Chapter 20: The Ghost Recorder
In the depths of a world twisted by nightmares and survival, some players bore more scars from reality than this false dream. One of them was Lysa.
Before the Sleep, she had been an archivist intern. Books, tapes, footage—anything with memories, she preserved. She wasn't particularly sociable, but her mind was a vault. A vault cursed to never forget... until one rainy night.
She had been riding home from the university archive when a car slammed into her side. The next moments were a blur—blinding hospital lights, muffled voices, pain... and then the most terrifying sensation of all:
Emptiness.
The anesthesia numbed more than her nerves—it fogged her mind. For days after, she struggled to remember things she'd once held with obsessive clarity. Faces blurred, names danced at the edge of thought. It was her worst nightmare.
She became obsessed with reconstructing her own life, journaling everything, hoarding data, even whispering thoughts into a recorder she called "marc." A tattered cassette recorder that never left her side. Her parents called it a phase. She called it salvation.
So when the Sleep came, and she awoke in a world ruled by abstract forces and divine systems, the memory-themed Pillar called to her like fate.
Tier One Abilities – Memory Pillar (Lysa):
1. Echo Lock – She could lock and replay the last ten seconds of any event within a 20-meter radius. Within the loop, she could adjust her own actions to correct mistakes or avoid danger. Cooldown: 1 minute.
"Mistakes are just memories waiting to be rewritten."
2. Cognitive Thread – By focusing on someone, she could tether a mental thread to them, sensing emotions, intentions, and sometimes even flashes of past memories. The longer the exposure, the clearer the vision.
"People are books, and I refuse to stop reading."
3. Phantom Archive – She could record the last three major abilities or skills she witnessed and reproduce one of them as a ghostly mimic—not at full power, but enough to shift the tide of battle or cause disruption.
"Everything you do… becomes mine eventually."
4. Mnemosyne's Curse (Passive) – Lies, memory alterations, and deceit became ghosts to her. When someone tried to twist or erase the truth, she saw flickering phantoms of what was real. The more hidden the lie, the more monstrous the ghost.
"Memories don't fade. They fight back."
As she sat with the others on the eighth night, where the air buzzed with an eerie tension and only eight remained, she glanced across the fire at marlo
He was quiet now, Their eyes met briefly.
"Is it time?" she asked
And somewhere in the dark, the record button on her old cassette clicked into place.
"In the darkest of nightmares… Marlo shone the brightest. But memories… they last even longer."