Chapter 20: Part 20

I let Boddy out through the window. Fortunately, the room was on the ground floor so it actually opened. Not very far, but it was enough. I felt like I was handling the whole “my only ally is currently a honeybee” situation pretty well. But then, what’s the baseline for comparison? At least I had managed to stop clenching every time I realized there was a bee on me.

Alright, he was going to find us a path back to a part of the irrealis with fewer guns pointed at us. It was time to figure out how my very limited and apparently not-as-rare-as-I-thought superpower worked. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I crossed my legs and rested my hands on my knees, like I was meditating. Before I closed my eyes, I looked at the clock. Eight fifty-four in the evening. 

Alright, I thought to myself. How do I make thought constructs? How had I made the metaphor creature real? How had I broken the illusion, before Rookie moved in and took over? I tried to think back to that conversation, three weeks ago.

It had been like lending my thoughts to my left arm to act out their intentions. I know that’s not a relatable way to put it, but that’s what it had felt like. But at the time I had already had an intent. The dream nightmare had an intent too, though I hadn’t deliberately given it one. Was that a necessary part of the equation?

It was a place to start. I focused on the part of my mind that I thought of as housing Rookie. There was a space there, in my mind. It seemed like…a paved city. Large enough for respectable shopping, small enough that people still lived mostly in houses. A city like barely existed anymore, as far as I knew. Okay, that’s…something. All of the houses were missing. Not like they were destroyed or there was empty space there. They were just…unformed. Like giant gray blocks of nothing in particular.

Before I knew it, I had cast my focus into that place. My mindscape, I guess. Or…my subconscious? I should have gotten some psych books in addition to the philosophy. For now I would call it my mindscape. I looked around. I was standing, or projecting, or existing, in the middle of an intersection. It was a little creepy without the cars, to be honest. Like when you go to a late show or close out the bar, except there wasn’t the other people also experiencing that same dead stillness.

I picked a direction at random and started to walk. I wanted to get a feel for how I interacted with this place before I tried to build anything. To my surprise, I was able to walk. I had given myself a body in my mindscape, apparently. I  could feel the rough concrete through the soles of my shoes, the weight of each step as I set down. Okay. So I could treat this place as a place, if I wanted. I focused briefly outward and was aware of my hotel room again. The window was still open a crack. I checked the clock. Eight fifty-eight. Four minutes. It had felt much longer, but I supposed thought happened faster than physical walking. Projection me was still there, and I briefly struggled to focus on both the real me and the projection into my own mindscape. A breath later, I felt a sensation like when you put the first two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. The two viewpoints locked together and I stopped struggling. Projection-Me resumed walking around my mindscape city, while physical me continued to do nothing in particular. But I was aware of my hotel room now. That was a neat trick. Or it would be, once my mindscape was more interesting.

So far, the mindscape hadn’t yielded anything other than the featureless substanceless gray shapes for houses, each surrounded by a yard filled with an approximation of grass. The shapes did vary somewhat in dimensions, but not much more than houses in the same neighborhood might. At the next intersection, I sighted on one of the distant high-rise buildings I could make out over the shapes and started towards what I figured must be the middle of the cityscape.

With a rush and a snapping feeling, I was walking down what must be downtown. The buildings here were slightly more detailed. Most of them had brick or stone exteriors, though some of the larger buildings were glass, instead. All of them lacked details other than the material they were made of, though. No doors, no windows, no steps or stoops or gazebos. Even the glass buildings were perfectly reflective, as if they were tinted so heavily as to basically be mirrors. I couldn’t see anything of their interiors. Like the neighborhood where I had first landed, it was a little creepy. Why was my own mind creepy? That seemed wrong.

Well, I should be able to change that. It was the whole reason I was going through this exercise. I walked up to one of the glass towers. If my height was to scale, I estimated this would be a ten or fifteen story building. Not the tallest, but tall enough. It took up one smallish block of my city mindscape, and four lane roads surrounded it. I pressed my hand against the glass. It felt accurate, smooth and cool. I realized at that point that my mindscape lacked a sun. Light seemed to fill the whole area from nowhere.

I just need to construct a door, so I can go inside. If there is no inside, I’ll worry about that after the door. One thing at a time. I coached myself. In a way, it felt like hotel-room physical me was coaching city-slicker mental projection me. That felt the most appropriate, somehow. Mental projection me took a deep breath. He reached up to his left shoulder with his right hand, and he pulled his left arm off.

I told you, it felt like giving my arm to the thoughts.

You are reading story Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) at novel35.com

The arm came off easily, like pulling clay or Play-Doh into pieces. With my right hand, I pressed my arm against the building. It began to sink into the wall, and with both hands--my left arm had apparently replaced itself as soon as I thought to need it--I shaped the energy, sculpting it mostly though focus rather than physical action. A double door with pull handles formed in the wall. I shaped a little more and the door’s edges became defined, separating it from the wall. I gave it hinges. As an afterthought, I gave it one of those door closer hydraulic things and a weatherproofing flap. May as well give the glass building inside my own mind a good door. I wasn’t some kind of deadbeat mind-landlord.

As I finished forming the latch that held the door closed, and the pushbar on the other side so it would let people out but not in when locked, the building settled. Not like sinking into its foundation, but like wet sand in a bucket. The door became a natural part of this building, as if it had always been there. That makes sense. Hotel-Me thought at City-Me. You can’t account for every last detail of something like this. Not deliberately. But you know, intrinsically, what a door is, and how a door should work. The mechanics are probably formless just like the houses were, but it should do all the things a door would do now.

I’m pretty smart when it’s just me talking to myself in a world that bends to my every whim.

City Me pushed open the door. Inside was what looked like the reception area of…a police station? Maybe a bank? There were bars and plexiglass over a few different booths. A series of benches took up most of the area next to the “front” door, which did not yet exist. I had come in through a smaller side door, into a space behind the barred and plexiglassed booths. Cubicles filled this space, each with a built-in desk. There were gray shapes instead of computers and other office equipment. A wall to my left divided the ground floor. A few doorways gave the wall texture, though instead of doors each contained just more wall.

I hadn’t intended there to be anything in particular in the interior of this building. Had that already been there when I gave it a door, or had my subconscious filled in details that made sense for the context inside? Hotel Me grabbed the notepad of the desk and started taking notes. Eventually I’d find a tutor. I could ask them. For now, I was looking for a way up. I wanted to get on the roof of this tower and get a higher view of my mindscape. I picked the door frame at the end closest to me to be the staircase, and I headed towards it. As I made my decision, little placards blurred into view next to each frame. Most of them were blank. The one next to my chosen doorframe read “Access to Stairs”. Hotel Me scribbled another note. ‘It seems like I can make minor changes automatically. Could I learn to control that?’

I removed my right arm below the elbow and shaped a door that opened to the stairwell. It was utilitarian, but that was fitting for a stairwell door. I pushed it open. Zig-zag stairs led up and down a square stairwell with a railing in the middle surrounding nothing but air. They went up all the way to the roof, assuming distances were constant in here. I walked halfway up the first flight to see how often there were doorways letting out. It looked like every complete loop was a new floor. So the building had twelve floors. I looked down. It also had a basement and a sub-basement. Maybe a parking complex? I’d check that out after I got on the roof.

With a flicker and a snap, I was standing at the top of the staircase. Oh, right, I could teleport in here. This was my own mind. I briefly felt silly about the stairs, but on the other hand I was pretty sure the doors counted as constructs. I pushed open the door and walked out onto a paved roof. There wasn’t a helicopter sign or anything like that, but it was wide and had a decently sized railing. I paced the length of it a couple times. Everything seemed fairly consistent in dimension here. I made another note to ask about how flexible dimensions were in the mindscape, then looked out over my city.

It immediately became clear to me that the city had been tampered with. It was laid out like a giant version of the House of Community’s crest. That was why the city buildings had more exterior detail. They gave the Crest its coloration. The glass tower where I stood was near the center. Buildings here had greater detail, with the details becoming less specific as I looked out towards the more residential perimeters. A large highway separated the formless gray buildings from the ones with exterior appearances. I lost sight of it a few times along its length, but from the pieces I could easily make out it looked like it formed the border shape for the crest. Near the part of the city that corresponded to the top right square of the crest’s design, I saw signs of destruction. Something had apparently been resisting Rookie’s attempts to overtake my mindscape.

No time like the present. Both versions of me thought in unison. It might be the original Imaginary Me. The one that broke Carver’s illusions.

With a whoosh, I vanished from the glass-walled tower.

You can find story with these keywords: Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022), Read Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022), Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) novel, Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) book, Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) story, Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) full, Wrought Iron (NaNoWriMo 2022) Latest Chapter