Dyna shoved back from the tulpa, ripping her hands from its momentarily loosened grip just in time to duck underneath a tiger-sized paw that swept through the air her head had occupied only moments before. Bastet didn’t stop at her. The hefty paw tipped with razor-sharp claws ripped at the tulpa’s throat. Dyna wasn’t sure if the cat goddess was attacking both of them or if she had just been in the way.
Scrambling back, Bastet continued to focus on the tulpa, ripping and tearing at it. But the tulpa just didn’t seem to care. Much like the PP-2000 wielding tulpa that Dyna had tried shooting at while chasing Harold into the noosphere, the tulpa just blurred into a mass of light and shadow before returning fully formed and whole. Physical attacks didn’t work on tulpa. At least not in the noosphere.
Dyna bit her lip, mind racing as she watched the tulpa reach for its sunglasses once again. Bastet ripped its arm aside with enough force to snap the bones in its forearm. A shimmer of shadows and the damage vanished as if it never was.
Why wasn’t Bastet just integrating the tulpa? Was it too strong? It seemed absurd that any tulpa could be as strong as something called a goddess, but the continued physical battle stopped Dyna short. Her mind drifted back to the Hatman and November’s comments about that entity when she had first met the other tulpa. The Hatman didn’t integrate with other tulpa often. Rather, it turned them into servants. Or, judging by its… hunting of humans and Ruby’s current state, it turned humans into tulpa then turned those tulpa into servants.
Was Bastet similar? Not necessarily in that it turned humans into tulpa and made them into servants, but just that it had evolved beyond standard integration?
If so, this fight could last potentially forever, with neither able to meaningfully damage the other. Or it would last until the eye-tulpa managed to remove its sunglasses. With the way its gaze had both disrupted Dyna’s thinking and the world around them—not to mention how it instantly destroyed her clone—Dyna wasn’t sure that even an Egyptian goddess would survive for long.
Dyna had been moving as she considered the situation. Thinking about Ruby made her panic, realizing that the younger girl had been hit by that gaze as well. While Dyna felt fine now that the eye-tulpa’s eyes were off her, she didn’t have that shadowy film around her like Ruby had.
Rounding a containment tank with an ibis-headed man depicted on its plaque, Dyna found Ruby on the floor. Ruby had been diving to the side when the eye-tulpa turned to her and Dyna had rushed up shortly after, so she hadn’t been hit by that gaze for long. Even the world around them wasn’t nearly as melted and destroyed as the area around the sphinx unit.
Ruby’s shadowy aura was thin and transient. Large bits of it, especially around her legs, were missing entirely. Checking the angles, her legs would have been most visible to the eye-tulpa following her dive.
Kneeling down next to the unmoving girl, Dyna felt a pulse on her neck and air coming from her partially opened mouth. Physically, she was uninjured. Mentally?
“Ruby?” Dyna whispered, lightly rocking the girl’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?”
Aside from a faint groan, Ruby said nothing. Her eyes remained closed.
Swearing under her breath, Dyna reached a finger up to the earbud, only to find nothing in her ear? Had it fallen out? More likely, it had disintegrated into disjointed thoughts like the disruptor gun had. Nothing in this place seemed real.
Ruby’s earbud was still in, however, and her disruptor looked intact. They had both made it behind cover before the tulpa had fully turned. Fishing the earbud from Ruby’s ear, Dyna put it on just in time to wince at the noise Doctor Darq was making on the other end.
“—warnings going off everywhere in the Egyptian section now. Status report, please! Tartarus is failing to report on two contained entities. Dyna? Ruby? Anyone?”
“I’m here,” Dyna said. “Ruby’s… hurt? I don’t know.”
“I was under the impression that she couldn’t be hurt. At least not in the long-term.”
“Physically, she is fine. There is a tulpa down here, one of the intruders. Its gaze seems to disrupt thoughts far more thoroughly than your disruptors. It stared at me for several seconds and I can’t remember much of anything except nothing.”
“Dangerous. Don’t get seen.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Dyna said, injecting as much sarcasm as she could possibly muster into the sentence. “It saw Ruby but only for a few seconds. She seems unconscious. It deleted my clone in an instant,” she admitted, feeling a roil of nausea at the admission.
That clone could just as easily have been her. From the clone’s perspective, it had been her. It was just that the continuity of her consciousness had split.
She had sent herself to her own death.
“Did you deal with the tulpa?”
Clamping down on her feelings, Dyna peered around the tank. Bastet pounced on the eye-tulpa, pinning its arms down to the ground to keep it from removing its sunglasses. The goddess tried snapping at its throat, only for the eye-tulpa to shift into its shadowy state, righting itself. It started to remove its glasses, only for a mangy orange tabby cat to leap at its head. That bought enough time for Bastet to round on the eye-tulpa.
Interestingly, Bastet did not turn into a shadowy form to reposition. The cat-like humanoid turned on all fours before moving upright on hind legs upon facing the eye-tulpa.
“No. It’s fighting Bastet right now. I’m not sure it is winning, but I’m honestly disappointed in the supposed goddess.”
“As I said,” Darq quipped, “those interred here are not deities. They are ideas given form. Tulpa like any other, even if they are older and more defined.”
“Still…” Dyna shook her head. “There is more, unfortunately. Eye-tulpa here has the power to disrupt not just human thoughts, but everything made of thought. Just looking around the area has these containment tanks looking like they melted down—”
“Has anything else escaped containment? Tartarus itself is unsure of what is occurring in your area.”
“Not as far as I know. Just Bastet and a dozen cats.”
“Small relief. It’s destroying walls, floors, and the like?”
“Whatever it looks at. That includes the earbud you gave me and the disruptor gun. Ruby’s is still intact.”
“That might explain how it entered Tartarus. If it punched a hole from the noosphere into here… I’m not sure how it might have figured out how to do that, but it is the only thing that makes sense in the moment.”
“I’m a lot less interested in how it got here than how to get rid of it. It shrugged off a disruptor to its back… I might be able to overcharge it, but isn’t there anything you can do?”
“Me?” Darq asked, humor in his tone. “I am nowhere near you.”
“You control Tartarus—or direct it if it is some kind of living entity—right? Was it not designed to capture gods? Surely it can capture this tulpa.”
“Contain, not capture. Ideas, not gods. And that isn’t exactly how—”
“Don’t tell me how this place functions. I’ll make it capture him if you can’t.”
Darq didn’t respond for a long few moments, all of which Dyna spent thinking about the facility around her. Despite her words, Dyna was far from confident in her ability to manipulate an apparently sentient location. She tried to think about it as if a being like Beatrice were constantly watching and, perhaps, even doing using things built into the facility. Beatrice couldn’t do too much at the Carroll Institute. She was connected to all the cameras and could open doors and send messages over computers, but everything she was connected to had overrides and there wasn’t much machinery in the facility under her control.
Even though, if given remote operation of construction equipment, Beatrice could have worked night and day with high precision at clearing out somewhere like Phrenomorphics, the institute still hired contractors to build everything. That, Dyna assumed, was just because of the distrust the administrators had for her.
Dyna let out a small sigh as she thought about Beatrice. Ever since figuring out Alpha’s likely role in Ignotus, Dyna had been avoiding Beatrice as much as possible. It just didn’t seem safe when Beatrice herself had warned her that the actions of the administrative council could not be overruled at any operating level.
Alpha must have sent this tulpa as well. What had she done, waited for Walter to check in, thus confirming that everyone was on the premises? Ignotus had been quiet for the past few weeks, so there was no possible way this was just a coincidence.
It was another assassination attempt.
“Tartarus tentatively agrees to your proposition of improvements to its ability to capture and contain dangerous tulpa,” Darq eventually said, interrupting Dyna’s thoughts. “I’ve almost got the fires put out. As soon as I finish, I will head over to the Egyptian Containment Sector to see what assistance I can render.”
Dyna shrugged. “I’m leaving the earbud here,” she said. “Just in case that eye-tulpa hits me again.”
“Understood. Good luck! Darq out!”
Dyna set the earbud down on the ground, hidden behind the ibis-man containment unit. Then she did something she probably should have done the moment she moved around the container and saw Ruby on the floor. Carefully picking the younger girl up, Dyna moved her further around the containment unit, making sure that she wouldn’t be seen by the eye-tulpa until the entire cylinder had melted away.
Standing, Dyna looked over Ruby for a long moment, watching the shadowy aura around her. It was like a dark fire, burning against her skin. Bits of it were being drawn closer from nothingness in the air. Thin strands of dark thought that rejoined the mass in a manner not too dissimilar from when Dyna had seen Ruby pulling her physical body back together after a particularly gruesome injury.
Ruby’s consciousness was supposedly stored in her artifact, the ruby implanted in her neck. If the earbud and disruptor had survived, that would definitely have been out of the line of sight. Yet Ruby also had that shadowy aura, meaning not all of her was in the ruby—at least not since meeting the Hatman.
Removing her jacket, Dyna carefully wrapped it around Ruby’s neck. She wasn’t sure if the thin material would help Ruby at all should the eye-tulpa spot her, but it couldn’t hurt.
Convinced she had taken all the reasonable precautions she could without outright fleeing, Dyna turned her attentions back to the actual problem.
Only to find there was no actual problem. Peering around the side of the containment unit, Dyna couldn’t see either Bastet or the eye-tulpa. There was fresh damage to the room, however, meaning that tulpa must have managed to remove its sunglasses for a short amount of time. Had it obliterated Bastet then simply walked on, unaware of Dyna and Ruby behind the container?
Wary, with Ruby’s disruptor in hand just in case it bought her a few seconds to hide, Dyna stepped out from around the container and looked up and down the walkway.
All she saw was a cat. Gray, white, and black with long, shaggy fur. Bright blue eyes stared at her before it meowed once then turned and trotted off with its tail high in the air. Watching it go had her frowning. Was she supposed to follow? The cat goddess could have taken her head off with that initial strike. What was it planning now?
Rather than follow, Dyna followed her instincts and moved to the nearest intact control panel, a short distance down the hall. The triple-hexagon logo of Tartarus spun lazily on the screen. The moment she tapped it, it vanished and revealed a wall of text that she couldn’t read at all. The swimming words actually gave her a burgeoning headache. Shaking her head, Dyna tried to focus on the symbols displayed. Letters were meaningless, but symbols somehow made it through the odd effect of the noosphere.
Dyna found what she was looking for on the third pass. She wasn’t entirely sure that it had been there on the first two times around. Whether that was her ability or Tartarus didn’t matter, she supposed, as long as she could access video feeds from throughout the facility. A few button presses took her to what she wanted to see.
The eye-tulpa was still fighting Bastet, for however much it could be considered a fight at this point. Its sunglasses were off completely. Bastet dashed around more like a frightened rabbit than a tiger on the hunt. The goddess didn’t stay in one place for long, dashing from point to point, taking fresh cover before everything could melt completely. It wasn’t going to be sustainable. In fact, they were headed back the way Dyna had come, over one of the catwalks that crossed a bottomless gap in the facility. There wouldn’t be any cover to hide behind.
Dyna didn’t know what would happen if it caught Bastet in its gaze long enough to harm or kill—disperse?—the goddess. She did feel a bit bad about freeing Bastet, making Doctor Darq’s job harder, but she couldn’t say she was sorry. Especially not with Bastet occupying so much of the eye-tulpa’s attention. Of the two tulpa, only one had been sent to assassinate her.
Feeling like she could do at least a little to help out the cat goddess, Dyna flipped back to the control panel. A small pane on the larger screen let her watch the relentless march of the eye-tulpa while she studied the rest of the console.
Having no desire to get close to the tulpa again, she needed some other way of attacking it. Surely this facility had active security measures.
Dyna tapped around, half hoping to find something, half hoping to create something. She kept tapping until she tapped a bright red button.
A sharp red laser beam lanced out from somewhere behind the view of the video feed, striking the eye-tulpa in the side of the head. It stumbled to the side as if struck by a baseball bat, but didn’t go down. After a shake of its head, it turned.
The view of the camera cut out, but another one quickly replaced it.
Dyna hammered her finger on the red button several more times, each producing a visible beam of laser light aimed directly at the tulpa. It kept knocking the tulpa around, keeping it off balance, but it wasn’t enough.
She needed something to stop it. Something it couldn’t just destroy. Two things popped into Dyna’s mind. The first was psionically shielded glass. It stopped psionic-based energy waves in their tracks. Dyna wasn’t entirely sure that it stopped her ability, but everything else? The other idea was the gel-like substance that tulpa were contained in. Tartarus used it, she had seen them do so when capturing the Hatman. The Carroll Institute had taken samples from the Hatman and fashioned their own version. It was effectively the same thing as psionically shielded glass, just in a liquid form. It absorbed and dispersed any psionic activity.
Dyna focused, picturing what she wanted out of the situation. Idea clear in her mind, she pressed another button on the control panel.
The grate beneath the eye-tulpa split apart and fell inwards. Within, a containment tube of psionic glass and gel awaited the falling tulpa. A second button press slammed a piston down on top of the container, forcing the tulpa into the gel.
The perspective of the camera changed, showing a view directly in front of the now swimming tulpa. The fact that its glowing white eyes were locked directly on the camera and the view wasn’t being obliterated made Dyna sigh in relief. She hurried back over to the earpiece and put it on while walking to the console to keep an eye on her captive.
“Doctor Darq,” she started, only to stop and narrow her eyes at the video feed.
The gel directly in front of the tulpa’s eyes looked like it was boiling. Large bubbles of black thought drifted upward in the container, winding up stuck in the more viscous gel over the entity’s head. Once a few little bubbles started, the effect expanded exponentially. In short order, there was a cone of empty space in front of its eyes. It never blinked, continuing to stare dead ahead at the psionic glass.
The glass wasn’t maintaining integrity any better than the gel had. It held for a moment, then the video footage cut out.
Dyna had to grab hold of the console as a small earthquake rattled the Egyptian section of the facility.
“What did you do?”
“That thing…” Dyna hissed, finger to her ear. She grit her teeth as she tried to come up with another solution. That had almost worked. It should have worked.
The problem hit her like a freight train.
“That thing was created to fight me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It disrupts thought. Everything I do is just thought. Even in the real world, I just overcharge my thinking to the point where the noosphere leaks my will into reality. Isn’t that what you said?”
“We aren’t in proper reality to test such a hypothesis, but it seems likely, yes.”
“How do we get it out of here?”
“Excuse me? Get it out of here? Tartarus was made to contain entities, not release them.”
“It isn’t going to be contained. Not unless you have a section of this facility that is actually real. Even then…” Dyna bit her lip. “We need to get it into the real world. Bullets kill tulpa in the real world.” The Hatman and the mountain man had shrugged off firearms, but surely that just meant that they needed to use more bullets. “I bet real gel and glass would work too. But nothing down here. We have to get it out of here and find real gel, real glass, and real bullets.”
A wave of nausea hit Dyna even as she thought those words. What if just by thinking that, she generated gel and glass. She could open up a supply closet, thinking she was grabbing a riot shield made from psionic glass, only for it to vanish into wisps of thought the moment the tulpa spotted her. Even other people, if she expected them to have psionic glass, might wind up with generated glass instead because she thought about it.
She couldn’t think about it. But just trying to avoid thinking about it only made her think about it more. She couldn’t stop herself.
Dyna needed help.
“Darq. How do I stop my power?”