Gabriel and Natasha sat cross-legged on the ground, a torso’s length apart from one another. Vish was sat between and to the side of them, with Rodney opposite him, making a slightly lopsided square.

Gabriel could feel the clamminess of his palms. Beads trickled down his forehead and settled in his lashes. He was painfully aware of his breathing. Actually, he was painfully aware of everything, but his breathing most of all. It sounded like he was sucking in air through a straw.

‘Is it normal to breathe this often? Shouldn’t one breath last me a bit longer than that? Do I have shit lungs? Am I about to put my sister in a body with shit lungs? Maybe this is a bad idea. I bet she’s scared. This must be so confusing for her, so daunting. She’s definitely scared.’

“Hey, I know this is tough, but it will be over soon,” Gabriel reassured her. His eyes were tightly shut, as Vish had instructed, “I bet we’ll be laughing about this in no time.”

Vish hawked, and audibly swallowed a ball of phlegm.

“Sorry, stone-dust,” the mind-mapper explained.

Gabriel frowned in his general direction but carried on comforting his sister, “It’s okay to be scared, Natasha, I’m here for you.”

Her silence was disconcerting.

Gabriel risked a peek.

She was asleep.

“Oh for gods’ sake, am I the only one who appreciates how serious this is?”

“Hey!” Vish reprimanded, poking a finger dangerously close to Gabriel’s less-than-closed eye, “Fucking focus, you twat. We do this all the time. Stop being such a girl... Heh, well, at least for now. You can start being a girl in a few minutes. Am I right? Am I right?”

“Yes. Intensely witty.”

“And quit talking! Less activity equals easier transition. All this speaking and, and, seeing, it heightens your bodily awareness and makes it harder to move your mind.”

“Who made you such a bloody expert?”

There was a short pause.

“Birth, Gabe. Literally birth. Now make like a meatball vender at the end of market and shut up.”

Grudgingly, the mercenary captain settled into uneasy silence.

Gabriel tried to think of nothing at all. He pulled his sense of awareness away from his limbs, and held it at his core. He tried to ignore the solidity of the earth beneath him, the scent of chiseled limestone, the heaving of his chest, the way the breeze gently caressed his nostril hairs just that little bit more enthusiastically on the right than on the left. He drew himself inwards, rubbed the edges of his mindfulness away, and became nothing, nowhere, and nobody. He was afloat, drifting in a sea of semi-consciousness, oblivious to all but-

“Ow! What the fuck?” Gabriel’s hand shot up to cover his burning cheek, “Did you just slap me?”

“You’re doing it wrong!” Vish chastised.

“And how exactly does slapping me help?”

“Oh, well, it doesn’t. It was a golden opportunity though.”

Gabriel made to slap Vish in return, but he was met by the mind-mappers own flailing hand. They dueled like this for a time, both flapping ineffectually at one another like reeds meeting over a river.

Lydia cracked her neck, drawing their attention. She didn’t have to say anything to dissuade them from further bickering.

Gabriel sighed, “I don’t understand what I did wrong.”

“You were thinking about not thinking. You can’t tell yourself not to be aware; that’s showing awareness!” the mind-mapper said.

“How can you just,” he threw his hands up in defeat, “not be aware?”

“I don’t know,” Vish admitted, “Bling’s pretty good at it.”

Bling snored.

Gabriel grimaced, “Truly inspirational.”

“Look, we haven’t got all day. Close your eyes, and try again.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll try again. If you slap me again? I’m going to pay Lydia to turn you into a loin cloth. Don’t test her, she’ll do it.”

“No, I won’t.”

“I’m not going to slap you. Now, come on, work with me a little.”

“Fine.”

Gabriel tried, no, didn’t try, to remove his experience from the world. He thought not to think, and felt not to feel.

Then Gabriel thought he maybe shouldn’t think or feel not to think or feel, because if he was thinking or feeling then he was being, ‘Huh,’ Gabriel mused, ‘that’s actually quite profound. I wonder if anyone has ever considered that before.’

“Bollocks to this,” Vish muttered.

Gabriel was struck again, but, this time, not physically. The blow sent him careening, tumbling through the fabric of reality. This wasn’t a slap; this was a mental assault.

‘What the aether are you doing?’ Gabriel screamed within the confines of his skull.

‘Getting. Your. Stubborn. Arse. Out of there!’

Vish barraged Gabriel again and again with mental shunts. They burst like light and colour in his cognitive vision, but could not be described as either. They were raw, and had a quality of intense heat to them, but the lunges that ignited and exploded against his borderless being carried no temperature, only the intensely unpleasant sensation of otherness. This was an invasion, and Gabriel could feel his fingers slipping on the polished floors and walls of the chamber of his sense of self.

‘I don’t want to go!’

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‘Don’t. I. Fucking. Know. It! Stubborn bastard.’

Gabriel wormed his way back into himself, inching closer to the top of the pedestal where he could dictate his own thoughts and actions once again. He could feel himself fumbling for a grasp on the rudder of his will.

‘You don’t have to force me. I’ll go when I’m ready!’

‘You’ll never be ready!’ Vish’s mental voice came through a maelstrom of white noise. The threat of nothingness roared, and spilled around each syllable like the cascading of a waterfall.

‘I just need more time!’

‘Now is the time!’

‘Maybe this was a bad idea!’

‘Maybe it was,’ Vish seemed to seize on something, ‘maybe you’ll fail.’

All was static, kinetic, potential, and void. Their world was a miasma of contradictions, full of unfathomable possibilities, and absolutely nothing at all.

‘We probably will. It was a stupid idea. Stupid. We’re going to fail.’

Vish’s pressure was a constant now, like the leaning of a house against its foundations. It no longer came in bursts and assaults but instead pressed like the wight of expectation.

‘You’ll never fail more than you are right now, though.’

‘Failure is failure. What’s the difference?’

‘The difference is what you can forgive. Natasha failed all the time, but she never stopped trying. We forgave her that!’ Vish dyed the whole with his words.

Gabriel slid further towards the edge.

‘We failed her more than she ever failed us!’ Gabriel screamed voicelessly.

‘No. This is failing her. This is failing everything she wanted for you, for us.’

Gabriel’s mind swirled and eddied around him, tumbling against his phantom limbs like an undercurrent. His own feelings were lashing tentacles against the integrity of his reason, unseating him, chastising him.

‘Vish…’ his whisper echoed through the eternity of the now.

‘Yeah?’

‘You’re a dick.’

With that Gabriel relaxed his resistance as much as he feasibly could, and allowed the mind-mapper to press him from his body.

The first feeling was one of intense loneliness.

Gabriel felt the absence of his body like the absence of a friend, or lover. There was an intimate connection that had been severed, and he grieved its loss.

It was hard to think of the body as having a personality and identity of its own; flesh is just flesh, bone is just bone, and all that holds it together is nothing more than sinew and meat. Yet, Gabriel saw himself as small and helpless without it. He was exposed, whilst simultaneously hidden in the great expanse of the limitless nothing. He was safely and dangerously insignificant.

In time, for that’s all Gabriel could call it – he had an inkling that it was a long time, but doubted that – an awareness tugged at the outer-nebulous of his being.

This new other was small, and meek. Gabriel had the impression that it was subservient to him, in a way; it was submissive in his presence. He knew little of it, but he knew that it knew fear. Fear was all it was at this moment in time: fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of death in all its iterations. Fear of him.

Gabriel sensed himself as a predator, as a destroyer. He saw himself as a primal power, too big and too complex to understand.

… He also had a sudden craving for flies, but that could be unrelated.

Then the world opened back up to him.

It happened all at once, like experience was poured over his soul from a colossal height, flooding him with sight, smell, touch, emotion. He reeled violently on the spot, intense vertigo conquering him as brightness, colour, contrast – all resolved before eyes that saw leagues in meters and miles in inches.

There was too much.

Blades of grass loomed on the horizon, towers and minarets of a civilization teeming with life that he had never noticed or appreciated before. Birds and beasts cast shadows that stretched empires, threatening destruction or tantalizing taste buds that craved in ways he didn’t understand.

The ground shifted beneath his feet. Great boulders, formed of particles of dust and grit, tumbled away where his body made contact with the earth in too many places.

He heard the beating of wings, like sails, flapping in the wind, and susurration of foliage far on the outskirts of the clearing. He heard the chirruping and clacking of creatures he felt unbidden kinship towards, and he heard it all from beneath him, resonating unnaturally through this body of his.

There was no time to ground. There was no time to make sense of things.

As quickly as he had come, he was gone, launched through the void once more and torn from that part of him that had feared and respected him so.

Once again, he was without.

There was no anchor, there was no basis to his being, just constant movement from nothing to nowhere.

Gabriel didn’t know if it was possible for a mind to faint without a body, but his gave it a damn good go.

The universe closed in and shut itself off, barring him access as he became only id. He was a cruelly and mercifully blinded version of what he had just been. Whether for self-preservation, or out of a sheer lack of comprehension, he ceased to experience in any way he could fathom.

Luckily, his next destination was more familiar.

When sense and self returned, it was in a manner he recognized.

He felt his being extend to fill fingers and toes.

He saw through eyes that knew vision in much the way he always had.

His heart beat to a familiar rhythm.

He heard in muted glory, dulled to a point that was palatable.

He tasted…

He threw up.

“Oh gods, what is that!” a soprano voice rattled from his throat.

Laughter permeated through the sounds of his expulsion.

It was his laughter.

Gabriel looked up to see himself laughing at himself. It was a surreal experience, to say the least.

Gabriel, the Gabriel’s body Gabriel, pointed at herself and howled raucously. Upon hearing herself/himself, her/his face fell. Gabriel looked at her extended finger like it was a six-headed spatula demon. She tried to move away from the offensive growth and stumbled backwards, landing flat on her back.

“Ha-ha! Not so funny now, is it, sister me?” Gabriel/Natasha said triumphantly, rising to gloat over him/herself.

He tripped headfirst and banged he head on his own knee. Well, Bling’s knee, for the time being at least.

Gabriel growled at her sister.

“It was an accident!” he said back to himself, “By the aether, this is heavy! How many cloaks do you have on, Natasha? It feels like I’m wearing a lead apron!”

Bling/Gabriel made to snatch at her clothing but missed herself entirely, and flopped back on the floor.

“And this hair! It’s a wonder you haven’t scalped yourself!” Gabriel shook his head experimentally and inadvertently slapped him/his sister in the face with dozens of tiny bells and hoops, ensnared in his braids like morsels in a spider’s web.

Vish, Lydia and Figo watched the pair roll around impotently for a bit.

“This is precisely as amazing as I thought it would be,” Vish said, his voice heavy with deference.

Figo grimaced, “How do you feel, Natasha?”

Gabriel/Natasha smiled wonkily and tried to give a thumbs up from the flat of her back.

Natasha/Gabriel grimaced, “It tastes like I’ve been eating sawdust… Juicy sawdust,” he shuddered.

“Oh, sorry, I meant Natasha-Natasha, not Gabriel-Natasha…” Figo frowned, “This is going to get confusing.”

“Enter the man with the plan!” Vish said, “From now on you shall be called, ‘Gling’!” he indicated Gabriel, in Natasha’s body.

Gling groaned.

“And you shall be known as… ‘Blabriel’!” he pointed at Bling in Gabriel’s body.

“Blabriel! Yesss!” Blabriel said.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Gling said.

“Well, I, uh, suppose that did it,” Figo conceded.

“You don’t become a master of minds without having much of one yourself,” Vish winked.

Lydia indicated her existence with a metallic shuffling that sounded like an anvil being catapulted at an iceberg, “Now I’m even less convinced this is going to work.”

“No, it will work, it will work. We can do this. I just need to, umm,” Gling fiddled with her hair as she spoke, unhooking, unclasping and unfurling every bauble she could find. It was slow going. Gabriel wasn’t especially dexterous in his own body, and he worked Natasha’s fingers even less artfully.

Blabriel’s lip quivered as Gling remorselessly dropped her treasures to the floor. She watched pitifully for a time but eventually could stand it no longer, and protectively scooped up her belongings, shielding them from her callous brother.

“Oh, umm, sorry,” Gling said weakly.

He handed her the trinkets thereafter.

It took Gling a full turn of the third wheel to fully extricate himself from his cupreous snare, at which point he presented himself triumphantly for peer review.

“Well?” he said.

Gling was a ratty, dirty looking woman with disheveled hair orbiting his skull like a halo, and rancid cloaks bowing his shoulders and masking any hint of femininity. He looked like he had been swimming in a swamp when he had been struck by lightning. There was even a cockroach leg protruding from his stained teeth.

“How do I look?” he asked expectantly.

There was an awkward silence.

When it was clear that no one else was going to say anything, Vish shuffled over and placed a hand on Gling’s shoulder.

“Seductive as fuck.”