It just drifted there while the selection committee deliberated.
It seemed to have come down to a choice between the fifty-something woman who works in the school’s canteen kitchen, the young man who works in a factory and wants to learn how to operate the forklift, and the contract bricklayer who’s thinking about retirement. It didn’t much care for any of them. The idea that they could take over human bodies one by one until there were enough of them down there to take full control of the planet was a sound one, but as invasions go it was an extremely slow business. This particular floating spirit, belonging to what may well be described as part of the group of lesser immortals, never really got a crack at anything big, anything of substance, anything really important, like a king or a president. However, there was no way it could complain.
It, along with all others of its kind, were constantly aware of what happened to Olly. That being a nickname, of course, used to add a touch of comedic relief to what was actually a most ghastly affair. The being in question had the temerity to balk against the system by demanding to know why it was always being made to host the bodies of people who didn’t really matter. It had point blank refused to take over the physical form of a second-hand car salesman. The reaction to this unheard-of audaciousness was both swift and permanent.
It was made to instantly host the body of a stuffed and extremely rare bird, the New Caledonian Owlet-Nightjar, hence the epithet, that, along with many other strange and mainly useless odds and bods, was crammed into a locked, steel trunk and held in a bank’s high security vault, in Zurich, Switzerland. The chest itself is currently unclaimed and will forever remain so, on account of the fact that the owner, a most eccentric and mysteriously wealthy taxidermist, who was found dead, alone in his bed, in his hovel, in a tiny hillside village that boasted a population of seven, in the Locarno district of that same country, who lived alone, had no living relatives and not made a will.
Meanwhile the committee, having decided, pressed the metaphysical button and the drifting being was immediately sitting in a forklift being given training by a fellow worker.
The invasion goes on.