So there I sat (floated), outside my body but still occupying the same space that it did. I couldn’t hear, smell, see, or feel anything from my actual physical body – but I could still perceive the world by focusing my attention in different directions. I still didn’t like the feeling, but I felt that I owed it to Mark to at least TRY and wait in soul-cloud form in case he… huh… he what? I needed a term for this, but I had no ideas right now. What do I call leaving my body and going into soul-form?

I pondered this for a while, reviewing the messages that Mark had sent me. It wasn’t like a physical menu, or something you could see and actually scroll through; it was more like the messages just existed and I could focus my attention on them in the same way that I perceived ANYTHING in this stupid cloud-form. So the messages were there, I could sense the span of them (earliest to latest), and then I could focus somewhere in that span if I chose too. Actually pretty simple once I tried it.

Mark seemed to be dealing with the whole message thing like it was computer-based, which I thought was both dumb and brilliant at the same time. It let him figure out that you could send pictures as well as messages, kind of like a cell-phone built into your mind. Mark is… scratch that… Mark was a professional programmer who also designs apps on the side, so it made total sense that this is where his mind would go. But at the same time, there is a very real chance that he is missing something important due to the simple fact that whatever this is, it is definitely not a computer. Not even close.

So I set my mind to work on the problem. This is one of the reasons I liked hanging out with Mark so much – we think very differently. Something I find hard to solve he can often figure out easily, and vice versa. So if he was treating this logically, I decided to go for mysticism.

The first thing I tried to do was move around, which failed completely. There was a strange sense of resistance, as if I was being weighed down by something so heavy that moving wasn’t even an option – like doing a push-up, and then expecting the entire planet to move while you stayed still. My guess was that I was tied to my body, and because my soul-cloud wasn’t able to move/touch/affect anything (according to the Celestial) it just didn’t have the power to even attempt to move my body.

Deciding to approach it from a different angle, I thought of astral-projection as you see it in video-games and a lot of tabletop RPG’s (I was a total otaku in my past life, after all). I mean, it’s not that games invented these ideas, but they condensed them, combing through the whole of human knowledge for ideas. I remembered that in a lot of the games I played astral projection came with a strange side-effect: A silvery cord that had to always connect your soul to your body.

So I gave it a shot, imagining a thin cord connecting my soul-cloud to my physical body, then moving upwards in the air. The results were immediate, as I felt (nope, no feeling)… ok, as I perceived myself lifting into the air. I went all the way up to the ceiling, then focused my perceptions back downwards, and I was able to perceive the cord I had imagined! But it was made out of cloud-stuff, and I wasn’t able to tell it apart from the rest of my cloud-form.

I was instantly elated, my guilt towards Mark gone. He is going to be so freaking impressed when I tell him about this, fuck yeah! Score one for team Heller! Now I needed to experiment with this so I can fine-tune it before the big reveal. Things like this are pretty normal for Mark and me; he figures out something cool, then I find a way to make it better, then he improves it yet again, and so on and so forth.

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After experimenting for a few hours I had made a couple more interesting discoveries. The cord wasn’t really a cord, it was actually just a part of my soul-cloud-form thingy. Being a shapeless cloud, I was able to change its shape without any real restrictions except that it had to be continuous, and it has to be attached to my physical body at one end. I could move my perceptions to any point along the cloud instantly, and by making it into a very thin line I was able to stretch my perceptions quite far from my physical body - the limit being, of course, the original volume of my soul-cloud. It was hard to make it really thin because it tended to clump up in other places when I focused on a specific part, but in the end I was able to circle the room a few dozen times, giving me a range of about a hundred to a hundred fifty meters.

I turned my attention back to my body and confirmed that everything seemed to be alright and found that mother was sitting up against the wall watching me sleep. I decided to glob the soul-cloud back into my body (took a few minutes of focus if I was really stretched out) and act like a normal baby for a bit. So I re-entered my body, which super easy to do. If I just relaxed and didn’t focus on anything in particular, my soul-form naturally kind of spread through my body and then poof, there I was. The entire process of leaving my body; stretching out my soul form; gathering myself back up; and then entering my body again took about 10 minutes.

So I pretended to wake up, looked at my mother, and made some convincing baby-sounds at her... then prepared myself to scout the fortress looking for my father.