Gadgets! Exposition!
“The spectral reverberator, or specrev, is here to help us contact ghosts,” Hank went on. “The real deep ghosts, the ones so old they’re almost in stasis. This should help us focus them enough that they can function and communicate – and who knows? Maybe some of them will take advantage of the specrev to Go On.”
All right, quick debunking here: ghosts don’t actually fade away into nothing, because a ghost is actually a soul and those are invulnerable to everything. But the really old ghosts get that way because they found this equilibrium where they don’t feel pulled either Up or Down – or pulled to do anything else, really. Which all sounds really boring, but I guess some people prefer it to being judged. Or they’ve spent so long paring away the post-mortem unessentials that they’ve forgotten that there was anywhere else to go.
Barbara spoke up. “Why are we looking for the deeper ghosts?” she asked. “I thought the dig was going to focus on the Dominion Conquest period. The Council of Five and the Rattlesnake Legion sites: we already know their approximate locations, and whatever ghosts survive from then are still accessible by the usual methods.” Goat blood, if you’re not familiar with the techniques. Hey, it worked for the Antediluvian Greeks and Romans, right? “Or do you have another little surprise for us, Sage Johnson?”