trans_9 | Here there be Shadows [open]

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Here there be Shadows [open]

For the first time since he'd arrived on this ship, Dustin found an empty Sensorium pod.

He'd been rather apprehensive about visiting them once he knew and understood what these devices were; a room that takes the mental images of the controller and manifests them into physical environments already seemed like a rather shifty concept, although surely it could be moderated by the controller in question, and with Stacy's built-in safety protocol it proved less of a problem than Dustin could otherwise discern.

Then again, Dustin's mind was very different from the minds of other crewmembers. Thus he remained apprehensive.

It was difficult to pinpoint why, exactly, he'd chosen now to settle into one of the pods--perhaps with all of the bomb scares, the off-planet chaos, his newfound job, just this whole situation in general--he needed to get his mind in order. Yes, that was it; with such an expansive subconscious, full of ideas and concepts and memories, one does find it necessary to sort through the mess every once in a while, if only to keep the eventual mania at bay. And though Dustin was capable of doing this without the help of artificial matter, he was still curious as to see how the Sensoriums would handle his mess of a brain.

Dustin at once found himself inside the blank walls of an unoccupied pod. It remained so as he closed the door behind him, glanced about, walked to the center of the room. It was all very quiet and surreal, in a sense that anything to him could be surreal at all, but you get the idea.

A tangent of thought flickered out of the corner of his eye. Dustin turned around to face it, but already it had disappeared.

Before he realized what was happening--and especially once he had--resulting thoughts flitted forth into the space, multiplying as he pondered over each one, spinning around the room like phantom strings of angel hair pasta, molding into theories, clumped and uncompleted, wherein they spawned pictures and memories for reference that, once used, danced into the background and slithered upon the floor, snatched by the next concept that required them. Soon the room was black with strands of content, most of it incomprehensible to the normal mind; views of colors and depth that should not exist, fourth and fifth-dimensional shapes that molded time at their whimsy, fleeting glances of infinity, nothingness, an infinity of nothingness. Disused memories reared and spat upon him images of blood and specters, phobias and emotions scattered the sea of textures and lunged at insecurities, hopes. The tangled masses of indefinable junk became dreams.

Overwhelmed, Dustin grabbed handfuls of his hair and, in a display of his famous maturity, angrily stamped his foot.

"ENOUGH!"

The whirlwind halted in a splash of violent colors, then crashed to the floor.

New commentaries were already beginning to spring up, but Dustin was prepared, silencing them before they spawned a new storm. It was like defragmenting a computer drive, he'd found; it would take quite a bit of concentration and time, but the end results would far outweigh the next few hours he spent essentially meditating, thinking of nothing other than what was in front of him and where to place it. Having the physical manifestations in front of him helped immensely in case of distractions--should any occur-and it helped to get a general sense of just how much crap was floating around in his head. Mountains of unsorted, twitching calculations were waiting with much impatience all around.

Dustin sighed and sat cross-legged in the center. This would take a while.

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Alex was not known for his awareness of his surroundings.

Alice was not known for knowing when to not bother someone.

Between the two of them, it was a shock that they hadn't intrupted someone's alone-time before now.

Alex walked in, Alice darting ahead of him to investigate Dustin. She hadn't had the chance while they were disabling the bombs, and so she didn't intend on passing the chance up now.

Of course, Alice running up to Dustin was what made Alex realize he was there. He whispered, "Alice! Alice! Get back here! No! Come!"

Alice was not giving up so easily. Really, all Alex needed to do was to turn around and start to leave, and Alice would follow, but it was clear who was the domanant rat here.

In the background, a tesseract danced over the piles of thoughts like a fourth-dimensional tumbleweed.

Dustin had adopted the lotus position, hands folded on his knees and eyes closed, balancing with an air and posture that, oddly enough, managed to make him look far lighter than usual, as if floating on the blank floor rather than falling into it. His steel gray overcoat had found its place as a pillow upon which he was sitting, revealing frail, relaxed shoulders; his mass of dark brown hair, normally ragged and heavy in the hallway lighting, had a certain weightlessness to it here, a softness and translucence uncanny. He was completely absorbed in himself and his task of mental sorting.

Thus, Alice went unnoticed for the time. As did Alex—the shrill whisper fell on ears currently listening to memories and thoughts, which played through the air in grainy strips of compact words and numbers and symbols, black in parallel, glowing like colored lenses at the right angles, wherein they fell into the designated piles upon the white floor and folded themselves neatly together.

Behind closed lids, Dustin's eyes were swimming as if in a dream.

Alex caught up to Alice and scooped her up into his arms. She didn't seemed too thrilled to be taken away from the person she had so wanted to investigate, but she obediently resigned herself to roam across Alex's shoulders.

Alex then stared around the sensorium in wonderment. His mind wasn't entirely sure what to do with all of these thoughts flowing around him, folding themselves neatly into piles.

Was he meditating?

Alex felt that he should probably leave, but he found himself rooted to the ground in awe.

It took a moment--and several curious thoughts, impeded by the faint heat radiating from the two small bodies nearby, subtle but present regardless of quantity--for the scenery to change. It was a sudden change, yet not immediately recognizable to the inattentive observer:

Someone was here. Scenarios of who it could be played out in stray tangents that flickered over the landscape, leaving shadows of their constructed scripts for Alex to watch should he catch them whilst they faded. In this corner there were the distant memories of a childhood long forgotten, an embrace he would never again experience yet always remember in whatever warped sense it became, the specters of his youth. And in that corner there were the other familiar ghosts, the textured rub of a small creature against his calf, the brilliant laugh displayed not in sound but in splashes of orange and gold and green that suggested the sound all on their own, a cold, trusting sort of reliance that could apply to any number of people both familiar to this location and to the one where he originated. And in that corner just opposite, like a tumor rising from the turmoil, smoke bubbled and crept in icy fingers towards the infinite ceiling, creating quick outlines of glowing, beady eyes that, however brief they showed themselves, remained imprinted along with a strong heat like a gust of hellish wind.

But all were abandoned in favor of a curious flash of indefinable nonsense, which, for the brevity of its stay, nonetheless managed to imprint what Alex may or may not recognize as his own semblance of being, coupled eerily with the notion that he was being watched.

Dustin had turned his head slightly and was looking up. His pupils were still in the process of acclimating; previously they had been nonexistent, leaving only the glassy circles of emerald green blankly staring into the whiteness that stared right back.

"Do you need something?"

Alex spun, trying to catch all that was changing about him, but it was impossible. Alex noticed the eyes and focused on it. They chilled him to his very core, though he knew that it was just an illusion. He was enraptured by the gaze until a flash of... he could tell in an odd way that it was himself, even though there were no words or images that really defined him in there. It was a sense of being that he actually was rather accustomed to viewing parts of the world in. If they weren't numbers and code strings, they were even more abstract, making them rather non-communicable. That way of thinking had always been a part of why he had trouble speaking with other people. That communication gap where he just couldn't express himself.

Then Dustin's voice cut through his thoughts. Alex looked down at him, rather frightened. No, he didn't need anything, though he had wanted to apologize for the other day. Still he wasn't quite capable of getting the words together in his head to express exactly what it was that he wanted to say.

"I-I... er, n-no, but..." Well, if Dustin could project that sort of thought into the sensorium, why couldn't he? He gave it a shot, and a sort of weak sense fluttered around him, the very thought was unsure of itself and it's own ability to form, but it expressed through a sort of sixth sense with the aid of colours and flashes of various images and scents that might not have meant exactly the same thing to Dustin as it did to Alex.

He frowned, sure that he had failed to communicate his regret for his attitude when they had first met, and that he was sensitive about the only thing he knew himself to be capable of, and that he really had just wanted to help that whole time, but he had a hard time being able to communicate well with other people, and that it tended to make him just feel worse about himself, and to feel angry, and that he really shouldn't have acted as he did, and that he should have just listened and not taken offence so easily. He, in his own form of thinking had actually done a perfectly fine job of projecting those thoughts, but that didn't mean that Dustin thought in the same matter as he did, even if his manner of thought was off from the average person's.

To try to make up for the perceived failure in communication, Alex stuttered, "I jus'... I suppose I wanted ta apologize for the way I acted the other day, there was lots wrong with it, and I really, well, s-sorry."

She had been shuffling by on her way to Engineering, humming in her tone deaf manner, random notes pulled incongruously and inharmoniously from thin air, when she heard his shout, and paused.

In that pause, she considered several things, not the least of which was the high potential for extreme irritation on his part, but in the end, some hitherto unknown--or maybe just unencouraged--urge won out, causing her lips to curl slightly as she changed direction, heading for the door from which she had heard him shout.

She is silent as she enters, glad to see his back facing her, and though she takes a few fractions of a second to examine their surroundings--incomprehensible to her, the machinations of his overwhelming mind being far beyond her, much as she might like to pretend to be on a level with him--she moves fairly quickly forward, not caring to delve this far into his thoughts uninvited. For all her speed of movement, though, she is silent, a skill she doesn't utilize much, but one she possesses all the same, until she drops to all fours and crawls the last couple of feet towards him, wrapping her arms around his waist very gently, pressing a kiss to his neck just above where his shoulder joins. She settles, pressing her forehead into the crook of his shoulder, remaining silent and present.

Meditating, meditating. Dustin was a silent figure, motionless where he sat in the center of the room, engulfed—literally—in his thoughts. They painted a fantastic portrait of his brain in all its organized complexity whilst they danced from corner to corner, displaying themselves in brief flashes of color and shapes before settling into their respective piles. From the simple, fleeting idea to the complex notions and desires, they marched relentlessly onward across the blank canvas.

And still Dustin was oblivious. Yoshimi had shown before that she could sneak up on him, and it wasn't like he was very aware of his surroundings at the moment anyways, thus he was pleasantly ignorant of her presence both in body and mind, as shown by the continuing fluidity of his organizing right up until—

A flash of surprise tinted the room deep with conflicting tones, each a different scenario that unfolded itself in an instant but, for Yoshimi's convenience, left a faint imprint against the quickly dissipating colors:

Was he being attacked? Glowing yellow eyes and a stitched face loomed overhead, fire and heat seared his face and burned at his ankles as he ran with the blueprints stuffed under his arm and backpack rattling with trinkets against his frail shoulders, fear, real fear blinded him everything other than survival and sadness— It was promptly discarded.

Who was it, then? Calculations of heat transference in relation to body size, body size in relation to average—and unusual—hand sizes of either gender, upon which proper correlations to people he knew were made. The various possibilities once again flashed forward, not in actual form but in related feelings and events, which spoke only in vague mumblings of abstract thought that might otherwise be incomprehensible, but displayed as Dustin's associations they almost defined themselves. Most of these were also discarded.

Yoshimi's apparition replaced the others, a steady transformation that asserted itself as she breathed down his neck. Each burst of heat energized the mass of color, feelings bubbled in with familiarity and, somewhere hiding in the center, intense longing and pleasure, intertwined with something else completely different and yet so well established that he had no way of describing it, and it had no way of describing itself, thus it became a pinprick of sweet nothings, a singularity that dragged in all the other colors and emotions and background noise into one fantastic maelstrom, growing steadily more concentrated, concentrated, until—

Two seconds after Yoshimi wrapped her hands around his waist, Dustin's eyes snapped open and his spontaneous train of thought imploded, scattered into beads, recognizable only in their shadows as they obediently filed into the directed categories. Their maker, thus satisfied, once again closed his eyes and tried to act apathetic.

As one might suspect from such an environment, this failed miserably.

"Are you looking for someone?" Dustin exhaled a slow, inaudible laugh, relinquishing a hand from his knee to draw against the one currently tangled around his thin waistline, whilst an ambient pulse made the nonexistent walls hum. Relaxed. He was oh so relaxed. It was an odd state to find him in.

"I was," she says, lifting her head to prop her chin on his shoulder, smiling a tiny little smile, "but I found him."

She had had her eyes closed for the few seconds it took Dustin to figure out who this person wrapped around--and essentially nuzzling--him was, so she is fairly oblivious to the epic spectacle she just missed. If she had seen it, she likely would have been awed at the incomprehensible complexity of his thought processes, and the sheer beauty of thought manifested in color and form in the space around them. As it stands, though, she's pretty satisfied with what she's got, pretty pictures or no.

If she were asked, right then, why she had abruptly stepped over whatever inane roadblock that had been keeping her from being affectionate, Yoshimi wouldn't have an answer at all. Something had compelled her to walk in here and hug him and kiss him, and she had done it, and that's really all that matters to her as she shifts her hand to twine her fingers with his, kissing the corner of his jaw with a growing smile, sensing his relaxation and responding to it with her own ease, using her free hand to tuck a bit of his hair behind a pointed ear.

"Hi," she says after a moment, her smile now audible, voice quiet.

There came a second laugh, rumbling softly through his neck and down his back like a contented purr absorbed from the live walls, which consequently had become a bit more hectic as should be expected from conscious thought, although what had been sorted stayed dutifully in place and the rest that appeared were far more orderly than when he first arrived. At any rate they were all directed towards a similar subject now, which Yoshimi might recognize, albeit from a slightly...skewed point of view. Tendrils of emotion like sparks from a live wire tumbled through the floor in random bundles, bringing with them inner warmth and the rhythm of a heartbeat or...well.

These temptations were surprisingly well controlled, just like everything else in his mind currently--not that this stopped him from nuzzling into her affections, tilting his chin to an acceptable angle wherein, upon letting Yoshimi have her way, turned on her with a quirk of the neck and a fleeting brush of his crooked nose against her forehead, breathing away her stray fringe of vibrant pink and replacing it with a tender kiss.

"Hello." Oh, god, they were snuggling. They were snuggling and it was fantastic.

This deserved a pause for the associated colors and textures that could no longer be contained to have temporary freedom amongst their rational brethren.

"Having a good day I take it?"

"It's a day, I guess," she replies, watching his thoughts flicker through the room with vague interest, catching the general gist of the series of abstract images, the pulses of color, the humming in the walls and the floor. Any other time, she would be interested in the flashes of image and form, maybe even be compelled to chase them with her eyes, just to watch them vanish or transform into something else, but really, why would she pay attention to nebulous, quasi-incomprehensible twitches of conscious thought when she could lean further over his shoulder, her still-free arm wrapping around his neck loosely, fingers playing along the other side of his throat. Her cheek brushes his stubble, nose bumping under his chin like some kind of odd, slightly-larger-than-normal, pink-haired cat.

"Were you meditating? I'm sorry if I interrupted you." She almost sounds sincere--almost.

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Here there be Shadows [open]

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