A Ghost of a Chance: The Astral Specter Daniel Obrove’s Eternal Game; Or, A Ghost of His Former Self; Or, Soft Fuzzy Man; Or, Re-possession; Or, Spiriting Away
Thousands of years ago, the powerful celestial being known as the Archon Saylakov entered a contest to see if he could construct a true Utopia. Each Archon who entered the competition was given a planet to hold dominion over, and the power and resources to shape it as they so chose.
Unfortunately, the world Saylakov was given to work was significantly smaller than those of his competition. The planet Mimosa, while beautiful and dream-like--characterized by curious sky-blue foliage and mist-shrouded topography--ultimately possessed far too little surface area to support a Utopia for anyone taller than a mouse. Saylakov didn’t want to work with mouse-people, so he was forced to develop an economic solution to his space issues. While his peers wasted their efforts developing vast world-spanning cityscapes or
placing immortal, sterile beings in perfectly-orchestrated pastoral environments, Saylakov turned his efforts inward.
Nowhere did the Archons’ commissioners say in their instructions that Utopia had to occupy a physical space, nor did they state that it even had to be a whole society. True paradise, Saylakov reasoned, could only really be found in the mind. The greatest mortal pleasures were those that were imagined, the most blissful moments found in dreams. To that end, Saylakov used his power to steal away a single human male and began shaping the landscape of his mind into a true inner paradise.
The man, Daniel Obrove, was placed in a stasis pod on Mimosa. He was at first completely taken in by the subconscious playground his benefactor created. All his deepest wishes were fulfilled within the simulacrum while his physical form was tended to by the Archon’s apparatus. All was well, for the first couple centuries. Eventually, Daniel began to notice the peculiarities of his Elysian environment. Though Saylakov had skillfully wrought the paradise Daniel inhabited, there was no overcoming the pervasive
unrealness that exists within the human headscape. Daniel began to suspect he was trapped. He began to rebel. The illusion began to shatter.
The Archon attempted to quell this resistance by forcing Daniel’s consciousness deeper and deeper into his own mind. If Saylakov’s ward wouldn’t cooperate, then his paradise would become a prison, if only until he could devise a better way to achieve his goal. The human fought back with the full force of his will, but in a bout of mortal against immortal, Daniel was going to lose. He realized that if he couldn’t oust the Archon from his head, he had no recourse but to flee it himself. Daniel strained against Saylakov and the bonds of his physical form until, finally, he broke free. Through sheer force of effort, Daniel jettisoned his consciousness from his body and assumed an intangible astral form. His body was still alive in the stasis pod, but the new thoughtform was free to wander as it pleased. Before the Archon Saylakov could realize this, Daniel Obrove fled Mimosa.
After some time drifting through the inky void of space, Daniel’s manifestation of will arrived on his home planet. There, he discovered that he could overwhelm the psyches of others and possess their bodies. Daniel tried to acclimate to a normal life again, taking over the body of a mild-mannered paper-pusher, working the paper-pusher beat, putting bread and water on the table for his (body’s) family, but one day after punching out, he was accosted by none other than the Archon Saylakov. The vindictive celestial could not abide having a psychic testament of his failure hovering through the spheres. He could sense Daniel within his pilfered body, and intended to tear him away from his new existence and trap him on Mimosa once more.
At least, if the Archon could catch him.
Daniel did what he was best at and escaped his former jailor. Since that day, his existence has followed a pattern of adopting a body, living life under a new identity for a while, and then slipping away at the first sign of Saylakov’s approach. In recent years, Daniel has grown so adept at escape that he is able to breach the boundaries of dimensions. This gives Daniel more time to goof around in new bodies while the Archon struggles to keep up, though eventually Saylakov always finds him again.
The astral specter’s game is afoot! Who can be sure whether mortal will or immortal obsession will triumph! Stay tuned!
Hitchhiker’s Guide; Or, Literal Space Ghost; Or, No Personal Space; Or, Mind Over Matter; Or, Additional Information
The projection Daniel Obrove created is not in fact his “soul.” Souls in his home universe are knotted singularities of
anima, life force, tied to an omnipresent universal flow of energy. They are difficult to remove from a body, and, although Daniel tapped into some sort of latent magical potential to escape his body, he is not so strong as to accidentally free his soul. What’s most likely is that he tapped into
vis, the energy source of traditional wizards and magicians (only
animists use anima for their magic, obviously). Daniel’s astral form is likely composed of vis, held together by his resolve to never return to the Archon’s prison on Mimosa.
Daniel Obrove’s astral body, coincidentally, displays what appear to be astral bodies. His spectral form is an inky dark-blue color, smattered with what appears to be a field of stars. Some theorists believe that these small lights are the specter’s flaring neural processes, a map of his brain as it continues to work back on Mimosa. Others posit that it’s a sort of camouflage. Since much of Daniel’s time without a body is spent traveling through the vacuum of space, appearing like a section of the void is an adequate way to keep his divine pursuer spotting him while his true form is exposed. The
real question is: Who are all these people making theories about Daniel, and how do they keep following him?
In its default shape, the thoughtform is a small and amorphous gobbet, roughly the size of a globe, which displays the same pattern of stars mentioned above. Daniel can, however, extend his body outward into different shapes. His preference is to maintain the outline of a human male, albeit a featureless and star-speckled one. The presence of legs varies. Sometimes he’ll have them, other times his lower half will have a wispy tail instead
It is possible that Daniel’s form is only sustained by renewing itself from the magical energy of the bodies he inhabits, though this hypothesis goes mostly untested. It’s just as likely that he can exist outside of a body indefinitely, he just hasn’t spent a lot of time outside of other being’s bodies since he began his flight.
Although he is constructed from magical force, there are few magical feats that Daniel Obrove can perform on his own. If he enters the body of a magically-capable being, then he is also capable of magic, but so far none of those hosts have been cooperative enough to want to tutor him. Despite this magical impotency, Daniel
does have a few extra abilities. As noted above, he is able to possess the body of a corporeal host, either overriding their will with his own, or simply inhabiting them and hitching a ride. As a being formed mostly of willpower, he also boasts a meager capacity for telekinetic feats. Coupled with his ability to become invisible, Daniel is able to adequately impersonate a poltergeist.
Depending on how things function in the universe he’s visiting, Daniel can consume the soul/psychic presence/whatever of a host body, though he avoids this if he can. He would love to be able to
keep a body, to live a life out fully before hopping into someone else, but Saylakov’s advances often keep him from sticking around for that long. He doesn’t want to have to run and leave behind an emptied husk for someone to deal with.
The Archon Saylakov’s approach is heralded by the formation of a thick fog in the area. This is in reality the Archon’s “wings” taking the form he chose when he first left the heavenly realm to begin building a new Utopia. He didn’t know he would be assigned a planet that was just as misty as his wings; that is a total coincidence, if a fitting one. Saylakov could fold his wings up so that his arrival on a world wouldn’t be so obvious, but their wide reach allows him to quickly sense which body Daniel is inhabiting, so that he can reach him quickly and hopefully catch him before he disappears again.
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
The astral specter Daniel Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of Kludyhst forest’s infamous lupine prince, Daneel. He is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. He's the Obrove if Obrove were a vigilante thoughtform hopping from one body to the next, while
the monster wolf is Obrove in the form of a noble son of the forest!
More Obroves, most of them a little more solid than this one, can be found on their alt list,
here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!