If Eoin can do it, then so can I

[Ari Rahikkala]

Post story fragments that you wrote so long ago that you can't even remember what you were planning to do with them anymore, that is. In this case, I *do* remember what I was going to do with most of it, so I'm cropping away a few paragraphs in the beginning that seem to have served no role at all...Quote:"Now I hope all of you have as much time as you said you have and nobody will have to leave suddenly. I'm going to explain everything - well, all things of importance - that happened since my last bodily death, what I am doing in this rather inelegantly... lumpy body and what I intend to do for my whole life after this moment, so this is going to take some time. When I had killed myself, I found myself floating high above the surface of Micras as always. What I did first was trying to do the usual thing I do right after I leave a body and want to enter a new one right away: Sending out a couple of spirits to bring me enough organic matter to synthesise a body, simply building it around my detached mind - after floating down to ground level, of course - so that when it's ready I'm a part of it and can just let the psi field that keeps me in one... piece fade out. "But this time it didn't work out that way. I could not control that field and let my mind fall into place in the body. At that time I did not know what was wrong. I tried it again, no luck. I tried it again, again and yet again, until that body decayed too far to be useful anymore. I tried having another body built, it did not help either. Now, I know what it's like to live as an independent spirit, and it's not nearly as good as it sounds. It's actually rather limiting. However, as creating myself a body did not work and stealing one from someone else has never been an option to me - I doubt I'd even have the mental power to drive a soul away from a body as a spirit - the only way to stay alive for me to just keep all my containment fields up and roam without a body. I could at least see the world and maybe find some sage - or necromancer - who could have an idea on what caused my problem and would give a flying fuck about the spirit of some ex-duke who has already lived more lives than most people should and is still asking for more."I did not find one. Instead, when spying one mountain range from the sky, I noticed a rather special village. It was in the middle of nowhere, on a mesa that seemed completely uninhabitable, with a dry, dark alley surrounding it at all sides and high winds constantly wracking the place. In the village, there was a mishmash of all sorts of pottery, small tools and a couple of weapons, and dead human bodies lying on the ground. This would have been interesting enough in its own right, but all this stuff actually spelled out something. I did not know what it was at the time since it was in a language foreign to me, but I could make out the fact that there clearly were letters. I explored the village the best I could without the ability to exert any physical force on anything without great effort, but could not find out what had happened. Apparently the people of the village had just cleaned up their homes of all loose stuff, spread it on their streets, fields and the roofs of their houses, leaving some holes in the pattern and then just nicely dying in the right places so that the picture became complete. "I moved to the nearest settlement to find some answers. There were no necromancers, wizards, priests, druids or even sages to communicate with me there, so I had to settle with intruding people in their dreams and hoping they didn't have too much psionic ability, lest they blow me completely away with an attack that's supported by a real body. I was quite lucky. After seeing a couple of different nightmares, one of which was mostly really silly in my opinion and the other just bland - and I know some stuff in people's heads is so scary you shouldn't go there at night - I found a person who knew a little about the village and spoke, read and wrote the language the message was in. I quickly found out the words spelled out were 'Thank You'. I also found out that the inhabitants of the village had died over half a year ago and nobody knew why their bodies hadn't yet decayed at all - and at this part nobody was willing to check if they had decayed anymore. "A mystery's worth solving even if you're dead and can't come back to life, so I returned to the village and searched through it more carefully than before. This time I noticed that there was an old man with a whiff of life still present in him sitting in one of the houses. He looked like he had been sitting there for two years, and there was a thick layer of dust on him. Still, he breathed, although only a couple of times in a minute, and so he was alive. The first thing he told me was that he saw me as clearly as if I was alive and in flesh in front of him. That is, not at all, since his eyes were closed and dusted over, but he was still quite aware of my presence. "He told me about the inhabitants of the village on the mesa. A long time ago, these people had lived in all corners of Micras. They were in high positions in their societies, often being unquestioned rulers and dictators. They had possessed a great deal of knowledge about the different aspects of life on Micras, and knew the great wonders of its history. Many of them had been a part of it, after all. But over time all of them had noticed one thing: They should leave. Perhaps they had had enough of the hostility of Micrasian politics and wanted to try living in a world where friendship was valued more, or perhaps they noticed nobody wanted them in their nation anymore, or perhaps there was something they were responsible for in some other world and living in Micras was taking too much of their time. Whatever their reason for it was, they all knew they had to leave that world. "How they got to know about the village, he never told me. It was irrelevant, anyway. But one by one they left their places, just slowly enough not to cause suspicion. And they all came to this village, ... and that's where it ended. Back when I wrote this I was planning on establishing a "retirement home" for micronationalists who really just didn't anymore... and also, back then I could actually write for shit, unlike now. However, I left the project to die when I finally realised the full extent of its paradoxality. The league of sadistic telepaths: "There's someone in your head and it's not you"