A simple ghost costume reveals extraordinary powers, just when trapped miners need an unseen hero.

Imagine yourself waking up one fine morning. You get out of bed, you stretch your arms and legs, you eat a little bit of breakfast, and you decide to go outside to explore.

As you play outside, you suddenly get a strange tingling sensation that moves up your spine, one that you’ve felt a few other times before, other times that the costume tree has appeared. You immediately turn around to look behind you, and instead of finding your house, you find that you’re standing in front of the magic costume tree: a huge and ancient tree stretching up to the sky, with a little door on the front.

Normally the costume tree appears when there’s some need for it, but today you’re not really sure what that could be. Maybe it’s just a little bit of adventure, or maybe you’ll find out the reason later.

You head towards the tree. You grab a hold of the ancient-looking doorknob and pull it open. Inside, you see row upon row upon row of costumes going all the way up inside the tree. You look around in amazement. So many powerful costumes to choose from, but which one should you try out today?

A light appears, illuminating a section of the costume tree. You know from experience that this light normally leads you in the right direction. You walk over towards where it’s shining, and you look inside the rack of all sorts of different costumes. You find a skeleton costume, some kind of werewolf costume, and a very classic-looking ghost costume.

When you touch the ghost costume, a tingling sensation passes through your fingertips and all the way down your spine, sending you a subtle message that this just might be the right one. You take the ghost costume off of the hook and you look at it. I mean, it kind of just looks like a giant sheet with some holes poked in it, but, uh, well, you know from experience that it’s probably more powerful than that.

You lift the costume up and put it up over your head. You find the holes to look through with your eyes, and two long and drapey sleeves. As you put it on, the costume feels like it just sort of attaches itself to you.

Next, you’re going to have to figure out how this costume works. You walk outside the costume tree into a large open area in front, and as you walk, you try to activate the costume in one way or another: swinging your arms around, jumping up and down. Man, you even try making spooky ghost noises, but none of it seems to work.

You look back behind you, and, oh, weird. The costume tree has disappeared once again. It’s been replaced by your house. As you look at your house, you walk backwards slowly. Then you suddenly hear the ding of a bicycle, and someone yells, “Look out, kid!”

You look to see what it is just in time to see a bicyclist heading straight for you. You brace yourself for the impact, but there isn’t one.

You open your eyes again and look to the side. The bicyclist has suddenly stopped beside you, and he’s looking around.

“What? Where did… I swear there was a kid in a ghost costume there a second ago. Uh, weird.”

Weirder still, the guy looks straight at you and doesn’t seem to see you at all. When you look down at your hands, they’re a little more see-through than you remember them. You must be invisible and, for that matter, incorporeal: able to pass through objects without, uh, even feeling them.

Cool. And even cooler, now that it’s happened to you once, you seem to have the feeling for it. You practice for a minute, shifting between being completely visible and solid to invisible and intangible.

You start by testing your powers out as any reasonable person would. You start by walking over to a tree. You shift into ghost mode, and you wave your hand towards it. Strangely, it goes right through. Next, you try to move your body through the entire tree. You leap forward, and in a single bound, you easily pass through the thing, finding yourself on the other side.

You sit there, amazed by your newfound powers, looking at your invisible hands and your invisible legs, and how you’re slowly floating up off the ground. You look down and realize that you’ve suddenly floated about fifteen feet off the ground. Ghost mode must have other abilities too.

You panic for a second, but before long you get your wits about you. You focus on what you’re doing, and you imagine yourself slowly lowering down toward the ground. And you do just that, slowly floating down until you land safely on the ground once again.

You continue to practice your powers, jumping through walls, floating up into the air high above the place where you live. It is a whole bunch of fun. Before long, you get the hang of floating from place to place just by thinking about it. You can now fly left, right, up and down with ease, and the faster you think about going, the faster you go.

Even more impressively, you seem to be able to fly through just about anything when you’re in this mode, which, uh, for all intents and purposes, makes you just about invincible. It’s pretty fun.

You fly about for a while, diving straight through houses and other buildings, flying high above the area where you live, until you spot someone down below. Someone you recognize, and someone who hasn’t been particularly nice to you in the past. You know who I’m talking about.

You decide that it might not be too bad of an idea to just kind of play a little prank on this individual. After all, they are kind of mean to others. You fly down, and in ghost mode, right behind them, you land. And you become solid for a second, tapping them on the shoulder before immediately disappearing.

The person looks back to see what or who it was, but instead they see nothing at all. Confused, they just sort of shake off the feeling and continue to walk. You float up in the air right beside them, and you begin to whisper.

“You should be nicer to people. Being nice is something you need to do.”

“What? Who’s there?” the person says, searching left and right but finding no one.

Again you appear suddenly and tap them on the back. Again they spin around to find no one, and nothing at all. Nothing even in the general area.

“What? What’s going on here?”

Again you whisper, “I am here to teach you how to be nice,” you say.

“What? What do you mean, how to be nice? I’m nice, aren’t I?”

“No,” you respond.

Again you float behind them, tap them on the back. But this time, when they turn around and find no one, you suddenly make yourself solid, appearing right in front of them and yelling, “Booga, booga, booga!”

You’re not sure why you decided on that exact phrase, but it had some serious, uh, serious results. The not-so-nice individual screams in fear, wets their pants, and then runs in the other direction.

You wonder for a second if you really should have taken things that far. After all, being mean to somebody who’s being mean doesn’t really teach them how to be nice. But then you become distracted by something that’s playing in a shop window nearby.

You fly over towards the shop window and float completely invisible right in front of it. On the TV, you see a newscast, a newscast about a local mine. A local mine that collapsed, trapping all sorts of workers inside.

“Oh no,” you say. “How are we going to get them out?”

And then, once again, a strange tingling sensation heads through your spine. Maybe, maybe this is the reason that the costume tree appeared in the first place, you realize. Maybe this costume is the perfect thing to save them.

You watch the news report a little bit longer to see exactly where the mine is located. Once you figure it out, you float high up into the air and head directly towards the mine. You find yourself floating high above forests and lakes and rivers until you come to the area where you know the mine to be.

You slowly lower yourself down, and you see a bunch of rescue people: firefighters, policemen, and a whole bunch of workers from the mining company. All of them are trying to dig through a huge rock wall, a wall that’s collapsed on top of the mine. It’s clearly going to take them a long time to get through this thing. There’s a lot of rubble here.

You tentatively press your hand through the wall, and it goes through with ease. But you’re a little afraid to go through the entire thing. You’ve never been in a mine before, and, well, this power is pretty new to you. But you take a deep breath, and you decide that it’s for the better good.

You float down through the wall of rock. It’s a strange sensation as you pass through solid ground. You can see all sorts of rocks and dirt and worms as you pass through, but you can’t feel any of it, and you can’t see very far off in the distance either.

Before too long, you pass through to the other side of the rock wall. On that side, you see a whole bunch of miners just sitting around against the wall. They look hungry and thirsty. Wait a second. That’s something you can help with.

You fly back up through the rock wall and above the mining area. You search around the area for something that looks like it’ll have water and food inside. Sure enough, you find a huge truck that’s full of the stuff: cases of bottled water and, well, rations to eat.

You grab a hold of a couple of the cases while you’re in ghost mode, and as you go to pick them up, you find that they lose all sense of weight, as if the bottles have become a ghost as well. Huh, cool.

With that, you’re able to pick up a whole bunch of cases of water and rations all at once. As soon as you activate your power while touching them, they become completely weightless. You float back over to the rock wall and down into the mine. Luckily, all of the water and food floats through with you.

You place it down on the ground in front of the miners, and as you let go of each piece, it suddenly appears to them, as if it’s, uh, well, appearing out of thin air. It makes the miners jump back in fear for a second. They’re happy to see the water, but they’re not sure how it just suddenly appeared in front of them. It wasn’t there before, after all.

Before too long, after not making any new things appear, the miners slowly decide to drink some of the water and eat some of the food. All right. That buys you some time. Now to figure out how to get all of the miners out of here.

Wait a second. If you were able to bring the food and the water in, maybe you could have just brought the miners out in the first place. Huh. You have to test this theory out, though.

You fly back inside the mine, into an area where only one individual is hanging around, sitting sort of by himself. When the others aren’t looking, you appear before the miner in your completely solid ghost costume form.

“Hey there, I was just thinking,” you say, as the miner screams out in fear, turns around and runs directly into the rock wall, passing out on the ground shortly afterwards.

Man, that’s not really what I meant to have happen.

You bend down and attempt to pick up the miner, but he’s way too heavy for you. He’s a fully grown adult. Then you remember what happened with the water. Right. You grab on to the miner, and you activate your ghost powers. As you do, both you and the miner turn to ghost mode. The miner now weighs pretty much nothing at all. It feels like lifting up a balloon full of helium.

You pick up the passed-out miner, and you easily and effortlessly float out of the cave, up to the search and rescue area above. You place the miner on the ground, and as soon as you do, the ghost power seems to deactivate, leaving him sitting on the ground right in front of an ambulance.

The people around suddenly notice the miner. “Hey, he must have crawled out somehow. Uh, somebody give him some help.”

The paramedics immediately rush over to help the miner, and now it’s your turn to help the rest of them. You float back down through the ground and into the mine once again. How exactly are you going to get the rest of them out of here? You can’t very well just sneak up behind them, activate your ghost powers, and float them up out of there, can you?

The more you think about it, the more that actually seems to be the best plan. You silently float over behind two of the miners. You reach your hand out, and you activate your ghost powers on them as well. They immediately disappear and become incredibly light. And before they can even think about it, you fly them up out of the cave and place them down on the ground where you left the other miner.

The two of them are left speechless and completely clueless as to how they got there, but they’re certainly happy to be out. You repeat the process about fifteen more times, sinking down into the mine, grabbing some of the miners and safely floating them out to safety.

Before too long, you’ve pulled every single one of them out of that place, and nobody even knows that it is you. You watch from above as the rescue crews are absolutely baffled, trying to figure out how the miners got out of the mine. They search around, looking for some sort of hidden entrance or a hole, but they can’t find anything. Something about that brings you great delight.

And then you feel a strange pulling sensation, as if your costume is pulling you away from the place. You try to resist it, but you can’t. And before you know it, you’re flying through the air at incredible speeds, back over the same forests and lakes and rivers, back towards your home.

Sitting there, right beside your home, is the costume tree. Your costume pulls you down towards the tree, inside the door, and places you on the ground.

“Uh, okay. Message received,” you say, as you reach up over your head and pull the ghost costume off of yourself.

As soon as you pull it off of your head, it floats up in the air and hangs itself back up on one of the hangers.

“Uh, thanks, costume tree,” you say, as you walk out toward the door.

You head out of the tree and back towards your house. You feel the same strange tingling sensation, and you look behind you once more to see that the costume tree has disappeared once again, leaving only your normal neighborhood behind.

You head inside your house and straight to your bedroom. You climb into your bed, just hoping for a little bit of a rest after such a long day of being a ghost. You lay down on your soft pillow, you pull the covers up to your chin, then you just close your eyes.

And with each breath, you release a little more tension from your arms, from your legs, and you allow your body to sink down deeper and deeper into the mattress. And the deeper you sink, the better you feel, and the better you feel, the deeper you sink. Each breath releasing more tension and allowing you to relax just a tiny bit more each time, until it eventually feels like you’re floating on top of a very, very comfortable cloud.

And once you’re in that extremely relaxed state, you focus your mind on something new. You focus it on somewhere else you’d like to go, somewhere else you’d like to travel, or maybe even another costume you’d like to try on. And as you imagine yourself on this new adventure, your mind slowly drifts off, and you fall asleep.

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