Chapter Text
It only lasted three years.
Oh, Mogami Keiji’s Spirit Walk is still airing, constantly demanding his face, constantly giving him opportunities to be dragged out to live talk shows. But the value of his own programming is reduced to those vapid variety hours as a showpony to tot around while the integrity of his work languishes. His ratings are dwindling to nothing, and with it, his income.
His real exorcisms — the ones against strong ghosts that rage hard enough that their struggles can be seen on camera — are so few they may as well not exist at all. Most of his work is about petty little dollops of negative energy and lying about sensing ‘a dark presence’ in spooky locales. He had once described on air that urban legends create currents of spiritual energy that attract ghosts, in hopes of spawning tulpas to work with, but it wasn’t enough. Seasoning City is too urban for the kinds of spirits he saw in his hometown. He could say ‘kuchisake-onna is real and she’s going to get you’ live on television and the resulting tulpa wouldn’t be half as powerful as the ambiguous presence that wouldn’t stop manifesting inside the old abandoned church down the road from his childhood home.
He can use his powers to make lights flicker and fellow hosts dizzy, but they can tell he’s as good as a fraud by now. The lies have lost their novelty, and the audience looks for greater and greater performances.
Keiji is not a showman.
He can’t rely on his admittedly weak imagination, here. He needs something real. He needs to know that he’s doing something. He needs to feel the pride of accomplishment. He needs a consistent way to find spirits.
There’s a figure in ghost circles, an individual his producer insisted on marketing as their ‘dark master’, to which Keiji responded ‘I am not fucking saying that’. Sometimes ghosts will wrangle low level spirits to ensure they can feed consistently. Exorcising the correct spirit is like prying a nut from its shell. At first, Keiji had assumed there’s some ghost under the industry district he’s missed.
But no. The ghosts that reference this figure aren’t limited to just that district. There’s little enclaves all over the city. This evil spirit, ‘Dimple’, is everywhere.
And a ghost that picks up followers wherever he goes will be able to get him the real haunts.
The best thing about ghosts being motivated only by survival and their dying regrets is that they’re very easy to convince. As long as a reasonably self-aware spirit is led to believe what Keiji wants is in its best interest, they’re happy to comply. It’s simple to find one that will tell him where Dimple is.
He arrives at the old school building he’s been directed to in the early hours of the evening. The air here is thick with malevolent energy, and he regrets that he can’t clear this prize out on television.
Keiji doesn’t need to look for Dimple, because the spirits fleeing Keiji's approach all focus on one place in hopes of rescue. It causes quite the ruckus. He can sense the responding group coming up to meet him before they even round the corner of the rickety wooden halls.
The spirit at the centre is almost certainly the one he's looking for. He’s enormous, and strangely featureless; the veins of ectoplasm spiderwebbing across his muscles at no point form clothing, or hair, or anything close to iconography. He’s green, though, so quite the saturated soul. How did he get this big with such an unremarkable little silhouette…
Dimple’s thick discoloured lips pull into a sneer. “So the exorcist has come at last? You’ve got a lot of guts going after my followers in my own domain!”
“They’re all as good as bait to me,” says Mogami. “The one I’m after is you.”
Unrest ripples through the crowd of spirits. The sneer becomes a glower. “…Don’t let your powers go to your head. You’re dealing with a real spirit now!”
Dimple expands to crowd the entire hall, his musculature distorting with the blossoming power inside him.
“Take my ultimate Wraither Bea—“
“Oh, none of that now.” With nothing more than a series of energy spheres — just barriers, really — Dimple is torn clean in half. The energy he’d been building is sucked into Mogami’s aura, only making it bite into the spirit more. Dimple’s surviving followers scatter to the four winds, leaving the two of them alone in the hall.
“I’d normally reciprocate your theatrics, but television has me burnt out enough as it is,” Mogami laments. Another few bursts of energy tears Dimple up until he’s a much more manageable size.
“Wait, waitwaitwait I get it, I won’t do anything wrong, I won’t mess with your business anymore, come on, please,” Dimple babbles desperately.
Ahh, well. All ghosts only think of their own survival.
Mogami strolls over and casually plucks what’s left of Dimple out of the air. He’s little more than a fragment of head, his sole remaining eye staring at Mogami with naked terror. Mogami smiles. “Won’t mess with my business? But Dimple, bringing you into the business is exactly what I need you for.”