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“Are you sure this’ll work? It won’t, like, break my brain or something, right?” Marinette squinted at his glimmering fingerprints, hands tightly gripping her jeans pants.
“Of course not—I do it all the time on myself.” He balled his hand into a loose fist then opened it again to reveal a shimmering, white, butterfly. “I’ll just quickly hop in to alleviate some of your stress, then I’ll immediately back out. I promise not to poke around your mind unless strictly necessary.”
“OK, I trust you, it’s just– you’ll be inside my brain!”
“It won’t be my first time inside someone else’s mind,” he murmured, then soundlessly kissed the butterfly before gently waving it out.
“It’ll be my first time with someone else inside mine!” The butterfly landed between her raised brows, sparkles flying out of its open wings as they enlarged more and more over Psyche’s vision, engulfing all his senses.
As he drew nearer into the light, the bedroom grew and stretched infinitely around him as the floor disappeared from underneath his feet. He fell onto the newly materialized surface with a muted thud.
Then something caught his ankle and he fell face-first onto a hard and scratchy ground.
“Argh!” Psyche pulled forwards, trying to shake off whatever caught his foot while trying to get a bearing of the place.
A gasp sounded from somewhere behind him followed by a squeaky voice, “Emergency on the road! Everyone, prepare for fishing! This’s a big one!”
He tried to turn to the sounds of chittering and small pitty-pattering footsteps and was able to make out large, round, ears on small bodies, dressed in overalls of all colors before more yarn caught his limbs. He quickly turned and started to pull with his hands and push with his feet to keep himself afloat till a pole lowered to his side with a loud creak.
“Thanks,” Psyche said after being pulled to the relatively safer sidewalk by the mice, who were now discussing whether or not they should properly fix the pole used or focus on the emergency first.
He looked around the narrow street—the road being congested by yarns and all the mice and platforms of all sizes only serving to make him feel more cramped. The houses seemed right out of a wood painting; thin trees with large and vibrant leaves growing asymmetrically between buildings. Over the rooftops, a large tower touched the sky itself, which seemed to be made out of weaved yarn.
He searched the sky, eyes squinted. He was no expert in sewing—knitting?—but the sky almost seemed to droop, with some of its threads flowing down.
“So…” He turned back to the mice, who all immediately stopped chittering and turned huge eyes at him and soundly blinked all at once.
With a shudder, he snapped his head to the yarn-covered road and pointed a thumb at it.
“Do you need help getting rid of all this yarn?”
Psyche jumped at the onslaught of objections that went out in a squeaky jumble of words he vaguely picked up: “What?” “Why would we do that?” “Are you insane?”
An ‘ahem’ sounded over the crowd and thankfully subsided all the affronted shouting into disgruntled grumbling.
“Excuse me, sir,” a mouse wearing a working helmet said from a platform that reached Psyche’s thigh, arms crossed, “but that’s some perfectly usable yarn right there. We can’t just put it to waste!”
“It almost drowned me!”
“Ehhhh– ” The mouse scrunched its face, scratching at its nose uncomfortably. “–sooooo maybe they got just an itsy-bit deeper than the safety program recommends, but we can still work with them! It’s just a matter of combing through it all…” She counted out a small finger at each point. “…detangling… putting it through the sewing machine…” Her hand slumped as she trailed off.
Psyche crouched to meet the mouse at eye level as best as he could. “Sounds like it’ll take a while–”
“It’d go faster if someone hadn’t used up all our energy supplies!” shouted one of the mice running the wheel that seemed to power up a giant yarn roller that pushed at the yarn blockage.
A mouse that was picking the yarn with a needle threw hands, shouting back, “How could I know so much yarn would just suddenly sprout out!”
“That’s why we need the reserves!”
“So,” Psyche said, turning back to the mouse that seemed to be in charge, who was in the process of rolling her eyes, “we better get started.”
~•~
No matter how much her bladder complained, Marinette would not move from this chair. First: Psyche’s body was still here and it had an unflinching gaze on her forehead that fixed her on the spot no matter how many waves over his masked eyes confirmed he wasn’t actually there. And second: how embarrassing would it be to have him come back while she was in the bathroom?
(And third: a slightly irrational fear that if she moved too briskly, she’d accidentally kill him.)
It was taking a while for him to come back though. And the more the time went on, the longer her yawns would get, and the faster her fingers and feet would drum on the nearest surface. Maybe she could quickly go to the bathroom, if only to move her cramped legs?
Marinette was about to stand up when a flash of light burst from her forehead and she screeched back on the chair with an eek.
Psyche jolted awake, glancing around a bit before focusing on Marinette again. “How are you feeling?”
“Uhm.” Marinette brought a hand to her temples, which seemed to have been unknotted. “Lighter?”
She cocked her head, eyes glazed over as she thought about– not much of anything. She hadn’t forgotten the fastly approaching entrance exam for university, nor all the available dorms site open on her laptop, but those thoughts weren’t squeezing her throat as tight. She could breathe.
She let out a small laugh, blinking up at Psyche, who, seeing her reaction, put up a relieved smile of his own. “What did you do?” she asked, screeching her chair closer—maybe a bit closer than they were before.
“It wasn’t much really,” he murmured, rubbing his arm. “You did most of the work yourself, I just helped to alleviate some of the load and speed things up a bit.”
“And that isn’t much?” Marinette grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking it a bit. “It means the world to me!” She wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing as she uttered as many ‘thank you’s as she could to his cloak.
“Uhhhhmmm…”
Seeing how he stiffened up, Marinette immediately backed out, palms up as she apologized.
He cleared his throat and hastily stood up, almost tripping on the chair as he stepped back.
“Anyway–” He coughed on a fist—was his cheeks pink or was it just a shade from his violet mask?—straightening up the chair, “I should go now. Thanks for letting me explore someone else’s mind Marinette!”
“Huh? Wait…” Marinette shot to her feet and dashed to the window. “You said this wasn’t the first mind you entered!”
But it was no use, his frame was already far into the rooftops. She would’ve spent her time glaring jokingly at it weren’t for her bladder reminding her of an emergency she couldn’t put off for much longer.
~•~
“Hey, Nooroo?” Félix quietly called to the still and dark room. “Think she’ll be alright?”
“I know you’re worried for your friend, Félix,” the only glow inside the room replied as it settled on the crook of his arm. “But you know very well that all minds have something with the potential to crush it down; it doesn’t necessarily mean it will. She’ll be fine.”
Still, Félix couldn’t shake off the images of the storm that the yarn-weaved sky covered off his mind.
