A Little More Backstory

"What's a human specter?" A new voice joins the commotion. Alex turns around to see who it is.

It's Serena. The pyrokinetic eleven year old. With light brown hair, hellfire auburn eyes, and interesting freckles all over her face, she was by far the most conspicuous looking of all of us. Elementals tend to give themselves away that way in their genetic and general appearance. Mikey was saved on account of his kind not having any kind of appearance differentiation. Serena walks in, makes a teeny fireball in her hand so she could see, and sits down by Delaina. Serena always had an admiration for her.

"Shouldn't you be sleeping?" Michael teased. They were cousins, and extremely close.
"Oh, hell no, you're not my dad. You guys wake me up, I want to know what's going on." Serena shuts us all up most of the time. Pyrokinetics.

With that, we all concede. Alex tells her what happened with the computers and the message and Cameo.

"But how do you know that's really what she saw?"
"Because I was reading her mind the whole time, and I saw everything until..." I really don't want to talk about it.

Serena doesn't make me. "You guys didn't answer my question. What's a human specter?"

"Nobody really knows. Most scientists that deal with it aren't really well known. The only guy who really dealt with it was a parapsychologist named Matthew Donnely, an American of Irish descent, but he died about ten years ago. I don't know much about him, except he had an astronomer for a wife who died with him." A new voice answered this.

It's Anna, forcefield twin number 2. She's the one out of them who is more skilled with forcefields. Lily was better at invisibility. Lily was shielding them while in the tracks, and Anna was creating a forcefield around everyone in case the train came and they couldn't make it.

Alex stares at her blankly. "How did you know that?"
"I read. People other than you know what they're talking about." She says this rather icily. Anna and Alex have a history. An interesting one, in fact. The twins and Alex went to elementary school together, and Alex tormented them until junior high, when he went off to high school. Anna held a little more of a grudge about it.

"I had to do conceptual parapsychology for a project awhile back, so I had to study his work. A human specter is a very rare type of ghost."

"So she's dead?" Delaina looked down at Cameo worriedly. Frankly, I'm worried too, but I'm trying not to wake her.
"Not quite." Lily said. She'd entered unnoticed after Anna. "Regular ghosts, or specters, are born when their bodies die, and their spirits then live on for an untold amount of time until the spirits themselves diminish."

"Half ghosts, on the other hand," Anna picked up seamlessly where Lily left off. "are extremely rare. It happens when a ghost knows it's about to diminish and die, and happens to be around where new life is occurring. In this case, this ghost was around a hospital. It picks the child it knows will give it the ability to live to the fullest. If she is a half specter, the ghost knew her future. He knew she was going to have special abilities, like retroclairvoyance, and the ghost has been making Cameo herself more powerful. Even if the ghost leaves her today, she'll still have her retroclairvoyance, and she may even pick up another ability. The ghost was simply taking what was already in her and making it better."

"The problem is." Lily took it from there. "is that for a very long time, this ghost has wanted to make itself known to her. The ghost is trying to unlock her spirit so it can fight the ghost war."

"The ghost war?" I don't buy it. I'm already a member of a secret psychic society with different chapters. One unbelievable thing at a time.

"Yeah, the ghost war. For millenia, ghosts have been trying to kill off humankind so that nobody will die. We've been killing off our earth that we even live on after we die, and the spirits don't like it. It sounds crazy, but we found books written thousands of years ago proving that every few hundred years, they have a ghost posses the body of an unsuspecting child that also happens to have special abilities of its own. It's like their version of a solar eclipse. Never really happens, and when it does, we're not alive to see it."

"They call the child after that a weapon. If Cameo is what Alex says she is, the ghosts are tracking her down right now. And they're ghosts. They don't give a shit about our security." Anna finished off. "She can either be the only person who can communicate with them and call them off, or the only person who can kick humanity's ass."

We all sit in silence, reeling from this information. So we're no longer a simple psychic society training each other and trying to fight for the ability to publicly show the world what we can do. Were a simple psychic society who's new job is to protect the ultimate ghost weapon from falling into the wrong hands.

Delaina's the first to speak. She normally is. "So...what are we gonna do?" She's moved over next to Michael by now, and he's very discreetly holding her hand. Do they have a death wish or what?

Alex looks visibly tense. "I'm not exactly sure. Either way, Delaina, you were right before. There's not much we can do, save for speculate. If I'm right, and we've stumbled onto a ghost prophesy, she's got to be trained. I haven't trained a retroclairvoyant before, so it'll be kind of hard."

"I'll help." I offer. Somehow I always find excuses to be around her.
"Okay, thanks, Vlad." Alex looks grateful. "You guys." Now he's reffering to Delaina, Serena, and the twins. "You guys get some sleep. You too, Daniel. Michael." He says his name with a degree of coldness I haven't heard from him since the storeroom. With that, he leaves quickly, but not before glancing sideways at Delaina.

Delaina looks worried. "Vlad, did you...?"
"No I didn't, but I should have, considering he knew about my pseudo date. I won't, okay?" I reassure her.
"Okay, thanks." She looks down from me to Cameo. "Vlad, take her to her room when she wakes up, she's gonna be tired as all hell. She's been there and back." She leaves, Michael at her heels.

"Okay, that's our cue to stay with Serena and Izzy tonight." Lily laughs. "I don't need to see Delaina and Michael in the throes."
"They didn't..?" I'm shocked.
"No, but they're not exactly slow and steady wins the race. Plus, Alex hates the idea. In Delaina's head, its more reason to do it, really. Deep down, she'd want to be with Alex, but she feels he doesn't understand her need to be unattached and have fun, so she rejects him." Anna says. Nice to have some backstory. With that, they leave.