Ladies and gentlemen! The dearly departed and the still-breathing alike! From Homo sapiens to Intellitrons, all sentient beings who call themselves thinking creatures! We implore you to spare a few minutes to learn about our cause and the desperate plight of ghosts in Astropolis. You may think this has nothing to do with you, but as long as individual lives have an end, sooner or later, in the near future or the far-flung days, you will inevitably face the same situation we do. To protect the rights of ghosts is to protect your own future!
And the ghosts' greatest enemy is none other than the Postmortem Employment Center, the place that chews ghosts up and spits nothing out. Until the Postmortem Employment Act changes, there will be no end to the ghosts' hell.
The Life of an Unwanted Ghost
Picture this: Your guardian racks up a million credits in debt, then vanishes into thin air. Or maybe you took out an IPC study loan to pursue advancement at the Intelligentsia Guild, spent the better half of your life grinding away, finally paid off half of it, and then you just... drop dead. You're practically celebrating, thinking "well, that's that," when you suddenly open your eyes and find yourself "resurrected" as a ghost. And that debt from your dearly departed self? Now it's yours to carry. Congratulations, you get to keep on working to pay it off!
Ghosts don't get tired, nor do they need rest. They can also lower the density of their own particles, which means that if your boss is shameless enough, you might find yourself "enjoying" the privilege of sharing an office with a thousand ghosts. Walking in every morning to find them all stacked on top of each other, it's like stumbling into a video game glitch.
Of course, you might be middle class, the quintessential "average person" of Astropolis. So picture this: You've spent your entire life scrimping and saving up a decent nest egg, only to drop dead unexpectedly on the way home from work one day. First, you'll find yourself trapped in the bureaucratic nightmare of proving to the Postmortem Employment Center that the ghost standing before them is, in fact, you. Then your assets get liquidated. Best case, you're slapped with a hefty tax bill, while the worst case is the Postmortem Employment Center swallows the whole lot. As a ghost, you're left with no choice but to rely on Wishpower to sustain your existence, that energy source woven from attention and imagination that's all around us. You manage to scrape together just enough to keep yourself going by chatting with a friend or two... and then the tax notice arrives.
Talking to your families gets taxed, Wishpower earned from streaming gets taxed, accidentally phasing through the floor and scaring passersby means the scare you generate gets taxed, and even the Wishpower you get from being yelled at by your boss at the Postmortem Employment Center gets taxed!
At this point, you might say, "I'm a filthy-rich tycoon, famous throughout all of Astropolis. I have more than enough money to pay for a post-death resurrection service. After I die, I'll come back as a ghost, and my lawyers will handle all the paperwork, dodge the taxes, and make sure my fortune lands right back in my hands. I'll keep living the high life, haunting Astropolis as the cream of the crop."
Unfortunately, we have our fair share of such cases among our own kind. He had prepared everything, but guess what? His two kids hired a "scientific exorcist" to wipe out every trace of his life. He'd set up 99 obsession-infused objects as receptacles for his revival, but 97 of them got burned to ash. Lucky for him, though, he was one step ahead, for he never told those two ungrateful brats his bank account number. So, to keep the family fortune from turning into cold, hard inheritance tax, they had no choice but to bring him back as a ghost.
What he didn't see coming, though, was that his children were even craftier. The lawyer they hired fabricated a false testimony to strip him of his identity, forcing him into a gig as a human customer service rep at the Postmortem Employment Center, while every last bit of his assets landed squarely in their hands.
So, stand with us! Join us in pushing for reform of the Postmortem Employment Act! For the ghosts, for the future, for the Amber Lord!