Write this! ...an exercise...

[TheDustyZebra]

Ok, now that the 300 word challenge is done, and NaNoWriMo is wrapping up, I thought I would post this here for your digestion. My first choice of theme for the October challenge when I won September was this idea I've had for a couple of years, but as it wasn't suitable for a 75-word challenge, the powers that be suggested I post it in the Workshop instead. I didn't want to put it out there when there was so much else going on, so it had to wait.

A word of explanation -- I was wandering around on Wikipedia and ran across a thing on pangrams; for those who are unacquainted, pangrams are sentences that include every letter of the alphabet. A perfect pangram is made up solely of every letter of the alphabet used only once. Pangrams exist in languages other than English, and the site included translations of non-English pangrams. This brings me to the statement in question:

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

This is a translation of a Bulgarian pangram, according to Wikipedia. When I read it, I thought to myself, there's a story in there! And I wanted to see what variations of that story might surface from a bunch such as we have here.

So my challenge now is to write a story (no particular word limitations) including that sentence. I was going to have it be the opening line of a 75-word story in the Challenge, and not counted in the words, but for the Workshop we can have more leeway.

I should note that I have never actually attempted to write the story myself, so I'm in the same boat. Or armchair, plush and squeaking, one.

 

[Ökuþórr]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair, but then I felt a strange heat in my veins, originating from the small mark where the man in the white coat stuck me with something. It was a pleasant yet odd feeling; I saw a brief hazy image of other people in white coats standing over me, then I was back at Waterloo, in my own chair sipping tea with an Admiral Ackbar. He had warned me of an impending trap. I smell a victory here today.


OK, its not great, and a bit weird, but it's something.

 

[Dozmonic]

The transmission. They said it was safe. That there were so many redundancies built in that nothing would ever go wrong. It was half a second before they flicked the switch that I saw the text on one of their monitors: "Probability of success: 97%"

It was said that God did not play with dice, nor did I. I should have been in New Orleans, my consciousness having been fused with the newly created replica of my body. But I knew it had gone wrong. In that 3% error my consciousness had veered off course. For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. They had hairy arms, whoever they were. Then there was black.

The next three months passed in an instant. Being held in RAM is like that. I was rejoined with a replica of my body just in time for Christmas. Think I'll ask for an armchair and take the bus next time.

 

[chrispenycate]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

Oh, I'd been furniture before, modern, form-adapting, gets out of its own flatpack type furniture; I can inhabit anything with enough junctions. But this was old and dusty, a bit malevolent. The sort of seat that you don't dare rummage round the cushions of, with hardly enough motor to tilt its headrest back. A moron among machines.

Mustn't panic; there must be enough computational power to contain me, otherwise I could never have got in me. They must have overengineered the TV remote, or something.

No! Now I recognised the chip. A genuine thirties 'control it by thought waves'. What was one of those doing still operational? And what would it do to me if some human thought at it while I was inside it?

It was less than an instant in meatcalc terms, but even as a large, shaggy mongrel lifted its paws to leap into the seat I was elsewhere, in a modern, automised kitchen, overseeing a sauce hollandaise with massive calculation reserve, ready to move on yet again before they recognised what I was.

 

[Hex]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. I couldn't see the number. I arched my neck, trying to read it, trying to see if I'd moved up or down the queue.

The man across from me frowned and nodded at the notice. I didn't need to read it. There were hundreds of them all over the room, one above every armchair. 'Silence, please. Remain as still as possible.'

I sank down and watched as his jowls quivered their way back to stillness. He'd done well; soon he'd be rewarded.

The next moment, though, I heard my own name called. Looked like the new armchair had moved me up the queue after all.

I stood, breathing heavily with the effort, my heart pounding with a mixture of excitement and exertion. As soon as my foot hit the pressure mat the door slid open. There was darkness beyond. A friendly, warm dark that smelled, mouth-wateringly, of roasting.

I stepped forwards.

 

[BookStop]

Assylum

We were not supposed to leave our assigned seats except when we ate, and cr*pped, and wove our separate ways toward our assigned bunks after evening cocktails of blue and yellow capsules.

My chair was too solid, too unforgiving, and it made my body ache. For three months I’d been slowly, rhythmically, beating my head against the old peeled maple finish. If I could just keep it up, make headway, so to speak, I might’ve just been able to get comfortable. Sometimes, I got tired though, and my head just fell forward.

Caroline occupied the spot next to me. She didn’t speak. I only knew her name because it was written in bold block lettering across a strip of duct tape on the back of her chair. I could read it if I craned my head way around and leaned.

When they wheeled in her chair, my eyes got hungry for it. It was not very nice, but it was padded. The padding was worn, and a permanent butt-print was carved into it. Caroline was so thin, her butt hardly took up half of the cavern. She was folded into it when the orderlies led her in. I thought my backside would fill the void.

The chair smelled awful. It should. Caroline relieved herself in it the first day here. Marsha, dressed in white scrubs, which made her blocky, soft body resemble a marshmallow, led Caroline to the toilets every hour-on-the-hour after that. It was three o’clock.

Caroline’s right eye twitched when the nurse pulled her away, guiding her with a white knuckled vice just above her elbow.

Jon Talbert was the only other caregiver on the floor. He was talking to Jerome, a prune of man who only spoke in songs from his youth. Jon’s back was to me.

I slid over, sank down, and closed my eyes. For a moment, I was in someone else’s plush, squeaking armchair.

A guttural animal sound pulled me from my blissful rest, and I opened my eyes just in time to see a mass of yellow hair launch itself at my right eye. Caroline’s head slammed against my brow bone with a bass like thud. I tried to push her back as she launched again, but my muscles were weak from so much inactivity. She bit my ear hard enough to leave just flap of the lobe hanging. Marshmallow and Jon pulled her away and injected her with something that appeared from Jon’s pocket.

They wheeled my old chair away after they wheeled away Caroline.

Now I get the padded one. A bandage is wrapped around my whole head, and protects my ear and the large cut on the opposite eye. It is only two hours before it starts to itch in the back. I beat my head slowly, rhythmically, against the threadbare headrest. If I can just keep it up, make headway, so to speak, I might just be able to get comfortable, but I am getting tired.

Jerome never complains about being uncomfortable. He has an old sweatstained pillow shaped like a horseshoe behind his neck. It is torn, and the fluff peaks out of a ragged hole....

 

[Perpetual Man]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

I was soon out of it, leaping as though I'd been stung.

The thing was new, so plush it still stank of whatever it was they cleaned it with in the warehouse; the cloying material smell, new wood and oil on the springs. So new that it really, really should not have been squeaking.

As I looked, that brand new piece of furniture seemed to move, bulges appearing in the seat, in the back and then sinking slowly back in again. Another bulge this time in the arm, stretching the fabric until it seemed as though it had to burst, but then the unsightly mound just receded back into the chair.

All the while though, there was that squeaking, high pitched, insistent.

The back heaved forward one more time, threads unsnarling, fabric fraying as it parted at the apex of the bulge, something pink appeared. Like a pig snuffling for truffles it seemed to force its way through the fabric, widening it, stretching it.

A nose, two black beady eyes, ears and whiskers. A rat!

A bloody rat! Huge it slid out through the hole it had made; followed by another and another. I could barely keep myself from screaming.

Oh, how I hated rodents, and rats were the worst. Disease ridden, claws and teeth. I hated them, all there, smiling at me as they slipped out through the hole in the centre of the chair. Looking. Right. At. Me.

I did what any sensible person would have done, screamed once, let my eyes roll up into my head and passed out.

"See, Geoffrey," the first rat said, "I told you there was a logical reason those bulges kept appearing inside the house."

One of the other rats shrugged, "So it's a house now is it? I told you it was a bad idea, no matter how comfy it looked!"

"I know, I know," the first replied, "But it looked so grand, I had plans for it you know, it was going to be my legacy, a new home for generations to come. The Family Seat.

 

[hopewrites]

The cold morning began to drag on. I hate waiting under the best of circumstances, and these were not the best circumstances. From my position, kneeling on the couch, I could see out the picture window, up and down the street. But the frost laden air kept everyone indoors, and she wasn’t coming.
Nothing to distract my anxiety, and no relief in sight, I slumped off the couch with a heavy sigh. Laying on the hardwood floor was uncomfortable and not being able to see out made my chest tight and my fingers twitch.
For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. Then she burst through the front door and I was on my feet.
“It’s a boy!” she laughed triumphantly, as I ran to embrace her and my new brother.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Ugh one day I'll put aside a day a week to do these sort of things. Aplogise for any tense issues - after eighteen months writing in present tense, I'm now doing past tense and I am confused

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. Where am I? What am I doing here? I must escape. Next to me some old bloke pulls his teeth out. Repulsive! Revolting! The clicking of the woman next to me with her knitting needles is driving me nuts. Keeps trying to speak to me. I touch the plastic thing in my ears. It needs batteries – cos I can't hear her. A cup of weak tea without sugar and one of those pink wafery biscuits is put next to me. Do I like them?


'Mum.' A rather handsome young man looks at me. Looks a bit like my husband. Wonder what happened to him? He was a nice chap. 'Mum?' Well at least whoever it is sat opposite me is pleasant to look at. I bang my ears, because I can still barely hear him. 'Angela wants to know if you would like to see the girls?'


'What girls dearie? You look like someone I used to know?'



The old fella across the room puts the TV on loud. Old black and white, western. Anythig else the nice young man is trying to say to me is lost. I just nod and smile. Hope that is the right answer.


He gives me a kiss. 'Bye Mum.'


'Bye, Jack.' My head furrows as I wonder who Jack is. He walks off. Very like my old goat. Maybe I left him back in my room. I stand up.



The bloke with the teeth looks at me. 'Why'd that boy call me Dad?' He jerks his hand towards the retreating young man. 'Wanted to kiss me. Don't hold with that sort of stuff.' He glares at me. 'That's my chair that is. You belong there.' He points to another chair that doesn't seem so comfortable.


'That's OK, Mr Jacobs. I'm going to see where I left my husband.'


'Still not found him, Mrs Jacobs?' He sits down and picks up his newspaper. Don't know why he pretends to read it. Not like he remembers it anyway. Looks a bit like that nice young man.



Where was I going? Never mind. I sit down in my old plush armchair and pick up my book.

 

[Abernovo]

За миг бях в чужд плюшен скърцащ фотьойл. Yes, it is a Bulgarian pangram. So, here goes:


When I first heard what the project was about, I almost walked out in disbelief. I was persuaded to stay by the Permanent Secretary. It's not often that a government department's most senior civil servant comes down in person to make a request of junior management. I allowed myself to be flattered, thinking of possible promotion. I have spent every day of the last forty years regretting that decision.

The physical research department, deep in the rural recesses of the West Country, thought that they had designed a time machine. They had not. They built a dimensional shifter.

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. That sort of thing happened to me a lot. One minute I would be in my own world, the next, I would be transported somewhere else. Believe me, a strange armchair made a nice change. I had ended up in deserts, stalked by creatures that I could not name, in dark forests and once, for thirty hour-long seconds, in the middle of a cold, empty ocean.

That damned machine altered us. We, all of us in the chamber when it was first switched on, found ourselves repeatedly pulled from our lives into other worlds, other dimensions. We never knew when it would happen: sometimes it would not occur for months; once I travelled to twenty different world in a single day, each time returning to the exact moment and place from which I had left. We destroyed the machine, of course, but it was too late. The damage had been done.

The care assistant came to check on me. "How are you feeling today, Jim?"

"Not bad today, Jen. Not bad."

What was I going to tell her? The truth? Quite apart from it all being covered by the Official Secrets Act, the best I could expect from telling the truth would be a note in my file that I had been confused about my surroundings. Some price I paid for my ambition.

 

[James Coote]

Ugh one day I'll put aside a day a week to do these sort of things. Aplogise for any tense issues - after eighteen months writing in present tense, I'm now doing past tense and I am confused

Maybe you could use tense confusion on purpose. I'm not sure you'd be conscious of your own or other's memory loss though.

____________


For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. Heaving myself up, the young man made such a fuss that I had to wave him off. It's all very well trying to help an old fellow like me, but I just can't stand that kind of coddling

My back ached terribly, and my limbs were so stiff, I couldn't possibly imagine what I must have been doing yesterday to induce such a bothersome groan of pains. I would have to tell the cricket team to find a replacement if it didn't ease by Sunday

I took a step forward, but pain shot through my hip, as though someone were trying to pop the damn thing out. My hands searched shakily across to the table, and when I found it, I gripped it with such strength as I thought it might snap any second and send me falling.

The young man placed a walking stick in my other hand, and took my arm, and I steadied. I looked into his face to thank him with a smile, so nice of him to help since I had my operation. A young fellow he was, seemed familiar. Must be one of the boys down at the franking department, I concluded.

Mercifully, someone else had pulled my chair across, and I eased myself into its plush, squeaky embrace.

"Now, where were we?"

Ok, so that didn't pan out quite as I'd envisioned. The other thing that is missing is the fear of not knowing or understanding what is going on, which can be incredibly powerful and as debilitating as the memory loss itself.

 

[David B]

In the darkness, a deluge lashed the pavement while river gutters flooded the street drain beneath a van. From the shelter of a doorway, two steps clear of puddles, I turned up my collar against the wind and waited. Patience was my only virtue.

Across the road, an internal light illuminated a third story window. I smiled as it silhouetted her movement behind silk curtains, knowing her time had come. Squinting, I synchronized that shadow with a mental aura that fidgeted with anxiety. Yes, somehow she knew her cover was blown.

My hand crept inside my coat, seeking reassurance, touching the gun nestling in a shoulder holster. Someone at division had been careless. She had known before I arrived, her emotions if not her thoughts were clear to any telepath.

A flash of lightening split the night, betraying a figure hidden from my mind. The distinctive antennae of a psychic helmet shielded the stalker as darkness reclaimed him. Thunder reverberated in my ears while l drew the automatic and thumbed off its safety. Abandoning the doorway that provided little cover against bullets, I ducked down the steps and splashed behind a van, water filling my shoes.

The residents had drawn their blinds hours ago. No one, whose eyes I could borrow, looked out into the cold. There was only the sound of my breathing and the rain.

A footfall spun me round into his sights. My spirit quailed and fled the muzzle flash, deserting my body, not wanting its pain. For a moment, I was in someone else’s plush, squeaking armchair. I stared out of another man’s eyes, across a coffee table, at the wife who ignored him engrossed in her knitting. Then I felt the wrench, severing me from my corpse and trapping me in this stranger.

 

[David Evil Overlord]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. Then the armchair folded up around me like deckchairs often do but armchairs, as a general rule, do not. Splintered wooden fangs slammed together, blocking my escape. A length of twisted metal coiled like a spring around my waist. The cushions contracted, and I was dragged down the armchair's throat.

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

 

[mosaix]

Okay, I've got no excuses, I was seriously drunk. But it was dark, and those tenement houses do look all the same, and everyone does leave their doors open. It was only when I was seated and settled that I realised that the wallpaper was entirely foreign to me. For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

*This actually happened to a friend of mine who lived in Glasgow*

 

[Aaron Stone]

It is said that at the moment of death, before passing on, one experiences being someplace one has never been, nor seen - somewhere completely unfamiliar, yet not altogether uncomfortable. No one knows why.

Up until today it had just been another superstition, more myth than fact, that I had paid no attention to. Besides, even it was true - and how could one know for sure - it didn't affect me any more than the talk of war in Zelania. I had carried on with my life, unchanged by either of these things. Until today, that is.

I was been sitting in my favorite rocking chair, on the front porch, rocking back and forth, reading the paper in the dying summer sunlight. A fly buzzed lazily around the porch light, and a small zap was heard as it burnt itself to a crisp. I chuckled, and turned to the obituaries. Crazy Martin had finally kicked the bucket, I noticed; a relief, that was - he scared the bejeezus out of me and my wife.

I tipped back, a smile on my face. Suddenly, I got a feeling of weightlessness, and the rocking chair shot out from under me, slick against the rain-soaked wood of the porch. I fell back, my head hitting the stone wall of the house. I heard a crack. I saw black. I felt nothing.

Then, for a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

 

[StilLearning]

The final message of Dr C.D. Ward.

The...thing is behind me now, and I cannot move. I am an experiment, a test of its abilities. I know this because I now know that if it wished me dead I would be dead.
I do not know Its true form, only that on the night which It was summoned It appeared to me (bound in what I had thought to be a secure pentagrammatic field) as a single spark of carmine light.

Curse that dog. A great black Alsatian, its origins now a mystery to me, which upon seeing the entity had bounded forwards as if greeting an old friend, scuffing the chalk marks upon the floor which restrained and bound It. The spark streaked upwards into the sky, and for a short time I thought the thing had retreated from my home and into the vastness of space, which lies beyond the windows of the dank upper tower that I had quietly annexed for my experiments.
Would that this had been the case. The pentagram, broken as it was, had included mathematical terms defining the House-upon-the-rock itself as the outer bounds of the confinement. The force of its escape has etched those terms into the metal of the floor, six inches deep.
This single sign of fallibility gives me my one hope.

One week later the fool dog disappeared, and the revolting noises in the walls and over the data streams began. The inhabitants of the house thereafter sickened, a malady as much of the mind as the body, and soon were leaving in such shuttles and inter-orbital vehicles as would carry them.
I remained. The fault was mine, and the duty to mend it if I could. I was arrogant, secure in my knowledge and hard won technomantic powers.

But the thing is greater than I. I will not tire you with the true story of my hunt for It, nor the sickening, seeping, realisation that I had summoned a thing which had seen time begin. A thing which was toying with me, testing Its control over me as a probe into the abilities of our race. I fear we have been found sadly lacking. My only hope is that we have been found so inferior as to present neither opportunity nor threat, and perhaps this thing will go Its way without bothering further with us.

In the end, exhausted, I returned to the tower room where this had began, and lowered my scorched and trembling form into the chair in front of my telescope, with which I once watched the great orb of Earth as a child – Earth which has abandoned me. Though the circuits and processors in this remote section of the house are sparse Its influence reached through them and into me. My desperate final plan to impede it as much as I might was already in motion, and I no longer had the will to keep the burning virtual tendrils out of my mind.

I was flying. I was a child again. I was myself, then some other. It was a homunculus, then a great AI mind, then a ball of imperishable flame, burning into me. Someone else was sitting in this ancient leather chair. The no-one was. Then, for a moment, I was in someone else’s plush, squeaking armchair. For a moment the room and its view were unfamiliar to me and my memories not my own.

Now, my last defences gone, it has entered the room and is behind me. I no longer remember my name, nor whether I was a man with a loving family, a loner, a man of importance, or a lone toiler in the dank tower. Perhaps this is a mercy.
I have record of the events that have led me here only because I have placed those memories in a secure crystal of neutronium, which even the greatest powers cannot, I hope, easily corrupt. I have placed one more thing in there. The line of code that has been steadily counting down as I send this. As I have said, the thing is bound to the House-upon-the-rock. Deep within the asteroid rock are our supplies of antimatter, mined over decades from the traces of positrons trapped in our lady Earths magnetic field. Upon the completion of the coded count down the magnetic trap will deactivate, and the thing will be torn in a thousand directions as the debris of the House scatt-
<<Transmission Ends@01.24.31.10.2183.>>

A homage to Lovecraft, I hope a sufficiently respectful one.

 

[StilLearning]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. Then the armchair folded up around me like deckchairs often do but armchairs, as a general rule, do not. Splintered wooden fangs slammed together, blocking my escape. A length of twisted metal coiled like a spring around my waist. The cushions contracted, and I was dragged down the armchair's throat.

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

I really enjoyed that. Horrible thought being eaten alive, but this was so brilliantly incongruous it made me shiver and smile. I enjoyed all the stories I've read so far in fact.

 

[Interference]

My club had booted us out on some pretext or another - probably cleaning up after the last bun-fight following Oofy's being given a role to play in the government of our nation - well, his pater had just snuffed it so he inherited the title, still it was something to celebrate, bun-fight wise.

So, anyway, I arrived at the Gateway To Hell in rather chipper mood till I crossed the threshold and wondered why there was no one around advising we who entered here to be- somewhat , as it were -ware. Still, enter one must when one is gasping for a resuscitative beverage at the conclusion of some, it must be said, pretty tough negotiations.

The negotiations in question wouldn't normally have left me gasping in the above-described manner, but this had been something of an exception being, as it turned out, somewhat more tricky than negotiating a contract with one of the more devious Devils who are out to get you to sign away your soul. I think I did all right, of course, and Uncle Chester, the devil in statu quo, as it might be held, finally gave forth of the moolah with which I was now intending to purchase an engagement ring.

So, anway, where was I? I remember. Quite literally, in a very literal sense of the word, standing before the Gatekeeper, though of course there was no actual gate to speak of, of the Senior Triskellian Club, so named for some reason or another which was probably emblazoned on the cold, dead souls of every member but, quite frankly, I couldn't have cared a great deal less about that than I already did.

The Gatekeeper spoke in something so nearly a whisper that I wasn't altogether, at first, certain whether he had spoken at all or if, perhaps, he might have been summoning the club cat. He disabused me of this fantasy by repeating his words while looking directly into my face.

"May I have you name, sir?"

Well, you know me, feed me with a line like that and I'll arise forthwith with the clincher, or hook, for the piece.

"No, but you can hang my coat and hat somewhere," I said while proferring the items in q. lest he should think I was merely being fascinating and amusing.

"If you would be so good," the man continued unabated, "as to sign the visitors' book," at which point he turned the volume to me.

I skimmed down the names of those present and noted with some satisfaction that Bingo and Bertie had already arrived before me. At least I shouldn't be stuck for someone to chat with. The other names that caught my eye did so more for the convoluted apostophisations and prepositional linkages than anything else. The nobility, it appeared, was well represented within these ghastly halls.

Having discharged my autograph duties with something of a flourish, I abandoned my coat and hat to the ministrations of the Guardian at the Gate and proceeded light-footed to the withdrawing room where I allowed a casual eye to wander over the gathered assemblage of dodderers. Yes, dodderers. There can be no other word for it, for dodder they did.

Fortunately, beneath a large puff of smoke that I recognised instantly as being one of Bingo's best cigars in the offing, I spotted Bingo in some seemingly secret conference with Bertie. I hove to and had a listen before announcing my presence.

"You simply must, Bertie, after all, we were at school together. By golly, I may even have saved your life once or twice."

"Really," said Bertie, always on the ball at these pronouncements of Bingo's, "I don't remember that. When did you save my life?"

"Oh, well, maybe it was someone else, then," Bingo rejoinded, if that's the word I want, before launching into a more fervent pressing of his point.

"Who's he fallen in love with this time?" I decided to ask at just the exact moment that would interrupt the poor bowser's flow.

The greeting was gratifying from the Bertram quarter while somewhat muted and, dare I say, less than fulsome from that of the Bingo.

"Sit, sit and join the comedy," Bertie said. "But not there!"

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair, the property, I have since been given to believe of one of the Lord Chief Rear Admirals of the Flying Squad or somesuch nonsense, a chair in which, had I remained, I should have become a pariah with undue haste and dispatch had the Lord Chief Rear Whatsisname caught me or, presumably, had I been snitched upon by one of the regulars.

"So, tell all, Bingo," I said settling more delicately into a wicker job that seemed to have been provided for we trespassers, "for I have a presentment that this is going to be one of your fruitier escapades and I desire nothing less than the full details of the matter."


*****


With apologies and gratitude to P.G.Wodehouse

 

[Christopher Lee]

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair. The leather stuck to my skin as if it belonged to my being. The building I was in was not familiar to me, nor was the man standing in front of me, staring. He had a gun in his left hand and a roll of duct-tape in his right.

My palms were sweating, heart now skipping beats at a regular pace. He raised an eyebrow at me as if to ask me a question, then raised his left hand. I was staring into the barrel of a pistol that I knew could end my night.

"What's your number, sir?" he asked me in an odd, monotone voice.

"Six," I replied, breathing the word rather speaking it.

"Well, your number is up, sir."

I closed my eyes and went to a different place. My wife was standing at the window, smiling. She waved at me and I waved back. In the distance I heard a loud -- bang? -- from the woods behind me, and looked in that direction. I looked back at my wife. She was no longer smiling. Duct tape was wrapped around her mouth. The man with the gun was standing behind her, looking out the window. He smiled. My vision turned into a black nothingness, and I fell.

When I woke up, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair.

 

[silvermoon]

Being between lives presently, I've discovered a number of things I can do to entertain myself occasionally, whenever I get bored. The most interesting is to slip my mind quietly into the body of a person while they're sleeping, or even just day-dreaming.

It's surprisingly easy once you know how to do it. The entry is only temporary, of course--you're not allowed to take over a person, and there are very strict censures for those who go too far with their experiments, or cause too much mischief. However, a quick visit is considered OK, even encouraged--it helps prepare you for your next life, after all.

There are no restrictions on whose mind you can enter. The soul is without gender, so you could slip into the thought-patterns of either a man or woman. There's no telling whose body you're going to be in during your next life, so it helps to have a balance of experience.

I've just integrated my mind into the dreams of a young woman who has fallen asleep in front of the fire on a cold winter's night. It's central Otago, the snow outside is at least a foot deep, and the temperature is way below freezing. Here by the fire though, it's warm and cozy...

For a moment, I was in someone else's plush, squeaking armchair...