[ TT ] Re-Imagine

``... let's take a second look, shall we...?'' 
 
 Whenever I pick up the easel, I always start with these words. I can count on them, those seven precious words, to help me into `` the zone''. It all started out with art therapy, a way to cope with the events of the past few years. But what started as a way to regain what I had lost ended up warping into a discovery of things I am not certain that I rightfully should know. 
 
 I will admit now that, prior to my treatments, my world-view could be described as `` grey''. At least, that's what Doctor Stormare deduced after the first few therapy sessions. I'll admit that he's probably right, too. After all, if you went through the things I did, you too would probably have an existential crisis. Our drab living quarters, the dreadful weather, the dull monochrome of the colony's structures, the cold efficiency of the academy, it's almost as if Blancmur itself wanted to make me feel like dying. Would it have been too much to ask for some colour ANYWHERE? How can an entire colony, a place where children are born and expected to grow up properly, be absent of almost all colour? 
 
 Even after my parents and I moved out to the frontier upriver, out into the living breathing wildlands of the continent, it was clear that something still was n't right. We were living in the green rolling hills and red rusty plains of Verthavre, where the skies were truly blue, yet all I could see were faint pinks, darkest navies and greys with mere suggestions of green. The doctors initially thought I was colourblind, but a further examination proved that it had nothing to do with my eyes. Out of the entire human race, from sacred and cultured Earth to distant and wild Arokeb, I just HAD to be the one to have a faulty ventral stream. The connections between my temporal lobe and visual cortex just HAD to be fraught with errors and breaks in all the right spots, so that any colour I perceived would be washed out at best and at worst incomprehensible to me. To me, everything I saw was shades of grey, like that one creepy novel back in the early 21st century. 
 
 To think, back in those days the costs of treatment would have been crippling to our family's finances, though nowadays such nightmares are relegated to period dramas and certain unscrupulous colonies in the outer reaches. We only usually talk about those places on subnetworks like CN/DarkCornersOfTheUniverse. Instead, if a patient lacks the Medical credits, or if their condition is deemed `` unconventional'', they are offered the opportunity to pay the `` Guinea Price'' and submit for the testing of less conventional treatments relevant to their condition. Indeed, there are some people who make their living through acting as `` guinea hogs'', repeatedly working with DiT to test all manner of treatments and augmentations in exchange for the all-enticing Commodity credits. It is through the Guinea Price that I was able to begin my treatment for my `` greysight'' as the doctors termed it. 
 
 I still have the distribution port in my neck where they injected the daily doses of neural `` defrag'' gel, and considering the difficulty involved in installing it, I do n't think they'll risk removing it. But that was only half of the experimental treatment they had lined up for me. Remember our good friend Doctor Stormare? Well, under his instruction I took up painting as a daily habit, as the experiment was exploring the formation of connections through going through the appropriate actions. In other words, if I were to work with colours, making them appear on blank canvases, in theory my brain would be able to truly comprehend and acknowledge colours just like everyone else in the Empire. And so, to attain what trillions take for granted, I painted. 
 
 Simple at first, were the fruits of my treatment. Flat shapes devoid of shade were what I painted first, and with new connections wriggling into place thanks to the gel, I first beheld the wonders of red. Our servant Clove, an ox-maiden of firm build, was normally the first person I would see after the clock passed noon, and she would always bring me my paints before heading down to `` la pumps'' as she so charmingly called them. Imagine my surprise when, after years of seeing her dark grey complexion, the fine lady walks in with a coat of auburn fur against the grey of the study walls, bearing a bottle of red paint to replenish my supply. I imagine she was as surprised as I was at the time, as my own surprise nearly made her jump out of her hooves. 
 
 Month after month passed by as my ventral stream knitted itself together, and new colours and shades became apparent to me. Finally I could see the blue sky, the green grass, the sheen of brass on Clove's ID piercing. Were it not for Imperial regulations concerning exposing the peasant races to art, I would have painted her in the colours that I knew. Why anyone believes the drivel about peasant races being highly susceptible to the emotional influences of art is beyond my comprehension, but when Earth has spoken, Earth has spoken. Regardless, in secret I permit her to look at my works and contemplate them, since to live a life without the arts would be no real life at all... 
 
 But while letting Clove live a little brings me no anxiety, recent changes in my artwork have. After exhausting things to paint around the farm and house, and since painting our beau servant was out of the question, I took to painting my dreams. After waking I would go through my mind-reader and skip through my latest dream to find wondrous vistas worthy of rendering in natural pigments, usually one or two on a good day. However, over the past couple of weeks I have had a recurring dream, wherein a face watches me from the ceiling as I sleep, which I initially believed to be representative of some sort of online peer pressure. I have felt compelled to paint each `` ceiling face'' whenever they crop up in my dream, since every time I dream of a face on the ceiling, it is different. Once, it looked like a jester; another time, it resembled Doctor Stormare, and just recently I broke the one rule by painting a face that looked nearly identical to beau Clove. 
 
 The faces themselves do not frighten me as much, but what does is that every time I paint the face, I later realise that I had painted a letter in the corner, almost always different, but in a colour that I had never seen before, nor heard of. Even having learned all of the colours known to the human eye, my mind simply can not process this one alien interloper of a colour, I can not put into words what colours I could compare it to, for there are none that exist in mankind's narrow band of vision. But even in the face of a colour that might as well have come from space, my greatest fears are what the letters are trying to say. My first face-dream painting included a `` D'', while the second had me adding an `` é'', the third yielding a `` p'', then an `` l'', then an `` a'', and so-on as if the series of paintings were spelling out a word. `` Déplacer'' was the word that the first eight in the sequence spelled out. Déplacer... Move what? The following painting was devoid of any letter, but my relief was short lived as five more face-dreams followed, the resultant paintings spelling out `` votre''. 
 
 Either I am going mad, or my dreams are talking to me through the paintings, referring to me in the second person. Surely it could not be the serum messing with my mind, for I had been taken off of defrag after gaining my full colour spectrum many weeks ago. Is it even possible for its effects to be ongoing even as I speak? And what of the message? So far I have `` Déplacer votre l'', and I fear what the final letters will reveal. But I have a feeling that I know just what of mine needs to be moved. For with every ceiling-face I paint, it seems to be sagging ever closer to my sleeping form. 
 
... perhaps I should move my bed?
