Deadspeech musings...

[Zea Mazuo]

I'm going to put together what I've been doing with Zea's Gift and associated difficulties and what she's theorized about how ghosts work and generally where I'm coming from with a lot of the stuff I've been doing in threads with Scott, Joseph, etc.

I was afraid that if I do a definitive write-up of everything that's in my head, that'll finalize it in ways that take it out of other people's hands, making it "Cobalt's Thing" about which Cobalt must be consulted when anybody does anything. But it's also not fair to decide things that affect the setting without making sure the information is easily available in case people get curious and haven't happened to read all Zea's threads. Because that's unreasonable and crazy and not fair. It's probably more considerate of you guys if I at least get my thoughts down so that you can get a feel for the tone of what I'm doing, if nothing else.

So! I'm gonna keep updates here so that other folk (mainly Kes and I, but obviously everybody who has any interest/ability to help out) can pitch in. Stuff will eventually go on her wiki page, unless someone has a better suggestion for where information about Rift's ghosts ought to go.

[Zea Mazuo]

Things Zea believes about ghosts and why she believes them:

The first one is that ghosts need to fixate on something, someplace, or someone in order to remain ghosts. Sometimes houses are haunted because ghosts are stuck on the location. Sometimes objects are haunted, which gives them a reputation for being cursed. Sometimes people are followed by relatives or other loved ones. The thing in common here is fixation (which, incidentally, is why Zea hasn't noticed her own Fixation's Calling yet; compared to a ghost she doesn't really have one).

Dead people who cannot fixate on something will generally just pass on, because frankly most people don't have it occur to them to do otherwise. It's just, "I'm dead, what now, oh I gotta go." If they say, "I'm dead, what now, I gotta look out for my kid," or "I gotta get revenge on this person," or even, "I don't know I'm dead and I gotta keep going to work," then they probably end up as ghosts.

Ghosts can pass on basically at any time, but while they're around they have something else in common, also known as Zea Belief Number Two.

Number two is that ghosts thrive on attention. Zea first had this idea come to her because of all the cultures who make a special point of commemorating their dead in some obvious and special way. The Chinese do it, the Pagans do it, the Japanese do it, the Catholics do it, Vodoun practitioners do it, etc. All these practices center on the idea that ghosts may be dead, but that doesn't mean they don't have needs anymore. They don't need food or warmth or vaccinations anymore, but they do need something to live. It's not necessarily love, either, since there are ghosts who do nothing but terrify and abuse the living, since... well, hell, at least it's better than not being noticed at all, right?

Ghosts that receive a lot of attention can become something more than a simple sad remnant of their former existence. Zea theorizes that this is why there are so many cultures that make a point of ancestor worship. If you pay attention to your ancestors, they pay attention to you, and they become more than mere shades of themselves. Ancestor spirits, Gede, etc. are not "alive" anymore, but they're leading a unique existence with its own limitations and advantages. The danger of giving ghosts a lot of attention is that they're less likely to want to pass on. Zea figures this is especially true of attention from Deadspeakers, who can focus more intensely and more clearly on the dead, and whose attention is therefore of higher tastiness value.

Ghosts that do not receive a lot of attention may pass on, but they may experience something worse. You know how a lot of hauntings are little more than noises in the night, a sudden chill in the air, an unusual smell, or the image of a person at the window? Hard to say that these are spirits which have passed on, because if they had... well, there wouldn't be a haunting. But the full person was so much more than the fading echo that now remains.

Zea's supposition, given this, is that they have faded. A ghost that doesn't pass on but isn't sustained by directed attention from the living may lose memories, a sense of self, and finally the last remnants of its existence. This is tragic as all hell even compared to the original death, so Zea generally encourages even the spirits she trafficks with to pass on before this happens.

Those are the beliefs that Zea has about the properties of ghosts, about what makes them what they are, and how they can develop over time, given (or denied) attention from the living.

[Zea Mazuo]

How Zea interacts with ghosts:

First off, Deadspeakers are the only ones who can see or hear ghosts to any degree according to the rules as I understand them. This leads Zea to believe that all successful shaman-types who interact(ed) with spirits must be werewolves who are just being careful about who knows it. This also leads Zea to believe that non-werewolf living people who report ghost sightings or experiences... didn't have them. It was their imagination, their superstition, their mistake. (This also conveniently allows for Rift's ghosts to diverge from the ghosts of folklore if we need to, since it allows for those sources of information to be incorrect.)

Now that that's out of the way... seeing and hearing ghosts is one thing. I reckon the average Deadspeaker can do both to some extent. Zea would guess that hearing ghosts would be easier than seeing them, since she expects visual "hallucinations" are easier to peg as out of place than aural ones (AKA people who hear voices are more likely to accept the new input than people who see stuff that shouldn't be there). She may or may not be correct here, and it doesn't really matter whether she is.

Some Deadspeakers can see something of the ghost, but not a full opaque representation of the ghost. A lot of this also depends on how strong the ghost is, Zea figures. There are some ghosts that are strong-willed enough to manifest fairly completely (such as the ghost of one late Deadspeaker she has had interaction with), but there are some which can only muster what amounts to a vague facial expression or a hand or a voice. (Note: Obviously this bit is highly variable, and people writing should always keep in mind what's most interesting or entertaining for the story, since I guarantee that any visual or auditory manifestation to a Deadspeaker can be made to make sense within this framework.) How a ghost is sensed by a Deadspeaker is so variable based on individual circumstance and the fact that the ghost isn't limited by material reality anymore.

Speaking of the limitations of material reality! Kes has commented, "ghosts are without the "shield" of a body and thus all emotions and memories are insanely powerful and aren't blunted by a body, thus those who are susceptible to ghosts (ghost talkers) sometimes get pulled into memories and emotions as if the talker is living it." That about explains it, so yeah. What Kes said.

Kes has written that this kind of thing can happen even if the ghost is not aware that they are transmitting this emotional information, which makes it follow that ghosts could theoretically induce such a situation if they wanted. They'd have reason to want it because it's a great way to get attention from a Deadspeaker that you don't have to share with any other ghost. Deaths are personal. Getting someone to relive yours after you die probably gives ya a good boost, y'know?

Zea's difficulty with ghosts comes from the fact that her interaction (particularly if she's close to or on her Phase) goes beyond the two senses of sight or hearing. A ghost of sufficient power can actually touch her. She categorizes this as poltergeist activity (and again assumes that any non-Deadspeaker who reports it is mistaken or lying). Part of the reason that she can interact with them this way is that she has very little by way of a natural barrier between her existence and the existence of the ghosts, and part of it is that she has--out of necessity, and not entirely consciously--trained her power in this direction. I won't share details here for why, because you proooobably don't want 'em. =P

[Zea Mazuo]

How ghosts interact with each other:

The short explanation here is that, mostly, they don't. If a ghost needs to fixate on something in order to hold itself together, what in the hell use is hanging around with other dead people? Quite frankly, it's probably difficult to even properly think about anything other than one's own object of obsession, which makes other ghosts a nuisance at best unless they are helping (or hindering) the attachment to one's chosen Special Haunted Thing.

But there are cases when ghosts will notice one another and actually do something about it. Zea's familiar (whom she categorizes as one of the ghosts-turned-Gede/ancestor-spirit type beings who are no longer simple shades) will occasionally block out or dampen the access of the others to her by taking a priority space and functionally claiming her where they all can see. He is more powerful than they are because concentrated, frequent, and occasionally carefully-ritualized attention has been directed at him, and that gives him some ability to bully the others away from her as well.

In short, Zea's attention gives him some vague echo of her own power, which he likes and other ghosts undoubtedly hate if what they're trying to do is get unlife-sustaining attention from Zea and John is getting in their way.

The point I wanted to get across is that these interactions are, at least in Zea's experience, very very limited. When talking about beings that probably can't even properly think about or remember anything but the object of their obsession/fixation/haunting, we're not going to see complex post-mortem relationships.

[Zea Mazuo]

That's what was on the top of my head. If anybody sees anything that doesn't jive or has any questions, please post? A lot of this stuff doesn't seem to have been decided before I started writing Zea, so what Zea believes is true and what is canonical fact don't always need to be the same thing in light of that (though she's been dealing with this long enough IC that at least some of what she's learned ought to be accurate). However, since I am sort of making rulings on things as I go... I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page and folk knew what was going on.

So... yeah. Feedback? Please?

[Sunreon]

Some of the specific things I've done with Caleb play off of this, and also sort of go on my own tangent.

When the lab pack was still at Elkyone Hospital, Caleb was somewhat similar to standard ghosts. He focused on Kepler, he did not have power to do anything but make a light nuisance of himself to Zea. And specifically, he did not have a purpose or a person outside of who he was in relation to Kepler.

He doesn't remember a lot of what happened after he was dead, if it didn't have anything to do with Kepler, or, sometimes, other somehow notable members of the lab pack. Griffin because he was a Deadspeaker, Mac because he was a Kahlite.

Then they got out.

And it's really where he goes off.

I've given Caleb power by being in a place where he was most comfortable and safe and happy when he was alive. He is no longer "Kepler's ghost." And he is capable of thinking about other people, even new ones, of mild poltergeist-type activities, and can even touch some Deadspeakers that aren't specifically, er, specialized in that ability.

And it all goes off the rational that the place and, because of it, his memories, that are providing the power. Past attention, of a sorts. I think he half-follows the bartering system, but a lot of it has to do with that right now, he feels that Zea has to pay for what she's done. She owes them retribution. But he would not necessarily care that she had promised to help that one Indian ghost find her head.

He appreciates and likes the attention he got from Griff, but he's not the kind that would look for any attention because he ghost-instinctively knows it will give him power. He already has power, power from himself.

----

Scott has mentioned that there were Deadspeakers in the Algonquin pack.

I figured these could be some of the more diverse, skilled Speaker examples.

One of them was rather like a shaman-sort. "Anna Whiteduck" checked with the dead animals to make sure things were kept in a natural order, able to talk to them no matter what, really, and also was able to talk to the bodies of deceased in the area if they wished to speak to someone. She often dealt with spirits of locals who wanted to say goodbye to their loved ones after they died.

She didn't have to deal very often with ghosts like Zea deals with. She wasn't strong enough to see the people, although she could get a general impression that usually helped her identify them. Surprisingly, animals she could sense quite clearly, and see relatively well, although they were very obviously not real. It had something to do with how animals are not really quite as complex as people and the emotions that get left over, and especially the memories, made them simpler spirits that all had ties that she could understand.

Anna was of one of the greater Algonquin-speaking native tribes, so she had some similar spirit.... worship? ish.... views that Zea's appropriated. I would need to look up that specific ethnic group to know their specific beliefs.

But she didn't really do/get the favours system. She never had to deal with it. And for her, when spirits passed on into the afterlife, they were gone. Rather like Zea's system. Ghosts were spirits that specifically stuck around. Those in the afterlife did not come back.

---

Richard Morneau learned of the same give-and-take system desiring attention like Zea uses, but he's not nearly as straight-power strong as she is. Nor susceptible. He worked as a medium in the city for a while, and a lot of times what he would do was barter with spirits who enjoyed the attention he traded them for small favours. Please find out about x thing that has happened or is somewhere else. Please go fetch x other spirit.

For him, it didn't matter if the person had "passed on" or not. Richard was a strong Catholic (brought up that way), so believed in an afterlife where the dead were capable of interactions. "Ghosts" tended to be those who were stuck, and weren't always the most pleasant to talk to. But he could also talk to spirits, the souls of the deceased, who had passed on. I figure that probably has a lot to do with the beliefs of the deceased and possibly of the Speaker.

After one rather nasty incident with the ghost of a serial killer, the closest he ever got to being in serious danger, he refused to do those sort of seances anymore. Turns out it's not a good idea to do a Q&A with a serial killer just because some weirdo teenaged kid asked you to.

---

And somewhere in my mind, I have an idea that there is, or once was, a Deadspeaker who worked as a detective. And they could only interact with a spirit if the body was there. Too weak to be possessed, couldn't be touched by them, but if they were particularly strong spirits they could be seen.


So those are my thoughts and musings. I get everything that Cobalt says, so I don't really have a whole lot to say ABOUT it, except to add on to it or explain how I think things can branch off and still be somewhat logically connected.

[Zea Mazuo]

Thank you THANK YOU THANK YOU for that post. My biggest fear was in writing stuff down in such a way that made all Deadspeakers into Zea-clones, which would be plusungood. So... yeah. Thank you for giving some areas to break the mold without breaking the theme or the logic behind it.