Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective Chapter 3.01
🕑 Added 2023-10-30 14:00:06 +0000 UTCBook 3 begins! At its conclusion, the main story slot will be moved to Summon Perfect Warlady, which will also lock the early access chapters behind the $5 paywall at that time, and it will be removed from the monthly poll. Just a warning.
Book 3 is planned to be relatively short, but it will definitely extend into next year.
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Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp… She hadn’t had the chance to see it ever since she was banned. It has changed a lot. There was a whole dock and some canoes on the lake, the Psychoisolation chamber was expanded to a greater facility that had multiple chambers, air circulation, and by the looks of things, they were larger too. They were still a few miles away, but Tanya let up on the accelerator, allowing the air to slow them as they approached.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that your mom was Agent Vodello.” Razputin said from the back seat. At ten years old, he had grown substantially from seven years ago, his repeatedly mended hand-me-down clothing doing a good job concealing his dense musculature from his work as an acrobat. Instead he just looked a little like a homeless child.
“Are you still on that?” Mary asked from her position on the other side of the back seat. “Tanya doesn’t tell anyone anything unless it’s pried from her lips with a crowbar.”
She was not that bad! …She just didn’t like talking about herself. “It’s far from the biggest secret I’ve kept from you.” Tanya said idly. “But as a Psychonaut, keeping secrets is just part of the job. This means you need to get comfortable with not knowing things, especially important things.” That was pure deflection, but it wasn’t untrue.
“What’s the bigger secret?” Razputin immediately asked.
“Can you keep a secret?” Tanya asked, a small smirk gracing her face. Mary sighed.
“Yeah!” Razputin said.
“So can I.” Tanya finished. Razputin scoffed, turning away and pouting at her joke.
The third occupant of the back seat stirred, waking up from his nap. “Hi hello!” Eric said, smiling.
Mom, from the front seat, turned back and smiled at her son. “Hello baby! We’re almost at camp. I’m going to miss you terribly, but your big sister will take good care of you while we’re at the summer camp.” She glanced at Tanya. “Aren’t you?”
Tanya gave her a thumbs up. “Supplies are stocked, the various schedules are memorized, emergency contacts prepared, and he’s used to me as a primary caretaker for extended periods.” Although the previous record was only two days, when they had a particularly involved mission. “There won’t be any trouble I can’t handle.” She has many contingency plans, even if Mom probably wouldn’t approve of some of them. If things go south, Dad can teleport back home to attend to anything that parental intervention is absolutely necessary for.
Shortly, Tanya set down her car in the camp’s parking lot. Several other parents were dropping off their children, and the flying car garnered a fair bit of interest. But she picked her spot well. “Hello, Mrs. Boole.” Tanya greeted the matronly daughter-in-law to Compton as the other occupants exited the vehicle.
“Oh Tanya! I thought Mrs. Vodello would have already arrived.” She gestured to the children she was extracting from the back seat of her car. “I’ve brought Lili, as you can see, and I’m sure Dogen will make plenty of friends.”
“Hi Tanya.” Lili said listlessly, clearly not excited to be at camp. Then as she looked over, she noticed Razputin taking his luggage from the trunk. “Hey, who’s he?” She asked, curious.
“Ah, introductions, of course. Come around, we’ll get this handled all at once.” Tanya said. Lili and Dogen left the backseat of the Boole family car willingly as Tanya gestured for them to join her behind the flying car. “Razputin,” She began, getting the boy’s attention first. “This is Lili Zanotto and Dogen Boole. They are related to the Psychic Six, but they are also fine individuals on their own. Lili is your age, while Dogen is seven.”
“Seven and a half.” Dogen murmured. He was wearing his protective headgear, which blocked psychic signals from propagating, although if he was deliberate, he could work around them. It prevented accidental usage. He had initially used the standard ‘chicken wire and aluminum foil’ model, but Tanya remembered how miserable children were to those who used them and created for him a much more effective and fashionable set of headphones, which could be sealed if he wanted, but otherwise didn’t muffle sound much.
“It’s nice to meet you both.” Razputin said politely.
“Dogen, Lili, this is Razputin Aquato. A pen pal I’ve had for years, and a rather talented psychic.” Razputin rubbed his neck in embarrassment at the praise. “He is a trained circus acrobat, and quite the fan of True Psychic Tales. I’m sure you’ll find that you three have a lot in common.” Although they probably wouldn’t find out the fullest extent of that.
Introductions finished, Tanya left the children to themselves and went back to Mrs. Boole. “You know how mothers of infants are when it's time to leave them somewhere. Always wanting to be with their babies until the last possible second.” Mrs. Boole nodded in understanding, glancing at how Mom was getting in one last cuddle before becoming Camp Counselor Vodello (she declined to change her name when married, although Eric took Dad’s name). “I’ll be on babysitting duty for the next few weeks, although I suspect that Mom’ll find some excuse to visit or get me over there a few times.” It was only two hundred miles as the crow flies from here to the Motherlobe, after all. It wasn’t a pleasant commute, but it was quite doable. Even picking up Razputin, which doubled the trip’s time (although some of that was because he lacked some supplies, so Tanya stopped at a big box retailer and dropped some money on cheap clothes and a swimsuit for him, among other things.), didn’t make the journey ‘road trip’ material.
“Well, if you need a break, you can leave him with me for an evening.” Mrs. Boole offered. “My rates are very reasonable.”
“I might take you up on that.” Tanya replied, “I had to update the military’s simulators with a fancy new vehicle, “ and that’s as specific that she’s contractually allowed to be, “-so odds are good they’ll call me in for troubleshooting at some point.”
Mrs. Boole snorted in laughter. “I just imagined you walking around a military base while carrying Eric.”
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t do it, but leaving him somewhere here would be preferred.” Tanya explained, “The Army probably wouldn’t insist that I get a one year old to sign an NDA.” They’d definitely raise a big stink about the little stinker, though.
After a little bit more smalltalk and their goodbyes, Tanya looked over the rest of the parking lot again. No more familiar faces among the parents… But that was Agen- Coach Oleander, and he seemed to want to talk to her. Checking whether or not Mom was done with Eric and finding the pair starting a diaper change, Tanya went over to the short man and leaned in close at his urging. “Status?” She asked.
“Everything’s set.” Coach Oleander confirmed, whispering. “Thanks for the tanks, the kids are going to love them.” He chuckled darkly. “Yes, they’ll never want to leave…”
Needlessly ominous phrasing aside, Tanya nodded. “Yes, well, just remember that Mary’s a powerhouse, so don’t be surprised when she breaks a few.” Coach Oleander had this ‘dramatic plot’ idea pitched for this year’s summer camp program, where he hires an actor to play a supervillain that the children get to defeat. To prepare for such, Tanya had created “psychic death-tanks” that ran on deliberately simplistic AI instruction sets that were stuffed in rubber brains. Unless one reprogrammed them and also gave them an additional power source, they couldn’t do anything remotely dangerous. She was admittedly concerned about how Ms. Zilch would react if she learned that the villain actor was her ex-husband, but that’s for Legal to worry about. Besides, unless Dr. Loboto was lying, he was supposed to pick up his son after the camp was over for a week of custody, so it was probably fine.
Wait, should she warn Oleander about Razputin? He was quite talented… Nah. While he’s probably at least as competent as, say, Lili, Mary’s on a whole other level. Besides, that means he’ll probably get to be the Hero of the story, and Razputin will love that.
“Couldn’t you have kept her home?” Oleander asked, a little resigned.
“No. She likes meeting new psychic kids and impressing them,” Tanya explained, “-she doesn’t get to show off as much in regular school.” She said to elaborate. “I tried to get her to go to a space camp instead, but she doesn’t want to be an astronaut anymore, apparently.” Which would be an easier pill to swallow if Mary had some other concrete goal to focus on, but Mom did point out that she had plenty of time to decide what she wanted to do with her life, and waffling on her career goals was common among teenagers, actually having goals was rare at thirteen in fact, and as usual, she was correct.
“Kids.” Oleander said ruefully, summarizing Tanya’s thoughts nicely.
“Break a leg.” Tanya said optimistically, lightly punching the shorter man in the arm. “The show’s about to start.” She smirked as she referenced some of the, ah, ‘acting lessons’ that she gave him, pretending to be the psychopath that he needed to oppose fruitlessly so the children could save the day. It was a fun time.
The military cosplayer waved her off. “Yeah, yeah, the first three rows are a splash zone. Now get out, you’re technically still banned.”
Chuckling, Tanya collected Eric from her mother, put him back in his carseat, moved the carseat into the front seat (her flying car didn’t use airbags to protect the passengers, so it was fine), and started the trip back. “What do you think about some pizza for lunch, Eric?” The baby lit up at the proposal, clapping excitedly. Of course, this was probably because he recognized the word ‘lunch’ rather than ‘pizza’, but it was good enough for her.
Now, how long is it going to be until Mom insists on seeing him again? Place your bets…
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The first day of the camp passed without incident beyond Visha’s usual dramatics when the dog was left home alone for longer than ten minutes, a lazy Sunday that Tanya spent playing games with her little brother. It was just a matter of imagination, and it was a skill that she had to develop out of necessity back when she was very young in this life. She couldn’t fill the hours by focusing her hate on Being X anymore, so she needed to entertain herself with dolls and other toys. The skills translated beautifully to entertaining her little brother, and over the last year and a half she’s made good use of them.
But she couldn’t spend the whole two weeks giving funny voices to stuffed animals with Eric and Visha, as fun as it was, so on Monday, after the usual morning routine, Tanya dropped off Eric at the Motherlobe’s daycare and got to work. Her inventions had vastly reduced the work the Engineering department had to do just to maintain everything, from allowing power to be drawn from psitanium sand reservoirs that could be refilled much more easily, to dedicated machines that could manufacture the most common replacement parts, the engineering core could instead be retasked to more complex assignments, like constructing and maintaining a larger fleet of vehicles with superior design specifications. Everything still needed maintenance, but most of the devices only needed checks every quarter or even once a year instead of every month or even week, so staying on schedule was easy. The resulting hiring freeze also allowed Tanya’s own company many more psychic engineering graduates than she expected, which wasn’t planned (even if she should have anticipated it), but greatly appreciated.
There was some grumbling on how boring it was to feed the psitanium sand grinder, but it was now simple enough that even Agents had to do it if they weren’t getting deployed, so the pain was spread around. Tanya usually used that time to catch up on her reading, keeping up with the latest developments in the field. If no new literature was available, she reads her fan mail instead.
Her actual task list for the day was to prepare equipment for field agents and instruct them in their use. If the comics were to be believed, this was a large portion of her job, second only to field work. It actually was more like… ten percent of it. Now that she had a bit of seniority, she spent about half of her time answering the support tickets that required high security clearance, as only four technicians had the necessary clearance to, for example, troubleshoot when the psychic computer that held the full personnel files locked up, which caused every single door to stop registering thinkerprints properly. Fortunately, there was a backup computer that made the actual problem only last about five minutes, but given that it was just her, Otto, Jerry, and Lawrence who had both the top clearance necessary and the skills to actually fix things, they had to take turns being on call to handle that kind of thing.
“Hey Tanya.” Greeted Samantha Boole, psychonauts intern for the summer, having her first day. “What’cha doin?”
“Working.” Tanya said immediately as she tuned the invisibility device. According to the mission specs, this one needed to conceal a gas mask without concealing anything else about the wearer. Tricky, but within normal parameters for the device.
“On what?” She asked.
“Classified.” Tanya replied, “Aren’t you supposed to go to Hollis’ presentation room?” She used it for all kinds of meetings, as the furniture was very comfortable, excellent for mental sojourns. Hollis liked handling the summer intern program personally, which Tanya attributed to just liking children, which is why she and Mom got along so well.
“I still got twenty minutes.” Sam replied. “I wanted to know, Morris said that you’re the reason he can walk now. That true?”
Tanya blinked. He could? That must mean… “Does he have a psitanium powered exoskeletal walker frame?” She asked.
“Yep.” Sam replied.
“Then yes, I invented that.” Tanya replied, bringing her attention back to the gas mask that she was fitting the invisibility device to. “I’ll see if I can teach him how to properly use psychic reinforcement during his internship, even if he can only manage it for a few minutes at a time it’ll help him get in and out of the frame.” She reached for another piece of scrap psitanium from the basket full of it at her workstation. The mission specs called for two invisible gas masks, after all. Eh… too small. She grabbed another piece and started to fuse them together.
“That’s cool.” Sam said airily. “So… do you still-”
Tanya cut her off. “You’re going to be late if you don’t leave right this second.” She said menacingly. A giant blue telekinetic hand manifested, threatening to pick the younger girl off the ground.
Seeing that she had worn out her welcome, Sam created levitation bubbles beneath her feet and skated off. “OkaygottagettoclassbyeTanya!”
Back to work…
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Right after Tanya finished instructing Agent Cassidy on how the hypno-bra worked before her mission, Hollis, also known as ‘The one the Grand head leaves in charge when he’s gone’, called her into her office. Well, the presentation room that was next to her office.
The interns, which this year were coincidentally the same group of currently-in-high-school children that were in the failed experimental session of Camp Whispering Rock, were projecting into Hollis’ mind, presumably to learn something. They were all laying down on the beds and luxuriously comfortable chairs that filled the room.
Hollis was still perfectly functional, although Tanya knew that she was splitting her attention, and thus knew to politely ignore if Hollis didn’t seem as intelligent as she usually was. “Tanya.” Hollis said in greeting. “Truman didn’t show up for work this morning. Nothing’s come up and he usually shows up late on Mondays, but I just called his wife and she said he seemed fine this morning, doesn’t know where he is. He’s not reachable through long range telepathy either. So I need you to go to his living quarters and see if he’s there.”
“Doesn’t Truman have a personal assistant you could have called for this?” Tanya asked, somewhat confused.
“He got fired on Friday.” Hollis added. “Came to work drunk one too many times.” Tanya’s heart seized with irrational fear. Did he… “You have clearance to go there, so get to it. Check for signs of a struggle or something.” Right, this is serious.
“Yes ma’am.” Tanya said, saluting. Now where is that bathrobe-wearing administrator?
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As it turned out, Hollis was right to worry. There were signs of a struggle, and Tanya’s limited forensic investigation skills estimated that there was a team of four people, and there were signs of psilirium deployment, if she was interpreting those cancerous plants correctly. Every plant in the Zanotto’s apartment was loaded with enough psychic power to react violently in its presence.
Psilirium… Tanya hadn’t really had time to properly study it, as while she did learn enough to protect her mind from the madness-inducing variation of psitanium, it was so incredibly hazardous to study for psychics that the stuff was only allowed in a heavily fortified secret facility in the Canadian wilderness, known only by its designation as Facility X. She had better things to do than go through the rigamarole necessary to gain access.
Still, the news that the Grand Head of the Psychonauts had gotten abducted spread quickly. Security records were checked, and it was determined that the abductors had somehow managed to acquire a copy of Truman’s thinkerprint emulation device, the one that was designated for those that Truman temporarily empowered to do a task for him. Such as, say, going into his apartment to fetch something he left in his home office.
Tanya immediately suspected Truman’s previous personal assistant. She had to ask someone what the man’s name was, and it was Tim Smith, an incredibly forgettable name. Tanya immediately disabled the clearances on that thinkerprint file, and created a second dummy thinkerprint to give to the Grand Head once he was back at work. That plugs that particular leak.
Still, the Psychonauts were perfectly capable of locating their leader, with the right resources allocated to the task. Those resources indicated that the Grand Head was held within a particularly dangerous part of the world: The Rhombus of Ruin.
Tanya immediately assumed, when she heard the name for the first time, that it was just an odd renaming for the Bermuda Triangle. Not so. It was actually in the waters between Iceland, Greenland, and Canada, and the cause of the mysterious disappearances is quite known: it was the location of the largest known deposit of Psilirium in the world, although the Bermuda Triangle was the second largest, at half the size.
Unfortunately, and this was likely no coincidence, the Psychonauts have been absolutely swamped with mysterious incident reports over the weekend, causing literally every field agent to be too busy to go on a rescue mission… at least, all of the ones that had psilirium defense training. Seeing as how that was because so many of those incidents had signs of psilirium use, this was understandable. Psilirium defense protocols also, as a side effect, limited communication with those field agents, which meant they couldn’t just recall them, either. Tanya made a note to check on the current state of cell phone technology to check its practicality for such situations in the future.
There was one agent pair that was capable of such a thing that were reachable… but that pair were Agents Vodello and Nein, and leaving Agent Oleander alone with twenty children, half of which were girls, was a dangerous prospect, no matter how trustworthy the short agent was.
Still, this was a fixable problem: while few were really qualified to run the activities at Camp Whispering Rock, ‘few’ wasn’t ‘zero’, and the primary operator of the Camp was Agent Oleander, he just needed help managing the children, so any caretaker would theoretically suffice, although bringing in some nobody to replace the famous Agents would likely anger some parents.
Unfortunately, Mom and Dad seemed to have cut off their own mental communication capability, an odd thing to do given what they were doing, but it was decided to just send the replacements and issue the new orders in person. By the time that the replacements (Tanya and Agent Jameson, who was a bit of a fruit but he had four younger siblings and more importantly was a licensed child therapist) were assembled and shipped over…
“What.” Tanya said flatly.
“Agent Oleander was evil all along!” Raputin began, before Tanya cut him off.
“Mom, Dad, what happened?” Tanya repeated.
“Well…” Dad said, a little ashamed. “Razputin is correct. Agent Oleander went beyond the bounds of the scenario, and genuinely endangered us, the campers, and soon…” He looked off into the distance dramatically. “...the world.”
Tanya stared at him incredulously. “Okay.” She said eventually. “We all knew that Agent Oleander was a little…” Tanya couldn’t quite find the word. “Off, but the fake supervillain plot was supposed to be fun.”
“Fake?” Razputin asked, devastated.
Argh, damage control. “But then he made the whole thing real!” Tanya said angrily. Razputin perked back up, beaming and posing heroically. “My question is who did he find with the expertise to modify the psychic death tanks… They weren’t supposed to be dangerous.” Given that he had them piloting by real brains, and his own hypnotic abilities… The modifications needed would have been quite small, as a lot of the limits were software-based, but not all of them.
“They weren’t that tough.” Razputin scoffed.
Tanya ran the numbers. …Okay, if he didn’t modify them, and merely swapped out for brains that were programmed with hypnosis… they would work, just not well. “I suppose they weren’t.” Tanya allowed.
She turned to Agent Jameson. “The plan is the same. You and I will stay here and make sure the campers all get home, while Agents Nein and Vodello go on the rescue operation.”
“Right. Let’s go!” Razputin declared.
Tanya raised her eyebrow. “You’re not going anywhere.” She declared.
“But I’m a Psychonaut now!” Razputin insisted. “Agent Cruller gave me a badge and everything!” Lili, for some reason, shouted an agreement to this statement. Why? She knows that Ford doesn’t have any actual authority, right?
Wait, was that Ford wandering off in his Agent archetype with a chunk of psitanium on his back? …Damn it, Ford! “You’re not qualified.” She said, letting the crazy old man retreat back into his “secret spy cave”, “This mission is for top agents only. Not rookies, no matter how talented.” She telekinetically seized the boy and withdrew her dog and little brother from the Pelican.
“I love you, Tanya.” Visha said as she was telekinetically brought into reach, giving Tanya a few licks when she was able to reach.
“I love you too, Visha.” Tanya said reflexively, kissing the dog on the head. “And you, Eric.” She added, doing the same to the baby.
“Love you!” Eric said, as Dad brought Oleander into the Pelican to be restrained.
Fortunately, Mom had enough presence of mind to not delay the rescue by doing more than just a happy wave towards her children, and they departed towards the Rhombus of Ruin.
…Wait. Where was Razputin? And Lili?
…They snuck onto the Pelican when she was distracted by Visha’s cuteness, didn’t they? Fuck.
Comments
Chris Larson
Small children and small animals are always such a hazard.
