Chapter Text
Everyone makes mistakes, and the one we just made should have gone down as a small, avoidable error.
It’s definitely not the vital kind of mistake—not the kinds people mean when they say if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making art—which is a philosophy we hear a lot from less-sensible Wordmates when we’re helping to clean up the results of said mistakes. It’s also something we tend to tell more sensible ones when they’re helping us clean up our mistakes. It’s not even an interesting mistake—those usually mean causing mild inconveniences for innocent people who aren’t our hosts and, going by our existing habits, would likely involve them getting bans from various zoos and aquaria until we’ve had the opportunity to go back in and correct it.
But it’s also not the worst kind of mistake we could have made either. We don’t think so, anyway. We’re not dissonant, which means we haven’t harmed any of the hosts we were occupying. We definitely haven’t done anything harmful to this particular woman. Nor do we think we’re placing anyone in immediate danger or actively aiding the cause of Hell through this blunder of ours.
And yet, nonetheless, this is definitely a mistake.
Eight decades is short time by celestial standards, but it’s more than enough time to understand how possession goes on the corporeal. There’s always potential dangers and ways to avoid them. Have at least one force in a host at all times, so the corporeal plane doesn’t object too strongly to a loose Kyriotate hanging out in celestial form too long. Take the time to observe possible human hosts to become familiar with their lives and habits. Observe the differences between someone merely in a hurry (and thus likely to reject possession) and someone who genuinely needs help. Leave them somewhere safe and comfortable when we’re done. Those tend to cover most of the usual threats in the usual cases.
Our fateful (lower-case letters, but only barely) lady should have been a usual case on a usual kind of spring day. We’ve spent the past week observing her in various guises: her pet dog Scottie, one of the birds nesting in her gutter, a squirrel who eats out of her bird feeder. She’s about sixty-five years old, hard-eyed and soft-bodied. She dresses in loose flowing skirts that almost, but not quite hit the hippie vibe. She lives alone. If she works outside the house, we’ve never observed her going to a job. No spouse or lover that we’ve seen. She has one daughter (Daughter-in-law? No. They have different coloring but strikingly similar bone structures.) who lives in the area. The daughter showed up once during our observation to take our lady-of-the-week to the supermarket. Otherwise, she rarely leaves the house for longer than it takes to get the newspaper and check the mail. Her hobbies seem to including watching television, reading the Weekly World News, and smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day. She’s pretty good at baking and can do some utilitarian sewing. We haven’t actually seen her use either craft since we’ve started our observations, but we have a sense for these things. There’s a decent base level of skill to work with. None of our surveillance critters ever had a close enough look at her ID to confirm, but we’re pretty sure her name is Barbara. Names are one of those little details that is easier figured out once we have possession of the actual body and the opportunity to go through purses and pockets.
In retrospect, we missed an important detail. The necklace she wore—a faded pink and green crystal wrapped in copper wire—should have been our hint that this would not be a usual case. She didn’t resist possession, at least not that we noticed, if she had we would have just not gotten in, like trying to turn the knob of locked door. Instead, it was like opening the door easily only to find a tornado on the other side eager to pull in anything not sufficiently nailed down.
We should have pulled out then, shut that metaphorical door. We could have found another project or at least found a way of helping her that didn’t involve body-borrowing. We don’t. Didn’t. That’s the key mistake, right there.
We don’t end up in this maybe Barbara with our forces animating her while her mind is off in the Marches, but just above her, like a bead of water on a duck’s feather. And then it’s not just the five forces allocated to Barbara or the sixth that we kept spare in case she happened to be one of those humans with an extra but also the two forces animating her miniature schnauzer and the one doing aerial surveillance in the body of a crow that get drawn out of their bodies. That’s the whole of us clumped together in once place.
Now, we’ve heard of Force Catchers before. What Hive working regularly on the corporeal hasn’t? Security-conscious (or paranoid) people on both sides of the War can carry or wear these wire-wrapped crystals to prevent those of us who borrow bodies from borrowing their particular bodies. Even the small ones that don’t hold more than two forces are effective defensive measures in that sense. They’re a fairly new invention in celestial terms—we’re told they first became commonly available (for celestial artifact standards of ‘common’) around the turn of the last century. That’s still enough time for word of them to get around, even to those of us who primarily work among unaware mortals.
(We assume our hosts are unaware mortals. Generalizing may have been another mistake.)
We’ve never actually seen one in person before, much less actually been caught in one.
First time for everything, huh.
It’s neither cold nor dark in here. Dark implies an opposition of light. Cold implies an opposition of warmth. Both sets of oppositions require sensory input to render the contrast. What we see is blank. What we feel is the absence of temperature, like an indoor room that gets neither hot nor cold, complete and total neutrality. There’s no air to feel dry or humid. There’s neither smell, nor taste, nor texture to compensate for the lack of vision. What we do get is sound and very specific sort of kinesthetic sense. It’s not quite the feeling of knowing whether a limb is bent or extended, at rest or in motion, but it’s in the same category: A physical cue based on motion and position in absence of true tactile sense.
Right now, we hear the blaring of a television and the heartbeat of the elderly lady we almost possessed. We sense the motion of a chest rising beneath us as the smoke from a cigarette gets inhaled, and then the same chest falling on the exhale.
Strictly speaking, it’s not painful in here. That requires more sensation. It’s not even physically uncomfortable, like being squeezed into a too tight crawl space would be. But we feel…uncomfortably singular sitting all in one place here in this Force Catcher. We should be more scattered, one here, another maybe a few feet away, a third outside, possibly a fourth somewhere else.
The obvious action is to try and get out. We struggle against the bounds. The crystalline structure feels like syrup on our wings, resembling rock candy more than actual rock in that sense. Not physically—see above about our absence of tactile sensation—but in the sense that this object wants to hold onto our Forces, and our say in the matter is limited even as we pour most of our Essence into the attempt. The Essence is gone. We’re still here.
We spend a few more hours contemplating this situation, our minds debating how to balance the need for discretion against the need to get out of here.
Who has force catchers? People who fear being possessed and have the resources to back that up. Which means people who are in the know about Heaven and Hell and the War most likely. And while we haven’t observed any signs that our maybe-Barbara is a deep cover Soldier for either side, that doesn’t rule out the possibility. No one would suspect her, which makes her the perfect unexpected ally for whichever side she works for.
And if she’s not a Soldier, then what?
How do ordinary unaware mortals find themselves with celestial artifacts?
It’s in this spirit we finally decide to speak up.
“Hey.”
“Demon! Evil spirit!”
If she had any Holy Water on hand, she would have probably dunked the crystal in it. It wouldn’t have had any kind of affect, except that maybe the crystal gets wet. As is, we can feel the motion of the force catcher as it’s removed from the lady’s neck and gets flung to the ground. The impact is hard enough to make a noise but not, unfortunately, hard enough to break us free the painful way. Just hard enough to convey her disgust at the whole situation.
“Look, there must be a misunderstanding. I thought you were just a regular human. If you let me go, I won’t bother you.”
“Don’t think you can trick me, demon! I know what you are!”
“I am NOT a demon!”
“You were trying to possess me! Evil spirit! You were going to take over my body and use it to do unspeakable things! I’ve seen the movie!”
Okay, yes, we were planning on taking over her body. That’s inherent to the concept of being a Kyriotate. Usually. It’s inherent to our concept of being a Kyriotate. But we were going to give it back to her, in better shape. A slight break from her pack-a-day cigarette habit would have been enough to do it, even without any other assistance.
And anyway unspeakable things? Some examples: trying to make her signature chocolate chip cookies and leaving her a plate to share with her neighbors, doing some corporeal-side paperwork, putting the laundry away, turning some of those piles of old newspaper into papier-mache and sculpting a bust to go on her mantle. Nefarious acts. Meanwhile, what else could we have done with those extra forces? A lost dog somewhere might have found its way home. A crow might have helped make a crying child smile.
If that’s what evil spirits normally did, wouldn’t that make corporeal reality that much better?
We [I] think so.
“I was here to help you! I promise you, I am not a Shedite, or any kind of demon for that matter!”
We [the lady and myself] argue back and forth for awhile before we [I] reach some conclusions. First, she’s not going to listen to any sort of reason. Second, she’s not going to accept any kind of bargain. Not dishes, not laundry, not even cleaning out the gutters (At least all the ones free of nesting birds; we have our priorities). Third, in the increasingly minuscule chance of her being an Aware human (Soldier or otherwise) that awareness is informed much more by the horror movies her grandchildren watch, than anything based in reality.
It’s about the time she’s trying to trick us into reciting the quotes from the Exorcist, that we stop talking back.
The Love Boat eventually starts playing in the background, followed up by some other program—a drama, we think. If it’s like the past week, she’s not doing anything with her hands, which most of us find rather odd. How do people sit down and watch Television without having something to do with their hands? We do speak up once to politely suggest she consider doing some crochet while she watches television. Because, come on, what evil spirit would suggest crochet?
Given time, at least one of our minds could come up with some reason. There are some very specific demons out there. Still, it wouldn’t be an intuitive conclusion.
“I’m won’t be fooled by you, evil spirit!”
No, it was quite apparent someone else had already done that.
—
We know it’s the next day when our daily Essence hits. And we get a confirmation that this lady is not Symphonically Aware at least when we throw the rest of what we’ve got into another escape attempt. Her hostility towards the ‘Evil Spirit’ caught in her necklace is such that surely she would comment if she could hear the disturbance from our escape attempt.
(That escape attempt, by the way, doesn’t work. The rock candy effect still binds us down, and wow it’s gooey in here. Figuratively speaking. Still not a lot of tactile sensation going on here. Let’s wait another nine days, and then try will all our Essence. That sounds like the best plan.)
There’s a whole production surrounding us this morning. We’re moved. The sounds of the lady’s heartbeat and breath grow more distant. Crinkling of thin paper (probably yesterday’s newspaper or an old magazine getting sacrificed, and not even for papier-mache,) sounds around us, and then every other noise becomes more muffled. Not a lot. We can still hear some inane morning news program blaring around us, but we can no longer parse out the individual words. We must have been wrapped up. There’s no other sensory differences between being around someone’s neck, and being prepared for some postal-based transportation.
We’re moved somewhere else. Outdoor noises are the ones being muffled now. Car engines, birds chirping in the springtime, leaves rustling in the wind. Then the motion stops. We hear the scrape of metal on metal, like something shut. We can’t exactly confirm this, but we bet there’s a little red arm flag thing going up on the side of the mailbox.
Do Lightning Kyrios ever do that? Just place a small object containing a piece of themself in a Self-addressed stamped envelope and drop it in the post? On one hand, it avoids disturbance. On the other hand, Lightning doesn’t generally care about generating disturbance enough to not use more efficient means of self-transport. On the other, other hand (and don’t worry, we won’t run out of hands anytime soon) there are Kyriotates of words other than Lightning (not us) who have the attunement as well, and maybe they would value a cheap, no disturbance version of cross country travel. If the time limit on said attunement even allowed them to do that. Maybe next time we talk to someone with that attunement, we’ll ask.
That would probably be a more comfortable way to travel via mail. And unlike us, they’d probably get to pick the destination.