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Ghost trick as mouthwashing

Hadn't planned this, but was looking over @fyeahghosttrick 's prompt list again, and this one jumpped out at me

On Block B, #45, another Anon asks for the gang assinged/ cast as mouthwashing characters (memey/not as dark as it could be)

I don't know that I would make a story with this, but I could certinaly think about characters and do an analysis.

Part of Mouthwashings horror comes from the capitalist hellscape it is set in, and while Ghost Trick is nowhere near as bad, the police department does have its share of budget concerns (ie, the lights in the level where you save Lynne from Tengo). In contrast, I would still have other crew members instead of a skeleton crew, but the ask asked about the main gang.

But if we were to asign the crew of Ghost Trick to a spaceship, Then Cabanela and Jowd are the pilots. Not only does it draw on the friendship between Curly and Jimmy, Cababela and Jowd are the ones with the most experience, and leading the investigation when they are united.

Lynne and Sissel may have gotten the evidence needed, but Lynne was running off on any lead she could find and getting recklessly killed often.

They are the ones with the Map, so to speak.

I would put Cabanela as captian, given he did succeed in beconing high enough on the food chain that he became a superior. So in game he has more experiance in leading, and learned from his mistakes.

Despite seeming initally to have the more reckless personality, is a more careful planner then Jowd. He is a deliberate dancer, seemingly careless, yet percice footwork that keeps people safe. He is good at leadership, social climbing, and inteligent. His inspector title isn't for show.

With all the ways Lynne looks up to Jowd, admiring him and wanting to learn to be like him, you could also draw paralles to her and Daisuke. As the rookie of the crew and the one who puts herself in dangerous situations to help others, I can see it.

Of course that then makes Swansea complicated. Cabanela is the one who did mentor Lynne in the program, to the point of giving her some nepotism in her test scores. But investigation Style, she is taking after Jowd.

Theoretically, we could switch her to pilot trainee.

But her relentless persuit of investigation, bad test scores, and desire to help people could put in place of another character. Anya.

Anya has failed to get into Medical School eight times (relentless pursuit of goals, possibly bad test scores), and we have to persume her desire to chase that goal is a desire to help people. Aditionally, before Jimmy happened to her, she was said to be a lot more cheerful.

Secondarily, rather then be an aprentice, that opens her up to Missile as her medical intern. Missile looks up to Lynne a lot, and also enthusistically likes to help people.

Lynne isn't a bad person to look after an aprentice either, given Kamilia was living in her appartment in game. (How she got guardian status as an unrelated rookie trainee is beyond me actually, so it's possible to assume Lynne is a cousin of some sort, but I'll try not to analyze that too much now.)

So Lynne and her enthusiastic apprentice Missile.

You see where I'm going with the last one, right?

Sissel as Mechanic. For all Sissel doesn't know how to read in game, Sissel remembers how a rube goldberg machine works (lol). Moving physics is how a lot of puzzles in ghost trick work. On a more serious note, Sissel is the mechanic of the game who fixes things (brings characters back to life) for the story to move forward. So it makes sense to me that on a ship, Sissel is the one fixing it so it may continue its journey.

Sissel deciding that Lynne's apprentice might do good to learn some repair, and deciding to teach Missile a few tricks, also ties back to how Missile first learned about Ghost Tricks from Sissel. But Sissel is more of an Absent Mentor, where Daisuke recalls Swansea being really anal about getting health and saftey protocol correct.

I want to write a little more below the cut, but I'm putting it there for both tone shift and use of the character Redacted.

Mouthwashing is a horror game, and this ask asked for not as dark as it could be. And I am sticking to that, in that the characters themselves are going to stay people with integrity.

But I can't help but think of some horror potential, and introducing angry manipulator ghost Yomiel could bring in the horror elements.

Angry Ghost Yomiel, with a tie to the captians. A ghost from their past, if you will. Perhaps he is an ex crewmate who blames them for his death, and is taking vengence after entering when they unwittingly pass his spaced body. Perhaps it was their faults for something they did when younger and less wise. Perhaps they are the only available targets in range. (Such as his anger at Lynne for being in the park, and therefore being hostage material)

Yomiel shares something in common with Jimmy in that he blows up at other people for problems he caused. And he does spend not insignificant time being angry at other people and ruining their lives.

As much as he is far more likable then Jimmy, Yomiel did kill an innocent women, tramuatized a child, got her husband to go to jailtime that ends in execution to cover up what he percieved as his daughters accidental crime, put two other people in the same jail, framed Lynne for his murder, killed an innocent scientist, forced Cabanela to walk up stairs on broken bones and killed him after some psycological warfare attempts, and planned to use the child he tramatized earlier to kill her father, ultimately killing Lynne.

Also in Rays timeline, he went in the apartment with Tengo, which lead to Kamilia dead instead of captured.

For all Yomiel was innocent of the crime he was arrested for, and Cabanela succeeded at psychologically breaking him down, after escaping his lashing out about it harmed a lot of people.

He was scared, disparing, angry. And in Rays timeline, everyone died for it.

So he would be a good antagonist to use, if you decide to go for a bit of supernatural in your genre of angry manipulator ghost Yomiel.

And unlike Jimmy, who will never accept his flaws, or back down from his actions, Yomiel in game is capable of being reached out to and reasoned with, giving this better potential to end happier then Mouthwashing.

Of course, Temsik comes from space, and ghost tricks from the other crew members could be a thing if you want to make it more supernatural on this haunted space ship.

But I'll end this here, rather then speculate on what other members of this crew might get with ghost trick powers.

*Missile as a goddamned Ray of sunshine

** fixing refers to both repairing something, and changing the odds to be in your (or someones) favor. Sissel fixes things in the game.

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do fic readers know that their comments actually influence the course of the story sometimes? i don't mean in a "you need to write it this way because i say so 😡" type of comment, i mean when people are asking questions or really engaging with the plot and the themes in the comments they sometimes bring up things that i didn't even think of, or dig into parts of the story that i've overlooked, or get really interested/fixated on something i was going to just kind of glance over--and it has me going 'oh wait that's actually really interesting, that's a good point' and fully adding or tweaking or changing things about the story going forward. i'm literally adding an entire additional chapter to something right now because someone's comment had me like "oh i didn't dig into that as much as i could have." you have impact!

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https://archiveofourown.org/works/66706330

Chapters 1/1

Fandom: Ghost trick: Phantom Detective

Warnings : No Archive Warnings Apply,

Characters: Emma (Ghost trick)

Ghost swap @fyeahghosttrick for block B, prompt 11

Ghost swap @fyeahghosttrick for block B, prompt 11, "In Rays timeline Emma learns of her husband's heart attack", by Anon.

I wonder why it doesn't gice me a nice box anymore for the A03 one?

Anyways spoilery notes about the game below here, for my notes from trying to figure out timeline

That the Minister had a heart attack in the Ray timeline, implies that his daughter was kidnapped. Of course, maybe they could have faked it. But they faked it by accident in the game timeline, so I decided against that. 

The next question is when did she get kidnapped. 

So this required some attempts at figuring out the timeline, which is hard as Sissel can travel through phone lines, and we have no idea about travel time. 

In game timeline , Kamillia left the apartment around 8pm. But Tengo likes being one step ahead, meaning Lynne's apartment could have been the first site of  death in the Ray timeline. 

Yomiel was in the apartment, in that timeline, which is a difference between Kamillia living to be captured, or getting shot. 

I'm going to chalk that up to timeline variance. Although, it could also be Ray. 

(Ray learning about how diseases work, and doing his best to swap stuff, to try to change some variables in the second timeline by getting some people sick and it working on someone. Possibly even just keeping Amilie outside too long. Or even psyching  out Beauty which gets her to change up the plan)

Wait, I suppose with timeline variants, the Justice Minister didn't have to die, and could have been visited in the hospital. But I only thought of that when I was mostly done writing this, so maybe in another story. 

Back to the timeline , The Chicken Kitchen Fiasco happened around 10PM. 

So how far is Temsik Park between the two locations?

Justice Minister found dead at 11:41.  

So if Kamillia died before 8PM, What time did they meet Yomiel at the Chicken Kitchen in Ray's Timeline? Did the abduction happen before or after? 

I'm inclined to think it happened before, as it would then give time to threaten before the execution. And the case is probably full in the restaurant. And apparently soundproof.  

I want to put the abduction between 7:30-8:25 range. That doesn't feel like an unreasonable time to go out to meet a tutor, unless it's winter. 

*The restaurant they met in is something I made up, as I couldn't think of an appropriate fictional place to meet. Cabenela likes pasta so I picked an Italian name and a kind of noodle. 

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Okay, another little lesson for fic writers since I see it come up sometimes in fics: wine in restaurants.

When you buy a bottle of wine in a (nicer) restaurant, generally (please note my emphasis there, this is a generalization for most restaurants, but not all restaurants, especially non-US ones) you may see a waiter do a few things when they bring you the bottle.

The waiter presents the bottle to the person who ordered it

The waiter uncorks the bottle in order to serve it

The waiter hands the cork to the person who ordered the bottle

The waiter pours a small portion of the wine (barely a splash) and waits for the person who ordered it to taste it

The waiter then pours glasses for everyone else at the table, and then returns to fill up the initial taster's glass

Now, you might be thinking -- that's all pretty obvious, right? They're bringing you what you ordered, making sure you liked it, and then pouring it for the group. Wrong. It's actually a little bit more complicated than that.

The waiter presents the bottle to the person who ordered it so that they can inspect the label and vintage and make sure it's the bottle they actually ordered off the menu

The waiter uncorks the bottle so that the table can see it was unopened before this moment (i.e., not another wine they poured into an empty bottle) and well-sealed

The waiter hands the cork to the person who ordered the bottle so that they can inspect the label on the cork and determine if it matches up; they can also smell/feel the cork to see if there is any dergradation or mold that might impact the wine itself

The waiter pours a small portion for the person who ordered to taste NOT to see if they liked it -- that's a common misconception. Yes, sometimes when house wine is served by the glass, waiters will pour a portion for people to taste and agree to. But when you order a bottle, the taste isn't for approval -- you've already bought the bottle at this point! You don't get to refuse it if you don't like it. Rather, the tasting is to determine if the wine is "corked", a term that refers to when a wine is contaminated by TCA, a chemical compound that causes a specific taste/flavor. TCA can be caused by mold in corks, and is one of the only reasons you can (generally) refuse a bottle of wine you have already purchased. Most people can taste or smell TCA if they are trained for it; other people might drink the wine for a few minutes before noticing a damp, basement-like smell on the aftertaste. Once you've tasted it, you'll remember it. That first sip is your opportunity to take one for the table and save them from a possibly corked bottle of wine, which is absolutely no fun.

If you've sipped the wine (I generally smell it, I've found it's easier to smell than taste) and determined that it is safe, you then nod to your waiter. The waiter will then pour glasses for everyone else at the table. If the wine is corked, you would refuse the bottle and ask the waiter for a new bottle. If there is no new bottle, you'll either get a refund or they'll ask you to choose another option on their wine list. A good restaurant will understand that corked bottles happen randomly, and will leap at the opportunity to replace it; a bad restaurant or a restaurant with poor training will sometimes try to argue with you about whether or not it's corked. Again, it can be a subtle, subjective taste, so proceed carefully.

In restaurants, this process can happen very quickly! It's elegant and practiced. The waiter will generally uncork the bottle without setting the bottle down or bracing it against themselves. They will remove the cork without breaking it, and they will pour the wine without dripping it down the label or on the table.

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subtle intimacy is so soft. knowing someone’s routine and slowly becoming a part of it. memorising favourite teas and soups and drink orders. good morning and good night texts and messy paragraphs of love written half asleep. nicknames only you know. just small things that say “look how dear you are to me.”

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I think more historical fantasies and alt histories that have gay marriage be allowed should mess around with the societal implications of this. If your aristocracy allows gay marriage, why? As a release valve for inheritance problems, like monasticism was in parts of medieval Europe? As a way of removing your failchild from the line of succession by legally binding them to the failchild of your political ally, ensuring any offspring they both have will be illegitimate? How about a society where the lower classes are allowed to be gay but the nobility aren’t? Idk there’s just a lot of options that are more interesting than “homophobia just doesn’t real”

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my dream as a fanfic writer is for one day, one of my fics to be someones comfort fic. like the fic that they reread when they don't feel good and want to be happy. i want my words to comfort someone one day

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Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

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Donald Trump spreads lies and misinformation about many things — immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, DEI, “wokeness,” FEMA, tariffs. The list goes on. But know this. Spreading lies is all part of his bigger strategy to sow chaos and consolidate more power. Understand it — and do not fall for it. ‘Andor’ hits close to home, doesn’t it?

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Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement

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How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

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I saw this and I thought Tumblr might enjoy it

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Hey... I have a lot of ideas for writing but I juat can't put it on paper... Whenever I try to write I really hate the way it turns out and throw it away... I don't know what to do, how can I write better and stop being ashamed of myself?

Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that you need to stop throwing away what you do write.

The disconnect of perception you’re describing here – where what you’ve just done seems awful or looks like shit – is something that (as far as I can tell) every writer living deals with to a greater or lesser extent, and the only way many of us get anything much done is by learning to shut it up or just ignore it. Some writers suffer from it far worse than others, especially when they’re just getting started.

Here’s the source of the problem. Most of what you read in the world is well-structured, polished, “finished”. It’s been rewritten sometimes numerous times, and then it’s been edited multiple times and gone over by either gifted amateurs or paid professionals. Even badly written stuff, by the time you’ve seen it, looks pretty good.

What comes out of your head onto the paper the first time, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of finished. It is just beginning. It’s probably fragmentary. It’s likely to be all over the place both structurally and stylistically. You may have absolutely no clear sense of where you’re going with it. You may not really know who the characters are or what’s driving them. (Or possibly worst, why anyone in their right minds would like them.)

And all of us who do this work sooner or later find ourselves, in our heads, comparing these raggedy just-written piles of unlikely-looking word-blots and splotches against two things: the images of what other people’s work looks like – well-structured, eloquent, rounded, very put-together – or the image of what your work was supposed to have come out looking like. This is where a lot of us run into trouble. We can see in our minds that shining image of the completed work, effective and beautiful and perfect (look up the word eidolon, it applies…). And the shabby raggedy ill-realized thing that’s all we were able to create today stacks up so unbelievably poorly against either what our work (we think) should be, or what (we think) others’ is, that the urge to chuck our own production in the fire or highlight the whole damn thing and hit DELETE is extremely strong.*

And this comparison is exactly the wrong thing to be doing. It is the job of written works in their early stages to be threadbare and patchy and faded-looking. The process of turning them into finished work is like making a film of the wearing-out of a piece of clothing, and then running that film backwards. You look at the patched holes and pull the patches off. The holes get sharper-edged. Then they heal. The garment gets less faded as you work. The seams pull tighter together. The longer you work the more clearly you can see what the “new” garment looked / will look like. And finally you’re done (or as done as you can be when you’re finished telling yourself the story for the first time). …This is of course the point at which you realize the garment’s pockets aren’t big enough, but never mind: dealing with that is what your next draft’s for.

You’ll never get there, though, if you keep trashing your work in the thing-of-rags-and-patches stage. That initial sense of shame will only get worse the more you indulge it, so as an initial step you’ve got to stop indulging it by throwing your work away.

So, initially, your mission (Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it) is this: you’re forbidden to throw any writing away any more. Everything must be kept. Not just as part of a plan for dealing with this problem, but because (deep breath: shouts) NO WORK IS WORTHLESS. Every piece of writing you do is worth something. You may not be able to perceive just what, at the moment, but that’s not your job. Analysis comes after execution. Overindulge the analysis in the “during” stages and you’ll just turn yourself off.

So cut that the hell out.

Your job now becomes to write and then put what you’ve written away. Don’t come near any given scrap of work for at least thirty days. Put it in a drawer and lock the drawer. Or give the file to someone who won’t look at it. Don’t peek. Let it alone.

After a month you can take a given piece of work out of the drawer and look at it. And you are still not allowed to throw it away. If you hate it, you have to sit down and write at least a page of analysis, specifying what about it doesn’t work. (And none of this “Because it sucks” crap. You need specifics.)

Then you put that analysis away with the piece of writing and leave them for another month. (And no, I’m not kidding. In this world of instant gratification, one of the single most useful things a writer can learn is patience. Are you serious about this? Then take a breath. Having written, go do something else. Leave that bit of work alone and don’t even think about picking at it. Give it time to mature.)

And also: the next day, write another thing. And put it away. And then another thing, and another, and put them away. Little scraps, they can be. To start with, the garment always looks like it’s entirely made of patches. (Which is just fine, because it is.)

If you did that for a whole month – wrote, say, a thousand words a day, and put them away – by the end of the month you would have thirty thousand words. They might not be joined together in any recognizable sequence, but that doesn’t matter. You’d have 30K of words, and such are the wonders of the Law of Averages that I can tell you this with absolutely no fear of being wrong: They cannot all be bad. Some of them will have to be good if only by accident. (Lots of us are beneficiaries of these happy accidents. The more you write, the more likely you are to have them. The universe can be surprisingly kind once you’re starting to impress your will on it at regular enough intervals.)

Anyway. Do that for another month, and you’ve got 60K of words. Do it for another, and you’ve got 90K. That’s a fair sized novel’s worth of words, these days.

Now you put them all in that drawer or file folder again and let them be for another month. No peeking.

After that month, you take out those scraps and start arranging them into a shape that approximates a story. Don’t rush. Pull out and set aside the sequences of words that you don’t like in association with the others. They may be useful for another project.

Something you’ll notice at this point, though. Your embarrassment, your shame at the newly-created stuff, will have started to fade, because you will have been reeducating the parts of your brain that were harboring it into more useful behaviors. Somewhere along the line you’ll realize that you’ve sweated the shame out entirely, forgotten about it. It may pop up again every now and then when you start something new or something particularly ambitious, but the same approach outlined above will get rid of it again. You may have to exorcise this particular minor demon a few times. Don’t fret: you can do it. You’ll find it gets easier every time.

…Now get out there and get started. One scrap at a time. :)

*My personal image of Heaven is (among many other things) as the place where you get to sit down and read the perfect, Platonic-solid versions of your books – the books that have actually come out the way you saw them in your head; as if lifted up at a great distance, radiant, satisfying, perfect. Every writer knows what it is to look at a book, even a very successful one, and sigh because whatever else it is, it missed that. And you turn away and say to yourself, Ah well… because we’re in the wrong place for perfection. But it doesn’t mean we don’t yearn.

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Dehumanizing bigots is bad, not because I want to be nice to them, but because they are human beings and they serve as a reminder that anyone is capable of evil ideation and action. Violent bigots are not fundamentally different beings from you. They are human beings, who have developed a reactionary and destructive belief system due to their circumstances combined with their biases. In a different timeline, that could've been you. Anyone can be radicalized. Nobody is immune to propaganda, not even the person reading this.

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Want to do something to help stop the tradwife pipeline btw? Include mothers in your feminism. Hold space for women and others who are experiencing pregnancy or motherhood. Listen to their concerns about and unique perspectives on things like universal childcare, bodily autonomy, healthcare. Hold men who disrespect, sexualize, fetishize, shame or harass pregnant women and mothers accountable. Advocate for the right to nurse in public. Advocate for bodily autonomy within the healthcare field. Listen to women and birthing parents who have birth trauma. Listen to women who have undergone things like “the husband stitch”, or medically unnecessary c-sections, or who were given drugs without consent by doctors and nurses violating their birth plan. Advocate for resources to promote an end to the high rates of maternal mortality in the US. Get to know a woman who has children. Get to know the person she is. Know about her likes and interests and hobbies. Unlearn the stigma in your head which makes you see pregnant women as “ruined” or “tainted” and mothers as devoid of individual personhood.

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the scariest thing about the generative AI thing is how quickly people have accepted it as an indefinite, irrevocable part of their reality. people have genuinely convinced themselves that ChatGPT is the only solution to most tasks - tasks they did with their own brain without any large effort two years ago. like you know damn well all of us used to write emails ourselves why are we pretending like this is an impossible task to do with your own two hands. what's with the fucking. AI revisionism. i feel like i am going insane.