Chasing Ghosts

"Chasing Ghosts" is the eleventh episode of Reflection.

*Silence descends over Fuse City, but the world itself shakes anticipating the next big breath. Flame oozes from the earth. It’s as if the whole city knows something big is coming, but they can’t make out the shape of it. FLOW takes this final moment to pursue personal projects in the face of the growing wave.*

## Summary

The episode opens in the middle of the desert, where the Director is foretelling the conflict to come around a campfire, to an audience consisting of Rangers and Aura Pridwyn. The scene shifts to Dr. Verona, who's driving to work while on a phone call, discussing the media implications of revealing Willow's ressurection. Meanwhile, in OPIA HQ, Ridill gives Basil a routine checkup. She explains to Basil that her Elemental composition is perfectly equal across all three Elements, making her more or less the "most human" person in the world. Basil finds this comforting, as she finally has an answer to whether eating humans is cannibalism or not.

After Basil's checkup, Circuit and Serve attempt to convert various OPIA and FLOW personell to join their side of a facetious conflict, with Cam also serving as a neutral party. After a brief meeting in the ESP wing's waiting area, the group splits up to pursue their own projects. Basil goes to meet with Cam in the OPIA entrance, where she returns a body cam she wore to Number Five in exchange for allowing Ridill to be re-hired.

Arg0s heads to the garden to meet with Ascalon, who promised to help him train his ESP due to their similar abilities. She surmises that Fractal Duality's difference between her own Duality ESP is probably the idea that, unlike Ascalon, who can only split sections of herself into two existences, Arg0s can, using Ridill's conception of a fractal universe as a framework, connect his body to many different avenues of power at once. She agrees to help Arg0s unlock a single avenue, which is using Duality in his basic dual form. With Ascalon's help, Arg0s is able to collect all of his ESP into a single half of his body, which could theoretically allow him to bind to two Reflections. Ascalon tells him to hold out on that, since OPIA had uncovered a cache of fifty new Reflections to use as a bargaining chip in the negotiations with GEIST. Arg0s agrees to wait, especially since he wants to help Mic pick out her second Reflection, which she can obtain due to Hope's Cultivation Seed's ability. After a brief sparring match where Arg0s impresses Ascalon with his skill, the two part ways for the moment. Some time after this, Basil arrives in the gardens and uses her ESP to sniff out Gnashing Maw, since Cam recommended that she try binding with it to access Collapse of the Living's memories from a different angle. She manages to pinpoint its scent almost exactly, and begins making her way to the weapon.

Meanwhile, Ridill drags Ace on a plane all the way to the border of Cialla and Goldenrod. Upon entering Cialla, a trio of Demons named Red, Yellow, and Blue manifest and begin to follow the pair, as if guarding them. Ridill assures as as, because these Demons are *not* of Codan origin, they won't actually ping Burn. Nonetheless, Ace is interested in the concept of non-Codan Demons. After a brief stop at an old home of Ridill's where she acquires a new Flame-sealing cast for Ace's arm, she leads Ace to the Lake of Oblivion, making sure to not let him actually see the lake in order to prevent him from taking an inordinant amount of Burn. She asks Ace to dip only his arm into the lake to attempt to use its power to lessen the permanent Burn he took in Above and Below. Before the ritual begins, Ace notices a corpse fall into the lake from the sky. Ridill says it's probably one of "her bodies" and tells him not to worry about it. Ace returns to the memory of the brass castle and, now with time to spare, attempts to percieve the entity at the bottom of the Coda. With effort, he manages to percieve the Queen of Flames for a brief moment. He then hallucinates two scenes of Ridill before she came to OPIA, where she is meditating with Demons before two Ciallan Seers approach her with the intention of parading her through a nearby village to reinvigorate faith in the God of Humanity after the opening of the Coda. Ace then wakes up from his trance, where Ridill asks him if he wants to abandon the memory entirely to fully heal his Burn. He decides that, since is fight is ongoing, he might need that information in the future, so he decides to keep it, leaving his permanent Burn lessened but still present. Back at Ridill's cabin, the pair have a long talk about Ace's outlook on the role of a hero and what his relationship to FLOW will be after he finds Ruth. At the end of this conversation, Ridill reveals that, by using information from the backdoored probes, OPIA managed to locate Ruth, who is stuck on the third layer of the Coda. Ace excuses himself, enters a room by himself, and starts to cry.

Willow spends her off day going on a date with Melli, alongside Circuit and Colt, who are also going on a date. She recounts the story of a legendary monster she encountered in the swamps of Beleth, and then decides to go on a ghost hunt. Despite Colt's fear of ghosts, he and circuit agree to accompany Willow and Melli. After Willow fakes an exorcism where she summons a coffin used in a ritual to seal away a ghost that was possessing a vending machine, the group encounters L0V3R C0LD, an artist from the Undercity who forces himself into their ghost hunting party. They find a Demon stuck in the ground, which oddly does not scare Colt as much as the concept of ghosts do. They are joined by Uno, who assists in dispatching the Demon. They then follow Uno to Ulilara's house, where she explains his situation and that Uno does not wish the party any ill will. In fact, using his monitor-like head to create sentences, he explains that he has actually met Ruth in the Coda, and she spoke well of Willow. He agrees to lead Willow to her if she helps him return home, as he is lost in Fuse City and wants to go home to somewhere in the Coda.

After his training session, Arg0s heads to the appointed destination for his "date" with The Muse. After getting a drink from Cal, he finds himself transported to an island on a sea of ash, at a table surrounded by scrapped robots of an unknown origin. Soon, The Muse arrives, but messes up her introduction. She disappears and tries again, joined by The Steward of the Stars, a Demon with a body consisting of starry tentacles and many eyes, who acts as The Muse's butler of sorts. Over the course of their conversation, The Muse explains the goal of the Court of Instrumentality, which seeks to record the great works of humanity and organize the story of the world to an appropriately dramatic climax. She also discusses the motivation of the Court of Beasts, which seeks to fulfill a similar role for non-human existences, and the Court of Inner World, which seeks to perfect the self and spends a lot of time "staring at large bodies of water". She also alludes to the existence of a "boss" of the Archdemons, who has put Instrumentality on the backburner after the incident in the Coda, pushing the Court of Death to the front lines. She also alludes to a "Flame shortage" in the Coda. By accident, she also reveals her face and her true name to be "Fio". Several times, the conversation is interrupted by Treble, who reveals herself to be a friend of Fio's and the "Lunar Muse" to Fio's "Solar Muse". Whenever Fio causes Arg0s too much Burn, Treble pulls him out of the hallucination for a moment. Eventually, they come to the consensus that, even if their sides in the war against the Coda are fundamentally opposed, they still want to be amicable with each other. The hallucination ends, and Arg0s leaves the bar and returns to OPIA armed with some unique information.

Basil has spent her entire day tracing the scent of Gnashing Maw throughout the entirety of Fuse City, eventually finding herself at the mouth of the Coda. With little consideration as to the consequences of her actions, she destroys the elevator tether and plummets down into the abyss, continuing to follow the scent to a hole to the Coda's second layer. Before she jumps in, she is approached by Cam, who managed to simply jump down to the first layer due to the immortality granted to him by the First Water. He asks to come with her, which she agrees to do. He also says that if they take too much Burn, he'll use a special technique to let them escape, which Basil also agrees to. They enter the first layer onto a floating stone platform above the layer proper. After jumping off the platform, Basil finds that gravity on the second floor of the Coda is somewhat unique. If she walks off the edge, gravity simply realigns itself such that it is as if her new position is "up" where it was "sideways" before. As they continue deeper into the second layer, Basil and Cam notice that much of this floor of the Coda is carried on the backs of colossal Demons, ensuring that the functioning of the layer is kept up to perfect form.

In an unknown GEIST facility, Number Five arrives in the building and informs his comrades that Basil has made contact with her other forms. One of the CEOs, angered, says that they never should've trusted the God of Humanity's tools to achieve their aims. Number Five, convinced the situation can be salvaged, tasks Satyr with retrieving her, to which he announces that, while he will do it, Basil has broken into the Coda, which only further enrages the CEOs. The Hunter of Mortals, who had been sitting atop a coffin the entire time, asks Number Five if the Court of Death should hold off their plans. He says that they are allowed to continue as planned, and that GEIST will keep up its end of the bargain. He then enters a coffin, and into his "eternal sleep".

## Characters

### Party

* Ace Galatine
* Arg0s
* Willow Wisp
* Basilisk Id
* Ridill Arondite

### FLOW

* Aura Pridwyn
* Ascalon
* Lugh

### OPIA

* Dr. Verona
* Director
* Treble
* Cam
* Circuit
* Serve

### GEIST

* Number Five
* Satyr

### Demonic Courts

* Queen of Flames
* Fio
* Stephano

### Other

* Colt
* Melli Luxity
* L0V3R C0LD
* Uno
* Ulilara
* Marco