The filthy, bedraggled prisoners nervously clutched at the bars of their cages. Helen whimpered fearfully, waiting her turn to be brought before the justice tribunal. Her frazzled, manipulated mind raced with thoughts of how terrible her punishment would likely be. Considering how long she'd been a fugitive from the Creche's control, and her extensive list of waiting-to-be-discovered thought crimes, the once-respected teacher was in for a gruesome fate. As her panicked sobs joined the chorus of defeated cries, Helen bitterly ruminated on how she'd ended up in such debasement.
The attentive teacher had been one of the first people in society to notice the change in prepubescent children. The classrooms became eerily quiet, except for random giggles and wordless murmurs. Though responsive, the young students would instantly fall into a stupor if unsolicited, unnaturally locked in their own heads most of the time. If adult society had know then, what it knew know, Helen wondered if people wouldn't have resolved it then and there. But how could anyone have known that the mind's of the worlds children were uniting into a decentralized, psionic neural network? The weaving together of the consciousness of every child formed a monstrous tapestry of psychic potential, fully capable of manipulating the global Noosphere. The psychically enhanced children formed a collective entity, and soon world government, known as the Creche.
The world's individual children were granted terrifying powers by the Creche collective consciousness. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, remote viewing, psionic projections, mind reading, and most feared of all, mind control. It took adult rebel scientists years to piece together the clues, relentlessly hounded by the almost inescapable, and physically unassailable, psychic super children. A bloody reckoning was performed on the world's adult population as children took control. Billions were executed, using grisly psychic means, such as forced suicide, telekinetic heart-tearing, mind-looping, and other lethal forms of psionic torment.
This was likely to be one of Helen's fates, for the crime of escaping from a back-breaking slave camp. Overworked slave-adults fabricated all manner of childish luxuries, lavishing hedonistic excess on the individual nodes of the extravagant, infantile mental collective. When the fillings in Helen's teeth began to rattle, she knew a young member of the Creche was approaching. An eerily serene, floating child entered the squalid dungeon, his youthful eyes glowing with strange powers. "Helen Mabel Johansson. You have been called for Reckoning. Do not resist my commands." As the child spoke, a cacophonous chorus of juvenile voices emanated from his gaping, drooling mouth, almost like television static.
Helen looked around, realizing that the room she was in was utterly unremarkable, except for the vacant-eyed adults curled up in piles all around. The woman realized she wasn't in a cage, and perhaps had never been, except for a cage placed in her own mind by the powers of the Creche. Unbidden, her legs began awkwardly marching forward, clumsily following the floating child. Each step was cumbersome and painful, as if Helen were being directed by a cruel, inept puppet-master. The closer she stepped towards her destination, the worse the incessant mental buzz became in her mind. Her eyes began to tear from the inexplicable strain of approaching the massive font of radiating psychic energy that lay ahead.
Helen's body would of trembled with fear, if not jerked forward with alien, possessing animus, as she gazed at the surroundings. The huge room resembled a courtroom, but built like a stadium-amphitheater. Hundreds of benches and tables lined around the circular audience chamber, filled with a teaming multitude of psychic children. Her mind burned as thousands upon thousands of glowing, merciless, child-like eyes gazed down at Helen with singular focus. A voice echoed out from everywhere at once, accumulating from the mouth of each child like the buzzing of many insects "Your individually conceived crimes against the Creche are to be weighed, and punishment wrought. Prepare for adjudication and extirpation, wretched one-mind."
The terrified woman began shrieking in unholy agony, as her mind was invaded by a legion of tiny, insistent despoilers, that rifled through her thoughts and memories with the carelessness of burglars. An incomprehensible tableau of Helen's past experiences swam past her eyes, as she realized her every memory was being assessed for wrong-doing. She tried to focus, to keep a part of herself shielded and sacred, but resisting the minds of the children was like trying to resist a river. A single memory suddenly bolted forward, as Helen suddenly felt like her head was full of angry bees. Suddenly, she remembered.
The voice of the Creche roared through the hall "The greatest of crimes has been found. An ultimate guilt has been discovered. This wretched non-person has committed the most unforgivable treason. Entrusted in the once-vital role of child educator, this 'Helen' defiled the innocence of one of her male students, who was underage by one and a half years!" Helen began to cry, as she tried to explain, but was held stock-still through psychic coercion. "For this deviance, you are to be placed in the Cogiodevorator until death." Helen shrieked as her traitorous legs marched her towards a small, strange band of metal lying in the center of the chamber. Unable to control her compelled limbs, Helen lifted the headband up, and placed it over her head, as her gaze instantly unfocused.
Little did Helen know, nor would it be explained to her, but the Cogiodevorator was an intricate new invention of the Creche. It fed on the natural psychic energies that existed in all creatures, to then project customized experiences back towards the user. These devices were bent towards nefarious ends though, and were used to create terrifyingly real simulations of real pain and injury. The cruel genius of the execution device, was that it was set to manifest the most horrifying fear of the wearer, and have said projection viciously ravage them, again and again, until the intended target was lethally exhausted of mental energy. As soon as she had placed the device on, her surroundings shifted and changed. The psionic device peered into Helen's mind, settling on a strange, powerful word: Ranidaphobia.
Helen groggily rose to her feet, as she realized the platform she was standing on, was unsteady. Worse, she was completely naked, exposed to the stinking, putrid elements, as she gazed around at her surroundings. The woman had been dumped right into the middle of a swampy bog, her feet standing on a massive lily-pad. As soon as Helen discerned the nature of her surrounding biome, the terrified woman's nerves somehow ratcheted up to another level of alarm. The roaring croak that issued out from behind her, however, made Helen collapse into a shrieking mass of horror. It's bulging, green heft shook the lilypad as it clambered on, as a bulbous toad began confidently approaching the hysteric Helen.
Helen was too scared to flee, as the warty toad ambled right up to her, and unceremoniously began opening its rubbery lips, slimy pink tongue gushing forth and squeezing into Helen, before withdrawing back into the toad's yawning pink maw, with the woman attached to the end of it. In horror, the woman struggled to pull away from the sticky tongue, but failed miserably. The amphibious monster began slurping up the frightened woman's head and shoulders in huge, sloppy gulps, as she screamed and sobbed uncontrollably. Helen's mind was utterly destroyed with fear, as the toad assertively gobbled her whole body up, sucking her head and torso inside itself as it used its webbed fingers to press against her wiggling posterior, roughly coaxing her into the toad's slimy mouth.
Helen's last sight, as she stared out from between the toad's rubbery lips, was of the brightly colored sky above her. The toad's soft, wet tongue slid back and forth in front of her eyes, as it began forcing her down into the toad's stomach. The horrified woman couldn't help but wonder how long she'd endure digesting, before finally suffocating.
***
Helen groggily rose to her feet, as she realized the platform she was standing on, was unsteady. Worse, she was completely naked, exposed to the stinking, putrid elements, as she gazed around at her surroundings. The woman had been dumped right into the middle of a swampy bog, her feet standing on a massive lily-pad. As soon as Helen discerned the nature of her surrounding biome, the terrified woman's nerves somehow ratcheted up to another level of alarm. The roaring croak that issued out from behind her, however, made Helen collapse into a shrieking mass of horror.