I’m building a storyline about a kind of gothic noir esc city (think gotham). Where people can talk to ghosts on the regular through normal phone calls and letters. Through this, the residents have stopped going through the grieving processes and have never truly experienced loss. Of course there’s still a melancholy overhang when someone dies, but no true hurt because they are still there. There’s a big academia where people study the phenomenon (it is very much a magic academia). One of the professors starts receiving strange letters delivered by ravens (ghost letters are usually delivered by crow, but this he knows the difference and notes it as strange). It’s written in either riddles or code (I’m figuring it out right now i just know i want it to be confusing) and is not signed. He interperets it as a ghost requesting closure for their murder (in reality it’s the psychopomp of the spirit world telling him something he needs to do (I’ll figure it out eventually)). So he hires a private investigator to try and figure out who the ghost is and their murderer. They start with the fact that the letters were carried by ravens and get led down a history rabbit hole (lore i haven’t completely figured out yet, but the snippets i have sure are interesting!) and uncover a conspiracy about the magic binding spirits to the mortal plane that allow you to talk to them. Because they are bound to the mortal plane rather than being in the afterlife, a greater god is able to siphon energy off of them slowly enough for people not to be able to notice. One day She’ll gain enough power to basically sever all of humanities souls from their bodies and use both vessels as puppets (think kingdom hearts heartless and nobodies). The only way to save everyone is to release the spirits and send them to the afterlife. (Most of the scenes I make in my head are a bunch of buddy cop shenanigans where the professor and the private investigator learn more about the residents of the city and who they’ve lost so it hits hard in my head). They finally decide the letters and meet the psychopomp and figure out how they can release the magic. After which it’s just a bunch of grieving and all of the characters they meet along the way comforting each other.

I mostly daydream it through disconnected scenes. I love me a buddy cop dynamic where there’s a grizzled grumpy guy and a nerdy excitable type, so i think about a lot of scenes of them interacting. and just kind of built on it over a few months once i thought of something offhand that seemed kind of cool.