#Drawlloween #Inktober 1 - Ghost

The prevalence of psychic powers in the Darkhive is known, dark energies weave through the cells of the hive imbuing gifted survivors with the ability to manipulate time and space, coalescing quantum probabilities into defined forms according to their will.

There are those who view the manifestations of psychic power as simple coincidence or happenstance, and for every skeptic who disbelieves the raw potential of psychic power there is a charlatan who capitalizes on the vagaries of chaos to make their reputation. But those who trick and those who disbelieve are vocal, in the echoes of their words are doubt, confusion, and superstition; folk lore whispers of those who are silent, who wield true power without the need for flamboyance or glory. In the shadows, some of the truly gifted control the destiny of the Hive, others don't even know they have the gift until the moment of their death when years or even decades of built up psychic potential is unleashed at the moment of death.

When a latent psychic is killed before they've been trained, they almost always return as spectral entities of quantum instability. They require the observance of those still living if they wish to remain coherent, but that very observance slowly kills them, collapsing their quantum waves into mundane reality. Often these beings fade into obscurity quickly, drifting too far from the settlements of the hive unaware that observance sustains them, yet too scared that the still living might fear them due to generations of folklore. Yet as they lose coherence, their minds shatter, they become remorseless and savage poltergeists as the last primal emotions sustaining their spiritual forms become unfettered by the morality and higher thought patterns of a civilised mind. By running, they become the very thing they feared.

Those few spectral entities who maintain coherence quickly learn that only those who are able to manipulate quantum effects are able to sustain them without killing them. But the effort of sustaining a ghost drains a psychic's potential to induce other effects in the world, latent psychic might not notice this but it is a rare latent psychic who ripples reality enough to earn the attention of a ghost, and such sustenance is erratic. Only focused and trained psychic have the stability to maintain a ghost for the long term, and such psychics know that maintaining a ghost is a drain on their gift. Savvy ghosts and psychics forge symbiotic contracts between one another, the psychic sustains the ghost, and the ghost enacts supernatural effects beyond the scope of the psychic.

When the psychic passes away, they typically don't have the potential energy to transcend to a ghost form of their own; when this occurs, a ghost must find a new psychic to maintain them. Though sometimes, the emotional shock of a broken symbiotic contract instantly sends a ghost into a psychotic poltergeist rage which may last days or weeks of savagery and destruction before their soul dissipates once and for all.

Ghosts are dangerous, it is merely a case of whether that danger is harnessed by a still-living psychic, directed by the desires of memory, or explosive and random.