bakerstreet | It's my turn on the braincell

The Mental World Meme

Everyone’s got a special brain, some more special than others - they all contained a little retreat from the real world that helps gather their thoughts and memory, and keeps them from going completely over the edge… usually. But sometimes that little world that someone created in their mind has a few cracks or skeletons buried so deep inside that their waking mind doesn’t realize they exist.

Whether you came in on purpose or by accident, a mental world isn’t a place to be mucking around casually, you might end up discovering something about that person you really didn’t want to know. Or you know, end up making things worse for them... but if you're really careful, and have a knack for it, one can do a world of good - just be careful!

Rules:

1. Top-Level must put in a description of their character’s mental world. Blank Top-levels will be deleted.

2. The mental world is often an imperfect metaphor for the person: For example, an artist’s mental world is all done in garish black velvet art, with his rage at being dumped represented by a bull charging around, or a paranoid schizophrenic sees a distorted 1950s neighborhood with spies creeping all over the place. These worlds aren't empty, they're often filled with inhabitants that reflect either an aspect of the person themselves, or how they view the world outside, and you might even met the "owner" of these minds.

If you want a more thorough idea of what to do with your character's mental world, take a gander at this guide: The Psychonauts Guide to Building Mental Worlds

3. Please put a warning in the header if there’s a chance your mental world will delve into trigger-y or uncomfortable content

Prompts:

1. Whoops!: Well you didn't mean to touch that, and now you're stuck in somebody's head and now you gotta figure out how to get out of there before you touch something else and make it worse.

2. Don't worry, I'm an expert: You got the Psychonauts Merit Badge, or a Dream Therapist license, or you're the headed of a school for gifted youngsters, you got this, man. You're here to help this person out to work through whatever issues they may have, but remember, while they consciously agree to this, their subconscious might have other ideas, but helpers will be there.

3. {Inception Horn Blare}: You're here for a purpose, but not necessarily for the owner's good. They got something locked away in their brains that you need to get, or something to plant in their head - even if it's just an earworm. Of course, their mental selves will look poorly upon such intruders and react - often times quite violently, so don't get caught.

4. Basic Braining: Whether it's learning how to enter people's heads, or some other skill, you two are here to learn and train. Now remember to follow the teacher's guidelines or things could get messy!

5: You got your brains in my brains: Somehow your mental worlds merged together and is making a huge mess all over the place! Obviously you can't keep it all together, I mean who wants that in your head? There might be a way to get it unstuck, but search me.

6. Obligatory Party Time: Who needs to be all serious all the time? Sometimes you just want to relax and do something crazy that you just can't simply do in the real world, such as stomping around like a Kaiju or have a massive disco roller derby party. Stay within the limits, and have a good time. If you want to do something more - well, that's none of my business.

7. Other: Well, as they say, the only limit is your imagination.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ It's dark. It's wet. It reeks of ashes and rot.

A shallow ocean of - water? blood? - stretches endlessly in all directions, a cold and ominous fog rolling after every ripple on the surface. The only light is a distant golden glow that never seems to get any closer, but those persistent enough to keep chasing it may soon find themselves on the shores of a small island. It's hardly more than a mound of grassy earth, but it's something. There is light and life and a sunny warmth, and smack-dab in the middle of it is a young man trying to arrange a pile of blocks to make... something. Something that keeps collapsing before it even begins to take shape, much to his chagrin.

Stay in the dark long enough, and one might come across something else instead. ]

[His dreamscape is vibrant, consisting of flat colours in vivid pastels. A living, breathing woodcut, with his synesthesia increasingly evident. Sounds are accompanied by drifting patterns, scents are given shape and sound, even tastes are shaped by the dimming or brightening of colours.

Colourful tatami rooms lead into inkwash orchards where confetti drifts on a breeze and the air carries the aroma of plum blossoms. Paths lead to theatres, where noh masks dance around each other, dividing and multiplying. Rooms turn on their own, and doors that led to one place now lead to another, all of it permeated by the scent of incense and a peculiar feeling of being watched.

You're not alone here and it's not just the Medicine Seller with eyes everywhere. You're certain you've seen that fox mask before...]

The world is chaotic in the way most traumatized minds are and yet it is controlled in a deliberate manner. Falling apart, yet organized carefully enough to continue functioning despite what it contains. The layout is labyrinthine but intentional unlike a schizophrenic mindscape which distorts because perception itself is unstable. Phyre's world distorts because he compartmentalizes aggressively.

The overall architecture resembles a vast, ancient city-state built on top of catacombs and battlefield graves. Not one singular era, but centuries layered incorrectly over one another: Ottoman courtyards opening into abandoned Soviet subway tunnels, Byzantine chapels attached to modern slaughterhouses, candlelit archives beneath neon-lit alleys. Time does not progress properly here. History is sedentary.

Entire emotional truths are physically quarantined.

The city is divided into districts separated by rivers, checkpoints, locked gates, or underground tunnels:

The Cathedral District: ritual, immortality, religion, guilt.
The Red Market: feeding, violence, transaction, survival.
The Archive: memory and historical identity.
The Battlefield: trauma that cannot be processed, only revisited.
The Undercrypt: the oldest parts of him, nearly inaccessible.
The Glass Quarter: intimacy and vulnerability, mostly abandoned.

Predictably, the city is under permanent night. Light exists merely in pools: interrogation lamps, church candles, operating lights, headlights in rain. Everything outside the light is indistinct, slightly out of focus. Never quite truly there. The mind rendering only what matters in the moment.

The sky is never visible.

There is no emotion here. Only systems. Barracks. Chapels. Armories. Autopsy theaters. Libraries cataloguing atrocities with obsessive precision. Endless corridors of records documenting names, debts, kills, favors, betrayals.

Everything has a purpose.

Even beauty is functional here.

The city itself behaves like a living organism designed for war and survival. Streets reroute. Doors lock or open based on intent. Elevators descend farther than physics should allow. Entire districts become inaccessible when certain memories are avoided.

And under all of this, the city erodes. Sinking. Slowly. Sections flood with black seawater, buildings collapse into underground graves, records rot, entire streets vanish overnight.

Time grinds on, pretending not to notice. Survival is maintained through ritual, control, and manipulation.

But the mindscape knows these walls are failing.

[Up to date on DD:BA but mark spoilers for others!]

The world someone steps into is dark in a very literal sense. In this mindscape it is always night, sometimes raining and sometimes with a bright full moon in the sky, but the sun never rises no matter how long one stays here. It will get a lighter shade of grey sometimes as if approaching sunrise but eventually plunge right back into darkness. Those who are familiar with the city will recognize it as New York City but not as anyone has ever actually experienced the city in reality. For one, there are a lot of gunshots, and turning onto a corner means getting caught up in a firefight more often than not. Never fear, if someone gets too close to getting hurt, a shot will ring out from high up above and take out whatever attacker has tried to kill them. Strangely, the gunman who fires out the shot is never seen no matter how hard someone looks.

There is one scenario that seemed to keep playing out over and over again as one wandered through the strange city, where chaos reigns as FBI agents are trying to protect someone in an overturned car despite being outnumbered before being rescued by a lone agent with aim so uncanny it seems to defy the laws of physics at times. This is the best chance to actually catch up with Dex, who is remaining frustratingly elusive in his own mindscape, as he will instantly protect anyone from the Albanians that will try to attack.

There is an incessant cascade of unusual and repetitive sounds that filter through the city the longer one stayed in it. Sometimes it is background noise the same as the hum of horns honking and people talking often to be found in the city, while at other times it sounds like it is coming right from within the person’s own head. If someone think that it is close to driving them crazy, well, they aren’t far off base. It is an amalgamation of voices saying things from Dex’s past or things he imagined they would have told him combined with a buzzing like that of a thousand insects trapped inside his mind.

The best way to back to the real world is to find Dex himself, for he’ll instantly be able to tell someone what was going on, but it won't be easy. He doesn't want to be found in the chaos of what his mind has concocted. If one looks hard enough, they’ll find three figures that kept showing up no matter how long one wandered: an older woman with dark hair, a younger one with bright red hair, and one very large bald man dressed in a white suit. If either of the first are approached, they’ll prove to be a helpful specter and lead the person right to wherever Dex is hiding away. This is the best case scenario to get the person back without any physical injuries. Mental ones will be another thing entirely.

The third specter is helpful in a twisted sort of way, for he’ll instantly attack the person who tries to get near him. But this will also draw Dex out as he protects whoever the phantom of Wilson Fisk is trying to kill, though he will need a little bit of help to put down the ghost from his past for good. If someone gets hurt in this scenario, good luck, because the injuries will last when they get out of the mental world.

It's my turn on the braincell

Malroth | Dragon Quest Builders 2 | happy minecrafting route OR grimdark god of destruction route

Ri!Kusuriuri | Mononoke (2007)

phyre | bloodlines 2 (cw: violence, blood, medical mentions, emotional/mental trauma)

Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter | MCU | OTA