By all rights, he should have been happy. Shouldn't he? Sure, he'd been through a lot, but on the whole everything was looking up for Razputin Aquato. His family didn't hate him for being psychic, there was no Galochio curse, he had decided to forgive Ford and Nona, he was a real Psychonaut (Junior) Agent just like he'd dreamed of for so very long, he even had a wonderful girlfriend!
So why did he feel so bad?
He wasn't sleeping well, although that was partly his own fault – he'd grown to dread going to bed. It wasn't even like he had nightmares to be afraid of – usually, anyway. He just desperately did not want it to be the next day. To have to get up and Do Things.
Well, actually, he knew why he felt bad.
It was because Doing Things meant looking people in the eye and tricking them into believing he was okay, like he should have been, because what did he have to be upset about, now that he was living his dream? It meant putting on a smile and acting like he knew what he was doing and deserved to be there at the Motherlobe. It meant pretending that he wasn't a secretly-sad ten-year-old child trying to seem more grown-up than he was.
He was tempted to stop going to therapy. After all, it didn't seem to be working. What was wrong with him, that it wouldn't work? The therapist had to know what she was doing, so the problem had to be him. But he kept going, as hard as it was, as useless as it seemed. A good Psychonaut was aware of their mental health and took appropriate steps to maintain it. He just hoped Agent Nein would return from his mission and finish fixing the broken brain tumbler soon.
Actually, it wasn't really broken, was it? Aside from the Censors attacking him, nothing had seemed off about his own mindscape. And even if it was a malfunction, Raz could handle a mental fight, so it's not like he could do any harm going in to sort some Emotional Baggage anyway, right? And it wasn't like he hadn't used the brain tumbler without Sasha's supervision before.
Now he stood nervously in the empty lab, staring at the machine, trying not to be reminded of the way he'd felt before altering Forsythe's mind. It wasn't like he was messing with someone else's mind, after all, he told himself. Biting his lip, he lowered his goggles and entered the mental world anyway.
It was colder than before; icicles hung from the caravan and the trees. An owl's haunting call echoed across the landscape. Looking around, Raz noticed for the first time that the castle on the crag was starting to fall into ruin. He could not remember if it had been that way before.
"You shouldn't be here," said an unfamiliar feminine voice, low and powerful.
The chill air felt thick and heavy as Raz tried to locate the source of the voice. Failing that, he spoke up into the black void of the sky. "What are you talking about? This is my mind!"
"Hm, but the brain tumbler is Sasha's, yes?" The last word was drawn out into a hiss. "And he told you not to use it until he finished working on it. He gave you one, simple instruction. And you couldn't follow it."
Doubts started to emerge from the forest undergrowth, along with a handful of Regrets.
"Who are you?" Raz demanded, even as he started psi-blasting the latter out of the sky. Something whooshed through the air above him, a shape briefly sweeping across the moon as he set the Doubts ablaze. He heard a thud and spun to face the source, looming over him from the rock it perched on. The first thing he noticed were the eyes, glowing icy white and piercing.
"I am the devourer of souls. The darkness in your heart," the voice crooned, and it belonged to a dragon, pitch dark and wiry, with a crown of long, pointed horns sweeping back from its thin face. "I am Melancholia!"
Razputin swallowed hard. "Are you… my inner Maligula?" The dragon threw back her head and cackled, and the boy shook his head and stepped toward her, fists clenched. "Well I'm not gonna let you turn me into a monster!"
The dragon let out a low, rumbling hiss, like a crocodile, and a vicious grin spread across her narrow snout, showing countless needle-sharp teeth. "Oh, no, little boy. I don't have to." She spread her vast wings and took to the starless sky again, moving like water – fluid and fast. "You'll handle that yourself, I'm sure."
"Wha-? What's that supposed to mean?"
The dragon did not answer.
For a moment, Raz stood there in the icy darkness, shivering and stunned. Then he pulled his smelling salts out of his bag and ejected himself from the mental world, feeling far worse than when he'd gone in. Maybe the brain tumbler really was broken more badly than he'd realized.
The Junior Agent decided, quite firmly, that he would wait until after Sasha had finished repairing it before trying again.