Chapter #8Possess Karl. by: Seuzz   You follow Allison out the door, but once you're away from the union you tell her that you need to make a quick, personal visit and that you'll catch up to her at the professor's office. She gives you a puzzled look, but doesn't argue. You leave her and stride purposefully away toward the English building.
Karl gives a double take when you open the door to the classroom and put your head in. "Hey, I thought I'd find you here," you say with a smile. There is no one else in the room, which makes it a perfect opportunity.
"I just wanted to tell you that I thought it was very sweet the way you were trying to bully Sam back there," you continue, going up to him and rubbing the back of his shoulder with your hand. He starts a little at your words, but you don't give him a chance to wonder at what you mean. You just lean over, take his lips in yours, and press your tongue aggressively into his mouth.
He is momentarily surprised, but quickly starts playing along. You aren't shocked: It is pretty clear to you that Karl is jealous of Sam and interested in Mary, but it's still a bit of a marvel to find him so easily receptive to your approach. Still, it wouldn't do to leave your sister with memories of having grabbed him this way, so you wipe her memory of the last few minutes and then send tendrils of blue goo running along her tongue and over Karl's and down his dark, gulping throat ...
You raise your new head to find that you and Mary have sagged against the conference table. This won't do, so you carefully fold her arms under her head so that she'll wake to find herself coming out of a sudden cat nap. Then you slip out of the room and saunter down the hall to the Coke machine.
Bob Kittridge, the English department's novelist-in-residence, is there, and the two of you exchange small talk for a bit. He's eager to know how Karl is getting along in the creative writing program—apparently Kittridge has heard that Karl has some talent—and you play along noncommittally, since you barely have any acquaintance with Karl's mind yet. Still, you try and succeed in spinning the conversation out, and are rewarded when you return to the classroom to find that Mary has vanished. So that's one awkward conversation you have avoided having to have.
But your encounter with Kittridge has left you nervous about having to talk in the workshop. You don't know any of the phrases or jargon or anything, and modern poetry (what you've read of it) just reeks, in your opinion. Nervously, you try running through Karl's head, trying to dig up what you can, but it feels like sludge. It's like when you first moved into Mary, and found that her mind was not responsive—
Oh, right. Your control of his mind won't be natural until after he's had a bit of a sleep. You've only about ten minutes until class starts, and fewer before anyone else shows up. Can you catch enough of a nap before then?
You lay your head down and try to stroke his conscious mind into slumber. Nothing happens. You try using your control of his body to relax his muscles and make his eyes heavy, but you don't even have that kind of control of him. You twist and fiddle with anything you can find in a mind that is mostly opaque to you. Sleep! you find yourself ordering him, as though that will work ...
But then, almost with a bang, everything goes dark. You can't see and you can't hear and you can't feel anything. But his mind blazes to life. Everything you want and need to know is there. But there is just so much—you'd forgotten how much a human mind can hold, and now you remember that it took you hours to fully digest your father and Mary when you were in them—and you despair of being able to digest it all in the little time that remains to you. With an air of resignation, you just wonder if there will be time for the dreams to begin before Karl is woken up by a classmate.
But the dreams don't start. Instead, his mind starts glittering as new and vibrant thoughts start forming. He greets a girl and two guys; he recommends a pizza place to them; he nods hello to the professor; he pulls out his sheaf of writing and starts looking through his notes ("good image"; "mixed metaphor"; "a little stiff and awkward--can't you come up with a different word than 'shiny'?"). Oh my God, you think to yourself. He's awake and he's in control of himself.
But he doesn't seem aware of you, though he is alarmed and confused at having woken from a faint to find an unconscious Mary by his side, and is aghast that he had merely "rearranged" her in a way he thought "satisfactory" and then gone off to get a soda. You snip the memories out of him. You experiment a little further when you prod him to get up and use the restroom before class can properly start; he does exactly as you had commanded, even though you are not working his muscles. This could be useful, you find yourself thinking. I can't see or feel what he's doing, and he's doing it all himself. But I can still push him around. And, with a sigh of relief, you realize you've got all the time in the world to absorb his mind in the meantime.
* * * * *
And that's what you settle back to do as the workshop proceeds. The mind you discover as you settle in more deeply doesn't impress you much. Whatever his poetic talents, Karl is a bit of a scatterbrain. It's no surprise to find he doesn't get along with his parents—who do at least live several hundred miles away, so they don't trouble him much. He isn't dating anyone, not because he is holding out hope for Mary (though you take malicious delight in noting that he lusts heartily after her, and that she shows up in some of his erotic fantasies) but because the girls he is interested in don't reciprocate. His interest in your sober, practical-minded sister is not atypical for the dude; he is partial to "respectable" girls, and relishes the idea of being the "wild," free-spirited guy in the life of such a one. He has not, however, found it to be a particularly realistic fantasy.
So, mostly he hangs out with other slackers and engages in the kind of low-level "activism" that gives him the thrill of being rebellious without actually doing anything substantive or dangerous. Oh, he's quite sincere in his anti-establishment convictions, and cheerfully nurtures morbid conspiracy theories about the corporate and military worlds. He's even half-convinced that they've got a file on him somewhere—probably on a computer in a base buried deep under a mountain in Wyoming.
You swim along inside Karl this way all through class, doing your best to ignore any thoughts he has on the "poetry" being shared by his classmates. (You listen long enough to decide that you can't figure out which is worse: the unicorn poetry being shared by some of the girls, or the overwrought, self-pitying free verse of a couple of the guys, including Karl himself.) You continue to slumber through a few more classes, and through a few hours at a part-time job he holds working in the college bookstore. Not until late in the evening, when your host is back at the house he shares with a couple of similar-minded guys, do you feel comfortable, if a little dirty, for having pulled his mind and personality down around your own. You try to push yourself to the forefront of his consciousness, and the world reappears around you. It is Karl's world, of course, but now it feels like home to you. A grin pulls at the corners of your mouth. You now feel truly part of the college scene.
You find yourself in the living room of a small and very dirty apartment, seated on the floor, with a wad of dough, cheese and tomato sauce coagulating in your mouth. You swallow it down, and then grab another slice of the cheap pizza you're sharing with a couple of his friends. A science-fiction movie is playing on the TV.
By some kind of marvelous coincidence, it's a cheesy, low-grade movie about an invasion of alien body snatchers. The aliens in question are not puddles of blue goo like you yourself are, but they are vaguely blobbish, and they move from host to host in much same manner that you have been doing. You find yourself laughing at inappropriate moments as you catch "echoes" of some of your own body swaps.
In fact, you are soon having so much fun that Derek Travers, one of Karl's housemates, gives you a funny look. "Did you get started before the rest of us?" he asks. You glance back in puzzlement; he just smirks and disappears into his bedroom. When he returns, it's with a plastic bag and a metal pipe. He shakes a few buds from the former into the latter, flicks a lighter over it, and takes a deep hit. Then he passes it to you.
You're not sure what a hit will do to you. Karl has had some bad experiences with the stuff recently; it's been making him paranoid.
You take the pipe and ...  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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