Dyllan landed with a thud in one of the more damaged train stations, and quickly began hunting for anything that could clue him in to the root of Andie’s problems. If the previous two awakenings had been any indication, they’d actually need to talk through Andie’s issues – and Dyllan was sorely lacking in insightful advice for her emotional baggage. Unsurprising, since he didn’t even know what her emotional baggage was. Hell, up until today, he wasn’t sure Andie even had any.
“How goes the search?” Cedric – or perhaps just one of his illusions – apparated behind Dyllan.
“Not great.” Dyllan shifted aside a piece of rubble to reveal… the floor beneath it. Honestly, he didn’t know what he expected. “How ‘bout you? Any leads?”
“No.” Cedric raised an eyebrow with a hopeful curiosity. “But I take it you have?”
“Why would you take that?”
“Because unless one found something particularly noteworthy, one would usually start their hunt for clues down below.” Cedric paused briefly. “…and I know you haven’t already checked down there, because you haven’t had enough time to even give a cursory examination to that whole mess.”
Dyllan froze in the middle of digging through the rubble. “…mess?” He turned to give Cedric a quizzical look. “What whole mess? Is there a particularly trashed station or something?”
“What? No, the -” Cedric seemed genuinely confused by Dyllan’s confusion. “The… huge fuckoff breached… containment chamber?”
Dyllan’s brain stalled for a moment, failing to choose between “the breached what” and the “what containment chamber” before his mouth started moving – resulting in a spluttered “the chamber containment breached what chamber?”
Cedric politely ignored Dyllan’s word soup and simply pointed down over the edge of the station.
A note from the author:
You know, with all the fight scenes and active rampages, it can be easy to forget how metaphorical mindscapes are.
Processes that look like they only took a few minutes have probably been slowly built up to over the course of months. Buildings in mindscapes don’t collapse unless they’re put under a lot of pressure for a long time… or are hit with a really nasty traumatic event.
The domino chain Andie’s Nightmare is knocking down took a long time to set up, and it will sill take hours to finish falling apart.
Cedric and Dyllan have all night to fix things up before this problem reaches the point of… well, not no return – but a significantly more difficult return.