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Much of what we call art caters to an inner desire for comfort. Yet the most memorable artists created works which disturbed the psyche of the viewer. That is why the most important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone by questioning the society's values can force it to change.
-archives of the Missionaria Protectiva, unknown author*

Something had welled up in Sheeana in the past few weeks. It was an accumulation brought about by too much time spent around people whose secrets etched lines on sleepless faces. The mood had grown tense and the ship was starting to feel closed in. She knew she would have to express what she felt on this sooner or later. It was either art or snarky commentary that was sure to earn her enemies.

Thus she was down in the city with lasgun and crysknife, carving wood. It was far cruder than the shaper gloves she was used to, and she had not the time to create the traditional Fremen wind sculpture but she would have to make do. The beam sliced the heavy Elaccan fogwood with an impunity not known to any earlier carving instruments. The crysknife took care of any spurs. The sandworm's tooth knife was a finer carver than any before her had been blessed with. The cloying smell of burnt fogwood filled the chamber.

Gradually a figure took place. Born under eye and hand, emerging fully from her roiling brain like Athena, was a humanoid figure. Atop a deep bed of blue sand, he struggled on his stomach in an arch-backed pose. He was half sunk into this psuedo-ocean.

And emerging from the sand all around him were arms, frozen perpetually in the act of reaching for him. They emerged from the sand, their fingers open, questing.

It was an ambiguous sculpture. Was the man drowning or swimming? Was he sinking or emerging? Were the arms reaching for him to pull him under or to support him? To rescue him? The answer would depend on the viewer, and they would surely project their own psychic situation onto it.

It was a distressing piece, not comforting, but she hoped one that would provoke something within the watcher, stir parts of themselves they had not known to activate.

A quick wash of paint (grey for the man, vivid red for the arms), and it was done. She let out a sigh, contented as she felt herself relax from the trance of creation. Time gradually began to reenter its normal phase and she lost her tunnel vision. That was when she realized she wasn't alone.

*[OOC: quote is actually by Samuel R Delany]

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"I'm the one who should apologize. I intended to notify you first, but I wasn't expecting you here." The words sounded oddly dead to his ears, as if the memories and fantasies drifting across his imagination consumed his entire attention span.

"Should I return later?"

"No, I was just finishing." She listened closely. There was a flat affect to his register. Human voices got that way when they were too exhausted for the normal social tones.

He's already been exposed to Voice. I risk weakening us by helping him. Yet there is always the outside enemy to consider. A mind taken over by this Nightmare King is surely an Abomination as much as Alia will become.

"You are stressed. You haven't slept enough. Something is weighing on you." She stood and crossed a few steps nearer to him.

Sheeana's intense scrutiny was difficult to withstand for long, but he managed to attempt eye contact. Billy had come to seek her assistance in these matters, but it bothered him that his deteriorating condition was so obvious. Someone he worked with would start worrying soon, no doubt, if they weren't preoccupied with their own nightmares.

"Affirmative on all counts. I've tried to resist the dark ideations stemming from my dreams on my own, but it was considerably easier at home with an external, far weaker enemy and well-established support system. Here, I need to approach the problem from another angle. There is no external nightmare force that I can defeat---I need to fight from within, and I don't know how."

It wouldn't have been obvious to anyone but a Bene Gesserit. She was pleased by his honest self evaluation.

"Ai. You are removed from your former support system. I understand." A Reverend Mother carried her support system with her like a hermit crab with its shell. "There is psychological ease to fighting an outside enemy. Rulers have known this for millenia...As i'm sure you noticed on the mission. So I will equip you with a few tools, though it will be your responsibility to figure out how to use them." She gestured at the grass in front of the hotel. "Sit." She did likewise, crossing her feet in lotus. "Are you ready?"

Billy sat obediently and mimicked her pose, mind reeling with wild guesses about the nature of the process. For this to work, though, he guessed he had to quiet his mind. He exhaled, sweeping aside the uncertainty and focusing as though on a difficult problem.

"I am."

Before the Litany, before anything else, she was curious about one thing. "What did the sculpture look like to you?"

His eyes cracked open, and his face took on the solemn look once more. "I saw a man. He was drowning, struggling to stay afloat. The hands were the forces attempting to pull him under."

There. That was the profile of his fears, the thing that had made him haggard and desperate for help. "Fearful things, right? Fear is the mind killer. It is the thousand little deaths that brings total obliteration. I must face my fear, I must let it pass over and through me. I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where it has gone, only I will remain." She emphasized the most important part of the Litany, the foundation upon which it would all be built.

As she spoke, he silently mouthed each sentence of the recitation, mulling over the words when she'd finished. I must face my fear. I must let it pass over and through me. And there it was, right in front of him. Something he'd known long before he'd been rescued from Earth.

"Every night, I've either fled or failed to act," he realized. "No longer."

"There is nothing wrong with fleeing or refusing to act, which is in itself an action. But they must be decisions made with a clear, conscious mind. Now..." She readied a small bit of Voice. Subtle, barely detectable. "Tell me what's really been troubling you. In your dreams."

This advice was internalized too. Hopefully, with this, he would be better prepared to clear his mind.

A confession came tumbling out of him effortlessly, helped by the fact that he would have explained this to her willingly without any subtle help. "On my former planet, I wasn't the only person with the fighting abilities I mentioned before. There were nine of us, though the group started with five. Our enemy, seeking to destroy us with the best weapon she knew of, created a sixth warrior under her command."

"He was an otherwise normal teenager just like us, but the evil forces gave him power that the five of us couldn't match. He severed our link with our mentor, destroyed our weapons, and nearly succeeded in killing our leader. Eventually, with all of our skills combined and some help from our mentor, we broke the spell and the sixth warrior became an integral part of our group."

"I was concerned about the extent of her power back then, but I didn't truly fear what might happen until she temporarily cast the same spell on me. I was completely powerless to resist, and in just one minute she caused me to surrender one of our most powerful weapons, disable our technical assistant, and box my team into a situation where we were forced to surrender our powers. Only our sixth warrior's intervention saved us from the damage I caused."

"At the time, I uneasily set those experiences aside. My fear lay dormant for a while, then intensified. Shortly after I awakened here, the Yeerk took control of some crew members' minds. If their plot had succeeded, Stacy's navigation data would have been destroyed and we would never be able to restore our worlds. I rushed to help the others stop them, but at the same time I wondered what would have happened if the Yeerk had taken control of my mind. If my technical knowledge had been at their disposal, the others might not have been able to stop the machine in time."

"And that brings me to the present. For the last few nights, my nightmares have been full of uncertainty. The first night, I watched as my friends from home witnessed the destruction of their town, defeated and powerless. I tried to comfort them, but they were deaf to my presence. They were staring at an evil warrior like us as he surveyed the wreckage with satisfaction. I couldn't see or hear him clearly."

"The second night, I walked alone into the woods. A dark presence was there, causing the forest to wither and die. Beyond the shadows, I heard the frightened voices of my friends. Then, I was attacked. I lunged to defend myself, accidentally stabbed an innocent creature, and...that's when I realized that the evil presence the forest was reacting to was me."

That, he thought, was probably far more information than she needed. Wasn't he supposed to be working on being concise?

It was a lucky thing then she'd spent time enough around a Mentat to observe how he went right for the most pertinent parts of any data stream.

"And you fear not only this happening again but the sensation of being that puppet. What was it like? Describe it for me as well as you can." She was probably setting herself up for another teal deer trampling there.

Luckily for her, this teal deer is somewhat lighter. Again, he launched into the story.

"At the moment the spell was cast, I felt my consciousness being pushed away from control, as though by a wall of fire. My temporary queen's voice latched onto my mind, locking me in chains as her puppet. I did as she commanded without resistance, because there was no other option. The chains drew me forward as a marionette on strings, twisting my limbs and tongue however they wanted to. And I saw everything as it happened. I was forced to watch as betrayed my mentor and friends, ridiculing their stupidity all the while." He winced slightly, remembering his mentor's shocked face from that invasion.

"Inside the trap, I was fighting for release. I tried to walk through the wall of fire and attack the chains several times, but I could never muster the strength to completely cross the wall. Then, once my queen had left my friends on the brink of disaster, the fire and chains vanished. I sat on the floor of the dungeon, left to contemplate the terrible things I'd done."

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