ECTOplasm
We keep the luminous dead in a jar. Move your cursor and the residue leans toward the warmth of the living — it merges, splits, and stretches like breath on cold glass, then lets go.
Substance stable
Cohesion 0.00
Manifestations 0
Call it up, then let it settle back into mist.
Press Manifest and a phantom oozes into the containment ring — a rough, breathing silhouette that holds its shape for a heartbeat before it forgets what it was and dissolves. Nothing is ever kept. That is the arrangement.
A residue
left by
attention.
Ectoplasm was never a thing so much as a tendency — the way a room remembers being watched. In the ECTO lab we measure that tendency and give it a body of light. The gooey field you disturbed above is not a video. It is a governed swarm of surface-tension blobs, each one solving the same simple question every frame: where is the warm cursor, and how far dare I reach?
Reach too far and a blob thins to a filament and snaps into a droplet — a split. Idle a moment and neighbours flow back together into one heavier mass — a merge. The spectral trail behind your pointer is simply the swarm's short, fading memory of where you last were.
We do not claim it is haunted. We claim only that it behaves as though it would like to be.
Catalogued residues
Four grades of luminous matter, sorted by how badly they want to keep their shape.
Measured over one long night in the cold room.
Give a shape
to the unseen.
Press once. Watch it insist on being, briefly, then forgive itself and go. You will not be able to keep it — but you can call it again.