Kevin Curry
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Psychoprotective Book 2 Chapter 9
🕑 Added 2023-06-12 14:00:11 +0000 UTC“Good effort, guys!” PSI King said, complimenting his current senses on their performance. “That was a good rehearsal.” He gave the band a thumbs up with the hand that was now hanging down from the floating eyeball with ears that was his astral self.
“It’s just not the same.” Audie O complained.
Dr. Touch nodded in agreement, bringing his fingers together as was his habit. “Without Tasty’s bass licks and Sniffles picking out notes on the guitar, the Feast just isn’t complete.” Tanya snorted at the puns.
“I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.” Tanya said idly from her position at the back of the stage. She got off of the speaker she was sitting on, dusting off her clothes. “For now, let’s see if this works.” She brought out her smelling salts and exited PSI King’s mind.
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The first thing Tanya did when she returned to her body was check the time. That took three hours? Sounds about right. “How are you feeling, PSI King?” Tanya asked, with a wry grin as she emphasized the pun.
PSI King’s mobility capsule floated upwards from its position in Tanya’s lap and turned to face her. “Kind of awkward, actually.” He said, “I mean, I know I was a brain in a jar, but now I can actually feel how light I am, how round…” He paused as he floated around. “Not a fan.”
“That’s the dysphoria.” Tanya explained. “You’re beginning to remember what it was like to have a body, so the fact that you don’t have one is unsettling on a fundamental level.” Tanya vaguely recalled reading about therapies that could assist with this in the mobility capsule manual, but that kind of thing was outside her expertise. “You’d experience something similar if you were placed into a body that wasn’t your own.”
“This sucks.” PSI King concluded.
Tanya nodded sympathetically. “I’d like to say that it goes away eventually, and it does in my similar experience… but it took me a little over ten years for that to pass.” Even then, she could only comment on gender dysphoria, not mutilation-related dysphoria. Unless… No, Mary would never agree to that.
“Yikes.” PSI King replied.
Mary glanced back at them from her cartoon about a distaff counterpart to a popular superhero. “Oh, PSI King can move on his own now. Cool.” She observed, before turning her attention back to her cartoon.
Reminding herself that Mary acting her age was a good thing, Tanya started to stretch. “Time for some exercise, I think.” She said, not bothering to specifically call out Mary. “I’m spending too much time sitting around inside people’s heads lately.”
“Sorry.” PSI King said.
“It's fine.” Tanya said, “I have some time to catch up now.” She’d like to say that she’d be inside her own head or the dead brain’s head… but if she was doing that, she could task an archetype to exercise, as she wouldn’t need her full power to deal with PSI King’s mental defenses. With her attention and power split on actually doing something, they would not be nearly as simple to deal with.
PSI King decided to watch Mary’s cartoon. “So what’s with this chick in that crazy outfit?”
Tanya tuned out the superhero discussion. The whole concept was silly, if you asked her. But it was popular, and will continue to be popular.
Just as long as she’s left out of it.
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The concert was a lot more entertaining than Tanya thought it would be. It wasn’t her favorite genre of music, but the crowd… The unified enjoyment of the performance created a secondary undercurrent to the music that was pleasing to Tanya’s psychic senses. It was easy to let the power of unified action flow through her, giving her a feeling of belonging that was rather novel.
It reminded her of battle, actually. Specifically, battle with her 203rd behind and around her, acting as extensions of her will. It was an easy feeling to disrupt, with the chaos of actual battle, but the first parts of most engagements, when everything was going to plan… that’s what being one with this crowd of eight thousand felt like. She felt that it would be easy to nudge the crowd however she wanted… and she tested it by getting everyone to sing a line of the chorus in a way that actually harmonized with the band, which visibly surprised the lead singer. “Take a chance you’re old enough to Dance the night away!”
“Yeah, that’s the best feeling.” PSI King telepathically commented right after she led the chorus. “You’re only nudging the ones who have given themselves to the music, but in a crowd like this that’s still most of them. It’s a good crowd.”
“This is the best concert ever!” Mary shouted at the top of her lungs.
Tanya laughed. “I love music!” She replied, shouting at the same volume.
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Ugh… her head. The concert was over, and they used their VIP passes to attend the small afterparty backstage. She was sipping some water after popping some painkillers that she always keeps on hand, just in case.
“I should have warned you about that.” PSI King said, laughing. “Being one with the crowd’s a bit of a transcendent experience… but it’s also going to give you a pounding headache if you do it for the whole concert.”
“Are you alright?” Mr. Roth, the lead vocalist, asked with a concerned look.
“She’ll be fine.” PSI King assured him. “Just opened up her mind a bit too long during the concert. Psychic thing.”
“That’s good.” Mr. Roth said, “Now, Agent Vodello mentioned that you don’t remember who you are?” Ah, Mom got in contact with the band directly. That made sense.
“Nope.” PSI King replied, “I’m remembering more every day, but I still don’t remember my name.”
“I’ve gathered enough evidence that I could narrow it down.” Tanya said while still rubbing her temples. “But it would require me getting access to classified documents.” Pretty much everything official about the Deluge of Grulovia was classified at the highest level. Personnel files, debriefings, after action reports, all of it. So while she was confident she could pick out who he was, or a small group of possibilities, if she read a proper sequence of events, as it would involve him being tossed into freezing water, she had absolutely no idea who fit that description. The only people she even knew for sure were there were the Psychic Seven themselves, and all of them are accounted for. One confirmed dead, the rest alive. If she didn’t know what happened to Lucrecia, she would have guessed it belonged to her, but that doesn’t hold up even a little bit when examining the mind.
“Well come on and enjoy some of the food, you’ll feel better.” Mr. Roth offered, lightly tugging on Tanya’s arm towards the rest of the party with a wide smile. Was he flirting with her? You know what they say about musicians…
The party was fairly casual, the presence of a ten year old making them limit the amount of drugs that they were doing. Mary still looked incredibly out of place, but she was enjoying some of the candy they had as part of the snack table. Tanya telekinetically grabbed some chocolate covered pretzels and sat next to her sister. PSI King settled in to her opposite side, floating himself there and engaging the drummer, one of the brothers the band was named for, in conversation.
Her head still hurt, but it had ebbed a bit, so she was ignoring it. “Are you enjoying yourself, Mary?” She asked.
Mary nodded furiously. “I’ve never been to a party like this before, it’s great.” Tanya glanced at the other band members, who were either engaged in conversation about music with PSI King or being fawned over by the other VIP ticket holders, at least one of them making out with the bassist. Mr. Roth had rejoined the groupies after Tanya had positioned herself next to Mary.
Taking a bottle of fruity soda, Tanya poured them both a cup and settled back. “It’s a bit novel to be sober at one of these, I’ll admit.” She said, glancing at the many open bottles of beer. “I convinced myself to stay out of these when my men had leave, so as to not rain on the parade. Also, they never let me drink the few times I tried.” It put a bit of a damper on things. She thought about joining them after she hit sixteen in the hopes they’d change their stance on that, but… she never did. One more regret. “I was never invited to the officer’s club parties either.” She didn’t even know they existed until a few months before she died, which was… yeah.
“It’s hard to picture you as a party girl.” Mary said softly.
Tanya shrugged. She had figured out a while ago that Mary never picked up on the fact that Tanya was a man in her first life, but she always spiraled whenever she contemplated her next life, and being reborn as a man was not a possibility Tanya wanted Mary to ruminate over. “You need to have essentially zero social life in order to get through college without attending parties.” She said, “Furthermore, drinking and partying is a surprisingly large part of Japanese corporate culture. If you don’t have beers with the boss, you’re not getting promoted when positions open up. Networking matters, even here in America. It’s not what you know, but who you know.” Both were important, but you could rise higher as a well-connected incompetent than you could as a highly-skilled recluse.
Mary hummed in acknowledgement, thinking on the subject as she drank the soda. “You never talk about your first life.” It’s more accurate to say that she never talks about it with Mary, and for good reason.
Tanya shrugged, but nodded to the question. “It’s not something I like talking about.” She admitted. “You also tend to get upset when you’re reminded of our circumstances.”
“No I don’t.” Mary insisted wrongly. “I talk about my first life all the time.”
“Not what I meant.” Tanya elaborated, “I meant when you think about your third life.”
“...oh.” Mary whispered.
“Last time, when I told you how I died in the twenty-first century, you had nightmares for the following week about being born in the neolithic era.” That was, admittedly, the kindest interpretation of those particular nightmares. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
They lapsed to silence, eating more junk food while idly listening to PSI King’s conversation. “Hey, I think Eddie listens to psycho.” Said the drummer. “Hey Eddie!”
A burly man with a soul patch dropped his invisibility power, which startled Tanya. She wasn’t really keeping an eye out for danger… “Yeah boss?” He asked. His voice was surprisingly similar to PSI King, actually.
“PSI King, this is Eddie, our best roadie.” The drummer explained. “Eddie, this is PSI King. He’s a psychic musician from twenty-ish years ago. Ring any bells?”
“Hi.” PSI King said.
“Aw man, Psycho-core wasn’t even around back then.” Eddie said, “It wasn’t until about thirteen years ago that the genre started picking up, and even now it’s pretty unappreciated by the larger music community.” Oh? “The only one even trying that kind of music back then was the inventor of the stuff, and he was never really appreciated like he should have. He was ahead of his time.”
“Who?” PSI King asked, enraptured. “Do you have a record?”
“Nah, man.” Eddie said, “No records exist of his music, the man insisted that it could only be properly experienced live. The only reason it’s as big as it is is because someone invented psitanium cassettes, and those are usually recorded by fans and distributed just to spread the word. It’s anti-corporate as hell.” He sniffed, his words causing him to tear up. “It’s beautiful. But people only make covers of the Psychoddesy, so that’s the closest you’ll get to hearing Helmut Fullbear’s music. He got killed by Maligula, so there’s nothing else.”
Wait. Tanya reviewed what she knows about PSI King. Was Audie O… That man in the figments… Bob Zanotto? She never really met the man, only saw him from afar, after he had let himself go in his grief, and even then only a few times… The broad strokes of the images matched, glasses, full beard… She was always just told that Helmut Fullbear died… but how certain was that death? Was it ever confirmed? She assumed it was, but…
She shouldn’t be hasty. If she gave Bob Zanotto even a single ray of hope, he would be crushed if it didn’t pan out. He’s waited this long, he can wait long enough for verification. She should… talk to Agent Boole. Or Agent O’Peia. Confirm things. It would be healthier if Helmut remembered that he was himself before arranging that meeting, anyway.
“Helmut Fullbear…” PSI King said to himself. “Is that… my name?” He went silent, but he emanated pain telepathically, a groan of pain truer than any performative one he deliberately unleashed. Eddie, Mary, and Tanya all winced at the psychic emanations.
Tanya took a psychoportal out of her jacket, slotting it into the mobility capsule. “If you’ll excuse me.” She said as she pulled the capsule into her lap and threw her mind into it.
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It was cold, and storming. Tanya appeared in the stage, where there were two additional mental entities panicking with the rest: presumably Sniffles and Tasty, given the shapes of their heads.
“What do we do?” Tasty said, with Agent Boole’s voice. “She’s on a rampage!” Like Agent Boole, he was short, a literal dwarf. Like the other entities, he was dressed for marching band, and distinctly his, he was yellow and had a head that was just a big pair of lips.
“We just need to make her remember who she is!” Declared Sniffles, with Agent O’Peia’s voice. “Who we are!” Sniffles was tall, purple, and had a nose for a head. She was also dressed for marching band, completing the set.
“We tried that, don’t you remember?” Vision groused. “Remember how that ended?”
PSI King moaned in pain. “It’s too much! It’s all coming back to me, but it’s too much!”
Tanya looked around. Despite the storm and chill, whatever nightmare entity that represented Maligula wasn’t actually present at this time. Strange…
“We need to all pull together.” Audie O said calmly.
“Only by everyone working in unison can we form a full fist.” Dr. Touch added.
“Where are your instruments?” Tanya snapped off, automatically affecting the growl that she added to command her men. Each of the entities quickly fetched their instruments, Sniffles and Tasty panicking at their absence. “Where are they?” She asked again.
“I don’t know!” Tasty said, sobbing like Agent Boole would whenever someone raised their voice to him. Yep, definitely Helmut Fullbear. Now, to defuse this meltdown.
Sniffles was a little on the ball. “I think… I remember… I dropped it!” She declared, “It was spicy, too hot to handle!”
Okay, a hot place. “Where’s the hottest place here?” Tanya asked, before immediately regretting it.
Audie O immediately replied: “PSI King’s mouth.” Ew. But her attention on the two entities without instruments paid off, as she felt a spatial tunnel open up in Tasty’s mouth.
Ugh. The things she does for tactical advantages. “I’ll be quick!” She shouted as she dived head first into the disgusting abyss.
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The place she was warped to was still wet and smelled of blood and black pepper. But unlike earlier, where it was bitingly cold, here it was oppressively hot. She never really had the chance to visit a place that was this hot while also being this humid before… It sucked. Wait, no, there was Cook Ford’s mind, it had a few places that were this damp.
Still, she wandered around, dodging flailing tongues and the occasional snot turret, Helmut’s state of agitation causing the terrain to become more subtly hostile. Censors roamed the place, but were easily dispatched. What was annoying about them was that a swarm of other mental entities came out whenever they noticed her, and becoming invisible simply did not help.
Tanya sneezed again, the irritation of the pepper-infused air bothering her sinuses. “Ugh, worst side-quest ever.” Ugh, she spends too much time thinking about her hypothetical video games. It keeps infesting her thoughts. Her eyes were starting to water too, and her shield was doing approximately nothing about the stinging pain.
Admittedly, it did give her an idea about using that one time she got exposed to tear gas unprotected on the Eastern Front as a mental defense… magical healing managed to save her delicate tissues, fortunately. Aerial Mages got top priority from the Medical Mages. Damn NKVD saboteurs.
Still, the instruments were actually fairly obvious in their location this time: there was a honey-coated shrine where giant statues of both Sniffles and Tasty were holding hands, the pair of string instruments just floating there.
Right before she could reach them, the screams of panic attacks intercepted her, launching water snakes at her that glowed with an inner light. After dodging, the two snakes curved around each other and became a waterspout, a copy of Maligula emerging from it. Fissures leaking hellish red light occasionally opened and closed on the copy, the calling card of Nightmares.
Like most entities of this coherence, it spoke: “Stop wasting your time with this useless lump.” Maligula said, hydrokinetically pulling water snakes from the stormclouds that were hanging over the area and letting them fall like rain.
“No.” Tanya said simply as she danced in the air between the snakes. Telekinetic power wreathed her arms, and the instant a snake deviated from its natural trajectory, she splattered it. The panic attacks were standing back, not yet contributing, but when that changed, she’ll need to deal with them.
“Why not? He’s been abandoned by everyone else.” Maligula said haughtily. “He threw his life away uselessly, killing both himself and his lover by my hand. His so-called friends didn’t help him for thousands of years, leaving him in a random jar! Even now, when they’ve had a week to learn of him, they do nothing!”
Ah. One common factor in stories that Agent Nein and Mom said about their adventures inside people’s heads is that when a mental entity is talking, you should always at least hear it out. Even the worst parts of someone’s mind are still fundamentally part of them, so nightmares tended to talk about people’s worst fears as if they are fact, as an example.
This was a relatively straightforward example, in Tanya’s amateur opinion. “You’re wrong.” She said, “Bob’s alive. He’s drowning in grief, even now, seventeen years hence.”
The rain stopped. “...What?” Maligula whispered, in Helmut’s voice.
“Lucretia Mux.” Tanya rattled off. She had read some of Otto’s experimental files from back then, specifically to better understand The Argent. “Born Lucretia Galochio, you experimented with the Psychonauts in Green Needle Gulch. Among other experiments, you sought to increase your hydrokinetic power by deepening your well of aggression, your will to force water to move according to your intent.” Tanya recalled the rush, the pleasure of fighting. No amount of reminding herself of the horror ever could get her to deny… that it was amazing. The drug-like rush of the combat analgesic formula… The raw thrill she felt in the middle of battle… “It worked too well, making your survival drive more active than most. When you experienced the exquisite joys of violence, your mind rebelled from the horrors you were experiencing, triggering a schism that allowed your survival drive to glut itself on your mind, creating an alternative personality that thrived on violence and domination.” Most of this was quoted from Otto’s infamous research paper, but Maligula seemed entranced.
Helmut never knew exactly why Maligula was created, what happened to Lucy. As such, the incarnation of Helmut’s memories and nightmares of the woman hungered for this information. To understand. “Essentially, she became stuck in a waking nightmare, her mind constantly tearing itself apart to generate more and more hydrokinetic power.” Tanya shuddered, “But you’re not the only one who can do that.”
Inside her mind’s eye, the memory tomb started to open up, the silver cap atop of the pyramid sliding aside, leading directly to the deepest pit in her mind. From those dark depths, came power. “For short periods.” She shouted at the top of her lungs as her mental projection’s outfit became a psychonauts uniform. Her hat, the officer’s cap that was always too large, sat upon her head, and her body tingled as the lines of her fractured psyche, filled in with gold and polished until they gleamed, manifested on her skin. “It’s perfectly safe!” Her heartbeat, the constant drone that one’s mind filtered out of awareness, ceased as the organ was replaced with solid gold.
She felt… warm. The telekinetic energy wreathing her hands compressed until they seemed like solid steel, gleaming silver fists whose every line and edge was sharp enough to cut with the barest twitch of them.
Tanya was not an experienced, or even a highly trained, psychonaut. She heard about Agent Nein’s lecture on how he subdued the Devil of the Rhine with words instead of force, but she wasn’t speaking to Maligula. Merely the nightmare caused by her actions. “The world has not forgotten Helmut Fullbear!” Tanya shouted. “It will welcome him with open arms! Your nightmare…”
Maligula roared as the ocean of water snakes burst from the ground and flew to her, and the panic attacks roared as they rushed to expel her from the mind.
“...is over.” Tanya declared as she raked her gauntlets through the bodies of the panic attacks, parting their unstable bodies like smoke before summoning an anti-material rifle, sighting it towards the nightmare while the water snakes crashed into her reinforced astral body.
Maligula drew the massive quantities of water to herself, a tidal wave of water interposing itself between Tanya and the nightmare, an iceberg forming as a shield.
Tanya just shot right through it. She had never tested this state in the real world, merely once or twice in secret to make sure she could use it if needed. The ice parted like water, and the water turned to vapor from the power of Tanya’s PSI blast. Behind the barrier, Maligula’s body exploded apart, banished to the recesses of Helmut’s mind, for now.
Now for the hard part. Tanya was overcome with a giggling fit as her enemy died by her hand. Ah, it was too short, but it was as sweet as she remembered, facing danger and defeating it with wit and her will to survive. Well, that and her killing intent. Infamously, one of the most controversial little facts in ‘True Psychic Tales’ is that innately sharp telekinetic constructs or particularly potent PSI blasts were considered a strong indicator of being a psychopath. It even made it into True Psychic Tales… indirectly. They didn’t use the word psychopath, but it was used in reference to a literal serial killer as a sign of his mental unwellness.
Still, after a moment of focusing, she was able to shut The Argent away, the transformation burning away from her with a golden flame. In hindsight, using it was probably overkill… but she really wanted to try out her super-mode in real conditions. It was a weakness borne of her memories of being a Japanese boy.
The string instruments flew to her, and the entire area dissolved as she clutched each one, a few chords playing in celebration.
Time to face the music, then.
