a simple question; (cw: death/dying discussion)

[icanhearscreams]

[An unsigned note appears on the bulletin board, written in extremely neat handwriting. There's a few smudges on it from erased lines, as if the author wrote it over and over again.]

Is anyone else here dead?

[Just five words. No signature. He'll see how this turns out.]

Comments

[telecosmetic]

Yeah, that's a pretty good description of it. And, well...everyone was pretty mad at Zange, and she phrased it like they had a choice to kill or spare her. But she was really also trapped there, for even longer than all us others. Plus...us ghosts knew that if they killed her, the whole thing would just repeat again. There were already a bunch of ghosts from the last round stuck with us. [A few more indistinct ghostly figures fade into view.]

It...it was very tense, since us ghosts couldn't communicate with the living during that trial. But in the end, they voted to spare her, and that meant all the ghosts got to come back. [Slowly, the ghostly figures fade back into full visibility. (Technically not how it went in reality, but she prefers that visual.] It also meant that the whole town was now crumbling since Zange was also free from having to run those death games now. But we had enough time to say goodbye before each heading home. Or, well, to someplace else better in a few cases. [One by one, each of the figures opens a door, stepping through as it disappears behind them.]

[icanhearscreams]

Okay... but what exactly brought you back? You just showed up alive again?

[That makes no sense.]

[telecosmetic]

I mean, I don't remember the exact details, but...the whole thing was kind of like a game, you know? And one of the rules was that if the living made the vote to spare Zange, the whole thing would end and we'd all get to leave. And that included the ghosts!

[She might be misremembering by now, honestly, it was years ago.]

I mean, if we were already ghosts, is it that weird that we could come back to life? Ghosts are already kind of close to being alive, after all!