09:37 Jun 16 2026
Times Read: 34
You really want to keep coming at me? I found your friend drunk in an Alley. Why are all your friends drunks now?
Vampire Attack (Ingress)
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"It's too easy taking over a body when the resident's mind is impaired. This one had consumed a few too many at the bar, and then—after getting in a fight with a group inside—got knocked out and dumped in the alley. Imagine his fright when he saw me coming at him. He tried to scramble away but his limbs wouldn't obey; he only managed a weak, useless twitch. He just kind of rolled into a corner of his mind, as if surrendering the last scrap of himself, and I slid in—smooth, cold, inevitable. The streetlights flickered; the night smelled of stale beer and blood.
At first it felt foreign: the rhythm of his heartbeat, the friction of coarse fabric against skin, the taste of copper at the back of his throat. Then the map of muscle and memory unfolded like a well-worn road beneath my feet. I learned his walk, his curse-softened laugh, the particular ache behind his left eye. Memories came in fragments — a faded photograph he'd kept folded in his wallet, the sound of a woman calling his name, a child's crayon drawing tucked between receipts. They were trinkets, shallow things, but enough to anchor me.
I stood and flexed fingers that had held a bottle more times than a pen. The city seemed to take a breath with me. People passing by glanced at me, never quite meeting my eyes, as if they sensed a wrongness and politely turned away. I tested the edges of control with small things: a cigarette lit and pinched between fingers, the swivel of a head, a curse muttered under breath. The man's vices were easy instruments; his anger, when I pushed it, flared like gasoline.
There is a delicious clarity in newness — a body’s spare parts aligning under a foreign will. I wandered through pockets of memory, sampling tastes, hearing songs that should have been strangers but fit like old keys. I could feel his shame-sour apologies, his debts, the thin hopes he kept that never came. They were weaknesses to be exploited, yes, but also textures I could wear when I moved through the world: a laugh that softened a bark of a command, a limp that made people underestimate me.
Night after night I tried different modes of him. Sometimes I let him stagger to the corner and plead for change, watching the disgust in others tighten into coins. Other times I let his fury loose, feeling the snap of a fist connect, the dull satisfaction of a stumble. It was an education in small cruelties and larger escapes. I remembered how bodies age, how joints complain, how lungs resist when you push them. I learned how to make his voice low and dangerous when the right moment came, how to soften it to coax a smile from someone passing by.
But occupying him is a theft that leaves room for the old owner's ghost. At the edges of dusk, when I relaxed my grip, I would hear his whisperings in the back of the skull — apologies, snatches of song, the wish to be a better man. They nagged, a small chorus I couldn't fully silence. Sometimes he tried to fight back, a brief shudder where his fingers twitched toward a different choice. It was never enough. I had the motion, the intent, the majority; he had only the residue of habit and yearning.
This time felt different, though. Somewhere between the alley and the bar's neon, I found a pocket of warmth I hadn't expected: the memory of small hands and laughter. I didn't know if it belonged to him or if it belonged to the body itself, but it tugged at something that had almost been dead in me — curiosity about continuity, about not being simply a parasite but a passenger who might learn to steer. For a flicker, the idea of keeping him intact, of letting some part of his life continue, crossed my mind.
Then the sirens began to wail in the distance. Instinct won. I adjusted his collar, wiped a smear of blood from his lip with the heel of his hand, and walked toward the sound to see how fear rearranged itself in others when they faced someone who had no right to be there. The city is full of bodies like this one, and rules stacked like a house of cards. All it takes is a gust.
I am patient. There will be more. There will always be more. But sometimes you find a body that surprises you: not with its strength, but with the small, fragile humanity that makes it worth keeping for a while. For now, I walk in his shoes, tasting the world through borrowed senses, making decisions that will ripple through his few remaining days. The thrill is in the experiment — in seeing how far a borrowed life can be bent before it snaps back to its original shape."
That is a lot of memories, but lets start with my first memory after entering this body. Going back into the bar to have some fun with the gang that had dumped my new body in the alley.
I walked into the bar and went straight up to the leader of the gang. He was facing away, but some of the members behind him started motioning for him to turn. When he did, he stared at me in disbelief — he could not believe I (or he) had come back in. He said, "Back for more?" and prepared to swing.
He was slow; I easily dodged his strike and drove my right fist into his right cheek, knocking him to one knee. As another member rushed in, I hit the leader a second time while dodging the attacker. I let the second fighter pass about two feet to my right—just enough space for a spinning kick that caught him in the jaw. He went out cold.
Meanwhile the leader had staggered to his feet. I hit him in the gut, then came down hard with a boot to the side of his knee as he doubled over. He was done, but his gang wasn't. Seven feet away, one of them was raising a revolver. He fired the first shot; I stepped left and felt the bullet pass by. I stepped slightly forward to the right as he fired a second time, and closed in as he squeezed off a third.
The revolver was in my hands before he could react. I opened the cylinder and let the spent and remaining cartridges fall to the floor. I placed the gun on the bar and turned back to the man who had just fired at me three times.
To think I had been without a body just 15 minutes prior...
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