“Hello, my name is Midrigar and I will be your server today. What can I get you?”
The man standing next to the table is young. ‘Midrigar’ is an approximation of his name, which was more a sound, really. A sound like a boulder rolling down a hill. I try to check his name tag but the symbols on it hurt my eyes.
Midrigar sees me squinting and covers the tag with his hand. “Sorry about that. If it’s easier, you can call me Mike.”
With my eyes released from the quivering letters on the man’s chest, I see that one of his eyes has rolled back up in his head. The iris reemerges from the bottom after a complete spin. An ocular sunrise that makes me want to vomit. “It seems important to call you by your real name… Midri…” My tongue becomes sluggish in my mouth. Blood pours up from my throat and I spit it into my coffee while I pretend to take a sip.
In the booth ahead of me, a mother snatches a child’s menu away from her son. He had been connecting dots and the result is a multi-pointed star that glows black. A man facing the corner of the restaurant and standing still as a statue disappears as she crumples it. The boy begins to cry.
“Midrig…” A car alarm goes off outside. Something small and reptilian briefly surfaces in my coffee. “Midriga…”
Midrigar sniffs and waves his pen at me. “Just order.”
‘There are things out there that are not human. Spirits. Demons. Monsters. Some, among these entities, see their inhumanness as an affront and seek to change to change it. They take what they want. They possess.
Then they find out what it is to be human and those that don’t seek out a violent end usually make their way to ‘Cal’s Place.’
‘Cal’s Place’ is a café that employees possessed humans that, due to personality quirks or the physical modifications to their host’s body that occurred as part of the possession, are unable to find work elsewhere. This demographic serves as the main draw of ‘Cal’s Place,’ which is otherwise known for mid-ranged food and less-than-ideal customer service. Customers arrive at the café well aware that their hosts and servers will occasionally skitter across the floor on limbs that bend backwards or utter words that shake the tables and cause those with sensitive minds to briefly black out.
The employees put up with the indignation of being photographed and recorded for social media because there are few other solutions available and, unlike their previous vague and immortal forms, their human bodies need to eat to survive.
As of 2025, possession remains unrecognized as a qualifier for any sort of government aid, though host bodies are sometimes stripped of their assets in situations where courts have ruled their identity has technically ‘changed.’ Advocates for human hosts tread lightly, aware that legal recognition of possession may just as likely result in prosecution as protection. The system is always looking for more prisoners.’
– traveler
