It had started as a force, a power that fed on the despair from the lost souls wandering the wastelands of transition. But transition was not the final place, and eventually the despairing souls would find the way to pass through and new ones would appear to take their place. The force had learned to reason and to manipulate, it had learned that there were ways of delaying the souls in transition so the force could feed off them for longer. Thus the force grew stronger. It developed substance, and then identified individual tasks that fragmented it into separate elements. The elements began to take the form that the human souls remembered; they grew to look like people. As the elements got stronger they got better at assuming the characteristics of humans until, after many centuries, they were identical in every way. They learned to speak to the souls in their own language, and they developed effective tricks to make the agonised souls stay in transition, thinking that there was no other choice. These souls usually thought they had been banished to Hell. As the misery around them compounded the elements became more like individuals. The force was stronger than ever but it was no longer a single entity, it was now made up of a collection of individuals all working to the common good. But the elements also developed human characteristics, and some of them became bored. Sure they could manipulate the pathetic souls using tricks like assuming the looks of long lost loved ones, but this was prone to backfiring. The elements soon realised that in the same way as the despair made them stronger, if the soul became happy it made them weaker and drained their power. But they were bored, and they looked beyond their traditional limits.
The force had watched carefully as humans had evolved. It had observed them through the thin divider of life, something the souls in transition were not able to do. And the force saw that despair was not just in the realm of the dead, it was also strong in the waiting room that the humans called life.
It was during a drought that the collective despair of thousands of dying humans had brought a large number of elements to the divider, and the weight of their primal desire had unexpectedly allowed them to pass through. The force had finally found a way into the world of the living. The elements drank greedily from the misery of the living, it was brighter, fresher, and made them swell with something they had never experienced, that thing that the humans called life. The elements stayed for as long as they could, but then rain clouds approached, and the delectable misery started give way to hope, and the elements had to flee. They used the same method to find their way back through the divider as they had to come through. All the elements that had stayed behind in transition then felt the increased power and strength of the others as they returned. The return was a surprise to the elements still in transition, because they could only see humans through the divider, they could not see their own elements.
The elements had repeated the foray many times, and they had learned some very hard lessons too. To be near a happy human was painful, to be near an ecstatic human was debilitating, and the number of humans affected multiplied the result. Once there were about ten elements amongst the crowd at a huge jousting contest. Twice his stronger and more skilled opponent, who was an arrogant oppressor of the common people, had knocked down the popular local knight. But he had remounted for one last desperate try. The elements were breathing deeply, sucking in the despair of the crowd as their battered hero rocked precariously in the saddle, barely able to hold his lance. As the horses galloped toward each other the elements prepared for the banquet that waited when the hero fell for the last time, but somehow the injured knight brought his heavy lance up, striking his opponent a fatal blow. The crowd's despair became instant jubilation, and almost all the elements were destroyed, simply disappearing. It was the single biggest loss of power that the force had ever experienced, and the two surviving elements joined other elements that were elsewhere during the tournament. It had been established that there needed to be about twenty elements clustered together to enable them to return through the divider, but they had just enough and were able to pass on the clear warning.
The force learned to only ever bet on a sure thing. They would enter the land of the living humans when there was a major disaster, natural or man made, which ensured that where they were going they would feed well and in safety. There were still risks involved, and a major one was that the elements had all the attributes of real humans when they went through the divider. During wars a number of the elements were shot or blown up, and they were injured and died in the same way as the humans around them, each time losing a small bit of the total force. But the overall net result of the visits was to make the force stronger, so they continued. If an element was injured when the rest had to return then it could not go with them, and could not get through the divide alone, so it remained. Because it was alone and invisible from the other side it too disappeared forever to the main part of the force. But some of these stragglers learned to survive, usually only very briefly, amongst living humans.
The rise of terrorism was a mixed blessing for the force. It did perpetrate major horrific acts that created misery and despair, giving the visiting elements places to feed, but it also gave desperate minorities some hope, when previously they may have fallen into despair. The mothers always grieved when their beloved sons died, but when they died a martyr, with explosives strapped to their bodies, the mothers also had a perverse hope. Misery remained, but it was no longer so thoroughly entrenched within individual populations.
Sally had very little chance from the start. Her mother was a drug addicted single mother who sold her body to make the money she needed to feed her habit. The short, skinny girl with the tattered clothes and matted dirty blonde hair grew up in a poor neighbourhood virtually unsupervised. She sometimes went to school, but was teased mercilessly and called 'rag doll' by the more fortunate kids. She never had the money for the required books, so she skipped classes more and more often. Sally wasn't clever, but she also wasn't dumb, and she was a keen observer of people. Sally could often guess what motivated individual people, just by watching them from a distance. She was a late developer physically, and kept her spindly and underfed boy's figure until she was into her late teens. This allowed Sally to watch a number of her friends suddenly becoming attractive to the neighbourhood boys, and she saw the power of sexuality used and abused by both sexes. Sally suddenly sprouted when she was eighteen. She had been working at the Tasty Chickee fast food place for a few years, but the addition of pert 36C breasts to her very slight frame became a major problem. The men all suddenly wanted her, and Sally's boss was a man.
Sally was a realist, she had seen her mother selling her body, and knew that sex was just another physical exercise. She also knew that where money wasn't involved, then usually the woman had the power to say no. Unfortunately for Sally, her boss was an arrogant and very strong man.
"Sally, come here, I want to talk to you," Dave said, leering at her too small shirt, which was straining to hold her chest in as she swept the green tiled floor. She shuddered, knowing he was going to try and paw her again, but she had no choice, payday was tomorrow and she desperately needed the money. The other workers had all left for the night, and the lights were dimmed in the front. Sally walked into the storeroom that had Dave's desk in it, and he motioned for her to close the door. She shrugged and did.
"Yes?" she asked, her voice trembling. Sally was scared of Dave, he had the power to fire her and cut off her money supply. He looked at her appraisingly for a moment. Sally was about five six he supposed, and very thin. Her hips had filled out a bit when her chest had, and he had made sure that her uniforms were always much too small. Dave liked them young, although he would never touch a girl under eighteen, he didn't want to go to jail. But Sally was eighteen now, and her mother was a whore; she knew what it was all about. Dave pointed to some clothes on his desk.
"You wanted a bigger uniform, there it is," he said pleasantly. Sally smiled, and Dave knew he had tricked her.
"Thanks Dave," Sally said happily, and she picked up the clothes and turned to leave.
"No,' Dave said, his deep voice grating, "you have to leave the old uniform here." Sally paused, realising he was taking this to a new level. She shrugged.
