Chapter Text
“You sure about this, Poots?”
The psychic members of the Aquato family stood in a circle around the large hole melted in the ice. Their patchy circus garb was covered by thick fur coats to protect them from the harsh winds of Grulovia blowing against them.
The hard work had already been done. The lake had been melted in multiple places with complete precision, pulled off by both a reverse-engineered Hyperhyglaciator and a team of the most skilled pyrokinetics the organisation had to offer. The brainless body of the Psychic Seven member was confirmed to be directly under their feet by its owner. Now all they needed to do was push it to the surface.
Augustus answered before his son had the chance.
“Your brother knows what he’s doing, Frazie. And we don’t want to keep our audience waiting.”
He gestured to the powerful Psychonauts rescue team, who were indeed watching them expectantly along with Donatella, Dion and Mirtala.
“It’s not like we’re making fancy water serpents,” Razputin reasoned. “Treat it like weight-lifting.”
“Heh. Hope you’ve got good backs,” the telepathic voice of Helmut joked from his brain ball. Bob watched on silently in anticipation, hugging said ball against his chest.
“Come ooon! I wanna try it out!” Queepie whined impatiently. “Or are you getting stage fright?!”
The accusation instantly made Frazie relent. With a huff, she joined her father and siblings in focussing on the water beneath them.
It wasn’t a straightforward manoeuvre, especially for newbies like them. The debris from the fallen ruins of the city also frozen in the lake were blocking the path to the surface. Nevertheless, making water push other objects was the bare minimum expected from hydrokinetics.
After moving a chunk of wall here and a broken roof there, shifting them easily as if they were tiles on a sliding puzzle, the gravity holding the body down had been loosened. The four then adjusted their stances to prepare for the big finish.
“Ready? On three,” Raz instructed. “One, two...three!”
They raised their arms, perfectly synchronised, and a spout of water erupted from the frozen lake, lobbing a human-sized iceberg out from the bottom and onto solid ground.
A few claps and cheers could be heard from various members of the rescue team, the loudest of which came from their other family members. It was hardly the thunderous round of applause they were used to receiving in the big top, but that didn’t stop the acrobats from taking a bow.
Raz shook his head at them and smiled. His family had to make a spectacle out of everything they did. Much like the rest of the team, his attention had shifted to the man suspended inside the block of ice, but while everyone else was preparing to telekinetically load it onto the jet to return it to headquarters, he was more focussed on Bob who was slowly walking up to it.
With Helmut’s brain tucked under his arm, Bob put a gloved hand on the iceberg, gazing at his husband’s face for the first time in twenty years. The young psychic could just about make out a smile underneath that thick beard.
What was supposed to be a simple family trip to Grulovia had lasted longer than Razputin expected. It was arranged through the belated courtesy of Ford Cruller himself, saying it was the least he could offer to help ease Augustus’s troubled spirit. While much of his homeland was permanently flooded and couldn’t be appreciated as it once was, structures built on higher ground had managed to remain intact. One such building was his old orphanage. His once fuzzy memories that the Astralathe altered began to regain clarity after visiting it again.
As an added bonus, the extra unfrozen water also made it a great training ground to steadily learn their newly-discovered abilities, no longer held back by a curse.
But just before the Aquatos were planning to leave, who should arrive but the Psychonauts. The mission Bob Zanotto and Helmut Fullbear had been planning to recover the latter’s body had at long last begun. It had been put off for an agonising two months to let any immediate media buzz from the Maligula incident go away. Of course, the organisation were going to publish the story eventually on their own terms (a story like that was too big to bury completely), but this was to hold up any potential political backlash until they had got it sorted on their end.
The hold-up also gave them ample time to prepare for the trickier half of the process: the actual resuscitating and recranialising of the founding agent.
Raz couldn’t help but beg his parents to stay for longer to join in with the rescue operation (and not just because he’d missed out on days-worth of missions). His father happily agreed, saying that it would be an honour. His mother required a little more persuading, but ultimately gave in when his other siblings stepped in, and he couldn’t have been more proud of them. After all, there was something poetic about letting the Aquatos amend a disaster one of their own caused decades ago.
Razputin rode the high of the historically important deed all the way back to the Motherlobe. The amount of gossip the mission had created made him practically invisible when he set foot in the bustling atrium. It knocked the wind out of his sails a little. He’d hoped to run into just one other agent who would want to talk to him about how he’d played a part in saving the day, and how Bob Zanotto himself had given him an exclusive "Thanks for everything, kid." But he understood that the potential of seeing a man long thought dead alive and well again was more interesting to the masses. How could anyone not be excited about that?
He perked up when he spotted Junior Agent Gette coming up from the entrance, thinking he might actually get his wish. Adam was all about research and documenting the exploits of the Psychonauts, and he was taking a short break from his field missions to share his knowledge with the public.
The road bridge was back down and open for tours. Although the mole incident was still fresh in everyone’s minds, it was one of the original money-makers the Psychonauts had, and thus desperately needed to get back in action.
That didn’t mean it was popular, however. Those older than school-age didn’t seem to have much interest in seeing the heart of such a great agency, which was ridiculous in Razputin’s eyes. If grown-ups could only understand the true educational benefit of comic books, then all the Psychonauts’ money problems would surely be solved.
"Hey, Adam!" Raz called as he ran towards his fellow agent.
"Razputin!" Adam replied warmly. "Just the man I wanted to see! Some members of the latest tour group have been asking after you."
"Me?" Raz asked, screeching to a halt.
"Yeah, and I haven't even shown them my history board yet."
Raz became sceptical. When he last had surprise visitors at the Motherlobe, it had caused him nothing but embarrassment. He started running through people he knew in his head that could fit three criteria: they would have to be adults, know he was a Psychonaut but also not be employees. This didn't take long, however, as only a few moments passed before Adam brought the tour members up so he could see for himself.
"There he is!"
Along with three total strangers were four people he didn't think he could ever forget, nor that he'd actually see again so soon. But there they were: Fred, Boyd, Edgar and Gloria from Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed, sticking out from the already colourful crowd.
They were a surprise alright. Raz was both baffled to see them long after the collapsing of their former prison, and ecstatic that his earliest work as a Psychonaut had not been in vain by seeing that they were unharmed.
“Wow! Hi, guys!” He couldn't think of anything else to say. More complex words just wouldn't come to him at that moment.
"I'll leave you lot alone for a bit," Adam smiled and escorted the other visitors away.
Gloria made the first move, waltzing over to Razputin and gave him a gentle hug.
“Oh, I knew it! I knew that you weren’t a dream.”
She was wearing a long, floral-patterned dress, a small amount of make-up and had run a comb through her unruly red hair. Despite that, it appeared that there was no way she could completely get rid of the volume in it that built up during her time at the asylum.
“Of course he wasn’t!” Edgar laughed. He was still wearing the same sleeveless jacket, belt and boots, but his shirt and trousers were both new. The artist came up to him and slapped him on the back; a gesture that was meant to be playful, but with the unintentional amount of strength he put into it, Raz felt like he’d dislocated something.
“Even at my most creative, I do not think I could dream up something so...mind-blowing.”
“H-how did you find this place?" Razputin found the words at last. "Did someone send for you?”
This question pulled Boyd out of a brief trance of staring cautiously at something to his left. He was wearing a white button-up shirt, a black tie and black trousers. He had shaved in recent days but his stubble was starting to grow back quickly.
“Well we remembered your name, and you told me who you were working for, so we found some supplemental material to narrow down your location!” Boyd confidently stated, folding his arms.
“‘We looked in a magazine’ is what he means,” Edgar chimed in.
Raz relaxed at the correction. The way the former guard had phrased it made it sound like there was another huge hole in their security. It didn’t take a genius to pick up a copy of True Psychic Tales and cut out the ever-present Motherlobe tour sign-up details on the back page. Razputin would never dream of defacing an issue himself. It would completely ruin the collector’s value!
“By the way, the army guy’s not around, is he?” Boyd half-whispered as he nervously tugged on his tie.
“Nope. Not today.”
Although the summer months were over and the camp was closed for the rest of the year, Coach Oleander was expected to stay longer at Whispering Rock to finish some last-minute admin. He’d be back at headquarters soon enough, though.
Boyd let out a huge sigh of relief. Raz could hardly blame him. Even if he was aware of the coach now being reformed, having your psyche openly tampered with wasn’t something you could just shrug off.
“Man, this place is huge,” Fred commented, gazing up at the levitation platforms above them. “It’s nice not having to duck everywhere.”
Raz giggled.
“How’s Napoleon?” he asked the ex-orderly, noting the absence of his bicorn hat that would have clashed terribly with the casual street clothes he was wearing.
“Been awful quiet since we left,” Fred replied with a smirk.
The pleasant reunion was suddenly cut short by someone loudly clearing their throat. They all turned to face Hollis Forsythe, glancing at them with a stern expression and standing with her hands on her hips.
“Excuse me, but who are you?”
“We’re this young man’s success stories,” said Gloria. Razputin took a step away from the four and held out his hands to present them to the second head.
“Agent Forsythe; these are the old inmates of Thorney Towers. Meet Fred Bonaparte, Boyd Cooper, Edgar Teglee and Gloria Von Gouton.”
Hollis’s eyebrows twitched up in interest as they nodded or waved when each of their names were called. Only two of the former denizens had been accounted for by the Psychonauts so far. One had somehow managed to escape their custody and the other had been hired by Agent Nein as an assistant in his lab at camp. To have four more fall into their lap when they hadn’t established their location yet was convenient to say the least. They might have been easier to track down sooner had they not escaped while all the agents on site were either de-brained or unconscious.
Holding back the urge to question them further, Hollis kept her professional tone and continued.
“Nice to meet you,” she said half-heartedly, “but I’ll have to ask you to rejoin the guided tour. Visitors who haven’t been formally invited are restricted to a set path. Besides,” Hollis laid a hand on Razputin’s shoulder and pulled him towards her, “Junior Agent Aquato needs to fill in his latest mission log.”
“W-what?! But I wasn’t assigned to the rescue mission!” Raz protested, “I was just in the right place at the right time!” He would have accepted an official assignment to it in a heartbeat if he hadn’t been away when the dispatching finally happened.
“But you did provide enough assistance to give a written report, and I’d like it on my desk within the next hour.” She gave his shoulder a reassuring pat and strolled off.
The young psychic’s face fell. Ugh...paperwork. He was given no mercy on it despite his age, and that deadline was Hollis being lenient. But as his superiors had told him, if he wanted to be treated like the agent he’d always dreamed of becoming, he’d have to suck up the bad parts of the job as well as the best.
“Yeesh,” Fred said when Hollis was out of earshot, rubbing the back of his neck, “Sorry we caught you at a bad time.”
“It’s fine. Really,” Raz answered. He tried to replace his disappointment with a suggestion: “How about we meet at the Lumberstack Diner at lunch?” It was lower key than the Noodle Bowl, so they wouldn’t have to worry about drawing unwanted attention if their conversations got too loud.
“That sounds good,” said Edgar, nodding.
“Yeah, I could eat,” Fred agreed, “What about you, Boyd?”
Boyd harshly blinked and rubbed his head, apparently coming out of another daydream.
"Uh...do they have bacon there? I really could go for some for...some reason."
"Yeah," Raz said, dismissing his odd reaction as a possible 'Boyd thing'. "It's kinda known for it. Plus its pancakes." That is, unless Sam had changed the menu since he last went in.
"Great," Boyd answered simply with a grin.
“We’ll see you there, then!” Gloria said happily. With that, the four walked away from the boy and waved him a temporary goodbye.
"I'll be there at about 12:30!" Razputin shouted, watching as they all wandered over to the history exhibit that Adam was proudly showing off to the other three people on the tour. Raz then raced off to the agents’ offices on a levitation ball. The sooner he got his paperwork done, the sooner he could catch up with them.