Category: Horror

#25 – Vlad

A child of privilege from the city’s outer suburbs, “Vlad” is a kid deep, deep into his vampire phase. Because vampires are powerful and sexy, and above petty mortal concerns like senior thesis and prom. When he’s a vampire, nobody gets to call him Albert, which is an old, stupid name. As a vampire, he’s not stuck in a dead town or ostracized by the few people his own age.

#24 – Mr. Fletching

A professional janitor and amateur physics enthusiast, Mr. Fletching spends all of his spare time fiddling with radios and electrical equipment. He’s a massive scatterbrain, with a head full of random bits of math and physics that he only half understands. Most of the equipment that fills his small apartment in the city is junk recovered from dumpster dives, or purchased from thrift stores, but he believes firmly that he’s discovered scientific proof for everything from telekinesis to Atlantean power stone technology. Of course, thanks to his free form take on the scientific method, none of this is really repeatable, let alone verifiable. He’s become rather more eccentric since the flood, since the increased incidence of paranormal phenomena gives Mr. Fletching what he really wants; a reason not to be a janitor anymore.

#23 – Sid Browne

When mass reports of ghosts started coming in after the flood, the city was subject to a deluge of self-proclaimed psychics. Some were simply convinced they had a gift, while others had more sinister intentions.

There’s a certain kind of person that sees a tragedy and thinks, “What can I get out of this?” Sid Browne is exactly that kind of person. He feels the world owes him something, and whatever material gain he can get out of the people around him is entirely justified, because he’s smarter than they are. So he has no compunction about telling people about all of the (fictional) cases he’s helped the police on, or the (non-existent) messages the families of the dead are sending them from their eternal resting place.

#21 – Steven Piet

The owner of the cab company where Edwin Michigan works, Steven Piet is a young man saddled with heavy responsibilities. A worrier by experience, Mr. Piet is a friendly guy, but not particularly pleasant to be around, given that he sees the worst side of everything. He’s also part of the vast majority of his city’s citizens who don’t care one way or the other if ghosts exist or not. To him, Edwin and Mala are welcome to continue doing whatever they want as long as it doesn’t put the company at any risk.

#22 – Wrong

There’s a light in the doorway, music playing and the sounds of inviting conversation, but there’s a faint smell, like the scent of burning hair. And the music is wrong. The notes don’t fit together properly, the voices aren’t saying words. It’s the soft shushing of something rustling, like dry paper or wet leaves.

#20 – Consume

This ghost is all that remains of a man who was convinced that the world had it in for him. By blaming everyone else for his failures, he drove those around him away. A possessive spirit, he wanders the city trying to connect with people in the only way he knows how; by attempting to control them.

#19 – Silver

Perhaps the biggest symbol of the gleaming new city that has risen out of the ashes of the old is the brand new elevated train system that carts people to and fro in the downtown area. Before the disaster, the city had a ground-level trolley system, vastly less efficient than the shiny new trains.

Of course, all this was quite expensive. In order to cut costs, the city bought older train cars and used the parts from the old trolleys to repair them. This has proven to be a mistake, as the spirits of those who died on their morning commute began appearing in the seats of the new trains.

#17 – Gran Harrelson

One of the oldest living people in the city, living in the oldest apartment building that survived the flood, Gran Harrelson is an old age pensioner whose biggest struggle these days is just making ends meet. To that end, Gran sells old-timey folk charms to ward off the dead that plague her building. She’s been so effective at working up a reputation that everyone from floor five and up are convinced she’s Alestair Crowley’s ex-mistress.

Of course, that does nothing for their actual effectiveness. Her charms are written in Sharpie on cheap printer paper. Her cash register is brand new, though.

#16 – Runner

After the flood, most of the city’s poor congregated in the few buildings that managed to survive. As the government rebuilt the financial and industrial centers of the city, the less fortunate spent what resources they could to make their new homes livable. The only real similarity between the bright, shiny new buildings of downtown and the ramshackle tenement buildings of the old city are that neither could expunge their spirits through simple reconstruction. Just as the city center has its wandering dead commuters, the damaged apartment buildings play host to the lingering souls of former inhabitants.

The Runner is a particularly intense spirit that inhabits a stairwell in one of the tallest buildings in the old city. Every night, it can be heard rushing headlong down the stairs, only to disappear at the bottom and reappear at the top. No one has been able to find anything out about it, other than that it does not like being seen.