nd-of-a-manatee
nd-of-a-manatee
BRIAR!!! - sig. RCN / CLH - any pronouns - 1996 - I'm here making Psychonauts fanart and comics! Feel free to reach out. Please reblog, please don't repost. Thanks!
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What if:
Raz's acrobatics change over time.
Because it serves a different purpose now, y'know?
The Aquatos are performers. Their movements are supposed to be exaggerated, rhythmic, and artistic. Form over function to please an audience.
As a Psychonaut, Raz largely uses his skills for traversal, combat, and focusing psychic energy. It's an advantage for his movements to be so quick and concentrated that his enemy hardly has time to react to--let alone see--what he's doing. And to help him dodge blows to the face. It almost becomes a form of martial art.
So imagine his family's surprise when Dion challenges him to prove that he hasn't let himself get rusty, and Raz sends himself sailing clear through the tent and into a lake.
#psychonauts 2#razputin aquato#psychonauts#psychonauts hc#raz psychonauts#the aquatos#raz's acrobatics
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What if:
Queepie isn’t the strongest boy in the world.
He’s just using TK on accident.
#psychonauts 2#queepie aquato#psychonauts headcanons#pn hcs#i doubt i'm the first person to think of this
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Aight, 206 has descriptions now.
I’m sticking with just leaving IDs in the text for now because a) alt text apparently doesn’t work well with screen-readers based on critiques I’ve seen, and b) my desktop and phone won’t...let me... use it? Like, the little meatball thing doesn’t appear. It’s super weird.
I’m gonna keep messing with formatting to make descriptions less intrusive, though. Italics, block text, stuff like that. If that also causes problems let me know.
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Wow oh heck I super forgot about describing the Rank 206 post. Will defo do that after I’ve had a rest.
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v *QUICK INDEX* v
RAZ: RaRaRa (vid) - RaRaRa (images) - Tours - Floating Eye - Speaking Grulovian - Red Raz - Rank 206
LILI: Divorce - Brambles 1 - Brambles 2 - Brambles 3 - Brambles 4
DOGEN: Prey
ENSEMBLE/OTHER: Sketches - Katamari - Skin Tones - Fashion 1988 - What if Queepie - What if Acrobatics
MY OTHER FANART BLOG: @rainbowchewynuggets
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I know this isn’t quite how ranks work in Psychonauts canon, just go with it.
[Image ID: The following is rendered in fuzzy digital pastel. Razputin Aquato–in his late teens, tall and skinny–lies breathless on his back on the ground, covered in sweat. He’s wearing sweatpants, a striped undershirt, and sneakers. His hair is disheveled, pushed back by his signature goggles. One of his eyes is a little higher than the other, now that he’s older. He stares upward with eyes wide, at his wit’s end. He lies in a white space, his colors graded dull blue. The foreboding cyan shadow of a three-digit number is projected over him: 206. End ID]
Raz has a problem.
He trains so hard to rank up his prowess as a psychic. He’s been training since the day he learned what a Psychonaut is. Now that he’s one of them, he sees diminishing returns for his efforts. That’s normal, they say. It gets harder over time. But he’s only 15, and it hasn’t changed in months. He’s way behind the other cadets his age, all approaching the 300s in their psychic specialities. Here he is stuck at 206.
This isn’t normal.
It’s not just about the number. There isn’t supposed to be a ceiling. A person can always improve, always extend themself to reach closer to their full potential. His mentors–his heroes, all well into the 1000s themselves–gave him a chance to be a Psychonaut because they saw so much of that potential in him. They were impressed that he picked up his first set of powers so quickly and used them to save the day nearly by himself–twice. What if that was the trick? He picks up a new discipline right away, then can’t advance it past a certain point. Hydrokinesis should be what he’s good at, but he’s barely better with it than anything else. That’s it. This is his potential. It was all a trick.
He lies awake at night, frantically weighing in anything that could be related to why. Anything he could do about it. He has often looked back on himself and thought that autism or ADHD or both could explain whatever being an enthusiastic little psychic nerd couldn’t. What if this is part of that? What if he can’t change it? His heart sinks.
He can’t hide it. They’ll all find out what he really is. What will they do if he can’t live up to the position he’s been awarded?
An old anxiety stirs. He doesn’t belong here.
Suddenly, Raz can’t concentrate. His performance falls below even his mediocre rank in practice, in study, in everything. He can’t even walk without tripping. His peers and mentors notice, though he insists that he’s fine.
It reaches a point where a couple of his teachers stop in their busy schedules and call him to sit down with them. That’s when the truth comes out. He tells them everything.
He waits nervously for their response.
They answer easily and say that he’s already proven his worth as a Psychonaut beyond any kind of rank or measure of raw power. His sense of duty, determination, willingness to learn from his mistakes, inventiveness, and compassion are what maximize the effectiveness of his psychic abilites–not to mention his unique skills as an acrobatic. If strength were all that mattered, none of them would be worthy of the abilities they wield.
[Image ID: Raz sits up. The hole in the zero makes it look like the shadow has retreated until it’s almost all the way off of him, lingering at the top of his head. His eyebrows are raised, but he’s calmer–having made an epiphany. End ID]
He hadn’t thought of it like that.
After some rest, Raz goes looking for new psychic sensitivities–not in a desperate attempt to find the thing that will bring him up to par, but with all the curiosity of an adventurer in search of new discoveries. By the end of the year, he has achieved adequate command of a wide, wide range of disciplines and has begun experimenting with using them in tandem. “Power juggling” is a difficult art for most psychics. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose control. As it turns out, Raz thrives in that kind of chaos and is able to compartmentalize his focus enough to practically create new powers unto themselves, if for a very short time. He shakes the dust off of his acrobatics. It’s no longer a grueling requirement to please his family. It’s his now. Fun and challenging, a test of dexterity and flow. He quickly renews his skills and finds new ways to wrap his powers around them. The other cadets come and watch him practice just to see what wild shit he’s up to that day.
He feels alive. He feels like himself, now more than ever.
[Image ID: Raz sprints out from under the shadow, turning to raise a middle finger at it with gleeful disdain. End ID]
[Image ID: The story shifts to a comic book sequence, also graded blue-green. Morceau Oleander has a green psychic shield raised to protect him, Milla Vodello, Adam Gette, and Norma Natividad from blue psychic needles that threaten to skewer them from above. The others use their own powers to try to fight the needles off, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. Someone talks over them. “Miserable fools.” A lanky white woman in a housecoat, plain shirt, sweats, and slippers with long billowing silver hair commands the scene from the center of some kind of pump room. Her arms are outstretched like a conductor. Her needles press buttons on control panels and hover menacingly over tied and gagged hostages. “I’ve had to devote my life to perfection to get this far,” she declares with triumphant superiority. We see her up close. She’s in her late 50s with sharp facial features and a high hairline, and she’s wearing a small earring on each ear. Her teeth gleam in a wicked smile as she shouts. “You have no idea of the sacrifice. The fortitude. I alone am qualified to correct the modern world’s failure to compete. Content weaklings like you don’t stand a chance. Just look at you.” She turns to face a shadowed corridor within a tangle of pipes behind her. “You can’t even sneak up properly.” Someone with angular shin-high boots runs down some steps deep in the corridor. That person– wearing black gloves and Sasha Nein’s old green jacket–uses orange psi power to draw water in the shape of a hand from a pocket-sized bottle. The hydro hand leaps forward toward the woman with its fingers outstretched. A coil of orange lighting snakes around it. Then, the hand freezes into an electrified claw. The hand is suddenly shattered on a horizontal needle that pops into existence. The woman sneers. “Ha!” The person uses the needle to swing forward and lunge out from the shadows feet-first. It’s Raz in his cool spy mission outfit. His boot folds the old woman in half by the stomach. She makes the dumbest surprised face, having been caught in her most confident moment. Raz looks determined and focused. Ice shards tinkle in the air around them. Raz then has her pinned on the floor. He has produced a helmet that looks like a Geodesic Psychoisolation Chamber from his jacket and plunked it on her head. “Did I break anything?” he asks, deadly serious. “My worldview is shattered,” she answers, bewildered. Raz pops into his excitable mode. “Oh! We can help with that.” He takes out a psi-portal. She turns to him and says, “Ok.” End ID]
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I keep rewording my commentary on this idea, so here’s the jumble:
I love the idea of protagonist syndrome. Main character kiddo is the specialest one of all who overcomes impossible odds or has a big cool unique ability. You see it all over magical/superhero kid cartoons. And then, that all collapses when they get older and change or can’t measure up and have to learn how to detach from the initial self-image and explore who they want to be (Steven Universe & Future, Venture Bros, my actual life experience if you can’t guess). I know it’s a little weird to poke holes in fun kids’ media and should be done with care. But I’m super interested in how protag syndrome applies to real life post-straight-A/sports star/Good Kid TM imposter syndrome. I wanna use this kinda thing as a framework to explore ways to be kinder to and happier with ourselves.
And just look at the boi. He’s doing so good.
Special guest appearance by the Noodler’s mean aunt, the Needler.
[Image ID: The Needler–the woman described before–is depicted in an initial sketch in black and white. She looks annoyed, standing with her hands and fingers splayed out in an “evil wizard” kind of gesture. The image is a little simplified. She has no nose. End ID]
#psychonauts headcanon#razputin aquato#raz psychonauts#pn hc#psychonauts hc#psychonauts 2#psychonauts fancomic#psychonauts fanfiction
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(lying in bed in a deep slumber when my eyes finally snap open at 2am) what if the Young Minds Protection Act was drafted and passed by the Psychonauts not to protect kids minds but because the minds of adolescents are always in such a constant state of changing and morphing in reaction to their environments and trauma that they realized the minds of kids are incredibly hostile and dangerous (and maybe even lethal)
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I’ve been reading some theories on the status of Grulovia twenty years after the deluge, and speculation seems to range from “it no longer exists” to “it got invaded again” but sometimes I think about the idea of the Grulovia that lived. The Grulovia that survived. The Grulovia that clung on by the skin of its teeth, took every bit of stolen wealth that the Maliks couldn’t take with them, and used it to rebuild. The Grulovia that beat the odds.
I can only imagine what kind of country it would be like. A country of those who stayed behind, of those who wouldn’t - or couldn’t - leave for greener pastures. A country equal parts traumatized, hopeful, and vindicitve. A country with a fear and distrust of psychics that is both deeply unfair and deeply understandable. A country trying to reinvent itself even as it’s still digging itself out of the ice, half trapped in the past and half desperately running from it.
This is all just speculation on my part, of course, but I personally think that, in a hypothetical “Return to Grulovia” storyline, a place like that makes for a much more interesting setting than an uninhabited frozen wasteland. It becomes a lot harder to confront the ghosts of your mistakes when it turns out those ghosts never actually died.
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Brambles pt. 4
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“Was that your boyfriend?” Lili’s mom asks, not bothering to hide her approval.
“Yep,” her daughter answers, comforted. She’s left there with her parents, in the mess that used to be her garden. “Help me clean this up first, would you?”
Water rushes with a foamy hiss from a small spigot as it slowly fills the dented watering can. Lili’s parents move purposefully through what remains of the garden. Truman moves piles of weeds with yellow-green telekinesis as his ex-wife pulls up gnarled green roots with her bare hands.
“How are you doing that?” he wonders aloud.
“Calluses,” she says flatly.
The woman summons bright red fire from her hand to incinerate the roots. She lets the ashes fall to the ground as she watches her daughter fill the watering can.
Lili shuts off the faucet with a “squeak”. She absently tips the watering can and gives the corpse of a small flower patch a shower. Her mom is behind her, arms folded reservedly.
“How much did you hear?” Lili asks without looking up.
“Quite a bit. We came out right after you left, but we got pinned.” She pulls a thorny green burr from her hair as she talks.
Lili is busy reviving her flowers with herbaphony. Magenta energy surrounds the stems, and they burst with new life. Passion flowers.
“Lili, I’m so sorry,” her mother continues with more contrition. “I never meant to put so much pressure on you.”
“I know”.
The girl still doesn’t move. Her mother kneels down and turns her gently–but urgently–around by the shoulders. She stares into Lili’s eyes, and Lili finally meets them.
“Listen to me. No matter how either of us feel about your father, no matter what you do in life, I’m still your mother. And you should get to do what makes you happy. I just want to make sure that you won’t be alone when you do need us.”
Lili’s expression widens in understanding as she speaks.
“She won’t be,” Truman comes in behind them. Lili brightens by a few more degrees, but the mother sours. “If Lili wants to stay, I’ll be there for her. You can count on it.” He also kneels, putting a hand on her shoulder with an apologetic smile. “I should have said so sooner.” Lili returns it happily. Her mother remains thoroughly unenthused.
The trio make their way back through the forest to the Motherlobe. Lili lightly traverses the uneven terrain on her own as the adults hang back, walking with a marked distance between each other. Lili’s mother waits until her daughter is out of earshot to lean over at her ex with a sharp finger.
“I’m holding you to this, Truman. I’ll be checking in.”
“Perfectly reasonable.” He raises his arms submissively with culpable eyes.
She folds her arms again.
“And I think we should… talk more. In general,” she tacks on after a silence, facing forward.
“I never did thank you for looking after her. I’m amazed at how she’s turning out,” he murmurs stiffly.
She shrugs.
“Well, the righteous adventurer in her didn’t come from me.”
Silence.
She turns her head to face him.
“Why didn’t you say something before?”
“I was afraid,” he admits.
The woman jolts in horror, and a hand flies to her chest.
“Of me?!” she demands.
Truman instantly becomes animated to correct himself.
“No! O-of facing what I did to you both.” He runs a hand through his hair as he dives into a rant. “Agh. I was so arrogant. I was so convinced that I could do anything and take on the whole world by myself with no consequence. And I managed to ruin the most important thing in my life. I thought the right thing to do was step back and accept that I’d failed.”
“Which you did,” she needles.
“I did.” His frame droops as he reaches the conclusion of his train of thought. “But I see now that leaving it at that was just cowardice. I left it all to you. I’m sorry, Aithne.”
Aithne can see the honesty in his eyes. It breaks the scowl she’s been holding over him the whole way back.
“I haven’t been much better,” she concedes, rubbing her lip. “Anyone can tell that you’re trying, Truman. I’ve just spent so long building walls between you and us… Looking at you and not seeing the troll I made in my head is humiliating. But that’s no excuse.”
The two of them reach the edge of the forest and step onto the floating platforms that lead back to the main building.
“Hm. A troll… I’ve been a goat before, but not a troll,” Truman babbles thoughtfully.
“You what?”
“A friend told me I was a goat in his mind once.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I hosted a game show.”
Aithne giggles, and they both then break into laughter.
“God, it’s so much easier to be mad than to have to talk about this,” Aithne observes tiredly, arms limp at her sides.
“I suppose it beats silence.” Truman stares plaintively at the moon with his hands in his pockets.
Lili is waiting at a side entrance with the door open. Rich yellow light spills out onto the grass from within.
“And if it’s for Lili,” Aithne concludes, “I guess we better suck it up.”
She takes Lili by one shoulder and heads in with her. Truman does the same.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
End.
End ID]
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Brambles pt. 3
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The vines are aware enough to dodge the shot, narrowly dragging Raz out of the line of fire with them. The margin is so close, he can feel the heat as the fireball passes. Lili shakes the flames out of her hand with a look of terrified guilt. Meanwhile, vines begin swarming around her in a circle.
The scare loosened the killer weeds’ grip enough for Raz to desperately hold them away from him, uneasily balanced upside down in mid-air by the tension. He calls down to the ground.
“Lili, I don’t think this is working. We have to get to the root of the problem!”
“I can’t!” she calls back, afraid and exasperated. The vines continue to gather around her, enclosing her.
“I don’t mean the literal root!”
“I KNOW what you mean! I–I can’t do it! You just don’t understand!”
“Then help me understand. It can’t stay like this!”
The sky closes up. Lili is alone beneath a wall of green. The light is even dimmer here without the moon, casting her in dull green colors. Raz’s voice squeaks through the ceiling of compressed weeds to reach her.
“Lili!”
“Raz!” she calls in fear.
She doesn’t notice the knot of vines coming at her until it’s nearly on top of her. She dodges backward with a yelp, and it lands beside her with enough force to send a bunch of nettles into the hair. She runs away. More movement stirs in the darkness.
She tries to explain herself as she dodges wave after wave of vines.
“We’re not like your family. I have to pick a side. My mom’s never going to forgive my dad. If I’m not against him, she thinks I’m against her. Cause she’s just waiting for him to screw up again.”
Her anger resurfaces, and her power with it. Bolts of magenta dance around her head as she faces down another wall.
“He’s not like that anymore, but he won’t say it.” She holds her ground and sends out a TK hand. It slices through the vines like a butcher knife, burning with aggression. It casts hot, vivid light back on her, illuminating the darkness as long as she can keep it up. “He lets her treat him like garbage because it’s easier. So, I have to be the one to defend him. And I can’t stand it!” She starts slicing through wall after wall, the hand growing hotter. “I have to do everything!” It’s all gonna fall apart, and then I’m gonna feel like garbage.” Cauterized vines peel away in layers, still smoking. Lili stares into them with loathing as chunks of plant matter rain down.
In retaliation, the roof comes down on Lili’s shoulders, and she stumbles with a grunt. The incredible weight of it presses down on her. She struggles to keep her legs straight, let alone summon any of the power that was helping her just a minute ago. All she can do is talk.
“Because I always feel like garbage… ‘cause I can’t fix it.”
Raz’s voice slips between the layers of rope that threaten to crush her.
“It’s not your job to fix it, Lili.”
Tears drip from her tightly shut eyes and sink into the grass.
“I just want us to feel like a family for once,” she chokes. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just… shouldn’t be this hard.”
Suddenly, the vines disband. They fall all around her, limp, not even thickly enough to bury her.
Outside, Raz’s captors have also given in, and he’s in the middle of falling into the bushes. With a thrashing of leaves and a metallic “BONK”, he lands in a shrub among the willows. When he gets up, he has a dented watering can in hand (and a sore spot on his head). His clothes and skin are scratched up from the ordeal.
“I found the watering can.”
He looks at the receding mass of weeds where Lili stands at its center. All the plants and flowers have been wrenched from the ground and shoved in piles at the corners of the garden by the wall of weeds. She’s just as torn, beaten, and tired. Tears pour from her eyes as she tries to hold herself together.
Wordlessly, Raz approaches her and wraps her in a hug. She holds him in return and quickly lets herself fall into sobs.
After a while, they unfold a bit and share a quiet moment, still in each other’s arms. Up close, it turns out that Raz is a little shorter than Lili. He smiles patiently up at her as she wipes the tears from her eyes. Her expression is complicated, but appreciative.
Someone from off-screen clears their throat. The kids snap apart with their hands to themselves. Lili’s parents are standing nearby, quiet and humble. We finally see her mom in full detail. She has pale freckled skin, a spade-shaped face, burly arms and legs, and long pink hair with the same style as the flashback. She wears a blue horizontal-striped button-up sweater, rust-red pants, and black strap sandals over white socks. Truman’s wearing a pale green polo with vertical stripes, pale red pants (purple in this light), and old loafers. He hasn’t changed much since his appearance in the games, except that he’s grown a pencil mustache.
“Razputin, could we have some time alone with Lili?” Truman asks.
“Oh! Sure.”
Raz waves goodbye as he sprints off toward the willows.
<Talk later?> he asks Lili.
<Yeah.>
Quick as a cricket, Raz hops from branch to lev ball and sails over the stone stacks and out of sight.
End ID]
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#brambles 3#psychonauts fancomic#lili zanotto#razputin aquato#truman zanotto#aithne byrne#lili's mom
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Brambles pt. 2
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Raz perks up and offers, “It seems like he’s around a lot more these days, though.
“He is!” Lili agrees as a tangle of vines agitate in front of her. One of them lashes out with a “SNAP”. She barely ducks in time. Drawing complicated movements with one hand and pressing the other to her temple, she attempts to break up the tangle. She looks a little more angry than focused. “It wasn’t just what she said, either. It was the way she was glaring at him. Like he’s nothing! And he just stood there and took it!” She pulls her TK hand through the weeds with a loud “CHOP” that breaks them up for good. Unfortunately, a flower patch with large triangular leaves gets caught in the action and is torn to shreds. Her TK hand disappears as she goes over to assess the damage. She cradles one of the mangled flowers sadly in her hand. “I didn’t mean to get so mad. It just slipped out. She looked so… betrayed. Next thing I knew, we were in a giant fight that went nowhere. And now, she’s probably up there fighting over taking me away.”
A quiet “...Jeez” comes from the other side of the hedge.
Lili folds her arms and stares into the ruined flower as it dangles from its bent stem.
“Maybe I should just go with her.”
Raz turns his head as if to face her as he shakes plant mush from his sheers.
“Come on, Lili. You love being a Psychonaut.”
“That’s the problem!”
“Huh?” He turns around all the way. His TK hand and shears disappear.
“Things feel so much easier on missions, y’know? We’re going out and righting wrongs, kicking ass, helping people. There’s always a plan going in. Even if it goes off the rails, it’s not the end of the world.” She makes broad emotive gestures as she paces through the grass until she runs out of steam. “Real life is so much harder to… fix. She parks herself on a big soft bush next to the hedge that supports her weight like a beanbag. There’s a garden ornament in the hedge shaped like an eye. Maybe just a convenient hole to put a hose through, but it’s just big enough for Raz to squeeze his torso through to the other side. He stays quiet and listens.
“Sometimes I don’t even want to go back. Is that screwed up?” She asks him with genuine worry in her eyes.
Raz makes an unconfident face and shrugs.
“You are asking Mr. Runaway.”
Lili lets her head fall back on the leaves like a stone. Raz searches for something better to say.
“But,” he finally adds, “I don’t think that’ll happen to you. You don’t have to fix it alone.”
This gets Lili to sit up.
“I get why she’s mad,” Lili says contemplatively. “We were always close when I was little. All we had was each other.”
She pictures a brightly-rendered tapestry with her younger self and her mother holding hands. They’re engulfed in flame, protected from layers of interlocking leaves that surround them. Her mother is red. Lili is pink. It’s all a little abstract in a Celtic way.
“But having your dad around is important to you, isn’t it?” Raz interjects.
“Of course it is!” Lili states tersely.
Raz goes on optimistically.
“And it’s not like your mom is really losing you. I call the circus all the time! You don’t have to be physically there to be close to someone.”
He pictures a vibrant circus poster style vignette of the Earth hanging in space with twinkling stars. Via cartoony telecommunication balloons, Raz and his family wave at each other from opposite sides of the globe. His family all look happy to see him… except his older brother Dion.
Lili’s growing frustration boils over, and she puts her head in her hands with her brows screwed together.
“That’s not how it works for us!”
Silence.
She looks up and sees that Raz isn’t in the hole in the hedge anymore.
“Raz?”
She puts her head through the hole to investigate and gasps in shock. Raz is being held high overhead, tied up and gagged by the stinging prehensile weeds. Erratic threads of orange energy shoot out of his head, but bounce weakly against the vines. The more he wriggles, the more it hurts, and he can’t concentrate.
“Hang on, I’ll get you down!” Lili calls from her side of the hedge. She summons a TK hand and sends it Raz’s way. The weeds react quickly and throw several strands up to tie the hand down. She strains against it. As she does, a smaller cluster of them crawl up her leg. She exclaims in surprise and sweeps her leg with anger and force. The weeds wear and snap in a flurry of nettles.
“Killer psychic weeds. Are you kidding me?!”
She ejects with a levitation jump as more weeds reach for her. She goes into a montage of fighting, using every psychic trick she has. Shields, invisibility, time dilation. Anything to gain distance. But the scrape gets closer every time.
“Die! Die! Die!”
Her frustration grows exponentially until it all flows down into her hand for one mean punch.
“YOU SUCK!!!”
She throws it, and an earthshaking “POW” fills the air as a blazing fireball rockets from her arm in the direction of the tangle of weeds holding her friend hostage.
End ID]
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Brambles pt. 1
Pls read this for context first
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(This description is a text adaptation of a comic. Some descriptions have been tailored to fit the change in medium.)
It’s night.
The Motherlobe looms black in the dark blue sky among the trees in the quarry of Psychonauts HQ. The center window of the brain-shaped building is illuminated with pale yellow light. Inside that window, the silhouettes of Truman Zanotto–the Grand head of the Psychonauts–and an unknown female figure argue with each other as word bubbles clutter the space above them. Far below, Lili Zanotto (in her early teens) escapes the building out a side entrance and hops across hovering platforms over the lake at the bottom of the quarry. She’s wearing a blue sweater, black pants, red and white sneakers, and her brown hair tied in long low pigtails.
She steps off the last platform onto a grassy rock formation. The top of the formation used to be where her secret garden grew. It’s now empty, with a hole in the ground where the willow tree used to be. Lili hops easily past the site and uses a squiggle of levitation to clear a gap in the boulders that structure the hillside.
Lili walks on through the forest alone, hands in pockets. Giant moonlit pine trees and bushes surround her as she makes her way along an unclear path. When she reaches her destination, she looks ahead with weary irritation. Her reddish eyeshadow is purple in the low light, making her look even more tired. She has a new garden–filled with many varieties of plants, sectioned by a hedge down the center, surrounded by smooth stones, and crowned with three willows of varying height that huddle beneath a cluster of vertical cylindrical rocks that push together as if to cradle them. The whole place is covered in ropey green thorny weeds.
“Ugh. Again?” she groans.
She starts trying to pull the vines away from a nearby flowering shrub, but they’re stubborn and bite her through her fingerless black gloves. Her sixth sense suddenly gets her attention (represented with magenta lines that emanate from her head). She turns around and sees a rail-thin figure posed atop one of the stone stacks, backlit against the half moon hanging in the sky behind it. The figure is boyish and short with awkwardly long legs, upside down with one hand supporting it, the other behind his back, and both legs straight up in the air. A familiar brown helmet and red goggles make its head look bigger than it should be.
Lili, smiling, responds with telepathy.
<Hey, tree-sitter. What’re you doing here?>
Her friend and partner, Razputin, lifts his head and looks down at her through all the red hair sticking out of his helmet. He responds warmly through orange psychic waves.
<I sensed a disturbance.>
<Psh. I bet the whole county heard it,> Lili adds huffily. She glances away at nothing in particular.
<Definitely could from Sasha’s lab,> Raz admits.
<What were you doing in the lab this late at night?> she asks, crossing her arms.
<Shooting psychic waves at the moon.>
<Why? The moon’s still there during the day.>
<I know. We’ve been at it since this morning.>
Lili can’t help smiling again.
<Mind if I come down?> Raz asks.
<Go ahead. You can help me get rid of these weeds. They don’t listen to reason.>
Raz lists forward and effortlessly flips his way down the steep stone slope, landing all clean and professional in the grass at the bottom. His outfit is easier to see up close. Mint-green long-sleeve, light brown pants. The cuffs of both disappear into gray-green gloves and black and white hightop shoes. Lili gives him a single clap, and they get to work.
Both of them generate giant telekinesis hands composed of psychic energy in their respective colors. Raz selects a cluster of vines and yanks as hard as he can with his big TK hand. The vines react violently, twisting on their own so fast that the hand snaps into a cloud of scattering orange remains, complete with a “CHOMP” sound.
“Can’t we psi-blast them off?” Raz asks aloud.
“No way.” Lili doesn’t take her eyes off of the mess she’s concentrating on. Two fingers are pressed to her temple. “I’ve been so busy with missions and my mom visiting that I’ve hardly watered anything. I’d burn these stupid weeds off myself if the whole garden wouldn’t go up with them. I need my watering can, but I can’t get to it under all this.”
“Have you got any hedge clippers?”
“Yeah, they’re with the watering can.”
Raz thinks, forming a thought bubble that expands into a hand with a pair of hedge shears. He presses in on the weeds with a devilish grin.
Lili has wound up on the other side of the dividing hedge as the two of them move further into the garden. Green nettles and chunks of rope fly up from the other side while Lili tears strands of weeds apart with her TK hands. It’s a little easier, since hers wear gloves.
“So, about earlier…,” Raz begins gingerly. “Are you okay?”
Lili doesn’t break stride, but her eyes drag the ground.
“I’ve been worse. I just… I think I really screwed up this time.”
“What happened?”
Lili flashes back to earlier that evening, inside the Motherlobe. Everything is rendered in vague magenta shapes. Lili stood before a cork board covered in papers, pointing things out to the female figure from before as her father stood by. The woman’s arms were crossed stiffly. Her frame was broad and imposing. She was taller than the others in the room. Truman’s hands were clasped limply behind his back.
“Everything was going fine,” Lili continues. “I was showing mom all the cool stuff we’ve been doing and how safe the cadet missions are. She seemed, like, actually impressed for a second.”
The figure of Lili’s mother put the knuckles of her hand to her mouth. She had long hair that fell over her shoulders and a frizzy topknot that resembled a flame or firework. Her chin dipped in consideration.
“So, when are you coming back East with me?” her mother asked.
“Uh, I dunno. Things have been really busy.” Lili hadn’t had a better answer.
“Lili, be careful you’re not letting the Psychonauts get in the way of the real world.” The woman turned her intense blue gaze on Truman, who didn’t meet her eyes. “And family.”
“Why’d she look at your dad?” Raz asks in the present, poking his head over the hedge.
“Well, my dad may be really good at his job as Grand Head, but he didn’t used to be good at being, y’know, my dad,” Lili explains as casually as she can manage.
“Oh…” Raz sinks down behind the hedge as he thinks about that. “I guess Truman does hold the record for the most field hours. And office hours. And overtime hours. That probably wouldn’t leave time for much else.”
End ID]
NEXT
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I LOVE THIS and TOTALLY DON’T THINK ABOUT FUSIONS IN EVERY SINGLE THING I TAKE IN
Obligatory “I watched Steven universe when I was younger so now I need to do character fusions” ideas
I wanted to do a more detailed introduction page that was a sort of True Psychic Tales fun facts page but my attention went elsewhere ADHIEHUFHUSJHD. and I want to show off this idea regardless so!! I’m throwing my sketches down!
I have Thoughts about this idea but I’m not coherent enough to ramble about it today!
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The besties in a sleepover
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Ooooh! Never knew that bit about dead soldiers. I bet the news of having to go into Grulovia to get Lucy due to the war hit Bob like a brick.
sometimes when I really go and re-experience Bob's Bottles I get extremely hung up on the first part where you learn abt his home life growing up and the sickening realization that he saw his mom deteriorate overtime and eventually found her dead. i rotate those lines of dialogue bob says in my head over and over and like just get a full upsetting picture in my head painting that scene of the day he found her. and im like oh thats terrible (keeps thinking about it) . Tia Zanotto captivates me for how little we know about her besides that sequence
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Love this analysis, and I feel the same.
I always thought another piece was that she’s suffering from grief, too. In the early part of the kitchen, I think there’s a dining table with a picture of Bob, Tia, and some guy. I figured it was Bob’s dad, and losing him drove Tia to drink and maybe started Bob’s road to reclusion. Just my take, tho.
sometimes when I really go and re-experience Bob's Bottles I get extremely hung up on the first part where you learn abt his home life growing up and the sickening realization that he saw his mom deteriorate overtime and eventually found her dead. i rotate those lines of dialogue bob says in my head over and over and like just get a full upsetting picture in my head painting that scene of the day he found her. and im like oh thats terrible (keeps thinking about it) . Tia Zanotto captivates me for how little we know about her besides that sequence
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