SubDE: Open your mind to me

[bjornwilde]

Inspired by Xavier's return to Milliways, what does your pup's mental landscape look like? I'm thinking of how mindscapes are typically presented in comics and movies as being unique and tailored to each person. For example, one might have something like an artist's studio, while another might have a void with stars or blotches of colors.

Your milage may vary of course.

Comments

[thepurposeofthegoggles]

As someone who's hoping to app a psychic pup in the near future I am very interested in people's responses to this.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka's I think would be areas of the Jedi Temple, specifically the sparing grounds. Girl seems to love her sabers and fighting with them so it's only fitting. So lots of stone monuments (in neutral tones), open expanses of walkways, and sand pits for practicing martial skills in. Reads very meditative and peaceful.

Quinlan's, on the other hand, would be his family's ship, the Dragon's Den. It would seem something like the insides of the Millennium Falcon, being similar model and made by the same company, but smaller. There would be plants here and there though, as well as children's toys and mediation pillows. Hidden among all of this would be a Jedi holocron.

Sabine's would have to be a cluttered workshop made of plastic or durasteel. There'd be lots of tools; paint sticks, paper, sprayers, battery packs, explosives, detonators, blaster parts, armor pieces, etc. Buried deep in it all would be an Imperial datapad that was passlocked.

Hank's, at this time, would be a lab; the tools shifting for whatever discipline Hank was working with at the time. Microscopes and other tools needed for biochemistry would be present, but there would also be a few trees growing...oaks I am thinking. Trees that just call for climbing. There'd also be a picture of Raven on the wall and Charles' thesis on genetics would be in a prominent place on one of the lab tables.

All I am getting for the Luidaeg is a kelp forest with darting shadows and bones. I don't think it'd be safer to venture farther than that.

Izana's would be their Grandmother's home, a mix of a traditional Japanese home and sleek modern. Wooden floors and walls, with paper windows and dividers to the rooms, with high tech looking light fixtures and appliances. Books would litter the tables; subjects ranging from technology repair, garde piloting and strategy, and sights of Sidonia.

Rollo's would either be a longship or a drinking/feasting hall, depending on how he felt. Regardless, there would be two wolves, one fat and the other starved, as well as murmuring voices that seem impossible to understand. Music plays as well, stringed instruments, drums, and flutes.

Amelia's would be a massive library, well light and warm, that also had a bar. The titles of the books would be hard to read, the words either fading from view or shifting to a language the reader doesn't read.

I'll have to think on Sam and Selina.

[2goodarms]

Imagine a very dark, very cramped storage space stacked floor-to-ceiling with sagging cardboard boxes. There aren't too many clear paths; the ones that exist are quite well-worn. If you're not careful, you'll take an elbow to one of the boxes and spill its contents everywhere. Whatever's inside will go off like firecrackers and blind you for a minute.

Toward the back is an enormous concrete wall. It's starting to crack in places, and in one or two spots, an entire chunk of concrete's been ripped away to let you get a glimpse of what's inside. Maybe you can wiggle your arm through one of the holes to retrieve something on the other side, if you're really trying. Maybe not.

So, yeah, Curtis's mind is a pretty precarious place. It's not even that hospitable to him, let alone any visitors.

[varadia]

X's mental landscape is a bunch of sterile brightly-lit corridors in a very rigid grid, lined with doors. Behind some of those doors are endless vistas of stars. She's fuzzy to telepaths, though. For multiple reasons.

Ysalwen's mental landscape is the Fade, constantly changing and flickering, horrors to wonders and back again, with vast barren stretches in-between. In the center, regardless of where you look, is a black city. What she really cares about is in there. Good luck reaching that. You'll need it.

Raven cleverly has no mind! *cough* If he did have a mind, as such, it would basically be the southern coast of Alaska down into Canada. Home!!!

Nynaeve has got the Two Rivers very firmly in there, with a very extensive herb garden. Far more extensive than could actually practically exist. The herbs are symbolic, okay?

Michael's mind is just a bright, burning light. Warm, not cold.

Galadan's mind is a blasted, sere plain. Somewhere in it there is a forest with a river in it, but you're going to have to travel a long, barren way before finding it.

Wonder Woman has all of Themyscira, knowledge and memories tucked into different buildings and with different people. It's a very heavily populated mindscape.

Flemeth, in the part of her mind that is not illusion or a clever trap, has Elvhenan as it was.

Dean Winchester has an endless highway through the Midwest. He rides through it in Baby, of course. And it ends up in Hell.

[have_no_mercy]

Tess' landscape is literally a giant file room.

[i_am_your_host]

Emcee's is the empty, silent Kit Kat Klub. There are shadows and light and gray cigarette smoke that blurs the edges between them. In the light one can see the tables where the audience would sit, shiny black tabletops with little lamps with bright red fringed shades. One can see the bar, with a twinkling array of glasses and bottles. And one can see the stage, well-worn wooden floorboards, edged with footlights and the circle of a spotlight upon it. These areas are where people can see him, where he exposes himself the most. But sometimes the lights are so bright that he gets washed out and you're still not seeing him fully. Then there are the edges of the room and the stage, where the shadows are. He lurks there, too, watching. You see him there one moment, but look away and he disappears as if part of the shadows himself. He moves between the darkness and light like cigarette smoke. It's here, in the smoky, blurred edges, where he fully is who he is, but he can shift from one thing to another so quickly that you're not sure of what you think you saw.

[maid_of_tarth]

Brienne's is a medieval castle, but waaaayyyy shinier and cleaner than any actual medieval castle, with lots of gorgeous tapestries and stained glass windows depicting stories of heroism and great deeds, and a minstrel with a beautiful voice who's always singing.

Combeferre's is a very large room, one section of which is a disorganized library, another of which is a disorganized museum, and the third of which is a laboratory. Also disorganized. Enter at your own peril.

Jehan Prouvaire's is a quiet room up in a tower, with bookshelves of poetry in different languages, and nothing on the walls except maybe one small painting, and a large window with a view of a meadow full of flowers.

Fantine's is a small, clean, bright room, done in pastel colors, with lots of light and large windows and a songbird, always singing.

[genarti]

I don't tend to actually conceptualize my characters' minds this way, but sure, assuming a comics artist of the right genre were drawing it:

Enjolras's is a library, a single room with bookshelves to the ceiling (and how high does that ceiling go, anyway?) and drawers full of papers. Sunlight streams through the windows, always.

Cosette's is, of course, a garden.

Thor has the open sky, full of clouds, with ground somewhere far beneath but never in sight. The weather varies with his mood, but even in the balmiest calm, the air is always charged with electricity, hair-raising and feeling as if lightning could strike at any moment. (But he's also very very hard for psychics to read, unless he's actively cooperating with you at the moment.)

Kazul has a cave network, full of rooms and twisty passages, and everywhere miscellaneous treasure. The organizational system isn't readily apparent, but she knows where everything is. (Basically, it's a combination of her home and the Caves of Fire and Night, writ large and dream-logically infinite.)

[clayforthedevil]

Joly's mind is a cozy little room, food and drinks set out at the ready, lots of chairs and tables, with books and papers scattered and piled everywhere and various Curious Experiments spread around the room. It's probably pretty easy to get to anything in there, if you actually know where to find it.

There are also cats wandering in and out of the room. In the symbolic landscape of his mind, they represent cats.

Bahorel's mindspace is Paris, always, if a more emotionally than factually accurate architectural layout, highly populated and speaking with a voice of Crowds and lit in various hours of sunset and evening. Assuming this is from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't live in his head, welcome guests will find that any street or door takes them where they're trying to go; anyone else will just find they constantly end up back at the theater. *Really* unwelcome guests will find that every door leads to a law school lecture hall with Blondeau explaining tax code.

[littleyellowboxes]

Deadpool is immune to telepathy. But if anyone ever managed to get in, they'd probably see a radioactive wasteland filled with rubber chickens and cheesedoodles.

Or maybe the World With Nothing But Shrimp, except all of them constantly sing the Looney Tunes theme. Off tempo and off key.

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut's mind is a destroyed cityscape in the crater of a volcano, full of alluring treasure and traps. And of course, many monsters ready to pounce on and devour any foreign minds that have been lured. Think of it as the unfairest dungeon crawl ever.

Fairy Fixit's is a cozy home, but since she thinks with portals, the dimensions don't make much sense. It's small if you are just chilling and a mansion if you are actually looking for something.

[repositorian]

Noriko's mind is tranquil, walled with rice paper and wood lattice, and a potted weeping cherry tree in the corner. It's filled with colorful pieces of things; a gold necklace, lichtenberg figures in glass, a shishi-odoshi, and a huge amount of books. There are some boxes in there, but tightly taped shut.

Ganymede's is an open, breezy house like this with one side opening to a beach, and the other to a dense, green rainforest. It's full of the clutter of life, but rather neatly organized for all that.

Sooraya's is a desert landscape; rocky mountains on the horizon, and though it's all sandy scrub, and looks desolate and dead, there's life all around like flowering cacti, desert marigold, kangaroo mice, sandbells and ocotillo.

[dejah_thoris]

Dejah's mind is a library, filled with information. Sketches, notes, snippets of sense movies, tomes upon tomes upon tomes, all very carefully organized. Some areas are dustier than others, but still carefully ordered. Still lovingly curated.

Around the edges, there are doors that open into different rooms. Some are expansive vistas; the open desert, alluvial plains, wind-etched canyons, war torn ruins; the depths of the underground seas, the massive pumps both in the process of being constructed and future images of them in motion, bringing water to the surface; the arch of the night sky, celestial bodies in motion; the inside of a great atomic machine, Ninth Ray isolates orbiting each other in a sea of blue light. Some are smaller, more intimate rooms, full of silks and shadows. There's a dojo, with an open space for moving through the 108 sword katas.

And there are darker rooms filled with the scenes of battles, walls spattered with the blue sheen of blood, the air filled with war cries and screams of anguish. There's a tiny room filled with lonely nights listening to a man's breathing grow shallower and weaker.

And there's a whole new wing being constructed. It has an engineering section, a psychology section, a physiology section. And a whole wall filled with sketches. A shaggy jawline. A crooked grin. Shoulders that struggle to be anything but hunched. Busted knuckles. Full soft lips. Eyelashes.

And the very light pencil sketches of a small mountain cabin.