[turboheaven] catchall for the ghost potentially known as dan

[jiaohua]

squints suspiciously at you. you're tutorialing aren't you. AREN'T YOU.





ok well i guess not

Comments

weekend 0, saturday

[jiaohua]

[here they are in the convenience store... well, specifically, waner doesn't know he's here yet. she's wearing real clothes again, browsing the unfamiliar items on the shelves... and then she pauses when she spots something.

a bunch of individually-portioned cereal bowls. i saw these at the convenience store on my street corner when i ran out to grab a snack so I KNOW THESE ARE A CONVENIENCE STORE THING.]

Oh! So these are cheerios!

[foreverphantom]

[ peeks over and...yeah, of course it's waner. ]

Congrats.

[jiaohua]

[she waves at him. hello.]

They didn't have these where I'm from. Were they a common snack where you're from?

[foreverphantom]

Cereal. Usually eaten for breakfast, with milk. Yes, it's ubiquitous.

[jiaohua]

[huh. she gives the little bowl another look before putting it back on the shelf.]

Cuisines really do vary from one place to another. The general goods do, as well. There are so many things on these shelves that I've never encountered before.

[foreverphantom]

Well, it's all standard where I'm from.

[jiaohua]

You haven't encountered anything here that is new to you?

[foreverphantom]

Not really. The touchscreens are pretty new, but it's not my first time dealing with them.

[jiaohua]

I wonder why this place is so similar to where you came from, then?

[foreverphantom]

I was already adjacent to the afterlife anyway. There are other times, other realities, but I suppose this just means mine was more closely aligned.

[jiaohua]

What?

[foreverphantom]

What? [ said with a tone of 'what part of this didn't you get?' ]

[jiaohua]

Other realities?

[????????????]

[foreverphantom]

It's not that hard to wrap your head around when you come from a place that gives you access to all of time and space and reality.

[jiaohua]

...that is most decidedly not what my homeland is like. [...] What are you, then? When you said you were adjacent to the afterlife I thought perhaps you were some sort of a priest in training, or perhaps a monk.

[foreverphantom]

[ barks out a laugh ]

Please.

No. I was a ghost.

[jiaohua]

Oh.

[...]

But how could a ghost die again?

[foreverphantom]

Couple different ways. The normal one is they get destroyed. Gone for good, the ghost dissipates and then there's nothing left.

Or you could go the freak route like me and get shoved back into a human body and essentially get brought back to life.

[jiaohua]

...then the human body is what died. [she gestures at his appearance.] And that is the body you were... "shoved back into"?

[foreverphantom]

Yes. I'm...I didn't always look like this.

[jiaohua]

What did you look like before?

[foreverphantom]

Taller. Older. Stronger. More like a ghost and less like a human.

[jiaohua]

[this tells her, like, nothing.]

What do ghosts look like in your world? Even the stories in mine cannot come up with a single consistent explanation of what they look like.

[so "more like a ghost" isn't terribly descriptive.]

[foreverphantom]

[ huffs a laugh ] That's because there isn't any one consistent way for them to appear.

Former humans tend to stay humanoid. Skin colors tend towards blue or green. They have a faint glow unless they're actively suppressing it. But other than that...anything goes, really. Number of limbs, size, whether your hair is hair or made of fire, if you're even three-dimensional at all...

Ghosts are ruled by the mind. The body is nothing more than whatever the mind wants it to be, in the end.

[jiaohua]

...and what did your mind want your appearance to be, before you were forced into that body?