AN:

Hi there everyone who's using their precious time to read this! This is my first attempt a writing Psychonauts fan-fiction, so hopefully it isn't a pice of crap. Just to warn people, I have incredibly bad spelling, so if you see any lingering spelling errors, please let me know about them.

Reviews and Constrictive Criticism are appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Psychonauts. What where you thinking?

Before I forget: Brackets like this [ ] means that there's psych emphasis on the text. Like if someone is using suggestion or their thoughts and speech when disembodied.

_)(_

Ch1: Of Loboto and Crispin

Raz leaned back in his seat, eyes half closed, listening to the soft mummer of Oleander, Sasha and Milla discussing something and the hum of the jet. Lili was already asleep in the seat across from him, her head resting on the shoulder of her father, Truman Zanotto. Raz, too, was exhausted from the rescue attempt, but he didn't want to sleep. Not with the one person who he had dreamed about talking to for years, the Grand Head of the Psychonauts, sitting a mere four feat away from him.

He took a cautious glance up at Mr. Zanotto's face. The man was fast asleep with his head resting on his shoulder, unshaved, and smeared with dirt. His suit was rumpled and torn from being forcibly thrown over a barbed wire fence, and his hair, which must have at one point been neatly groomed, was a tangled mess. A single nettle leaf was still caught in a snarl just above his right ear.

Realizing that formality and appearance weren't even close to important at the moment, Raz garbed his back pack and began to dig through it.

There was a granola bar in there somewhere and, by all things psychic and sane, he was going to find it and eat it before he passed out from exhaustion.

As he searched for the illusive snack, his hand brushed against something unfamiliar. What he pulled out surprised him.

It was a necklace of some sort, made from a single deep arrowhead held to a leather cord by a some wire. The arrowhead was charged with energy, making it glow slightly. Something, some strange impulse, told Raz to put it on as he looked at it. He hesitated.

For one thing, he couldn't remember picking it up from anywhere, and he certainly would remember picking up something like that.

Raz glanced around. No one was paying any attention to him at all, because the where asleep or hotly debating something that Raz didn't feel like eaves dropping in on. Without anyone noticing, he slipped the necklace on and tucked it under his uniform.

A few minutes later Raz, having finally located and devoured his granola bar, fell fast asleep.

He had the strangest dreams...

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The surface of Lake was still; as perfectly smooth as glass and black as the night sky above. A lone crow perched on a small tree that jutted out of a crevasse on the lake's rocky shore, scanning the water below. The crow was a wretched old thing, blind in one eye and missing several of its feathers. It knew something was watching it. It just knew it. It could feel the feathers on the back of its neck standing on end.

Of course, with the lake in the mirror-like state that it was in, the crow could only see it's own reflection staring back from amongst the reeds.

A second crow landed next to the first; a far younger, healthier looking one. They regarded each other for a few moments. Then the first crow let out a caw of indifference, and together the two crows turned to watch a burning tower off in the distance. A second later another crow joined and two became three.

And then another.

And another.

And another.

Before long the combined weight of fifty odd crows, all intently watching the now rapid disintegration of Thorny Towers Asylum, had bent the tree enough that a good, strong branch hung within two feet of the water.

The old crow was now, understandably, very, very nervous: it happened to be sitting on that branch. It shifted from foot to foot, still feeling a watching pair of eyes somewhere below. The crow glanced down once more, just to be certain that there really was nothing in the water.

The crow's eyes grew to the size of quarters. A soft breeze had disturbed the surface of the water, allowing a brief glimpse at what lay just beneath. It (the crow) let out a screech of terror, then rocketed off of the tree and into the night faster than anyone could have thought physically possible for something so decrepit.

The resulting chittering laughter from the other crows was abruptly cut short when a hand shot out of the lake and seized the branch, exactly where the old crow had been a moment before, in a vice-like grip. The crows immediately took off, yanking the creature out off the water as the tree sprang back into place.

A certain blue-skinned dentist chuckled dryly as he watched the panicking flock of crows.

"Fly away, little birds." He muttered around the hollow reed clenched firmly between his teeth. "You won't be picking the flesh off of these bones tonight."

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Fifteen minutes later Caligosto Loboto lay, shivering, across the top of a particularly large and flat rock. Cold, hungry, exhausted, and soaked to the bone, he began to take note of his various injuries.

His biggest problem, as far as he could tell at the moment, was the loss of his robotic arm. It had been ripped off just below the shoulder, leaving only a few pieces of twisted metal and wires attached.

"Must have happened during that nasty little fall. Lets see... Did I try grabbing something? Or did it get caught?" he mused. "I can't seem to remember."

Loboto groaned and forced his aching body into a sitting position. The shredded, soaking wet remains of his lab coat hung limp around his body and did nothing to protect him from the cold The hideous green and yellow floral-patterned shower cap of his was missing, letting the mop of jet-black hair on his head hanging limply about his face. The lens of his left "eye" was cracked, like most of his ribs on the same side of his body. The ribs didn't bother him, he'd broken multiple ribs on several different previous occasions, but he was having a hard time seeing through the broken lens.

And, most unusually, his face was set with a grim expression.

After a short rest, Loboto painfully hauled himself to his feet. The pain didn't bother him much, it never had and, most likely, never would. As far as he was concerned, it was his connection to reality; a reminder that he was awake and alive and not slowly drowning in a deep coma on the lake floor.

Reaching over, he grasped the remains of his arm, twisting and turning until the mangled peace of metal came free from the mechanisms in the socket.

It was sad, really. He could clearly remembered how he had made it from what little he could find around the asylum. He'd lost the first one, which had been a bit more natural looking, just a few days after he had first been brought to the asylum. Come to think of it, why had they let him keep that first one so long? They only confiscated it after he'd used it to attack an orderly.

That day Loboto had been out in the court yard, enjoying the sun and the birds, when he'd over heard a conversation between two of the orderlies. One of them was complaining about a tooth ache, of all things.

Needless to say, Loboto was on the orderly before anyone could react. The razor sharp claws sliced clean through his strait jacket and the orderly's gums. By the time the help had arrived, Loboto had located and extracted the problem tooth, and had returned to bird watching. He spent the rest of the day in solitary confinement, and the next morning the asylum staff demanded that the arm be removed. Said it was a "safety risk", of course. The look in their eyes when he'd simply detached it! They must have thought they would need to have it surgically removed.

The second one hadn't been as good. Sure, it looked more menacing, but he'd been forced to make it shorter than he'd liked because of limited materials. But an arm was better than no arm at all, especially after last summer's modifications. Sneezing powder made brain extraction so much easier.

He let out a sigh, before pocketing the small scrap of metal. He needed a souvenir, a little reminder of what happened here. He stood there for a time, swaying slightly on unsteady legs, watching his home for the past fifty years burn, before finally turning and limping off into the woods. The cave Loboto planned to meet with Crispin at was three or four miles away from the asylum as the crow flies, and now he had to evade any search parties that were out. They wouldn't be looking for him, he was "dead" as far as they knew, but Crispin was still unaccounted for and considered to be dangerous.

Then the world blurred....

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.... And a new vision began.

Crispin stumbled over the rigid, darting from tree to tree, telekinetic bear in hot pursuit. The bears always had a harder time killing you if they didn't have a clear line of sight, and his erratic path was the only thing keeping him from being ripped to pieces. He could just barely make out the entrance to the cave through his nearly blind eyes. It was a dark blur on the cliff wall only fifty feat away.

But the bear behind him was gaining fast, and he didn't think he was going to make it....

He could see someone emerging from the entrance of the cave, someone tall and skinny and wearing white- yes, that was Loboto.

Crispin could sense his employer's mood: brooding, not so much angry as contemplative. It was an acquired skill, necessary for survival around a man who would cheerfully perform horribly painful experiments on you and or rip out your teeth and brain.

Suddenly Crispin felt the grasp of a great telekinetic claw on his head and realized that his feat where pedaling uselessly in the air. He was turned around to face the bear, which slowed down to a leisurely pace.

It was savoring his terror as it slowly grew closer and closer and closer...

"HEEEELP MEEEEEE!" The ugly little man screamed.

The bear was still coming....

Crispin panicked. If Loboto was in a bad mood, then he might just stand by and watch while his fateful elevator operator of many years was torn to shreds, even if it wasn't really his style.

No, Loboto preferred to strap his victims down nice and tight, to "forget" to administer anesthetic, to talk and laugh and joke with them while they screamed and sobbed and pleaded. Crispin had, before his vision had deteriorated, stood beside Loboto during these events, cackling with glee and passing wicked tools to his employer.

Then the bear stopped, beady little eyes growing to the size of saucers. It stared over Crispin's shoulder, terrified, before It turned and fled. The telekinetic claw which clutched Crispin's oversize head dissolved in an instant, and he hit the ground with a thud. He lay there, stunned, staring up at the sky.

It was a beautiful shade of pink: sunrise.

Then a shadow fell across him and he saw Loboto's blurry form loomed over him. Crispin squinted up at the man's face. Loboto wasn't smiling. Not good.

"What took you so long?" Crispin started to answer, but Loboto cut him off. "Not the bear, Crispin, it just made you run faster. Did you run into any pesky psychics on the way here? Like, say, a little boy with goggles on his head?"

"N-n-no s-sir." Crispin stammered. This was bad. Very, very, very bad. If Loboto thought that he could betray their location...

"Stand up! You know I don't like you groveling at my feat."

Crispin carefully picked himself off the ground and stood, trembling, before Loboto. Loboto knelt down so that Crispin's budging eyes met Loboto's robotic ones. The silence was deafening as they watched each other, as even the birds in the trees had stopped chirping.

Then Crispin noticed his employer's missing arm.

"Sir! Your claw is missing! And your eye is cracked too! Are you hurt?"

For the fist time all night, Loboto smiled. It started small, just a slight upward twitch of the corners of his mouth. But it kept growing. Black lips stretched and curled before parting, revealing well-kept even white teeth.

The familiar ear to ear grin calmed Crispin. He relaxed and managed to force his fat lips into a smile.

Suddenly, Loboto's hand shot forward, grabbed Crispin by his greasy blue hair, and yanked his head back.

"How did you get those bruises on your neck, Crispin?" Loboto inquired. He leaned forward to examine them. "They're hand shaped. Has someone been trying to kill you again?"

"Yes!" Crispin gasped. He tried to twist out of Loboto's grasp, to no avail.

"Stop struggling. You're hurting yourself. Now, were they wearing... Goggles?"

"No! No! It was Fred! Fred Bonaparte- the former head orderly! He tried to strangle me after I let you in to the elevator, and I had to play dead to escape!"

Loboto's head snapped up so he could look directly into Crispin's eyes. Loboto's brow creased.

"Crispin, I didn't use the elevator last night."

The color drained from Crispin's face.

"You... Didn't?"

"I spent the entire night up in my lab. When you let me into the elevator, did I seem to be shorter than usual?"

"Well, yes, but-" Crispin stopped when he put the pieces together. That kid who had bugged him last night, trying to ride the elevator. He'd been wearing something on his head: two shiny orange disks, held together with some kind of strap.

In other words, Goggles.

'Shit... Now I'm going to die.' Crispin thought

"I'm sorry sir. I should have known that the child wasn't you and should have alerted you to his presence immediately. Please don't kill me."

"That's all right." Loboto released Crispin, who fell over. "This mess we're in is my fault. I caught him sneaking around my lab a few times, trying to take the brains out of their jars or otherwise being a nuisance. I should have cut open his little head the first time, taken out that lovely brain, and put it somewhere nice and safe. Like the Tank."

"So, all forgiven, sir?" Crispin said as he picked himself up off the ground.

"No. You need to have your eyes checked out. Now, if you would just step over here.... Ha Ha! Relax, Crispin, you look like you just saw a painful death in your future! Can't take a joke this morning, now can you? I can't do anything like that with only one arm. But I do have an old friend in a nearby town who might be able to help us with our problems. He's a brilliant man, I think you'll get along at least reasonably well."

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A sudden jolt woke Raz. He stat there, blinking, for a few moments, before he released that he was staring into Lili's eyes.

"Wake up, sleepy head." She said, her face just barley not touching his. "The jet has landed."

Raz hastily unfastened his seat belt and jumped out off of the seat.

"Did you're dad...?" He said, glancing over at Mr. Zanotto, who was talking to Sasha.

"See you drooling in you sleep? Yes." She smiled playfully, holding out a handkerchief.

He grabbed the handkerchief, and, turning very red as he did so, wiped the drool off of his face.

As they walked down the stairs off of the jet, Raz felt something brush against the edge of his mind.

"Hey, Lili, did you just try to probe my mind?"

"No. You probably just imagined it." She looked at him for a moment. "Is something bothering you?"

"Well, yes. I had the weirdest dream..."