Francess Penn (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} out_of_body) wrote,@ 2009-03-26 20:11:00 |
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Invisible Girl
[During the Personality Trait Plot]
Habits were an odd thing. Ingrained over several years, they became second nature. Even when the situation didn't call for a certain action, if one had been conditioned to perform that particular action, one often did it without thinking. Maybe that was why Avery still stood in front of the bathroom vanity mirror when he brushed his teeth. Of course, he couldn't see his teeth; he couldn't see any part of himself. But it would feel a little ridiculous for him to do it over the kitchen sink, for instance. He finished up, rinsing off the blue toothbrush and setting it in its ceramic holder. The vampire wiped his mouth on a towel hanging on the rack, flipped off the bathroom light and entered the illuminated hallway.
The curtains were drawn tightly against the remaining day, the sun sinking resignedly over the horizon line of the lake. He yawned, crossing the room idly into his kitchen. Opening the fridge, Avery contemplated the contents, then closed the door again. He rearranged some magnets on the white surface, his thoughts lost in what he'd like to do that night. Absentmindedly, he opened the refrigerator again, as if what was inside may have mutated into something different and more appealing. No such luck.
Diary of Francess Penn
March 20, 2014
Dear Diary,
There are 6 steps to achieving 'out of body travel', according to Robert Monroe.
Step 1... Lie down in a semi-dark, quiet room and shut your eyes. It's best to lay down in north-south orientation, but I can't figure out why. It might be an earth polarization thing.
Step 2... Enter a meditative state through progressive muscle relaxation (pee first!) and deep breathing.
Step 3... Enter a stage of such relaxation, you're almost asleep or hypnogogic. If you're prone to falling asleep, hold one arm up. If it falls, you'll wake back up!
Step 4... Clear your mind and focus on the light patterns on your eyelids (they look like paisley to me, but it turns out they're neural discharges).
Step 5... Concentrate on the void beyond your eyelids. Select a point a foot beyond them and focus on it, then two feet, and so on. Think about rising up and how nice it would be to float (they all float down here?). Alternate method: Roll your ethereal self out of your body, but that weirds me out because it reminds me of shedding a crunch exoskeleton.
Step 6... Do it!
So Fran, no longer too cautious to fly, learned how.
She came into the vampire's apartment from above, sinking through layers of wood and insulation and more. The light coming from his refrigerator was luminous, seeming more so because there wasn't much inside... At least when compared to the cramped refrigerator of her parents' home, with its endless jars of jelly, pickles, and mayo, its collapsed bottles of yellow mustard and packaged sandwich meats.
Oh God, was her ethereal body wearing anything?
Funny how checking that only occurred to Francess once she was hovering behind the vampire. Looking down, she saw that she was ghost-like, translucent, so far only a vague shape of a girl named Francess. Only once had someone perceived her presence, anyway, a strange vampire that saw her face and heard her voice as a watery echo, so faint, its origin not vocal chords but her mind.
Avery was bent at the waist. Fran could see his boxer shorts in the gap between his shirt and pants, and a tag with laundering instructions flipped upward. Machine wash. Tumble dry.
He straightened, a thoughtful frown on his face as he studied the label on a plastic container of parmesan cheese. It was from when he made spaghetti for Francess, and Avery wondered if it was still good. Closing the fridge door with his bare foot, he turned around and pulled the green plastic cover open, head bent downward as he sniffed it. It was only when he felt the odd sensation of being watched that he looked up.
And subsequently dropped the grated cheese onto the hardwood kitchen floor.
The vampire blinked once, blinked twice. Swiped the back of his hand over his eyes, before determining he wasn't imagining anything. "Francess?" Then his expression cleared, eyes widening in realization. "You're doing that thing, aren't you?" Tentatively, slowly, he reached out a hand and tried to touch the apparition of her form. His fingertips felt only air. "Wow."
"You can see me?" She was surprised, pleasantly so, having thought that Nathan's perception of her was a fluke. Perhaps the demon aspect of Avery allowed him to see, gave him sight beyond an ordinary human's eyes. "Can you hear me?" The voice, if he received it, would've been faint and slightly broken, like radio signal coming from a tower just too distant, or how the world sounded when one's ears needed popping.
Francess found her ethereal self over-pronouncing her words, in hopes that Avery could read her lips. "I wasn't being a peeping tom! I just wanted to try!" she explained hurriedly, because what if he thought she spied on him while he slept or took a shower?
Avery tilted his head, watching her face carefully. There was a sound like trying to talk to someone on a cell phone on the subway, crackled and piecemeal words that were faint. "Something's making you cry?," he translated incorrectly. The vampire glanced down, noticing there were speckles of water on his t-shirt from the spray of the sink, making a pattern of little dark dots on the material.
For one brief moment, he had been about to invite her to sit, but could she? Or would she just sink through the chair? "Have you been anywhere interesting?"
"What? No. No crying." Francess shook her head. She found herself twisting incorporeal hands, wishing not for the first time that she knew sign language. How could she tell him where she'd gone? That she'd inspected her other neighbors' apartments to see who had the most square footage of closet space, and whose apartment was the source of the boiling broccoli smell?
She touched her lip, and then gestured at Avery's, though it resembled blowing a kiss. "You have toothpaste," she said. If there in body as well as spirit, Fran thought, she would've leaned closer and enveloped the bluish paste with her mouth.
He touched his own lip, felt nothing, then remembered the opposite side. When he pulled his fingers away, he could see what she meant. Avery turned around to the counter and pulled a paper towel off the roll, using that to wipe his mouth. Crumpling it into a soft ball in his fist, he stared at her in amazement. "You can see anyone," the vampire said, a small note of wonderment in his voice. "You can see what they eat for dinner, hear their arguments." The idea intrigued him; he had always found other people's lives curious and fascinating.
The vampire hovered his hand, millimeters away from her transparent, incorporeal skin. "Can you feel that?"
Francess raised her hand and placed it where it met Avery's, overlapping his physical body with her etheric one. "A little," she said. "It's like air pudding." There was a subtle difference between how empty space felt to her as opposed to solid objects. According to her new, favorite theorist, it had something to do with vibrating frequencies; her 'second' body had weight and malleable form. She slipped her fingers between the vampire's.
Reaching through Avery would be similar to traveling through walls, except harder. Francess would feel more resistance from him, perhaps because he had a 'second' body, too, inside him. "See?" She concentrated on his palm and attempted to slip through him. But it was a bit like trying to push two positive magnets together. It produced a resistant sensation that was almost like touch.
Avery held up his hand for her, watching her intently. "Wow," he said, feeling a slight push. He looked up at her, grinning. "You've really been practicing." He looked over his shoulder at the shuttered kitchen window. The sun had dropped, and while it wasn't full dark, it was safe enough. "Can I show you something?," he asked, turning back to face Francess. "It's kind of up high, and I know how you feel about heights, but..." The vampire trailed off, a hopeful smile overtaking his features.
"I'm not afraid of anything right now," she said, it being clear that Fran felt wonderment at that statement. Whatever had changed within her in recent weeks had allowed her to do things she always wanted. To get closer to Avery. To let go and really act on the tiny stage where she took beginner classes. To pick up a book on a famed expert of out-of-body travel, relinquish her worries, and give herself over to the techniques he suggested. She wasn't too scared to lift out of her body and fly. She didn't constantly look over her shoulder to make sure the cord still connected her to it.
"Show me," she said, smiling.
Deciphering the smile as a positive response, he nodded. "Okay, so, I think you'll like this. Or you'll just think I'm strange." Avery gave a careless shrug as he shot her another smile, before gesturing for her to follow him to the living room. He undid the locks on his front door, briefly wondering what it would be like to have locks be of no consequence, nor walls or other boundaries. To go anywhere, see anything. He wouldn't even begin to know where to start.
He held the front door open for her. "Figured this might just be easier for you," the vampire explained. "I don't know if it takes energy to do that or not. Do you get tired out?"
Francess resembled a ghost moving through his apartment. Her feet hit the floor, but there was no sound. She knew that Avery could barely hear her, so she gave a bit shrug. "I don't know. I've never stayed this long." She touched her wrist, where a watch would be worn. It had also never been on purpose, just incidents where her spirit wandered out of her sleeping body. When traveling, Fran had been like a person resisting sleep-- she drifted into the etheric world, like a sleepy head bobbing, then realized where she was and jolted back into it.
She followed him out.
Avery walked past the elevator and found one of the stairwells. It was a heavy push-door with a flickering red, glowing 'Exit' sign above it. The fluorescent tubes buzzed audibly as he pushed it open, glancing behind him to make sure she was still following. The vampire began walking up the stairs, one hand on the metal rail. "I'd have taken you on the elevator," he told her, "but it doesn't go to where I want to show you."
The stairs were strange for Francess to manipulate. So far in the etheric world, when she wanted to go up, she simply concentrated on the space above her and floated directly there. Going in a horizontal line didn't require steps, but she took them out of habit. On the diagonal stairs, her steps didn't seem to sync up with the risers, so it looked more like she was traveling up an escalator.
It was odd, not being able to reach out and touch Avery's back in the traditional sense. Where the vampire saw opportunities in her gift, Fran noticed the limitations, often forgetting herself and trying to grab, only to grasp at nothing. Too, the world looked different to her. It was more vibrant. It hummed. There were presences sensed that she normally wouldn't in her physical body. Unusual hazes around unremarkable objects. Once, a faint image of a frightening face squirming behind the guise of a regular one, which she hadn't understood.
She stopped when Avery stopped.
He opened a second door, this one locked. He had to exert a fair amount of force to jimmy it open, and he led her out onto the tarred roof. From their vantage point, it looked as if there was nothing between them and the lake, as if they had stepped off the edge, they'd plummet to the water below. It was an expanse of inky black, so dark it didn't even reflect. There were tiny dots of yellow light in the distance. Avery looked at her over his shoulder. "It's nothing mind-blowing, I know. I just like how it looks, almost as if the world ends right here and drops off at the horizon." A cold breeze rushed past them, amplified by the height. "Do you get cold, like that?"
"Wow." Francess was next to him. Looking out over the lake, she stretched her translucent arms backward, like Atlas with the globe. In this case, the city could've been on her back, for how it felt from her perspective. "It's like being a mermaid on the bow of a pirate ship!" she said, smiling at Avery. As she voiced it, the strands of her hair began to flow backwards. There was a connection between Fran's perception of her etheric self and her appearance.
"I don't feel cold or warm," she said.
Avery smiled at her, feeling pleased and an odd sense of pride, not because he had any part in creating this view, but for showing it to her. "When it was really cold out, it almost looked as if you could walk right across the blocks of ice to Michigan. Not that I'd ever try. But you probably could have, in this form." He looked back at the lake, the perfectly smooth surface. "Then you can turn around and see the whole city. But I prefer this perspective."
Francess looked at it, too, and then back to Avery. What had she been so afraid of? With Avery and heights and out-of-body and everything? For two weeks straight, she had been free of being so cautious. She took chances. For the first time in Fran's life, she jaywalked, and she didn't get hit by a car, either. She blew her hair dry over the bathroom sink, without worrying about some freak accident involving dropping the appliance and turning the faucet on simultaneously. She wore a skirt on a really windy day. She kept her library books out late. She opened an umbrella in her apartment. In fact, it was a good thing she didn't have someplace to travel, or she might've hitchhiked the whole way.
She lifted a hand and tried to touch the side of his face. When she pressed hard enough, her fingertips disappeared. Fran quickly pulled them back; that had brought new meaning to invading his personal space. "Sorry!" she said in her radio-interference-voice. "I wanted to say thank you."
Her other words were lost on the air, but he could read her lips and connect it to the tinny, faint sounds he could make out. He didn't mind when she touched him, or at least, seemed to touch him. Avery nodded slightly, his fingers trying to run through her ethereal hair. "You're welcome," the vampire told her. "Thank you for coming with me. And not just tonight." He turned and crept further toward the edge, before sinking down onto the gritty surface of the roof, crossing his legs. "Do you want to sit with me?"
Francess nodded. She stared at the black rooftop, considering how to lower herself onto it without sinking into someone's living room. It was apparently a matter not of moving, in this state, but of shifting her perception of her physical body into a sitting one. Once on eye level with Avery, she stopped and held on. "For a while," she said and then kept the silence. How much longer her confidence would hold out, she wasn't sure. But she could see a faint, trailing line behind her, only barely visible, that connected her to the physical body. She knew she was safe.
[During the Personality Trait Plot]
Habits were an odd thing. Ingrained over several years, they became second nature. Even when the situation didn't call for a certain action, if one had been conditioned to perform that particular action, one often did it without thinking. Maybe that was why Avery still stood in front of the bathroom vanity mirror when he brushed his teeth. Of course, he couldn't see his teeth; he couldn't see any part of himself. But it would feel a little ridiculous for him to do it over the kitchen sink, for instance. He finished up, rinsing off the blue toothbrush and setting it in its ceramic holder. The vampire wiped his mouth on a towel hanging on the rack, flipped off the bathroom light and entered the illuminated hallway.
The curtains were drawn tightly against the remaining day, the sun sinking resignedly over the horizon line of the lake. He yawned, crossing the room idly into his kitchen. Opening the fridge, Avery contemplated the contents, then closed the door again. He rearranged some magnets on the white surface, his thoughts lost in what he'd like to do that night. Absentmindedly, he opened the refrigerator again, as if what was inside may have mutated into something different and more appealing. No such luck.
Diary of Francess Penn
March 20, 2014
Dear Diary,
There are 6 steps to achieving 'out of body travel', according to Robert Monroe.
Step 1... Lie down in a semi-dark, quiet room and shut your eyes. It's best to lay down in north-south orientation, but I can't figure out why. It might be an earth polarization thing.
Step 2... Enter a meditative state through progressive muscle relaxation (pee first!) and deep breathing.
Step 3... Enter a stage of such relaxation, you're almost asleep or hypnogogic. If you're prone to falling asleep, hold one arm up. If it falls, you'll wake back up!
Step 4... Clear your mind and focus on the light patterns on your eyelids (they look like paisley to me, but it turns out they're neural discharges).
Step 5... Concentrate on the void beyond your eyelids. Select a point a foot beyond them and focus on it, then two feet, and so on. Think about rising up and how nice it would be to float (they all float down here?). Alternate method: Roll your ethereal self out of your body, but that weirds me out because it reminds me of shedding a crunch exoskeleton.
Step 6... Do it!
So Fran, no longer too cautious to fly, learned how.
She came into the vampire's apartment from above, sinking through layers of wood and insulation and more. The light coming from his refrigerator was luminous, seeming more so because there wasn't much inside... At least when compared to the cramped refrigerator of her parents' home, with its endless jars of jelly, pickles, and mayo, its collapsed bottles of yellow mustard and packaged sandwich meats.
Oh God, was her ethereal body wearing anything?
Funny how checking that only occurred to Francess once she was hovering behind the vampire. Looking down, she saw that she was ghost-like, translucent, so far only a vague shape of a girl named Francess. Only once had someone perceived her presence, anyway, a strange vampire that saw her face and heard her voice as a watery echo, so faint, its origin not vocal chords but her mind.
Avery was bent at the waist. Fran could see his boxer shorts in the gap between his shirt and pants, and a tag with laundering instructions flipped upward. Machine wash. Tumble dry.
He straightened, a thoughtful frown on his face as he studied the label on a plastic container of parmesan cheese. It was from when he made spaghetti for Francess, and Avery wondered if it was still good. Closing the fridge door with his bare foot, he turned around and pulled the green plastic cover open, head bent downward as he sniffed it. It was only when he felt the odd sensation of being watched that he looked up.
And subsequently dropped the grated cheese onto the hardwood kitchen floor.
The vampire blinked once, blinked twice. Swiped the back of his hand over his eyes, before determining he wasn't imagining anything. "Francess?" Then his expression cleared, eyes widening in realization. "You're doing that thing, aren't you?" Tentatively, slowly, he reached out a hand and tried to touch the apparition of her form. His fingertips felt only air. "Wow."
"You can see me?" She was surprised, pleasantly so, having thought that Nathan's perception of her was a fluke. Perhaps the demon aspect of Avery allowed him to see, gave him sight beyond an ordinary human's eyes. "Can you hear me?" The voice, if he received it, would've been faint and slightly broken, like radio signal coming from a tower just too distant, or how the world sounded when one's ears needed popping.
Francess found her ethereal self over-pronouncing her words, in hopes that Avery could read her lips. "I wasn't being a peeping tom! I just wanted to try!" she explained hurriedly, because what if he thought she spied on him while he slept or took a shower?
Avery tilted his head, watching her face carefully. There was a sound like trying to talk to someone on a cell phone on the subway, crackled and piecemeal words that were faint. "Something's making you cry?," he translated incorrectly. The vampire glanced down, noticing there were speckles of water on his t-shirt from the spray of the sink, making a pattern of little dark dots on the material.
For one brief moment, he had been about to invite her to sit, but could she? Or would she just sink through the chair? "Have you been anywhere interesting?"
"What? No. No crying." Francess shook her head. She found herself twisting incorporeal hands, wishing not for the first time that she knew sign language. How could she tell him where she'd gone? That she'd inspected her other neighbors' apartments to see who had the most square footage of closet space, and whose apartment was the source of the boiling broccoli smell?
She touched her lip, and then gestured at Avery's, though it resembled blowing a kiss. "You have toothpaste," she said. If there in body as well as spirit, Fran thought, she would've leaned closer and enveloped the bluish paste with her mouth.
He touched his own lip, felt nothing, then remembered the opposite side. When he pulled his fingers away, he could see what she meant. Avery turned around to the counter and pulled a paper towel off the roll, using that to wipe his mouth. Crumpling it into a soft ball in his fist, he stared at her in amazement. "You can see anyone," the vampire said, a small note of wonderment in his voice. "You can see what they eat for dinner, hear their arguments." The idea intrigued him; he had always found other people's lives curious and fascinating.
The vampire hovered his hand, millimeters away from her transparent, incorporeal skin. "Can you feel that?"
Francess raised her hand and placed it where it met Avery's, overlapping his physical body with her etheric one. "A little," she said. "It's like air pudding." There was a subtle difference between how empty space felt to her as opposed to solid objects. According to her new, favorite theorist, it had something to do with vibrating frequencies; her 'second' body had weight and malleable form. She slipped her fingers between the vampire's.
Reaching through Avery would be similar to traveling through walls, except harder. Francess would feel more resistance from him, perhaps because he had a 'second' body, too, inside him. "See?" She concentrated on his palm and attempted to slip through him. But it was a bit like trying to push two positive magnets together. It produced a resistant sensation that was almost like touch.
Avery held up his hand for her, watching her intently. "Wow," he said, feeling a slight push. He looked up at her, grinning. "You've really been practicing." He looked over his shoulder at the shuttered kitchen window. The sun had dropped, and while it wasn't full dark, it was safe enough. "Can I show you something?," he asked, turning back to face Francess. "It's kind of up high, and I know how you feel about heights, but..." The vampire trailed off, a hopeful smile overtaking his features.
"I'm not afraid of anything right now," she said, it being clear that Fran felt wonderment at that statement. Whatever had changed within her in recent weeks had allowed her to do things she always wanted. To get closer to Avery. To let go and really act on the tiny stage where she took beginner classes. To pick up a book on a famed expert of out-of-body travel, relinquish her worries, and give herself over to the techniques he suggested. She wasn't too scared to lift out of her body and fly. She didn't constantly look over her shoulder to make sure the cord still connected her to it.
"Show me," she said, smiling.
Deciphering the smile as a positive response, he nodded. "Okay, so, I think you'll like this. Or you'll just think I'm strange." Avery gave a careless shrug as he shot her another smile, before gesturing for her to follow him to the living room. He undid the locks on his front door, briefly wondering what it would be like to have locks be of no consequence, nor walls or other boundaries. To go anywhere, see anything. He wouldn't even begin to know where to start.
He held the front door open for her. "Figured this might just be easier for you," the vampire explained. "I don't know if it takes energy to do that or not. Do you get tired out?"
Francess resembled a ghost moving through his apartment. Her feet hit the floor, but there was no sound. She knew that Avery could barely hear her, so she gave a bit shrug. "I don't know. I've never stayed this long." She touched her wrist, where a watch would be worn. It had also never been on purpose, just incidents where her spirit wandered out of her sleeping body. When traveling, Fran had been like a person resisting sleep-- she drifted into the etheric world, like a sleepy head bobbing, then realized where she was and jolted back into it.
She followed him out.
Avery walked past the elevator and found one of the stairwells. It was a heavy push-door with a flickering red, glowing 'Exit' sign above it. The fluorescent tubes buzzed audibly as he pushed it open, glancing behind him to make sure she was still following. The vampire began walking up the stairs, one hand on the metal rail. "I'd have taken you on the elevator," he told her, "but it doesn't go to where I want to show you."
The stairs were strange for Francess to manipulate. So far in the etheric world, when she wanted to go up, she simply concentrated on the space above her and floated directly there. Going in a horizontal line didn't require steps, but she took them out of habit. On the diagonal stairs, her steps didn't seem to sync up with the risers, so it looked more like she was traveling up an escalator.
It was odd, not being able to reach out and touch Avery's back in the traditional sense. Where the vampire saw opportunities in her gift, Fran noticed the limitations, often forgetting herself and trying to grab, only to grasp at nothing. Too, the world looked different to her. It was more vibrant. It hummed. There were presences sensed that she normally wouldn't in her physical body. Unusual hazes around unremarkable objects. Once, a faint image of a frightening face squirming behind the guise of a regular one, which she hadn't understood.
She stopped when Avery stopped.
He opened a second door, this one locked. He had to exert a fair amount of force to jimmy it open, and he led her out onto the tarred roof. From their vantage point, it looked as if there was nothing between them and the lake, as if they had stepped off the edge, they'd plummet to the water below. It was an expanse of inky black, so dark it didn't even reflect. There were tiny dots of yellow light in the distance. Avery looked at her over his shoulder. "It's nothing mind-blowing, I know. I just like how it looks, almost as if the world ends right here and drops off at the horizon." A cold breeze rushed past them, amplified by the height. "Do you get cold, like that?"
"Wow." Francess was next to him. Looking out over the lake, she stretched her translucent arms backward, like Atlas with the globe. In this case, the city could've been on her back, for how it felt from her perspective. "It's like being a mermaid on the bow of a pirate ship!" she said, smiling at Avery. As she voiced it, the strands of her hair began to flow backwards. There was a connection between Fran's perception of her etheric self and her appearance.
"I don't feel cold or warm," she said.
Avery smiled at her, feeling pleased and an odd sense of pride, not because he had any part in creating this view, but for showing it to her. "When it was really cold out, it almost looked as if you could walk right across the blocks of ice to Michigan. Not that I'd ever try. But you probably could have, in this form." He looked back at the lake, the perfectly smooth surface. "Then you can turn around and see the whole city. But I prefer this perspective."
Francess looked at it, too, and then back to Avery. What had she been so afraid of? With Avery and heights and out-of-body and everything? For two weeks straight, she had been free of being so cautious. She took chances. For the first time in Fran's life, she jaywalked, and she didn't get hit by a car, either. She blew her hair dry over the bathroom sink, without worrying about some freak accident involving dropping the appliance and turning the faucet on simultaneously. She wore a skirt on a really windy day. She kept her library books out late. She opened an umbrella in her apartment. In fact, it was a good thing she didn't have someplace to travel, or she might've hitchhiked the whole way.
She lifted a hand and tried to touch the side of his face. When she pressed hard enough, her fingertips disappeared. Fran quickly pulled them back; that had brought new meaning to invading his personal space. "Sorry!" she said in her radio-interference-voice. "I wanted to say thank you."
Her other words were lost on the air, but he could read her lips and connect it to the tinny, faint sounds he could make out. He didn't mind when she touched him, or at least, seemed to touch him. Avery nodded slightly, his fingers trying to run through her ethereal hair. "You're welcome," the vampire told her. "Thank you for coming with me. And not just tonight." He turned and crept further toward the edge, before sinking down onto the gritty surface of the roof, crossing his legs. "Do you want to sit with me?"
Francess nodded. She stared at the black rooftop, considering how to lower herself onto it without sinking into someone's living room. It was apparently a matter not of moving, in this state, but of shifting her perception of her physical body into a sitting one. Once on eye level with Avery, she stopped and held on. "For a while," she said and then kept the silence. How much longer her confidence would hold out, she wasn't sure. But she could see a faint, trailing line behind her, only barely visible, that connected her to the physical body. She knew she was safe.