The Beast Fears Fire - Phantoms

I'm caught up, but fuck it.  I want to crank through this and get done with spirits.

Phantoms [Violence 3]
Impulse - To open the way.  Phantoms don't persist under their own steam, and that's a big problem.  In order to retain their consciousness, they are stuck getting patrons, and by patrons, we mean big bad unique entities from the Underworld, the Other, the Atrocity Realm, or some other less well known but similarly ominous title-bearing otherworld.  There are some folks who think that this is the natural consquence for people who poke at the borders of the world when the inevitable happens to their hubris.  In any case, phantoms don't seem terribly happy about their arrangement.  Or anything. 

Phantoms are stuck with the job of playing doorman for their patron entity, an anchor point for when the creature feels like popping over to this side from... whereever, to do... whatever it is it's going to do.  In order to open that door, the Phantom needs to drum up some psychic energy, and that's where you come in.

See a phantom starts out like a run-of-the-mill ghostly haunting.  You may notice I haven't written anything about ghosts, because there's nothing to write about: ghosts are psychic echoes left behind by the dead that manifest and repeat certain actions until they fade out.  They're mostly harmless, and nothing worth getting upset over.  Let's see how many sentences in a row I can use prepositions to end with.  Anyway, you can kind of think of this as a phantom's attract mode.  They will make things happen for a little while to get someone to drop in and take a look to see what's happening. 

Harm - 2 Injury.
Once they have a couple of people, the phenomena start getting more lively.  Phantoms stake out an area, usually not much larger than a single room or small structure, to serve as the gateway.  Once they get someone in their operative area, they start really haunting things, making walls bleed, calling out in voices from beyond, and, most importantly, sealing off all the entrances.  If there isn't enough energy stored up in the space, the phantom will manifest and start beating on any witnesses in the area, using furniture, manifested objects, flames, poison gasses, snakes, whatever.  They are still mostly incorporeal at this stage and only magic and breakers can hit back.  If there isn't enough power in the room, the phantom will try to kill as few of the onlookers as it can to reach the requisite amount of energy.  Once there is, the phantom will start opening the door.  The door will be visible, the door will be terrifying, and the phantom will be visible in the door, struggling to open it.

Throw Wide the Gate
When a phantom is trying to open a gate to another dimension, and you don't want them to, face Violence.
On a Hit, you keep the door from opening, barely, and some energy has been lost.  You still have an angry phantom with a job to do.
On a Hard Hit, you shut the phantom in the door, destroying it and making sure whatever it is on the other side never gets in that way.
On a Miss, the phantom's patron comes through and obviates any threat the phantom posed to you.  So that's kind of like a win, except for the evil alien entity in the room with you.  Good luck!

Born in Sin, Come on in!
That whole notion that people who poke at the boundaries of our world are somehow tainted and doomed to become phantoms when they die is somewhat validated by the fact that disparate entities from different points of origin and no obvious link with one another (other than being a damn nuisance in our world) all use them  Of course, that could just be the way our world interprets disparate powers breaking in.  It could be that the phantoms aren't spirits at all, but a manifestation of cracks in our reality.  There's some evidence that goes either way, and whose to say, house of some unethical philosophical scientist, whether the awful orange light is because of her spirit or the blowback of her experiments, and does it really matter when the thing is pummelling you and calling forth a nightmare from beyond?  It doesn't.

You can tell to what kind of force a phantom has hitched its wagon from the kind of crystal it makes when it get destroyed.  Underworld brings forth Choronzonite, the Other makes Maelcryst and the Atrocity Realm gives Miasmite.  Shutting a phantom successfully in its own door makes a small fortune in crystals, which almost makes up for what you saw on the other side when you closed it.  Other realms give other crystals, and every once in a while, somone who has prevailed against a phantom has looked down and what came of it and gotten that much more frightened.