ways_back_room | DE: It's all in my mind

Hank's looks much like his lab at Division X. Lots of cabinets, acid/fire resistant blacktop tables, various instruments, and then a tall mirror that is covered. It changes throughout his life--sometimes becoming a office much like a senators, sometimes becoming a sound studio, sometimes a large library--but the mirror is always there.

Jess's looks something like the back room of a natural history museum with all the display specimens being various arachnids. Some of the cases are blurry and some are empty or missing. There are two portraits up on the wall which show Carol Danvers (both as herself and as Captain Marvel) and Lindsay McCabe. There are also tons of food scraps laying around.

Brimstone's looks something like a mashup between a reading room, a jewelers work space, and an apothecary. There are many chests of drawers with varying sizes of drawers and lots of glass jars with different kinds of teeth and jewels.

Quin's is a dark room with no walls, only support columns. There are lots of drapes that blow in a none existent wind and there are many patches of light and dark. The laughter of his wife and children can just be heard.

Isabella's (since I am going to be aging her soon) is her work study in her garden. It is a converted potting shed and is lined with many glass jars containing preserved sparklings. There are many notebooks about; the pages filled with either scientific observations or drawings of sparking anatomy. Occasionally notes about trivial matters needed to run a Victorian era house can be found as well. Central to the room is a copy of A Natural History of Dragons; though later in her life Isabella will discover much misinformation within the pages, she still holds the volume in a special place in her heart.

I'll have to think about Andrea and Mulan.

Edited 2014-07-02 15:35 (UTC)

Correction...
Jess's mindscape is actually a Victoria flat with a very San Francisco feel. Out some of the windows can be seen the landscape of Wundagore mountain but everything else is as I described above, including the specimen cases and portraits.

I have said before that this sounds like what Amascut's mental landscape looks like, but it is time to put that to words especially now that I know more about the traumas in her life. So, it is not a room, it is an entire formerly beautiful city full of ancient architecture in ruins, an irradiated mess full of non-Euclidian geometries. In some parts the harsh sun burns the sky, looming far too close and too large. In other parts the landscape the sky is dark and sunless and the tortured geology of Freneskae protrudes from the dusty ground and runs right through the buildings of the city. And throughout rampages Mah, one of the creators of the (former) universe, howling in pain and fear at her hunger and at the the loss of her toys and her sisters. She's usually what bites back at psychics that are careful and devours those that are not. Other times it's the sun and his harsh, unforgiving light.

~phew~ that was an essay. Moving on.

Fairy Fixit's is a meadow-like clearing, surrounded by a super dense forest of blue trees. Whether or not there is a sky is unclear because of all the glowing fruiting fungal bodies and the lanterns hanging everywhere. It's her "office" in a way.

Amascut's mental-scape is fascinating.

Yeah, a psychic had better come prepared with a very good radiation suit. But then there is still the danger of Mah catching you and playing with you. Not a friendly place at all. Elder gods don't play nice.

I actually wrote up a description for Stitch's mind awhile ago. I keep it on hand on the off chance he comes across a telepath. I'd like to note that while emotions are feelings, they don't encompass everything that feeling entails.

This is not a place of words. Oh, they're present; flitting past in small shoals, darting from one corner to another, dialects intermingling as they scuttle for cover. Yes, words exist here, but it is not their place. This is a place of images, of sounds, of the shapeless ghosts of scents and the swirling kaleidoscope of color and sensation that are a frenzied (if thus far brief) lifetime of memories; crisp and vibrant, faint and graying. They all tumble over themselves, yammering, whispering, tasting, simultaneously, constantly. And crackling beneath it all hums a sharp intelligence. No, this is not a place of words. This is a place of feeling.

Edited 2014-07-02 16:37 (UTC)

All I can say is wow and very fitting!

(BTW, sorry I never tagged Discord with Jessica. RL got in the way. ={ Next time?)

Thanks. And no worries! Next time.

I'd love Stitch and Charles to talk, I think they could be interesting in a good way. He has X's stamp of approval.

I'm game!

Sam: Is the cozy cottage she grew up in - everything dated by at least fifty years, very lived-in and comfortable and stable.

Oswin: Is the easiest of mine - whatever it might have been before, it now defaults to one of the Alaska's survival pods... one curiously fitted with a kitchen, complete with souffle-making supplies.

Clara: It is a kitchen - one with the scent of her mum's perfectly-made souffles in the air. Of course, with the Doctor and the TARDIS messing with her head, some of the walls and drawers are developing glitches.

William: Because the boy has ambition, his is a cozy cabin on board ship (something like the captain's, or the doctor's - something a little more permanent than the midshipman's quarters.

Bones: It is, somewhat predictably, the treatment room of a hospital - not a medbay, because he was well into adulthood before taking shipboard posts, but something land-based and stable, everything laid out in logical (hah) and clean precision. That also means everything is very clearly labeled - Bones has pretty much no defense against telepaths, poor boy.

Balthazar: It is Merlin's castle keep, where he was trained - and just about as full of traps as the original.

Ace: When she was young, it was the interior of the youth club in Perivale, one of the few places in the world she felt safe and part of a group. There were, even then, places that a telepath wouldn't be able to go, and that she didn't know about - dark shadowy places full of anger and hunger. Now... now it's the interior of a TARDIS - just as full of twists and turns and connections that shouldn't have been there but really are and connections that should be there but really aren't. There's also a cheetah on that TARDIS... a rather clever cheetah that likes to hunt down intruders. Or maybe just come back to your head with you.

Katya: Her mindscape does not read as human, because while she once was, she isn't now. There's a chill to it, like stepping out into the Moscow winter in a coat that just isn't suitable.

Glorfindel: I imagine that sound has a larger role in memory than anything else... Still working on this one.

X-23: It's all sterile windowless corridors, with blank, automatic-opening doors behind which sit rows of impeccably kept filing cabinets. None of the rooms have windows, either.

Raven: It's a mix of blinding light and depthless shadow, in abstract patterns. Aside from the demarcation between zones, nothing is visible.

Galadan: A vast forest, populated by all manner of creatures. Most of them can kill. As can the trees.

Michael the Archangel: Burning light and a sword like a brand.

Nynaeve al'Meara: Randland but smaller, with a neat herb garden, the towers of Malkier in the distance, and a vague set-up for a village. Probably sheep. And a forest. No ships.

Sam Tyler: A bizarre hybrid of the police building in 2000 and 1970. There's a lot of background shouting.

Wonder Woman: Themyscira-that-was, including the opening into Tartarus, etc. With monsters.

Dean Winchester: An endless highway with roadside attractions and diners and more roadside attractions and bizarre motel rooms and diners and the occasional deep dark wood equivalent. And a corner of Hell.

Will's mind is depicted very frequently in canon, to the point that it's arguably the lens for the show as a whole. Even when not outright depicting his mind, real events are often shown with his mental flourishes. The most frequent specific setting the show has depicted for Will's mind is a wide stream in a forest. This isn't really a … mental landscape so much as an acceptable retreat that can subsume his physical reality if he allows it to. But Will's mind is never exactly fixed in any particular way – to the point that I actually resist the term "memory palace," because that suggests rooms and, well, structure that he completely lacks. He can't compartmentalize at all, can't keep anything in his mind really apart from anything else. (In the pilot when Lecter was poking at him, he claimed he could build "forts" in his mind - he was lying.) In fact, when he thought the Bar was part of his mind, what felt most wrong about that to him was that the Bar was too structured and too organized to be something in his head.

So I don't generally visualize Will's mind as any specific space (unless he's imagining such a space). Much of the time it's more like a tide of sensations and experiences that roll in and out, and that he feels in what's akin to synesthesia (e.g., hearing light and color and seeing sounds, etc. – this comes a lot from the show's borrowing Harris' prose, such as the air at crime scenes having "screams smeared on it"). Part of the reason he uses metaphors so often is because ~~he's in a Bryan Fuller show~~ his mind switches so quickly to and among various sensory experiences. Sometimes I think of his mind as a dense web so that I can see the connections he makes, but this isn't how he perceives it – while I as the writer feel like I have to know how he's making connections, he doesn't always know himself. For him it's more like a haze that can very quickly suddenly take the shape of a storm.

His mind is also (kind of unsurprisingly) a little easier to explain in relation to others'. One of the show's examples, that I like and use in my head a lot, is mycelia - thread-like strands that grow from the roots of plants and physically attach to others, and actually allow plants to communicate. That idea of communication through connection is a pretty good, albeit metaphorical, visual for Will's mind – his mind reaches out directly to others' without intermediary and without any way to really mitigate it on his part.

My own way of visualizing it sometimes is kind of weird, but – I think of his and others' minds in the form of three-dimensional sculptures made up of hovering points of light. In most others' minds, those points of light are fixed in place. But in Will's, when he approaches another, his points of light will immediately rearrange themselves to at least partially take the shape of the other's mind. Which not only means his mind will try to take the shape of the other person's but that it will only partially do so, so he operates in this kind of weird, misshapen medium a lot of the time.

And this has gone on forever so okay.

Elle's is really sort of an empty room. That makes her sound shallow or stupid, but it's not that – it's more like a kind of detachment from being any one thing too firmly. She does take and keep notes because it's hard for them to stay in her mind, but she can temporarily dress up her room as she needs to – it's just that she'll usually take down those decorations, move out the clutter after she doesn't need it anymore. (This is distinct from Will, for instance, because she does have a structured space – she just didn't really have the chance to develop a firm sense of identity, and that was rocked further when she recovered her memories.) A few things have accrued that she doesn't remove, and there are doors she can walk through to temporarily be someone she used to be. But for the most part she's sort of in this one bare but changeable room, and her interaction with others is like peering through a window out of it.

Asami's I feel like would be less a physical space, and more like the inner workings of a clock. Highly organized, tightly structured, each piece serving a specific need. In most instances, this mentality helps her make quick calculations, and act with precision, especially when she needs to think on her feet.

Katara this of open space – unsurprisingly, tundra. It's simultaneously wide and inviting, but also consuming. She can move and think freely, but has to be constantly aware, and frequently verges on being overwhelmed, especially if she has no one else with whom to share this space.

I love, love the description of Will's mind reaching out and I would love to talk empaths and telepaths with you sometime. Charles and Will themselves are complicated but fascinating, but playing them and navigating all the challenges is why I love playing Charles.

I'd be happy to do a thread with them sometime! I don't really have to worry about Will finding out things he shouldn't at this point, and he's already sort of been pushed in Charles' direction, so. Yes! :D

HAHA

Clem: Ever seen the trippy fantasy sequence from Walk Hard? Yeah, that.

Dix: A plush, velvet lined bedroom with the world's biggest stage.

Juliet: Absolutely adorable and yet absolutely deadly.

Pinkie: Pink! And bouncy! And friendly! And PINK!

Eponine: Filled with pictures of Marius.

DE: It's all in my mind

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