Delinquency

by Daemon McRae

Essay Two: Psychonauts, or, How I Learned to Love the Screaming

Essay Two: Psychonauts, or, How I learned to Love the Screaming

Sugarcoat and Sunny Flare were not unintelligent people. The former was a prodigy in civil engineering, quickly working her way towards a degree in the same vein from a college who’s name loosely translates from Greek to “How much money do you fucking have?! She could tell you anything and everything about putting a building together and making sure the bugger stays there for something akin to forever. She also had a great mind for mathematics, computer programming, and motocross.

The latter, Sunny Flare, was for all intents and purposes, what a weather pegasus would look like if they’d bothered to wander through the portal and translate all of their knowledge and skill into a universe who’s own weather patterns do not, in fact, understand the terms “Stay, sit, beg”, and make them do it anyway. While not as skilled with technology as their friend Twilight, she had an even better grasp on the subject than Sugarcoat did, and spend a great deal of her time making them wish they’d spent the last several hours in the loving care of a one mad scientist with the last name Sparkle than hers, as she seemed to have a penchant for technological BDSM. To date, the only thing that seemed to share her almost sexual proclivities towards machines was the device on her arm, which no one was quite sure what it did.

Between the two of them, however, they had absolutely no idea what on God’s green Earth a psychonaut was. “Ok,” Sugarcoat said, with a hint of impatience. “This is the part where you actually tell us what this ‘psychonaut’ thing is, so that we can decide for ourselves whether or not crying in a corner is a logical conclusion.”

Treble, to his credit, had since taken their awkward pause in response to his deceleration as an opportunity to smack himself in the face lightly a few times to regain composure. “Well, start walking. There’s a lot to cover, and I’d rather we not be sitting ducks for whatever this thing is.”

Sunny tilted her head, doing a much worse job of containing her exasperation than her friend. “I thought you just. Said. What this thing is.”

“Like I said, lot to cover. Scooch your booch,” he grumbled, leaping off the counter and shimmying the last of the shakes out of the bottom of his foot with much the same approach one would shake off a particularly friendly small dog. They set off down the maze of identical corridors, taking arbitrary lefts and rights whose only guidance was making sure they didn’t go down any of the previously marked hallways, making new marks as they went. Once they’d gotten a rhythm going, Treble did what he did best: talk.

“Ok, first things first, you guys familiar with the multiverse?” he asked. He would have directed his question over his shoulder, as he had taken point on their little marauding party, but he wasn’t exactly keen to keep his eyes anywhere but directly in front of him.

“You mean multiverse theory?” Sunny asked. “Yeah, anyone who’s even touched a string theory text knows about-”

“Not a theory. Also, ‘string’ theory is total bull. Trust me, if the guys who wrote those books actually knew how it was all connected, they’d cry themselves to death,” Treble groaned.

“Wait… what?” Sugarcoat asked.

“Come on, do I really need to explain this part? You literally watched your friend blow holes in the walls of reality into another world. One which keeps dropping its trash in ours.”

The girls exchanged glances, and decided that, between the two of them, they had no counterpoint to that. “Ok, multiverse, go,” Sugar huffed.

“Right. Well, there’s a few different analogies I could use here. One particularly effective one I’m partial to is the bag of marbles thing, but that wouldn’t properly illustrate how potentially Gungnir-up-the-everything fucked we are right now. So, given that the two of you probably have an IQ north of three hundred between you, I’m going to do my best in my limited intelligence to draw you a picture from scratch,” Treble continued, even as he poked his head around a corner, only to see much of the same. With a sigh, he pressed on. “Now, I’m going to do a lot of talking in what might amount to a very short time, so please only interrupt me if I’ve lost you completely or I’m about to get horribly disfigured. If it seems like both, just scream wildly. Anyway, I know you know about physical dimensions, so let’s push past the first grade shit and move into the scary stuff: there’s a shit ton more than three. Problem is, they don’t exist in this universe. We, funnily enough, have only three dimensions.”

He stepped over a fallen med cart as he talked, and a small part of his rather loud lizard brain asked, with the air of someone watching someone else about to die and pointing out that there is in fact, a do-not-die-here button behind them, ”Now what could have knocked that over?” “Some dimensions only have one. Some have numbers in the thousands or higher. And don’t try imagining how that works, we are literally not programmed to do that. A psychonaut, in all it’s pants-shittingly terribly glory, is a creature from a higher dimension than ours. One with the ability to travel between dimensions. Now, seeing as we have a standing portal in our school’s courtyard that leads to a dimension of talking horse-mages, please don’t ask, and have watched someone literally Spirit Gun their way into that same dimension with little more than some stolen magic and a portable spectrograph, this might not sound particularly impressive.

“And it wouldn’t be, if he bothered to stay in universes with the same number of physical dimensions as his home world. Unfortunately, he’s said ‘fuck all’ to that and decided to come to ours. Now, the reason this is a particularly unfortunate turn of events is that it takes an ungodly, and I mean that in the most literal, biblical sense of the word possible by human tongue, ungodly amount of power to do so.” He paused to take a breath and also investigate an overturned wheelchair in a side room. The girls looked in the room from the doorway, opting to stay behind lest the room decide it wanted teenager for lunch.

“Wait, Twilight told me about something like this a little while back. Didn’t one of those pop into your school earlier this year?” Sunny asked, peeking carefully into the room for anything that might warrant screaming and crying and all sorts of unladylike natural reactions.

Treble sighed. “That’s… kind of similar. Ok, bag of marbles time. Imagine our happy little universe is a tiny marble in a bag filled with all kinds of marbles of all shapes and sizes. The dimension that creepy fucker from the Fall Formal was wrenched out of was from a particularly large marble rubbing up against our own. It’s not hard to break a wall when it’s particularly thin and you’ve got people on both sides working it over. No, that thing was scary for completely different reasons. And yet I’d still rather watch that thing bust down a wall than be here right now. At least then I knew we were screwed. This in-between shit is making my hair stand on end and do a little dance.

“No, psychonauts, the bastards, don’t care how big your marble is. They don’t care how big the bag is. They wander around doing whatever the fuck all they’d like. Even in the space between marbles, which is where we most likely are now. No, one of the many, many reasons I wish one of you was even remotely magically adept is that ‘nauts have this nasty habit of creating staging areas, like this one, to attune themselves with the laws and nature of however few dimensions their target universe is.”

He was interrupted by a polite cough and a hand in the air. “Oh for god’s sake, Sunny, we’re not in school-”

“Quite in the back, Miss Sugarcoat,” Treble said, in a much-too-practiced ‘teacher’ voice. “Miss Flare?”

The girls both blinked a few times before Sunny stuck out a tongue at her friend, then turned back to Treble. “Is that because they’re trying to learn how to live in our universe without… exploding?”

“Unfortunately, no. It’s so they can learn how to manipulate the real thing into whatever shape they want. Like I said, ungodly power,” Treble reiterated.

“Wouldn’t that make them gods in their own right?” Sugar asked.

“No. There’s a very large distinction. While they may be able to do fuck-all they want with the physics of a universe, they can’t manipulate ‘souls’. Don’t get me started. Keeping it simple, they can do whateve they like with the physical world, and if they’re feeling particularly pissy, the mental one, but spiritually, they’re about as dangerous as a Shiba-Inu who’s learned tic-tac-toe and meditation. Doesn’t make them any less awful, though.

“So if it’s so adept at making with the horribleness, why are we allowed to walk around freely?” Sugarcoat asked. She had the temperament of someone who was being forced to buy a lot of bullshit all at once at extortionate prices when all she wanted was a can of soda.

“Because we can walk around freely,” Treble answered. When that got him blank looks, he elaborated, “Let’s fall back on your programming metaphor for a second. We’d been wandering around for an estimated way too many hours before he managed to pop out something as small as a pen. Which means he either has issues with detail, or he wants to make sure he has a perfect understanding of one program before he moves on to the next. Now, I imagine you’ve done some coding in your time?”

Sunny and Sugar exchanged smug glances. “Yeah-huh,” Sunny said.

“Imagine having to program from a rather limited resource a very, very large space. Then add detail,” he said.

Sunny seemed to be keeping up so far. “Ok, sure.”

“Now imagine someone dumped an infinitely more complex, self-contained system somewhere in the middle of your project without telling you where,” Treble continued.

She made a face. “Oogh, okay.”

It was Treble’s turn to look smug. “Now imagine it could get up and walk out of the room.”

Sugarcoat made a face like… well, she raised an eyebrow. Which to her was somewhat expressive. Sunny looked mentally ill for a second. “Oh god, no thank you,” Sunny grumbled. “I suddenly feel much safer walking around. Now get out of that tiny room and keep talking. As horrible as the things you keep saying are, I’d rather that, and some forearmed knowledge, than making this easier on whatever our codemaster has planned.”

“Now you’re learning,” Treble added with a grin, stepping back out into the hallway. He gave Sunny a pat on the shoulder. “Gold star. NOW,” he exclaimed, taking a few large strides forward, finding his pace again. The girls fell back into step. “I think we’re all on board with the multidimensional tinkertoy enthusiast part. Now comes the really awful stuff.”

Sugarcoat glared at Sunny. “You just HAD to say something.”

They rounded a corner, and stopped as Treble saw a familiar mark on a door; one he’d made himself. Looking behind him down the third arm of the t-intersection they’d come across, and seeing no similar marks, he turned on his heel and kept walking. “You might wonder exactly why you haven’t heard of something that powerful trying to screw with our space before. Truth is, they have. Rather unsuccessfully. Humans are kind of pesky that way. I don’t know the details, or I’d be significantly more confident about our position than I am right now, but needless to say their impact on our world has been rather minimal. Minus a few casualties over the millenia. Don’t ask, I couldn’t give you a number in a million years. No one knows how many have tried to breach our walls. The running theory behind why we’re still alive is a tie between human ingenuity and the idea that our universe might have a funny aftertaste. I wish I was being sarcastic.

“Now, the other part of that question is: if they’re so powerful, why aren’t they going around ripping about every universe they can find? That’s actually one of the few cosmic questions we have answers to, because someone in the right place at the right time asked the right questions, and then did us all a favor and took fucking notes. The thing about psychonauts is that there’s only four kinds, or should I say, four motivations. All of them suck,” he added with a grim expression. They’d come to a dead end, and all the hallways branching off the one they’d come across they’d already visited.

They turned around as a group and kept walking, less to explore and more to keep themselves largely in the ‘moving target’ category. “What, exactly, are those motivations, pray tell?” Sugarcoat grumbled. Her head was starting to hurt and her worldview was crying itself into a pint of ice cream on the couch.

Treble flinched. “Ergh. Ok. Number one: They are predators who have eaten everything in the normal dimensions they have access too, and come to other dimensions to eat. I think it’s safe to rule that one out, as they tend to not favor the slow, methodical approach our… I think I like that word you used earlier, ‘Codemaster’. The approach our Codemaster seems to favor. So I’m confident we aren’t about to be chomped into oblivion by a fax machine just yet.

“Number two: they’re scientists, reaching out to explore the multiverse and learn as much as they can about the higher and lower realms through continuous, rigorous experimentation.”

Sunny raised her hand again, only to realize Treble wasn’t looking at her, still being in the front of the pack. “Um, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Maybe we could reason with him.”

Treble glanced over his shoulder with an uncomfortable glare. “Do you listen to your petri dishes?”

She put her hand down solemnly and decided to stop asking questions that would make her whimper quietly. “No.”

“No,” Treble agreed, then continued, “We might be dealing with a scientist here. Given how carefully he’s putting together this space, that’s a very likely scenario. Also a very bad one. They have a tendency to go overboard in their experiments, especially when they have live subjects. We tend to look an awful lot like toys to them. Number three: the hunter. These guys are also a bit meticulous, as time seems to mean different things in different dimensions, and they have a large amount of patience. This is our best option, but also our least likely. Hunters tend to ignore small fry when in pursuit of their prey, but they also know quite a bit about the multiverse, and tend to be very good at shortcuts. We would not exactly be considered a shortcut. The worst case scenario with a hunter is that his prey is somewhere in our dimension already, and there’s going to be some fallout. Again, that’s unlikely, because their prey is usually motivation number four, and we’d have heard about that one by now. Not this stumble-into-the-box thing we’re doing, unless they just got here.”

“And what, exactly, is number four?” Sugarcoat asked. Sunny flinched, as she was about to ask the same question, and her sense of mental self-preservation had stopped her.

Treble sighed, then leaned on a wall. “The psychopath. Someone or something so absolutely crazy and uncontrollable that they were kicked out of their own dimension and locked out as a last resort. Imagine a serial killer so god-damned awful that not only could they not put you down or lock you up, but the only proper way to make sure you weren’t a continued threat to the rest of the universe was to kick you the fuck OUT OF IT. These guys wander the marble bag looking for shiny, easy-to-eat marbles and play wit them until they get bored. They’re exceedingly patient, powerful in the extreme, and impossible to reason with. They’re also the most common.”

The girls looked at each other, shuddered violently, and followed Treble around a corner. “Huh,” he said, stopping in his tracks.

Sugarcoat almost ran into him. “Um, excuse me? Moving targets, right? What’s so interesting you had to stop and almost break my nose on the back of your head?”

Treble jammed a thumb to the end of the corridor they’d just turned into. “Stairs.”

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Ah. So it's either something as above them as they are paramecia, a hyperdimensional Yautja, or an omnicidal maniac. Lovely.

[Jarimor]

dundun.

[Ytak]

This arc is creepy in a different way than the other arcs. Definitely a different flavor of horror. It makes me kind of want to go home and get a hug from my mom.

[Disavowed ASH]

Oh universe, never change. You are constantly trying to kill us. XD

Also. I be liking Sugarcoat now for some reason. :P

[Shock Jock]

This section of the story is reminding me of Wildbow's Worm. Keep up the good work!