Discovered 30 years ago, the volcanic mineral atma is a rare substance indeed. It emits a subtle radiation which can empower living beings — and even artificial ones — granting them strange and often wondrous new abilities. Individuals exposed to atma often become adepts, able to manipulate the elements or tap into psychic powers, though stranger powers akin to witchcraft have more recently been attested.

Though atma is most commonly mined from dormant mountains in the Commonwealth and Indo Kingdoms, almost every geo-nation has begun to amass, harvest, or study it. Those that cannot have turned to recruiting — or coercing — secret armies of adepts into service, often using them to track and hunt their own augmented kind.

Ghosts

Its most striking quality, however, its atma’s ability to entwine the dying. It has ignited global debate about the nature of life, death, and the soul. Regardless of semantics, the result is indisputable: ghosts are now real. Some return as they were in life, with their memories and form intact. Others assemble from wisps of fading life into new, wildly different individuals. There have even been reports of myriads: multiple souls finding shelter within the same body, living or dead.

Ghosts, as well as their close possessions, attain a solid physical form comprised of faintly-glowing ether. Much like atma itself, its composition is poorly understood. It can react to electromagnetic radiation, or even transition between states of matter seemingly at will. Just like the living, ghosts can be harmed, degraded, and destroyed — and few want to gamble on returning a second time.

Many ghosts face the same challenge: what to do with their additional time on Earth. A loved one may hesitate to rejoin a family who’s made peace with their passing. A newborn ghost, unburdened by memories of any former life, may still be shunned by societies of flesh and blood. Mankind is still gripped by an overwhelming urge to view death as final, and some see ghosts as a blasphemic refutation of that truth. When all else fails, the dead can embrace the same refuge as the living: forging a new existence for themselves beyond the boundaries of the Restless Zones.