by Will Stanton » Tue Feb 02, 2021 10:29 am
For a moment, the all-too-familiar scope of Will's mindscape flittered in front of Sam's eyes -- forest, town, factory, sewers, everything in it's proper place. By now, Sam knew it well enough to get around blindfolded.
But this time...Sam hadn't really checked Will out since the original MGH incident, and things simply were not the same. Miriam had seemed a little shaken when after her encounter inside Will, buffeted by his thoughts. Sam was going for a more metaphorical approach, and so the same overwhelming affect came more as currents in the air as she reached out, buffeting and swirling, making it next to impossible to get a good grip on Will's headspace -- a physical, or at least astral, representation of the invasive thoughts, voices in his head, and indecisiveness Will had noted. And the images she could get were...wrong was not the right word. Different. Less coherent.
Everything...flickered and flitted. The forest fluctuated between a redwood forest, a tropical jungle, something straight out of the Lorax, a logging camp in the center of a clearing, a zoo. The town grew and shrank, looking at one moment futuristic, lined with neon lights and cassette futurism aesthetics, and the next stone age caves carved into the side of the rock, nothing fancier than a stone axe as tools. The factory was alternatively industrial and whimsical; now a standard office building, now a series of bespoke stalls, now a towering monolith piercing through the skies. Even the statue of Will's Sam in front changed and shook - slight variations in pose, form, overall shape.
It wasn't that the aspects of Will's head were shifting and changing -- this wasn't some kind of intermediate process of shifting, which might be where Sam's head first went. It was more that it was all there, just at a slight right angle from reality -- like she was seeing bits and pieces of a larger diamond passing through the plane of the Astral, with different facets occasionally catching the proverbial light. Or a kaleidoscope, held up to the light, different bits and pieces falling into place at different points in time.
Sam -- or, rather, the Morrigan -- was used to the chaos of a battlefield. This wasn't a million miles off, but it was it's own kind of chaos -- it's not that the different aspects were fighting, per se, so much as they were trying to occupy the same limited space. It's no wonder Will had got Miriam to basically shut him down mentally, if he was trying to deal with all this on a constant basis.
It goes without saying that trying to actually enter the mindscape alone would be, at best, highly difficult. Not strictly impossible, if she wanted to try to push through, but this was not a calm, ordered mind.