10-02-2017, 01:07 AM
Kelly watched as the battered reploid pushed his way through the curtain of mosses and vines that concealed the rocky crevice which had granted them access to this cluster of hidden ruins, and disappeared into the narrow passage that lay beyond. The truth was, he had enjoyed working with X as well. The artificial warrior was skilled, competent and determined, with an acute tactical sense that had enabled the two of them to co-ordinate easily using only few words: in short, the ideal partner for a lightning-raid on a cancerous pocket-reality.
There was more he would have liked to say to his erstwhile ally - contact information for one; a warrior of X's caliber was a useful sort of person to know. However, around the time they'd begun to discuss the darkspawn that the two of them had left tied up in the woods Kelly had begun to lose his ability to focus on the conversation; the moment he'd emerged from Nebula's collapsing gateway his extrasensory perceptions had returned in force, expanding further, into realms of pure thought - and an awe-inspiringly complicated process had started unfolding in his brain.
It was slow, at first: a long-disused engine meshing its gears for the first time; a mighty assembly of frozen thoughts, structures, and associations grinding into purposeful motion under the stimulus of sudden telepathic feedback from X's neural network. As the cascade accelerated lights began snapping on in the darkened aeries of Kelly's shrouded mindscape, brilliant beacons in the fog, and by the time X began to say his farewell, his presence was largely eclipsed by the awakening taking place inside the psychic's own head.
Wind whispered through the canopy that crowned the rock-face surrounding the clearing, bringing with it the smell of wet leaves and stones in the sun. Standing on the barren concourse between two crumbling, tree-spotted, terraced pyramids, the traveler pushed tangles of filthy hair away from his battered face with both hands, sweeping it back behind his ears. He gathered his thoughts, and sat down atop a stray block of weathered granite.
The forest, the rocks, the clearing, and the ruins all fell away. Kelly was overcome by a feeling of emergence, as though he'd been wandering on the bottom of a deep, dark ocean, and all of a sudden he'd been thrust into the noonday sky, hovering above the waves. What was unfolding within him was more than just the power of telepathy; it was the associated knowledge, and the labrynthine structures of posthuman consciousness than came with it.
The traveler understood, now, how he'd put established his haunt; how he'd fashioned the partition in his mind that processed danger and dealt with pain. He could see and understand the purpose and structure of his own psychic defenses - and glimpse the shadow of still-indecipherably complex mental forms interleaved within them.
Even the churning wall of intangible mist that formed much of his history had grown less indistinct. With his returning insight into psychic matters, he could see patterns within the gyre, illuminated beneath the unforgiving gaze of his re-opened third eye.
This isn't a matter of losing my internal index - its the opposite. Everything is misfiled: out of sequence, and a lot of the information is in formats I still have no context for - missing senses, missing thought-forms.
And there's SO damn much of it...
Outside of his head, Kelly was utterly still. A bird with long, radiant plumage, green and red and blue, landed on his battered shoulder and whistled twice. It began to pick at a twig stuck in his mud-and-gore-crusted hair with a long purple beak.
Within the psychic's skull, days and weeks flashed before his mind's eye. He could still parse only brief impressions from his Reign, the pluripotent sense of deja-vu that the Darkchip fiasco inspired gnawing at him like a sneeze that refused to come; His centuries wandering, however, had grown clearer, the sections of continuous experience expanding, towers of clarity solidifiying within the roil like columns of dimly glowing crystal.
He remembered spending a year in a reality on the brink, alternately operating that world's only bookmobile and sabotaging a series of increasingly desperate attempts by the leaders of two large countries to start an apocalyptic war between their nations; He recalled two months stuck working on a railway chain-gang in the Republic of California: inhumanly strong and bulletproof, though without his pyschokinesis, but grateful for the isolation after a still-hazy bad time; He remembered learning the basics of defending his mind, frantically improvising while trapped on an desert planet ruled by six-lobed telepathic ammonites.
Bit by bit, scattered across centuries, about twenty years filled themselves in - but though there were holes in it now, windows of clarity, the mist remained. Kelly's origins lay in shadow, and his recent pre-Omniverse history clawed and howled at the walls of its cage - but he knew a little more than he did before, and he was beginning to see a pattern.
The more powerful my mind becomes, the more of my past I'm capable of piecing together. I don't think its the entire solution - but even just getting back all of my wandering years would go a long way towards explaining why I am the way I am. All I need to do is continue to grow.
As for the rest of it... that, I think, will require either a major push from a fresh, simmilar experience, or repeated, dedicated meditation.
The psychic's eyes snapped open. The bird on his shoulder launched itself into the sky, startled by the sudden motion.
All around him the forest teamed with life and energy - the heat of the sun on the pyramids, the concourse and the little stone temple, the electrochemical glow of a macaque's nervous-system, and the buzz of ten million tiny insect minds.
Kelly's hair, jeans, and every inch of exposed skin were filthy with caked-on mud, dried blood, plant debris, and sticky purple ichor. His shirt was in tatters, and completely leaving aside his multitudinous cuts and bruises, there was still a small, jagged hole in his midsection.
I think that before I do anything else, I need to take a shower.
There was more he would have liked to say to his erstwhile ally - contact information for one; a warrior of X's caliber was a useful sort of person to know. However, around the time they'd begun to discuss the darkspawn that the two of them had left tied up in the woods Kelly had begun to lose his ability to focus on the conversation; the moment he'd emerged from Nebula's collapsing gateway his extrasensory perceptions had returned in force, expanding further, into realms of pure thought - and an awe-inspiringly complicated process had started unfolding in his brain.
It was slow, at first: a long-disused engine meshing its gears for the first time; a mighty assembly of frozen thoughts, structures, and associations grinding into purposeful motion under the stimulus of sudden telepathic feedback from X's neural network. As the cascade accelerated lights began snapping on in the darkened aeries of Kelly's shrouded mindscape, brilliant beacons in the fog, and by the time X began to say his farewell, his presence was largely eclipsed by the awakening taking place inside the psychic's own head.
Wind whispered through the canopy that crowned the rock-face surrounding the clearing, bringing with it the smell of wet leaves and stones in the sun. Standing on the barren concourse between two crumbling, tree-spotted, terraced pyramids, the traveler pushed tangles of filthy hair away from his battered face with both hands, sweeping it back behind his ears. He gathered his thoughts, and sat down atop a stray block of weathered granite.
The forest, the rocks, the clearing, and the ruins all fell away. Kelly was overcome by a feeling of emergence, as though he'd been wandering on the bottom of a deep, dark ocean, and all of a sudden he'd been thrust into the noonday sky, hovering above the waves. What was unfolding within him was more than just the power of telepathy; it was the associated knowledge, and the labrynthine structures of posthuman consciousness than came with it.
The traveler understood, now, how he'd put established his haunt; how he'd fashioned the partition in his mind that processed danger and dealt with pain. He could see and understand the purpose and structure of his own psychic defenses - and glimpse the shadow of still-indecipherably complex mental forms interleaved within them.
Even the churning wall of intangible mist that formed much of his history had grown less indistinct. With his returning insight into psychic matters, he could see patterns within the gyre, illuminated beneath the unforgiving gaze of his re-opened third eye.
This isn't a matter of losing my internal index - its the opposite. Everything is misfiled: out of sequence, and a lot of the information is in formats I still have no context for - missing senses, missing thought-forms.
And there's SO damn much of it...
Outside of his head, Kelly was utterly still. A bird with long, radiant plumage, green and red and blue, landed on his battered shoulder and whistled twice. It began to pick at a twig stuck in his mud-and-gore-crusted hair with a long purple beak.
Within the psychic's skull, days and weeks flashed before his mind's eye. He could still parse only brief impressions from his Reign, the pluripotent sense of deja-vu that the Darkchip fiasco inspired gnawing at him like a sneeze that refused to come; His centuries wandering, however, had grown clearer, the sections of continuous experience expanding, towers of clarity solidifiying within the roil like columns of dimly glowing crystal.
He remembered spending a year in a reality on the brink, alternately operating that world's only bookmobile and sabotaging a series of increasingly desperate attempts by the leaders of two large countries to start an apocalyptic war between their nations; He recalled two months stuck working on a railway chain-gang in the Republic of California: inhumanly strong and bulletproof, though without his pyschokinesis, but grateful for the isolation after a still-hazy bad time; He remembered learning the basics of defending his mind, frantically improvising while trapped on an desert planet ruled by six-lobed telepathic ammonites.
Bit by bit, scattered across centuries, about twenty years filled themselves in - but though there were holes in it now, windows of clarity, the mist remained. Kelly's origins lay in shadow, and his recent pre-Omniverse history clawed and howled at the walls of its cage - but he knew a little more than he did before, and he was beginning to see a pattern.
The more powerful my mind becomes, the more of my past I'm capable of piecing together. I don't think its the entire solution - but even just getting back all of my wandering years would go a long way towards explaining why I am the way I am. All I need to do is continue to grow.
As for the rest of it... that, I think, will require either a major push from a fresh, simmilar experience, or repeated, dedicated meditation.
The psychic's eyes snapped open. The bird on his shoulder launched itself into the sky, startled by the sudden motion.
All around him the forest teamed with life and energy - the heat of the sun on the pyramids, the concourse and the little stone temple, the electrochemical glow of a macaque's nervous-system, and the buzz of ten million tiny insect minds.
Kelly's hair, jeans, and every inch of exposed skin were filthy with caked-on mud, dried blood, plant debris, and sticky purple ichor. His shirt was in tatters, and completely leaving aside his multitudinous cuts and bruises, there was still a small, jagged hole in his midsection.
I think that before I do anything else, I need to take a shower.
Quote:And I think that is pretty much that. This thread, as they say, is a wrap.