Body Thief

Body Snatchers or Body Thieves are persons that have achieved a certain degree of immortality by stealing the bodies of other persons.

In General
At some point or another in life, everyone has wished or will wish they could be someone else. We've all looked at a friend, coworker, family member, or complete stranger with envy. Everyone has looked at another person with a heart that coveted. If only we could be stronger, luckier, smarter, or kinder. Of course, the difference between the average person and the body snatcher is that the thief has found a way to see what they want in others and take it, usually by force. There are a million and one reasons why someone might take the step from simple natural envy and cross over to some of the most despicable kinds of robbery. Sometimes it starts innocently, an unconscious need and a wish fulfilled by outside forces. Sometimes a thief walks into their wanton career with eyes wide open, having been taught or heavily researched the art of stealing life itself. Sometimes people, with lives too short or will too strong, find a way to extend their existence by moving from body to body through the ages, escaping death by not being there when it happens.

However, whereas there are a million or more reasons to seek immortality through the violation of others, there are three neat, or nearly neat, categories into which a body thief can fit.


 * The Mentally Talented body thief uses will and thought alone to transfer his soul from one body to the next in the race against mortality.


 * The Magically Talented body thief has found or been taught dark magic that can shuffle his consciousness from one body to another, but he must either find a soulless body or kill the original body to make the transfer permanent.


 * Sometimes, body thieves come from seemingly nowhere, or have methods that defy easy terminology, those rare curiosities fall into the third category of Oddities.

Society
To the character who would be a body thief, nearly more important than the type of thief they are is the society they fall into, the subculture of like minded, or at least like talented people who create a network for the thief to fall back on. Some body thieves are solitary individuals who know few if any others of their kind. However, in a world where almost everyone thinks you are someone very different from who you are, many body thieves seek some sort of continuity in their long lives.

Living in someone else's body is hard work, especially at first. Unless you are lucky enough to end up in the body of an independently wealthy recluse, your new body has a job to do, friends and acquaintances to deal with, and all of the many minor details of daily life that the body's original owner knew by heart and that you may have no clue about.

A body thief who fails to successfully impersonate the person whose body she now inhabits is usually safe from detection. Only the paranoid and a few exceptionally observant Hunters will realize the truth. However, failure can result in the individual being fired from their job and the body's friends and loved ones trying to stage some sort of intervention. If a body thief seems sufficiently uncertain about the names and identities of the body's loved ones, he might even be declared mentally ill and locked up.

Having a social network of other body thieves can help resolve all of these troubles. A group of body thieves can help one another research a new identity and provide help with a new career. More importantly, they can provide a new group of friends for the body thief to spend time with. When someone ceases to recognize their friends and becomes a recluse, the people around them worry. If the same person is simply too busy and has a new and eccentric group of friends, people may suspect drugs, or they may simply be insulted, but they're not going to be nearly as worried. Also, other body thieves understand who the body thief really is and call him by a name he'll hear from no one else.