Young Writers Society

Magic. The Personification of Magic. Bo followed behind, but this time with more energy behind his steps. He wanted to ask Magic if they were the Magic he knew, but considering how poorly Magic was managing navigation and everything else, he didn't want to distract them from their current task at hand.

"Okay Magic," he said. "How bout you just focus on walking. We can talk details later."

Télos wasn't sure he agreed with that - he had a lot of questions he wanted to ask - but when Magic nodded and almost walked into another wall again, Télos realized he could wait.

"Walking sounds good," Magic agreed.

Bo smiled and nodded. "Okay. You got this. Just keep walking and we'll follow."

Télos wasn't sure how much longer they walked. It felt like an eternity, but maybe that was just the stress talking - he couldn't help but think that they were going to run into someone who worked here soon. They were lucky that Magic wasn't really who they appeared to be.

They stopped in front of a door.

Magic gestured for them to wait, peeking inside the room with a duller glow to their eyes. They slowly pushed the door all of the way open before slipping inside and gesturing for them to do the same.

Télos and Aquarius hesitantly entered the room.

Télos didn't know a lot about labs, but this certainly looked like ones. There were weird vials, lots of tables, and a box with a thin pad in front of it to the very back of the room. There were charts, too, on clipboards scattered across the tables, but Télos didn't bother to look at them.

Instead, he looked at what was in the very back of the room.

There was a row of five tall, cylindrical tubes lined up against the back wall. Each tube was filled with liquid, but the liquid wasn't the only thing present.

There were bodies in them.

It looked almost like they were all asleep. Their eyes were closed, and the bodies didn't move. They just stood there in the liquid. That was disturbing on its own, but it was even more disturbing when Télos finally faced what his brain hadn't wanted to register.

His body was there, right next to Aquarius.

Bo's body was next, quickly followed by Bobby. The last body belonged to someone Télos didn't recognize, with long blond hair, pale skin, and a slightly muscular body. From the way that Magic was looking at it, Télos guessed it belonged to them.

But it was weird seeing the bodies of everyone else. He felt like he was seeing double when he glanced between them all. If he didn't know he was technically a ghost right now, he would have thought he was looking at a weird cloning thing - because they all looked identical to the people in the tubes.

Bo felt a laugh tickle at the back of his throat, but he held it back for the sake of the others, knowing it wouldn't be helpful. He was keeping Bobby in mind, and keeping the kid in the corner of his eye.

"You know, ironically, this actually isn't my first time seeing myself like this," he said, his tone still far too light for what the situation warranted. "In a tube, I mean. It's nice to know this is probably my original body though, and not a clone grown in a tube."

He blinked. Was that a comfort? At this rate, he wasn't sure.

"In other news, we might want to free our bodies before hopping into them, otherwise we're just going to be uh, trapped in fluids."

Bobby's stomach churned at that sight of his body. Bo's voice sounded like it was a million miles away and underwater, slow and muffled beyond recognition.

Bobby walked toward his body. His heartbeat thumped against his organs, pushing them up, up, up his throat.

This was wrong.

Everything about this day was wrapped in such a heavy fog of wrongness, Bobby felt like it weighed the very air down.

And then they snapped back to reality. Here. Now. They needed to escape.

He gave a quick nod to Bo's statement as the syrupy-slow words inched their way through his processors.

Télos stared at Bo.

He couldn't see him doing it, but Aquarius was staring at Bo, too.

"That sounds terrifying," Télos whispered. He wasn't sure if he was talking about being surrounded by fluid or having a clone. Neither one sounded all that good.

He looked back the tube his body was in.

He made his sword appear.

"That's not going to work," Robin and Magic said in an almost eerie unison. Their tones were different - Magic was distracted, while Robin was much more focused - but there was still a spooky overlap that made Télos shiver.

The two of them faltered. Magic snapped back their attention to the group beside them; Robin kept her gaze on the row of test tubes.

"We need something a little more solid," Magic suggested. They crossed their arms and tilted their head ever so slightly to the side. "Something that if it was swung with enough force, it would break the glass-"

There was a loud shattering sound from down by Bobby's tube.

Télos spun around.

Robin stood next to the tube, a work stool in her hands as fluid spilled out from the container and mixed with the shards of glass on the ground. After making strands of darkness appear to grab at the glass still there and make a larger opening, Robin moved onto the other containers.

Télos, Aquarius and Magic were all wise enough to step back.

Bo's arm shot out in front of Bobby when Robin started smashing glass, and he motioned for Bobby to back up with him. He would've helped with the glass smashing, but figured Robin had it handled. She had magic to help clean up, it seemed.

Bobby jumped back, alarmed first by the shattering glass, then by Bo's arm. Bo motioned for him to back up, and he did, if only because he didn't know what else he was supposed to be doing.

His gaze kept drifting back to his body. His real body?

He looked down. He felt real. Sturdy. Present.

But...he was just a ghost.

Outside of his body.

Which was just over there. Lifeless. Stiff, cold, and...wrong.

He couldn't seem to look away.

A few moments later, their bodies were all free.

Télos stared down at his.

"...How are we supposed to get back into them?" he hesitantly asked, finally addressing the question that had been lurking at the very corner of his mind. There wasn't a button, and something told him there wasn't a spell-

He started to hear a little beeping noise from nearby.

It wasn't a siren - it wasn't any kind of major alarm.

But when he looked at the source of the noise, he saw it was a watch that must have been left by one of the people working in the lab. A pit grew in the depth of his ghostly stomach. The watch was probably making that noise because the tubes had been broken. And if this watch was making that noise, then the other pieces of technology that belonged to the researchers would, too.

"That's a sign we probably should hurry things up," Magic said. They crouched down beside their body. "It should be pretty easy for you to get back into your body - Robin can agree that the connection is still strong between them. All it needs is a little tap and-"

The body Magic was possessing suddenly crumpled to the ground.

A second later, the body Magic had been touching shot up with a start.

"There!" they said. "It, uh, might have been a little easier for me because my actual body is like a magnet for me, but you should be able to do the same thing."

"We probably should do it quickly," Robin added, "because we just lost the edge we had over the people who work here."

Télos nodded. After a moment of hesitation, he walked over to his body and sat down on the ground beside it. He could see Aquarius doing the same thing out of the corner of his eye. Télos wasn't really sure if this was how he was supposed to be doing this, but he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Then he touched his arm.

A moment later, he felt like he was laying on the ground with glass digging into his leg. When he opened his eyes, he was laying on the ground - and Aquarius was unsteadily getting up beside him. He wasn't seeing double anymore; both of them were safely inside of their bodies.

Bo wanted back in his body more than anything. The moment he saw Magic do the thing, he walked up to his body, which was slouching half in and half out of the shattered tube, and practically threw himself into it. There was a split second delay before he woke with a start, feeling a different kind of alive as he woke up wet, surrounded by broken glass.

He was glad to still be wearing shoes, but still haphazardly got to his feet and turned to the kids - Telos and Aquarius first, who seemed like they did it. It worked. They were in their bodies.

And then to Bobby. "You got this, Bobby," he said quietly, even though he couldn't quite see the ghost of the kid anymore.

Bobby didn't like the look of his corpse. It was...wrong. In every way it was wrong. He didn't want to go near it - to touch it. The thought made him shiver.

One by one the others got back in their bodies. Corpses springing back to life as they were possessed by their own lost souls.

Ghoulish and wrong. That was what it was.

Still...Bobby couldn't stay a ghost forever. Or, maybe he could. He wouldn't get cold, or hungry, or thirsty. People couldn't hit him.

He shuffled back a few steps.

There were footsteps coming from down the hallway.

"Why isn't Bobby getting up yet?" Aquarius nervously asked. Water was already starting to wrap around his arms in thick strands; Télos probably should have taken that as a cue to get his sword out again.

Instead, Télos glanced over. Bo was sitting up now, but Bobby was still laying on the ground - and Télos couldn't see his ghostly self anywhere.

Magic unsteadily got to their feet.

"Now isn't the time to be debating if being a ghost is better than being in your body," Magic said as they marched over to where Bobby's ghostly self had been earlier. They pushed thin air forward, but it looked like there was some kind of resistance.

"Is Bobby there?" Télos asked, eyes wide.

"You can still see him?" Robin added.

"Yes and yes," Magic replied. "I'm the Personification of Magic - any magic goes. And seeing ghosts is a type of magic."

Magic gave one last shove.

Télos had no way of knowing it, but Magic had just shoved Bobby back into his body.

Bo shuffled away from his glassy sea over to Bobby's and started clearing the glass away from the kid's tube as quickly as he could with his feet, so that Bobby wouldn't hurt themselves getting out.

Bobby was in shock for a moment. The way sensations processed in his regular body was...different. Shifted. He hadn't even realized anything was wrong before.

He sat up slowly, trembling as he looked up at Bo, who was clearing away some of the glass.

Bobby got to his feet and brushed himself up. He body was a little scraped up, but it didn't hurt that much.