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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/bukkithedd on 2024-11-02 21:27:32+00:00.
“What’s the worst I’ve seen in a humans’ mind?”
I looked up from the glass I held tightly with my two upper manipulators, willing it to refill with the ethanol-based liquid that was probably strong enough to dissolve paint, let alone braincells.
"You don’t know the horrors I’ve seen, and I hope, for your own sake, that you never will. The beauty. The smells. The SOUNDS!!!" I could hear my voice rising to a shrill pitch as my psychic envelope lost some of it’s tightly woven and intricate net of control woven into it, it’s colors flaring for those that saw psychic energy as a color-palette.
I continued, my voice a harsh whisper as bleak dread, anguish and an emotion unknown to non-humans bled through the psychic plane: "You don’t know the desolation. The despair. The pure, raw anguish!!!" The last few words accompanied by my lower set of manipulators gripping the other persons’ collar, pulling them close to my optic-sensors as I screamed it into their face before letting them go and plopping down onto my chair again with a resigned sigh.
“It was supposed to be a routine examination of the human Greg… Just purely…routine. Normal. Mundane, even. I have done many such examinations of sophonts during my career without any issue”, I said, my voice returning to normal again as I let go of my unwilling, listening companion. “Nothing could prepare me for what I saw, felt and had to endure, nor will it ever leave me.”
I signalled the bartender to refill my glass for the 9th time, meeting only a raised set of eyebrows before it reached for the bottle. Refilling my glass, it merely nodded, as if it knew what I had gone through despite not belonging to the species that were known to be psychics.
“The dive was normal in its anormality. At first, I mean. Open green fields under an azure-blue sky dotted with white puffs of what looked like smoke, with grass gently swaying in the wind. Majestic white flying creatures with slender wings surfing on the winds, diving and frolicking in its gentle caress. Giant, towering plantlife gently waving their branches as the wind passed through them. The smell of what the humans call the sea lured me to climb a small embankment where I gazed upon a vast body of water stretching as far as my optical sensor could reach, while my auditory sensors heard the static-laden sound of undulations of liquid striking the sand where the two met. The beauty of it dumbstruck me, it humbled me with its magificense and made my mind weep through the endlessness of it. But little did I know of the trap that laid within that mind, behind that pleasant and joyful facade that the human always wore.”
Half the liquid in the glass disappeared into my primary feeding-orifice, the raw chemical taste of it burning its way down into one of the digestive-sacs to spread its fiery warmth. The room around me was silent, lost in the psychic imagery that was leaking out as my control slipped.
“I do not know how long I was standing there, with the vast body of undulating liquid ahead of me and the green, fragrant plains behind me. I only noticed that it was missing after it had started to fade, which made me turn around. It was as if the scene in front of me had…frozen, somehow. It was first at that point I noticed that the colors were getting muted, the grass and the giant plants withering away into nothing but ash on an invisible wind and the creatures once frolicking had disappeared. The entire scene changed before my eyes to a featureless landscape in the color of gray, industrial ferrocrete for as far as I could see, while the once-azure sky had been replaced by a black more intense than you have ever seen. No stars. No stars to be seen at all. Just…black. A deep, maddening black that hurt to look at, like an abyss with no end and no beginning, ready to swallow the unwary souls that dared challenge its might.”
“I started walking, unable to comprehend what was happening, unable to process the oppressing feeling pushing down on me from…everywhere, seemingly all at once. For what seemed like hours I saw nothing change. Regardless of which direction I looked, all I could see was the same bland, gray landscape under a completely black and featureless sky. It became hard to think, to comprehend, to feel, even, although parts of my mind was racing along a myriad of paths trying desperately to make some sort of sense where nothing could be found by bleak emptyness.”
“For a long while I walked, until I could walk no more and stumbled onto the ashen ground before me. I was…spent. My once great mental fortitude gone like ash on the wind, my willpower withered into but a husk, my emotions completely overwhelmed by sheer hopelessness and my strenght to continue on lost to me while a sickeningly sweet voice whispered into my audiory sensors for me to give up. To rest my head and succumb.”
"Yet somehow I managed to get back onto my feet to stagger forward, as if pushed. Stubbornness, mayhaps? Or driven by a will not of my own? I do not know. All I know is that for the longest time I continued to stagger through the blasted hellscape in front of me until I could see what looked like a rectangular building in the distance. As my energy seemingly returned to me, I started running towards it, reaching for the doorhandle that manifested itself together with an entryway. Desperate to escape, I threw myself through it and slammed it shut in order to escape. And escape I did!»
A bitter laugh escaped me, increasing into a cackle tinged with insanity
«…Or so I thought», I whispered. «When I turned from the door I was faced by what looked like an endless corridor filled with doors on both sides, lit by harsh fluorescent lighting from above. Many doors were unremarkable, while others were held shut with chains, boards and long metal spikes. Some doors were pristine, others wore deep scars of what looked like clawmarks done with a five-fingered hand. Others yet were burned around the edges and angry yellow-red jets of flame leaked through the cracks, and I even spotted some where the door seemed…alive, for lack of a better term, slowly pulsing and twitching
It was at this point that I felt a hand on what humans would call my shoulder, and a gentle yet firm voice say to me that I should not have come here and that I did not belong in this place. I turned back towards the door I came in through only to find that it had been replaced my the visage of the human Greg wearing a sad, weary smile filled with anguish, pity and something I have come to understand is shame. «You do not belong here», Greg said once again, giving my shoulder a gentle squeeze. «You should go back, as this place is not safe for you. There are….things here», he said, nodding towards the closest of the doors.
The door was slightly ajar, opening onto a sterile white room with another frail-looking human female laid in it. The human itself had a sickly pallor to its skin, stark white hair and a drawn expression on its face as it slept, obviously close to death. A young male human standing at the foot-end, its face locked in a snarl of anger but also of immense sadness, its grief rolling off it as powerful as the heat of a blast-furnace strong enough to crack a moon. He did not notice us, and Greg gently reached out and pulled the door quietly shut while once again reiterating that I should not be here. It wasn’t safe.»
Greg led me down the hallway past many doors while saying nothing. He only stopped me after we reached a door with a gentle light shining through the window of it, turning me in order to look at me. «Now you know», he said. «You know not to look into the minds of humans, as you may find a yawning abyss staring back at you». Another sad smile crossed fleetingly over his face, once again equal parts pity and sadness. «You understand what many of us carry now. What we hide from others, even our closest friends, family and lovers. Some of us might talk of it, others will not. Some will succumb due to it, yet others will silently endure it. I am sorry that you had to find it out in this way. I really am. Mostly because it is infectious, which is why I said that this place is dangerous to you. I hope you can forgive me, but I cannot allow you to stay.»
Some of the other creatures in the bar were openly weeping now as the control of my psychic net had completely failed. A few were unconcious, and one staggered over into a corner and hurled up probably what he ate during elementary indoctrination facility classes in his youth by the looks and sounds of it.
«So what happened? How did you escape?», the bartender said, curious to hear the end of my story. He had a few centuries to get used to all manners of things, given that his species were notoriously long-lived. I merely sighed, my shoulders sinking forward as my head tipped forward as I pushed myself onto my lower appendages.
«Greg kicked me out», I said as I made my way towards the door while pulling my psychic net in tightly around me again. «He opened the softly glowing door behind me, once again begged me for forgiveness, mumbled something about pasta before using one of his primary motive appendages to forcefully and literally kick me out. When I came to, I was half-sitting-half-lying in a corner of the infirmary, while my assistant was still out cold. Human Greg, however, was gone, and I have not seen him since. And I have never dared peeking into a human mind again after that, nor do I think I ever wi…
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