Ponysona 4, the Campaign.

That was odd...Why was Soul gasping like that...It wasn't like she-Oh...OOOOOH. That was right...Ponies needed to actually use their lungs...If that was the case, then..."Oh, buck...This is bad...This is really bad...I didn't think I did that much damage to-...Oh, no, no, no...!" She hurried to Soul, Wraith and George, kneeling down, checking over the equines, trying to help George...Somehow. Her knowledge of pony medicine in general was...somewhat lacking, she'd mostly just learned what she needed to blend in, but if the trained nurse wasn't gonna do anything..."C'mon, breathe...!!"

Healcheck:

Zeela snaps out of her thouhgts at Melody's actions and goes to trying to help as well.

"Mmm-mmm-MMM! This is great. I don't know why I was clinging on to that musty old body. Always having to feed it, walk it... I feel like a new stallion already! Why did I even waste time sitting there watching that Wraith live my life?"

A whistling noise echoes away, down through the passage Soul originally came through. Meanwhile Zeela, thinking quickly, rushes in with a bubbling cocktail in a ounce-sized flask, bowling the other three away. Forcing the pony's mouth open, she tips the potion down Soul's windpipe. The still pony jerks a little, and a tense moment passes before Wraith suddenly lapses into a coughing fit as Zeela's concoction floods his body's lungs with oxygen.

It's not the best, and it won't last all that long, but it'll do for the moment. Wraith feels some semblance of clarity flowing back into his brain as the air supply is partially restored, though the feeling of grogginess continues to hang over him.

Melody blinked, wondering why she was suddenly getting to know what the floor tasted like before getting up, shaking her head..."Did...Did it do it...? And...Oh...We...Fell for another trap, I see..." Melody's heart sank...Not only had they messed up again, they'd played straight into the shadow's hooves..."Uhm...Are you...Gonna be okay?" she asked Wraith, kind of dreading the answer...She glanced at Zeela and George, hoping they could give a second opinion...Either way, she wanted to hurry, they still needed to find the rest of their friends, and...Wraith's Shadow. Again.

Rushing down the steps leads the party into a mish-mashed chamber, half of it looking identical to the ship-cabins overhead with wooden planks and a banquet fit for a large crew, though the food is stale and disgusting at a simple glance, and the other half looking like a the first floors- glass and goop abound. ON the opposite side is a shadowy Soul with three other figures- ones of Rumor, Shiro, and Tilt. The quartet all get surrounded by Soul's shadows, and her laugh sounds through the room. The shadows explode out from them one by one, Shiro having turned into Arachne, Rumor into War with what appeared to be some feline qualities to her persona's head, and Tilt into Mars. Soul, or rather Shadow Wraith stands three times as the others with what appears to be soul underneath her, entrapped in a bone cage, large wings spread outwards of the sewn-together creature above her dripping with slime and her two-faced face split into a wide grin.

Daisoujo and Alice collapse to the ground, out of breath and looking at Wraith. "W-we can't fight all four of them at once."

"Heck I don't think Wraith can fight right now PERIOD. You have to calm your shadow down yourself. Accept it. We've already beaten them up above so hopefully...

Wraith stumbles after the rest of the party, having to be prodded at some points. He tenses up when the enemy presents itself again, but is in no shape to fight now. He makes a sidelong glance at his body on Daisoujo's back, then back to the enemy. "It...has to be me, does it," he says flatly.

Wounds still misting a mysterious green substance, he shambles forward to the head of the little herd of ponies. "...I just realized. We both fought so hard over a little piece of meat. One that neither of us thought we really wanted. I spent so much time bemoaning this body, the one that reflects who I am better than anything else, and I just...gave up on the old one. And when it was threatened, I fought so hard to get it back against...your minions." He can't quite bring himself to say who they were that he fought.

"And the instant you lose Soul, you just...give up on owning her. I guess we're a little alike in that way, huh?"

The Wraith-creature slams its forelegs forwards, lowering itself and swinging forwards. The puppet-soul looks up blindly, and leans up against the bars, almost touching Wraith's nose. This close, he can see its eyes are sealed shut, tattooed in bright green ink with barred gates.

It snorts, little plumes of acrid steam puffing up into Wraith's face. "...reeeeeally now?" it rumbles, its lips curling to reveal a grin of jagged steel teeth, pointed outwards, a dozen tiny Souls and Wraiths staring back in the reflections.

"That's a good start Wraith, keep it up!" Zeela calls out as she relights her body on fire... Sure they're in no state to fight. But if things go bad, this pegaus was going to go out fighting.

Wraith nods and continues, "We're both so much alike. Neither of us really knows what he wants until he's lost it, and doesn't know that what he has isn't what he's really after." He puts a hoof against the grating with the caged Shadow-Soul. "All that stuff about how it sucks to be me... It's just my own rationalization for what I've become. It's still raw, but I can't let go of the past. I'm still mourning my Canterlot for star's sake. Who knows when I'll be able to face the fact that the Salvation is probably a forgotten wreck.

"I've lost the right to complain like that anymore. I've lost much, but I'm never at risk of my dreams and my heart giving out on me, or of being exposed for a real monster, not the one I've made myself out to be, but one that the ponies know and hate. All of my woes are in the past, and I've yet to accept that I have more to look forward to than to look back on. My old friends, Hotstick, Midnight, even that weirdo Amek, they wouldn't want me bemoaning their loss a thousand years ago, in fact, to them I just up and left one day, just...like...I......died."

He falls silent for a few moments, then backs up so he can get a good view of the Shadow's scarred face. "We're both so much alike, aren't we? You're the face of the monster I've always claimed to be, but always took the face of the fairer Soul as a mask. You have the same crutch of leaning on our friends whenever things get bad, but never realizing that they may want to be there for us. I..." As his voice catches there, Wraith looks down, and a lime tear falls from his eyes to sizzle on the ground.

"I wanted so badly for you to be just the next big bad monster for me to defeat. Another Discord for me to hate and swear vengeance upon. I've had so many, and torn down so many. Too many. I'm stuck in the wrong war, aren't I? And so are you, but you don't even have the saving grace of a cause and real friends at your side to help you when it's too much.

"We're both so much alike. You. Me. Soul. You are a part of me, aren't you? The real Soul Wraith."

The creature shudders, and the cage falls to the ground, landing in front of Wraith. "Soul Wraith. I like that." The shadows encircling Shiro, Rumour, and Tilt slowly melt away, leaving behind the real ponies to shake goop out of their coats, and their glowing golden eyed doubles. One by one, the shadow ponies walk over to the cage, pausing a moment to nod to Wraith before walking through the bars and merging with the shadow. After a while, the ethereal forms of Wraith's old friends return from the previous room and do likewise.

As each shadow melts into the whole, the jagged teeth melt together into fewer and fewer teeth, until finally the menacing jaw has become a giant pair of buck teeth, the reflection of Soul in one, and Wraith in the other. Finally, the comatose body of Soul slips off the back of Daisoujou and lurches over to the shadow, the bone bars widening away to let her in before straightening again, and she steps into the puppet-shadow, enveloping all but the split steel grin.

Her eyes slowly open, blank and black.

"Only one piece left."

"Is something wrong?" asks the shadow after a moment, its grin fading into a bit of an anxious frown. Tilt over to one side looks furtively at Shadow Soul and back to Wraith, wrapping a leg tightly around Rumour and biting her lip. Would he make the connection? She could barely dare to breathe.

Looking into the face of the grinning, lifeless body, Wraith gulps(in spite of not having a real digestive system). "A-alright." He allows himself to fall forward, deliberately this time, toward the blue mane that he always should have taken more care of...

"Welcome home." rumbles the shadow, as Soul's eyes start to glow a dim green and brightening to their full lively colour as he pours more and more of himself into his shadow. Things switch back on inside, and his chest starts to slowly move again as the last of the concoction bubbles away.

He coughs, and a small card flies from his mouth, and fades away, leaving him staring into a pony - almost completely alien, and yet not, a patchwork of his identities both mortal and ghostly stitched with stained thread. It stands as tall as Wraith, but from its hair and body structure it resembles more closely Soul, with the exception of two thick steel bolts jutting from either side of its neck.

It rears up and places its hooves on Soul Wraith's shoulders and smiles a crooked smile before fading away into its card form again.

Spoiler:

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Tilt's relief is palpable, and with only a brief look at Rumour and a nod to make sure they were both on the same page, takes off at a running gallop for Soul, leaping into the air and tackling him to the ground and tumbling head over heels, laughing all the way. "Soul! Soul, you made it! I'm so proud of you, Soul!" she laughs, blinking away tears of joy.

"That got a little touch and go at the end there... But thankfully we're fine. And Soul Wraith won..." Zeela comments relieved at how Wraith was able to figure everything out. She for one was a bit clueless...

"Yeah...You did it..." Melody looked over at the others as well, smiling and nodding...She was glad they were okay, when they'd fallen into the trap...Best not to dwell on it, probably. "That was...crazy, though...If the Shadows are getting this powerful...We...could be in for some serious trouble..." While she was glad that Soul had succeeded...There was the fact that his shadow had forcefully caused the others' shadows to manifest as well...It was...disconcerting, to put it mildly.

Shiro bounced around happily, getting reused to his body's control after the shadows had taken him over and gives Soul Wraith a gently hug. "Awesome! I'm so happy that you accepted it! It was weird being more or less possessed, but if you're a ghost then it made sense."

Rumor wriggles and shakes off some remains of shadows, stomping on them with a quiet glare as he sees the colt and her marefriend hugging Soul. "I'm relieved as well. Those creatures are a lot stronger than I thought."

The unicorn filly pulled Shiro over with her magic, the colt flailing around wildly as she bonked him on the head and quietly berated him. Alice gives him a quick hug as well before asking. "What happened?"

"Dropped down a hole into a pit with shadows, got covered by them, next thing I remember I was here getting released from Shadow Soul's grasp." Rumor nodded, acknowledging that it was the truth.

"That's dangerous... If shadows are able to manipulate ponies we must be even more cautious." Daisoujo's glaring eyes never removed from Alice, his wings flared slightly. "Hopefully we can grow stronger."

"Hey I'm sure we will get stronger... For one thing we just got yet another full persona user..." Zeela comments with a lot on her mind after this, still unsure what to think of the whole Shadow Events and partly worried of how her own will play out. "But regardless... Let's get out of here... It's been a long day..."

"Yeah...I had something to bring up...But now...May not be the best time...We should head out, get some rest...Maybe try to figure out how they were able to control you...That's...I'm with Daisoujo, that's baaaaad news. Think we can meet up at Junes or somewhere tomorrow and talk?" Melody suggested, thinking. They needed to rest, that was important. But there was information to exchange, and they still needed to resolve Arcana being stupid enough to wander off on his own...Even if the stallion had been trying to make them dance on his strings, there wasn't a need to leave him to a fate worse than death.

"Oh, come off it you killjoys. Coming to terms with your true self happens but once!" calls back Tilt, wrestling Soul into an upright position and rubbing a hoof into his mane, doing a thoroughly redundant job of messing it up.

"We can deal with this later, when we come back to talk to Shadow Soul again."

"Oh... We'll party tomorrow for Soul's great job here... Just... Could use an ending at this point. That fight... Was scary and it felt like to me everything could've gone a hell lot worse at the end there." Zeela retorts sounding so tired the fact that she hasn't even set off her fire-aura thing yet seems notable. If anything Zeela seems to have forgotten that it is on. She is just THAT drained form everything so far that she'd like to just exit and go to bed...

"That was definitely an...experience," Soul Wraith says as she(...she? hm.... nah.) he leans on Tilt for support. "I've been through Chaos Storms that weren't as draining." He ducks as Tilt messes his blue mane, grinning at the show of camraderie, then frowns at thoughts of his new persona, which had vanished soon after appearing. After everypony finishes congratulating him, he heaves off his extra set of legs with a thankful smile to turn toward the party.

"Thanks so much, all of you. I guess i'm going by 'Soul Wraith' now. As much as I prefer to keep it secret, I'm fine with casual discussion about anything 'me' related." She smiles."Tomorrow is a another day, and I feel pretty good about it. I have another new friend waiting topside for news, who I owe for getting me here a bit faster. I think I'd like to introduce you sometime. For now, everpony, I'd like to hit a nice soft bed. I don't care if I can't really sleep, Tilt, I'll just lay on your couch for a week as long I don't have to move another muscle."

"You have at most about less then a day to rest... Then you'll be partying with us over your victory." The Still-On-Fire Zeela jokes with a chuckle.

Soul Wraith's eyes glaze a little at the second mention of 'party,' and then gains a sharp glint in his eyes. "That...sounds kinda awesome. Wait till evening, though, I think I'll have something prepared for it."

Melody chuckled slightly, looking at Zeela for a moment before doing a double take. "Uhm...Zeela...You're still...Erm...Fwooshed," she pointed out, blinking.

Zeela headtilts. "Wat-really?" Then she goes out blushing. "I couldn't tell at all... Must've forgotten after Soul's Persona came out or something."