Partially inspired by my recent obsession with Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and a strange recurring daydream where a girl cuts her hand in the middle of slicing her throat open coolly but dubiously.
Working Title: Ghost Brigade
Genre: Fantasy, or maybe Supernatural?
Protagonist: Becky, an 18-year-old woman with blue eyes and dark, curly hair. She's a little too big to be considered slim, and she's below average height. She has a general depressive aura about her, is very prone to snarking, and has few friends outside the Internet. She's exceptionally talented in the detection of ghosts, although she tends not to pay much more attention to them than she does living people (that's not much, by the way), and it turns out she also has significant powers within the ghost world.
Other Main Character: George, a 21-year-old (30 years dead) ghost who is a total dweeb. He would have quite an impressive stature if he had the muscle to go with his bone structure, but, as it is, he just comes off as barrel-chested but lanky. He's very well-intentioned and determined but generally inept and not very intelligent. He doesn't have any unusual abilities in either the normal or ghost planes.
Antagonist: A serial killer, although not because of mental instability (at least, not that kind).
Setting: A modern-day urban area. Becky lives in an apartment with her parents (it isn't typically haunted). There are both ghost and normal planes, but they're technically the same world, just inhabited by ghosts and the living, respectively. The ghost world's appearance is sort of a negative of the normal world. Some ghosts can manipulate objects or people, but most can't. All can be seen by living humans at some occasions, mostly depending on the human.
Plot: George is determined to stop an upcoming chain of murders, but he's all but powerless. He manages, after some time, to establish a connection with Becky and, knowing her powers, convinces her to join him in the ghost world. Under the impression that her life is going nowhere, anyway, she takes the chance, and George manages to pull her spirit into the ghost world before it can get any farther. She retains the ability to reanimate her body (although she has to do herself in if she wants to go back to the ghost world) and can also influence quite a few things as a ghost. George does his best to lay out the situation he's discovered, and they work together (okay, Becky does most of the actual work) to save the lives in danger and avoid those in the ghost world trying to stop them.
Point of View: First person (Becky).
And I will conclude with a brief spurt of dialogue that hit me (starting with Becky):
"Hang on, can ghosts hurt each other?"
"Well, no, not normally. You're different, though, so you might be able to."
"Oh, so if I did this..."
"Owowow! What—Th-that wasn't very nice!"
"Well, you've been dead for 30 years, right? Isn't pain supposed to help you feel like you're alive again or something?"
"Pain hurts, though..."
I really like both of the characters you've established here; they seem like they'd be good foils to each other. Poor George at the end D:
ReplyDeleteI'm a little confused about Becky's, er, status of existence, though. Is she somehow stuck between the ghost and human worlds? That's the impression I got out of it. (Probably because this whole thing reminds me a bit of Danny Phantom XD)
Haha, so far Becky seems to be a foil to most of the characters.
DeleteWell, at any given point, she's either living or a ghost. But she can sort of retain abilities in the opposite plane-e.g., manipulate objects as a ghost or phase through them as a living human.
Haha, we'll see how original it ends up being. So far I've taken a lot of things rather directly from other sources.