Freya's Offer of Help

The straight jacket moves quickly and whips a strap around your lightsaber holding hand in order to both avoid your attack and further propel itself towards Freya. As it reaches her it begins to wrap itself around her.

The hospital is degrading around you with ceiling tiles falling down and the walls cracking as the mold spreads itself further.

The security guards look unconcerned by your lightsaber as they continue a slow approach towards the two of you.

"We have a very strict no visitor's policy here." The Arahn informs you.

Freya rolls her eyes and growls. Feeling that her's is the more dominant personality, she tries to activate Force of Will and throw off the straight-jacket.

"Bloody hell," Artemis snaps. "By the black stars, why won't you all listen to me. This is my Sith-damned mind! I am revoking the no visitor policy!"

Artemis gathers all of his strength and invokes his own Force of Will to try to bend the mindscape to his control, stopping the orderlies and the decay of the hospital. He tries to calm the hostile energies, rather than adding his own fury to make things worse, but he still throws all of his abilities into the effort.

Artemis telepathies a quick message to Freya in the middle of all of this.

If you affect my mind to mask your presence here from me, it might stop the attack! This is my mind, and if I don't know you're here, then neither does the hospital!

You both manage to pull up Force of Will. However, a presence stronger than Vox seems to have hold of this reality. The strait jacket loosens but does not come off completely. The decay stops but the damage is done with no signs of reversing. It looks almost as it did when Artemis first entered his mind to cure his insanity.

The Arahn laughs at Dr. Vox and his voice distorts sounding like a multitude of voices speaking at once, "A brilliant plan doctor, thank you for sharing it with us all. As for you intruder, this is a dark place where even the Jensaarai should not dare to tread."

The guards are only a few steps away when a sudden sharp pain stabs at Dr Vox like an ice pick inside his head forcing him to grab at his face in reflex.

The Defel speaks, it's guttural growls now barely intelligible, "What's the matter doctor, got something in your eye?"

"Doctor, you are letting this happen. Despite accepting my help, there is still part of you that does not want me here. You have to accept that all of. these are your symbols. Nothing has secreted itself inside you mind. I know. I've looked for it."

Freya tries to keep them talking while she starts working her way of the jacket. (OOC, don't know how many of our physical powers are carrying over into this, Freya has Resist Pain and Contort / Escape)

Artemis clutches at his eyes in pain, and his glasses fall away as he does so. He takes a step back.

"I do want you here!" he insists, mostly to convince whatever is out there that he's sincere. "But if this goes out of our control, I want you to leave while you can still do so, and be ready to take me down."

He doesn't open his eyes. What I do to myself is mirrored on my aspects. So, instead, focusing on the fact that yes this is his mind and his symbols and his fears, he goes into meditation. He draws the Force around him, calming himself with it, blanking his thoughts and emotions in its shroud of peace. He extends his stillness outwards, connecting with the illusory landscape that is his own mind. His fears cannot control him. His past cannot rule him. He will not allow it.

"There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force."

(OOC: Will spend my temp Force point in drawing the Force to calm Artemis's mind)

Freya manages to contort her way out of the straight jacket but it struggles in your hands now whipping at you with it's straps and buckles like a mad animal.

As the doctor calms his mind the two guards become intangible, fading into shadows. The syringe the Arahn was holding clatters to the floor as the straight jacket finally stops struggling and becomes limp. However, the decor remains the same and there is still a sharp pain in the doctor's eye.

A gravelly voice echos down the halls from out of nowhere. "Your hold on this mindscape wanes dear doctor, open the door, let the darkness back into your heart so that I might take root."

(OOC: Yow, today has been busy!)

Freya drops the straight-jacket to the floor.

"Well, I didn't get the impression of anything toying with you in the past..." she grumbles, "Which isn't to say that something hasn't recently found this little festering pocket a nice place to nest in."

"Which eye is bothering you?" she asks as she walks forward and starts to check Vox's face over. "It's not the one you dropped the sample I brought back into, is it?"

Artemis hisses as he draws in breath slowly. He keeps his eyes closed, but outwardly it doesn't look as though anything is wrong with him. Not physically, at least. "Yes, it's that eye. I just had a very, very bad thought about all of this. Listen."

He takes a deep breath and continues, measuring his words carefully.

"You said you didn't see anything when you looked? I'm assuming telepathy or farseeing? Maybe you didn't look back far enough. I'm positive that there was a man in my childhood who severely abused me. Probably my father, considering what mom said about him. Last time I was in here I saw shadows--more like echoes--of past memories. They weren't whole, but I gleaned an impression of what they should have been. And I know that I came in here a while back specifically to lock up memories. I remember doing it, I just don't remember what I locked up."

Artemis lightly touches the eye behind which the pain resides.

"But that might be the least of our worries right now. I'm afraid that some of Sith's presence might have escaped into here when I spilled the sample you gave me. Maybe it fled here and killed the Jedi and the Healer. Or maybe the Jedi locked it behind the door along with the man I forgot. I still want my memories back, but I don't want to be unlocking Sith inadvertently. Are we prepared for that to happen?"

Artemis opens his eyes.

"I've looked back several times to the creation of the Vox Virus and got no sense of a presence beyond your own. That's as far as I've seen and as far as I wish to see."

"Let me look at this more closely." Freya leans Artemis' head back and holds his eye open, trying to find a good spot of light in the hallway.

"There are a couple of possibilities... You could be infected with Sith because of your contact... "

She shifts around, squinting trying to get a good look. "Your own dark side could have gained in strength from the contact with Sith..."

She leans in and pauses for a moment.

"Of course, you could just be a sick bastard," Freya says as she suddenly licks the doctor's eyeball.

(OOC: Do I taste anything besides salt?)

(There is no way that I can't reply to that right now. XD)

"Of course you wouldn't have sensed any other presence, Freya," Artemis mutters as Freya studies his eye. "Childhood trauma can induce permanent psychological damage. Even insanity. You'd have to look back at my childhood to be sure that there wasn't anything there."

Of course, the moment Freya licks his eye, all of those thoughts get tossed out of mind.

"Bloody stars, Freya!" the doctor yelps, jerking back instinctively. "Are you nuts?!"

As Freya licks the doc's eyeball she tastes despair and anger it also feels as though a spark of electricity leaps from the doc's eye and zaps Freya's tongue.

"Ewwwgh." Freya scrapes her tongue over her teeth and shakes her head as if she's tasted something bad.

"No, that's not right," she muses.

"I didn't look back farther because I was hoping that I would sense that you were being possessed or being manipulated by an outside force. Instead, what I saw was all you. The traumas may have been caused by someone else, but it was you who put them together in that petri dish.

"For what it's worth, if something is in here with us I don't think either the Healer or the Jedi have been hurt; supressed, maybe, but not destroyed. They're aspects of yourself. If something had happened you would have changed. Or killed."

"So, where were we going? The morgue?"

Freya looks at her fist then clenches and releases it a few times. Keeping it at her side as they start down the hallway, she covertly repeats the action carefully every few seconds.

(OOC: Freya's trying to see if she can stay within Vox's mind, yet still have some small degree of movement in the real world)

Indeed, Artemis thinks, that really isn't right. But he realizes what Freya was trying to do, and the results of her bizarre experiment only add weight to his suspicions about Sith.

"Ah," he says quietly. "Entirely correct, of course. Crazy notwithstanding, it was entirely me and me alone."

He scans the darkened, dilapidated hallway. He doesn't like the sound of a being that could suppress both of his aspects. But suppressing is better than having killed them. "I suppose we'll find out. To the morgue."

But as they walk towards their destination, he voices his concerns. "I worry that we won't know which of your three possibilities is the correct one until we open that door. If it's the first, then unleashing Sith is the last thing I want to do. You have a plan for that, right?"

As they walk, Artemis will sense for the presences of the Healer and the Jedi. He'll try to tell if they're gone completely, there, or just suppressed.

Also, do I think that trying Farseeing while in here would be at all illuminating as to figuring out if Sith did come in?

"Of course, Doctor," she says as she continues to flex her hand at her side.

"That plan had better include burning my corpse, putting the ashes inside a mandalorian container, and throwing said container into a black hole."

Freya seems unable to obtain any physical response from her body in reality.

Artemis does think that Farseeing may give him some insight as to what happened here.

As you walk towards the morgue you come to a section of the hospital where the floor is gone and a gaping chasm of darkness spanning about 50ft keeps you from the hallway connecting to the morgue.

Must be in deeper than I had thought. Maybe I should try something more subtle, like my breathing... (OOC: Going to concentrate on a particular breathing rhythm to see if I can slowly work on getting some slow, small control of my real body.)

Freya stops at the edge of the pit and looks down and then across. "Wow. Now there's some symbolism that I totally understand and agree with. It's simple, but it works on so many levels!"

You start to gain some minor control of your body, but as you do the mindscape becomes less substantial like you're on the verge of waking up. The darkness Freya sees is further obscured by what seems to be a thin veil of fog.

(OOC: I hope I'm okay assuming that Freya also looks less substantial to Artemis as a result.)

Artemis stares at the darkness. He keeps his distance from it and does not attempt to approach or cross it. "Wow. Got to agree with you there, Freya." He considers the chasm. "I'm going to try Farseeing in here. I think I might be able to catch a glimpse of what happened without actually releasing anything."

He turns to look at Freya and blinks. "Freya? Freya, hang on! What's the matter?"

OOC Yes Freya does appear to be less substantial.

(OOC: Ok, in that case I'll back off just enough so that everything is still real and try to hold it there.)

"Sorry. My... mind was wandering."

Artemis accepts that explanation without question. If Freya's up to something, it's best that he doesn't know what it is anyway.

He sits down cross-legged on the floor, still a good distance away from the chasm, and slips into meditation. He draws the Force around himself protectively as he did before. Then, he will try to Farsee into the past to glimpse just what happened here. If he senses that his attempt is damaging his current state of mind, he will back off. Above all, he does not want to unleash anything right now.

Freya once again solidifies and Artemis begins to peel back time through the Force.

Seeing the day you spilled the goo in your eye everything slows down as you zoom in on your eye. A tiny dark tendril trickles through past your eye and into the coils of your brain. Everything zooms in closer until you're seeing the hospital from the inside. Lights are flickering on and off with shadows moving of their own accord. As they pass over the people in your mind their eyes cloud over becoming solid black before returning to normal. The darkness spreads in all directions and as it gets to where the Healer should be, he's nowhere to be found. As it approaches the morgue and the Jedi, the Jedi can be seen outside the morgue lightsaber already ignited in hand. He slams it into the ground as the darkness closes the distance and everything shakes as the hallway rips in two creating the gap you two stand before. The darkness floods into the chasm like a tidal wave before slowing to a trickle, a seemingly endless trickle. The Jedi walks back into the morgue and everything is silent, the only sound is the slow trickle of darkness into the chasm. As you come out of the vision you realize you can still hear that trickle oozing out the shadows and into the chasm.