Living with Spirit Girl: Cp9

Living with Spirit Girl
Chapter Nine

I really did not think that Blake could relax his mind enough to allow me to take over. He tended to react strongly to things both mentally and physically. What delighted me was that he usually acted with his vocal chords, which only embarrassed him and did little to nothing harmful to others. The lad sought to control his emotions, which I felt necessary for our cooperation, although any failure by him ended up with no one being hurt. I also admired watching his friends do their best to give him pointers. They were close to his age, and had a history with him, so I felt they would do the better job of helping him. Strangely, it was not Dorothy that provided the best advice, although I considered her the most sensible one. It seemed that Tim and Justus had things in their lives that caused them to need to control themselves, and I sensed Blake taking their advice on how to relax his mind and putting the suggestions into practice.

It surprised me and the others when I suddenly appeared before them. I hugged both of Blake’s friends. I felt him not exactly pleased with what I did, although he kept himself to the background until Dorothy said something that he felt a need to speak a reply. That was when he suddenly appeared back among his friends.

After speaking nothing more than a simple comment, he said, “Sorry, Arraelly.”

Before I could answer, the tone sounded for the end of the lunch period, but I did not feel a need to say much. “It was a good, successful first attempt in a stressful setting, Blake. Nothing to be sorry about. Now, go focus on your studies. I am going to move around and check on things.”

He was picking up his things preparing to move back inside the school as he said, “The brooch is in my pocket, Arraelly, so you should be able to be a little visible if you need.”

“I can sense it, Blake. Thank you. Let me see what I can learn while you attend classes.”

I concentrated to lift myself to the roof of the school. My concern was that I heard Lorither and Honidder speak of needing money. Anything associated with Lorither had death attached to it. We were not a predator species. We did not evolve from killers. As we advanced in intelligence, we did learn the art of gaining advantages and controlling others. Most spoke of us learning the advantage of killing any predator that threatened our territories, but as a rule we were not a species that attacked each other. Those that did were quickly removed with those that continued to kill, meaning killed one more time, needing a more permanent solution. Lorither had many people die at his hands, and I added to that the two school workers who were killed by his men. I had come to Earth due to my determination to catch Lorither, so moved to the roof of the school seeking to determine where he might be found.

While I had used the map programs, it better fit my mentality to see things as they were. My ride with the criminals was only a few days in the past, so I looked around considering present conditions would be as I remembered them. I moved to where I could see the place where the van left the building, then thought about what I would do next.

It was weird standing on the edge of the roof with a fear of falling. My race was an aquatic species. Going down usually meant just swimming in that direction, although I knew about falling. We could breath air, as we tended to live in the shallows that would be exposed at low tide or simply dry up in certain seasons. From my time in the military, I dealt with a number of the major threats to our people. The most dangerous ones were in the water, but those on the land could be big and deadly as well. What was worse, was that those that lived out of the water forced us to come out of our element to deal with them. I had seen comrades fall, and as I stood on the edge of the roof those memories came to my mind.

Yes, it was true that I had floated up to be on the roof. I also told myself that I had floated up to listen in on conversations. However, floating from the roof, flying as a superhero, seemed so wrong to me. I stood there reminding myself of my present non-physical existence. Looking at my arm and seeing the evidence of presently being in the form of a creature who was used to dealing with an air environment I felt should not affect my history of having an alternate life. I forced myself to think of past experiences with vertical movement, but all of that did not make it easy for me to advance to the edge of the roof.

Determined to overcome any mental reservations preventing me from taking advantage of my situation, I floated up from the roof, then directed myself forward with the thought to catch myself if I fell. I stopped with the realization that as an insubstantial entity I could not touch anything. It then came to my mind that Blake did have the brooch in his possession, so I could materialize to a point. In thinking to do so, I looked down and realized that I had moved beyond the edge of the roof and was floating in the air.

The fear of falling was still very strong with me, but I forced myself to confront it. Even with the memories of what I had seen happen to fellow soldiers, no sudden pull of gravity affected me. I came to accept that I was truly non-physical. To overcome one fear, I forced myself to accept that if gravity would pull on me, the ground, roof, even water would not stop my downward movement. It took some more time, but I finally forced myself to accept that I needed to make use of certain benefits of my situation to achieve my objective.

Reminding myself that I should not totally lose my fear of falling, as I would definitely need it when again physical, I descended to the ground. I then walked out to where I could still see signs of the explosion that destroyed one police car. The news reports spoke of a missile, and I found myself agreeing seeing signs of fire. A gravity shock would not have caused any spurts of flame. It looked magnificent under water, but on land the weapon just caused things to suddenly jump, usually hurting us and not the creatures used to moving in air. Agreeing with the reports of what had happened to the police car, I sought other evidence on the ground supporting my memory of the fleeing criminals.

I tried to judge distance as I moved. My problem was that my unit of large distance was much shorter than the units humans used. They actually had comparable smaller units, especially the foot and centimeter. Blake considered it strange that I liked one unit in what he called the English system and another in what he called the metric system, but I reminded him that he also used a different number system than me. Since our development of computer technology, my people used a base sixteen number system. We had nine very limber fingers at the end of each arm, but had never really settled on a base eighteen number system. Some societies had a base twenty, others a base twelve. None that I knew of used a base ten. Conversions were common with most being glad that binary logic came along to establish a standard number system. An added benefit of base sixteen was that it made binary math, functional computer logic, very understandable to children of our world. Anyway, what seemed like strange units to Blake, actually made sense to me, but looked at the distances between places attempting to determine how I could translate my data into terms the humans would understand.

Having watched through the forward window in the van, and having studied the route on the computer, I sought the place where the van had let out all the passengers. While I accepted that I was not moving that fast, a fact reinforced by the speed of vehicles moving past me, I still did not remember being in the van for long. It helped that I saw a neighborhood ahead of me. Walking on the sidewalk, I saw ahead the mass of trees that I remembered. Coming up to where I felt the passengers left the van, I chanced moving out into the road to assure that I had the right place.

I did not see them leave, so I knew they had not gone further up the road. While the trees blocked the view of the flying vehicles, if the criminals had run back along the road they would have been seen. That just left to the right and left. To the right the trees stopped with what I believe was a business district behind the solid fence marking the rear boundary of the yards of some houses. To the left however was a set of hedges, like that I saw the driver move behind, as well as more cover from trees. Feeling certain that they had gone in that direction, I moved from the road.

A feeling to laugh at my earlier fear came over me as I concentrated to float over the hedges instead of moving behind them. The height however was survivable. I also told myself that I needed to retain my fear of heights. I thus put my mind to work hopefully tracking the criminals and not worrying about other things as I floated along.

Something about the yard just looked wrong. I thought back to the driver being able to pretend that he was just watering his yard. Coming from a life in a watery environment, I could easily accept that the plants needed watering. What I saw before me were plastic plants. I actually had to move around and look into the yards of the neighbors to see if they had plastic plants. Seeing the natural foliage around me, the large plastic, balloon tree in this yard looked very out of place.

The grass around the tree was plastic as well. I started to concentrate and become slightly visible when I remembered that I really did not need to move the artificial plant. I put my mind to work to have me float down instead of up.

I did still need light. Enough sunlight however filtered down through the plastic grass that I could make out a door. Instead of knocking, or looking for a doorbell, I simply floated through.

A voice I had heard before spoke my native language into a phone. “*You got it, Lorither. Grab the money and get back.*”

Honidder was a tall man. He sat in front of a couple of computer screens using some type of program with one while watching the signal from a camera with the other. I moved to get a good view of this criminal. I knew Honidder. While it was rumored that he had criminal connections, he did good work to those that could afford him. Considering that I had the reputation of coming back successful, I knew of a couple of times where Honidder was called in to do some lab work so the department would have some evidence already processed to hold a bad guy when I brought him in. Seeing this stranger, this human, speaking my language and directing those committing a crime, I knew that I would need to put my focus on him after I dealt with Lorither.

Feeling that I gained the evidence I sought, I thought to return to Blake. I then considered where I was. I then realized that Lorither and his gang would probably come by this way. Suddenly, I felt a strong need to rush back to Blake.

Concentrating to move my body just did not propel it fast enough for me. Once back at ground level, I stopped to set my mind to return some degree of substance to my form. While I did not feel as I did when Blake was unconscious, I still found enough weight of my body on the ground to enable my feet to work. Working my legs, I propelled myself as fast as possible back to the school.

Approaching the campus, I could only wonder how I would get Blake to switch bodies with me. I almost wanted to cry feeling that he would be in class. Even I would have to agree that he needed to stay at his studies. As much as I wanted to stop Lorither, I would not have Blake ruin his life on my account.

It then hit me that he was alive. Whoever had Honidder’s body was no longer in charge of the form, so was being held in some mental prison or killed. The poor gorilla was now just another victimized pet of Lorither. Blake, my body, still retained his life, his control, of who he was. It never entered my mind that I could have killed him. If the signal that transported me had influenced him directly, without the interference of that locket, I would now be in the body of the young man and he would be dead. I did not want Blake dead, and definitely did not want his body for my own. I was not too happy with the form I had, but it was a separate identity that I could call my own. Thinking to keep him alive, I set myself to stopping the evil from my world.