Short Story: Dasan and Sakari

"I need a new vessel. This one is all worn out―my back and knees hurt, I can barely get around, and I'm losing my hearing," said Dasan.

"It doesn't work that way," responded Sakari, "you still have things to do in this form."

Dasan knew Sakari was right but it didn't keep him from feeling frustrated. Dasan had been through this many times during his 400-year existence, but he hated the end-of-life phase and never seemed to get used to it. He also hated his vessel when he overindulged in good food, women, and booze, and often wanted to leave the flabby shell behind for one with rock-hard abs and a healthy heart.

“Besides,” said Sakari, “you still have some mileage on that meat suit and we haven’t found an ideal replacement host yet.”

The ideal replacement had gotten harder and harder to find since the inception of modern forensics, so they had to be careful when scouting out vessels. The team preferred young bodies but not too young. Nothing gets more complicated than inhabiting the body of an infant as it raises way too many eyebrows, although they’d had no choice but to go this route once before, which is why Sakari was so much younger. But, that was before modern times when abandoned babies were a dime a dozen.

Taking over an infant’s body required a caretaker, of course, which is what Dasan had been. To the outside world, he looked like a caring single father but in private he hated changing diapers and dealing with the toddler tantrums. He was relieved when Sakari reached the age of realization around 10.

They had become selective since that time and instead started scouting out the streets for runaways—teens and tweens from bad homes that nobody would miss.

Along with the authorities, in recent years, another threat to the duo emerged. A regular modern-day Van Helsing of sorts who made it his life’s work to hunt down skinwalkers, wendigos, and other cryptids, like Dasan and Sakari.

Stay tuned for more of the story―coming soon!