Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective 3.04
🕑 Added 2023-12-12 01:44:46 +0000 UTCHollis’ mind was not someplace Tanya has ever had reason to visit before. At least, the real parts. Back when she was still in college she “audited” some of the lessons the interns got from her, so she's seen the classroom construct.
But it was impossible to truly separate such a construct from the rest of the mind using conventional techniques. Her technology got around this by ‘plugging’ the connection with the artificial mind of the device, which left the well concealed exits (with signage demoting it as an ‘admin only’ area) appear to be a crystal wall with a warning sign informing the player that attacking the crystal will damage the simulation and is a violation of the user agreement. As there was a safety feature of automatically shutting down when the artificial mind suffers damage from outside, it also triggers from any attempt to destroy it from the inside as well.
Well, that was how she originally did it. Her truly artificial psychic environment may have substantial drawbacks, but it lacked this weakness.
Being here with Hollis’ blessing did have some perks, though: a nugget of wisdom was in plain view in the middle of the classroom construct, and she eagerly absorbed the knowledge. It was purpose-built, giving Tanya a refresher course on how to use Mental Connection to treat maladies such as this. Useful.
Still, it was relatively simple to fly up to the aperture to the rest of the doctor's mind, taking a ride in an ambulance as the transition.
Once the ambulance stopped and she was thrown bodily out the back, she landed on her feet and assessed the area. It was familiar, the sandbags piled up to mark the area’s borders along with the barbed wire images announcing the military bent of the area.
But… Tanya did not expect military imagery from Hollis Forscythe. The building was the area in front of a large hospital, the “Our Lady of Restraint Neurological Hospital”. There was a giant version of Hollis supporting the sign, and she was dressed as a military… actually it had elements of multiple ranks, so it was nonsense cosplay. The medals were more fit for a tinpot dictator than an actual military leader, although admittedly Tanya did have a single chance to wear all of her medals at once on her seventeenth birthday, and it looked similarly gaudy. She also nearly fell down from the shift in her center of gravity from the weight of them, but she deflected that at the time with a joke about breasts.
The hospital was fortified, thick concrete and equipped with anti-air weapons and artillery, a combination that frankly disgusted her. This was a literal war crime… which admittedly was an apt metaphor for the intern’s actions, something that seems to be a good idea only to the most short-sightedly ignorant.
Taking a moment to re-center herself, Tanya gathered the stray figments and handled some emotional baggage. “Hm, you haven't been keeping up with your emotional baggage. You’ve been getting sloppy with her own mental security.” Tanya said out loud, knowing that Hollis could hear her. Come to think of it… Tanya mentally pencils in another session with Mom for when things calm down. This week has already been quite stressful, and it promises only to get worse.
With nothing more to do, Tanya entered the militarized hospital.
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The metaphorical security checkpoint was easily bypassed, the shift to two-dimensional movement a little disorienting but easy enough to handle. She ignored the medical chatter in the background, knowing that it would not be useful information and not really wanting to delve too deeply into the woman’s secrets anyway.
Past the checkpoint was a morgue, with clear labels denoting… most of the upper leadership of the Psychonauts. And the most experienced agents, in fact. How morbid. Although… wait. Where was… ah. She understands now. These were all of the people that Hollis would normally rely on that have been sidelined by the latest crisis, or are otherwise incapacitated.
…Seeing them all at once like this really did put into perspective just how hobbled the Psychonauts currently were. It still wasn’t dire enough to warrant putting interns on duties that are actually somewhat important, but given that whatever modification they made to Hollis’ mind still had to be rationalized, she was beginning to see the logic behind it.
Still, she walked outside of the Morgue and found a hallway, barricades and cover erected for urban combat operations making it easier to just float over the waist high obstructions, shield up and reinforced, instead of navigating it with her feet.
A few censors came out, rifle-shaped stamps shooting dangerously fast bolts of censor energy, but she just PSI blasted them as they came, bullets of psychokinetic energy making their heads crack open like watermelons before the censors turned to dust.
The first turn out of the hallway of urban combat was, from the sign, the Records room. This… probably wasn’t where she needed to go, but she went in anyway to check. It was thankfully a small area, and booby-trapped. It wasn’t anything Tanya couldn’t handle though, it’ll take more than a few Bad Ideas to slow Tanya down, and the additional explosive traps weren’t enough against Tanya’s reinforced Shield.
“I see. The reason the records room is so close is that it's a decoy for classified information.” Tanya said conversationally to Hollis. “Clever.” Looking through the files and records, it showed files on the interns, formatted the same as full Psychonauts. “While I don’t disagree with the facts as listed in these files, they still should have been sent home at the same time the probationary workers were.” Sending the non-senior members of the low-security support staff was the whole reason she had to spend thirty minutes preventing the mail room systems from metaphorically… and possibly literally exploding come the 1PM USPS delivery.
…Come to think of it, it probably would have been a better idea to just tell the post office to hold the deliveries for the day. Ah well, hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Truthfully, the current crop of interns was a touch more competent than the rest. Mom and Dad seem impressed enough with Razputin’s strength and moral compass, which given the little Mom said about the incident at the Rhombus of Ruin makes sense.
Moving through the documents, which denoted what appeared to be years’ worth of intern files, Tanya paused as she noticed a very unusual one. “T. Dosva/Degurechaff”. She felt her blood turn to ice at that file name, and in a mental world that kind of metaphor has weight; her next breath was a puff of white mist. Opening the file, Tanya read the thick document.
“Razputin… what have you done?” She asked rhetorically, seeing a file that was not about her mechanical skills and engineering accomplishments, but a clinical dissection of her combat power as gathered from the spars she partakes in as entertainment on slow days. It further outlined her psychological triggers that could be exploited to induce a berserk state, force her to release the Argent. The most chilling of all, however, was a little note, tucked away under ‘medication approvals’. “100mg of formula M”. She knew that designation. A cocktail of adrenaline and a few other psychoactive compounds, it was developed by the Soviets to induce the self-destructive psychotic state in their child soldiers. Also, she just so happened to know that the listed dosage would be overkill on someone Helmut’s size, and he was twice her weight. She wasn’t entirely sure how bad that level of overdose would be, but it would not be pleasant.
Tanya tucked the file into her astral form. Some may delude themselves into thinking they were putting it into their pocket, coat, or knapsack, but she knew better. If this thing isn’t destroyed by fixing whatever was wrong with Hollis, she’ll have to take… measures.
Finding nothing else in the records room besides some emotional baggage which was noted for future disposal, Tanya moved on to the next stop on the hallway of endlessly respawning enemies. Hollis’ mental defenses were fairly powerful, she wondered how it compared to some of those mental patients that Razputin supposedly treated.
The next stop that she found, which required turning at an intersection, was the pharmacy. It was set up as a combination of an actual hospital pharmacy and a military mess hall, with drugs served on trays along with coffee and vodka. While she wasn’t a pharmacist, she liked reading all of the scientific papers published by the Psychonauts, and among them was a treatise on the short and long term effects of combat stimulants… and she recognized the names of the drugs she saw here from that paper. There was some emotional baggage on one of the tables, too.
Still, it was time to investigate. She needed to draw out Hollis’ associative network so she could find whatever’s causing this. In a move that has become casual, Tanya changed her clothes to her military uniform between footsteps as she entered the line. The soldiery in line, with their hospital food trays, were all underage, and many faces matched the ones in the files. Others seemed more like mashups.
The cafeteria worker was fairly generic, she couldn’t place it as someone she has seen before, although he did have a nametag, ‘Potts’. On one hand, the name was painfully generic. On the other hand, the fact that there was a name at all… not important. A glance at the menu, lists of stimulants from cocaine to the formulas with either single-letter designations or twenty syllable latin monstrosities. One notable entry was ‘50mg M’. “Give me an M ration, and make it a double.” She said to the cafeteria worker.
She was given some kind of biscuits-and-gravy type of horrid slop. “Remember to take that with food.” Potts murmured.
“Please, I’m not a child.” Tanya said, scoffing. As the words left her mouth, the mood of the room shifted. Ah, a reaction. Perfect.
“Failure!” Shouted a boy that sounded suspiciously like Razputin.
“Communist!” Shouted another soon-to-be-dead mental child that looked like Lili.
“Spy!” Shouted one that Tanya didn’t recognize at all.
Combat began, with the child soldiers all going berserk with whatever they were dosed with. Tanya supposed that most psychonauts may have trouble using violence on so many children, uniforms or not, but they were just mental constructs. She just reinforced her shield, formed PSI blades on her hands, and started fighting. “Here I go, killing again.” She mused as she decapitated the Razputin soundalike.
At the fight’s conclusion, Tanya took some deep breaths to calm down her giggling fit. “Ah, that was fun.” There was something about fighting with actual stakes and danger that was just impossible to replicate… Even if, admittedly, the danger wasn’t that much. She’s not using her personal, modified, psychoportal right now, so it has all the safeties on.
…Come to think of it, that’s probably why her mental body feels so sluggish. She only noticed in the middle of battle, but now that she’s detected the defect, she can’t stop noticing it. Bah.
Still, the battle and disruption of this portion of Hollis’ mind did what it was supposed to do: a destroyed part of the wall in the back led to a space that displayed a portion of her associative network. “Okay, so drugs being seen as useful, that’s probably an echo connection. Snip that… What else…” This segment appeared to include her medical opinions and attitudes, mostly. The result of the intern’s tampering mostly seemed to compromise her morality; even if she was sure Razputin did the actual work she knew that he would never have thought of that himself. Being peer pressured to get in trouble by the teenagers, on the other hand… much more plausible. If she thought she could find out which one initially proposed the idea, Tanya would ensure they get booted… but she knew that wasn’t going to happen.
While Tanya wasn’t entirely sure of the original makeup, the changes she made seemed stable enough, and aligned Hollis with ethical behavior, so it’ll do for now. Plus, she found the emotional baggage tag back there, so she didn’t need to double back.
One down…
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Tanya attempted to enter the next area, labeled ‘Maternity Ward’, but it was locked. “Our most valuable employees are kept here!” Hollis’ crazed voice shouted from behind the door. “Access is PRN.” Ah, that was a Latin hospital expression, she knew that. It meant ‘as needed’. She needs to find a way to get inside.
“I need to enter.” Tanya insisted, “I’m pregnant.” It wasn’t exactly a plausible lie, but it was worth an attempt. Even if saying the words made her feel nauseous.
“Nice try.” Hollis’ voice replied. “But you still have to talk to the Administration.”
The last easily accessible area of Hollis’ mind was ‘Administration’, and was populated by, instead of children, many copies of the same man in different outfits and accessories. He was a tall, thin white man with brown curly hair and stubble, and each version of him had a different personality. Most of him were waiting in line to meet with a copy of Hollis wearing the same elaborately fake military uniform that was on the statue outside.
“Johnathan? Hold my place in line.” Said one wearing glasses. The one behind him, with an intensely agreeable expression, silently nodded. The glasses-wearing one moved out of the line and sat in a break room-like area, right on top of a large case of emotional baggage. Looking at each of the other copies of himself, he nodded to each one, addressing each one as “Johnathan.”
Who was this man? He was clearly important… Tanya turned invisible and observed the dynamics of the area. The Johnathans each approached Hollis, addressing her as ‘Paymaster’, and got approval for things they needed to pay for. The requests were a mixture of ordinary medical practice, psychonauts gadgets, and research materials that ranged from the reasonable to the absurd.
Paymaster Hollis approved, disapproved, or yelled at the Johnathans, with very little rhyme or reason into which she did. Tanya did manage to catch her muttering something about having married the man, and it became clear: Jonathan was her ex-husband. Tanya had no idea Hollis was previously married. She’s never spoken of him before. More to the point, the old crone Forscythe never mentioned him, and that was a lot stranger. Was the divorce so bitter that even Hollis’ mother refuses to speak of him?
Still, she cut in line in front of the kindly Johnathan who was wearing a unicorn headband, accepting the offered lollipop with a smile. Once in front of the Paymaster, she said: “I need access to the Maternity Ward.” She said simply, “I was told you’re the one to speak to.”
“Of course I’m the one to speak to.” Paymaster Hollis spat back. “I have to do everything around here!” Ah, a representation of the stresses of Hollis’ command. “Who are you, soldier?”
“Major Tanya von Degurechaff, commander of the Whispering Rock training battalion.” She said, infusing her nonsense assertion with telepathic weight. What’s a little bit of hypnosis between friends? “There are chain of command issues and I wish to hash things out with the other branch before things escalate to an official inquiry.” Paymaster Hollis’s eyes widened in panic. “Or even…” Tanya leaned in close, levitating her feet off the ground to get in whispering range. “...an audit?”
“Audit?” Said the condescending but friendly Johnathan behind her.
“Audit bro?” Asked a Johnathan who was doing pushups.
“Audit!?” shouted a panicking Johnathan who was wearing an expensive suit and slicked back hair.
The copies of Hollis’ ex-husband all started to panic, running around screaming. “Great.” Paymaster Hollis said, letting her head drop onto her desk. She lifted her head a bit and let it drop again a few time. “How can I get you to go away again?” She whined.
“Access to the Maternity Ward.” Tanya repeated.
“Done.” Paymaster Hollis said before taking out a literal whip and storming forward to bring the Jonathans in line. A golden key appeared on the desk, and Tanya pocketed it.
On intuition, Tanya looked behind the desk, and found another sequestered off area with Hollis’ associated network exposed. Ducking inside, she assessed the area. Yes, this one was mostly filled with worries about the Psychonauts, finances, and her personal life. It took some studying, which always made Tanya feel a little scummy, but she made a few tweaks that looked like they were caused by the intern’s interference. “Not much needed here, at least.” She also found two emotional baggage tags, one for the one amongst the Johnathans and the one for the Records room. She better double back.
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After the stop back at the Records room to deal with the fourth piece of emotional baggage, Tanya went to the Maternity Ward, presenting the key and entering it without resistance.
When assessing a mental area’s aesthetics, one had to keep in mind that what they perceived was filtered through the thoughts of the person inside, and did not involve actual light or sound. Therefore, when Tanya’s first impulse of this place was to refer to it as a church, she knew that it was true, even if there were vanishingly few decorations that had much in common with them.
Reflexively kicking something that ran at her, Tanya looked at the dazed Memory Vault, slideshow reels spilling out of its mouth. Tanya sighed and inspected the memories, hoping for some kind of context here.
After looking through the still images, Tanya dropped them back into the Memory Vault, disgusted. “Leaving her just for infertility… repugnant.” Did she have time to slaughter all of those Johnathans for a little catharsis? …Probably not. She can load his appearance into one of her violent game demos later. “Could have just adopted…”
The Maternity Ward’s church-like aesthetic was broken up with tables and easels, maps of the Motherlobe clear and colored pins denoting the deployment of her forces.
“Where is the mole?” Hollis asked herself as she looked through the plans. This version of Hollis was dressed as she was in the real world, with a white power suit that had those strangely thick shoulderpads that were fashionable as of late. They were supposed to make the women look more in-charge with the broader shoulders, but Tanya thought they made the wearer look vaguely silly. Then again, she managed to seem powerful and in control while being less than five feet tall, so her opinion on what other women thought was not exactly reliable. “Why is Ford here? Who brought him in? How did they move him? Where does Maligula come into this?”
“All excellent questions.” Tanya assured the mental construct.
“Ah, you’re here.” Hollis said, as if expecting her. “You’re being promoted to Senior Agent of the Intern Agent department.”
“I refuse.” Tanya said immediately. Now, to draw out the associative network. “Further, why did you deploy the interns? This is a crisis, they should have been all sent home, or failing that, the daycare, so they could be protected and not sent out to root out delusional cultists or managing dangerously powerful lunatics.”
“If you won’t do it, I’ll need to find someone else who’s powerful enough to keep the soldiers in line.” Hollis said, ignoring her question. “Your sister’s in the daycare right now, isn't she? Maybe she’ll want the promotion.”
“She’s not even an intern!” Tanya snapped back, scowling. “She’s just about to start high school at the end of the summer!” Whether she’d even want to be a Psychonauts intern was another question entirely.
“She’s strong, and she’s got military experience, it’ll be fine.” Hollis insisted.
Tanya seethed at the woman’s careless words, but took a deep breath to calm herself. “She’s not in her right mind, it would be wrong to hurt her for this.” She whispered to herself. Instead, she vented her anger, sending out a massive wave of fire to wash over the church/office/surgical theater/military tent. ”Over my dead body.” She says, her voice carefully measured.
“Insubordination, is it?” Said a completely different voice.
Hollis’ eyes widened in fear. “The Mother General.” she whispered.
“Yes…” The large entity said, removing one of the walls of the area to reveal themselves. Looking like an amalgamation of a nun, doctor, and military general, with the face of Hollis herself, scaled up to about fifty feet tall. “I am the Modern Mother General!” …and just a touch of Broadway punnery. “Now, did I hear you correctly?” The mental entity said warningly. “You know the punishment for insubordination.”
“Did I stutter? I’m not a soldier.” Tanya said, enunciating clearly and fearlessly. “Neither are your subordinates. This is not a military installation, as much as it resembles one at times.” Tanya waved her arm dramatically around them. “This is a place of medicine! Of Knowledge! You grasp at things you have no right to take, and seek to explore the depths of depravity that we stand against. I am here to knock you back to your senses.”
With a wordless roar, the giant woman tore the rest of the building apart, revealing another area that contained her associative network. From nowhere, anti-air guns manifested and started tracking Tanya when she leapt into the air to avoid The Mother General’s sloppy punch.
She started things off by playing defensively, using flight, shields, and a few tricky maneuvers with invisibility to exhaust the mental entity before risking a commitment to attack. It wasn’t her usual instincts, but she needed the time to calm herself, focus on rational calculations of combat rather than going straight for the kill. It may surprise those who saw her fight in her last life, it certainly would have surprised Mary, to know that such careful assessments were something she considered herself skilled at. Granted, staying back like this meant she got to feel her instincts screaming at her to capitalize at the many, many mistakes the slow, lumbering mental entity had as she attempted to fight.
Fortunately, the anti-air guns were, in fact, stupid enough to hit the Mother General if she played her illusory cards right. One of the many tips and tricks Dad was fond of when discussing combat with mental entities is that getting a mind to hurt itself was a lot more difficult for the entities to deal with than hurting them directly.
Even if Tanya knew she was stronger than Hollis… that didn’t mean she should be reckless. She needs to take her time, and do it right. “You don’t want to do this!” Tanya shouted.
“A good commander uses every resource at their disposal to achieve victory!” Retorted the Mother General.
“Ford is dangerous!” Tanya retorted. “Sending them will get at least one of them hurt, and badly!” Any of them, on failure, but on success… Razputin would be devastated.
“Casualties are unavoidable in a war!” The Mother Superior shouted back, deploying a literal army of Bad Ideas, a pair of Judges, and a morass of Doubts. “God will sort them out!”
Fire washed over the battlefield, eradicating the Doubts and making the Bad Ideas blow up in each other’s faces. “That’s it!” Tanya shouted. “You want me to fight? To kill?” The Mother Superior grinned. “You’ve got it.”
With a burst of focus, Tanya locked down her own mind, splitting off an archetype to control her astral projection while keeping her mental hand firmly on the leash, ready to pull back.
Her astral body dived for the Judges, carving them up with her PSI Blades, before launching a fusillade of PSI bullets at the reforming and surviving Bad Ideas. Thus cleared, Tanya manifested a rifle to focus her killing intent, charging forward at the massive entity.
It had been substantially weakened by her previous efforts, but by mustering her will to its fullest extent, she stabbed her bayonet into the forehead of the Mother General, right in the white covering of the nun’s habit, and fired. It lived, but Tanya kept firing, repositioning every time that the entity recovered enough to attempt a counterattack.
After about sixteen shots, the entity finally got destroyed. “Hm, Dad was right. That was far more durable than it had any right to be. These things are resistant to direct psychic attack.” It’s not like she doubted him, he was the experienced one, after all.
Tanya took a chance to clean up the emotional baggage that was left behind, but she pretty quickly found the problematic question that started this whole cascade: “Children” with “Competent”. Yeesh, talk about dissonance. No wonder it exploded out of control.
After correcting as much as she could, Tanya left Hollis’ mind.
Comments
Chris Larson
Wow, that was the key issue? I can see why Rasputin would link them and think it's fine, because people really underestimate what they mean when they think of people as competent.
