morganizedchaos | VT app [WIP]

Player Information

Name: Nael
Age: 28
Contact details:

starcrossedsky, discord @ Starcrossedsky#0506
Other characters: N/A

Character Information

Name: Ghost (Typhon Morgan/protagonist)
Canon: Prey (2017) -> postcanon fanfic crown of succession
Canon Point: After talking to Alex on the plane off Hawaii
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: [horrible Venn diagram] officially getting classed as AU OC
Age: In the most literal sense, about two weeks. (Ghost counts it as twelve and a half days, from when he came out of the sim.) Physically (in human form) and developmentally, 30 years.

World Information:

And so begins my abuse of collapsible sections

Alternate timeline Earth, date 2035. In the historical background, JFK wasn't killed by assassination, which resulted in major changes in the relationship between the US and the Soviets compared to our Earth, most relevantly to the space program. More relevantly, in the 60s, a manned Russian satellite called Vorona I discovered aliens in orbit.

These aliens were not friendly. A US-USSR collaboration to research them was built, a station called Kletka. When the aliens (now called Typhon) escaped their containment on that station in 1980, the program (by now exclusively in American hands) was shut down. Because Typhon eat people, that's a thing.

Smash cut to the late 2020s, when an international megacorp called TranStar (basically this universe's equivalent of whatever Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX) purchases the defunct station. A lot of rebranding and construction later, Talos I is born - a corporate research station exploring the very cutting edge of the human mind, conveniently outside the jurisdiction of any of the world's criminal laws, labor laws, and ethics committees.

...Yeah, if you didn't expect there to be shady stuff going down in orbit around the moon, I don't know what to tell you. TranStar restarted the research on Typhon, using convicts purchased from Russian labor camps as human sacrifices, in secret in the depths of the station, eventually developing the most potentially revolutionary product: the NeuroMod, a brain injection that can be used to pass skills from person to person by restructuring the brain and implanting the new skill directly. It's the future of human learning! ... It's also made of alien matter and oh, "removing" a NeuroMod causes your memory to be reset to when it was installed. Don't tell the public that.

Anyway, in a massive example of "you should have seen this coming," the Typhon broke containment on Talos I in February of 2035 and ran loose on the station, killing most of those aboard. Some ~unknown~ time after that (but for our purposes, within two months), they made their way to Earth, and have been munching their way through the planet's population ever since. It's Bad, Man.

Also worth noting: A lot of "parapsychology" and psychic-powers-related stuff is true enough in the Prey universe to be regarded not only as a legitimate scientific discipline, but is one of the focal points of the game's scientific research. So it's probably safe to say that the Prey universe is a little more psi-active than the real human Earth we live in; however, unlike the alternate timeline information, there's nothing directly stating this.

(You can go digging around the wiki if you want more information.)

Personal History: So, before we talk about Ghost, we have to talk about Morgan. (cw unethical experiments, familial abuse and gaslighting, and similar subjects)

A Brief History Of That Morgan Guy

Morgan Yu (player choice of gender, but Ghost's Morgan is the male option) is the second child of William and Catherine Yu, who are the public face of TranStar's otherwise-anonymous Board of Directors. His older brother, Alex, became the CEO in 2025. Their cousin Riley is the administrator of the Pytheas moonbase mining-and-research operation. That Morgan would wind up involved in TranStar is an inevitability, because it's familial nepotism all the way down.

However, well and beside being the child of the 0.01%, Morgan is categorically and objectively a genius. He got a doctorate of neuroscience at the age of 22 and immediately went into TranStar's research division, but he's also a pretty intense polymath. He builds and designs complex equipment for the study of Typhon; he reprograms fairly complex AI by himself for reasons ranging from Extremely Serious to For Shiggles; there's an untranslated book of Tang Dynasty poetry kicking around his apartment that he can presumably read fluently; and while we don't know the exact details of his involvement with the development of the Neuromod, the Typhon-ability Neuromods were entirely his brainchild. Oh, and he builds robots and reads "science of cooking" books for hobbies.

We're going to come back to a lot of those things here in a minute, I promise. So, in March of 2032, Morgan goes to space to work on board Talos I, as Vice President and Head of Research. During the first two and a half years or so he was on the station, Morgan was heavily involved in the Typhon-related experiments in the Psychotronics division. He was in charge of the research, which included feeding "volunteers" - Russian convicts who were promised commuted sentences for their "help" in the research - to the Typhon to see what happened and to produce additional Typhon to be turned into the raw material for Neuromods. Over time, this evolved into being research on the unique psychic abilities possessed by the Typhon organisms.

It's worth noting that Morgan had a sharp work/personal divide on board the station. Go to work, order a man's horrible death in the name of science... Get off work and reprogram a robot into a snarky kitchen assistant for the head chef. Have a secret relationship with Mikhaila Ilyushin (the head of engineering) that he hid specifically from Alex, callously watch a man beg for his life.

And then in October 2034, Morgan made the decision to use himself as the subject in research in using Neuromods to transfer Typhon abilities to humans. As a part of this, all his existing Neuromods - and thus, all of his memories of his time on board the station - were removed. Morgan withdrew from his social circle, broke up with Mikhaila, and began to experiment on himself. These experiments were a wild success, and Morgan developed abilities based off the Typhon - before having them pulled again for further testing. Over and over again.

This had a strong effect on Morgan's psyche. The "personality drift" caused numerous changes in Morgan, some of them seemingly contradictory. According to members of the crew commenting on him without knowing what was going on, Morgan became blank and zombielike. On a deeper level, Morgan became paranoid and aggressive; his psychological evaluation found in-game has him yelling at the station Psychologist that he wants an end to the test, wants it all shut down.

In December, Morgan programmed an Operator (a kind of assistant robot with a moderately complex AI) to bust him out of the simulation used in the testing and guide him to escaping the station with the data and going public with everything that went on. In January, he programmed another, similar Operator, but this one with the objective of helping him escape in order to detonate the station's nuclear reactor and destroy Talos and everyone on it. Somewhere around this time, the thing Morgan was growing more paranoid about happened:

Alex had him put in the simulation and not brought back out, reliving the same day over and over with a slightly different set of Neuromods and no memories of the previous tests. This continued until February 23rd, 2035.

The "Real" Outbreak And Aftermath

On February 23rd, the Typhon broke containment. Morgan woke up - still with no memories of where he was or anything he'd done - to aliens steadily taking over the station, eating and killing everyone they could get their hands on, and a robot named January with his own voice telling him to blow up the station. This is, sort of, the end of canon and the beginning of fanfic land, except where it isn't. Because while Prey is a representation of Morgan's experiences, exactly what happened is left up in the air, in large part because the PC isn't actually Morgan.

Hypothetically, there's a lot of Options here, but I'm going to narrow down to what Morgan actually did in Ghost's universe, by bulletpoints:
-> Woke up in the sim to January telling him what to do; initially went along with it but decided to be just playing along as time went on
-> Saved everyone it's possible to save from the Telepaths/et cetera
-> Installed as many Typhon-based mods as were available and a load of more "human" Neuromods as well
-> Had several drag-out screaming fights with various people (Sarah Elazar, the Security Chief, over how the turrets reacted to the Typhon neuromods (IE they shot at Morgan); Danielle Sho, over Morgan's refusal to hunt down Luka Golubkin (local murderhobo and possible cannibal?) and avenge Danielle's girlfriend; Alex, over, a lot of things)
-> When Walther Dahl showed up to kill everyone, knocked him out and (with Dayo Igwe) reset Dahl's memory to manipulate him into driving a shuttle full of the survivors off the station
-> Gave Mikhaila Ilyushin her medication, and the incredibly incriminating-to-Morgan-himself recording of her father's death
-> Just, in general, discovered what had gone on in the station and was horrified by it and everyone who took part in it, including himself
-> Nearly losing his mind when the Typhon "Apex" showed up because a psychic alien bigger than the space station isn't a fun time for anyone involved
-> Eventually blew up the station and the Apex after evacuating everyone still alive, including Alex in spite of the latter's stubborn objections.

The survivors made their way to an abandoned TranStar facility in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, where they stayed for several months, hidden away from a world that was steadily going to hell. Morgan and Sarah Elazar were loosely considered to be 'in charge' of the group, primarily because they were the ones most trusted by the survivors as a whole. (Personally saving everyone's lives during a crisis will do that for you, huh, Morgan?) Morgan tended to drift among the crew, providing behind-the-scenes support for both the emotional needs of the survivors (displaying an uncanny knowledge of when someone was in crisis, probably due to Psychic Nonsense) and the projects that kept them alive and defended.

Eventually, the group (primarily Morgan and Alex) came to the decision to try and create a Typhon-human hybrid from the "put human in the Typhon" angle. This was done by capturing a Phantom (the most human-like Typhon, given that they're made of human corpses) and injecting it with Morgan's neurology. From there, the experimental hybrid was tested by running it through a simulation of Morgan's experiences during the space station outbreak, looking for the amount of empathy and other traits of humanity it displayed.

Although Morgan participated heavily in the creation of the simulation program and some of the initial tests, he left the Kalaupapa facility in June. Officially, the reasoning that was his presence attracted the powerful Typhon known as Nightmares (two-story bipedal monstrosities that specifically hunt down abnormalities such as "human with Typhon powers"). However, the real reasoning is much closer to "Alex performing Typhonand-neuromod experiments set off his PTSD real bad, and Morgan couldn't stand to be around it." Morgan disappeared in the middle of the night and wandered the Hawaiian islands for several months.

And Now The Part About The Character I'm Actually Apping

Ghost was the fourteenth test subject, and the first to "pass" the simulation. Unlike Morgan, he didn't save everyone within the bounds of the simulation, in particular having a more vicious, less forward-thinking reaction that led to him killing Dahl immediately. However, many of his actions - saving Mikhaila and giving her the incriminating recording, for example - were the same, especially as the simulation went on and he 'learned' more humanity. Ghost "finished" the simulation by using the Nullwave Prototype to destroy the Apex.

At that point (September 12th, 2035), Ghost was brought out of the VR simulation of Talos I into the real world, and shown the state of the real Earth: a Coral-covered collapse of society brought on by the Typhon arriving and doing what they do best. Based on his actions during the simulation, Ghost was considered "safe" to be around humans and allowed out among the surviving crew, many of whom he has formed friendships with (though an equal number of them are still afraid and/or suspicious of him). He named himself, in a way both on the terms used for Typhon created out of human bodies (Phantoms and the occasional mutant Poltergeists) and partially due to echoing You look like you've seen a ghost which was said several times around the period of his creation-slash-awakening.

Ghost spent his first few days of life adjusting to just being and also being around people, making a few friends, fighting a few aliens that showed up at the door, getting a bunch of medical tests done, and so on. During this period, he dreamed (or, "dreamed") Morgan's Extremely Recent experiences (not quite 1:1 time but within the last day) without recognizing them as different from Morgan's memories that he also randomly dreams.

And then on the scheduled check-in where he actually would have spoken to Morgan for real for the first time, the guy was a no-show. Some muddled figuring out of exactly what connection Ghost's dreams had to Morgan's real experiences later, it was determined that Morgan had been captured and was currently being held by KASMA - a rival corporation to TranStar notorious for stealing whatever assets they could get their hands on, and some equally shady business practices. Ghost attempted to make contact with Morgan through the dreams, and sort-of succeeded (in that he did succeed but Morgan thought it was a hallucination). The next night, plans for a rescue were interrupted by KASMA calling the survivors to report Morgan's (extremely faked) death.

Ghost was eventually able to make proper contact with Morgan, and so discovered that the reason Morgan was staying in KASMA custody was because he was being blackmailed with the safety of the survivors. Thus, rescue plans in turn had to be changed to 'get everyone out' plans. This led to a few days of furious activity, but also to Ghost being the receiving party of a few emotional meltdowns and even having one himself, as the crew handled the "death" of Morgan and/or the deception (in the case of the small group involved in the planning) in their own ways.

Ghost went on his first adventure beyond the facility the day before Morgan's rescue, which was in some ways an overwhelming experience. While Coral and Typhon were carefully kept out of the Kalaupapa facility, they were everywhere in the ruins of the city the Security team went on a last-minute scavenging run to. This cumulated in an encounter with a Nightmare and the realization that it isn't anomalies that the Nightmares hunt - rather, Nightmares are somewhat more mentally individualized than the average Typhon, and they're hunting their competition.

No time to unpack that, though, because at that point it was time to start the rescue operation. Ghost snuck into the KASMA facility while Alex and Sarah retrieved "Morgan's body," by mimicking a small infiltration bot Mikhaila and some of the others had built for the purpose (dubbed "Hummingbot" for its general movements being similar to a hummingbird). He was eventually able to locate Morgan, and after some Slightly Rough conversation, convinced him to escape and meet up with the survivors on their way out of the abandoned TranStar facility. The two of them engaged in some Slightly Vengeful Sabotage on their way out.

The next morning, Ghost and Morgan did meet up with the survivors, in time for Morgan to appear in the video announcement accompanying the survivors revealing all of the TranStar secrets they had in their possession to the internet at large (or at least, what remains of it), including the self-incriminating ones and the Typhon-based Neuromods being released in an Open Source format that would allow anyone to hypothetically use them. Avoiding backlash from TranStar over this was the official reason for the evacuation of the facility, and the group was indeed immediately contacted by TranStar -

But, surprisingly, not with guns and threats. Instead, on the other end of the line was Morgan and Alex's cousin Tracy - who had thought himself the sole survivor of that generation of the family, and who was weeping with relief that reports of at least some of his cousins' deaths had been Greatly Exaggerated. Tracy begged them to come to the TranStar facility in Seattle, now abandoned by the corporate arm of the company and left to fend for itself and a haven for survivors in the region. After a great deal of debate, the Talos survivors agreed that it was as good a place to go as any. Even if it was a trap (and the general conclusion was that it was Probably a Trap), it was at least a direction to go in, and evidence that other survivors existed.

Course set, everyone crowds aboard the plane, and while Morgan went through the "I'm not actually dead, again" dance, Ghost cornered Alex for a Definitely More Than Slightly Threatening talk about Alex's treatment of Morgan, and the relationship between Alex and Ghost in turn. It's in the cooldown from this, when Ghost actually has a chance to take a few minutes to himself for the first time in 2-3ish days, that I'm pulling from.

Personality:

spooky spooky collapsible sections

It's difficult to talk about Ghost's personality without the constant comparisons to Morgan's (especially where Ghost himself considers his personality largely based off Morgan), but it's not nearly as simple as saying they have the same personality, or even close to the same personality. They're more alike than regular siblings, somewhere more akin to identical twins raised separately - except that their experiences are far more in common than that. Ghost is more divergent from Morgan than he thinks of himself as being, which colors a large amount of any analysis of his personality.

At first brush, Ghost is a incredibly casual person; he jokes around, takes things as they come, and doesn't seem to get aggressive over people being assholes to him. He's a little bit of an asshole, with a streak of mischief that can lean a little into mean, but that is more likely to come out with people he's already got a rapport with. With strangers, he does his best to be unobjectionable.

Which, to a certain extent, is a defense mechanism in a social space where it's very easily for him to attract aggression. Ghost was born in an enclosed with a lot of trauma survivors who are specifically traumatized by the kind of alien that he is; he's socially aware enough to recognize that most of them aren't going to take his side against a "real" human if there's a conflict. He makes himself harmless as a personality because he is very much not harmless to the people around him, literally and psychologically. Playing along, so long as it doesn't cross any lines for him, is the best strategy he's got in the social sphere of the Talos I survivors.

His success on this is... mixed. It's hard for anyone to forget that he's an alien when he doesn't speak verbally, for a start, and in a lot of ways Ghost is aggressively casual about the use of his powers. He's your harmless neighborhood alien, but he also won't let you forget that he is alien - because that, in turn, keeps away the people who are most likely to react badly when he does have a reaction to something that is obviously Not Human. If you can't handle him at his floating a coffee cup across the room, you definitely won't be able to handle him at his psionic-sense-induced sensory meltdown, and that runs the risk of getting unsafe for everyone involved.

And those kinds of safety calculations are just running constantly in the background for Ghost, because he came pre-loaded with PTSD, and specifically a PTSD based in being gaslit and betrayed by the people Morgan was closest to. Trauma rewires the brain, therefore, trauma responses get passed along in neural imprints, at least when you take as much from someone as the parts of Morgan that were passed into Ghost. Accordingly, Ghost is extremely disinclined to put his bodily autonomy in anyone else's hands, especially in a medical or scientific setting. He's an average degree of trusting on most other things, but that in particular just isn't going to happen.

He's also considerate of, and very much prefers to be aware of, things other people find triggering or upsetting. This is only partially a survival strategy for not setting people off; Ghost is also, genuinely, a person who cares about others and doesn't want them hurt if he can avoid it, and doubly so by his own actions. After all, that's the "Empathy" the experiments that created him were selecting for - the understanding of what it means to hurt other people and the desire not to do so.

On this measure, Ghost was perhaps a bit too much of a success, or perhaps it's more that he internalized that "Empathy" as the metric he was being judged by as a person. (The judgements on his degree of empathy, after all, were the first words he heard as himself, rather than inside the simulation under the belief he was Morgan.) He's always ready to help out, quick to lend a shoulder even if it makes him uncomfortable, never objecting to a request even when it puts him in physical danger. Where he's needed, he'll go.

It isn't that he doesn't have a sense of self-preservation; Ghost just doesn't experience fear for himself very much. Morgan's old arrogance manifests in Ghost as a certain degree of cockiness; he's confident in his ability to handle direct threats and confident in his ability to think his way out of less direct ones. The difference is that unlike Morgan's tendency to think he's the best person for everything, Ghost is very aware that he isn't always the best person, and he's willing to let better-equipped people step in. It's just that if there isn't anyone better-suited around, he'll try anyway, with the confidence that while it might not be the most ideal and efficient solution, he can probably wrangle something.

He's also very much of the opinion (formed in large part because of what he saw of the simulated Talos I outbreak) that if you see something happening, you should investigate and do something about it. The majority of the time that Ghost doesn't poke his nose into potentially messy situations, they're social ones, and his lack of getting involved is self-protective. However, he's willing to make himself a bigger target to protect someone else, and there's a few lines that he won't allow to go crossed without saying something about it. As he gets more confident in his social position, this increases; when he's secure enough, the bystander effect might as well not exist.

Where are the uncrossable lines? For Ghost, they mainly center around personal agency and trauma responses. He'll object to coercion in any form he encounters it, but especially as regards bodily autonomy. Disrespecting people's known triggers is a good way to get on his shitlist, though he's fairly understanding of the fact that accidents happen. And treating people as expendable is unconscionable to him. Ghost will bear a grudge towards anyone who does these things, though he's willing to allow a second chance to people who are actively trying to change and make up for what they've done. (Key words: Actively trying. Second chances are not offered by default.)

Outside of this, he has a fairly even temper. This is a good thing, because Ghost doesn't really have any models for healthy expression of anger. Danielle Sho's "walk off in a mildly vengeful rage and then come back super guilty about it later" is the best he's got; Morgan's default anger reaction is "put it in a box, put the box on a shelf, and eventually some poor bastard will hit their head on the shelf, knock the box off, and release the rage inside" and Alex's tendency towards patient vengeance isn't much better. Ghost falls somewhere between the three depending on context, but except for his emotions towards Alex, he has no experience with truly being angry.

Truthfully, Ghost's limited life experience creeps up in unexpected ways. He's perfectly at ease in heavy discussions, either academic or emotional, but you throw a kid or teenager in his path and he'll freeze up, as an example. Anything that isn't within the general span of experiences that Morgan left him with tends to get a reaction of uncertainty, and Ghost is very much a freeze response kind of person (when he isn't so startled that he skips straight into the turn into a cup reaction), especially in social situations.

Counterbalancing this, Ghost has SO MUCH curiosity (which should come as no surprise given the number of bad decisions Morgan has made in the name of science). If there's something to be learned, especially on the lines of scientific inquiry, Ghost wants to dig his fingers into it until he knows how it works, especially if there's nothing better to do. (He doesn't handle boredom well.) There's awareness of the consequences and appropriate wariness of danger to life and limb, but Ghost has enough lateral thinking to get weird ideas and want to test them out. And considering that he inherited the brain of an absurd polymath protagonist, there's a lot of knowing just enough to get weird ideas and draw intuitive connections between unrelated subjects.

Ideally, he'll be able to get someone else on board with him. Ghost is an extrovert by inclination, friendly by necessity, and prefers witnesses around out of traumagenic anxiety. While he's sarcastic and can be a bit of an asshole, he's fundamentally engaged with the people around him. People are, by and far, his most interesting source of stimulus, and therefore his favorite. Yes, even though people are very much responsible for most of the things that hurt him. He doesn't have any idealism about it, either - he knows people are the thing most likely to hurt him again.

It's just that, well. Ghost was made to be as close to human as they could manage, and humans are social animals. That's their primary survival strategy. And if you can't fight your nature, you might as well own it with everything you've got.

Key themes: "What is a human?" where the answer is less about what humans are individually and more on the themes of communities and supporting each other. The idea that resilience against trauma and despair comes from the ability to make things something other than an endless parade of horrors - to laugh, to play, to bond with each other. Identity and the state of being known; identity as an active choice. Family, chosen and not-chosen, and how it can make and break a person. Consent, agency, and protecting your ability to have a say in those things.

Main Motivation: A mix of curiosity and desire to help people.

Skills: You will take my subsections and you will like them.

Typhon biology/abilities (Morgan mimicry, Phantom abilities, passive telepathy)

In spite of surface appearance, Ghost is definitely not human. However, he passes completely for human (specifically Morgan Yu, age 30, exactly and perpetually) to everything except psychic senses when in human form. This is slightly different from object mimicry (see next section), but fundamentally similar in that Ghost's "real" Phantom body is 'replaced' by Morgan's. Because it's mimicry and not genuinely being human, Ghost's human form doesn't age (even to the point of not growing hair or fingernails), though he can eat and do pretty much anything else a human would be capable of. Because this mimicking is based upon the large amount of Morgan's neurology and sense-memories Ghost has embedded, it can't be used to mimic anyone else.

Ghost can also partially demimic between "Morgan" and his Phantom form to make use of Phantom limbs (see below). Injuries to his human body are reflected on the Phantom and vice-versa; switching doesn't allow him to regenerate from injuries. There's no time limit on how long he can be human-shaped (and indeed, he spends more time human than not by far) and the ability doesn't require him to be conscious.

Under the hood, so to speak, Ghost is a Phantom (of the "normal" subtype but see next section), a type of Typhon made when Weavers animate corpses. Like all Typhon, they're made of black tendrils interlaced together with devs-intentionally-left-it-vague anatomy (we know they HAVE organs, we don't know where those organs ARE), though Phantoms possess a generally humanoid shape. Typhon are unaffected by vacuum and space-cold, capable of surviving possibly forever in space. Only a few types of Typhon can move effectively in zero-gravity, however, a group that normally doesn't include Phantoms (once again, see next section for why Ghost is an exception).

Phantoms specifically can 1) "shift" to transport themselves quickly over short distances (it's an anime flashstep with shadow aesthetic, limited to about 40 feet; note that unlike the in-game version of the ability Morgan can get, Ghost doesn't generate a shadow or double); 2) fire orbs of kinetic energy that detonate on hit, knocking things back and deal damage, 3) just good-old-fashioned stab things with their weird stretchy tendril arms. Ghost can do all three of these regardless of human/Phantom form (through partial transformation, in the last case), though in practice he almost-to-never makes use of kinetic blast. Phantoms also have an... interaction? with electrical lighting that causes it to flicker heavily (only applies to Ghost in Phantom form, and he can control it somewhat, but Only Somewhat).

Typhon have a heavy connection to the psychic space that isn't clearly explained in game, which I've kind of put through a cheese grater and baked into a headcanon casserole for my own purposes. Weavers create a "substance" called Coral which retains cognitive imprints of Typhon victims, and the primary purpose of Coral seems to be to summon the Typhon Apex from wherever it is in order to consume all the consciousness it can. Ultimately I went with the interpretation of "hivemind of completely non-differentiated low-cognition aliens with cognitovorous reproduction, linked primarily by Coral" for crown, which brings us down to:

Ghost is a passive telepath, able to sense disturbances on the local psi-space. The hybridization process cut him off from the Coral "frequency," so his only default connection is to Morgan (due to their Extremely Similar cognition and neurology). Any conscious mind counts as a "disturbance" in terms of what he can sense, but it's mostly limited to presence (and identification, if he knows someone well) in normal circumstances. The ability is much stronger in Phantom form (which is a significant part of why Ghost prefers to be Morgan-shaped).

In practice, this limit is partially due to Ghost himself trying to stay within his own head, because experiencing other minds too closely is overwhelming in a meltdown-triggering way (because human minds are so much more complex and individualized than Typhon; his sensitivity is way, way overtuned). While he can reach out and hear thoughts properly, he would Prefer Not To. As far as Ghost knows, it's reception-only except for the weird edge case between him and Morgan; he could send if he really pushed for it, especially to people who have their own psychic potential, but he wouldn't know this except by experimenting with it.

Also, as a neurological hybrid caught between human amounts of sleep and not needing to sleep at all, Ghost's ideal sleep time is 4-5 hours; he can push without sleep for about two and a half days before he starts to feel it, partially dependent on psi usage. He still tends to dream more in straight memories than the disjointed brain processing of human dreams. He may get ominous dreams related to psychic disturbances (it's canonical that a lot of people dreamt about the Typhon Apex long before it actually arrived), but they're not nearly to the level of anything that could be called 'visions.'

SON OF AN ALSO: he's resistant to psychic-based mind control effects (magical ones function as normal for whatever that ability is).

Other Typhon-related abilities (object mimicry, telekinesis, technopathy, electostatic abilities)

Note: While there are other Typhon-based mods and powers available in the game, Ghost specifically only has these. They do use a "psi pool" in game that I've chosen to translate as "psychic stamina" (focus/mental fatigue/etc) as well as psychic energy. TLDR; powers in this part of the list can't be used too much in typical RPG fashion (though Ghost's "psi pool" is a lot larger than an equivalent human's, splitting the difference with Typhon not having any limits on it.) Also note that anything that disables psychic abilities (such as the Nullwave fields/devices in Prey canon) will disable all of these.

OBJECT MIMICRY: The more traditional "mimic" ability. Allows Ghost to take the form of an object for short periods (varying based on complexity and also his own current mental strain/psychic stamina; complex machines up to about half an hour, simple items like coffee mugs up to about two hours). With the exception of a few objects he's familiar with enough to visualize absolutely perfectly, it has to be an object within visible sight. "Destroying" the object causes him to painfully revert, but otherwise he's indistinguishable from the mimicked object. Physical senses very limited most of the time (unless eg taking the form of something with a camera or mike).

The only "complex"/noteworthy items Ghost is familiar with enough to take the form of are January and the Hummingbot prototype. January is a custom Operator robot built by Morgan as a backup plan for when the sim tests went tits up. It is equipped with Morgan's voice synth, a full set of camera/mike "sensory" equipment, and the ability to use long science graspers to deliver a nasty electric shock. The Hummingbot is a very small robotic prototype designed in crown of succession (primarily by Mikhaila Ilyushin) that looks passingly similar to a hummingbird and is about the same size. It's primarily a recon drone, most of its parts sourced from repurposed and gutted smartphones, with agile movements but no means of attack or defense. Both January and the Hummingbot float via gravity manipulation technology.

TELEKINESIS: Folding two abilities into one here. The first is Remote Manpulation, which enables the picking up and throwing of objects up to "what Ghost can lift with actual hands," as well as in theory other manipulations of objects (this part however takes practice). The other one is Lift Field, which generates an area of psychic antigravity that flings things straight up in the air and holds them there. (It's also useful for superjumping and can be used to push around zero-g environments.)

TECHNOPATHY: Technically, this is a combination of "Machine Mind" (corrupts + partially possesses computer systems) and more mundane Weird Future Superhacking skills. Functionally, Ghost can manipulate mundane machines to give him access, cough up their data, and do whatever else he psychically orders them to do. (The AI you can do this to in game are high-level "dumb" AI rather than the nebulous "smart" AI that would be other PCs in-game, so I'm assuming it doesn't apply to other PCs, not that he. would.) This is probably Ghost's most "refined" ability, since he's low-key using it constantly on his phone, and he has a lot more finesse with it than a Technopath (big T). It does tend to leave corrupted data in its wake, and at high levels of power usage can even physically melt computer components together and screw up wiring.

ELECTROSTATIC ABILITIES: Catchall for "can generate small balls of lightning that deal AOE electrical damage," "resistant to electrical attacks," and "can convert electricity to psychic energy." Additionally, while in Phantom form, Ghost can use this electricity manipulation to effectively be a mock Voltaic Phantom (though without the distinctive extra spikes). Electricity absorption is also how he'll probably be recharging his psychic stamina while on the train, sorry train.

Mundane skills (aka the Thanks, Morgan) section

So first off, as a result of getting most of Morgan's procedural memory, Ghost has a bizarre eclectic mess of scientific knowledge available for recall; he couldn't tell you where Morgan learned it, but he does know it. The bulk of this is neuroscience (and related medical-adjacent fields like cellular bio), computer science, and engineering (including robotics); however, as the head of research at TranStar prior to the neuromod experiments, it's fair to assume that Morgan had at least a "baseline" knowledge of all the stuff that was being worked on on Talos, which includes the above subjects, hyperrealistic 3D monitor screens, absurdly advanced 3D printers, portable plasma cannons, and the artificial gravity system. Oh, and xenobiology and psychic sciences centered on Typhon organisms, obviously.

Outside of the sciences, Ghost inherited Morgan's cooking ability, physical ability to do robotics and computer repair (ie soldering, wiring, etc), and languages (native fluency in English, presumed fluency in Mandarin, probably bits bobs and swearwords in Russian). He has baseline knowledge of culture appropriate to a Gen Z rich kid with precocious internet access, though for Ghost it's mostly a disconnected blob that he can sometimes pull references out of.

He also has non-Typhon neuromods for guns (both traditional firearms and weird science weapons, including the ability to clean and upgrade them to a certain extent as well as firing them), hacking/coding ability, sneaking around without making footsteps noise, and lifting heavy objects up to the size and weight of a standard size fridge without too much effort. (Do NOT ask me how the Leverage mods give you super-strength from a brain injection. I CANNOT explain it to you.)

Finally, while it's not exactly verbatim/photographic, Ghost's memory is extremely good, especially for conceptual thinking. (Morgan actually does have verbatim/photographic memory, Ghost just inherited it imperfectly.) He's generally comfortable in and aware of his body and physically fit, though not to a Sports Guy or Fighting Person's level. Morgan kept up with the space standard of physical fitness, but never had a real passion or direction for it.

Item: Smart phone, circa 2035 (it's middle-tier for the time period, but super advanced relative to us). Assume a fairly standard array of apps, though 1) bloatware has been scrubbed 2) a number of TranStar proprietary apps have been added. Most notably, this includes a voice-synthesis engine that can create a passable imitation of anyone's voice from sufficient samples (for my sanity, 30-40 minutes of speech, either live or recorded). The voice synth is preloaded with voice data for Morgan and Danielle Sho; Ghost uses the former as his "voice" by having it read text generated with his technopathy. There's also about 2TB of music files (mostly rock, orchestral, and EDM/dance). Anyone hacking the phone would find that the coding is Frankly A Mess, full of corrupted data and code, especially "around" the voice synth, yet it keeps working perfectly normally somehow. (It's also one of those phones that has a portless charging system, so it's waterproof unless you bust the casing open.)

Sample: TDM stuff here

Notes: i'm so sorry about [gestures at all of this]

VT app [WIP]

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