Small successes

"Maybe... faster?"

You hovered in the air, little more than a glowing purple silhouette in the shape of a person at that point. You looked at your hands, and saw Scarlet's polite smile through your transparent palms. She turned to a notebook at the table next to her, jotting down your suggestion, and then faced you again. "Test suite seven, differences in velocity. Ready when you are."

The morning had been non-stop activity with barely a moment to think in between. You touched the ghost machine at the highest possible setting for the device, and you dissolved into a purple spectral entity in a frightening instant, but you quickly acclimated to floating around and drifting through walls. Emilia explained that at this highest setting, possession capabilities would be at a maximum, but it also decays the fastest back into normal forms faster than at other settings due to an increase in energy expelled--with one caveat. That decay only occurred when outside a body, where the timer seemed to halt mid-possession. If for some reason it was necessary to stay in a body longer than a few days, you could, and then you'd just have to wait out a day or two as a ghost to get back to normalcy.

Before you'd absorbed all that information from Emilia, she shipped you and Skyler off to a section of the mansion off-limits to visitors, one that resembled a gym or obstacle course or something. The walls had climbing equipment, there were raised platforms and hanging rings and ladders and a lot of other feats of athleticism that seemed entirely ill-suited to Emilia's easily-injured form. But they weren't meant for her anymore, as now it was part of the test. Your goal was simple: get inside Skyler's body with your spectral form, take control, and complete the obstacle course before she could wrest control back. If she could, even. Whatever psychic trickery Skyler developed to combat possessive techniques hadn't been thoroughly tested with the possessor already inside.

But there hadn't been time to worry about that yet. You weren't even given a chance to try to successfully take control to understand the nuances of settling in to a new body, especially one so different from your original self as Skyler's. You'd find out how that worked later in the day as per the agreement, but you were intended to fail on the first day, as whatever Skyler did when she focused seemed to throw up a wall all around her. You'd push and push toward her, almost touching her shoulder or face or stomach, only to feel a repulsion, like two magnets forced from one another, sending you backwards.

How embarrassing, the movies made it seem so easy for ghosts to possess people!

Most of the morning and into the afternoon was you trying different points of entry and then changes to surface area, like if reaching out with a single finger versus a hugging motion made any difference, with little progress. You'd state your next test suggestion, Skyler would note it down and then stand at the ready, you'd try something, you'd fail. This speed test, trying to ram into her at a high velocity versus the slowest approach, yielded zero possessions.

But, this was just the beginning. You'd been straightforward and honest with Skyler, doing exactly what you stated you would try every time. And as an engineer meant to test things in the real world, you knew that things break primarily when directions are not followed. "Okay, we're going to do another low speed approach toward the face as the focal point."

"Got it. Ready." Skyler hurriedly wrote down the next test combination and then closed her eyes, waiting for your approach.

This time, you drifted behind her. One of your hands came up near the side of her head, to give both of you the sensation of being repelled by this psychic energy field, but that wasn't the end. Your other hand pressed against her back... and sank inside.

It both felt and looked so bizarre, seeing your hand sink into Skyler's back between the shoulder blades. From within, it felt like you were pushing into warm ooze, although you suspected the spectral makeup of your body was likely more the source of the oozing feeling when pressed into a solid body. You wriggled your fingers inside, feeling the muscles in Skyler's back contract in succession as they translated your movement into their own motion. Even with just that much inside, you could... feel her. Not just her guts, as your hand was technically somewhere in one of her lungs, but there was a physical, tactile feedback you sensed that came from her body's own senses. A patch of you, in essence, had become Skyler, just as possession promised.

The wriggling of your hands, as well as the realization of your deception, caused Skyler to gasp. The barrier she'd created around her head diminished, and your other hand collided with the side of her face by accident. Wriggling your hand inside her head caused the same muscular contractions to occur, almost turning Skyler's mouth into a puppet where flexing different fingers caused her jaw and mouth to open and close. She tried to speak, but because you controlled her lips, all that seemed to come out was an "AAAAUUUU OOOOAAAAIIIIII" before she huffed. Even when you relaxed your hand, she spoke much like she'd just had a novocain injection at the dentist and her mouth was numb. "Ohkay, sho...thad washn't the plahn..."

"That was my plan, though. It's taught me two things: your mental barrier is unevenly distributed, and you reinforce wherever you think I will go. This is the next logical step in testing, it's clear you can handle things easy when you know what's coming."

Even though you couldn't see it, you felt the muscles in her face contracting in a way that felt like how a smile would feel on your face, even if you sensed it through your hand.

Before you could continue, the door to the gym slid open. Emilia entered, her slow approach aided by a cane as she walked. "From this vantage point, that looks like progress. Is it fair to say that Skyler's techniques are no longer unbeatable?"

"It'll require some back and forth, for sure. It was a lucky first attempt for me, I'm sure she'll figure out a way to counter."

Emilia nodded. "It's coming up on the top of the hour, let's call it a day for this session. Skyler, go ahead and get changed, I need to talk with Wesley before he possesses you for the evening."

You disengaged from Skyler's body, feeling the oozing sensation recede as you did. Skyler, for her part, looked slightly flustered, either by the sensation of your intrusion or that you'd found a crack in her wall. Either way, that was a sign of victory to you. She hurried off to another door leading to the locker rooms, to get out of the simple yoga attire she'd been wearing and back into something more casual, you assumed.

"I have a... secondary test for you to conduct," Emilia said.

You crossed your spectral arms. "Oh? Something Skyler doesn't know about?"

"Indeed. I've asked her to wear something as a signal for whenever you're fully possessing her, I've explained it's so I know who is in control. It's only partly true, it's a yellow ribbon that will indeed make it easier for me to know who I'm talking to, but it 's a particular one from my collection. Embedded within its stitching is a suppression spell, one designed to mute negative emotions like fear, sadness, anger, embarrassment. They don't vanish, but they're dulled to the point that they barely register under even extreme circumstances, and for typical reactions they likely wont be noticed at all."

"And you want me to do... what, exactly?"

"That's up to you," Emilia said, leaning on her cane. "I know enough about these sorts of scenarios that even when people say they'll let you do 'anything' as them, they will often push back when they do in fact find a limit they can't stand, and that often leads to problems with these ongoing experiments when there's a clash like that, so this should allow you to go about your business and she won't panic or yell at you, even if she thinks like she should, and you'll find her a lot more agreeable in that case. It will make your time in her body easier to handle, she will still feel conscious and an active participant without objecting to your every move, and it should make it easier to keep these trials going as long as possible."

You glanced toward the locker room door as Skyler returned through them, in a sky-blue blouse and tan skirt, and true to Emilia's words, with a yellow ribbon tied in her ponytail and dangling down. As she approached, you turned to Emilia. "And for this other experiment, what about some extra pay?"

"Don't push it."

Skyler came up toward you, set her bag down, and held her arms out, the freckled redhead letting out a big exhale. You couldn't tell if the big breath was her bracing herself for this obligation, or if she actually looked forward to this moment, given her interest in the paranormal you couldn't rule out either possibility. "I guess it's time. As promised, my body is yours until tomorrow. I'll be your copilot in your head, I guess, so we can use my car and all that to go wherever. You ready?"