Since the dawn of humanity, people have been plagued by supernatural entities known as spirits, the physical manifestations of people's desires. Spirits are created when a persons desire can no longer be contained within the soul, and spreads through the rest of the body, effecting the persons ability to complete normal tasks.
It will be your job as a spirit medium to expel these spirits from the affected through a process called exorcism (see page. 36 for details).
Sarah looked up from her textbook and stared blankly at the blinking line at the end of her essay, slowly calculating the hours she still needed to spend sitting there to finish it.
She's never really been good at researching for papers, especially ones she needs to cram for.
It doesn't help that she hasn't slept in over two days, her train of thought was painfully slow, all she could manage to do was stare...
And stare she did… For a long time… As if words would magically appear on the screen for her…
The room around her is impossibly quiet, and the only source of light is coming from her laptop.
The light coated everything in her small dorm room in a harsh white light, everything but her shadow, a crisp black reflection stuck to the blank wall behind her.
Her mind, half asleep, didn't even notice that her mouth was half agape.
Her baggy eyes and greasy face were caked in her laptop's unnatural white light, and her heavy head hung centimeters over the keys.
She looks much more like a ghostly spirit than a spirit medium.
She's unbelievably tired, and every part of her brain is telling her to go to sleep, but that's just not an option right now.
If she fails this essay, she could lose her academic scholarship which pays for her meals, or maybe it was the international student scholarship...
Either way, it was important that she finished this paper by sunrise.
"This sucks... but it'll be worth it... it'll be worth it..."
Sarah is attending the prestigious Seoul School for the Spiritually Gifted in Seoul, South Korea to chase her dream of becoming a world renowned spirit medium and making a ton of money.
As described by her professors, she is "remarkably gifted," and "a generational talent, who will undoubtedly become a generational medium."
...
After a few seconds, she lifted her hands back up to the keys.
She didn't type, she just froze there for a few seconds, but she convinced herself she was technically making progress.
She silently watched the small black numbers on the bottom right corner of the screen.
2:58 AM
"2:58 AM… Huh…" Her skull was as empty as the words she just spoke, so it took her a solid few seconds to form a cohesive thought.
"I have to wake up in two hours to go to work…" She glanced back at the pitiful amount of words on her screen, and chuckled to herself a little.
"I guess I won't be sleeping tonight either…"
She let the words fall out her mouth, extra cargo hidden under each exhale. Somehow, she found it much easier than thinking.
It's not like she has to worry about waking anyone up. Hana, her roommate, was probably out drinking with her friends, or at some fraternity party getting 'familiar' with her peers. They haven't really spoken much, but Sarah pretty much had her personality pinned down.
"I wish… She'd just die…"
In case you couldn't tell, Sarah has a terrible personality and absolutely no friends.
Her idea of what the typical student likes to do on a Wednesday night is entirely based on pop culture, and almost always wrong.
In fact, right now Hana's face is planted on her laptop, sleeping soundly in the campus' library, with a good Samaritan's jacket draped over her like a blanket.
"I wish everyone would die."
She began to type a little, slowly chugging off of her hatred.
Usually she's not this bad, but the lack of sleep the past few days fed the worst parts of her brain, like how a spirit does on human desires.
"I wish…"
She tried to think of something else to kill, but it's hard to top 'everyone,' so she went back to typing.
The quiet room was filled with the sounds of the keys like a steam train on train tracks. Her hatred for humanity fueled her fingers.
Suddenly, she stopped, and slowly turned her head around to look at the empty pink heart themed bed sheets on the other side of the room.
...
"I wish..." She paused, as if there was somebody else around to hear what she was going to say, and then frantically blurted out the first thing she could think of, "p-people who say they're in love would die."
As soon as those words left her lips, as if on queue, the ceiling above her silently detached from the walls, and slowly climbed into the dark starless sky.
Her fingers continued to tap and chip away at the giant essay that was due in a few hours, completely unaware of what had just happened above her.
"When did it get so cold…"
The sky above her head is crystal clear, and pitch black, as if there were clouds the moon and stars could hide behind.
After a few seconds without the roof to support them, the four walls surrounding Sarah's desk suddenly began to wail.
CCCrrrrreeeaaakk…
It started small and quiet, but the volume quickly rose. The noise was loud enough to pull Sarah out of her computer to look around.
"The heating?" Despite the schools prestigious air, this hadn't been the first time she'd heard a noise like this coming from the crappy heating ducts, and it explained the sudden drop in temperature, "it's never been this loud before..."
Suddenly, small cracks started to form where the walls connected. The noise sounded like the crackling of a camp fire.
C-c-c-craackk... C-c-c-craackk...
Then, with the heavy sound of a branch snapping, the walls broke at the seams, and the four walls, still intact, slowly topple into the earth, all at the same time.
Sarah watched in horror at the dark blue field of deep red roses stretching for an infinite number of miles all around her.
"I-I fell asleep?! But I still have so much to write!!"
She slammed her first on the table, but the whole table turned to goo as she did. In a chain reaction, she watched everything on her desk turn to goo, then it crawled down the legs of the desk and spread across the floor to the wheels of her desk and the legs of her bed frame. The goo absorbed itself into the dirt, vanishing without a trace.
Sarah, now sitting on a grey dirt path, stood up to get a good view of her surroundings.
Millions, no, billions of dark red rose bushes stretched for miles and miles around her, as mentioned before, the sky was pitch black with no moon or stars. The dirt and bushes were a dark grayish-blue, and there was an occasional will or divot far into the horizon. There was nothing to block her view, no fog or tilt of the earth's surface, she could see forever.
The first thing she noticed, however was the giant mansion about fifty feet away on a small hill, which the dirt path she was standing on led to.
"... Strange dream..."