Phantoms | Freewriting inspired by Geist

A long time ago, I was going to try to make a game based on a concept that was somewhat cobbled together from a bunch of sources. Some of it was Fate/Stay Night's and Negima's concept of a team of two people fighting together to amplify each other's strengths (in both series, one of the team is a mage and the other is a warrior. In Fate the Servants begin as warriors, while in Negima, the Minister Magi becomes a warrior by dint of the Pactio).
Some of it was Bleach and what little I knew about Geist at the time, the idea of fighting against ghosts with swords and magic. Some of it was other things from the World of Darkness games, like how Werewolves deal with Spirits, and Spirits in general. Each Spirit is something conceptual. Not exactly a ghost, but in a way just like one. It's a totemic thing.
There might be a Wolf Spirit, but it isn't the spirit of a particular wolf so much as it is a spirit of the concept of Wolves. It embodies the real aspects of wolves, but also the concepts that humanity associates with them.
There was also a little bit of Phantom Brave in the original idea. Each mage had a Phantom that they would be bound to, and to give that Phantom a physical body, they needed to bind their soul to some object. Whatever the object was, the Phantom would have abilities related to that. Some kind of memento might allow it deeper insight into emotions, or a rock would make it sturdy and immovable. A Phantom materialized with a book would have knowledge of that book, and a greater affinity for books and knowledge in general.
The concept of Phantoms in the game is that they weren't necessarily dead people, they were those same kinds of totemic spirits like in Werewolf and WoD. They wouldn't necessarily have been spirits of objects, but special spirits of the concept of Phantoms.
The enemies of this Phantom game would have been Hungry Ghosts. This is one of the concepts I took from Bleach, though it of course took if from Buddhism. In a way, the Hungry Ghosts are spirits (whether totemic or human) that have been stained with death. Maybe there was a church were someone was mugged and beaten to death, and now the spiritual essence of that church is stained with the violence of the attack, and the suffering of the victim and the fear of their death. With the spirit stained, instead of sending out the feeling of the impressive gothic architecture and the comfort of God, it instead sends out negative vibes, and another murder happens there. Eventually the spirit can't cope. It gives off a resonance comparable to what it feeds on, but as that resonance grows darker, it starts to break at the spirit.
Eventually, unable to passively endure the trauma, it takes on a semiphysical form, one that eventually becomes capable of crossing over the barrier and reeking havoc on the living.
When one of the Hungry Ghosts kills a human, then that human's resonance is stained when they die, and they're more likely to come back as a Hungry Ghost as well.
What's capable of stopping them, then, is the bond between a Mage and a Phantom. They join together as two sides of the same coin and they become able to operate on the same wavelength as the Hungry Ghost, and beat it into submission. The way spirits work, killing a Hungry Ghost is a release, and allows it to be reborn.

Well, after reading the new World of Darkness book, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, I got some more ideas. The new game is basically about Sin-Eaters, people who have died and come back thanks to creatures called Geist (pl. Geister). Geister are basically a cross between ghosts and World of Darkness's Spirits. They're ghosts that are closer to spirits. Instead of just being dead humans, they've transcended that into being dead Spirits. One example is a Discarded Man, made of newspapers and beerbottles. Another is the Drowned Gardener, bloated and wet and covered in chains.


Well, they gave me some ideas, and I just started freewriting.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes, the dead aren't restful. They die alone, lonely, sad and pathetically. Sometimes they die by diseases that aren't content to leave the soul untouched, and consume it as readily as the body. Sometimes it's violence and hatred that takes them out, leaving a harsh stain on their echoes. Sometimes it's not how they left the world that matters, but how they existed in it. A young girl teased and tormented by her classmates because she's quiet and dresses all in black, her long hair covering her face. A middle aged man who put up with abuse from his mother now goes out and enacts revenge on women who look like her, raping them and leaving them in the woods for the coyotes. Another man runs with a crew of three, each one as bad as the next, they hit every bank in town and shoot the place up before anyone can get there. A woman knows her client's guilt, and how he'll kill again if he's not locked up and treated, but still she smiles when the verdict comes, because the money helps her sleep at night.
Dying cold and alone, wasting away in a hospital bed, murder most foul. A life of quiet pain and depression, or one of violence and hatred, one driven by avarice and pride. These are the things that cause a death to go bad. In these circumstances, the dead aren't restful. They scream, and they shout, and they rage against any they encounter.
A death stained with sadness creates an echo that takes others into that sadness, making them weep until they die, laying in a bathtub drawn with hot water, they lean back and let the blackness embrace them as the blood drains from their wrists. Misery loves company.
A brutal murderer and rapist escapes prosecution only to meet his death at the hands of the survivor. His anger and hatred fuel his echo, and he returns to continue his bloody 'work'.
A man does nothing more than stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time. His car broke down in front of an old mansion. If he was able to look back now with cognizance, he would laugh at something so cliche. He stumbled in from the rain and looked around for the owner only to find just that, the owner. The only one who's truly ever owned the estate, and killed anyone who would claim otherwise. Now he's among the number, just one more echo in the cacophony of anguish that haunts the site.
I've met them. The echoes. Some are quiet, and some are restful.
Others aren't. They're cold, and cruel, their corpus twisted and altered from years or decades of self inflicted pain that most of them can't even see. The dangers to themselves that comes from indulging those malicious desires. The desire to write a wrong or save a loved one, a desire that mutates and manifests as something wholly unlike what it might have been.

When echoes become obsessed with a concept, they grow Hungry, feeding off of mortals and creating more of their kind.

Those echoes that become something unhuman, something almost primordial, they torment the living and destroy reality with their existence, passively fraying the ends of everything and chewing and digesting it just by being there.
The worst of it is that they consume souls. They do it to sustain their blasphemous unlife, or perhaps to fill some hollow part of themselves, to fill up the empty shell that they know are. The Buddhists have a name for them. They call them Preta, the Hungry Ghosts. They have "mouths as small as needles, and stomaches the size of mountains." Colourful imagery. That's what they do, though, they eat and feed, trying to fill that mountain with needle sized bites of humanity. The Japanese call them the gaki or Jikininki, and they were greedy, jealous people in life. They come back with an insatiable hunger, be it for corpses or shit. In the Book of Enoch, something similar is described. Great beings with unrivaled hunger, completely devoid of a mouth to sate it.
Whatever their origins, people who die deaths with a great stain might become one. What's worse, one of these hungry echoes will often leave more of it's own kind birthed by it's voracious wake.
They're hard to stop, the echoes of people who died terrible deaths--and even those who had their echoes stained before they even died. They come back when you kill them, because they're already dead. They can be banished back to whatever Hell they came from, but that's a stopgap. The dead come back, until you can kill them once and for all. Sometimes it's as simple as offering something to them. A simple meal. Sometimes you'll have to find a corpse, dig it up, salt it and burn it.
If only it was always that simple.
Sometimes you have to take an exceptionally old and well made sword, blessed by some religious figure, and cut the echo until it dies once and for all and never plagues the living with it's Hunger.
Sometimes even that, a fight to the death with steel and will, is too simple. Sometimes you have to reenact the death. An act that can be painful even if the echo in question is terrorizing innocents with it's Hunger. How much conviction does a hunter need to find the soul of a little girl causing young women to take their own lives in depression and berate her and torment her until she takes her own life again, this time with a definite finality. Or what of dragging an innocent man unaware of what his Hunger is doing along the same road he was murdered on, scaring him to death as he's pulled from a car by chains soaked in holy water.
That's what it's like to see the dead.
It means seeing the innocents who are lost, and doomed to repeat their actions, echoes of hurt who can't move on. It means helping them, whether by destroying what ties them to the world, or resolving their issues.
It unfortunately also means dealing with the restless dead, the merciless demons that a person can become when they don't get help, when they're hung up on it all and can't move on to the Beyond. They become predators, their Hunger withering and killing lives both metaphorically and literally.
It means dealing with the things that are wrong in society, and sometimes it means doing things that shouldn't be done, things that leave a bad taste in your mouth. You'd damned well better swallow it down and chase it with something less bitter. Sometimes you have to fight off the echo of a lonely girl who met her end in an alleyway at the tip of a knife. Sometimes the innocents go bad. It isn't their fault. What happened to them would scare anyone shitless. They don't even know what's going on half of the time. They just exist, like animals. Fear drives them. The fear of a death they've already faced but refuse to face. Refuse to accept and acknowledge. They lash out, frightened and alone.
When they become like that, when an echo's Hunger starts to take them over, starts to become all they are, they change. Usually it's the face that changes the most. Their eyes and mouths become... less. Less than human, mostly, but sometimes they become smaller. They may even vanish. Their clothing becomes less clothing, and more symbolic. The old image of Jacob Marley in chains, his earthly greed tethering him to the mortal world, denying him entry into heaven. This is how the Hunger starts for an echo. They think they're missing something. Something that ties them to the world, something that they can get from others, but they're too simple, too animalistic, to do anything more than Hunger for that thing.
That's when they try to take it. That's when they start to become defined by their Hunger and feed off of the resonance left behind by whatever it is they think they lack. Even the kindest soul can become Hungry after death, no one knows what causes it, other than a thick and ponderous stain on their echo. Even the innocent can become monsters after death, their echoes feeding on friends and family.
Their essence shifts and twists until they become nothing more than a living symbol of their Hunger, a demonic and tortured soul that can do nothing more than attempt to ease that torture by spreading it on to others and consuming what's left in the wake, all while hoping that they can obtain whatever ephemeral quality it is that they're missing.
Feeding their Hunger just makes them Hungrier. With every bite, their stomachs grow emptier, and their souls become hollow.

Disturbing Dream

Alright, it took place in a corporation complex that was more of a huge, walled city. Originally it was actually some strange dream about ant infestations that played out like some Discovery Channel documentary, but that was just what they were telling the people or something.
Everyone's watching this documentary or whatever, then it switches to inside the domed city, and it's these people wandering about, looking slightly diseased. One woman has a thin, gaunt face and a splotch on the side that looks like a skull. A guy in a nice suit looks around, people check cell phones, that kind of thing. There's one lady talking about about how someone she knew's baby died or came out wrong when she was giving birth or something. No one knows what to do, and they're all just wandering about.
The guy that the whole thing is focusing on, who you'd have the impression was the main character if it was a movie, tries to make some speech about sticking together, but then someone comes up behind him in the crowd and garrotes him, then someone breaks a bat or a board on the back of the guy chocking the first guy.
Then everyone gets into a riot, knocking the crap out of each other.

This one guy who was inciting violence--at first it was a stereotypical rap guy, but it changed to a football captain type dude when one of the dream people said something, because dreams never stay straight. It may have happened because the guy he was talking to was supposed to have been a nerd, but looked like Emilio Estaves' character from the Breakfast Club. One thing was that he had a big diamond ring, and when he was saying something, someone said they should take his ring and punch him in the nose with it.--so the football captain/rapper is pinned to a wall by someone's foot, and he's telling everyone how he can get everyone out, and lead everyone to safety, and how things are different than they were before.
He mentions how the nerd-who-looks-like-a-football-scrub/Emilio Estaves guy that he disobeyed him, and that his mother disobeyed him for having scrubguy, and he pushes the foot away and lunges over at EE and the foot pins him back down on the shoulder, and he starts laughing, and what wasn't so obvious until just now is that his shoulder is a little longer on one side, and now that he's laughing and going freaky, the shoulders getting longer and like a big, fleshy, cancerous wing or something, and his mouth is widening as he's laughing crazily.

One of the guys in DEGD has a game planned for his next capstone called Extinction. It's apparently Dead Space meets Mass Effect, and is about a virus that enhances people's emotions before making them into monsters. That was a really freaky, fucked up dream, even when it felt like I fell asleep in front of the TV and my mind was messing with infomercials or a Discovery doc.
So, note to self. It's good to write down dreams, especially the freaky ones.

Tactics game

The idea for this game is that it's a miniature tactics game. Instead of controlling one adventurer, the game harkens back to wargames such as Chainmail and Warhammer. In some ways though, it's a mixture of a roleplaying game and a miniature wargame.
Each player takes control of their army, here called a guild, and either works together or against themselves to get to the center of a dungeon and defeat any monsters they encounter. The other possibility is of a Dungeon Master type referee player who sets up a series of challenges and the players Guilds try to overcome them and race to the finish, working together when it's necessary, but ultimately competing. There's also the possibility of one player--and one referee--games. The whole thing ends up something between early Dungeons and Dragons, and a wargame.


Players create their Guilds using two things. One is the limit, which tells how many units you can take with you. This number is always just ten. The other is the total unit cost. Each unit costs a certain amount of points, generally from 1-10, and players are given a point total used to 'buy' units.

Each unit has
HIT: A unit's skill with hitting in combat with weapons.
INT: A unit's skill with using magical abilities.
For HIT and INT, characters roll 2d10+ INT/HIT against the target's AGI+10.
AGI: The unit's ability to avoid damage. This number is added to 10 to determine if an attack against the unit misses.
MOV: The movement allowance of a unit. Measured in one inch squares representing five feet, this is the total distance a unit can move in a single turn.
-- JMP: Based on MOV/3, how many squares a unit can move vertically, used if the terrain has any variances.
TOUGH: The unit's ability to withstand or negate damage. Any time the unit is damaged, they roll TOUGH (2d10+TOUGH) against the rating of the damage. Each time the unit fails, they take a -1 to their TOUGH rolls. When a unit fails a TOUGH roll by five points, they are rendered unconscious.
DMG: The rating of a unit's damage. This isn't actually a native stat, but is something important. The unit might have special maneuvers or abilities with different levels of damage. Damage is 10+Rating, meaning a character with a damage of 3 attacking a character of TOUGH 0 would cause the unit to be wounded on a roll of 13 or less. Damage is static, and unrolled.

More to come.

Odyssean

The idea is basically that these people, called Travelers, have been cursed with power. They can perform magic and miracles, but they're burdened with the Odysseus curse. They can never go home, and in their case they can never settle down. If they try to, their curse manifests however it does for them. They might become paranoid or frightened of everything, they might become easily angered, or they might become agitated to the point where they're forced to leave. They can still own bank accounts and such, but they can't get a home or anything. In fact, if they do have a way of getting rid of the curse and staying in the same place, then they'd still have to stay only in some magically barriered building. So they either have to roam or stay in one spot without even being able to go into their backyards.

The other big thing is that instead of just learning spells by spending the points for them, you'd learn spells by finding and translating scrolls and rituals, or devising your own, and doing research. Once you learn a spell, to be able to use it, you'd have to make some sort of sacrifice. For something like a healing spell, you might need to set a broken bone or something without magic, or for a luck spell you might have to reverse pickpocket someone a hundred bucks.
For something like a dangerous damaging spell, you might have to stab yourself, cut a mark into your body, or even sacrifice an animal or human being.
Of course, if you're one of those not-so-nice guys who wants to heal himself, you might not wait around for someone to break a bone.
Once you've learned a spell though, you wouldn't have to do it again. So if you needed to rip your own tooth out for the spell to work, you'd only need to do it once.

How much are you willing to give for power?

Ashcroft | Bram Hellsing

Abraham Hellsing was one of the ranking members of ParaSol, and he was the head of Ashcroft's wing of Neurological Enhancement and Application Research, what most people called The Cradle.

First, to understand things better, it's necessary to know more about the Cradle. The project had it's roots in the late Sixties, after the end of the MK-ULTRA trials. NEAR was designed to "create and cultivate psychic and parapsychic potential in the individual", and to achieve this goal they created the Espers. Young children, often either clones or orphans, that had their neurological abilities enhanced, made stronger, brought out.
NEAR's espers were designed with a variety of applications, from simple remote viewing to more direct operations. Though the Cradle's projects still failed in most cases to live up to the military expectations, they still made great strides. Unfortunately, there were side effects. While MK-ULTRA's trails involved LSD and hypnosis, NEAR worked with genetic manipulation and neurological engineering. The children of the Cradle became quiet, reserved, and completely obedient to their handlers without a second thought. All qualities that any parent would want, but in a way that no child would normally be. The children were often described as 'creepy', 'ethereal', and in at least five cases 'evil'. Studies revealed that the Cradle's espers emitted a low level psychic field that caused unease in those around them, specifically their handlers.
The children themselves often had problems. The were often plagued by nightmares, and the espers labeled Watchers, the ones involved in remote viewing, would have visions, seeing things that weren't there. The children called them Faeries, and more often than not they took forms that were disturbing and wrong, much like the feelings that the children themselves emmitted. They would look perfectly normal, but at the same time they would appear off, as if everything about them was shifted one micrometer in the wrong direction, or their shadows twisted and changed while they stayed the same, or they had smiles that were too wide. They saw things that weren't there, things that couldn't be explained even by the tests that revealed the low level psychic disturbances caused by the children.
But every single one of the children described the same creatures.
Either way, the Cradle suffered from a number of psychological problems, and had a high rate of suicide. In at least two cases there were murders, but both cases were considered to be unrelated to NEAR.

Bram oversaw the Cradle of the Sariel Project, one of the most promising subjects. She had relatively few of the problems that the other handful of current Cradle children did; she didn't see dark creatures between the seams of reality, she didn't unnerve her handlers, her nightmares were easily manageable. She was the most talented esper of the lot of them, and people would stand to make a lot of money if things had gone well.
Now, with all of this it would be easy to paint Bram as a monster, a cruel man who only wanted to make money. This isn't true, though. Yes, he was motivated by his own greed, and it was that greed that he was punished for when Sariel snapped. He also treated her like a daughter. While his primary goal was for wealth and power that would come from the success of NEAR, he was still a decent enough human being if not for his insatiable avarice. He cared for Sariel, treated her kindly. He was still strict, but he would treat her as gently as possible. He had a grandfatherly demeanor, though he was capable of outbursts of anger. He managed to restrain that temper around Sariel, and not only because she was important and expensive. He truly cared for the child so long as it didn't interfere with any money or power that he would gain.

It was Ashleigh Harker, Sariel's handler, who was the one who stopped that. She grew too close to Sariel, and as she got older, and the tests got harder, she couldn't deal with what she had to do to the girl to force her potential. She went to the head of ParaSol, and she lobbyed to cut back on the project. With results not being what they wanted, they scaled back the Sariel Project. Or at least, that's what the official unofficial statement was. Bram made it so that the project would be going into a new phase, to watch and wait. Sarah was given surgery that would hamper her abilities, her memory was erased, and she was placed in adoption to be adopted by Micheal Carpenter.

After Sarah was raped and Michael killed Andrew Cunningham and himself, Bram was there to pick up the pieces. Ashleigh, shaken deeply by the incident, ran away, fleeing to Boston, Maryland to start a new life. Hellsing continued the project without her, and Sarah once again became Sariel. Things quickly spiraled out of control, though, and Sariel slipped deeper into the same problems that the other Cradle children had. Her demeanor became the same hollow shell that the other espers had, and she began seeing the Faeries--and the other things that either couldn't be seen or didn't exist--more and more. Her nightmares increased, and her new handler was unable to help her cope. He hanged himself less than a week after starting, despite maintaining his composure through three of the Cradle's other espers. This was three days after Paul Krueger was found murdered in the California Hotel, and by the end of the month, Ashcroft stopped existing as it had and became part of the Otherworld.

Hellsing, for his part in it, sits in the Operating Room of the Ashcroft Medical Research Hospital, between the main hospital and the branch used in the Cradle. His new form represents the Greed that drove him to make and break a little girl, and is punishment for his part in Sarah's death, and Sariel's rebirth.

On Angels and Demons

God is a bastard. Angels are like white blood cells.

The armies of the Almighty cleanse any infection that might threaten the whole of the planet. In doing so they stir the flames of doubt and fear. What God would allow such a thing to happen?

Angels are robotic, and think of nothing but eliminating anything that creates a problem for the rest of the body, the body being humanity. In fact, if you look at it, the MOST holy thing for them to do is to kill anyone who doubts, as well as kill anyone who met that person. An angel sees doubt and blasphemy like a white blood cell sees infection.

You need to destroy it and keep it from spreading, even if you have to destroy a relatively small part of the body in the process. It's better to amputate and stop the infection than it is to keep a full body that is crawling with disease and infection. That's what an angel does when it destroys cities, cleansing them from the planet with divine fire.

That's what makes them so scary. They're the embodiment of all that is GOOD in the world, and nothing they do is wrong. Even if they kill billions of innocent people, because the individual is nothing to them. In fact, they literally surpass good and evil in that they are capable of doing monumental amounts of good by doing incredible evil. If a new messiah comes into the world then the most good would be to kill it before it ages, to smother it in the womb or the cradle and to kill it's mother and father and wetnurse. To keep the infection from spreading. Quarantine. Amputate. Cleanse.

A demon, on the other hand, that's something that has feelings, something that's learned the difference of right and wrong, something capable of more than cold, biological pragmatism. A demon is 'fallen', but what is it that they've fallen from? Oh, far too often a demon will go too far, a demon will fall from being the implacable, unremorseful thing that an angel is and go straight in the other direction. Overcome with the sensations of the lives of mortals--a life of sinning, winning, uncertainty, great pain and great pleasure, a life that is so full of pain and hurt and joy and bliss--a demon will go too far. In becoming more human they instinctively amplify their negative traits. So many demons hate what they were before, what better way to get back at their former colleagues than to become everything that they hate and stand against. But those that don't, those that fall just far enough to know what it's like to be human, those are the ones that hurt the most. It's far easier for anyone, even a divine being, to grow darkness in their own hearts than it is for them to slay the darkness in the heart of another. Those that go halfway, falling enough to live and learn and laugh and cry and hurt, they're willing to protect humanity from their brothers and sisters, both the other demons and the angels.

Even those that fall halfway, the ones who do their best to be good and don't hurt anyone, even the demons who protect humans and extol the virtues of faith hope and goodwill... even the most just demon is seen by an angel as a beacon, a beacon of something that needs to be cut out, destroyed before it can spread to the rest of the populace and infect them with their nature. A nature of something that is what it should not be. And that puts everybody that they know or who knows them in danger, all because angels are cold and pragmatic.

Ashcroft

A few years ago in the town of Ashcroft, Bram Hellsing made Sariel, a little girl with psychic powers. After Ashleigh Harker, one of the members of the project, became endeared to Sariel, she had the Sariel project was shut down, and then some scifi-y stuff was done to the girl's brain to make her forget. She became Sarah, a little orphan girl.
Sarah was adopted by Michael Carpenter, a devout member of the pseudoCatholic religion of the town. He adopted her after his wife died, and made sure that she had everything she could ever need, and so Sarah got to go to the fancy private school. There she met Andrew Cunningham, who tormented and teased her because he secretly loved her, but was too prideful to risk his social standing to associate with the poor little orphan girl, and teased her instead.
Sarah's life changed when she and Ashleigh, who stayed in contact with the young girl, were walking home from the park one day. They were kidnapped and held hostage by a man namedPaul Craven, a sexual deviant and rapist. They eventually got free, but Sarah was never the same.
Ashleigh up and ran away to Boston and tried her best to bury the memories, and Sarah became introverted and withdrawn.

Now, while normally this would just be a sad occurrence, there'd always been a malevolent presence in the town of Ashcroft. The natives were hostile and savage, and sacrificed to dark things, killing or enslaving other tribes. The people who came over from the Old World were quick to get swept up in the witch trials, and even in the modern age people would occassionally be killed gruesomely, or pets would go missing.
In fact, there was such a killer going around at the time. The papers called him the Ripper, though that was just the journalistic nature of comparing things to Jack the Ripper. He would hang his victims with chains, and slowly cut them to pieces.

But this was not a normal case. Michael could tell what had happened, and he took revenge on the one who did it. Or at least, who he thought had done it. Michael found Andrew, and he beat him. He beat him so bad that he died from it. It was something that he regretted, and he took his own life the next day. The sin of breaking not only his religious beliefs, but his ideals as an officer of the law was too much for him.

With Michael out of the picture, Bram Hellsing did what he had wanted to do for some time.
He took Sarah away, and he restarted the Sariel Project.

He took a scared, frightened, emotionally and physically abused little girl--who had just lost her best friend, the man she called her father, and the boy that she had a crush on--and turned her back into a weapon. All for the monetary gain and political clout that would be his if he was to perfect the project.

The first thing that happened was that Paul Krueger was found dead in the seedy California Hotel, hung by chains through his skin, long strips of flesh torn from his chest. This was two days after the Ashcroft Ripper hung himself.
The second, more overt change, was that the town become darker. Bram Hellsing became a representation of Greed, trapped beneath the hospital. Paul Krueger became Lust, burning in his own fire in room 1312 of the California Hotel.
Andrew was brought back to life as an embodiment of Pride, unable to express his feelings because of the effect it would have on his social standing. Overcome by grief and anger, enough to make him forget his social codes, Michael is Wrath.
Sarah, or Sariel, so full of power but so incapable of protecting herself when it mattered most, is Sloth.

And the serial killer who would hang his victims and torture them to find out what made them tick, who would dress up in their clothes and pretend to be them until the time came to move on, was given a second chance, and now wanders the darkened town as a man with no memories. He introduces himself as Jack, and he is unique in that he has the choice to break free of the town and start a new life, or he can give in to his nature and become Envy.

The last thing to happen was that in Boston, Ashleigh's perceptions continually shifted to the now hellish Ashcroft, as if it was reaching out to her, and calling her. She would walk into a room or a building, and find herself in the old ruins of her hometown, the monsters lurking about. The phone would ring, and she would hear the voice of an old friend, or someone from Ashcroft. Sometimes it would be static, sometimes it would be a quiet voice begging for help.

Either way, there's only one thing that she can do. She has to go back, she has to recover her lost memories, and she has to put an end to the dark nature of the town, once and for all.