a truth so strange it can only be lied into existence

[suckersluck]

CHARACTERS: Doug Rattmann (suckersluck) and OPEN!
LOCATION: A random side hallway near Engineering.
WARNINGS: Mild craziness?
SUMMARY: Doug's spent a week trying to cope with his arrival, and he's well overdue for a slightly manic art therapy session.
NOTES: Doug won't hang around very long after finishing the painting, but you're free to have been watching him, catching him fleeing the scene, or miss him completely and just admire his ramblings. All up to you!



The paintbrushes were the easiest to find: stored away in his locker and wrapped in cloth, they were worn and reliable and familiar. The paint was more difficult, but an unlocked storeroom finally provided enough to work with, and a quiet corridor near Engineering felt out of the way enough for a mural.

Finding the paint couldn't have come at a better time; Doug's mind hurt. He'd spent a week with his thoughts tying themselves in knots, trying to work through what was real on this impossible ship, and what was just his mind lying to him. It was an overload -- there were people here, not sleeping test subjects or dead scientists or homicidal AIs. There was food, showers, beds, hints of normalcy that left him nervous and paranoid. His fingers itched to paint.

With one hand clenched around the brush, he sorted through the mess of his thoughts, finding a thread and following it to an idea, and expression. The first stroke came slowly, carefully, thoughtfully -- but with the second, third, fourth, his paced picked up, and he lost himself in the art.





Doug came back to himself with a clearer mind and a paint-speckled lab coat. He felt settled, tired but calm, and he took one long look at his work before quietly gathering his supplies and turning to leave.

Comments

[megamind]

Engineering was his space, so Megamind tended to stay alert to things there. Finding some random man fishing hall art got -- an eyebrow arch, at best, but he stood back for a while and watched.

Once it seemed like the Rattman was done, Megamind coughed into his fist, and then said, "Very-- ah, interesting. The turrets, especially."

[suckersluck]

He'd been so absorbed in his work that Doug hadn't even noticed he had been watched until Megamind spoke. He flinched hard, took a startled step backwards, and immediately felt the first creeping sense of worry. He'd always been careful to keep his paintings hidden, out of the way; being exposed made him nervous. These weren't just pretty pictures -- they were a portrait of his mind. A fractured and damaged portrait, but it was all he had.

Doug glanced at the painted turret, then back to Megamind, weighing his options. He wanted to bolt, duck into the safe, dark network of air ducts and crawlspaces. But this was a spaceship; he couldn't avoid the other -- blue man? alien? -- forever.

His brown furrowed, and his response was quiet, hesitant. "...thank you?"

[megamind]

"How long have you been out?" he asks, green eyes looking over the images. Megamind was smart-- and being stuck in a prison for gifted criminals meant that madness was not uncommon. "Either of your meds, or your mind. Your choice."

There's no judgment, there-- just a sort of matter of factness that might grate on even a thicker skin. Still, he can recognize the crazy when he sees it (little did he realize that Hal was a junior sociopath in the making; he might've seen that if he hadn't been deeply invested in the idea of everything 'working as planned' while trying to date Roxanne at the same time) and that?

That's crazy all over the wall. Still. Text subjects; that rings a bell. That ridiculous paperwork that Cave gave him. Yes.

"Did you work for Cave Johnson?"

[suckersluck]

"Only his ghost," Doug replied. It was true enough -- with all of his pre-recorded messages, it sometimes felt as though Aperture had been haunted by the man. His shadow had lingered in every hallway and office, and every project had been done in his honor.

And now he was here, alive and as charismatic -- and insane -- as Doug remembered from the recordings. He hugged the paint cans a little tighter to his chest, shoulders slumping.

"Years." Both his pills and his mind. But that was all right -- he was used to it, now. His madness had kept him alive.

[megamind]

Megamind considered the man. "Prison, asylum?" he asks. "I have-- experience. With one of them."

He doesn't specify. It's best not to. But genius and madness goes hand in hand -- God knows he had a line of shrinks trying to get into his oversized head to figure out how he worked, how he was different from a human person.

Megamind looked at the art, then at Rattman, and then said, "I'm Megamind. There are doctors here. Have you talked to them yet?"

[statsraaden]

Stats was wandering around, hoping to see one of the scientists, Geek Clubbers, or someone like that. Instead, he saw Doug frantically paint... something. He went closer to see exactly what.

"Hello. What were you painting?"

[suckersluck]

Rattmann took a nervous step back, but recognition kept him from bolting. He looked at the mural and gave an uncomfortable shrug. "A madman's dream," he replied. "It... helps. Sometimes."

[statsraaden]

"Are all of these from where you're from?"

[suckersluck]

Doug nodded, then tapped the edge of the blue pods on the wall. "Like looking into a mirror." The gravcouches, cryobeds-- they were the same, really. It made him nervous.

[handelaar]

Bored and annoyed with what little information he could find about this ship, the Netherlands had taken to... wandering. Initially to the places already known, clearly mapped out for them, and as he went he couldn't help but notice that there were a lot of unmapped areas.

And he'd done a lot of mapping over the years.

Despite that, figuring out anything other than a general layout of the Tranquility was proving to be way damn harder than it should be - it freaked him out, a bit, and the paintings he stumbled upon in some narrow corridor didn't help that feeling at all. Quickly, he glanced up and down the halls, chewing on his lip, but no one seemed to be around. Tapped around on his comms device, noted the location, and gave the wall one last unnerved glance before taking off again.



He came back later that evening armed with a shitty brush and two colors of his own, but ran out of paint long before he could cover up the entire thing.



Well. It was a little better.

[sweetmotherofgod]

Heather had passed the strange graffiti earlier, and hurried away from it; it wasn't the art that scared her so much as the fact that she didn't know what any of it meant but it kind of made her want to cry. And that sort of feeling was weird and gross and one she'd definitely had enough of, thanks.

She hadn't quite figured out what her excuse was for having to pass through Engineering again, but there was definitely a reason. Yup. No way she'd pass that creepy painting again unless she had to. So she didn't quite understand why she got so angry at the sight of some guy painting over it - and doing a crappy job of it, at that.

"Hey! Jerk!" She stormed over, fuming, totally unconcerned with the fact that the culprit was a foot or so taller than her. "What the hell gives you the right?"

[handelaar]

Even though she made plenty of noise storming his way, he was more absorbed in trying to grapple with the problem of one brush, two paints, no foresight water - he didn't hear anything until some angry little stormcloud of a chick was calling him a jerk.

He blinked down at her with a small scowl.

He blinked back at what he was doing. Goddamn, he needed better supplies.

With a small huff he turned back to her, with only one question in mind. "Is it yours?" Because if it wasn't, he couldn't give less of a shit about what she thought of him painting over it.

[sweetmotherofgod]

She thought about lying and claiming it, or trying to spin some line about how art belongs to everyone, but dropped the notion pretty quickly. This guy looked like he'd have zero respect for either tactic. Hell, Heather would've had no respect for them, and she was the one all unaccountably defensive of the painting. So she settled instead for an acidy glare, hands on hips and eyebrow cocked.

"It's not yours."

[cutsofftheirlimbs]

Isaac had found his way down to Engineering fairly soon after having arrived, but this cooridor had not been one of the ones he had explored recently. The thought of unexplored areas in Engineering unnerved him, for obvious reasons.

It unnerved him more when he saw graffiti splayed out among the cooridor. Those had assured him he was not aboard the Ishimura were not making him all the more assured that this wasn't exactly like the Ishimura.

Except now he could see who was making the graffiti.

"Hello...?" He stoood there cautiously. He knew how on edge people writing semi-comprehensible (well, to the normal person) graffiti could be.

At least it wasn't in blood.

[suckersluck]

(It wasn't in blood this time.)

Doug was edgy, but the manic energy of painting had worn off quickly. He flinched and turned, tense but aside from clenching his paint brush a little tighter, he didn't move.

Oh. Right. A response. "Hello."

[cutsofftheirlimbs]

"Hey there." To any other person, this guy might seem completely crazy, but Isaac knows the look in his eye all too well. He was there once. It's not pretty. His body is tense - he didn't need another Stross - but it looked like he was peaceful.

"...What's that drawing supposed to mean, exactly?" He could decipher bits and pieces, but some of it was foreign to him. "I'm uh- not exactly well-versed in the ship yet."

[suckersluck]

It was part warning, part madness. Doug's mind was on perpetual alert, making associations and connections, seeing things that weren't there. The gravcouches, the lack of a crew, the utter vastness of the ship... it reminded him of the facility. Then his own paranoia had done the rest, and things had built up in his mind too much, too quickly.

Doug looked up at the painting and gave a small shrug. "Was thinking too fast," he said. Painting cleared his mind.

[testgasm]

His first thought, when he passed the newly-decorated hall on his way to meet Cave, arms full of various papers and forms to process, was that someone had gone and defaced it. Another moment and Wheatley realized not only that he was wrong, but that he knew this artwork--maybe not murals like this, but these back-room scrawlings were certainly familiar. Just out of the reach of his management rail, a little too hidden away to observe properly, sometimes covered in overgrowth and always impossible to understand, but distinctive nonetheless.

So what were they doing here?

The artist, of course, was gone, but given the chance to find out just who had turned the walls of the Enrichment Center into his personal canvas. Wheatley had a feeling, of course, considering his recent exchange with one of the new arrivals. He just had to be sure.

Maybe Mysterious Painter hadn't gone far. He kept on down the hall, figuring he'd have to run into someone eventually.

[suckersluck]

His paints successfully stored away (he'd collect them a little later, when the ship was quieter), Doug ducked out of the spare room. He almost didn't see Wheatley, but the core-turned-human rounded the nearest corner just as Doug shut the door behind himself. Doug paused -- he looked as though he was searching for something, and his mind immediately supplied an answer.

He's looking for you, his mind whispered. (It sounded, in this case, almost like Her, in the days when She took pleasure in egging on his paranoia.)

Or, more likely, he was doing work in this section. But the nagging remained. "Hello."

[testgasm]

To say this man didn't make him nervous would have been a lie. Wheatley was not at all fond of the scientists who worked on the personality cores, and even if Doug was telling the truth about his minimal involvement, any reminder of Aperture's human employees was enough to put him on edge.

Still, there was a mystery to be solved, and this was just the person to help him do it--if his suspicions were correct, anyway.

So of course, he was going to say the one thing that certain paranoid schizophrenics probably did not want to hear, waving the other man down the corridor, back towards the mural.

"Oh! Brilliant. There you are. There's a, um. Painting. Down this hall. I don't know if you ever, ah...were around to see them, but they're just like the ones in the Enrichment Center and I was on my way to the science department and I saw them and sort of thought...well, if they've only just started turning up, and you've just turned up, I...I was just wondering if. They were yours."

[suckersluck]

Doug glanced down the hallway Wheatley indicated, biting the inside of his cheek. He hadn't thought that anyone would ever see his paintings, apart from-- well. The test subject. (And Her, but Doug wasn't very fussed if She saw -- She already knew he was crazy, after all.) But an Aperture device? He hadn't thought they'd care even if they could see them. It was... odd.

Some part of him wanted to pretend it was a coincidence, but what would be the point? Wheatley clearly suspected. He exhaled slowly, then nodded. Yes, they were his.

[articletwelve]

Wash has been watching for a while -- more out of curiosity than anything else, really. It was obvious the man was more absorbed in his work than his surroundings, and he hadn't had the inclination to interrupt him.

It's not until he gets up to leave that Wash moves at all from his spot against the wall, and even then it's only with a single footstep, helmet tipping down at him.

"You've been busy."

[suckersluck]

Doug, on the other hand, takes several steps back, gripping his little cans of paint tightly. He's wary, but it's an assessing kind of wariness, and he doesn't have a reason to run, yet.

"Yes." His voice is quiet and a little rough -- not much need to talk, in Aperture. The Cube was the only who would answer, anyway. Well, the only friendly one.

[articletwelve]

The faceless visor stays on him for a moment, looking him over -- the man doesn't look like he's in great shape, but then being on this ship isn't the best situation as it is. His work is of much more interest, though, and Wash steps forward to look more closely, eyes flickering over the words and pausing on one in particular.

"Testers, huh." His helmet tips back down at the man, an eyebrow silently rising behind it. "Who?"

[suckersluck]

"Everyone," Doug says, with a glance at the painted grav-couches -- the grav-couches that were so much like Aperture's cryo-beds. He pauses. "Not yet, maybe. But..."

He trails off. An empty, cavernous ship with pods full of people did not inspire any trust in him.