Fanfic / Later, Traitor

Art by EarthVStheDerek.

Raz had been the first choice to send to camp, but he hadn't been the only choice. In a world where things hadn't gone according to plan, a different Aquato finds themselves thrust into a new world of psychic awakening, strange circumstances and burnt s'mores.

Raz was given a pamphlet for Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp by a mysterious stranger, who was revealed in Psychonauts 2 to be his (sort of) grandmother Nona. She told him that she briefly considered giving it to his older sister Frazie but ended up giving it to him. But what if she did give it to Frazie instead?

Frazie heads to Whispering Rock so she can learn how to train her psychic abilities. However, an accident at breakfast leads to her entering the mind of Dogen Boole to try and prevent him from accidentally exploding the heads of other people. From there, she (accidentally) obtains a modified Psycho-Portal that allows her to enter the minds of anyone, regardless of their age. From there, she uses it to go inside the minds of the campers for the purposes of learning or helping.

However, not all is well. Slowly, Frazie discovers a conspiracy where the children of the camp arrive missing their brains. Joined by Lili Zanotto, she and Frazie work together to get to the bottom of the brain thefts.

Later, Traitor is a Psychonauts fanfic by BurningFox6, and can be read on Archive of Our Own here and FanFiction.Net here.

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Later, Traitor provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Clem's father is absolutely horrible to him and is the contributor to Clem's worldview that he can never be good enough and is the reason behind his various suicide attempts. Crystal's briefly-seen mother is implied to be not much better, as she is heard calling her daughter stupid when she hands the phone to her.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: A memory vault shows that Vernon's ego grew extremely large after a story he wrote was featured in his dad's newspaper.
  His English teacher had been leaving a lot of gentle suggestions lately, prompts to go back to his older style, to focus less on the fine details and focus more on telling the story. Clearly, the teacher just didn't understand his incredible storytelling ability. What did they know? It was Vernon who'd been in the newspaper, not them.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Frazie encounters some mental beings that weren't introduced until Psychonauts 2, such as Doubts and Regrets.
• Adaptational Late Appearance: Linda doesn't start kidnapping campers until Frazie's second day at camp.
• Adults Are Useless: Zig-zagged. While Milla and Sasha leave the duties of finding the children to Oleander and don't bother to investigate by themselves until it's too late, Milla is horrified by the knowledge of Clem and Crystal's horrible situations and tells them they can take a trip to the Motherlobe after camp where they can get away from their parents (and presumably receive some professional help there).
• Air-Vent Passageway: Frazie and Lili crawl through one in Maloof's mind to find the Memory Vault he wants to hide away. Lili comments about how vents in the real world aren't big enough for anyone to crawl through, but Frazie counters by saying that Maloof has probably watched enough crime films for him to internalize the idea that vents can be crawled through.
• Allegorical Character: Just like the video game the story is a fanfic of, Later Traitor has many an allegorical character inside the minds of the characters.
  • Bonfear is the physical representation of Dogen's Power Incontinence anxieties, the thing that's holding him back from full control over his blastokinesis.
  • Freezie is a representation of Phoebe's negative impression of Frazie after she accidentally burns down a part of her mind that causes her to lose control over her drumming abilities.
  • The boss of Clem's mind is a giant Killer Gorilla representing his abusive father.
  • Everyone in Maloof's mind is completely invisible save for the clothes they wear, including the mental Mikhail. Maloof hasn't formed any meaningful connections with most of the people in his life, so they're all faceless to him. Maloof sees Mikhail as a tool to get back at his bullies with, so he's faceless too.
  • In Chloe's mind, there's a planet filled with tiny little cavemen, and the beautiful alien matriarch who watches over them. This represents the orphanage she lives at and the matron. She dislikes the kids and thinks they're too dumb to understand her, but the matron is intelligent and accommodating to her, so she holds her in a high regard.
  • Obsessions are a representation of, well, obsessions. As an enemy, they Draw Aggro so that attackers are focused on them instead of the other targets.
  • Egos are little goblins that start out small, but grow to monstrous sizes if left unchecked.
  • The Drag-on is the personification of Vernon's long-winded storytelling style.
  • The mental version of Sally is a representation of Pepper's own unhealthy coping mechanisms regarding the death of her daughter. It's a construct more concerned with pretending Sally is still with her rather than caring for her own wellbeing. Pepper is only able to heal once Sally is destroyed and she is allowed to deal with her grief in healthier and constructive ways.
  • The Night-Mare in Jakob Winkle's mind is an upgraded version of the Nightmares from the Psychonauts games; this one both represents Jakob's constant nightmares and his guilt over the Highway Stallion cars he used to sell, which had defects that injured and endangered the people who bought them. Unlike the destruction of Sally for Pepper, Frazie simply can't destroy the Night-Mare, and to cure Jakob's insomnia, has to tame it and bring it back to Jakob's mental self to let him reconcile with his guilt.
• Animate Body Parts: Inside Vernon's mind, a crowd of disembodied ears watch him tell (bad) stories.
• Arc Villain:
  • The living ice sculpture Freezie is this for Phoebe's Frosty Funk.
  • The boss of Clem's Happy Happy Happy Happy Place is a giant Killer Gorilla representing Clem's abusive father.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the "Son of the Mob" memory vault, Maloof is upset because he has no friends, the fact that his father's underling is probably only playing on the see-saw with him because he's his fathers son and the fact that said underling sucks at the see-saw.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Dogen is a side character in Psychonauts and the first victim of Oleander's world-domination plot. Here, Dogen not only avoids getting kidnapped, but he accompanies Frazie to Thorney Towers and becomes one of her party members.
  • To a lesser extent, many of the other campers who were previous just comedic minor characters are fleshed out significantly, with Frazie helping to resolve their faults by entering their minds.
• Back to School: It isn't until Frazie convinces the counselors to let her stay does she realize that all of her "fellow campers" are preteens and acknowledges that since she made this bed, she'll have to swallow her pride and lie in it.
  Frazie: I didn't know I was sneaking into elementary school... especially when some of those kids are already ahead of me.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Dogen. Both of his proposed "plans" to stop Oleander involve politely asking him to not be evil anymore. But after Frazie helps him with his issues, he’s more confident in the use of his powers, allowing him to chase off Linda twice by almost making her head explode.
  • More 'Beware the Cowardly Ones' than anything, but Norville wouldn't hurt a fly - most likely because he'd be scared of it instead. Yet when he finally takes a stand, he quickly cripples the monster that'd been haunting him and teams up with Frazie to deal the final crushing blow.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: While exploring "Phoebe's Frosty Funk", Frazie finds herself stalked by a yeti-like monster. It turns out to be a living ice statue of herself, which she nicknames "Freezie", representing the bad first impression Frazie made and Phoebe's lingering resentment for messing up her mind in the first place.
• Big Sister Instinct: Frazie is livid when she realizes that the Intrusive Thoughts in Clem's mind are because of abuse and vows to help him get his mind back.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Delivered by Frazie to the Drag-on.
• Blatant Lies: When Frazie tries getting bacon with her breakfast, Chef Ford tells her that they are all out. When she tries pressing the issue (especially since he reeks of bacon), he tries bribing her with a free Dream Fluff.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Clem tries to convince Frazie to ignore the Intrusive Thoughts trying to break into his Happy Place, and offers her a juice box in her choice of "cherry, cranberry, and cyanide flavors."
• Cement Shoes: Parodied in chapter 17; the mental version of Maloof has one of his Mafia goons threatened with "cement shoes" for a minor mistake, but it turns out they only do they "encasing their feet in cement" part and not the "dropping them in the nearest body of deep water" part, so it's more humiliating and painful than deadly.
• Character Development: Usually seen after Frazie goes into the minds of other people.
  • Dogen takes full control of his powers once Bonfear is extinguished, allowing him to shed his anxieties of a Power Incontinence.
  • Clem and Crystal agree to help each other overcome their suicidal ideations.
  • Maloof becomes nicer and starts to see Mikhail as a friend instead of a tool.
  • Chloe gets her intense Telepathy back under control and learns the 'alien' voices in her head are just far-away humans. Frazie manages to convince her not to give up on her dreams of space and extraterrestrial life, and Chloe starts to open up to earthlings more since she knows they're 100% real.
  • Vernon's overly verbose storytelling technique gets trimmed down, allowing him to actually spin decent yarns (and also share information in a timely manner).
  • Pepper finally accepts her daughter's passing instead of pretending it never happened, and thanks to Frazie's consoling, focuses on the good times they had together instead of the tragic loss. While she's still troubled, she at least gives up her puppet and promises to never try and replace Sally again.
  • Jakob conquers his trauma-induced insomnia with a talking-to from Frazie, and recognizes that the car dealership that had him sell defective cars was the real culprit in the chain of injuries and accidents that traumatized him. With his guilt assuaged, his insomnia disappears and he's able to get a good night's rest.
  • Norville comes to realize his own strength and learns that bravery isn't fearlessness, it's being scared and carrying on regardless. With that in mind, he finally stands up to the horrific visions that plague his thoughts. He's still pretty cowardly, and has a long way to go, but what matters is he actually tries to face his phobias and step out of his comfort zone rather than shut down entirely.
• Chekhov's Gun: Early on, Ford Cruller offers Frazie a Dream Fluff to keep her from prodding him about bacon. It ends up giving her a Heroic Second Wind against the Intrusive Thoughts in chapter 11.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Near the story's start, Frazie helps Dogen overcome his fears and get a better hold on his immense psychic abilities. Not only does this power boost help keep him from getting kidnapped by Linda later, it also enables him to help Frazie and Lili scare the mutant lungfish off back to Thorney Towers and eventually overload her mind control implant entirely.
• Companion Cube: In the upper levels of Thorney Towers Frazie meets Pepper Triggs, a woman whose only company besides Sheegor is a ventriloquist's dummy she calls Salty Sally.
• Confusion Fu: Literally. When Frazie goes up against a boss that can predict her every move, she uses Confusion on herself so it (and herself) have no way of knowing what she’ll do. This does leave her in a daze... but she only needs to hold out until she can start confusing the boss himself.
• Content Warnings: Chapter 10 has a warning that it deals with depression and suicidal impulses.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Frazie promises to braid the Night-Mare’s mane if it tries to torment Jakob again. Given its mane is made out of assorted arms and limbs, it’s a surprisingly painful and effective threat.
• Cryptically Unhelpful Answer: When Frazie grills Ford about how he's somehow everywhere at camp, he tells her that he's just looking out for the safety of the campers. Frazie can tell he is leaving out huge chunks of the real answer, but drops it.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When Linda finally appears in person and attacks, she targets Dogen... without his tinfoil hat. He easily brings her to her knees and even shorts out her brain implant with Lili and Frazie’s added power. Also applies to Dingo Inflagrante and Jasper, whom he completely crushes in seconds so the group can skip their battles entirely.
• Demonic Dummy: Salty Sally, who is overly protective of her status as Pepper's favorite puppet and tries to get rid of the other dolls when they begin to complain about their working conditions.
• Doing In the Wizard: Chloe's Cosmic Charter explicitly states that the "alien voices" Chloe has been hearing all her life are regular humans, and the reason she's been hearing them is that she can't turn off her strong telepathic abilities.
• Double Meaning: Phoebe's second mindscape — "Phoebe's Frosty Funk" — could be referencing Funk music to fit with the girl's musical theme, but it could also stand for the funk she's in after Frazie accidentally robs her of her rhythm.
• Draw Aggro: The primary ability of Obsessions. Frazie can't help but focus on the one inside Chloe's mind, despite intending to attack the Censors and not the Obsession.
• Epic Fail: In her attempt at learning pyrokinesis, Frazie accidentally sets her hair on fire, followed by a near-drowning via the Hand of Galochio when Lili tries putting it out.
• Evil Living Flames: Bonfear is a personal demon that embodies Dogen Boole's anxiety and the Power Incontinence that follows, manifesting as a sentient fire-monster causing all of the fires and explosions happening in Dogen's mind.
• Face Your Fears: Or beat the crap out of them, rather, as Norville demonstrates.
• Firehouse Dalmatian: Dalmatian firefighters attempt to extinguish the burning buildings in Dogen's mind.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Subtle, but in chapter 27, the monitors in Ford's Sanctuary that show important news broadcasts display a picture of a man in a bathrobe. This seems to be setting up Truman Zanatto and the events of Psychonauts 2.
  • Jakob initially mistakes Frazie for someone named Dita, who apparently tried to sing him lullabies sometimes. No one resembling this appears in either his mind or his memories, so it can be presumed this person is another asylum inmate that still remains to be seen. Later confirmed when she appears in person in chapter 40.
• Friendless Background: The "Son of the Mob" Memory Vault reveals Maloof had no friends prior to Whispering Rock and was a prime target for bullying on the playgrounds.
• Gangsterland: Maloof's mind — "Maloof's Mafia Metropolis" — is a massive, near-empty city ran by a mafia gang made up of sentient pinstripe suits and Censors.
• Gone Horribly Right: Phoebe was able to teach Frazie how to properly use pyrokinesis while in her mind. Unfortunately, she gets carried away with her training and ends up starting a huge fire. By the time Frazie manages to reenter her mind, Phoebe's ability to play the drums is all but shot and her mind is rendered a frozen wasteland.
• Hailfire Peaks:
  • Phoebe's mind — "Phoebe's Fire Mix Tape" — starts out as a volcanic world surrounding a lively dance-club. After Frazie accidentally sets the whole place on fire and gets kicked out, Frazie returns to find everything frozen over, having been turned into "Phoebe's Frosty Funk".
  • "Nein and Vodello's Merged Mentality" is a mindscape built from the semi-permanent psychic connection Sasha and Milla built for each other. It's described as a haphazard mix of their canon-counterpart's minds as an obstacle course used to teach Frazie Psi Blast and Levitation.
• Halloween Episode: Chapter 36, released on October 22, features the beginning of "Norville's Nightmare", which delves into the mind of a man who's afraid of everything. The mental world opens on a Halloweentown style plaza full of friendly and well-mannered Halloween monsters, and the narration remarks on how kid-friendly and cutesy the "scary" decorations are (and how disproportionate Norville's fear response is). It's soon revealed his fears aren't entirely unjustified after she delves deeper into his mind and things get genuinely horrifying.
• Hate Sink:
  • Clem's abusive father, who has virtually no positive characteristics and is the definite reason behind why the poor kid's so messed up.
  • Jakob Winkle's cruel and greedy boss who deliberately sold people faulty cars, not caring about the accidents this lead to because he managed to squeeze profit from their suffering. He eventually got arrested, but not for that cruel act— he got arrested for tax evasion.
• Honest John's Dealership: A memory vault reveals Jakob used to work for one of these. His scummy boss knowingly had him sell a faulty automobile series that got a lot of people hurt, and the guilt's driven the man into a state of near-sleeplessness.
• Ignored Epiphany: Even after his bullying nearly caused Dogen to explode everyone's heads, Bobby goes onto bully someone else later.
• The Insomniac: One of the patients Frazie encounters at Thorney Towers is Jakob Winkle, a man plagued by terrible insomnia.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Frazie begins to get along with the younger campers once she starts helping them out with their problems. Out of all of them, she’s closest to Lili, who directly assists her with figuring out what's happening to the missing kids.
• Interrupted Suicide: In Chapter 10, Clem and Crystal try to attempt suicide by tying boulders to their ankles with jump ropes and throwing those boulders in the water. Frazie notices and thankfully intervenes in the nick of time.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the divergent path the fic takes from canon, Mikhail ends up meeting Maloof and becoming his bodyguard offscreen.
• Ironic Name:
  • Jakob Winkle's last name is a reference to Rip Van Winkle. But while Rip Van Winkle slept for years and years, Jakob is an insomniac.
  • Object Permanence is a person's ability to remain aware of something even after it leaves their line of sight. Its personified in the story as devastating brutes that immediately lose track of you if you leave their beam of light.
• Killer Teddy Bear: Norville Burton has a particularly nasty one lurking in his mind that hunts Frazie relentlessly and shrugs off all her attacks.
• Lame Pun Reaction: In chapter 18, Frazie and Lili are forced to use the sewers to enter a secure area in Maloof's mental world and get one of his memory vaults. Frazie wonders why Maloof's mind even has a sewer, and Lili jokes "I guess he's got some dirty thoughts?" Frazie is unamused.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Chapter 28 consists of abbreviated versions of the Thorney Towers stages from the canon version of Psychonauts (The Milkman Conspiracy, Gloria's Theater, Black Velvetopia, and Waterloo World). When Dogen manages to take out Jasper's flying box seat in one hit, Jasper complains about him "skipping the boss fight."
• Living Clothes: The mental figures in Maloof's Mafia Metropolis are mob goons represented by disembodied suits of clothing.
• Maniac Monkeys: In Clem's mind Frazie encounters Intrusive Thoughts, aggressive monkey-like mental creatures with sharp claws, barbed tails, and jack-o'-lantern-like faces that spew hateful insults. Their leader is a Killer Gorilla-like monster representing Clem's abusive dad. The Intrusive Thoughts reappear later, in the mind of Norville Burton, where their words are primed to fray Norville's nerves even further.
• Meaningful Background Event: Crystal and Clem are offhandedly mentioned in certain parts of the story to be standing by the loudspeakers and on top of the roof, the two places in the game where they tried to attempt suicide. When they tell Frazie they've already attempted suicide twice, Frazie remembers seeing them at the aforementioned locations.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Pepper Triggs' last name means 'faithful', which is very apt given she's absolutely devoted to her puppet. Also, her name sounds vaguely like 'puppetry' if said fast.
  • Jakob Winkle is named not just for Rip Van Winkle, the fairytale character who slept for decades, but for Jakob Klaesi, a psychiatrist famous for contributing to advances in sleep therapy.
• Metaphorgotten: Lili tries to convince Edgar that Dingo and Lampita aren't worth his time:
  "Edgar, listen to me! Look, I know I'm young, but trust me, I've met girls just like her! It was never going to end well for you. They chew you up and spit you out! They use you to try and get back with someone else, or they try to mind control the camp DJ into liking them!"
  
  That barely made sense even if he wasn't in a delirious rage. "What?!"
• Metaphorically True: Jakob's doctor told him there was one last thing they could try when all his sleep medications stopped working and the man got desperate and aggressive. That thing was having him sent to Thorney Towers.
• Miracle-Gro Monster: The Egos Frazie encouters in Vernon's mind start out small, but grow bigger and tougher if left alone for too long until they reach enormous size.
• Mistaken for Spies: When first meeting Frazie, Coach Oleander thinks she was a spy who broke in, thinking her actual name is too ridiculous to be anything other than a codename.
• My Greatest Failure: Jakob Winkle is haunted by the memories of selling people faulty cars that caused a number of deaths and injuries.
• Nervous Wreck: Norville Burton, the third patient Frazie meets on the upper level of Thorney Towers, is afraid of everything despite his massive size, and he seems to even frighten himself just by mentioning some of the things he's scared of.
• Nigh-Invulnerability:
  • The representation of Mikhail in Maloof's mind is a bulky brute that completely brushes off all attacks. It takes a severe electrocution to stop him, and even then it only briefly knocks him out. It's explained that since everyone at camp (and Maloof by extension) sees Mikhail as untouchable, he actually is almost unstoppable in his mind.
  • While she's never actually attacked one, it's implied Object Permanences are invincible as well. They're listed among one of the few entities powerful enough to hurt Frazie through her shield power.
  • The monster bear in Norville's mind kicks this trope into overdrive by straight-up ignoring Frazie's entire arsenal, even after getting set aflame. The only thing that finally stops it is getting completely obliterated by a bunch of Nightmare bombs.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: In Vernon's mental version of Psychonauts Headquarters, the Psychonauts are more preoccupied with getting the proper paperwork done rather than saving lives.
• Oh, Crap!: Frazie (who's deathly afraid of water thanks to her family curse) is understandably freaked out when one of the story ideas in Vernon's mind is about the flooding of Shaky Claim.
• Once per Episode: Frazie tends to find one memory vault in every world she visits, each one either giving its owner some more backstory or explaining how their mind ended up in its current state.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Frazie and Crystal enter Clem's mind, the first massive clue that there is seriously something wrong with Clem is when they encounter Censors — who are normally hostile to psychic foreigners — that ignore them completely, instead choosing to laze about as though on vacation.
• Original Character: The fic has new characters to keep things fresh and distinct.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Pepper's daughter Sally drowned in a lake when she was very young. Distraught, Pepper coped with the loss of her daughter by replicating her in puppet form.
• Painting the Medium:
  • When Frazie accidentally gets hit with one of her own Confusion Grenades in chapter 24, the story's formatting goes all wonky, part of a sentence being printed vertically, then backwards.
  • When the Phobiamalgamation speaks, its words come out in garbled Zalgo text.
• Past Experience Nightmare: Once Jakob discovers he's indirectly responsible for a lot of deaths and injuries that came from selling people faulty automobiles, the guilt haunts him for years in the form of the Night-Mare.
• Patrolling Mook: In Chapter 17, Frazie encounters Object Permanences, mental figures with flashlights for heads who attack anything that steps into the beam of their light.
• Playing a Tree: Dogen says that his only experience with theater was playing a tree. He also ends up playing a sunflower while helping put on a play to bait out the Phantom.
  Dogen: My sister said I was the best oak she'd ever seen.
• Power Incontinence: The Memory Vault "Phoebe’s First Recital" shows Phoebe playing her drums so hard that she unknowingly sets the sticks on fire, leading to a chain reaction that accidentally sets her school's music hall on fire. This leads to Phoebe discovering her psychic powers for the first time.
• Precocious Crush: Benny seems to develop one on Frazie after she praises him for his assistance in Dogen’s mind. She shuts down his advances for obvious reasons, but does admit that he’d be a pretty good kid if he didn’t hang out with Bobby.
• Punny Name: The author is fond of this. Some examples:
  • Bonfear (A fire elemental personifying Dogen's fear of his power anxieties)
  • Freezie (Frazie's icy doppelganger inside Phoebe's mind)
  • The Drag-on (A triple threat. It represents Vernon's lengthy stories, which tend to 'drag on'. It resembles Vern-on a bit. Lastly, the dragon's found inside a tome, making it a 'book wyrm'.)
  • The Night-Mare (A Nightmare that's undergone a horrifying horsey transformation to symbolize its host's traumatic past.)
  • Also, Dogen's Saturday Morning Kaboom.
• Replacement Goldfish: Salty Sally turns out to be this for Pepper Triggs' own daughter, who drowned in a lake years ago.
• Residual Self-Image: Inside Vernon's own mind, he's a wise old man weaving stories to an audience of disembodied ears.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: When Frazie discovers Coach Oleander's secret plan, it leads to this exchange.
  Frazie: What do I think? I think you’re completely out of your freaking mind!
  Oleander: Am I, Frazie? Or am I the only one here with the vision and drive to get things done?
  Frazie: No, you’re really just absolutely insane.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Elka has a vision of Linda coming to the cabin to catch them, so she runs away to avoid getting captured... and gets nabbed when she steps out of the cabin.
• Shout-Out:
  • When participating in the punching minigame during Basic Braining, one of Crystal and Clem's cheers is "KICK, PUNCH, IT'S ALL IN THE MIND!"
  • When Benny saves Bobby and Frazie's butts with his levitation abilities, Bobby pokes fun at him by saying "Dumbo really can fly!"
  • The mooks in "Maloof's Mafia Metropolis" have names of various fictional mobsters and criminals, including Rocky, Mugsy, Pinhead, Dirty Dan, and Fat Tony.
  • The Drag-on is described as a fluffy dragon with a long body, not unlike Falkor from The Never Ending Story.
  • Coach, a (wannabe) soldier, tells Frazie to get out of his mind with "This is my world, and you are not welcome in my world!"
  • Frazie's tiny pony Sugarcube gets its own little spot at camp. The author refers to it as Sugarcube's Corner.
  • While Frazie faces a luchadore in Velvetopia's wrestling rings, Lili's by the ringside cheering her on with "The chair! Use the chair!"
  • While in Pepper's mind, Frazie finds herself attacked by a Heavy Censor while climbing some inclines. It throws a number of things at her, including barrels that she jumps over. She even calls it a 'big gorilla'.
  • The cowardly Norville Burton's name is a reference to Norville "Shaggy" Rogers from Scooby-Doo and Tim Burton, creator of such macabre films as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.
  • On Frazie's way into the graveyard in Norville's mind, a little cardboard cut-out springs up with a cute green slime creature as a shout-out to Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion. It also doubles as foreshadowing; she's unimpressed and pushes it aside... though unseen to her, when it swings back into place, it’s transformed into something ghastly. Just like how it lulls players into a false sense of security in its origin game, here, it also hints that things are going to get a lot more horrifying than they first appear.
  • The Black Speech of the Phobiamalgamation tormenting Norville's mind is taken almost word for word from Yogg-Saron in the World of Warcraft.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Vernon, natch. He thinks of himself as a wise storyteller, casts himself as the top agent of the Psychonauts in one of his stories, and his mind even serves as the introduction of the Ego enemy. A memory vault shows that this is more or less a result of him trying too hard to live up to his family's storytelling prowess and as a result he's become too absorbed in his work to accept any sort of criticism.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In a sense. While Dogen doesn't die in Psychonauts, he's the first kid targeted by Linda for the brain thefts, leaving him essentially brain-dead for the rest of the plot. In this fic, he manages to avoid getting his brain stolen entirely.
• Spotting the Thread: When Frazie tries to help her fellow campers in Basic Braining, Oleander scolds her for "babying" them and trying to help "Slowey Joeys". This leads her to question his history in the military when he is encouraging an "every man for himself" mentality.
• Stealth Pun: Pepper Triggs, an original inmate in Thorney Towers, has specks of white and gray in her hair. Ergo, she has Salt-and-PEPPER hair.
• Story-Breaker Power: Dogen's incredibly powerful psychic abilities allow our heroes to not only break Linda's brainwashing and skip Lungfishopolis, but it allows them to skip the fights with Dingo and Jasper as well. Naturally, Jasper complains.
  Jasper: You... you can't just skip the boss fight, you heathens! It's the grand culmination of the conflict! The final dramatic confrontation! You hacks can't even stick to the script!
• Stylistic Suck:
  Frazie's eyes widened as the fabric began to shift and move, the figures on it playing out the words Vernon was speaking. It was amazing, like a quilted movie screen adding images to his story. It was also amazingly awful. The colors were an eyesore, and the movements were janky and nonsensical.
  
  Basically, it had the same quality as the story he was telling.
• Super Drowning Skills:
  • Frazie, naturally, just like the rest of her family. She seems to handle the water worse than her brother, though. It’s even weaponized against her in the fight against Freezie - when her clone realizes Frazie’s afraid of the hole in the icy lake, she tries to force her into it.
  • Also weaponized against her while fighting the Phobiamalgamation, because Hydrophobia is a thing and its entire moveset revolves around fears.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: When Pepper finally takes Sally off her hand in Chapter 31, she isn't able to move it. It turns out keeping your hand locked in a certain position inside a hunk of wood for a few years isn't exactly healthy for its bone structure.
• Token Heroic Orc: Lefty is the only mental entity in Maloof's mind not allied with his self-serving desires.
• Tomato Surprise: Lefty is Maloof. Specifically, he's the representation of Maloof's weaker and nicer side.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Right after diving into his head to improve his technique, Frazie warns Vernon to hide from the brain-stealing monster lurking around camp. He immediately heads out into the open to see if he can find any other campers to try his new storytelling style on. To put it in his own words: ‘If something happens along the way... well, that would just be another amazing story to tell, right?’
  • Elka as well. When she has a vision of Linda coming for them, she ditches the group to try and escape before she arrives... and runs right into her.
  • Averted with Dogen. When he wanders off alone to go check out the G-Men, he somehow manages to convince them to unionize and becomes an honorary member.
• Toon Town: Dogen's mind — Dogen's Saturday Morning Kaboom — is a cartoonish world set within a malfunctioning TV.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: While Frazie openly questions Ford's omnipresence around camp, everyone else just shrugs and ignores him.
• Visual Pun: The residents of Maloof's mind are faceless men wearing suits - literal Faceless Goons.
• What If?: What if Frazie went to Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp instead of Raz?
• Who's on First?: When taking directions from Lefty in Maloof's mind, Lili tries to get a refresher on which direction they need to go:
  "You said go left, right?"
  "No, go left, not right," their guide replied.
  "Right! Left!"
  "Left, right."
• World of Symbolism: Just like the games, the minds Frazie enters reflect the personalities and innermost thoughts of the people they belong to.
  • Dogen's Saturday Morning Kaboom is a kiddy-like Toon Town filled with talking animals, reflecting Dogen's mentality and his zoolingual abilities. Frazie, Benny and Bobby enter through a fuzzy television that represents Dogen's worldview. Inside the television, various buildings are exploding and in the center of it all, there's a burning building filled with cardboard cutouts of the campers and staff, a representation of the current head-explosion danger in the real world. The "boss" of the area is Bonfear, a living ball of fire. He is a representation of both Dogen's blastokinesis and fear of his blastokinesis instilled in him by Compton and various others. Once that fear is snuffed out by Dogen, the boy is finally in control of his powers and doesn't need to wear his hat anymore.
  • Phoebe's Fire Mix Tape is a bouncing music club in a volcanic area where Phoebe is the number-one VIP, reflecting her love and talent for music as well as her pyrokinetic abilities. When Frazie accidentally burns the club down, Phoebe loses her groove and the area turns into Phoebe's Frosty Funk, a desolate landscape consumed by the cold and is filled with various Doubts, reflecting Phoebe's fears that she'll never be able to play again and that she was never good enough to begin with if she was able to lose her skill so easily. To help repair Phoebe's brain, Frazie must grab three CDs that have three songs on them, which are linked to three important memories of Phoebe's: The first instrument she ever played, her school's musical tryout that led to Phoebe's accidental discovery of her pyrokinesis and the first song she ever made together with Quentin. Along the way, Frazie is stalked by a "yeti" who eventually turns out to be wearing one big hairy disguise. The yeti turns out to be an icy replica of her called Freezie, a representation of Phoebe's negative view of Frazie after she accidentally ruined her musical abilities.
  • Clem's Happy Happy Happy Happy Place is anything but. The starting point is a little tropical bubble where Clem is seen relaxing alongside various Censors who don't even try to stop Frazie and Crystal from running around, a major clue something is off. The bubble is Clem's Happy Place that gradually shrinks as time goes on, reflecting Clem's Stepford Smiler aspects and the fact that the façade is slowly being chipped away at by his self-hatred. Outside the bubble is a dark twisted jungle filled with hateful and manic Intrusive Thoughts, with his abusive father being the biggest Intrusive Thought around, the biggest contributor to Clem's self-hatred and his desire to kill himself. The jungle itself is a dark and twisted representation of Clem's home and his life there. Finally, the representation of his home is a big menacing cave, an indication Clem does not like his home one bit and regards it poorly.
  • Nein and Vodello’s Merged Mentality is a merge of Sasha and Milla's minds, as the name indicates. Because they have a psychic link, they're able to fuse their minds together to act as a Psi-Blast/Levitation training ground for Frazie. While Sasha's side of the mind is neat and organized and Milla's is just as funky and colorful as her, there are some indications that the other has rubbed off on them, with Sasha's side having colorful throw pillows on his couch and Milla's side having been organized by Sasha.
  • Maloof's Mafia Metropolis is a big city populated by Faceless Goons working for Maloof. In his mind, he's the boss and what he says goes, having very little regard for his mooks. A mental version of Mikhail is there as well as Maloof's bodyguard, but he's faceless like the rest of his gang because Maloof doesn't see Mikhail (and the rest of the other gang members, by extension) so much as a person but rather as a tool to get back at his tormentors with. The rest of his goons have names that come from cartoon characters, an indication that Maloof gets some of his mafia knowledge from the shows he watches. Maloof wants his goons to lock away a memory vault so Frazie and Lili can't get to it because in the real world, he is on a power high after Mikhail volunteers to act as his bodyguard.
  • Chloe's Cosmic Charter is a vast galaxy with a series of planets that all represent different aspects of Chloe. The first planet represents Whispering Rock. The place is barren because she doesn't really care about the others because she thinks they're boring earthlings. The second planet represents Chloe's fixations and fascinations with aliens, which serves as the debut for the Obsession enemy. The third planet represents the orphanage where Chloe lives. The residents are all dim-witted cavemen because Chloe thinks the other orphans are dumb and could never understand her, while the Matron represents the orphanage matron who Chloe loves because she takes care of her and is smart enough to understand Chloe. The final planet is brain-shaped with a large radio tower constantly emitting signals, a representation of Chloe's uncontrollable telepathic abilities.
  • Vernon's Vernacular is a nested world filled with books that represent the stories Vernon wants to tell. The campfire represents how Vernon thinks of himself: a wise old storyteller who sees everyone as a potential audience to his annoying stories. His world is imaginative, but most things in it get bogged down by excessive wordiness and unnecessary attention to detail; such as the Psychonauts not saving the world because they have to do all the boring paperwork in excessive detail.
  • Pepper's Production is a giant version of a rustic toymaker's shop that represents Pepper's passion for making puppets and dolls, transformed into a constantly running production line as a marker of Pepper trying to use her work and her puppet Sally to distract herself from her grief over her daughter's death. The living toys in Pepper's mind are mental versions of the dolls she's made over the course of her life, and their positions as factory workers with no rights are an analogue for her neglecting those toys in favor of Salty Sally.
  • Winkle's Dreamy Domain is a version of Jakob Winkle's mind twisted by his insomnia; because of his chronic inability to sleep, his mental world has been blurring the line between dreams and reality, and his thoughts are constantly on trying to get a good night's rest, so his mental landscape has become focused on representations of sleep, dreams and comfort, with pillowy soft clouds, moon-shaped lamps, bounding sheep for the mind's owner to count, and a giant quilt-covered bed that the mental version of Jakob is trying to catch his forty winks in. As Frazie investigates, she discovers that mental Jakob can't sleep because of a massive cluster of storm clouds that represent Jakob's guilt-induced nightmares and traumatic memories, which light up with deafening thunder and lightning to disturb him from sleeping. We also get a glimpse into what dreams look like in a segment where Frazie travels through several dreams Jakob hasn't had a chance to experience.
• Younger Mentor, Older Disciple: Frazie ends up getting tutoring from the other kids (like Lili and Phoebe) in learning how to use her psychic powers, this despite them being around the same age as her younger brother.

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