immediate fires put out, she can move on to addressing the root issue.
The prison kitchen was large, filled with dangerous appliances spewing fire. Compton was panicking as he was given order after order from a darkness beyond the counter, with amendments to the orders thrown in for spice.
Still, Tanya rolled up her sleeves and started cooking at the man’s side, silently helping him work through the backlog and keep things running smoothly. As more of the orders got completed, the shouting voices of Truman, Ford, and Hollis quieted down, refraining from changing their orders before completion and adding new ones less frequently.
After what must have been enough food to feed sixty people left the kitchen, Tanya telekinetically grabbed the top of the order counter and pulled down the shutter. “Kitchen’s closed!” She shouted for good measure.
“Thank you, Tanya.” Compton said, clearly ashamed of himself. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Tanya shrugged. “What happened?”
“Well… starting yesterday, a little after lunch, my anxiety started to spike.” Compton began.
“Did you take lunch here?” Tanya asked, trying to figure out the timeline.
“Yes, I did. My mail had gotten mistakenly redirected here, so I waited until lunch and took a trip here to take a break.” Compton explained, “I’m not sure why, but when I left lunch, I was the opposite of relaxed. It was difficult to get anything done, but I powered through.”
“Good job on that.” Tanya said. It was the wrong decision this time, but she could appreciate that he put in the effort to master himself. “I take it that you forgot to get your mail?”
“Thank you, and yes.” He replied, “After work, I decided to check in here for an overnight stay, and in the morning… Well. I was in a bad state.”
“I understand Sam went to borrow your senior bowling league card.” Tanya said.
“Yes, I asked her to fetch me a bee from the forest in return for it, so I could check on Cassie, and possibly send her a message.” Compton explained, before grimacing. “She brought me over fifty bees. I couldn’t handle it. I exploded.” He glanced around nervously. “She managed to escape, right? Unburnt?”
“She’s unharmed.” Tanya confirmed. “The psilirium sample that was in your mail has been destroyed as well.”
“Ah, that makes far too much sense.” Compton said, slumping as he realized his error. “I was soaking in it all night.”
Tanya looked around. “Looks like your Bowling League card got destroyed.”
Compton looked around at the destruction of a rather sizable amount of sentimental garbage. “Ah, unfortunate. Why did she need it?”
“Ford’s infesting the Motherlobe again.” Tanya explained quickly. “Truman ordered for him to get fixed, and one of him’s holed up in the bowling alley.”
“Ah, it would be practice day, wouldn’t it?” Compton said, thinking about it. “Well, it would be if the team still existed. He must be using the old schedule book instead of the computer records…”
“Fortunately, we don’t actually need it.” Tanya said, snorting at the whole situation. “So you can join Helmut and Bob in dealing with whatever’s up with Cassie. They haven’t checked back in, and I’m worried. I suspect more psilirium.”
“I’ll get my protective equipment from my apartment.” Compton said firmly.
“Good, because you’re not going to find any spare in official caches.” Tanya said firmly. “They’re all being used.”
“Oh dear.” Compton said, very worried. “I must have missed a lot.”
“Hollis and/or Truman will fill you in.” Tanya said, “But the best thing you can do right now by my reckoning is getting Cassie, Helmut, and Bob back in the field.”
“Right. I’ll get right on that.” Compton said, firming up his resolve. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s.”
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Unfortunately, Razputin, Sam, and Lili left the area around the Pelican. After double-checking the interior of the plane, she sighed and decided to move on to another one of Ford’s personae.
The first one she found was the janitor, operating a floor waxer in the front lobby, heedless of the slipping hazard he was creating without placing adequate warnings. Norma, the one nominally supposed to be watching him, was nowhere to be found. Tanya decided to get it over with.
The Janitor’s mind was similar to what it was before, a rendition of Grulovia circa 1962, with a copy of Maligula wreaking havoc among the populace of germs while a giant Ford statue begged her to stop.
Maligula was a powerful enemy, as Tanya had expected, but launching bottles of liquid soap into the water she controlled weakened her, turning the water into bubbles. When she was no longer wielding quantities of water normally transported by 18 wheelers, it was a simple matter to cut the mental entity into pieces with PSI blades.
After the difficult battle, Tanya collected some emotional baggage and a memory vault that depicted the battle against Maligula in full detail. “So that’s how they won…” Tanya murmured as she flew up to the statue. “Open up!” Tanya shouted at the statue’s head.
“She’s dead…” Murmured the statue. “We killed her…”
Tanya manifested a giant telekinetic hand and slapped the statue. “Lucy’s alive, you stupid construct! The sooner you get yourself together the sooner you can see her.” Well, assuming that he can’t resist the urge to look for her. Tanya can at least ensure that their visit is as discreet as possible.
“She’s alive?” The statue said fearfully. “We’re doomed!” Argh, she hates dealing with insane people. Tanya punched the statue in the face with the giant telekinetic hand, and floated inside the now broken skull. “Here we go…” Tanya pulled out the mirror shard out of the tiny brain inside the statue head.
“She really was dangerous…” Said Ford, sounding much more lucid.
“She was a dirty girl, and we thought we could clean her up.” Said the Janitor persona within the mirror. “But she just dragged us into the mud with her.”
“Ah, but we loved it.” Ford said.
The mental world collapsed, and they were back in the ‘hub’ part of Ford’s mind that she had created all those years ago. Tanya took the bucket of soapy water and placed it next to the bookcase that Razputin placed the typewriter in.
“...She’s spent the last twenty years among family.” Tanya said, glancing at the broken mirror, now with three shards. “With your help, we can reverse what you did to her and seal away Maligula with something more stable.”
“I can’t wait.”
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When Tanya returned to herself, she stepped back and looked solemnly at Ford.
“Well, that floor’s looking mighty nice, isn’t it?” Janitor Ford said, smiling. He vanished in a teleport, a tiny pop of displaced air sounding out.
Tanya looked over the freshly waxed tile. “It is.”
She walked towards the front desk. “Jenny, call Razputin Aquato on the PSA system, please.” After a moment, she asked: “Did you see Razputin, Lili, and/or Samantha come by?”
“Nope.” Jenny said as she keyed up the public address system. “They probably used the tram.” Putting the phone to her lips she announced. “Razputin Aquato, please report to the front desk. I repeat, Razputin Aquato, please report to the front desk.” She hung up the phone. “Or they went exploring around the quarry.”
Ugh. “I’ll go look for them outside, then. You have a spare radio?” Tanya accepted the walkie talkie. “Call me if they show up.”
Why could he not go ten minutes without causing trouble!?
