Chapter 96: Book 2 Chapter 19.2: Headspace

“Oh thank god it’s my house,” Hawke sighed. The hilltop suburb of a quiet New Zealand neighborhood made for a welcome respite from the wolf-haunted halls of Freddy’s mind. Hawke nearly collapsed in relief, falling into the soft grass of his lawn. He took a moment to enjoy the sight of the placid ocean in the distance, and listen to the soft sounds of the surf rolling over the beaches.

“So. Nice neighborhood,” Luke said. The various homes were all slightly blurry and indistinct, owing to Hawke’s less clear memories of every home other than his own.

“Yep,” Hawke said.

“Good view of the ocean.”

“Yep.”

“Do you want to...look around?”

“I most certainly do not,” Hawke said. “Luke, I have been traumatized by shit you’ve never even heard of. Like, odds are there’s a haunted iPhone that knows all your sins hanging around somewhere in here.”

“Ugh. That one was unsettling,” Lee said.

“What?”

“Don’t even worry about it,” Harley said. “I know you got several dozen good reasons to be freaked out, Hawke, but we still have to generate some calibration data or whatever for Cane.”

“Okay, you guys go poke around, have fun,” Hawke said. “I’m staying right here where there’s definitely no brain-demons or repressed trauma’s.”

“Okay, well we still have to explore, but I also like the ‘no brain demons’ aspect,” Luke said. “So maybe let’s just poke around in the house here.”

With no objections from Hawke, who remained peacefully on the grass, Luke moved to open the door to the home. The interior was just as detailed as the exterior, proving how well Hawke had memorized even the most minute details of his childhood home. A small amount of traditional Maori artwork lined the walls, alongside the more universally-recognizable awkward family photos.

The comforting mundanity of the domestic domicile came to an abrupt end when they entered the living room and saw several dozen identical duplicates of the same three people. The duplicated trio, presumably Hawke’s mother, father, and brother, all stared at the new arrivals with friendly smiles, made unsettling only by the fact that they were completely identical on every face.

“Good thing Hawke didn’t come here,” Harley said.

“He would not like this,” Vell agreed.

“Guess this is how he organizes his memories,” Luke said. “It’s not...the weirdest thing.”

“No, that probably goes to the trauma school,” Freddy said.

“I didn’t say it.”

“You were thinking it. Don’t need to be in your brain to tell that.”

Luke shrugged and returned his attention to the doppelgangers of Hawke’s family. He was torn between his desire to help Cane get calibration data and his hesitance to go poking around in Hawke’s memories while the man himself wasn’t around.

“So. You all probably represent a different category of memory or something, right?”

“Yes,” the doppelgangers said simultaneously. Nobody liked that.

“I’m going to need only one of you to talk at a time from now on,” Harley commanded.

“Okay,” said only one of the many mothers. The rest stared forward silently, though their heads bobbed slightly as the one spoke.

“That’s not better,” Vell said.

“It really isn’t,” Lee said. “I think I’d like to go back and sit on the grass with Hawke.”

All agreed, and left the horde of cloned relatives behind.

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The transition into Vell’s mind seemed uneventful at first. They were all seated right off the bat, lounging in comfortable chairs. A slight rattle and roll beneath them made Vell take a look around at his surroundings. They were in a train car. A very, very familiar one.

“We should leave now,” Vell said loudly. He stood and headed for the back of the train car without waiting for anyone else. It only took a few seconds for everyone else to catch on and catch up. Vell had died in a train just like this one. There was no guarantee that this mental train would meet the same fate, but nobody wanted to stick around and find out. They started scouring the train for a way out, so preoccupied with making an escape that no one even stopped to make a “train of thought” joke.

At the very end of the doomed mental train, Vell finally found a door that opened -into absolute nothingness. There was empty blackness in all directions, as far as the eye could see.

“So. Anybody feel up to a leap of faith?”

Harley peered over the edge. There was nothing in sight. Cane hadn’t exactly been clear on whether they could be injured or killed in the mindscape, but he had advised them to avoid it if possible. Jumping into a bottomless abyss didn’t seem much like avoiding it.

“This is your mind, dear,” Lee said. “I suppose we just have to trust in you.”

Harley felt like starting off in a doomed brain train stretched her trust a little, but at the end of the day, Vell was still Vell. If you couldn’t trust him, you couldn’t trust anyone. Harley held out her hand to a nervous Hawke, held on tight, and jumped.

Much to everyone’s (pleasant) surprise, they didn’t actually fall. The empty blackness became a floor below them, leaving them suspended in the void. While the train careened into the abyss behind them, the motionless void below them ceased to be motionless and ceased to be a void. It retained it’s black coloration, but gained a much more solid, chitinous appearance. Then, on either side of them, broad sheets of iridescent purple took shape, and the newly formed mental butterfly took shape.

“Oh, a giant butterfly,” Hawke said. “The least terrifying of all possible giant insects.”

“I could go for a ladybug,” Harley said. She’d actually been eaten by a giant ladybug once and the idea of seeing another one still didn’t bother her.

The massive purple butterfly descended through the black spaces of Vell’s mind, careening towards the core of the emptiness. A massive planetoid composed of several mismatched elements drifted in the blackness. Soaring above the surface, Vell could see the ranch that was his home, the drifting island of the Einstein-Odinson campus, and even towering basalt pillars that likely represented his interest in runecraft. The butterfly drifted past all these disparate ecosystems and landed on the doorstep of what appeared to be an ancient Greek structure, vaguely similar to the Parthenon.

The butterfly lowered a wing and waited patiently, as if expecting the group to dismount. They did so, and no sooner had Freddy taken the last step off the butterfly’s wing than it took off again, vanishing into the blackened skies of Vell’s planetary mind. Vell took a step closer to the towering pillars of the structure and examined the carvings. He bashfully turned away when he noticed that the frescoes contained some images of Harley, Leanne, and Joan, among other past paramours.

“I think we’re in the capital of your brain, Vell,” Luke said.

“And weirdly, I feel like this is the only place we ended up on purpose,” Freddy said. He looked at the purple butterfly still flying into the void. “Like your subconscious took us here.”

“I sure hope that was it,” Vell said. He knew better than to assume that everything in his life, much less his mind, was entirely under his control. He cast a nervous glance above the towering pillars of the entryway, at the fresco stretched out above the doorway. Nestled in between carvings of friends, enemies, and lovers, dead center in the tapestry of his life, was a carving of Quenay.

The smiling face of the mystery goddess drifted out of sight as Vell walked into the central rotunda of the massive structure. A circular meeting hall filled with rows upon rows of familiar faces stared down at their new arrivals.

“Hi, Vell’s brain version of me,” Harley said, waving at her doppelganger. She was at the forefront of the many rows of people, with a placard in front of her that said “Passion”. The mental Harley waved back.

“Vell, any clue what this is all about?” Lee asked, looking at her own doppelganger, labeled “Discipline”.

Vell, rather predictably, said “Uh…” until a mental image of Professor Nguyen, labeled “Knowledge”, spoke up on his behalf.

“We are the logic center of Mr. Harlan’s brain,” Knowledge said. She seemed to be at the forefront of the crowd, indicating a more prominent role. “In short, we are his decision making process.”

“Everything you see before you has a role to play in how Vell goes about his daily life,” said Justice, wearing the likeness of Vell’s father. He was also seated towards the front, between Knowledge and Love, represented by Vell’s mother.

“Okay, I can see that,” Harley said. She found doppelgangers of all present company in the crowd, finding Luke as “Logic”, Hawke as “Caution”, and Freddy as “Curiosity”. She also spotted Leanne representing “Strength”, and, sitting very very far in the back, Joan, representing “Desire”. Vell chose to ignore some of the associations being made there and turned his curiosity elsewhere, which caused Curiosity to sit up straight.

“Hey, wait a minute, if this is the part of my brain that does the thinking, shouldn’t I be actively ‘thinking’ about this conversation as it happens?”

“We’re actually more of a visual metaphor than a literal depiction of your thought process,” Kknowledge explained. “Are there any other questions?”

“I do have one,” Hawke said. “Who’s that?”

He pointed to a small alcove at the side of the council chambers. In an oddly dark shadow, there was a large iron box, wrapped up in chains and sealed with massive locks. The other council members of Vell’s mind actively recoiled from it.

“That one keeps causing trouble,” Knowledge scoffed. “We usually have it locked down, but it finds a way to speak up at the worst possible times.”

Even as they spoke, the metal cage rattled and shook from within, as though someone inside was trying very hard to escape. From the way the iron bent and the chains rattled, one could only assume whatever was contained inside possessed incredible power. Vell started to sweat.

“I feel like that reflects poorly on my mental state,” he said.

“I don’t know about that, dear, maybe it’s one of the bad ones, like wrath,” Lee said.

“No, those are accounted for,” Knowledge said. She supplied Lee with a telescope, and pointed it far to the rear of the room where, several miles further back, a figure of Kraid labeled “Wrath, Greed, Envy, Etc.” sat with his arms crossed, occasionally shouting something that went unheard.

“Alright then,” Lee said. “So if not one of the major flaws, what’s in the box?”

Vell looked to the various facets of his own mind. In a way, it was comforting to see that ideals like Love and Knowledge were prominent in his mind -but he couldn’t get past that iron box, and whatever aspect of himself was locked inside it. He felt like knowing the name of that caged aspect would help him understand himself much better.

“Well that idiot has gone and gotten us into every big mess we’ve ever been a part of,” Justice said. “If you really need to know, it’s-”

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The mental landscape blurred, and shifted into the next mind as Cane transitioned them from one mind to the other. Vell sighed.

“Oh come on, Cane,” Harley shouted at nothing. “We were this close to an epiphany!”

“I’m sure I can get therapy later,” Vell said. “Come on. Let’s see what Lee’s brain is like.”

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Lee’s brain turned out to be suspiciously like the school. Every aspect was perfect, down to minute details like dirt trails through the grass where students cut across the quad rather than sticking to the sidewalks. While the hallmarks of human behavior were present, the humans themselves were not. The entire campus was still and silent. Even the leaves, perfectly detailed as they were, did not sway in the wind -nor was there even any wind to rustle them. Stifling silence permeated everything, interrupted only by the breathing of the visitors that walked through it.

“Hey, wait a minute, if this is a mindscape, do I actually need to breath?”

Freddy tested his hypothesis by holding his breath for a bit. He found he didn’t need to breathe, exactly, but it got more and more psychologically uncomfortable the longer he held his breath. The lungs didn’t need air, but the brain didn’t know that. While Freddy carried out his one-man science experiment, Harley started to poke around at the surroundings.

“I can’t say I wasn’t expecting the school, Lee, but I was expecting it to be a bit more...lively,” Harley said.

“Well I can only get so many details right and it seems I put a bit too much effort into the leaves,” Lee said. “Odd priorities, I suppose, but you know how I am.”

She did know how Lee “was”, and that familiarity allowed Harley to tell quite quickly that Lee was nervous about something. She glanced at Vell, who was standing stiffly in front of a tree, just as he’d stood in front of the painting of Kim back in Harley’s mind. Lee was clearly hiding something -and Vell was helping her hide it.

“Hey, how about we go find my dorm and see how well Lee remembers it?”

It would never be said Harley didn’t help her friends. It would be said, unfortunately, that her help didn’t amount to much. Her attempt to distract the group failed quite utterly.

“Hey, Lee, I don’t mean to alarm you, but your brain’s got a crack in it,” Luke said. In between the paved walkway and the grass, a small opening like a torn seam let out a small amount of purple light. The minute rift in the mindscape grew a little wider as Luke pointed it out.

“Ah. This is a facade, I assume,” Luke said.

“I prefer to think of it as a carefully constructed persona,” Lee said.

“So a facade.”

“Yes.”

The fractures in the fake reality grew a little wider. Vell’s foot nearly fell into the crack he was trying to hide, and he stepped away, exposing another rift in the roots of the tree.

“Okay, let’s all maybe stop pointing out the holes here,” Hawke said. “Lee can keep whatever she wants bottled up. That’s her business.”

“Let’s maybe go do Harley’s thing,” Luke suggested. “Poke around some dorms and see what Lee remembers. That ought to get us some data for Cane.”

Harley took Lee by the wrist and nodded at Vell. She said nothing, but communicated everything. Vell followed her lead and took charge, leading the other guys towards the dorms and hoping they wouldn’t notice Harley and Lee staying behind. They lingered in the fracturing quad until the guys were gone and the stifling silence reigned again.

“So, Lee?”

“Yes dear?” Lee said with a resigned sigh. She already knew what Harley wanted to ask, so well that Harley didn’t bother having to put it into words.

“I’m asking, not telling,” Harley said. She held on to Lee’s hand a little tighter. “You don’t have to knock down any walls on my account.”

Lee grabbed back at Harley’s hand, tightening the comforting grip a little more.

“To be frank, dear, I’m not sure what’s down there either,” she said.

“Well then let’s find out together. Or try to, at least. This is a weird digital brain projection, I don’t know if you could control this if you wanted to.”

“Only one way to find out,” Lee said. She closed her eyes and let herself get lost in the silence, anchored only by the reassuring pressure of her hand entwined in Harley’s. Reassured by the safety of her presence, the silence became a storm.

Lee opened her eyes to see the shell of the placid island stripped away, to it’s barest essentials. The illusion she had conjured had faded, and in it’s place there was an indistinct mass of shapes, colors, sounds, and other sensations -all of them seen and heard as if from a distance. Harley could tell on some level that she was standing right next to the blurry mass she assumed was a tree, but it also seemed a million miles away. She reached out to try and touch it, and it felt like sticking her hand between two magnets. There was a force, a presence, but nothing solid to the touch. She drew her hand back from the blurry world around her.

“Is this how you see the world?”

“Not always. Sometimes. When I’m in a bad mood, it’s hard to...feel like I’m part of everything around me,” Lee said. “Sometimes I feel so far removed from ordinary life...”

“Quit doing that pausing thing,” Harley said. “And look at me.”

Harley grabbed Lee by the cheeks, gave them a good squish, and forced Lee to look at her. Even at a casual glance, the reality around them sharpened, become more distinct, more connected.

“You’re my best friend,” Harley said insistently. “And you’re Vell’s friend. And Kim’s and Hawke’s, Luke, Cane, Freddy, all of them. And now you’re Adele’s girlfriend too!”

“Well, we haven’t-”

“Made it official, I know, whatever,” Harley said. “Your life has been rough, but you got a lot of people who love you and want to help you. I know that’s not enough to solve all the problems you have, but please don’t ever feel like you’re ‘separate’ from the world.”

The pep talk shifted the world around them like a camera lens coming in to focus, as every detail became clearer. Harley barely noticed, as all of her focus was on Lee.

“You’re part of our world,” Harley said. “And you’re a super important part of mine.”

Harley released her grip on Lee’s cheeks long enough to give her a quick kiss on one of them. Lee turned red in the face and smiled slightly as she rubbed her smooched cheek. The world around them was almost crystal clear now, close to how it had appeared as the original facade.

“Thank you, dear,” she said sheepishly. “You make a wonderful therapist.”

“Oh no, I do not, you should probably talk to a professional. This blurry stuff? That’s called derealization, it’s like a whole thing, you should definitely talk to a therapist about it.”

Harley waved her hand at the still slightly-blurred landscape around them.

“Yes, well, I’ll put that on my to-do list.”

“You got a long list, buddy,” Harley said. “But I got your back every step of the way.”

“No matter how hard I try to get rid of you, I assume,” Lee joked.

“You wouldn’t.”

“No I would not,” Lee said with a smile. “Now. I think I would like to find the mindscape version of my dormitory. I’ve been considering rearranging the furniture and I’d like to try it here, before I make any permanent changes in the real world.”

“Works for me,” Harley said. It was a distraction, and they both knew it, but they were both okay with it. Everything would be alright, in time.

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After a brief interlude of interior design, the group moved on to their final destination: the mind of Professor Plocinski. Hopefully the journeys through their own minds had generated enough calibration data for Cane to build an exit in Plocinski’s.

“I kind of wish we had some way to talk to Cane,” Luke said. “We’re not really going to know what’s happening until it happens.”

“I trust Cane,” Freddy said. “In terms of neurology, at least. He still owes me money.”

“He can hear you, you know,” Hawke said.

“Oh, I know,” Freddy said. He glared upwards at nothing. A whole lot of nothing. Much like the initial void of Vell’s mind, Professor Plocinski’s brain had a featureless black abyss for a sky. The surface under their feet seemed to be some kind of light gray wood. Vell kicked it slightly, and found it as hard and immovable as stone.

“Anybody know anything about the Professor?”

“No. Admittedly we should have done our due diligence before entering his brain,” Lee said. “But too late for that now. C’est la vie.”

“Let’s just keep walking and see what we can find,” Luke said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and another weird butterfly will haul us somewhere.”

They walked, but no butterfly, weird or otherwise, presented itself. With no sun overhead and a featureless wooden expanse under foot, they had no way to tell how long they had traveled until a landmark finally came into view. A stack of wooden blocks, marked with letters of the alphabet like children’s toys, were stacked high on the horizon. Lacking anywhere better to go, they headed towards it. The arrangement of the blocks became more apparent as they got closer, prompting a sigh from Harley.

“Oh this is going to get real Freudian real fast.”

“What makes you say that?”

Harley grabbed Freddy by the head and aimed his gaze towards the blocks. She pointed out the arrangement of the letters more specifically with her finger. All together, the stacked blocks spelled “BAD BOY”, repeated over and over again across the rows of blocks.

“Oh no.”

Luke took the final steps towards the tower of blocks and found a small opening in the pyramidal structure. Inside, curled up in the fetal position, was the trembling body of Professor Plocinski.

“Uh. Professor Plocinski?”

With a frantic turn, Plocinski turned towards them and held a finger to his mouth, pleading with them to be silent. Vell spoke again anyway, though he did lower his voice.

“Why do we need to be quiet?”

The wooden floor beneath them rattled. Plocinski retreated deeper into his block pyramid.

“Mother has heard you!”

“Of course,” Harley sighed.

The pyramid erupted from below, scattering wooden blocks everywhere. The floor below splintered and shattered as a colossal hulk forced their way through into the black sky above. Plocinski fled while the others stood, awestruck, as the titan rose to it’s full, monolithically motherly height.

“Herman Plocinski, don’t you run away from our guests!”

“Oh this is even worse than I thought,” Harley mumbled. The frightful Freudian titan stepped forward, and the group turned to flee.

“Hermie, are you still poking brains for a living? You’re never going to meet a nice girl in that line of work,” The Freudian Titan shrieked. “How are you ever going to give me grandchildren, Hermie?”

Somewhere in the distance, “Hermie” screamed. Somewhere in the nearby, Freddy also screamed, but only because a giant maternal foot narrowly avoid crushing him. The mother monster ignored the presence of the strangers underfoot, focused entirely on nagging her son about his career and relationship choices. Instinctively, Vell reached for the rune that summoned his pistols, and found his pocket empty. Similarly, Harley tried to summon Botley, and he did not answer her call.

“We’re in the mindspace, we don’t have access to any of our weapons,” Lee shouted.

“Any chance we can, like, imagine weapons real hard?”

“Maybe in our own heads,” Freddy said. “But this is Plocinski’s mind.”

“And he does not seem in the mood to stand and fight,” Harley noted, as Plocinski continued to run screaming from his nightmarish mother. His arms flailed behind him like limp noodles as he fled, weeping and begging for forgiveness.

“Do I look like that when I run around?” Hawke asked.

“Nah, you don’t do the wiggling and the crying,” Harley assured him. “Or the peeing your pants.”

“Let’s not talk about that,” Lee pleaded. She turned her attention to the mother monstrosity that still tailed them. “We have to do something about that.”

“Eh, we’ve faced worse than a giant Freudian nightmare with no weapons,” Harley said. “We’ve got brains, brains, and...more brains.”

“We’re really lacking in brawn since Leanne graduated,” Vell said. With regard to their lack of muscle, the group veered out of the path of the mother monster and allowed it to chase Plocinski without the risk of them getting trampled. With some space to breathe, they made use of their surplus of brains, beginning to plan, and more importantly, to observe. They watched the beast make a fractal approach, always getting closer without ever actually reaching it’s target, just like any nightmare.

“Oh. Wait, he’s not in any actual danger, is he?” Luke asked. Now that the dream monster wasn’t chasing them, it was a lot easier to remember the restrictions of dreams. The monster never actually caught you in the end.

“I don’t know, this can’t be good for him mentally,” Vell said.

“Eh, it’ll get erased anyway,” Harley said. They were still technically on the first loop.

“What?”

“Brain stuff. Don’t even worry about it,” Harley said. “Plus, we don’t really have to beat anything anyway. All we have to do is wait and hope Cane got enough data to do-”

With a jolt, the mindscape blinked out of existence, and Harley’s vision snapped back to reality -and her head snapped back to a very uncomfortable helmet. To her left and right, other members of the team also reentered reality, shaking their heads to fend off the disorienting transition. She looked to the subject of their not-so-heroic rescue and noted with some disgust that the real Plocinski had also wet himself in terror.

“You got some issues, dude,” Harley said. He only grunted in response. Harley stood and helped Lee to her feet.

“How long were we in there?”

“About an hour. You guys feel alright? No side effects?”

“I’ve got a bitch of a headache, but I think it’s fading,” Luke said.

Everyone else had a similar throbbing pain in the head. Harley made a requisite joke about throbbing while everyone else tried to ignore her. Lee successfully ignored her, as she was preoccupied thinking about something else.

“That went rather...quietly,” she said.

“There was a lot of screaming involved, actually,” Kim said. “And not just Hawke this time.”

“Yes but, well, we’re all alive, dear,” Lee said. They’d had daily ‘apocalypses’ with low casualties before, but they’d rarely had an apocalypse with no casualties. Lee had to wonder if they’d missed something, or turned their attention to the wrong failed experiment.

“Were you expecting to die?” Cane said, offended. “I know what I’m doing. I put in enough data to create a safe exit protocol back to reality-”

Th ground rumbling interrupted him. The building shook, and then the roof of the lab cracked. The ceiling peeled back like the label on a pack of cookies in the hands of a hungry child.

“Hermie!”

“Ah, that’ll do it,” Lee said, as she stared up at the Freudian nightmare.

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One murderous mother and a time loop later, the loopers headed back to the neurology lab -sans Kim, who had gone ahead to start the process of canceling the experiment.

“You know, aside from the fact they can bring giant imaginary monsters into the real world...somehow,” Vell said. They weren’t really clear on how that had happened. “Those helmets seem pretty useful.”

“I have to agree. They have great potential for self-actualization.”

They made their way into the lab, to find Kim standing over an array of the helmets in question, taking a few final notes. She nodded at them as Harley continued their earlier conversation.

“I know, right? We should strap one of those on and go back into Vell’s head, find out what was in that cage.”

“Nope,” Kim said. “None of you are going to wear these ever again.”

With a stiff sweep of her hand, she pushed all of the helmets into the garbage, piling them into a trashcan at the end of the table.

“Hey, what gives? Those were going to save these guys a fortune on therapy,” Harley protested.

“I took some notes yesterday, and confirmed them today,” Kim said. She lifted up the macabre result of her experiments -a brain floating in a jar. “Those helmets create a neural feedback loop that results in extreme cerebral swelling.”

“Extreme how? That looks like a normal sized human brain to me.”

“This is a squirrel brain.”

Harley shoved the helmets a little further into the trash, just to be safe.