Katalepsis VI: "And Less Pleasant Places" (part 1)

This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny


At long last, back to Katalepsis!

Heather, Evelyn, and Raine had a relative breather of a winter break. I say "relative" because nobody was trying to kill them, nobody got stranded on another plane of existence, and Heather didn't go through anything that would have put a normal person in the hospital. Instead, they just dealt with multiple false alarms of people trying to kill them, threats of stranding people on other planes of existence, and veritable mountains of emotional and mental trauma being dropped on everyone with the possible exception of Raine. So, yes, a relaxing vacation by their standards.

This next arc starts with the gang returning to Sharrowford, university resuming (seriously, why is Heather even still bothering with this? Take a year off to focus on Maisie, for god's sake girl!), and all their more pressing problems coming back with a vengeance.

The title for this one, "And Less Pleasant Places," makes it clear right from the outset that playtime is over. Especially when you consider the previous arc title; what place could possibly be less pleasant than England? HAHAHAHAHA ZIIIIIING! More seriously, the title is apparently quoted from a Call of Cthulhu TTRPG sourcebook detailing the "Campbell Country" region of England. I've only read a little bit of Ramsay Campbell's Cthulhu Mythos work myself, but I figured that any Lovecraft-inspired story set in rural England would probably be taking at least a few notes from him even if I can't necessarily recognize them on sight.

This source for this title is also highly appropriate to this arc for another reason: "And Less Pleasant Places" really, really feels like a Call of Cthulhu adventure. The pacing, the type of investigation the characters perform, the kind of mistakes they make while performing said investigation, it all really has a Cthulhu TTRPG vibe to it. In the good way, not in the litrpg shite way. Like, I guess a good way of putting it would be that this is the kind of story that would be readily adaptable into a CoC adventure, rather than it reading like a novella adaptation of a CoC adventure.

This arc also picks up a lot of dropped threads and uses a lot of previously minor characters from earlier arcs. So, I'm not going to do a detailed recap of the entire story so far; there's just too much of it at this point, so you'll have to go back and read my earlier posts if you haven't already. Or, better yet, read Katalepsis itself.


Before things get dark, the beginning of "And Less Pleasant Places" starts off by leaning on another major theme of the series.

Katalepsis 6.1:

I've been told, repeatedly, that I must possess a rather high tolerance for pain.

This is not true.

"I really do think Praem is too big for this," I said, then shot a guilty look at the doll-demon.

Very funny, author. I'm sure you had absolutely no idea of what you were doing there.

What's actually going on is that, now that they're back in Sharrowford (the visit with Heather's family ends up being mostly offscreen. Ah well), Heather is trying to use what she learned from the Sayes' Multiverse Map to make navigated plane shifts as opposed to blind ones. The others are insisting that she bring Praem with her to whatever realm she visits, just for security's sake, and Heather is protesting that that much extra mass will make the hypermath much more difficult than it needs to be (especially since the attack-portal in Evelyn's workshop seems to have collapsed when Lozzie got free of the New Suns, so they don't have a shortcut around Earth's dimensional gravity).

In terms of ability, Heather is reasonably sure that traveling to and from the Eye's homeworld wouldn't be harder than beaming to any other extradimensional realm. However, there's no telling what kind of security the entity might have in place, how zealously it might be guarding its domain from extradimensional intrusion. Furthermore, going back to "wonderland" is only part of the problem; she'd still need to find Maisie's specific location (assuming she hasn't already been bodily assimilated by the Eye like I've come to suspect), which might require all sorts of equipment and manpower that she wouldn't know to bring. So, before planning the rescue, they decide to perform a couple of experiments.

First, send a small, inanimate object to wonderland, and bring it back. Heather has already been practicing recovering objects after sending them away, so the principles are sound. This will be a test of the Eye's defences more than anything else; see if anything prevents the pebble from escaping once it's there, and watch (and be prepared) for any possible retaliation that gets sent to Earth after it. Second, Heather herself will go to a different, less dangerous, realm, take someone or something with her, and then return from there with a souvenir. This will test her ability to choose destinations using the map coordinates, and her ability to bring other things with her either way without damaging them.

It's a good pair of tests to run. Unfortunately, they make the mistake of not factoring in the observer effect. IE, they assume that the act of performing either of those tests won't have any effect on how the other one goes.

Likewise, it turns out that their actions in previous arcs have been having unseen consequences that the gang has pointedly avoided thinking about, and it's all about to come back and bite.

...

That said, it might actually be that if they'd only done the experiments in reverse order, things could have gone much better for them. In retrospect, knocking on the Eye's door and then doing other planar travel experiments right afterward might have been kinda, um, well, yeah.

Also, this arc is when it becomes absolutely explicit that the Eye is, in fact, wilfully antagonistic. I can no longer give it the benefit of the doubt after this point.

...

After sending and recalling a pebble from Planet Eyeball and giving Heather some time off to rest her brain, do schoolwork, and enjoy some strongly implied BDSM with Raine, they try the manned expedition to somewhere else. Heather remembers her astral projection dreams with Lozzie sometimes involving a place called the Library of Carcosa, so she decides to try and bring herself and Praem there and come back with a book.

-___-

Okay, in theory this is an important and necessary experiment to perform. In practice...they did not think through the details very well at all.

Even ignoring the meta-knowledge I have that Carcosa from the Cthulhu Mythos is virtually always associated with cognitohazards and demonic possession (in Katalepsis, Evelyn knows about an extradimensional library full of esoteric knowledge called Carcosa, but she knows nothing about it besides that), there are some obvious issues that should have occurred to the characters. First of all, why choose a place that they know is inhabited? Isn't that just asking for trouble, or at least for complications they don't want to deal with right now?

Second, and more importantly, are they seriously planning to beam over there and just fucking STEAL from these intelligent aliens of unknown power and disposition? And yes, they are aware that what they're planning is in fact theft.

Katalepsis 6.1:

"I can't." She took a deep breath and forced a humourless laugh. "You need to understand, Heather, this presents me with a dangerous temptation. A selfish part of me, perhaps the part I inherited from my mother-"

"Evee, no."

"- very much wants to visit that library and pilfer as many books as I can," she carried right on, raising a hand. "If I was being … mercenary, I would tell you there might be books there we can use, things that might help us locate your sister, even more so if you're not going to be able to pit your mind against the Eye. And that wouldn't be a lie."

"Oh." That pang of guilt.

"Evee, come off it, that is being mercenary," Raine said. "But hey, if it might help?"

"Perhaps," Evelyn admitted. "But you do need to test the map, and I need to test the door. The library, well … " Evelyn shrugged.

"What Evee's saying," Raine added, still rubbing my shoulders. "Is that it's your choice, this is your circus, Heather."

I took a deep breath and tried to sit up straight, tried to feel big. I did not.

"I am large and in charge," I said, closed my eyes and nodded. "I'll do it. A trip to the library."

Now, this is a mistake that flows logically from the characters' established flaws. For all that she renounces her mother, Evelyn was still raised by her, and trained by her, and so her first instincts when it comes to magic is to act like her and/or the New Suns. Plunder and exploit the far realms with cruel indifference, and slowly, gradually, increase the likelihood that humanity will eventually be wiped out when they heedlessly poke someone big enough to poke back. Heather, meanwhile, is just thinking about the Library of Carcosa in the context of her adventures with Lozzie; she's hoping she might happen to run into Lozzie again, and she also associates Lozzie with safety and the free exchange of knowledge. And, Raine just doesn't offer critique when it comes to subjects outside of her wheelhouse.

But still. You'd think Heather and Evelyn would at least be able to cover for each other's blind spots, after all the introspection and interaction they've gone through? I guess not. Ah well.

As Heather's twentieth birthday comes and goes (and, she reminds herself painfully, Maisie's twentieth birthday does likewise), she make the Carcosa jaunt. If she wasn't infected with the King and Yellow before now, she's probably going to be by the end of this arc lol. So, reluctantly taking Praem with her despite the extra cost in neurons, Heather plane shifts to Carcosa.

It's a surprisingly mundane-looking library, apart from its mind-boggling size and bewildering amount of disorder. The wooden bookshelves and leatherbound books turn out to not just be a perception filter from the dream with Lozzie; whoever built this place, they were either literally humans or else remarkably humanlike.

Katalepsis 6.1:

The library of Carcosa looked exactly as I remembered it from the dream Lozzie and I had shared. We stood at the bottom of a wide canyon of bookcases at least a mile across, the floor covered with thousands of discarded texts. The bookcases vanished into the dark, far far above, crossed and looped by hundreds of wooden walkways and balconies. Billions of books. Beyond counting.

Praem seems to be doing just fine, as is Heather aside from the usual nosebleed and nausea she gets from doing this. They grab a book, Heather hoists her half-filled barf bag to prepare for the return trip, and then she sees Lozzie off in the distance milling about among the bookshelves and stairways. Only...she's not looking too healthy.

And it gets even worse when Heather sees her in motion, too. Made even worse by the fact that she's in motion away from Heather, after looking her way and not having any apparent reaction.

Katalepsis 6.2:

Lozzie was here, just beyond the shadows and my own blurred vision. She'd turned and walked away, up into the winding maze of the library staircases, but I'd seen her, I'd seen-

I'd seen a face twisted into alien emotion. Barely her.

Lozzie's facial muscles had all pulled in the wrong directions, tensed and relaxed in the wrong order, at the wrong angles, like an inhuman hand puppeting her from beneath the skin.

No no no, Lozzie, no! If I hadn't been wracked with brainmath-fumble aftershocks and a headache fit to kill a bear, I believe I would have wept.

How could this happen to her? She'd insisted she was meant to be out here, to be Outside. She was supposed to be safe, from her uncle, from the cult, at home in the inhuman wilderness – and what had happened to her? Even worse, too unthinkable, had she invited this change?

I couldn't bear it, couldn't bear what it implied, for both of us.

I had to find her.

The shock causes Heather's half-formed hypermath calculations to just melt in her mind's eye. Trying to chase after Lozzie while experiencing the partial brain-shock causes Heather to lose consciousness. Praem has to stand over her, alone in an alien library, for over thirty minutes, until Heather regains consciousness.

...

Now, my own thought when I was reading this point was that "Lozzie" was part of an adaptive security system. Try to steal one of the books, and you hallucinate something shocking that has a good chance to prevent you from escaping. Turns out I was wrong. Or at least, half-wrong. I was correct that this is not actually a possessed/mutated Lozzie, but I was incorrect about it being a Carcosan construct.

Sending that rock to and from the Eye's realm did, in fact, get its attention. It chose not to interfere with the test, letting the girls come to the false conclusion that it can't detect such intrusions. Meanwhile, it kept its pan-dimensional gaze on Sharrowford, and watched and waited for Heather to try something else. Carcosa turned out to be an easy realm to intercept someone in, and the Eye prepared a piece of bait.

As for where and how it learned enough about Lozzie and Heather's relationship with her to know how to use her image, well. That's where the consequences of other early actions of the girls' come into play. This plot is about to get complicated.

...

The librarians, previously seen only milling about at a great distance, seem to have found Heather and Praem by now.

Katalepsis 6.2:

Four figures, maybe a hundred meters away. Tall, perhaps six or seven feet, lean and humanoid beneath long ragged robes – but lumpy and rippling, as if they possessed unspeakable concealed appendages in addition to their grayish hands and forearms. Great masses of ropey grey tentacles hung and twitched in place of faces, set between long spines like those of a sea urchin, no eyes or mouths or noses, though their faces pointed at Praem and I as if watching through human eyes.

The boldest of the librarians, creeping forward at the head of their group, carried a large book tucked into its armpit – and a barbed metal cattle-crook in the other hand.

The others didn't look as confident as they approached. They were empty-handed except for one carrying a pair of books, as if the tentacle-face had been busy sorting volumes, its work interrupted by a human girl noisily passing out on the floor. The rearmost figure seemed wary, craning to look over his companions' shoulders. Another knot of the creatures was descending a staircase at the edge of the canyon, a couple of them pointing toward us.

Heather still hasn't quite conquered her irrational aversion to alien life forms, despite the multiple optimistic data points she's been handed at this point. She assumes her options are either "flee" or "make Praem fight them." Which...well, as I already said, choosing an inhabited location for this experiment was a needless complication to begin with, and coming into it with that attitude only makes it worse.

The semi-humanoid size and shape of the Carcosan librarians does suggest interesting things about the books and structures and their origins. However, this ends up being basically just an early-bird cameo. We don't return to Carcosa for the rest of "And Less Pleasant Places," nor do we interact with creatures from there. There's also still no confirmation on whether or not this place is teaming with infohazards as it is in other authors' takes, apart from the one that the Eye installed by giving Heather bait to get obsessed with chasing.

...

Now, about that last part? The behavioural anomalies in Heather that I've been noticing throughout the last few arcs do escalate massively in this one, to the point where I don't think I could attribute it solely to organic natural character growth even if I wanted to. *Something* is changing Heather's personality. That something may or may not have originated in Carcosa, though; at least, its escalation doesn't seem to correlate with her new in-person visit especially.

...

The Lozzie image is very well-chosen bait. As Evelyn later points out after Heather's return to Earth, Lozzie is the one person Heather knows who could plausibly be in Carcosa under alien mind/body control. The only other image that could have possibly worked would be Maisie's, but as Heather's mental image of her is that of a 12 year old it would be hard to make all the details make sense. Showing a mutated Lozzie, specifically, also plays at Heather's concerns about what might be happening to Maisie right now without actually having to show her Maisie. There's also another factor in the Eye using Lozzie's image rather than Maisie's, here, but neither Evelyn nor the reader knows about it yet.

At any rate, Heather's decision to go back instead of chasing after the Lozzie-image is the outcome of a difficult inner conflict, and the resolution shows us how far Heather has come since 1.1. The decision is arrived at when Praem reminds Heather that she'd promised Evelyn and Raine to keep her safe.

Katalepsis 6.2:

"Promised," Praem intoned. "Best look after her."

That dumped a bucket of cold water on my mounting hysteria: Raine's words to Praem, back in Sharrowford.

The doll-demon had promised to look after me. Raine and Evelyn were waiting, with no idea why I was overdue. Raine would be worried sick. She'd never show it, never let on in the moment, and as soon as I got back she'd be all practical care and tender smiling encouragement. She loved me, and perhaps the way I felt about Lozzie right now was a shade of how she worried for me.

"You can't- you can't make me," I muttered. Voice weak, my heart wasn't really in the words.

I did hold the real power here, I determined our return. I'd dropped the notepaper with the equation, now lost amid the mess of discarded books on the floor, but I could perform it all from memory, at the speed of thought, at the cost of a little more agony.

Praem said nothing, arms tight around my waist, taking my sagging weight on her front. Together we stared at the approaching tentacle-faces, the librarians. They'd reach us in a minute or two, and even though they looked uncertain and wary I would rather they keep their distance.

A crazed part of me wanted to refuse, make the doll-demon choose between fighting the tentacle-faces or picking me up and running, give her no option but to help me find Lozzie.

I couldn't. Didn't have the heart, couldn't stop thinking about Raine. Left my sister behind for ten years, and now Lozzie's lost herself Outside and I can't even go after her.

I choked back a sob.

"Leave," Praem repeated.

"Okay. Okay, yes, yes. You- you have the book, don't you? I'm not doing this again."

Heather learning to value herself, and to recognize the value that she has to other people in turn, is a much-needed balancing factor to root her determination to save Maisie. Aside from worrying about what Evelyn and Raine would do if she never came back, Heather realizing that Praem is relying on her to bring Praem back with her. Someone else's survival depends on Heather's self-preservation.

...well, maybe. I don't know if losing this avatar would actually meaningfully hurt Praem. But Heather isn't sure, so she has to assume for the time being that it would. Probably something for Heather to ask about before doing this again, heh.

So, reluctantly, Heather beams herself and Praem back to Earth, and then spends the next day and a half or so recovering from the brain trauma and NOT recovering from the emotional trauma. It's as she's finishing this recovery that the next plot point her experiments unknowingly catalysed comes boomeranging back. And...this is also the point where the arc starts to really feel like a Call of Cthulhu module, heh.


I'll cover that in the next post. For now, just a couple of bits of prose from the first chapter and a half of this arc that I feel the need to point out.

Katalepsis 6.1:

My fingertips brushed the notepaper; warm to the touch, like fevered flesh.

HOW DOES SHE KEEP TURNING OUT THESE BANGER SIMILES HOLY SHIT!!!

Katalepsis 6.2:

I felt Raine's hands on my face and forehead, wiping the blood and the bile from my lips, telling me I was home, I was safe, and it was all okay – but I wasn't really there. She tended to a thin veneer over a void. The void was me, I was it, and it was all.

Amazing expression of how Heather's body still doesn't feel like it's back on Earth yet, like a kind of dimensional vertigo. Describing an alien sensation that no human has ever actually experienced, but still letting the reader both imagine it and (easily) intuit what's causing it.

And, finally, this incredible bit of subtle characterization, when Heather had just been glancing at Evelyn's spider-synth while talking to her and Raine:

Katalepsis 1.1:

"Y-you said Praem's gone out?" I hurried to change the subject. Even now, after all these months, the old instinctive habit still held a lot of ground inside my head – don't let on that you see things other people don't.

Both her adaptive trait of trying to hide that she can see pneuma-somatic entities, and her being self-aware enough to realize she's doing it and should stop...gaaaah, genius.

Next time, more of arc 6.