Wreck of the Bluebottle
Having lain quietly in the sunlight for so long, drinking in its heat, the white spirit feels warm and suddenly rowdy, like an overcharged battery ready to burst; you turn your attention to one of the local crabs, eager to learn more about the creature. Gently brushing your fluid aura-body against its carapace, you are briefly conscious of a sound like an explosion under wet muck, and then — you are inside the crab. Your entire essence is entwined through every curl of its tissues, and the flaring of its primitive nerves sparks through you, flooding you with strange new information; you are suddenly aware of exactly the extent to which the lights and shadows around you do or do not resemble an octopus, and the smell of snails in the water awakens a hunger you can't remember ever feeling before.
You have unlocked a new skill.
Splorch: Meld with a living creature which you are capable of subduing, or leave it.
The blue spirit has only dim awareness of its existence before awakening, but it is impossible for so many human souls to gather in such absolute desperation without leaving a phenomenological mark. Their anguish and fear is printed into the scratch marks on the rotting beams where icy hands once scrabbled for purchase before sliding into the abyss. The spiritual smell of them is everywhere, and it isn't hard for you to root out some of the closest bones, your movements stirring the water and gently brushing sand from a limpet-encrusted skull. Though the tenant is long dead, you glean some old sorrow and pain from the bone, grazing like the mollusks do the algae, but you find you are still unsated.
The orange spirit begins to explore its surroundings, making a study of the strange structure where it was born. The wooden ribs of the vessel, though heavy with barnacles and tubeworms, still hold their shape, and the splintered decks offer refuge to little darting fish that eye you glassily, octopuses lurking in cramped gaps, and scuttling crustaceans. All around, the seafloor is littered with bones, scraps of cloth, and the shapeless, disfigured remnants of personal effects. Some skeletons clutch little wooden idols, strings of prayer beads, or tattered leather flaps that must once have bound books, all of which radiate the aura of things which were once important, even worshipped, by people who are themselves no longer remembered in the world. Each one seizes your curiosity for a moment, dropped in turn as your attention shifts to the next find. You can taste desperation and loss everywhere, but only faintly, like a dream that seemed to hold such promise before waking.
As you work your way forward along the axis of the ship, the field of your awareness expands and contracts like breathing, and you notice (in a way difficult to put into words exactly) a blue spirit toward what you do not know would be called the prow, rooting around in the seabed. You have no tongue with which to speak, but you might try to communicate, or turn away in caution.
The Fields, and Beneath
The red spirit feels a strong kinship to its birth-scrap, hoping to make use of conveniently empty vessels to carry it along. Analyzing the bodies with your spiritual senses, you gently push yourself into one and stretch out, wrapping your essence around its fibres. You quickly derive a vague impression of how to make it go, observing the machinery that moves the mighty limbs and the thin, wiry nerves where a well-placed spark would bring that machinery into action, but you find you lack the stored energy to sustain such a discharge, let alone in the coordinated fashion all throughout the body these things seem to need to operate. Tracing the nerves back to their origin in hopes of finding a more efficient place to act, you twine your self through the coiled mass occupying the skull (only slightly decayed), and you are surprised to find it dripping with the taste of delectable memories — memories of pain and bewildered anger and fear for loved ones. Gorging yourself on them almost involuntarily, you learn they take the edge off your hunger in a terribly pleasant way.
After your feast, a thrill of energy shivers through you, and you seem to sense faint ribbons shimmering just outside normal reality, leading somehow away from the corpse you entered: one toward the other of the pair, and two more stretching off in another direction.
You have unlocked a new skill.
Slurp: Consume the memories of the freshly dead to feed yourself and discover their blood ties.
The purple spirit, cautious before venturing into an unknown world, stays where it awoke and stretches its awareness out carefully into the world. You determine that you have been secreted out of the site of your slumber and deposited in a mound of dry dead grass in some kind of wooden structure, seemingly high above the ground. Below you, you hear (in a way) the snuffling of beasts, awake and sleeping, some munching on their own piles of dry grass and lowing softly to one another. There is an air of confusion around them, as if they expected something that had come regularly every day in living memory and has now failed for the first time. Stretching to your absolute limit, you feel the warm sunlight above the roof and outside the walls, and you drink what you can from the shafts that breach gaps in the boards; on the very edge of your awareness, dim and still fairly distant, you become conscious of a colourful dissonance that you eventually recognize as the shadows of beings like yourself, though you cannot tell how many or discern their properties, since you don't yet know how to tell those shadows apart.
Long sleep has left the black spirit wan and hungry, but its birth-scrap has mouldered away to nothing under the strain of millennia, and the shell of non-being to which it is tied can offer little pull to resist its exploration. Weaving upward between the atoms of earth and stone, you finally, after no small travel, break out into the open sunlight, its warmth reinvigorating you after having spent nearly all your life force on the journey. You feel as though you could bask in it forever, but, as much as you enjoy the flood of heat and light into the deep corners of your essence, it tastes like sugar-water after your solitude: a cloying wash of calories and little flavor. As your mind clears, you notice first the grass growing beneath you, then a strange wooden structure rearing up ahead, not unlike the hut in which your birth-scrap once hung, but bigger beyond your capacity for reckoning.
Finally, the grey spirit has waited for longer than several popular star systems have existed, and sees no harm in waiting a few minutes longer. Pulling its essence more densely into itself, it pushes the tendrils of its awareness out at the same time, like a crinoid gently sweeping the flow of the earth's pulse down toward the central core. Though your reserves of energy, collected over a universe's lifetime swimming through glittering starlight, are so great that the effort does not leave you hungry, it seems that the actual benefit gained from tapping into the thin telluric current is not especially satisfying, and the sunlight far overhead would warm you so... as your attention drags itself upward, you also sense three distant and quite distinct incongruities in the background, like colored lenses floating on water, seen from below.
You have unlocked a new skill.
Stretch: Extend your resonant field into a thin tentacle to cross distances without moving.
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Topic: Wild Spirits: a Game for [Seven] to More Players of Ages One Million and Up (Read 1761 times)