Me & My Ghost (audio story)

 was a Faction Paradox audio story released by BBV Productions on their website in 2021. Written by Bill Baggs, who also voiced Dionus, it served as the third and final release in the Dionus's War range (and the fourth counting the pilot episode Eternal Escape).

Publisher's summary
Just when things are beginning to settle in Dionus' clinic, the latest patient turns everything upside down. Who is this mystery woman, and why is she sending Dionus into a romantic spin?

Plot
Dionus's latest half-hearted attempt to record a honest autobiography, where he would own up to his various crimes during the War, is interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected new patient at his door — a strange woman who immediately collapsed into unconsciousness after stepping through the threshold. She sleeps throughout the rest of the afternoon; examining her, Dionus cannot see any visible injury or signs of illness other than her unconsciousness.

In the morning, she regains consciousness but remains very weak, unable to speak as more than a bare few whispers. Dionus starts to get the sense that he has met her before and that she is someone dangerous. He makes a light soup for her, and, gingerly eating it, she gives her name as "Nari". She acts the picture of charm with Dionus, who starts to develop an infatuation with her.

The next day, she is much improved, though she is able to tell him definitively that she is suffering from amnesia, only remembering that she is a Homeworlder and that she knew of Dionus' reputation and came to seek him out to help with her condition. As more patients arrive at the clinic, Dionus decides to leave Nari to her own devices while he goes and attend to them. When he returns after a day's work, he finds her gone, all her bags packed.

He goes to bed wondering if he imagined her entire existence, and dreams of her. He is awakened by the screams of another patient, coming from the ward. Hurrying there, he finds the patient in question gruesomely murdered, and no signs of a perpetrator — that is, until Nari returns to the ward, with blood on her hands but no memory of what she seems to have just done. After cleaning her up and putting her to bed, he covertly locks her in her room.

The next day, he wakes up early and connects himself to the Great House mainframe. He finds an "infamous set of files" which only higher-ups have access to, scanning a list of the renegades on whom the Great Houses keep tabs. As he brings Nari her meal, he warns that he knows who she really is, and says he'll soon be back to talk. Back at the main ward, he reassures the other patients that the murderer is under lock ane key, and talks with one who knew the murdered man, with the both having been assassins.

Returning to Nari's room, he has an uneasy conversation with her as they reminisce about the Homeworld, but when he asks her why she came to his clinic with her bizarre cover story, she collapses into unconsciousness once again. Wheeling out an old mind probe from his days as an Interrogator, he is able to determine that she has been "charming" him using artificial "love pheromones", but also that the innocent Nari is not merely a disguise, but a fully autonomous artificial personality under which the Renegade has hidden her consciousness so as to keep under the radar of the Great Houses, as the renegade is currently on the run.

However, the process went wrong, and her real personality is buried in such a way that even she can't free herself: while Nari can call upon her memories to a degree, she falls unconscious whenever she tries to tap into the memories of her criminal career — but, on occasion, "sleepwalks" and lashes out murderously as her unadulterated "evil side" comes to the front. Dionus makes a deal with Nari: if she agrees to stay locked up most of the time to minimise the threat her "murderous spells" pose, and to put her talents as a chemist to work to help Dionus cure his other patients, he will work on a way to free her real personality.

For a time, they settle into a friendly routine, with Nari indeed putting her talents to good use, and building up a non-pheromone-based friendship with Dionus. Eventually, he agrees to have a "dinner date" with her under no false pretences, with her doing the cooking. The next morning, Dionus awakens to realise that she had drugged the meal, and that she has fled the clinic for good. He decides not to chase after her, somehow happy to know that she is somewhere out there in the universe, though he doesn't think he'll ever meet her again.

Characters

 * Dionus
 * Nari
 * Patient
 * "Peter"

Crew

 * Dionus played by Bill Baggs
 * Writer - Bill Baggs

Worldbuilding

 * When Dionus wonders if he's met Nari before, he muses that he "can't remember where, or indeed which lifetime", indicating that he is not in his first incarnation.
 * Dionus claims to enjoy cooking.

Continuity

 * Dionus reflects that it has been a long time since he's had feeling for a woman. He was married when he first came to Gulliver's Rest as depicted in AUDIO:, but his wife was erased from time by Faction Paradox.
 * Dionus is haunted by guilt about his actions in the War, as established in AUDIO: The Healer's Sin.
 * The events of PROSE: were specified to result in Dionus "conveniently" forgetting his encounter with a certain "knockoff evil botanist lady". Notwithstanding the obvious fourth-wall joke, the in-universe description of Nari as a "knockoff" evokes the War-era hatchling project as referenced in PROSE:, which had been shown to create duplicates of the Rani among other Renegades.