Heeding Whispers

Artem’s revelation that the ghosts have largely disappeared from Lavender Tower raises more alarm than relief. The group heads to the massive tower, noting that the townsfolk have plastered their doors with ofuda soaked in repel—a blend of spiritual prayer and physical deterrent. Approaching the graveyard, they test the Silph prototype goggles on Jason’s gastly. The heavy lenses successfully counter the disorientation of surreality, allowing them to look directly at the ghost without instinctive terror. Maria’s natural sensitivity to the gastly's emotions confirms Jason’s suspicion that she is a non-psychic medium.

Dividing into small teams, they spread out to search the graveyard. Red, Blue, and Leaf enjoy a surprisingly peaceful walk as the first winter snow begins to fall. Leaf summons her noctowl for aerial overwatch, while Red spots a loose ribbon of unown flying high above. Soon after, Jean calls them over after spotting a wild ghost. When they converge, they are confronted by two Rangers, Nathan and Gale, who are shocked to see civilians investigating. Blue manages the tense encounter, offering to share their goggles in exchange for information. The Rangers admit that the top floor of the tower has been cleared out by a phenomenon they can’t identify, and that suspicious individuals had been seen prowling the area in the weeks prior.

Nearby, Jason attempts to commune with the wild gastly to learn why it fled. Red uses his partition to try mirroring Jason's mental state, attempting to understand how the medium withstands the ghost's chaotic psychic attacks. He adopts Jason's posture of profound, prostrate humility, but quickly abandons it, terrified by how dangerously open and defenseless the mindset leaves him. When Jason finally breaks the connection, he is visibly shaken, revealing that the gastly felt overwhelming fear and grief.

In the tower’s basement, they meet Sergeant Iko, who commandeers their help after Blue confidently challenges him for transparency. Iko explains that the top floor is radiating a phenomenon akin to intense surreality that feels like crushing grief, driving both ghosts and human rangers away. Eager to investigate, Jason, Red, Jean, Artem, and Maria accompany a strike team of Rangers to the third floor. Sitting in a hallway, Jason extends his mental senses upward, but quickly becomes trapped in an overwhelming loop of the unknown entity's sorrow. Red’s unpartitioned self manages the agonizing spillover of shared grief while his partitioned self scrambles to save Jason. Drawing on physical grounding rituals, Red uses water, incense, and Jason's prayer beads to snap the medium out of his trance. Gasping for air, Jason reveals that a new, incredibly strong ghost is brooding above, mad with grief. Moments later, Jean and Red sense the psychic projection shifting—the entity has noticed them, and its crushing sorrow is descending.

Lesson — Cognitive vulnerability. Red mirroring Jason's extreme humility demonstrates that adopting certain open, receptive mental states strips away cognitive guardrails, making the mind dangerously vulnerable to whatever it encounters.