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Tennessee's mindscape is has fragments and mementos and oddities of more than a dozen human-occupied worlds and a few nonhuman-occupied ones, all crammed into a sprawling ranch house...

...which, a step outside will reveal, is on a cozy little plantoid orbiting a gas giant.

One of the doors is fairly uninteresting. Rather futuristic and made of metal, slightly timeworn, but with no adornment.

On the other side? You'll find yourself standing in the woods on the side of a mountain. There's a dropoff nearby looking out over a lake, and a very narrow footworn path to one side. Something clearly used, but not often enough to make it very wide.

"Jeez, did I start playing a bad vid-game by accident or what?"

Joking aside, Terry's little, well, domain seems pretty stereotypically teen-aged-male-ish. Fragments of fantasies about girls and nice cars, school assignments bouncing around, everything incredibly cluttered and disorganized.

But there's one corner of his mind that stands out. It's the mouth to a near light-less cavern. Looking into it, you can see shadowy features. A bar-door like the ones you see in prisons, a smashed window and what looks like some sort of gang graffiti, an ambulance and the worlds 'HA HA HA' scrawled across a wall. And hanging overhead, all throughout the cavern, are hundreds of bats of all sorts of species.

And even if no one else can tell, Terry knows that the cavern's been getting bigger in the past couple of years.

Gauron's mindscape consists of jungles, bleeding out through vast swaths that look like they were napalmed, hit by Agent Orange, and barbecued by flamethrowers, into vast, rocky deserts. In the occasional ravine, there's a swatch of city (most of them are late 20th/early 21st century Hong Kong, for anyone who recognizes it) - a pastiche of all the places where he feels so comfortable that he's almost invisible, cut together in a way that makes little sense to anybody except him. Come on in, if you dare, but there are booby traps everywhere - step wrong, and you'll find yourself trapped in his memories of being tortured, beaten, stabbed, shot, or blown up, except without any of the perverse enjoyment he felt at the time.

Ladies and gents, welcome to hell - for the mind is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

If you open the door to Yuri's mind (it says "Sixth Grade Wisteria Class"...er wait...you could have sworn it said "Wisteria" but actually it says "Alien" now).

There you will find a darkened classroom. The children are faceless black cutouts, from behindwhich tend to emerge tentacles and mandibles.

The teacher is a distorted and lumpen thing, looking like it belongs equally to some distant sun and the depths of our own seas (http://i37.tinypic.com/2ic3c7a.jpg).

In the center desk is Yuri, spotlighted.

They're all looking at her.

Even in her headscape, she's not comfortable.

Satori's mind is a pretty nice place. Very classy furnishings, all very expensive-looking and fancy. Almost like a palace. Satori is sitting in the throne room, of course. Beyond that, though, nothing too interesting or peculiar in here.

Oh, wait, yes there is. Maybe it's all those windows scattered haphazardly along the walls. Maybe it's how they give views into everyone else's minds.

The door to Sheeana's headspace is a rubber iris, incongrously decorated with Arabic-looking designs.

Step into it and the door hovers in the air over a vast desert at twilight. Looking over the dunes, the pink and purple light makes them look like the backs of great pods of candy whales frozen in migration. There are the ghosts of great sandworms there, translucent bodies miles long, roaring hauntingly.

There is a small, hardscrabble village, sorrounded by a moat of moist sand. The dwellings are simple hovels. Their inhabitants are fremen (http://www.lisashea.com/hobbies/dune/scifi/fremen2.jpg) in stillsuits. They are simple but honest folk, tenders of their desert home.

In the middle is a vaguely churchish looking building (http://www.rrp.lv/images/ropazi.jpg). Inside, women in black robes train in obscure martial arts, talk over spicecoffee, read and eat together.

All of these people are fully independent personalities and can talk to you themselves.

Sheeana could be anywhere.

Inside the vaguely futuristic looking door to Lafiel's mind, find an immense space colony, orbiting in a graceful parabola around a gently glowing star. Outside great ships pass silently in the void.

Inside, find a clean, almost crystal-spires-and-togas-ish environment. Warm light. Great bulkheads. Windows out to the sun and stars. Teams of Abh children in jumpsuits compete in low gravity sports throughout.

There are also well manicured little parks under artificial sunlight. Inhabited by friendly cats. Dozens of them.

Jamie's subconscious is excruciatingly orderly, all straight lines and right angles and the occasional gentle curve, in neutral shades of grey. Thoughts and memories appear as uniformly-sized cubes arranged in a grid pattern, each one swirling gently with images in subdued colors and neatly labeled in precise, cramped handwriting: and so on.

Near certain memories, the gridwork and neat lines and memory-cubes vanish suddenly, resuming again some distance away. There's no pattern to these voids, though they seem to cluster up in areas delineating the more recent portions of Jamie's life and then, themselves, abruptly disappear.

Aside from the blank spots, the only thing marring the mindscape are places of intense turbulence, heaving and roiling in agitation. These are contained behind nice, clean-looking barriers, but despite their tidiness there's the suggestion that they were constructed hurriedly, out of fear. Every now and again the walls shudder and bend outward, glowing with the faintest hint of electric blue.

Motoko's door isn't so much a door as a net gate, glowing brightly white in the relative gloom, and very clearly digital in origin, crawling with both English and Japanese, labels detonating it as her own.

On the other side, a burst of blue-white fills your eye, and if you can keep them open, a momentary glimpse of a midnight field dotted with glowing lights and traveling data-packets like shooting stars: the Net as seen from within. It fades quickly, leaving an aftgerimage, and before it can be fully grasped you find yourself in an empty studio apartment, spartanly furnished, but elegantly designed in steel and obsidian, lit in a blue tone and windows ringed round. Welcome to Motoko's home; you getter get the fuck out of her head before she fries you for violating her barriers.

The door to Holly's mind is octagonal in shape, and made of gold. It looks almost like the cover of an oddly shaped book, with something in an odd pictorial language written in a spiral in the dead center of the door. By the way, the door's only about four feet tall.

Inside of the door is an enormous perfectly circular room, the walls made of stone. Grass grows on the floor, and there's a great oak tree growing in the center. Looking straight up, there is a ceiling stalactites, like a deep underground cave. On the walls, there are more writings in the same language as on the door, in huge symbols multiple feet high that glow a faint blue. They are passages from the People's holy Book; rules, as well as curses, that restrict Holly and her magic.

Beneath the oak tree there is a pedestal, on it sits a copy of The Book, which looks very much like the door to her mind, and what almost looks like a toy gun, but is much, much deadlier. And a gold brick, which seems wildly out of place.

All throughout the room swirls a blue mist, and blue sparks occasionally crackle in the air.

Samus' door was not elaborate by any means. Not quite plain, but lacked unnecessary adornments. There was writing across the door, an ancient-looking language, quiet strange, inscribed across the it.

On the other side, was an open landscape. A desert-like place, red rock cliffs rose high above. It was a rather harsh environment, dry air filled the lungs of those who entered. And yet... this rough place was surprisingly peaceful. Reds and oranges filled the sky as the sun set.

A bit far off, a young woman (http://i34.tinypic.com/33vyae8.png) sat with a small creature on the edge of a cliff, just watching.

A blue-tinted gray door marks the entry to Billy's mindspace, but you'll have to think for a moment to set the cogs in motion that will open the lock. Luckily, there's a convenient string hanging to your left.

Within, if you choose to enter, the stylings are quite monochromatic. Three guesses which color it is, and the last two don't count.

Yes, everything inside this massive library is illuminated by an electric blue current. The light touches aisles upon aisles of books, a set of filing cabinets against the far wall, and scattered display cases of various inventions in Earth's history. You'll have to look high to find Billy, as he's currently standing atop a ladder in one of the aisles and retrieving an important tome.

The door (http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/photos/ny_metal_door_soho_102.jpg) to Wyn's headspace appears to be made of fragments of a coppery metal welded together in no discernable pattern or order, and the inside is no less chaotic. Books, papers, mugs of long-cold coffee, and household appliances in various states of disrepair cover every available flat surface and litter the stone floor. The walls are covered with snippets of scrawling writing in languages that are almost incomprehensible, although some of them are smudged beyond legibility.

Wyn is seated cross-legged in an overstuffed armchair in the center of the room, balancing what looks like a slightly smaller, much more battered omnicom in her lap. Her headphones (http://images.actionvillage.com/inc/images/large/195-390-0114.jpg?qlt=100&cell=244,300&cvt=jpg) are blaring music, so there's no guarantee that she'll notice anyone's approach.

Edited 2009-11-07 01:17 (UTC)

There is one door, ancient, heavy, forged from steel. It bore a strange symbol resembling a two-headed eagle (http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs25/i/2008/268/d/f/Imperial_Aquila_II_by_WackyCamper.jpg).

On the other side of the door, one will find themselves in an dark, cold stone room with an almost Gothic style architecture, lit only by wrought-iron braziers affixed to the walls. The room smells of incense, coming from the censers placed around the room. On the far wall, the twin-headed eagle symbol appears again, this time forged from gold.

Before the symbol kneels a mountain of a man, clad in a tattered gray robe and wearing a blindfold. He was muttering quietly in some form of pseudo-Latin as he drew strange glyphs and symbols on the floor before the eagle symbol with yellow chalk.

Even though he is in the most lit part of the room, it is difficult to look directly at him, almost as if every time you attempt to look at some distinct detail about him, your eye is driven to look elsewhere.

The effect, over all, is quite unsettling.

This door was a circular portal made of a sand-scoured copper with thin aquamarine triangles ringing its frame. It was old and the metal was warm to the touch, but not too warm--like a nice cup of something hot on a cold day. The door itself opened in a spiral, and the soft whoosh of air was heavily scented with the bitter cinnamon scent of spice melange and an odd ozone tang that was faintly metallic at the back of one's throat.

There was something clean about it. Clean and calm and quiet, but beneath that, there was fire.

This was an odd place. Everywhere there was sand and rock. Stone trees were adorned with rustling, glowing aquamarine crystal leaves that shone brilliantly in the sunlight. Their light pooled in bright refracted blues that glittered across sand and the polished twisting rocks. Shapes, endless shapes, drifted within the forest of rock and crystal. Here and there one might catch a glimpse of a face, a smile across the lips of an old woman, a younger one, fleeting laughter, even deep discussion.

A glowing line threaded its way from trung to trunk, glittering and humming as it wound through the forest. At the center, the very dead center, was a most curious sight. A massive tree of light and rock had erupted like some sort of strange fountain, its roots threaded and twisted within the sand and rock. It was thick, massive, even, and its trunk was a braided mix of both light and worn rock. Coiled around the base of this tree was a massive Shai-Hulud. Sandtrout swam in a sand pool, swirling the surface of reddish sand as they moved.

It was here that Arha Masaari sat, her face upturned, bathing in the light of the tree, with a sandtrout and a swirl of sand suspended a few inches in the air, hovering over her palm.

Edited 2009-11-07 05:49 (UTC)

The door is wrought iron, covered in contrasting engravings of feathered wings and draconic claws.Rust covered it, but still it was incredibly strong, creaking as it gave way to a mindscape of which it was but a taste.

Cloud cover hid the sun from view for the most part, but in parts one could see the golden rays of its light piercing through. These were spotty at best, however, and served more to tint the clouds with a disturbing red tinge. Fires and debris covered most of the landscape, and the ground was barren, dust and rock.

In the center of it all lay a castle. Far from being rubble and dust, however, the castle is tall and proud. The standards atop the ramparts are torn, however, faded and old. The thick wooden gate into the castle was bound in black iron, and hanging open slightly from rust covered chains.

Somewhere in the center of all this, surrounded by life and death, light and dark each vying for control, was a monster who had once been a man.