#the viruses are their own enemy type alongside the usual ones

[duckapus]

Calvin’s Cannery and Cerebral Cyberspace

Two ideas I had for Psychonauts mental worlds.

Calvin’s Cannery is inside the mind of Dr. Calvin Marlin, a marine biologist and powerful telekinetic who’s been stuck in a lab at the bottom of the ocean alone for five years because his bosses are shit and it’s hard to argue worker’s rights when you’re living underwater and relying on supply deliveries and metal domes to stay alive. He’s found by Milla and Raz when they sense a psychic distress signal coming from his subconscious while on a completely different mission.

When they find him he’s become so wrapped up in his work through a combination of hyperfixation and mental breakdown that he doesn’t even notice there’s finally other people in front of him, so they go in to get him un-stuck. As the name implies, the mental world combines his love of fish and hatred of his thankless, literally-dead-end job into a sardine canning factory run by the very sardines that get canned there, with Raz and Milla entering via cans small enough that Raz finds them cramped and Milla...well, let’s just say it’s a very good thing that she’s an astral projection. Calvin’s inner self has gotten stuck inside the factory’s mechanisms, and to get him out the agents have to reach the control room and switch everything from automatic to manual.

Obviously this isn’t as simple as just walking through the factory floor, since the entire place has been warped into a deadly obstacle course that violates every OSHA regulation you can think of as well as several laws of physics. There’s also the Floor Manager, a hulking whale of a sardine who considers Raz and Milla employees and will can them both figuratively and literally if he catches them “slacking off,” which applies to pretty much every action you can take, so just don’t get caught. At the end of the level he’s the one who gets caught in the machines, specifically a food processor used to make canned tuna, and merges with it to become a boss I’m currently calling the Daily Grinder.

Afterwards Calvin tags along with the agents so he can escape the lab, quit his job, get some fucking therapy, and take legal action against the godawful company that left him to rot down there.

Cerebral Cyberspace is inside an Artificial Intelligence that serves as the main computer of a Psychonauts base where all the agents have mysteriously disappeared. Looking into those disappearances is what Raz and Milla’s mission was in the first place, and in order to continue the investigation they need to find the security camera footage between when they were last heard from and now. Unfortunately the computer is infested with viruses that make it impossible for them to find anything, and it could take hours or even a full day for Sasha to talk Milla through fixing it(since the three people actually there aren’t tech savy enough to do it on their own).

Raz ends up doing his own thing in the meantime and realizes that the computer has a mind of its own, so he decides to see if it counts enough as a mind for him to project into it. Turns out it does, so now he can find the footage and clear out the viruses from the inside. It has that futuristic white blue and chrome look that a lot of sci fi stuff has, and the AI(initially called Unit KL-C41905, then renamed to Kelsie), creates a little floating robot avatar so she can follow Raz around and help out. The boss of the area is the original virus, which has merged into Kelsie’s central processor and is holding the security camera files hostage.

Afterwards it’s revealed that the Psychonauts in the base were abducted by some notorious group of psychic villains that I haven’t come up with a name for yet, and it’s also revealed that while Raz was in there, his body, Milla and Calvin were also taken, stranding his astral projection in Kelsie’s mind. At least until she manages to rig up a temporary robot body for him to use while the two of them work together to fix this.