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The Great Ghost, or formally “His Ectoplasmic Spiritualness, the Supreme Commander of the Displaced Masters of the Spirit Realm, the One and Only Great Ghost”, was a powerful ghost from the Prime Universe's Spirit Realm. During the Rifts Crisis, he led a “legion” of miscellaneous spirits who wished to escape the Spirit Realm by any means necessary.
Description
Physical appearance
The Great Ghost was a “large and powerful-looking ghost” with “hollow eyes”. When he possessed an organic being, their eyes started glowing with a strange white light. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Personality
The Great Ghost was a pompous, narcissistic individual, but genuinely driven to conquest by what he viewed as necessity, rather than an arbitrary lust for power. Though not without a flair for the dramatic, he was practical, strategising quickly in the field and always calmly surveying the situation even as the ghosts under his command let themselves become more chaotic and frenzied in their haunting. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Powers & abilities
As a spirit, the Great Ghost was capable of possession. He could fly and had some degree of telekinetic ability. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
Biography
Halloween 2019
By Halloween 2019, it had become tradition in the Cupid Homeworld that every year, the Spirit Realm Gateway would be activated at the height of the Halloween celebrations, allowing a fleet of Fog Ships to pass into the Spirit Realm of the Prime Universe and romanticise spirits before returning safely home. When Frankenstein made to switch it on, however, for some reason, it malfunctioned. Frankenstein insisted on fixing it himself, removing a number of parts indiscriminately and trying to fake success via a holographic ghost-projector. Instead, the Gateway collapsed in on itself into a true, two-way dimensional rift.
This was noticed by the Great Ghost, who had already been planning to lead his legion out of the “doomed” Spirit Realm, but hadn't accounted for the rift, intending to use ordinary spirit paths. Exiting into the Homeworld, the ghosts quickly swarmed out, looking for bodies to possess to anchor themselves and thus not be drawn back into the Spirit Realm at the end of the day. In response to the threat, the Cupid Prime pressed the Emergency Transport Button, and, when Lord Thymon brought them back to the Homeworld shortly after, the Cupids found that the ghosts had gone, stealing a number of Fog Ships and setting out across the Multiverse to find vessels to possess.
While the Cupids discussed what to do, with Frankenstein setting out to create a One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway which would send everyone in a certain radius of it to the Spirit Realm once it was activated, whether they had a physical form or not, the ghosts continued their rampage across the Multiverse. Heading to the Interdimensional Black Market, they found it mostly empty, but the Great Ghost possessed the Queen of the Black Market. They next headed to the Workshop of Madame Tarsa, stealing a number of her marionettes for use as vessels. The ghostly legion then returned to the Cupid Homeworld to summon even more spirits, and, finding that the Department of Rifts had closed the rift, decided to abduct Frankenstein to force him to build a Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway.
However, with the help of his assistant Igor-1612, who had been told how to activate the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway, and of Madame Tarsa, whose ire had been drawn by the ghosts when they stole her marionettes to use them as vessels, the Department of Problem-Solving and Technophile-963 were able to track down the ghosts to an abandoned theatre in the Prime Universe where Frankenstein had indeed built the new Gateway. Throwing a huge marble at the stage, Tarsa initiated a swordfight with the Great Ghost (still in the Queen of the Black Market's body) while the Cupids split up, trying to take advantage of the commotion to disable the machine and recover Frankenstein. As Tarsa transformed them all into useless things, the spirits left their possessed bodies and tried to help their master in their true forms; this gave the Cupids the chance to throw the One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway at the swarm of spirits and send them all, save for the still-embodied Great Ghost, back to the Spirit Realm, though they broke the One-Way Gateway in the process.
The possessed Queen managed to distract Tarsa long enough to activate Frankenstein's new Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway, but it turned out to transform all the spirits into clockwork toys even as they pour out (because it was a wholly reversed version of Frankenstein's original Gateway, including with the functionality that turned Clockwork Cherubs into spirits; Frankenstein noted that he had not consciously realised this fortunate fact until now). While the possessed Queen watched, aghast, Igor managed to shove her into the Gateway, turning her into a toy as well. A delighted Tarsa scooped up the toys to use them as part of her Halloween line, and used a magic hat and wand she'd been working on to separate the Queen from the Great Ghost, sending the latter to parts unknown. She departed, leaving the Cupids to ponder what the Great Ghost meant when he implied that his ghosts were themselves fleeing something terrible in the Spirit Realm, and to return to their party. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
These facts were recorded in an entry for the Great Ghost in the Book of Evil, which was later one of the ones chosen to be digitised for the abridged electronic version. The entry noted Pythagoras-858's predictable certainty that the Cupids would meet the Great Ghost again sooner or later. (PROSE: The Book of Evil)