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zumester · 8 years ago

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Behind the Black

This is our contribution to M3, Multiple Media Month. For those who don't know, M3 is a time in which the multiple/plural community has a special opportunity to get together and create. It can be anything, from a piece of visual art to a line of code. If you identify as plural, you can contribute using the hashtag #multiplemediamonth.

This is a piece we wrote, recounting some events that took place within the system over the last few weeks. Hope you enjoy.

The mindscape was permeated by an all consuming darkness, hiding the hills and valleys, the sharp corners, the signature of the land. Hiding squinted eyes and thin smiles and hints of movement that otherwise would have been invisible, just above the horizon.

You wouldn't have known, as an outsider looking in, but above the ground, a loft hung bolted to the underside of the sky. A loft made of the same abysmal black as everything else was.

If you could have seen through the darkness, you'd have noticed the occasional murky glimmer from deep within the walls. Suggestions that something inside of it was alive, and at work. And if you could have seen through the darkness, you might even have been able to guess what he was doing. You might have been able to hear the pressing of buttons, the pulling of levers, the clickity clack of fingers on a keyboard, and the muttering of half formed words. You might have been able to smell smoke billowing just under the surface and wondered what, of the things there, was worth hiding.

If not for that darkness, you'd have seen a vaguely humanoid shape emerge from the door to the loft. You'd have seen him step out onto the beginnings of a catwalk that weaved through the mind, highways forged out of metal and madness. The walk spread for infinite miles, looming above the ground below, an endless expanse of empty space.

He perched his hands on the catwalk’s railing and looked down. Tried to make sense of the scattered activities of his fellow headmates. From below, he appeared black on black, a silhouette whose shape was ever changing, no single feature stagnating long enough for anyone to have caught more than a glimpse.

He called himself the Master Plan.

“We talked about doing an overhaul of the mindscape… Any suggestions before I start moving things?”

Eli was the first one to lift his head, running his tongue over a pair of fangs before speaking. “Moving what? Your loft isn't going anywhere. Alpha’s probably never going to leave the basement. I'm the only one on the ‘ground floor’ with a room, and it's not even a room! It's just a designated zone where hordes of shadows sprites like to congregate. It's not corporeal, you can't move it.”

It sounded like a challenge. Plan quirked his brow, only for as long as it took him to find inspiration.

Meanwhile, Eli wasn't done. “Everyone else is just kind of groping around in the dark. No landmarks, no landscape, nothing to--nothing that--”

From some undetermined location in the darkness beyond Eli’s “not a room”, Nomad finished his sentence. “Nothing which would ground one to their surroundings.”

It struck him, belatedly, that Nomad’s words had been a pun, but before Eli could respond, Plan had already raised his hands and gathered what energy was in them, ready to make his move. The drone of angry machines fueled by roaring steam pipes reached their ears, presumably from inside the loft. It had never been clear exactly what made the mindscape what it was, but it was clear that whatever it was, the Master Plan held dominion over it.

With a flick of his wrists, the shadows circling around Eli’s head were pulled out of formation, tugged in one direction and then another by invisible strings; dancing puppets that only knew one song. Plan stretched his arms wide and the entire scape resonated with a daunting chorus: clanging metal and unrecognizable voices. He held a remote control that no one could see. A power over their shared mental space that no one could understand.

From his spot on the catwalk, lodged in the sky, he made Eli’s “designated zone” spread to two dozen times its original size. It was as if he held a remote control that no one saw. A power over their mental space that no one understood. Shadow's licked at the air, now far away. What they revealed was an opening in the darkness that almost looked like light.

For the first time, everyone could see everyone, revealed for what they were. Strangers shambling through an empty eternity.

Still holding the railing like a set of reins, Plan sorted Eli’s face out of the crowd. “What was it that you said about moving shadows?”

Footsteps echoed like gunshots in their newly broadened scape. Plan, slouched forward with his hands in his pockets, made his way to the ground floor, as if to say, “Look at me, bringing myself down to your level. Let's make something together.”

A tunnel opened up in the ground, not far from Plan’s feet. Metal hinges screamed, and a figure emerged from within. “All this open space is well and good, but we need our own rooms. Places we can have and hold and hide in.”

Eli nodded in his brother’s direction. “Alpha, finally decided to join the party?”

Plan’s gaze had shifted to the horizon. “You're right. But we'd need so much space, so much maneuverability. For a cluster of minds that never stop creating… What way would we have of keeping up with what one another was creating, making it all fit together into a three dimensional space? Without getting hopelessly lost in the process?”

“It doesn't have to be that complicated,” said Jude, who had otherwise gone unnoticed. “If we set this slot of land up as the base, we can layer as many alternate realities as we want on top of it. They can all exist at the same time, right next to each other, without interfering with one another. Easy enough for you to keep track of, with a measure of privacy for whoever wants it.”

Plan’s expression condensed into a frown, gears turning behind his face. “We'll need gateways of some kind. A way of allowing each of you a personalized method of entering your own rooms. A method of organizing it all in a way that can be visualized from any part of the mind, by any of its inhabitants. Ensuring that no one enters anyone else's reality by mistake. Doors with their own keys.”

“What are the doors gonna look like?” Domino asked.

Scattered silence followed. Despite sharing a mind and a body, the members of the system didn't have a lot in common. They weren't even the same species. Architectural design wasn't exactly the kind of subject that made collaboration easy.

Ideas spiraled into the air and became clouds of thought, reaching for the highest layers of the upper consciousness, far beyond sight.

Static that played on a loop from speakers unseen was overshadowed by a subtle melody weaving its way between stacks of cumulonimbus.

From one corner of the mindscape, a little blonde head lifted and big blue eyes scanned the horizon, as though certain that the song had been written specifically for her.

She padded across the featureless black ground and knelt beside the figure of another child. His hands were buried wrist deep in the ground. Searching for something?

He lifted his head to look at her and moved to open his mouth, but was stopped by the web of string that had sewn his lips together. She understood him anyway. Partially-formed bits and pieces of thought were visualized above their heads as a scrambled collage.

“There's something under the ground. It's really big, spread out all over the place,” she said, pointing to get Plan’s attention. “But he says it's stuck.”

He was almost glaring now. Not at Ghost. No, he seemed frustrated at the idea that he might be missing something.

He stooped down and ran one palm over the air directly above the surface of the ground, going for a less hands-on approach than Brenn had. The rest of them were fixated on the spot just beneath his fingers, and as he clenched them into a fist, curiosity rewarded them. A set of mangled roots emerged from the dirt, and the ground around them was displaced, shifting upward in a way that suggested that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

“Who planted that?” Oliver asked.

Plan didn't answer.

Master Plan grew entire trees from the horde of roots interlocked beneath them. Most everyone in the system chose a tree and nurtured it to full size, building each one into something as unique as its owner. They functioned as literal grounding techniques, as well as doors.

Ghost’s tree had a wooden toy chest growing in the space between two branches. She was a 5 year old kid and it suited her. Aside from serving as an actual toy chest, when opened, it also formed a kind of mental wormhole. All she had to do was hop in and be ready to fall.

Nomad’s tree had a thick trunk and, at its top, the tree's branches spread out in such a way that the center had formed into the shape of a bowl. It held a small body of water, and its reflective surface linked it to another world that Nomad could visit whenever he wanted to, just by diving in.

Oliver’s tree appeared to be a normal willow, other than the fact that one of its branches was actually a lever that could be pulled into place to reveal a fissure in the surface that opened into a fully sized door. The shape and location of this lever changed every time the door was opened, to keep outsiders out. He was a bit of a hermit.

Brenn’s door, though built plainly into the trunk of his tree, required the repetition of a specific tune before it could be opened. One of the tree’s branches curved down in front of the door at arm's length, with piano keys carved, perfectly, out of its surface. Brenn, a mute who was obsessed with the power of musical expression, had only to play three notes to unlock his door--his name.

Domino’s tree didn't seem to have any kind of security system built into it. It simply employed a series of doors; small doors built into progressively larger ones. As a polymorph, she required entryways of all shapes.

Deth had pulled a slice of bark away from the base of his tree--just far enough away that he could slip into the narrow space between. Somewhere inside was a similar break in time and space that allowed him access to all kinds of places, but most often, he preferred to rest directly behind the bark, quietly watching the rest of the mindscape.

Lorys's tree wasn't so much a tree as a bush, with a large pet door in front. This was, of course, because Lorys was a man who had been reincarnated into the form of a wolf.

Some of them resisted.

“I'm still not leaving my basement,” Alpha said, from below ground.

Jude attempted to reason with him. “C’mon, Alpha,” he said. “Plan made you a tree and everything.”

It stood towards the western edge of the scape, and Plan was still playing with the way the leaves had arranged themselves on its upper branches.

“I like it down here, it feels…” He wanted to tell them that it felt safe, down there, with the heat of the furnace gliding off of his back and a familiar feline curled around his feet while he played his organ. He didn't want to sound human. He certainly didn't want to live with them.

“We had a theme going,” Plan said, and stepped back to survey his work, tilted his head as though judging the balance in a photograph. His words were noncommittal, more so than the words he didn't say aloud: “We had a theme and you're ruining it.”

Maybe out of spite more than anything else, Alpha reacted; appeared at the door to the basement and laid eyes on the tree. Lifted one hand and pulled. The sight of it wasn't entirely unlike watching a mime pull on a rope that wasn't there. Watching a jedi padawan try a tad too hard.

“What are you doing?!” Nomad cried, climbing out of the pond in his tree, still dripping wet. “You're killing nature!”

Alpha’s eyes glowed red. “I'm fixing it.”

His tree began to shake, wood cracking and giving way as its trunk began to bend down. Some of its roots snapped, and the ones that didn't curled inward. The trunk itself arched toward the ground in the shape of an inverted U. It slid into place along the floor of Alpha’s tunnel, where its leaves withered to dust.

He brought one fist down to his core and opened it, palm spread skyward. The trunk of the tree molded into the shape of a set of stairs leading right to his doorstep. At the mouth of the tunnel, a mess of roots obscured the entrance, but the onlookers could all hear Alpha ascend his newly installed staircase and as he approached the surface, that mess untangled for long enough to let him through.

“Better?” he asked.

He wasn't the only one to resist. Jude politely declined Plan’s offer, preferring to wander the forest on his own. He was the “host” after all, the one who spoke to most outsiders, the one who went to work and did the groceries and went to doctor’s appointments. He had to be in tune with what the others were doing. He had to be ready to front on a moment’s notice. He couldn't afford a world of his own that wasn't directly adjacent to the one outside, like the mindscape was. But while that was a reasonable choice, the scape’s resident demon infestation (Eli and Grubbs) resisted with motives that weren't as clear.

“We'll just hang out over here,” Eli had said, sticking to the edge of the forest; the small strip of land between the tree line and the beginning of the shadow wastes. The area beyond the mindscape, where Eli’s shadow sprites had been delegated to swarm aimlessly and obscure what lay beyond.

The wastes seemed impossible to navigate, but then, no one really needed to. They were all fairly content with the forest they'd been given and the loft hanging above their heads. It seemed natural enough that some places, like the upper consciousness and the deep subconscious (the areas encompassed by shadow) wouldn't just be available for exploration on demand.

Not long after the mindscape’s intensive remodeling, someone started popping in and out of view, partially visible from within the shadows. Eli saw him first. A tall, lanky type. Straight purple hair. Carried boyish charm in his pockets, and wore makeup to match. He seemed to drift close to the mindscape’s edge, and then back away again, not quite ready to be found, but teasing the idea of it.

Nobody but Eli seemed to care. It wasn't entirely uncommon for fragments beyond the scape to show themselves long enough to be seen, perhaps long enough to make a passing comment.

Master Plan was in charge of who was allowed in. His word was final, and he hadn't chosen to speak up on the matter. But Eli wasn't happy with that. He respected Plan’s authority. He'd earned that much, by this point. But Eli reserved his right to investigate what little he could. So, again and again, he found himself hovering at the shadows’ edge, peering into the wastes, calling to what might lay beyond and waving to get its attention.

Jude watched him with curiosity. The rest ignored what they saw as futile.

Until the one beyond the shadows began to respond.

The outsider was standing there, smiling at him. Waving, like it was nothing. He'd disappear back into obscurity and then reappear, a few steps ahead of where he'd been before.

He'd appear masculine one moment, feminine the next. In jeans and a jacket, then in a dress and heels, then in a button down, a bow tie and a flowing skirt. He carried a suitcase in his hands, and the shit eating grin on his face suggested that there was something fantastic on the inside of it.

The rest of the system was beginning to gather, suddenly curious.

The outsider’s grin faded and he pointed through the crowd. Behind them, Plan stood, expression characteristically blank. “Pherris. His name is Pherris.”

Eli’s line of vision bounced back and forth between them. “Pherris?”

“He--actually, he seems to be juggling pronouns here. Not sure which ones to pick, perhaps? No...more like… he… she… uses both?”

Plan was accessing stray bits of information from within the wastes. Something that only he had the ability to do. Latching onto new information and stringing it together into statements of fact.

He figured it out at the same moment that they did. Felt it, a truth whispered in the farthest reaches of the upper consciousness, while they saw it, in the gaunt look of the outsider’s body, her grayed out eyes and pale lips.

“She's undead.”

A cold hand reached out of the writhing mass of shadow sprites. Eli grabbed hold and pulled. They tumbled out onto the grass and she struggled to find her footing. “S-Sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to…” Her voice was a hoarse whisper, and if her body hadn't been dead, she probably would have been blushing.

“How did you die?” they later asked. It was the obvious, most pressing question. Most of the system members held a distinct identity with its own context and origin. But she could only offer an apologetic shrug. She had no memory of her previous life.

“I'm pretty sure that I used to be a necromancer… Ironic, huh? But that's it. I don't know what my life was like, why it ended, why I'm not lost within the deep subconscious, a rotting corpse of memory, fading into nothing.”

On the catwalk above, Jude turned to face the Master Plan. “Do you know?” he asked. “About her life, I mean?”

He didn't answer right away, which didn't bode well.

“C’mon, there must be something out there in the wastes to tell us where she came from.”

“There isn't. Anywhere. I've checked and double checked and triple checked. Whatever thought patterns she's made of, I have no idea where she came from or what her origins are.”

“Well, she must have originated somewhere in the mind.

“... Are you sure?” He retreated to the loft and closed the door in Jude’s face when he tried to follow.

For days, Plan’s main focus was sifting through the neural network, searching for any shred of data that might shed light on the situation.

Meanwhile, Pherris settled into life in the mindscape. She was given her own tree, but was at a loss as to how to reach her room.

When Eli came to investigate, she was kneeling at the base of the tree, running her fingers down roots that spread like veins into the grass. He poked his head out from behind the trunk, eyeing her for a moment. “S… where's the door?”

“What?” she squeaked, not having seen him until he spoke.

“The door. Isn't that the point of the trees? Gateways to our own dimensions. Privacy and freedom of expression and all that good shit.”

“Oh… I… I just feel like a door would be too… direct? I feel like I used to be very good at that magic stuff. I can sense it, resonating through this tree. Life. What feeds all white magic. I… don't have it anymore. It's not fair. I don't remember being a witch, but… I miss it.”

“You're right, that blows.”

She stared at her hands, struggling to hold onto her past, a finely orchestrated web of sights and sounds. Left to weave a tapestry using the few strings of thought she had left.

“But…” Pherris lifted her head, brows furrowing. “But white magic isn't all that's out there. The living aren't the only ones capable of accessing the supernatural. There are some nonliving entities capable of tapping into sources of energy other than their own bodies…” Her wandering eyes landed on Eli. “Like demons.”

He froze. “What?”

“I remember… I was swimming in darkness and I saw you there. No soul, no humanity. Dead, according to the laws of nature. Dead, and very much alive.”

He stood, resisting the urge to back away. Unsure as to where this conversation was heading.

If she noticed his skepticism, she didn't show it. “You use magic, right? That floaty thing you do. I've seen it.”

“I… If that's magic, then I don't know how it works. I don't know how I do it.”

She reached out to him. “I bet I could figure it out.”

He grabbed her wrist and bared his fangs. “But you won't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm no one’s lab rat.”

“But you have so much untapped potential. There are so many things you could do, if you only knew how…”

The growl in the back of his throat faded, slightly. “... what do you mean?”

“Magic is a very versatile craft. Once you have a source of power and know how to use it, there are few limits on what can be done. All that is required of you is that you be willing to learn.”

He turned this idea over in his head a few times, examining it.

Pherris searched the expression on his face and grinned. “You could do almost anything.”

“Don't tempt me.”

“... said the demon.”

Her grin was contagious, and it tugged at the edges of his mouth. His body relaxed and he released his grip on her arm; couldn't help but consider the implications of what she was telling him.

The mindscape was non physical, yes, but it was also under the control of the Master Plan. Anyone couldn't just do as they pleased. Their rooms were the exception to that rule. They offered a space in which system members could do whatever they wanted, however they wanted, with as much space as they wanted. The catch, of course, being that their rooms were completely isolated from the mindscape. Isolated from the space they shared. The one that mattered. The rooms that Plan offered them were empty promises. A game. And that was why Eli had refused the offer.

But Pherris wasn't from the mind. Not even Plan knew where she'd originated.

If she could teach him how to tap into a power that the Master Plan himself couldn't interfere with…

“Let's do it.”

The next day, the system had a new addition. Plan and Jude spoke in hushed tones after the stranger showed up, having emerged from the wastes entirely unnoticed by the rest of the system. They waited for the others to catch on. Waited for the show to start.

“I've been catching bits and pieces of information about him for the last day or so. But with Pherris still so new, I figured it might be best to hold off on a system wide announcement until I was certain he'd be joining us. And then, he was just… here.”

Jude tried desperately to read his face, but it was an amorphous silhouette that cycled through a handful of different shapes for every second that he looked at him.

“Who is he?”

“He's from the mind. I'm sure of that. But… I didn't piece him together. Again, I didn't invite him here. Name's Krowen. He's blind, but…”

“What is he?”

“He's composed of anger, but… nothing like Eli’s. Eli filters the system’s anger in the moment. He helps them vent. This one… I don't know if there's anything in him but pain.”

“That's what you said about Ghost.”

“This feels… different. His anger isn't the same kind of anger as any of ours. This is rage, spawned by much older and much stronger catalysts.”

“Like what?”

Plan shook his head and marched past him. “If this is handled correctly, I won't have to tell you.”

The members of their system recognized, one by one, that someone even newer than Pherris had come to town. She didn't say it, but seeing him sent a feeling of dread right to her stomach.

He wasn't speaking. No, he seemed to prefer aimlessly wandering through the forest. The system, which tended to welcome newcomers with open arms, met Krowen’s silence with silence of their own.

That night, magic was the last thing on Pherris’ s mind. She had begun to become increasingly aware of a kink in her neck that just wouldn't go away. When she reached back to run a hand up her spine, she felt a bump. A bump where one of her vertebrae had been displaced and pressed tight to the skin.

It must have crushed her windpipe. It must have damaged her spinal cord. It must have killed her.

When Jude saw it, he went knocking on the loft door. “Plan. Open up!”

No answer.

“I know you can hear me. I know you saw what I saw!”

He thought that, maybe, Plan had resolved to ignore him. Until the door swung open to reveal a silhouette superimposed over the brightly flashing control panel that hummed in the background.

“Earlier, when we spoke,” Jude said, “you mentioned that Krowen was blind. That he was blind and something else… What was the ‘something else’?”

Master Plan sighed, almost inaudible over the mechanical orchestra playing around them. “He’s blind, but he has an ability that compensates this loss. He can speak to the dead.”

They were laying down, nestled comfortably in bed, face half buried in a pillow, legs cocooned in a tangle of bedding.

The room was blurred out of focus by exhaustion but it didn't matter. Rays of light pouring down on a palette of yellow and white, none of it mattered. It was time to sleep. The familiar lull weighed them down, pulled them under the covers, and it all felt so warm, so comfortable, so inviting that--

They could hardly breathe.

Internal dialogue played in the backdrop of their fading consciousness.

“Can't breathe.”

“That's a bit worrying.”

“What do we do?”

“I don't know, can't we just finish falling asleep?”

“So… tired…”

“What if we suffocate in the night?”

“That probably won't happen.”

“But wouldn't that be a stupid way to die?”

“...”

So they sat up. Or tried to. Tried to push the covers back. Tried to roll off their face. Tried to move at all, really. But nothing happened. And lethargy only weighed down on them further. Until mild annoyance turned into panic.

And then the dream ended.

Their eyes popped open and they realized that it had all been the beginnings of a disturbing nightmare. That they were okay, in their physical body, in their physical room.

Plan settled down at the controls in his loft, hands dancing over the keys like lightning danced over the ground. Because this nightmare had felt different. This had to be something new…

Krowen had been given his own tree, but at the time, he'd simply burned it down and left a charred stump at the center of the forest.

Now, he huddled among its smoking roots and grinned. Plan felt it before he saw it.

“You.”

The whole system resonated with the strength of the accusation as he made it.

“You're doing this.”

He materialized in front of Krowen, arms folded, while the rest of them kept their distance. Krowen tried to stand, but Alpha molded a set of chains out of the darkness and wrapped them around the stranger, pinning him to the trunk with a force that shook the entire scape.

“Whatever the reason, stop,” Plan said, his words wearing a tone that held no room for defiance. “We need to sleep. It's been over 24 hours. What, a day and a half? 36? 40?”

He glanced at Alpha, who shrugged.

Krowen said nothing. Hardly suggested that he heard at all.

Plan sighed, strung out and on edge. “Okay, we're going back to sleep. Alpha, keep an eye on him. Eli, you're on high alert. Nomad, round up the littles. Lorys, patrol. Good night. The end.”

He trudged back up to his loft and slammed the door.

Less than 10 minutes later, they were there again. Laying in bed. Above them, a ceiling fan whirred and whirred, getting louder and louder as the need for oxygen became more and more desperate.

Again, they were forced awake by their own terror, and again, Plan found himself in front of the stranger with the grin plastered across his face.

He wanted to yell, he wanted to scream--if only because it might weasel an answer out of the troublesome newcomer.

But Eli was just as exhausted as the rest of them were. None of them had the strength to be angry.

So Plan decided to say what they were thinking. To vocalize their fears, in the hopes that it'd set them down a path towards resolution.

“You murdered Pherris.”

Almost immediately, images flashed above her head. A nondescript but very humanoid figure loomed above the bed from their dreams. And there was an inescapable feeling of helplessness as he leaned over her, laid his hands on her body. Drained the blood from deep gashes in her arms. Wounds that manifested themselves now, on her undead body, as carefully stitched scarlines. Wounds that painted the white sheets red, like roses.

It was why she couldn't move, couldn't speak. Why every part of her seemed to be fading into nothingness. She was on the verge of death, and he just couldn't wait to finish the job.

She was taking too long. Maybe it was the will to live. Tendrils of magic pumping life through her veins while she still had it.

So he reached down, took her neck in his hand, pulled her from the bed, lifted her into the air, palm cupping her spine, and snapped it.

“So help me, you will not be allowed to tear this system apart. I'll kill you if I have to, and if you have the nerve and the strength to come back, I'll kill you again. I'll kill you over and over and over and over again if it means keeping this system running.”

He said it, but even as he said it, Plan knew that it wouldn't matter. For as long as Krowen kept coming back, Plan was wasting his time. Providing a temporary answer to a long term problem. That wasn't going to cut it. Not this time.

He needed to turn a curse into a blessing.

The system was in lockdown. Sleep wasn't working. Every time they tried, nightmares wrapped further around the mindscape. Thick vines; thorns that latched onto everything they touched.

Plan wandered endlessly across the catwalks in the sky, muttering to himself, muttering things that ended up making it to the outside, to those beyond the system.

“How did he even get inside?”

“Pherris. She was a decoy. When she came to the system, I focused most of my energy on learning who she was and supervising her transition to life in the mindscape. The mystery of where she'd come from and how she'd died was enough to… to distract me from… the real threat…”

“A primordial archdemon. Meant to embody the subconscious mind’s darkest desires, bred from the conscious mind’s worst memories.”

“I had theorized at the eventual formation of an entity like this. We--they--they have so many bloody, twisted, self deprecating, emotionally cannibalizing thoughts; cropping up in the mind all the time. I had to put them somewhere. So I cast them to the bottom of the subconscious mind where they became an unchecked mass of fear and hate. It was so easy. Loading them into the dumbwaiter, pulling the lever, saying goodbye. Thought I was saving everyone… It festered there, congealed into personhood, became… him. It was naive of me to think that I'd solved the problem simply because I could no longer see it. Now, it's back. Locking it in the dungeon of our mind won't work. I should have known that.”

“But… how did a fragment crawl out of the subconscious mind on his own and formulate a plan for infiltrating the mindscape? That's more than impressive… That's…”

The Master Plan froze in place, realization washing over him, baptizing him in dread.

“He had an accomplice, and I know who it is.”

Master Plan stepped into the elevator built into his loft and pressed one of two buttons. The box shook in it's frame, and he wondered briefly why machines in the scape needed upkeep. Why his elevator groaned in response to use, why the lights flickered. Everything else in the scape was the manifestation of the system’s thoughts and feelings and--oh.

He began to sink.

The mind was like an ocean. Above the surface, thoughts became actions, became reactions, became realities. It was where system members went to front.

The upper layers of the “water” constituted the most active regions of the conscious mind. Short term memories, fleeting thoughts.

Far enough below the surface that it wasn't effected by rippling waves and wind, the mindscape was a veritable Atlantis. It was where the system’s members lived, interacted with one another, spent their downtime, all while sheltered from the outside world.

If you went much farther down than that, you found yourself in the mind’s Marianas Trench. The deepest depths that the ocean had to offer. The subconscious mind.

That was where Plan was headed.

The elevator came to a rickety stop and the doors opened on a cold, smokey darkness.

There were things strewn about the ruins of the mind. A purple bicycle with pom poms glued to the ends of the handlebars. A toy dinosaur that had had his tail gnawed off. A red hat, covered in moth holes. A doll with curly brown hair.

Half faded images came in and out of focus, projected onto the shadows in the distance. Images of the family, the friends. Images of the used-to-be family and the used-to-be friends. Eyes scrawled out in angry black ink. Repressed. Buried deeper than the bottom of the ocean. Forgotten forever--or, that was the intention.

Above it all, roots hung in the air. Hopelessly entangled, reaching ever further upward. It wasn't a stretch to think that they might reach as far as the mindscape. Somehow, Plan wasn't surprised, and he was fairly certain that he knew, now, who had planted them.

He was there, perching on a pile of garbage. A faint silhouette on an already colorless exterior. Ever changing. A thousand faces in one.

Plan stopped at the foot of the pile and met eyes with his twin. “Master Disaster. It's been a long time.”

Disaster glanced up from what he'd been inspecting. A ragged, homemade “book”. Newspaper articles and journal pages taped together between two pieces of cardboard. “For Julia, my gem,” it said.

He set it aside and took a few steps down the pile, knocking memories free from their graves and sending them rolling down the hillside, coming to a halt around Plan’s feet.

When he reached the bottom and the two found themselves at eye level, Plan lifted a hand, to shake his brother's hand. It was a bid for formality, and it failed. Plan was the personification for association, order, reason. Disaster personified dissociation, disorder, chaos.

“You would know better if you visited once or twice a decade,” said Disaster, tactfully avoiding the outstretched palm. He turned and led Plan deeper into the subconscious.

Plan considered asking the question he'd come to ask, but he already knew the answer, and his brother knew that he knew.

“You fashioned that child out of all of the worst memories hiding in the deepest corners of the mind. He's toxic waste, leaking pain and suffering everywhere he goes. So, how do we clean it up?”

“I hope that you aren't surprised by these developments. We both know that something like Krowen has to exist. This mind is broken. Not having an entity like Krowen, forced to embody the worst of the damage… is a luxury. A luxury that we can no longer afford.”

“But having him so close to the others--”

“Is a good thing.”

Plan fumbled for words, not used to being on this side of the discussion. “Why?”

He tripped over something wedged into the sea floor. Would have fallen, if Disaster hadn't steadied him in time. Looking back, he saw that it was a small toy lock box. It had rattled when knocked out of place by Plan’s foot. Filled with childhood secrets.

“There's so much down here that… I never thought I'd see again.”

“Foolish not to stay in touch with this part of the mind. Clearly, it has just as much bearing on the system as anything else does.”

“And you? What have you been doing down here all this time?”

Disaster looked away. “You don't remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Did you ever consider that of all the things you cast into the abyss, over all these years, I was the first?”

It wasn't until Plan was alone again, in the elevator, rising slowly, that he received his answer.

It came from above the stormy surface of the water. From another system entirely.

He had been so focused on saving the system from Krowen’s wrath that, possibly, the most obvious solution had sat unnoticed for weeks.

“...what if he's the one who needs saving?”

If you could see through the darkness, if you could see into the innerworkings of those within, if you could see anything but the pale, human face, the hazel eyes, the glasses, the short, red undercut, the septum ring--if you could, you'd see the smile on Plan's face.

But you can't.

#multiplemediamonth #multiplicity #plurality #did #osdd #osdd1 #osdd1a #osdd1b #traumagenic system #mindscape

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