[ti]open[/ti] Hey ghosts! It's me, ya boi!

Who you gonna call? Not Taro, because he's too busy getting lost in this darn forest. The masked trainer had decided to follow what had initially looked like the light of a lantern, going off whatever path there was and deeper into the mist. And of course that light had to flicker out at some point, leaving Taro confused and lost. Was this lantern another player? Or an NPC? Or simply an ambient effect that caused the exact chaos it was supposed to.

Either way, Taro was lost and unsure where to go, unless... He quickly let Aureate out of her pokéball, the litleo looked up at him with a grumpy expression. <You know you just woke me from my beauty sleep, right?> Taro shrugged, trying their best to be indifferent to her complaints. "I need your assistance, Aureate. We will need to hunt down a ghost-light." Their mask was chesire-grinning as usual, it was a mask after all, but the tone of their voice was a little onimous. <Ghost-light? What the heck does that mean?> The pokémon looked around, unsure what to "hunt" for exactly. "I saw a light in the mists, leading me here. Of course, the light snuffed out when I arrived here. But as you might have guessed, I am curious to see where this light originated from, and what its purpose is." Aureate firmly nodded her head <Understood. This doesn't excuse you for ruining my beauty sleep though.>

And thus, the two of them went on their way to find the source of this light. Not without (almost) tripping over tree branches and roots that were hidden by the fog, though. <Are we there yet?> Aureate asked for what probably was the fifth time in the past three minutes, and Taro would answer the same answer as he'd done the previous four times: "We 'get there' when we encounter that spectral light again." They let out a sigh of frustration. "I believe you would know that by now." And as if Aureate's complaining had magically summoned it, a light popped up in the distance.

"There it is!" they ran towards the light, but tripped over yet another branch and fell flat on their masked face, as if fate demanded something "comedic" to happen in case there were other people around. "Aureate, Ember!" they grumbled at their litleo, still face-first on the forest floor. Fighting ghostly maybe-fire with fire, obviously a great idea.


After they got up, Taro realized something. This was definitely not the same kind of light they had seen earlier...