Katalepsis IV: the Other Side of Nowhere (part 1)

This review was comissioned by @skaianDestiny


This arc doesn't go at all the way I expected it to, after the way the previous one ended. It really seemed like Heather was going to have to spend a few chapters escaping New Sun captivity and maybe liberating some of Alex's secrets and/or prisoners in the process, but nope! Things get derailed almost immediately on account of Heather finally deciding that enough is enough and it's time to stop hiding her power level.

I mean that in something closer to the original, Dragonball sense of the term. Not the irony-poisoned "how deep are you into your subversive ideology" sense. Raine would be way ahead of her if that was the case, of course.

Either due to the construction of the dimensional tunnel itself or because of some active countermeasure the cultists are using, Heather is unable to plane shift away like she did in the university ambush OR plane shift the attackers away like she did in the alley chase. However, if you'll recall, plane shifting is only one of the magic tricks that Heather has been too afraid and too valuing of her nervous tissue to use. She also did that telekinesis thing to repel a bullet, back when Amy shot at Raine. Now she does the telekinesis thing again, but with significantly more force, and acting directly upon an opponent's body.

Zheng the zombie, who has thus far not taken visible damage from any form of attack, gets her arm twisted off and blasted across the corridor.

Heather has a seizure and loses consciousness immediately after performing this feat. But still, she does it. It's something she can do. It's something that she could have done at any point in the last decade if she chose to.

...

The theme of power and the exercise thereof is one I've commented on at a few points in Katalepsis, mostly in the context of Heather's feelings about Raine. I wasn't sure how intentional its presence in the story, but now I'm sure that it was completely intentional.

The fact that Heather is doing this now, after all these conversations with Raine about violence (and just barely tiptoeing around interrogating her own aversion to it), isn't coincidence.

And it...you know, really, thinking about this some more, it occurs to me that Heather might be a much less reliable narrator than I realized.

Did she ever actually think she was schizophrenic?

She's been sitting on these extremely verifiable, extremely material magical powers for this entire time. Her framing at the beginning of the story implies that she's always been too scared and sad about the Eye in her dreams to actually experiment with its teachings, but is that actually true? Did she really never, at any point in that decade and change, try performing the mental mathematics and dealing with the brain pain, just out of curiosity and/or frustration? Never? Not even once?

Maybe it's not just internalized stigma against the mentally ill and general British pseudo-liberal indoctrination that gave Heather her extreme aversion to (and simultaneous fascination with) violence. Maybe it's also that she's known, all along, how much damage she could do if she chose.

...

When Heather wakes up, one of Evelyn's spiderbots is standing guard over her just inside the portal threshold. I guess they can remain active a little way inside. And also they managed to be a little smarter and more proactively discriminating than usual. So, that's nice. It keeps Heather safe until she can drag herself back into Evelyn's workshop and then scream the others awake.

It strikes me as a bit of a design flaw that the spiderbots don't automatically set off an alarm when they respond to an intrusion like this. Well, probably less of a design flaw and more of a bug that's cropped up since Evelyn's mother's death that Evelyn yet hasn't figured out how to fix.

Anyway, once the others have come over and Heather's recovered a bit more, they puzzle out what the heck happened and what to do about it. It's obvious from the ink on her hands that Heather is the one who finished the portal, but even with her self-catalyzing mathematic Edward Elric powers she shouldn't have had the know-how to do that even if she had the inclination, so her mind control story is readily believed. Heather still doesn't quite remember who Lozzie is, but she recalls a few more details this time, and putting them together with other details she's told them about after previous dreams they're able to determine the general shape of the situation. IE, that Alex is still gunning for Heather specifically, and that there's another entity associated with the Brotherhood of the New Sun that's trying to help her. Evelyn infers that there's a power struggle going on within the sect, which isn't exactly right, but it's reasonably close.

While Heather was recovering, the others investigated the tunnel entrance a bit, and found something that made Evelyn decide not to close the portal immediately. See, there's a dead cult member laying on the floor a few feet inside the corridor, and he does not appear to have been killed by Heather's kinetic blast. Rather, he was torn apart with fingernails and teeth.

““Ugh.” Twil straightened up, holding her nose. “Dunno about you lot, but he reeks. Can’t we get on? What are you even doing?”

”Looking for clues.” Raine said, still poking and prodding at the corpse. “Investigating, you know?”

”The zombie did it,” I deadpanned.

”Ahhh yes, but did she knock his head off first and then pull his guts out, or the other way around?” I saw Raine grin in the corner of my eye. Nobody laughed.”

Evelyn exposits that some demon binding techniques involve inscribing control-glyphs on the body you want them to animate. If one of Zheng's control glyphs was inscribed on the arm that Heather blew off, and she wasn't thrilled with the direction her relationship with her summoner had been going, then it's very likely that Zheng took advantage of this opportunity. Hence Heather still being alive, and this cultist being dead. I guess now we know what happens if you're stingy with the strawberries.

This is also why Evelyn didn't immediately collapse the portal. If the enemy has already lost their assault team and are on the backfoot due to Zheng rampaging, then this is the perfect time to launch a counterattack. Heather is still kinda fucked up from using the brainmath, but other than that the party is all fresh and well-rested, and they might never get another opportunity like this. Twil is onboard for this; she might not be on speaking terms with her family at the moment, but that doesn't make her any less irritated with the New Suns. She's met Alexander Lilliburne in person, and after that you can't rest until you've punched him in the face at least once.

On the topic of Twil, we learn a somewhat surprising fact about her here:

““What if they won’t leave?” I asked.

Raine cleared her throat. “That’s what I’m for, yeah?” A shiver passed up my spine.

”Me too,” Twil said, almost a whine in her voice. Evelyn sighed and shot her a sidelong look.

”You’ve never killed a person,” she said. “You’re here for shock and awe.”

Twil opened her mouth to complain, then halted. “Shock and awe?” She grinned. “Cool.””

Twil has never killed a human. Like I said, I'm moderately surprised to hear this. Even if the Church of Hringwingdings has become a more peaceful organization in recent years, the magical world seems hostile enough by default that I figured she'd have had to kill someone within her several years of being their main combat asset.

Even if the occult underworld is a battleground of wizards vs brain parasites as the last arc strongly implied, I feel like Evelyn's outlook might be disproportionately bleak and paranoid.

So. They take a minute to arm up. Evelyn with the rune-inscribed leg bone of...either her own mother, or her own body, not yet sure which...that she apparently can do magic with. Raine, with more conventional weaponry of various types. Both the Praem instances come along too.

Heather, for her part, brings a ball of yarn. This ends up being a very prescient move on her part, and is more useful at least in the immediate future than any of the edgier accessories. The tunnel entrance leads into a maze of twisted space that doesn't follow the usual rules of mazes on account of having an extra spatial dimension to work with. If not for the string trail they leave behind themselves, they'd get themselves lost beyond the point of recovery. Even with the trail, making progress is virtually impossible.

Once again, Heather is the one able to solve the problem. Her plane shifting might not work from inside here, but her mind - due to exposure to the Eye's hypermath lessons - is much better able to grasp the shape of a four dimensional interior than a normal human's or even Evelyn's. Granted, she has an extra advantage here as well, even though she's still only half-conscious of it.

“I told myself I was strengthened by the sense of purpose, or the companionship of my friends, or maybe I felt better because I’d already passed out once, like purging rotten food from my belly.

Purpose, yes, that must be why. I was on my feet and moving forward because of the need to know, because of lost time like the absence of a tooth, a wet bleeding socket I couldn’t help but probe; because somebody had helped me, and I needed to return that trust and support and love.

Love? Where had that thought come from?

I turned my mind away from the other possibility: that I was simply becoming inured to the reality-breaking contusions of the Eye’s brain-math.

I was getting used to this.”

Lozzie said before that she worked a vulnerability into this structure for Heather to exploit. It turns out that the "labyrinth" is actually a very simple pair of corridors spiralling around each other in the fourth dimension with some junctions connecting them. To most people - even to most magically educated people - it reads as maddening eldritch geometry. To someone with a more intuitive grasp of such things, it turns out, navigating it is almost as simple as just walking in a straight line once you've realized what the shape is.

Lozzie did say that Heather was "like her" in some unspecified way. Presumably, whatever state Lozzie is in, whatever power she has that lets her mould these extradimensional spaces, it has the same theoretical underpinnings as the Eye's lessons. And Alexander is in the same boat as Evelyn when it comes to actually understanding the theory vs. having someone else to do it.

Well, Heather also does have a third advantage too. This one relating to her morale:

“The trick was unthinkable – literally, none of us would have ever figured it out. We wandered until we found a four-way junction, a crossroads amid the claustrophobia. I directed us, voice steady as I concentrated on instructions, rather than risk contemplating what we were doing. Twil’s frowning confusion helped, the way she cocked an eyebrow at me in the middle of my seemingly ridiculous directions. I managed a smile. She was so pretty. I focused on that. Pretty girl in the mist. Don’t think about the spiral.”

Oh, Heather.~

For at least part of the trek through the warp-spiral, they have the benefit of Zheng's blood trail to follow. It leads them to the body of the second cultist who tried to nab Heather, and who has now been killed in a similar manner to the first. Shortly thereafter, it leads them to Zheng herself. Before the encounter can happen though, Raine just straight up loots both the corpses.

“I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes and thought about bed and books, as Raine repeated her ghoulish performance and extracted another wallet without getting her hands dirty. No car keys this time.

”That’s what he gets for trying to kidnap my girl,” Raine said. Nobody laughed.”

My assessment of Raine has shifted a few times over the course of the story so far. At this point, though? After the vaguely defined tragic backstory that conveniently takes place somewhere across the country offscreen, the strong but weird convictions, the nonchalance toward lethal violence, and now the compulsive corpse-looting? I think "player character" really is just the best description.

Also also, the New Sun rank-and-file are all wearing the stereotypical robes when operating inside their own lair. Which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it's a dumb cliche that I feel like the cultists themselves would feel really silly about doing. On the other, Alexander Lilburne is the exact specific kind of cringelord who would force them to do it anyway. So, I'm 50/50 on whether this detail improves the narrative or detracts from it.

When they meet Zheng again, her behavior is...confusing, to say the least. She seems to be in the process of reattaching her arm to its stump, which is surprising if the arm has a control glyph on it. Maybe she's scratched it out in the time between then and now, or maybe Evelyn was wrong about the catalyst for her breaking free. Evelyn being wrong about a magic thing she claims to be intimately familiar with, imagine that. Anyway, while reattaching her arm, Zheng is also banging her head against the wall over and over again. More than anything, it seems like she might be trying to fight off an attempt by Alexander to reassert control. In any case, it's probably for the best that she warps away through the walls when she sees the group approaching her.

Zheng could prove to be enemy or ally the next time they run into her, but for now she seems to be a nonfactor. So, after trying in vain to figure out what they just saw and what they should do to account for it, they let Heather guide them onward along the warp spiral. Eventually, they make it to the end, and it turns out that the Brotherhood of the New Sun's spacewarping schtick is not at all what it looked like.

Turns out we're in something along the lines of the Upside Down. An alternate dimension reflection of Sharrowford (and possibly the rest of our universe, for all that they can tell). Only, the entire landscape - buildings, pavement, and everything else - is made of one contiguous chunk of greenish stone-like substance, the sky is grey and choked with mist, and there are giant sky-jellyfish that everyone can see. Also, there's a giant fucking castle molded out of the weird landscape in a spot that doesn't correlate to any similar-ish landmark in Sharrowford.

No way in hell did New Sun create all of this, Lozzie or no Lozzie. This is some kind of natural liminal dimension that they discovered and are exploiting. Lozzie's spacewarping powers just let them build structures within it and form tunnels connecting it to realspace.

...

The Brotherhood of the New Sun probably aren't the firsts to have ever done this, assuming that this liminal dimension has indeed always existed. Maybe exploring this Upside Down-ish realm would eventually turn up the remains of other wizards who have camped out in it over the centuries, and perhaps even other living one who are still doing so.

Then again, Sharrowford is supposed to be an interdimensional hotspot for whatever reason. It could be that this shadow realm is much more limited in size, and co-occurs only with "hotspot" sections of Earth's surface (either as the cause or as an effect). In that case, it's much more likely for any individual section to have gone undiscovered.

In any case, I wonder where the sky jellyfish came from. And if there's other (indigenous? invasive?) nonhuman life in this dimension(s).

...

Anyway, once they're done being blown away by what they've just discovered, they set out toward their new, obvious objective. I'm sure Evelyn will love to study this place once Alexander is no longer in it.

I wonder...if this space is liminal between our dimension and someplace else, it might also be able to serve as an "orbital launchpad" for Heather to plane shift from. IE, it might take less effort and cost fewer neurons for her to travel to other dimensions from here than from Earth, with the tunnels connecting it to Sharrowford in turn serving as a space elevator analogue. If so, securing this location might be an important step toward rescuing Maisie as well as getting rid of Alexander.

...

Once again, I imagine how much easier things could be for everyone if it only weren't for this background expectation of hostility from other wizard groups. Even if that paranoia is justified by historical conditions like mind parasites etc, and even if Evelyn's perspective is making it seem worse than it actually is, imagine a version of this world where it didn't exist, and New Sun could have just let Heather and Evelyn explore their discovery in exchange for borrowing their nightgaunt.

Well. Alexander would still be a douchebag. But douchebags would have a harder time gaining power in a world that encouraged prosocial behavior among magicians.

...

Moving on toward the castle, they find further evidence that the Brotherhood of the New Sun only discovered and modified this realm rather than creating it. There are multiple layers of defensive glyphs, in paint, in candles, and other stranger materials, set in wide circles around the castle. Seemingly placed and painted by hand, in stages, through a slow, painstaking process. They even meet a living cultist leading a small team of zombies (these corpses have only just recently been bound to their controlling entity, making them slow, fragile, and more like typical fantasy mook zombies. Whether the entity they're bound to is the same as Zheng or a different one is unaddressed for now) in completing the most recent ward-ring, by slowly walking around the castle and placing the candles by hand.

The cultist dude surrenders and pretends to be a helpless dupe who doesn't know anything. When he tries to gank them with his zombies after they let their guard down though, he finds out that their guard wasn't actually let down.

“For a split-second the young man’s face was no longer the sobbing, desperate drop-out, conned into a cult with promises of easy money; instead, raw dominance, victory, pleasure in inflicting pain. ‘Got you’ his eyes said.

Then Raine shot him in the head.

...

”Never had to actually pull the trigger before,” Raine said.

”Are you … okay?” I asked.

She flashed a grin, clicked the gun’s safety on, and tucked it back into her jacket. “Hundred percent. More concerned about you, wish you didn’t have to see that.””

Raine has killed people before, and she's shot guns before, but apparently this was her first time killing someone with a gun. Noted.

As for how seeing this effects Heather, well. She's seen Raine kill before, but she hasn't seen it happen again after she herself plane shifted that cultist to dogworld. And now after tearing Zheng's arm off and actually seeing the spray of blood right in front of her eyes too. That latter one is actually hurting Heather's self-perception more than the incident in the alley, on account of the latter having not actually killed the cultist but merely forced him to start the tedious bureaucratic naturalization process of the Fleaman Republic. This time, she saw herself do bodily harm, and its aftermath.

Well. I imagine that thread is going to lead somewhere very specific very soon.

When they reach the castle, they find a rather more literal "maiden in the tower" situation than I expected. Lozzie is, to all appearances, physically walking around inside the castle. She's confined to the upper levels, and - on seeing their approach - calls out to them for help. Seeing her in the flesh again, and this time not in sleepwalking zombie mode, jogs Heather's memory and lets her recall all their dream meetings in detail. Hopefully, that information barrier will never have to be worked around again after this.

“Dream-memories pummelled me. Raine spoke but I couldn’t hear a word, squeezing my eyes shut in a vain attempt at control. The memories were all there. They’d been there all along, on the other side of a conceptual leap I couldn’t possibly have made alone. The places Lozzie had taken me in our dreams—the great winter castle, the desert, the library, a dozen others. Mars. She’d shown me the surface of Mars and I hadn’t remembered. We’d cried together, talked for hours, cuddled and held each other—were we friends, or more? A seed of guilt snagged in the base of my chest, but I crushed it down and ignored it for now. Bigger things to worry about.

I knew Lozzie, if only from dreams; I knew better than anybody else alive that dreams could be completely real.”

I just realized that the memory-barrier is another parallel between Lozzie's situation and Maisie's. Just, Heather is on a different side of it this time. Clever.

Evelyn is predictably reluctant to grant any quarter to a member of the opposition, even despite everything Heather tells her (the words "one of the vermin in my city" are spoken), but she grudgingly lets herself be overruled. They start trying to work out a way to get Lozzie down from there, only for her brother and a couple of lackeys to step out onto the deck behind her and haul her away.

Heather once again demonstrates that she needs to learn when to keep her mouth shut.

“Alexander straightened up from his sister. As he did, I took a step forward, suddenly resolved, a feeling of desperate, unfamiliar strength in my heart.

”Give me your sister and we’ll leave,” I shouted.

Alexander met my eyes. His expression shifted and a shiver crawled up my spine. Wrong tactic, Heather, utterly wrong. All his irritation and anger appeared to drain away as he raised his eyebrows and ran his hands over his hair, as if to check every strand was in place. He raised his chin and the ghost of a smile played across that shiny, clean-shaven face.

”Lavinia wishes to make a deal? How interesting,” he said, and turned to Lozzie. “How do you know Lavinia, dear sister? When, in all the permutations of time and reality, could you possibly have shared each other’s company? Hmm?” He leaned down close to his sister and cupped her chin in one hand. “How curious.”

”Oh, shit,” Raine hissed.”

God fucking damnit, Heather. Guess they'd better rescue her really, really soon, after that happened.

Raine tries to shoot Alex off the wall. Unfortunately, his skill at defensive magic once again proves far more impressive than his tactical or social thinking abilities. Direct hit. Negligible damage. It's like the heart and lungs aren't even vital spots at all, for him. Maybe hitting him in the head would have worked better, but unfortunately he comes up next in the initiative order. He speaks an incantation, and a truly massive creature lowers itself down from above the misty sky, scaring the swarms of sky-jellyfish away with its colossal bulk.

It doesn't seem to be attacking them, exactly. But just having it nearby overhead seems to cause psychic damage, and the sounds that it makes are basically in the flashbang range when it comes to ear sensitivity. With Alexander and his goons inside the castle seemingly protected, it seems like they'll be able to pick off the heroes with impunity while they're stunned unless someone does something fast.

That's where I ended my reading session, about a third of the way through the arc. Nice dramatic cliffhanger, I think.


So far, "The Other Side of Nowhere" has been pretty action-focused, so there's not a ton of deep analysis to be done that I can see. Some nice environments and concepts. The visual of the party venturing ahead with Twil in werewolf mode and the two goofy giant blue meido bodyguards is a very MMORPG visual that I can't say I care for all that much, but other than that this was some great atmosphere.

Though, uh, when it comes to keeping the tone there are also a couple passages that...like, okay, take this for example. If this exchange happened during a more casual conversation I'd be more appreciative of it, but during a tense action sequence, well:

““Fucking shit,” Twil spluttered from the floor. “Bitch-ass cunt motherfucker. Ow.” She probed a nasty gash on her forehead, blood smeared down her face, her nose bent at an angle.

”Language, Twil,” I muttered. “Werewolf, not swearwolf.” She goggled at me and I managed a shrug, shaking with adrenaline and shock.”

-___-

Yeah. Feels like a little too much winking at the audience for a point in the story when immersion needs to be at its strongest.


Anyway. Next time, next time.