The Reaches of Psyche
…
It’s hard to describe all the things I saw over the last few cycles of us trying to bring Amanda and her Tasque out of the asylum, but it’s my duty to keep my friends informed, so I’ll try my best.
Let me set the stage: grimy, half-destroyed hallways and rooms repeating in fractals inward, outward, inside out, outside in … and everything just had this horrible stench. Rotting blood, mildewed carpets, desiccated remains … but the smell was nothing compared to the sounds that rang through the halls in an almost constant drone. The screams of those within the offices. All around the asylum were these, well, doctors and nurses I guess. But nothing about these things implied any sort of caring nature and the willingness to help others. No, these skinless beings with features just long enough to be uncanny only sought to perform vile experiments on the poor souls trapped within the walls. They were not initially hostile to us, at least not at first, simply giggling darkly whenever we would pass by. But this would change later on.
The more rooms we explored, the more experiments we oversaw, the more the patients screamed at us to do something, they became more and more aggressive. We witnessed a pair of werewires being painfully soldered together and bent into some unholy effigy. I pray their torment was over swiftly, but given how precise all of the staff members were here, I don’t think they had such luck. We also overheard another group of patients in a locked room being forcefully reprogrammed via a series of tapes. When the music would swell, we heard the horrible noises of them ripping each other apart before the chorus would reach an end and they would scream at the sight of each other. I could swear I heard one of the doctors humming that tune gleefully while that was happening …
Worst of all was what happened to Amanda. By this point, from what Swatch, Spamton, and I saw, none of us were discussing things anymore on our walks down the halls. Additionally, the staff members were now actively trying to get at us, trying to subtly poke us with sinister looking syringes, or simply attacking us on sight with rusty surgery equipment. None of them were particularly dangerous, at least not alone, but they weren’t supposed to be fighters in the first place. Anyway, after what was probably hours of searching, we came across the room where Amanda was being experimented on. When we went inside, there was no gruesome sight per se, rather just a horrible grim situation. Amanda was strapped to a table, her eyes stitched open as a sort of modified projector beamed a repeating scene directly into her eyes. When we had gone over to the nearby console to turn the device off, we unfortunately had to witness what footage they were showing her.
Amanda was experiencing the psychological torment of watching the creation process of every single Vessel Unit we’ve ever created in the CIFT. Lightners, both monsters and humans of all walks of life systematically ripped apart and their souls placed into biological stasis capsules, where they would remain until The Founder was overthrown. After she had witnessed this assembly line of torment for multiple cycles, she was broken. She didn’t even acknowledge the presence of any of us until we had turned the machine off, and even then her words were a rambling mess. She kept mumbling, “Brothers and sisters, all of them.” “I damned them. We damned them.” “What have I done? What have I allowed to be done?” In a way, I feel for her. But unlike her, I don’t have that same empathetic connection to the Lightners we had brought this fate upon. She, being a human, would not have that level of disconnection the rest of us used as a protective defense mechanism.
Her Tasque Rodney had been simply locked in a cage in the corner of the room, and it was clear he was stuck in a loop of starving to death and appearing back in the cage upon the start of a new cycle. With the help of Spamton using the NEO-MK2 suit, we managed to break it open, and the presence of her feline friend did certainly help calm Amanda’s nerves even a little bit. Unfortunately, removing Amanda from her torment was akin to triggering an alarm. Staff members were flooding into the room now, and we had to push our way out. We made a mad dash back through the rancid halls, the walls seeming to spin and spiral the further we would go. It’s as if the building itself was trying to eat us alive, its architecture bending into shapes unfit for travel. Luckily, for every bottomless pit, Spamton was able to just throw us over.
Our path back to the exit was basically just random searching, as at this point the building had shifted so much it was impossible to tell up from down, much less left from right. As we were running and fighting, the droning screams had sort of faded into the background as the torrential noise of the staff members singing in unison filled our ears like an invasive swarm.
🎵 “Why do you run, dear friend?”
“Why do you fumble through the daaark?”
“Why do you hide away when there’s no safe place to stay?”
“Why does fear brew in your heeaaart?” 🎶
By the blade, I never want to hear that rancid melody ever again. That aside, it felt like we were doomed to just keep getting lost again and again. Then … something changed. We turned a corner to head down another hallway, when the area in front of us suddenly changed. Everything was far more open now, and a dense fog filled the path ahead. Deep in the distance was a bright light that called us forward. Nothing in The Simulacrum should be taken as a good thing, but in this moment of pure desperation, I led us towards the light. I didn’t care, I just wanted to get out of this awful place.
We cut through the fog, and with only a few more minutes of running, we found an open door which gave us a glimpse of the outside. We were free … or rather out of the cage within a cage. The long walk back to the abandoned bank we had established as a home base previously was mostly us just trying to console Amanda, as she was still crying over what she endured. It might take a few cycles for her to get back to thinking straight, but until then, we needed only to find the location of Marcus. He was the last of the Administrators we knew of inside The Simulacrum, and it seemed to us like A.B.Y.S.S was personally trying to keep us away from each other.
No matter what he throws at us, he made the mistake of giving us an infinite amount of tries to get it done. It feels odd to find comfort in the painful existence of repeated death in this way, but nothing here is regular anyways …
Note to self: Record information on Haedopelagic Homonculi for a future log. These void doctors, while weaker than most void entities we’ve come across so far, possess a level of awareness and knowledge that seems to be a rarity in the void.
-Everest