Death. What happens after it? What lies beneath the surface?
Poor Arielle Daniels stumbled through dangerous hoops to figure this out. She wakes in a new place--the Void--and discovers that what waits after death are layers, dimensions, and sadly...
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This poor soul.
The ghost advanced towards the recently deceased girl, taking in her frazzled appearance. "You'll get used to it." She morphed her tone, ensuring it sounded feminine, and not like a whisper in the wind. In her specter-form, it was sometimes hard to decipher her gender.
"What... what do you mean, I'll get used to it?" The girl's voice was fractured, and her body was obviously shattered.
"I mean," said the ghost, doing her best to sound normal, "that as specters, we have to learn how to communicate all over again. Speaking to the alive folk in their world... is complicated."
"Specters." The girl—as the ghost understood it, her name was Arielle—bit her lip. "I am a ghost, then?" Her eyes sparkled, as if filling with tears.
The ghost hated tears. She hated newcomers who lamented over themselves and all the regrets they had. She hated when they begged to be alive again. And yet, it was her goal to guide them.
Would Arielle be one such being? A whiny, kicking-and-screaming girl who'd refuse the truth? Would she learn the ropes quickly, or would she be annoying?
"Yes, dear, you're a spirit. You know you're dead, right?" The ghost hovered a tad closer, observing the blood stains on Arielle's shirt from all her wounds. She noted the tangles in her maroon hair, the scars on her knuckles, the dirt on her knees, caked onto her jeans. She'd been through a lot, the poor thing, and no one had been around to welcome her, to explain to her what happened after death.
"I... I figured," said Arielle, peeping at the chalk outline on the floor, then returning her gaze to the ghost. "But you... who are you? You're... blurry. I can't tell...what you are."
"Oh, crap." The ghost chuckled. "I'm sorry, I've been here so long I sometimes forget to show myself properly."
Inhaling a deep breath, the ghost concentrated hard on the image she wanted to adopt. After a few moments, she broke her foggy, specter-like shell—her blob, as some would call it. Her hair grew out, tickling down her lower spine, soft and sleek as always. Her mouth formed, round and wide, and her body took shape, slender and pale. Sneakers wrapped around her feet and clothes cloaked her skin.
Her human-like form wasn't as shocking as her spirit one. She usually took on the appearance of a girl in her mid-twenties, with skater shoes and ripped jeans and an obscure nineties band t-shirt. It freaked newcomers out a little less. "There we go."
In the background, she spotted the male human—she'd overheard his name was Benny—suppressing a shiver and squinting at the area where she floated.
"Huh, there's more energy now," he said, raising his arm as his hand prodded about the air, as if working to touch the ghost or Arielle.
Arielle paid him no heed, her head tilting sideways. "Wow... so you are a ghost, not just some blob."
