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Otto thinks this is a bad idea all-around.
He’s never really been good with the touchy-feely side of being a Psychonaut. Some of the uninitiated hippy types might say that that’s most of being a Psychonaut. Otto is inclined to disagree. Psychic studies should focus on taking the output from your brain and putting it into various inputs: robots, lasers, or brain-jars.
He tried to make a device that would fix this, once. It didn’t go over very well. When he left it by Bob’s door, he found it the next week being used as a planter.
Kinda makes it nicer, in a way! To know that Bob wants this about as much as Otto does.
Unfortunately.
When a Psychonaut agent doesn’t show up for a week, you need to make sure that he hasn’t kicked it in the greenhouse where he spends all his time. That’s the bare-minimum. Truman also wants Otto to convince Bob to start showing up to work again, and that’s… kind of a harder ask.
For a while—that is to say, for the past fifteen years—this has been a Psychic Seven issue. Something you generally swept under the rug. While it’s impossible to fully ignore the kind of man that Bob’s become, you never mentioned it aloud. At least, Otto can only assume. He doesn’t spend much time around the water cooler these days.
Problem is?
It can’t really be a Psychic Seven issue if there’s not much of the Psychic Seven left.
Lucy’s dead. Ford is—well, Ford. Boole’s locked himself up in psychoisolation for the past year. Cassie disappeared into the woods six months ago.
Then. Helmut, too. Gone. Dead.
It gets colder in Green Needle Gulch every year.
He gets a good view of his old workshop from this angle. Strange to think of how long he spent in that old place, before they built the Motherlobe. Seems impossible now. Drafty, prone to breaking down. He’d had to siphon off power from the psitanium plant, which had riled Ford to no end. Then there was old Bob showing up at his door at all hours, talking about how his noise was disturbing the plants.
Now, his lab is sweet. State-of-the-art, built to his exact specifications. The stuff he’s been able to build there has been incredible. Better yet, nobody comes knocking on old Otto’s door these days. The privilege of being a senior agent means that people think they’re not worthy of just strolling in. That’s to say nothing of the Brainframe, his finest work. Could he have made that in his mountain cave lab?
And yet. Y’know.
Staring up at it, Otto gets hit with a sense of nostalgia he can’t put his finger on. Bad emotions are like indigestion. Maybe he should get into the pharmaceutical business.
Turning around, he knocks on the door to the greenhouse. It’s looking, uh, greener than normal. Otto hasn’t ever had any patience for plants. Maybe that’s good. Hey, maybe Bob’s looking to retire. A lot of people would be relieved, if that were the case.
Nothin’.
“Bob?” Otto calls out. “It’s, uh. It’s Otto. You got a second? Wanted to pick your brain about something.”
Nope.
“Not literally pick your brain, of course. Unless you’d be willing. I actually did want to touch base with you about that project. I just think it’s a good idea to preserve all of our brains. For posterity.”
Zilch.
“Especially with so few of us left! Don’t you think that’s worth preserving for future generations? I tell ya, those comic books were a real smart deal, but that’s small-time! That’s archaic. We’re thinking for the future.” He waits another second. When he still doesn’t receive an answer, he sighs. “Alright, you old donkey. I’m coming in.”
It’s hard to say whether the greenhouse looks better or worse. Otto’s always thought it looked like a tornado hit it. Hasn’t always smelled like a mushroom’s foot, though. He takes a few steps inside, lets the door shut behind him.
Less plants, Otto finally thinks. Yeah. It used to be a veritable bonanza in there. Now, it’s looking sort of… dowdy. Most of the crap shoved in this room are broken pots and old dirt.
Bob’s back is to him. Carefully, almost tenderly, he prunes a shrub.
“Bob! Good to see ya.”
Bob grunts at him. Even from here, Otto can sense his inebriation. He takes another step, only for one of the thorny vines laying about the place to hurl a bottle directly at his head.
With no hesitation, a metal arm springs from Otto’s backpack to catch it.
“You’ll have to try harder than that. Good girl,” he praises the metal arm, which dutifully retreats back into its casing. Psychoimplants are the way of the future. If only he could stop them from becoming fully sentient. Or picking his nose. “Now, Bob. You probably know why I’m here."
Bob doesn’t try to fling a bottle at him again, but he still doesn’t turn around. Otto comes around the side of the table. “You know, I could do something about those broken glasses of yours. Won’t take more than a second to fix.”
“Can you fuck off?”
See, that’s why they don’t parade Bob Zanotto around the newbies anymore. He gets a mouth on him when he’d drunk. “Not yet. Y’see, Truman asked me to check up on you. Said you haven’t shown up to work in a while, old boy.”
Truman’s name is enough to make Bob pucker, looks like. Otto’s a little hesitant on the guy himself—he’s fine, but he’s not a member of the Psychic Seven, put it that way—but he’s heard the shouting from behind closed doors. Thing is, Otto doesn’t head out on missions anymore, but he wouldn’t want to be matched with Bob, either.
Bob schools his face, looks back down at his bush. “Why’d he ask you? You’re not exactly a mother hen. I’m pretty sure you have a calculator where your heart should be.”
“I’d hope it’d be something a little more advanced!” He fires back, scandalized. Doesn’t altogether help with the clarity of his question, though. “But—who else would he ask, Bob? You’ve made it clear that he’s not allowed anywhere near your greenhouse.”
“You’re not allowed anywhere near your greenhouse. I don’t know. Cassie, maybe. Who else is… Ford?”
Oh. Uh.
“Ford’s mind shattered during the Battle of Grulovia,” Otto reminds him, gently. Bob doesn’t seem too nonplussed about it—he only grunts and takes a swig from his flask. “And Cassie hasn’t been seen in a few months. She’s tending bees out in the forest, last anyone heard.”
He doesn’t think about them as much as he probably should. Thinking about them, it’s… it’s tricky. He can think about one Psychonaut at a time, but imagining them all—imagining them all in relation to each other…
Well, look at Green Needle Gulch. This place had once been his home. Otto thinks it might’ve been the happiest he’s ever been, all things considered. He’s not miserable now, he just thinks he might’ve forgotten what being actually, really happy felt like. Being in his own little bubble in the lab, he… he doesn’t know, it’s different than being around others. Otto’s been beating around the idea of being a mentor. Might help him out a little in that department.
Still, he hopes that Cassie is happy.
“Right. So the man who couldn’t get Compton or Cassie to stay is giving advice to me. I see how it is.”
He’s shot out of his memory. “Hey now, Bob. That doesn’t seem too fair to me.”
Maybe he should’ve been paying attention, but truth be told, he’s never been all that good at keeping his foot out of his mouth. It seemed like a perfectly normal sentence to say, and then his metal hand is plucking a spade out of the air. Jesus, Bob. That could’ve hit me square in the—
“Fair!? Now, you want to talk to me about how fairly you’ve been treated? Do you think any part of this is fair? You’re the reason the battle went so badly—you’re the reason we all splintered—if your fucking instruments did what they asked you to do—”
“Well, now, Bob,” Otto interrupts impatiently. “They did. The Hyperglaciator—”
Bob roars then: a seemingly endless, unbroken stream of hot, fetid air in his direction. Otto leaps back from where he sits, half-convinced that Bob is going to throw the table at him. As it is, a vine wraps around his wrist tight. It would’ve gotten the other one, too, if his mechanical hand didn’t start a minor tousle. Hard to tell who’s winning.
With his one hand, though, he’s still stuck.
Otto finds that he’s—
He’s scared.
Been a long time since he felt much of anything, and fear is definitely not high on his list to revisit. Otto takes a step back. His shoe crunches on broken glass. It passes through his mind that Bob might actually kill him out here.
“Ford, gone! Compton, gone! Cassie, gone! Lucy, gone! My husband—dead! All because you weren’t as god-damn smart as you think you are, asshole!”
It had seemed so simple. So simple. Back in the board rooms, back in his laboratory. Back on the jet. He had been given a shining purpose to do what he did best—think! Invent! And yet, when the cards were laid upon the table, when he looked his former friend in the eye, he… he…
“Now, here you are! The Psychonauts’ poster child. Nevermind all the graves you stepped on to be there!”
Someone had to do the work. Psychonauts was ready to crumble when they returned. Yes—yes, alright, there was part of him that enjoyed the attention. That enjoyed the praise, that enjoyed the awards. For the first time, they had enough money to build a proper location. What was Bob suggesting he do? Turn it down for the sake of his dead husband? They tried to dig through the ice. They did, but one had to be reasonable.
He finds that his mouth has gone quite dry. Otto wishes that Bob wasn’t glaring at him so. Nobody glares at Otto Mentallis like that any more. It reminds him of the times they were all together. The last time Otto Mentallis was really known. Now, everyone who really knows him is either dead, disappeared, or…
Bob.
Steam hisses in the back of his head. His carefully-prepared systems are beginning to overwork. Something is starting to creep out of the vents.
Not as smart as you think you are, they whisper. You killed all your little friends. What good did you do? You never fought from the heart.
The brain doesn’t need the heart, Otto chastises himself, but it’s weaker than usual. He clenches his hands. “I’m sorry if you think that way, Bob, but I had to be an adult. Do you remember what that’s like? Some of us don’t have the luxury of being a public embarrassment—”
“I don’t care what I am!”
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that this man fell in love with Helmut Fullbear. It was a briefly fascinating anthropological study. Final conclusion? Bob has a shorter fuse around Otto. They always came to verbal blows more quickly than the others, who all seemed content to make nice. Otto doesn’t think of himself as a very violent person, but Bob barely lets him talk sometimes.
“And you know the worst part, Otto? Old buddy? Old friend?”
Otto scoffs. He straightens his shoulders and tries to cool everything down in his head. “I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.”
“I have to wake up every single fucking morning and see where you built the machine that killed my Helmut.”
That isn’t—
Oh.
Oh, he can see. Through one of the broken panes, they have a perfectly uninterrupted view of Otto’s old workshop. How strange. He has dim memories of placing it in there. Literally dim. Most of his recollections of that time are covered in a thick wax, and he tries not to pick at it. Otto only stayed there for a few months longer before he moved into a half-finished laboratory. They hadn’t even had a ceiling yet. He’d been so eager to move in, but now Otto can’t remember why.
How hard he’d worked on the Hyperglaciator. Toiling day and night, nearly freezing the nearby river for his trouble. Bob had been so angry at the noise. And now, he… he…
Otto remembers his own scream as the Hyperglaciator began to fire. The others had rushed for the spot where Helmut had fallen, a chaotic milieu of people and animals and vines and emotions. Otto was the only one to run for his instrument. No, not yet, please don’t fire yet, Helmut down there, if you freeze the rest of the ice now, we’ll never get him back, please, please—
He hadn’t been able to stop the machine before it fired. In a last hail mary, he’d tried to rip the antenna off with his bare hand.
The flight back had been hard. What was he meant to say? Bob had cried the entire time, Cassie at his side. Boole had been practically catatonic. Ford wasn’t even there—he had said he would arrange his own ride, which should have been an indicator of his mental state. Ford was never one to let them all suffer alone, until he was.
Otto had sat with his Hyperglaciator in his lap. He remembers the weight of it—how cold it was—he remembers his own face in the reflection, he remembers thinking—my god, you just murdered Helmut Fullbear.
In the waking world, his eyes close tight. “I can’t, I can’t… think about that right now, Bob.”
“Oh, can’t you? Is it too hard for you? That’s all I can think about. Get this—hey, hey, hey!”
The weight on his wrist suddenly loosens. Otto looks back to see that his mechanical arm has a knife in its hand. What remains of the vine lays in pieces on the floor. To that, Bob looks truly alarmed. He rushes over—stumbles—knocks a pot off the table—and then gets on his knees to hold the mangled bits close. The edges of the vines are already starting to shrivel.
When Bob looks up at Otto again, almost cradling his dead plant, Otto sees the tears in his eyes. He sees the hatred lurking there. He sees…
“Get the fuck out, Otto,” he tells him, with a terrifying calm.
And Otto doesn’t hesitate.
***
Once Otto started to remember, he can’t stop.
It comes up at the strangest of times. Worst is when he’s trying to invent something incredible, and his brain beams an old Psychic Seven memory straight into his head. So much time has passed, he nearly forgot that Otto. The Otto that ate with other people every night, the Otto that people liked to spent time with. He remembers how annoyed he’d felt when the others kept insisting on socializing.
Comes up other times, too. When he’s trying to eat, when he’s trying to sleep. Truman had called him into his office to let him know that he’d been accepted into the mentorship program. His newest mentee was named Sasha Nein, a bright young man, and he would be arriving in a few months. Otto is meant to develop a task list. He hasn’t even thought about it.
It doesn’t help that there’s so many goddamn artifacts laying around the place. Feels like he can’t turn around without seeing a carved likeness of some old dead friend. He can’t even get peace in his laboratory, because everything started in a laboratory.
Over the course of weeks, it drains him. Empties him. He stops attending Psychonauts meetings, then quits inventing altogether. Even Truman pulls him into the office to tell him that he’s noticed some behavioral changes. Truman made an honest attempt to be earnest, to have a heart-to-heart, which only served to strain Otto’s incredulity.
You don’t know what it was like, he remembers thinking. You can’t even imagine what it was like. All of it, every single inch of this space, is a memory.
Compton would understand. Cassie would understand. Somewhere deep down, even Ford might understand. Bob understands and would let Otto know about it—which is where he finally gets his idea.
He could’ve cried tears of joy when he thought of it. Something that absolutely had to work, something that he could do, something that he could fix. A fine way to sort out the trouble in his head, and all he would need is a water gun and a golf club. Otto has several. He liked golf, once upon a time. Played it with Truman a lot when he first started.
This is how he ends up outside of Bob’s greenhouse again, several weeks later, during a rainstorm.
Despite the heavy downpour, he can still see the outline of his laboratory built into the mountain. Otto isn’t bad at golf, per se, but he thinks he’ll need some psychic energy to make his shot hit true. He has a pocketful of psitanium, should he need it.
The exploding blastcaps are a recent addition to Bob’s greenhouse. Otto can’t say he recognizes the species, though that doesn’t mean much. He can’t say he likes them. Every so often, they’ll hear an explosion from the depths of the gulch, and then Truman has to send a scout to make sure that Bob hasn’t blown himself up. The wildlife are slowly starting to learn their ways around them.
He did some research before coming here, of course. Though the blastcaps are quite aggressive, they can be temporarily dampened.
Otto takes out his watergun. He shoots the blastcap several times, until it’s soaked to a dark purple color. That should give him more than enough time to line up his shot.
Of course he considered telling Bob about this. Perhaps Bob would approve. More likely, it would make him angrier than ever. He knows that the fellow is bustling around his greenhouse, as he’s still not shown up to work. In a few minutes, he’ll get one hell of a wake-up call anyway.
“Alright,” Otto says aloud. He drops the water gun to the side and takes out the golf club. “You cocksure, selfish son of a bitch. It’s about time you lose something.”
The blastcap is a little larger than your average golfball. Otto squats next to it, readies his swing. If he was wrong about the water calculations, then he’s about to get one hell of a surprise. He’s rarely ever wrong where his calculations are concerned, though.
One, two…
Otto follows through.
The golf club makes a hollow thunk! against the hull of the plant, like he’s just chucked a pumpkin, but it’s lighter than it appears. It goes sailing through the air. While it’s a fairly pitiful arc, Otto sends out a psychic whirlwind to keep it afloat. The tomato-colored thing bounces like a ball towards the edge of his workshop, and then…
BOOM!
An explosion cuts through the sheets of rain. More goes to follow. Otto couldn’t even begin to guess what sort of chemicals he’d been keeping in there, but that doesn’t matter now. Sparks go off like fireworks, and smoldering bits of infrastructure go down the mountain. He’s made a giant hole in the side of his former laboratory, and Otto—Otto—
A cackle bubbles up from the depths of his stomach. He doesn’t expect it, doesn’t know where it came from, but he can’t stop it. Otto laughs like a man possessed, until tears are streaming down his face and he’s practically dancing in the rain. All the while, the fire rages on from his old workshop.
He laughs because the memories are starting to burn with it. Otto feels them wither away, feels them disappear as his lab does. Was that all he needed? Was that all he had to do? If that’s the case, he’ll never come back to this greenhouse again. Never come back to Green Needle Gulch. If all he has to do is ignore the places that make him feel bad, then he’ll stay right in—
“What the hell are you doing!?”
Otto doesn’t realize that his ears are ringing until someone shouts loud enough to break though. He turns to find that Bob, sans one sock, has stumbled out of his greenhouse. In his free hand is a flask. Suffice to say, it’s nine in the morning and he’s five o’clock drunk.
“Blowing it up!” Otto announces gleefully, pointing at the burning wreckage. More laughter escapes him.
For once, Bob is the sensible one. He looks past Otto’s pointed finger, then back at the inventor’s face. His expression is one of complete puzzlement.
Then, it settles into resignation. Bob takes a few large gulps from his flask.
“Blowing up your lab isn’t going to bring Helmut back, asshol—”
“You think I did it for you!? Bob, I’m a selfish man! I only care about me!” Otto announces with some measure of pride. He turns back towards his destructive creation, his hands on his hips. “I did it for myself and only myself! If I destroy every memory here that reminds me I killed the Psychic Seven, that make me want to die, every memory that makes me want to become a useless lump of a brain—like you!—then I’ll do it! I can do it.”
His heart is beating worryingly fast. His vision is starting to shake a little, but that might just be the rain. It’s probably the rain. If it’s not the rain, then Otto is going to die staring up at his fire.
“I’ll have so much more room up there! I can fit so many more diagrams. Blueprints. If I just dump everything that once meant everything to me out, I can—”
At first, he thinks Bob is going to attack him again, which would be a little rude. When he looks down at the weight on his chest, though, he sees that Bob has pressed his flask against him.
“Have a drink,” Bob grunts. “To celebrate that piece of shit burning.”
Oh. Oh, yes. Yes. Otto doesn’t like drinking. For a man who constantly makes scans of his own mind, it tends to delay his progess somewhat. However, he’s not immune to celebrations. He takes the flask and takes a long glug of the absolute worst tasting thing he’s ever had. When he passes it back to Bob, he smacks his lips in satisfaction. The liquor ran down his throat, clear as water.
Otto is filled with so much joy. He is so happy. Finally, he’s learned how to fix himself. He’d already been doing so much better than the others, namely this smelly little thing next to him, but now! Now, it’ll be like nothing ever happened. He can just move on with his life. Everything has been put away, everything has been resolved, everything is closed—
He remembers the funeral.
It hadn’t felt like a funeral. Cassie had come up to him, buzzing with energy, and informed him that they were doing Helmut’s funeral today. Otto had asked with some urgency if they’d found Helmut’s body. Cassie had replied in the negative. Otto had asked whether they could have a funeral without a body. Cassie had replied in the positive. Otto had asked whether they would hold a funeral for Lucy. Cassie had told Otto to wear a suit and to be in front of the Feel Mobile at sunset.
Otto had brought a team photo of Helmut to put on the shrine. Others had contributed to it, too—guitar picks and Helmut’s hat and his favorite records and his preferred, hard-to-find brand of beer. It seemed less like a funeral than a junk sale, especially when they all lived under a photo of a smiling, young, confident Helmut. Hadn’t they all seen his last seconds? Hadn’t they all seen the fear on his face?
Bob had brought a bouquet. He always brought a bouquet whenever they were all forced to go listen to Helmut’s Psychodyssey down in the theater. Otto always thought that was unbearably slow, but if he refused, then Helmut would refuse to participate in his experiments. Unfortunately, by the time that he’d brought them to the altar, they were all dead and rotted.
The worst part had been the eulogy. For whatever misguided reason, Cassie had gotten Ford to give the eulogy. Otto supposes that he would’ve been second-choice (given that Cassie had been with a sobbing Bob during the entire thing), so perhaps he should have been grateful for it. Except—
Ford’s shattering had been obvious, at that point. He’d read over a prepared speech (written by Cassie, Otto expects), except it was clear that he had little idea what was going on. Helmut was consistently referred to as Helmet.
It’d been a travesty of a day—and it appears in Otto’s mind now, crystal-clear.
The euphoria leaves him.
All that he feels, then, is the rain that soaks his clothes. Otto stares up at his burning workshop, at whatever little baubles might still lay within. Something fills in his chest, but it’s not joy. It’s not relief, it’s not drive. It’s, it’s…
“I miss ‘em, Bob.” His voice croaks. “I miss every single last rotten second we were together.”
It’s an unacceptable vulnerability in front of a man who will jab his finger at any sore spot. He half-expects Bob to leave him bleeding. Why shouldn’t he? A parting gift. Otto never wants to step foot in Green Needle Gulch again, so why the hell shouldn’t Bob make the bruises worse?
He hears Bob take another slug of his flask. Otto doesn’t know how he’s survived out here for so long, bouncing from one world to the other. No wonder why he doesn’t show up for work.
When Bob speaks, he sounds as haunted as Otto feels.
“I miss ‘em too, Otto. I miss ‘em, too.”