milliways_bar | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Agent Nein has decided that he likes the Bar. It's got better food than the commissary at Psychonauts HQ, for one thing. And the time-stop effect is very, very convenient at times.

Take right now, for instance: figuring out what's wrong with this psychometric metabolizer (a toaster-sized, critical piece of his Brain Tumbler) is going to take hours. If he holes up in his lab for hours, someone might come looking for him, and then he'd have to explain (a) why he isn't helping with the 2006 admissions screening for Whispering Rock, and (b) what he's doing with a Brain Tumbler.

In short: Man In Dark Suit with a mug of coffee the size of his head and a tableful of disassembled electronic gadget.

He could probably use a distraction.

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Gavroche stops to give his gadget an interested look.

"What've you got there?"

Somewhat distracted tone: "Psychometric metabolizer. It's, um, ..."

Nein trails off as he realizes that he has no idea how to explain what a psychometric metabolizer does in less than twenty pages of technobabble.

"... It's a key component of a piece of experimental apparatus that I am preparing, but unfortunately right now it doesn't work."

"It... digests... thoughts?" he hazards based solely on those two words, peering at it. "That's new."

"Not thoughts themselves, but the psychic radiation they induce. Digestion is not a terrible analogy, if you think of the rest of the apparatus as the body that needs the waves decomposed into fundamental components for further processing."

"I can explain better what the whole machine does: it takes a common psychic ability in my world, the ability to enter and navigate someone else's interior mental landscape, and turns it back on the subject. So they are exploring their own mental landscape. And it also enables me to monitor their progress from outside."

"Sort of a new method for therapy?" he asks, perching on a nearby chair.

"I am intending to use it for psychic training exercises, but ... those often do have a great deal in common with therapy. A practitioner of the psychic arts cannot afford to be in poor mental health, and rather too often I get students whose initial manifestation of the talent was traumatic in itself."

Gavroche considers this, then nods. "'Specially if they didn't have any chance to prepare for it. What sort of psychic arts do you have in your world?"

"There's a common set of abilities -- telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, that sort of thing -- that anyone with the basic talent can learn, and beyond that it's mostly determined by what people are good at imagining."

Nein goes on to rattle off some statistics about how common psychic talent is in his world, which unfortunately canon leaves completely unspecified. ;-)

Gavroche listens with open fascination to the unspecified statistics, then grins. "Your world sounds fun."

Sasha cannot argue with that! Even considering the pyrokinetic mountain lions. (Or the lake monster, which he doesn't know about yet.) Still, it is not his habit to grin.

"It can be dangerous, or frustrating, or both at times, but ... yes, I do rather enjoy what I do."

"What is your world like? I have the impression there is a great deal of variety represented here."

"Endless variety", he agrees. "I was born in France in 1822, but now I live in a hidden magical city under and around London."

Sasha starts to say something, then stops, then shakes his head, then tries again. "I was going to say we have nothing like that in my world, but for all I know there is a hidden city under and around London. I've run into plenty of strange things in my line of work, and it would hardly be a hidden city if everyone knew about it."

"How are you defining 'magic,' though? Psychic phenomena in my world have proved... natural, if that makes sense? Just as susceptible to scientific study and technological manipulation as, say, electromagnetism." He waves at the disassembled gadget by way of example.

"There's a lot of different things. Some of them would be a lot like your psychic arts - Opening, or telekinesis, that kind of thing, and the people who talk to rats... but there are vampires and there used to be an angel and a pair of assassins who could time travel, and I heard a story about a man stashing his life in an egg so he could come back when he was killed."

”That is quite a variety. I guess what I'm really wondering, though, is, how often do you have to answer ‘how does that work?’ with ‘...it just does’?”

"...most of the time", he admits with a crooked smile. "There might be a better answer for some of the Talents, but I don't know it."

"That's very different from how it is in my world, then."

He doesn't sound bothered by this. It is another curious fact to file with the others. Milliways is nothing if not horizon-expanding.

"...I must say, being able to store your life in an egg and come back later if you get killed sounds very useful."

"You can explain how most things work in your world, then?" He nods. "Very useful indeed, but nobody seems to really know how he did it."

"We can, and it's been tremendously useful. Gadgets like this wouldn't have been possible otherwise. Also, when students have trouble with a particular thing they should be able to do, we can usually figure out why. I'm hoping that this project will make that even easier."

"'Cause you can go into their mind - or put them in it - and work out where the block is?"

"Right, the idea is that by having them go into their own minds, instead of one of the instructors doing it, not only will they be able to work through the block, they'll learn more from the process -- having experienced it from both sides, as it were."

[OOC: Going to bed soon. Continue tomorrow?]

He nods. "And maybe in the future, they'll be able to help somebody else having the same problem."

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