Wish

The mocha-skinned twenty-something beauty, Jasmine, considers, “and if I don't like the deal later?”

“I don't cotton to slavery,” the man in the mirror shrugs, “I will never take all your time, and if you decide it's a raw deal, I won't stop you from pulling me off your finger… after which, I have no power over you whatsoever.”

The woman furrows her brow, “What power over me are you talking about?”

The man considers, “Okay, so… I'm not trying to scare you, but I don't want to deceive and this is inherently scary stuff. Anyone else in the room would see you looking at your reflection, and hear you talking, pausing, and talking more. I'm erasing your perception of your reflection and substituting my image. I'm adding my voice to your perception of sound. I am doing this so we can talk, but I'm not limited to sight and sound, and can erase or add as much as I choose.”

“So you could blind me, or make my mother look like my worst enemy…” she shudders.

“Theoretically, yes,” the Ring agrees, “but the reason I'm a ring and not a lich or body-thief is because I don't want to be evil. I do not wish to take what is yours, I do not wish you to suffer; the worst I'm deliberately going to do to you is find another host. I do want to live, however, and to do that, I need to borrow someone's flesh. So… let's make a deal. What do you think would be a fair trade for some of your time?”

The half-black daughter of a white woman considers, “I want to find my father. What will that cost me?”

The reflection shrugs, “Your own father is straightforward… I'm assuming you have paper, pens, pencils and such I can use?” The younger Smith nods, and so the mage continues, “With you as the focus, I can put together a bloodseeker spell in about an hour, which will get you a full name, a location, a current picture, and some limited indication of his health. Fair warning: The location will just be where he is when the spell goes off. It might be where he lives, it might be where he works, it might be a store he visited, it might be a spot miles up in the air if he happens to be in an airplane in flight… but as long as he's not warded, it will be accurate as of that moment.”

The Ring has the proxy take a completely unnecessary breath to let that sink in before continuing, “additionally, I'd like an equal amount of ‘me time’ - an hour where I can simply pursue my own ends.”

“So two hours…” the woman considers, “Well… I've already spent far more than that without any success. Umm… what are your ends? I don't want to end up in trouble with the law or anything.”

The image chuckles, “In a broad sense, I want to enjoy life. For this first hour, I'm going to spend most of it setting up an alternate identity I can use so as not to tangle up your social life. For the concern… look, you're my host. Anything that would harm you would fall back on me as well… and even if I somehow avoid that, it makes you likely to invoke that ‘Raw deal’ severance I mentioned. I'm not going to deliberately cause you any harm, physically, socially, or mentally. That said: I'm only human… or was, anyway. I will make mistakes. Although that does bring up a concern… if, in my possibly-flawed judgement, I believe you're about to be seriously harmed… do you want me to let it happen, or am I okay to ‘grab the wheel’ so to speak long enough to diffuse the situation?”

Jasmine considers, “Can I change my preference later if I find out you're too jumpy?"

“Any time,” the image confirms.

“Then provisionally… if it happens…” the woman takes a breath, “go ahead.” She pauses, “So how do we do this?”

The Ring shrugs, using Jasmine's body, “Like this. Where's the paper and pens?”

“Dining room, cabinet by the glass door, top drawer,” she speaks in the Ring's mind, “You can just take over, like that?”

“Just like that,” he thinks back at her, not actually speaking as he walks to the indicated area of the house, “and as you can see, you may not be driving, but you're not dead to the world: You still have full access to your senses.”

“The back seat…” a enger in her own body, Jasmine watches and feels everything as the Ring controls every motion, getting several sheets of paper, some pencils, and a sharpener, “This is… umm…” she trails off.

“If you're looking for a word,” the possessing entity thinks back at his host as he sharpens the pencils to a very fine point and begins drawing some intricate almost-patterns on the first sheet of paper, “prior hosts have used, ‘disconcerting’, ‘disorienting’, ‘disturbing’, and ‘weird’... there was one that went with ‘sublime’, but he was weird by MY standards.”

“How many hosts have you had?” The current one wonders, “you make people immortal, but yet…” she pauses, searching for the word.

“But then how did I end up in a garage sale?” the ancient entity completes, “Hmm… how to put this…” the mage continues working as he thinks to his host, “For your direct question, ‘Hundreds’. For the rest… some asked me to do something I refused to do, and I eventually left when they became overly insistent. Some got drunk on wealth and power that I arranged for them at their asking, and I abandoned them rather than them further. Some made crafty enemies who found out about my nature, slipped past us both, and severed the connection before killing my host. Some fell in love and chose to grow old with their mate rather than live without them forever. Some basically forgot I am a person with my own needs, and I left when they simply kept me around as nothing more than **** insurance… and on and on. Average hosting time is a ballpark of ‘centuries’.”

“‘Severed the connection’?” The woman asks as the mage continues his work.

“Literally: The assassin cut off the hand hosting me,” the ring explains, finishing up the first drawing and setting it down, putting a hand on it and causing it to glow as he moves on to the next paper with ‘his’ other hand “I can only save someone if we're connected when they die. By cutting off the hand wearing me first, the assassin was able to keep me from reviving my host. So… please don't tell people; you never know who will get jealous.”

“And you can just… leave if you want?” The voice currently stuck in the back of their shared head sounds a bit concerned.

“I have the option, yes…” the ring replies, one hand on the almost-patterned paper, the other busily sketching a face on autopilot due to magic, “I have basically one spell I can cast without a host, and that's ‘find a host’ - my anchor vanishes from wherever it is and appears at some location where I'm likely to be picked up and put on in relatively short order… and I don't have to be pending a host to cast it. I have the option to walk away, so I make sure you do, too. If you take me off, I won't resist. I won't stick around long, as being without a host is… unpleasant… but I won't stop you.”

“What do you mean by that?” The woman asks her very male spirit as he finishes up the spell, his off-hand having made a very detailed sketch, two numbers that extend to five decimal places, a dash, a five, a name, and a small icon that looks like a horseshoe open downwards.

The man shakes his head slowly, choosing to answer the actual question before reading the results, “I have access to your senses while you're wearing me. When nobody is… I'm basically blind, deaf, and numb. I can… kind of see life forces around me, but that's not very precise. We're you to, say, put me in your pocket, I could tell you were very close by, but that's it. It's almost total sensory deprivation, it's not fun.” The body takes a deep breath, “and I have your results,” he relays to his host, “I can tell you where he is, but meeting him is, umm….”

“Out with it, please,” the woman sighs in her head.

“He's dead,” the mage informs his client bluntly, “The location is for his mortal remains, five feet underground. We can visit his grave if you like. The name is Mathew King, not that you can do much with it… at least the sketch is from before he died, so you can keep that.”

“Mama always did say he was dead…” the woman tries to nod, and fails, “I would like to do at least that much. Can you….”

“I'm not going to raise the old dead, no,” the spellcaster shakes their shared head, “if he's been dead long enough to be buried, his soul will be well past judgement and firmly in the hands of some very powerful entity who likely wants to keep him. Given a few weeks I could get his old flesh up and running well enough to fool a doctor, access his memories, and put something that could pretend to be him piloting the corpse, but…” the man currently in control of the body cringes.

“It wouldn't be him,” she completes.

“No, it would be some soulless monster that would, at best, stain any memory anyone had of him. If I get to a corpse before the soul moves on there are things I can do, but…” the man shakes her head, “without the soul, whatever I brought up would need to be put down. We'd just be desecrating his remains.”

“Well. You did the job…” the woman affirms, “So now what?”

“Now I get ready for some fun….” the man grins.