#hatchetober

But basically I think a short piece focusing on Steph and Richie could be really fun. Just having them mourn the friendship they could have had, y'know? The dynamic between Steph and the nerds fascinates me deeply, because I can't fault any of them for how they act but I do want to shake them about it.

My main idea for this one is based on how much I think about the fact that Hatchetfield High is a Black Altar so it's not ENTIRELY OUT OF THE QUESTION that some piece of Ruth and Richie could be lingering there. Not anywhere near the same level as Max, but enough to rattle a window here and there. I have a lot of thoughts about ghost mechanics in Hatchetfield actually.

Anywho GHOST TIME!

I actually have a lot of ideas about Richie's ghost design and how it works and how to make it clearly distinct from Max while maintaining a common thread, so there are those thoughts in no particular order:

The blue veins are unique to Max. Ruth and Richie have the same gray pallor to them, but no blue veins. He is a fundamentally stronger version of whatever they are. It's like comparing a Chihuahua puppy to a grown Malinois. Sure, they're both dogs, but only one of those things is sending you to the hospital.

Richie was drowned, and you can tell. Random puddles show up in the locker room all the time, a leak that the janitor can never find. His hair is always soaking wet, he's always shivering, and his lips are blue. Harder to see with no circulated skin to compare it to, but noticeable nonetheless.

I don't know exactly what the final blow was, but a lot of things happened all at once and they all get incorporated into his ghost appearance. Ghost Richie is really banged up. He's bruised everywhere, but his neck is particularly fucked. It makes it really hard to talk, so when he can he uses the memories of what he's said before and projects them out, as though it was footage from his camcorder. Insert Magnus Archives joke here. He can just think of the memory and his voice will play through his mouth like a speaker without him actually having to physically replicate the sound. Now his tone is almost impossible to get a lock on in an entirely new way! Bonus, sometimes he can get it to play through actual speakers, but only for a couple words at a time.

Richie can appear in the locker room and in the boys bathroom, but on nights of power like the Honey Festival or on the anniversary of his death he can extend that range to the rest of the school. Ruth works the same way, but she's localized to the school stage and theater classroom. Richie tends to kind of glitch in and out of sight, like low quality film. He's a very Ring-coded ghost lmao

The awareness and power that Max had came entirely from the Waylon Place. Richie and Ruth are much more limited. They don't manifest all the time, so they're not always suffering, but it's not exactly a release either. They're very much tethered to the Black and White, there's just not a lot to tether.

He's actually super chill, he's just trying to warn you that the sink you're using has no soap and you shouldn't watch Voltron 2016, but you could be forgiven for missing that part considering the context.