Random stories

Motion in the Lower Three Dimensions was so slow. It always took time. It would take forever, for Oob to get to Barcelona.

So, Oob caught a passing human, who he could see was going there. He would not ride a human who *wasn't* going there. It was very rude, to ride one so far through the Lower Three, if it would not have gone there anyway, and Oob was very polite.

He rode the human through the train station. He rode her towards the boarding platform. Then he rode her onto the train, used her hands to neatly stow her luggage, and parked her in her seat. Along the way, he enjoyed all the wonderful feedback her body provided, from the feeling of her feet in her shoes, to the clever sense of balance that let her walk on just two legs. The first time he rode a human, Oob was sure he was going to make it fall over by accident, but considering how they moved, they were actually remarkably stable.

It was strange, how little the humans themselves appreciated the input from their array of senses, always tuning it out and pushing it away, even though it created such a rich, multifaceted representation of their world. Oob himself loved feeling their senses. If you were going to travel the Lower Three, you simply *had* to travel by human, that was what Oob told all his friends.

Though Oob always enjoyed his rides, the humans seemed incapable of doing so, for the most part. They were always going places, but they seemed to *resent* the journey it took to get there. They would try to shut off their conscious control of themselves, and think about something else, somewhere else, *anything* else, besides where they were, and what they were doing. Fortunately for them, there was Oob, and other beings like him, who needed to get around the Lower Three.

Oob was surprised at first, that the humans never seemed to notice, when they had a rider guiding them around. But it turned out they had a sort of superstition that explained how they got through their days without thinking about what they were doing.

When Oob was riding a human, the *human* thought that it was using some sort of internal "auto-pilot", or "muscle memory", that would take it where it was going. That way, it could use its mind to think about what it was going to do later, or eat later, or see later, or think about the things it saw and heard around it, or what was on its phone, or what it had experienced in the past. It was, of course, a very silly model of reality, but Oob got the impression that humans would find being ridden very distressing if they knew about it, so it was just as well that they deluded themselves.

Oob's human stared vacantly out the window of the train for a while, watching things go by, so Oob could enjoy the scenery. Unfortunately, then she started thinking about how she would like to look at things on her phone. Humans were not as fun to ride, when they were just sitting still in one place and looking at a screen, which generally had only two of the Lower Three Dimensions on it. But it would be impolite to make her keep watching the scenery when she wanted so desperately to look at the little cats in her phone, so Oob dismounted her

He touched her mind with a feeling of gentle affection, to let her know what a good girl she was. The human smiled absently, and sat up a little straighter in her seat, as she pulled out her phone. Humans rarely told *each other* that they were good boys or girls. Oob thought that was sad.

He floated over towards another human, further down the train car, a young male staring out the window, just as Oob preferred. He hopped into the human...and it *bucked* him right back out!

*Get Out!* the human shouted at him, mentally.

Humans couldn't communicate with telepathy! They just made little noises at each other! Oob floated before the strange human, stunned by his bizarre behavior. He saw the human tense up, his eyes wide, as he looked widly around the train car. Of course, the human couldn't *see* Oob. At least Oob didn't think so. But a moment ago he would have been sure the human couldn't sense his presence, or speak telepathically.

Perhaps the human had just been more alert and present than he had first seemed? But no, Oob had accidentally ridden alert humans before. He always realized it, and dismounted quickly. Invariably, the human would just be disoriented for a moment, and then laugh, or shake it's head, and maybe say something like "Sorry, brain fart." or "Lost my train of thought."

Oob tried to touch the human's senses with a soothing feeling, like he'd done to one he'd ridden earlier. He felt bad for upsetting him. But instead of relaxing, the human jerked reflexively, and flailed his limbs.

"What the fffffaaahhhhh!" he cried, incoherently, shivering despite the agreeable temperature on the train, and drawing the attention of other nearby humans.

Oob felt even worse, then. This was starting to look like what happened when rude beings of Oob's people rode humans in ways that disturbed and disoriented them, and made them start rambling about "alien abduction" and "ghosts".

"Sorry, I, um, I thought I...saw a bug." the human said, weakly, to another human that had begun staring at him.

Oob was very disturbed. But he was also curious. The human seemed to be able to communicate with its mind. On the other hand, it was terrified when Oob tried to send it just a gentle emotional impression. It was so *interesting!* Impulsively, Oob decided he would try something he rarely did, and he began to search the train.

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Submitted by SilasCrane on Sun, Apr 17, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You’re a bodiless benign entity with the ability to possess people. You use this ability to travel and experience physicality. Spotting a suitable host, you leap into it. A second later it says “Get Out!” and you find yourself forcibly ejected out of the body. This has never happened before.