>>5583708"Yeah. Like how All-Nighter jumps out of the shadows and picks off bad guys one-by-one until there's only a few left and then he--"
"Yeah, yeah, that's cool." Sam says. "That's one way of using fear. But Dr. Bell, she uses fear a little differently. She actually uses fear as a tangible thing, as a tangible...creature."
"She has a thought-form." you guess.
"Class 5 possession." Sam says. "When she was eight years old."
"Yeesh..."
"Class 5 possession. And it was a black 20."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
"And she lived?"
"It's not a ghost that teaches her class."
Like most people, you only know a little about thought-forms, but everyone knows what a black 20 is. It's like how people know who Hitler is, or what cancer is, or what a Velstok imploder does. Black 20's are the soul-eaters, the nightmare beasts.. Even the Gods fear them, because fear is all that they are.
"Hey, Sam." Edith speaks up. "What are the possession classes again I might need them for a psychemorphology test..."
Sam sighs. "And here I was starting to get on a roll. You know, I bet the Ghoul Guide doesn't have to deal with interruptions like this."
"But I forgot when the next test it! It might be tomorrow!"
"Okay...class 1 means you know it, it doesn't know you. Class 2 means you know it, and it knows you. Class 3 means it's following your thought-patterns, but still staying out of your mindscape and in the Bessant layer of the Astral. Class 3 means its bordering your mind. Class 4 means its in and out of your mind. Class 5 means its in your mind and its not getting out."
"Okay, got it!" Edith says. "Thanks!"
"No problem. Anyway, she got this black 20 inside her when she was just a little girl. And it was mad, and it was powerful, and it turned Belltown, Tennessee upside down, I mean it was pulling some serious Astral powers, picking up buildings, blotting out the sun, making clocks run backwards, real horror movie stuff. So TIMS comes in and they start mapping all the stuff going on and they do the thumbtacks and cloth map thing and find that at the center of all the disturbances is a little farm. And on this farm was eight year old Dr. Bell, who her parents said had an imaginary friend named Mad Mary who she blamed for all her wrongdoings."
"The Black 20." you say.
"Bingo. She still calls it Mad Mary, to this day. So the TIMS guys encounter Mad Mary, and they see her manifest in physical reality, take a big step out of the Bessant layer and into our world of matter and energy, space and time. They see an inky black mass like a shadow ooze into reality. They see it billow like a storm cloud around some kind of frame. They look closer and they see white--little bars of white peering from out of the dripping darkness. Little connected bars of white. A skeleton."
"The grim reaper." you say.
