((Hang onto your hats, folks, it's time for a massive collab starring
Tiger,
Lizica, and
Huntress!))
Sylvester Castell anticipated having an...exciting day, to say the least.
Which was not to say that the past year had been very full of boring days or days to relax and unwind after everything that had happened to Melville in the span of that one desperate week.
On the contrary, the past year for Sylvester Castell had been quite eventful and quite hectic, and it would have been enough to keep anyone in town on their toes, even without the restructuring of the whole society.
Because very, very few people had readily volunteered to help look after the new inmates.
And by all rights, Joan Wrigley seemed to be enjoying her jail sentence much more than should have been permitted. But no one was particularly keen to stop her—not even Sylvester Castell.
For instance, on the first day that the inmates were scheduled to clean up the debris that had formerly been the clock tower and the guard barracks, Sylvester had gone into the small Melville prison (Excellently built, did you know that during its construction, several mages and local welders collaborated to create the iron bars and the padlocks, which are extremely old by now, antique several times over, but they’re still in tip-top shape, quite impossible to pick). As he had begun to unlock Joan’s cell, he happened to glance across the way at former Councilman Blair Roce’s cell wall, which was bedecked in a corner full of tally marks. Which was odd, considering how short a time the Council had been imprisoned at the time.
Nodding to the tick marks, Sylvester had asked Blair Roce, “Are those days—”
“They’re NOT DAYS,” Roce spat. “They’re
every single time that that
woman has told us about the
dairy farms in southern Melville.”
Joan had smiled brightly at Blair Roce and given him a saccharine little wave through the bars. “Why, Councilman Roce!” she began. “Did you know that before that portion of the fields was made into a grazing pasture, part of it used to be a corn field, and in the autumn, parts of the crop would be very carefully shorn away and used for a corn maze where people from all across the southern district would come and have a great time and get bargain deals on produce, and those deals were really something, and people in the area would stock up on food during this period, which was additionally excellent for the local economy, until the Council shut it down and virtually held the land hostage, letting it fall into disuse, until some years later they finally sold the property to the Delacey family, who only got the land by a rather lopsided deal to give the majority of their dairy profits to the Council for keeping them Ever So Safe, but don’t worry, I’m
sure you’d still have a lovely time if you ever went to visit the farm, Councilman Roce, did you know that Mrs. Delacey’s cow Magnolia was the inspiration for the fifth hole at the mini-golf course in Sunnyside Park, she’s such a benevolent creature, very friendly, she even stood for a portrait painted by local artisan Phyllis Burrow, which you can see on display if you go to the mini-golf course, and there’s an excellent coupon in the Sunday
Melville Harbinger, let me tell you—...”
Somewhere in the middle of this spiel, Blair Roce had clamped his hands over his ears and started chanting for Joan to
shut up, and various other former Council members along the hallway had started swearing vehemently at Roce for getting the travel agent started again.
And so it was that on this particular day, the former members of the Council were actually
almost excited, because today was the day when Sylvester Castell would be taking Joan Wrigley out of the Melville prison on her first day of parole time. She’d be back again before sundown to sleep, of course, but in that sweet, sweet interim, the former Council would hear nothing from her.
Absolutely nothing. Who cared if today was the first day they’d be one woman short as they stood shackled together, clearing rubble and hauling bricks and dealing with trash and digging canals and mixing cement? She
wouldn’t be with them.For his part, Sylvester Castell had invested in a pair of knee pads. Not because he thought he might be attacked, but because today he’d be tied directly to Joan Wrigley. The chain leash had been deemed a good idea because a year ago, when Sylvester had become separated from her by the rioting crowd, apparently she had slipped away and subsequently shot the radio host. And although she seemed to be doing much better mentally than she had on that particular day, still—the few times that Sylvester had attempted to take Joan out on parole before, Joan had gotten much too excited about some new building that had cropped up during her incarceration and had accidentally yanked Sylvester to the ground in her haste to go see it.
So, knee pads.
“I was thinking first we could go to the Goodshows’ for coffee,” Joan said excitedly as Sylvester closed her cell door behind them. Her cell was coated in meticulously organized articles, stacks of coupons, and hand-folded boxes made of newspaper, all filled with brochures. A couple maps with pen scrawlings to update the landmarks were hung on the stone walls, and a mug filled with water sat on the barred windowsill, reading, “Those who don’t come to the Melville History Museum are doomed to repeat it!”
“I heard they’ve hired on Ms. Billows,” Joan went on. “And the paper Mr. Gresher brought me last Tuesday said they had a brand new iced coffee flavor just in time for autumn, pumpkin, made in conjunction with the fresh produce from Mrs. Mitchell’s crops. I hear they’re doing well! Josh Frieden (of Frieden’s Shoe Repair) also told me that the carousel has a brand new melody that plays at opening time, composed by Bertha Montag, Howard’s daughter. Do you think we can stop by and hear it before we head over to the Ghost Town pub? I’ve been hoping to work on another design for the brochures for their living clientele. Have you tried their evening stout, Sylvester?”
Sylvester was never entirely sure how much he liked the Ghost Town pub. It was one thing that they had good music and that all the ghosts in town seemed to congregate there and seemed to generally have a good time. It was quite another thing that all of Joan’s dead friends seemed to enjoy hanging out there, and to be honest, they still made him slightly nervous, even now. Sometimes they came to visit her in the Melville prison. Joan loved having them, at least, but they didn’t exactly do wonders for the temperaments of the former Council members in there.
Aerona Tolbert, for instance, was now a ghost with a constant entourage of slightly glowing lightning bugs who seemed to enjoy striking the bars of the Councilors’ jail cells; despite being intangible, they were evidently still capable of making the cringe-inducing
whack of a large bug slamming itself into a hard surface. Her mentions of various friendly Outside creatures probably didn’t make them feel any better, either, nor did the news about some of those beasts coming
into the city, including one who had temporarily lived with the lanternmaker while part of town was rebuilt to accommodate their various needs. She usually didn’t stay long; business with aforementioned creatures often kept her busy.
In fact, this was one of the first afternoons in a while that Aerona found herself without a meeting to attend or imminent Price to fulfill or a dispute to settle between an Outsider and someone’s garden of delicious but unattended vegetables. In the past, she would have taken this time to work on a lantern.
In the past, she hadn’t been dead and intangible.
Interacting with objects had gotten easier over time, and it was her hope that someday she might be able to work on a lantern without getting distracted by, well, working on the lantern, only to find her carving knife or pan of glass or glue-brush falling out of her no-longer-corporeal hand. But today was not a day she cared to lose to frustration.
She expected to find some situation that needed taking care of, but instead found Joan - out on the street instead of cooped up in a jail cell, still alive (even a year later, it was a thing Aerona took particular note of; she had been worried for a long time that someone might exact some vigilante justice on Joan while she was trapped in a jail cell and the stupid fish claimed they couldn’t bestow their powers on people who weren’t entangled in Price, and
even if they could they didn’t
have that kind of power, or did she think they’d
wanted Aerona to die from the bullet she’d taken to the chest?), and...it had been a while. A touch over a year since the last Resistance meeting. Probably time to actually do something besides brief check-ins.
Aerona hovered up beside her friend and the guard tasked with keeping her out of trouble. “Joan! It’s good to see you out and about and in the light of day.” She glanced at Sylvester, but opted to say nothing. “How many coupons left to take advantage of?”
Upon seeing her old Resistance friend, Joan’s face broke into an even wider grin. “It’s a great day to be out, isn’t it, Aerona! There are
so many things I need to see, I hear there’s even a celebration going on today, and I have at least five coupons I want to try out, seven if you count the two that Sylvester didn’t use yet, which is silly, everyone needs their grass mown at 20% off—” Here, the guardsman gave a tremendously awkward subtle hand wave of greeting to the lampmaker ghost and then returned to very determinedly looking elsewhere around the area. Joan pulled out an origami wallet made of newspaper and filtered through some coupons. “—Have you been to see the new Outside exhibit at the cultural history museum yet? I mean, you probably have, you were helping to fact-check it, right, but I can’t wait to see the paper mache Rykfang that Lloyd Whitmore made, I hear it has glow-in-the-dark paint and everything! –How have you been doing? I haven’t seen you since Bellini tried in vain to petition Mr. Sansweet for a bug zapper, did you hear about that? Do you have any other recommendations for me? We also wanted to go check out the coffeehouse and the carousel, but we can go to the pub first if you’re headed that way, are you headed that way?”
Aerona had learned by now to just hold all answers to Joan's questions back until the woman had finished. “Yes and no; I’ve been there but I haven’t seen the full paper mache Rykfang, just the sketch - the full thing should be very nice, though. I’ve been well - busy, but well. Hadn’t heard about the bug-zapper - Bellini
is aware a bug zapper probably isn’t going to do anything against magical ghost fireflies, right? He
must have bought his council seat - overseer of public education, my foot. I hear there's a bookshop that's finally finished making copies of some of the books the Outside expeditions found and brought back and are putting them on the shelves - there might not be much touring information, but there could be interesting facts about Melville or the Outside before the war that might be interesting to share with your clients.”
Aerona shrugged slightly as she considered Joan’s last question. “I wasn’t heading anywhere in particular, but you know, the pub
does sound like a good idea - one-year anniversary is at least a few celebratory rounds of drinks, right? And we can convince Ene to join in, I’m sure.”
Joan nodded vigorously as she listened with rapt attention. “Good—good, we’ll have to find another good bookshop, too—it’s too bad I don’t have any coupons, well, that’s okay, full price for a special occasion! They sound positively gripping, I’m sure Ene is hyped to get some extra customers for the celebration, I haven’t gotten to try her alive-mandatory drinks yet, but I’ve heard good things, how are the ghostly variety? ...”
At this time of the day, the ghost pub was fairly quiet; it generally operated throughout the night and opened in daytime whenever the staff could be bothered. However, you could usually count on the staff to be home. There wasn't much in the way of entertainment unless any of the patrons decided to play the piano, but you could get in and you could have a drink, so this afternoon lull had begun to draw in an entirely different crowd. There was now a group of elderly ladies who used one of the farther sofas for their bi-weekly knitting club with tea and cookies. Two of them had since died, which had put a slight dent in the regularity of their appearances because of the funerals, and then they all just showed up again as usual.
Ene was negotiating through the pages of a bartending equipment catalog and wondering if getting a cocktail shaker was worth going through the hassle of mail orders when the group came in. She looked up, immediately brightened up, cast a quick look around the pub, saw that most of the current clientele was of the young and giggly female variety and called Ivan over to man the bar. She clattered over to the door to meet the others.
"I swear," she said by way of greeting, "sometimes this place is less of a pub and more of a setting for a highschool comedy. Or maybe drama. Hard to tell the difference. If Theodor also agreed to take his shirt off then we might actually start turning a profit here."
"Yeah, that is not happening," Theodor said amiably, ambling past with a tray of glasses.
"See, that is how he supports his wife in entrepreneurship," Ene complained, directing the group to one of the free sofas and perching herself on its back so as to get a better overview of the pub. Her heels, which once barely left a dent in the upholstery, were now digging heavily into the sofa. Sometime over the past year, the pub had become increasingly more tangible for ghosts while still staying just as tangible for the living. It wasn't a perfect overlap between the two worlds yet, but it looked like it might get there eventually.
"Well, that's my life or lack thereof in a nutshell," the proprietress said, leaning forward to rest her arms on her knees. "Holy smokes, guys, how long has it
been? I can't say that I'm sentimental about the days of the Resistance because, you know, murders and fear and that shack always smelled like mildew, but we all sort of fell out of communication when it all ended. Aerona, you look to be out and about all the time, and you," she nodded at Joan, "looks like they've put you on a longer leash now? That fella of yours has done an admirable job sticking with you this long, in any case, you should really hold on to him."
"I'll just fetch you a beer," Theodor told Sylvester, meandering past the sofa again.
“Uh—” Sylvester piped up, reddening. “That’s—not necessary—”
“Not to worry, compulsory beverages for the living, it’s all part of their business model, really excellent for keeping out living freeloaders and then encouraging repeat customers,” supplied Joan. Then, turning back to Ene and Aerona, “And I’m certainly holding onto him, this chain was made at the Melville Ironworks, really superb craftsmanship, lightweight and durable, they also helped with the construction for that small new affordable apartment housing on Verity Lane, we got to help some with the concrete and foundations for that, but I haven’t seen it since, I hear they ordered a really lovely blue carpeting for the lobby area and commissioned some local artists for paintings. Gosh, I love your place here, Ene, you’ve really dressed it up, it’s got such an
atmosphere, it’s even
better than that pale ghost brochure you left in my cell.”
"It
is cozy," Aerona agreed as the fireflies around her dimmed to cooperate with the lightning. "I'm sorry I haven't been by enjoying it more; you're right that it's been...a while. Had to keep the guards from shooting the friendly Outsiders and from getting eaten by the unfriendly ones, and then there was renovating part of Town for the new residents, and...well, I can go on a ramble once we have drinks in hand. If Joan's got a longer leash and we have a place to meet that doesn't smell like Aghifyer hide, we should take advantage of it and catch up. ...I'm sure the conversation will be nicer now than the ones in the old shacks, too."
Ene snorted with amusement, swung herself backwards, reached out to grab a pint Theodor had whisked in at speed known only to ghosts and lifted it over Joan's head to Sylvester.
"Dense foam with small tight bubbles, oaken aftertaste and a hint of coffee and hazelnut," she said expertly, "except don't ask me
how, everything's made in the same vat. You'll thank me before the hour is up." She leaned on her knees again. "That shack is covered in graffiti now, would you believe. I went to see it the other day. Lines like "RESISTANCE IS HEROES" and "COUNCIL=MURDERERS" and other such lovely support that we probably could've used when we were actually trying to make a difference with just the five of us, give or take Sebastian, although he did have some pretty good haircare tips." Ene, who altogether believed in having one vice at a time, started fishing around in her dress for a smoke. "In any case, we might've discussed bloody murder less than we did if
someone wasn't picky about just sending a letterbomb to the Council - what'll you guys be having, anyway?"
Already conflicted on how to feel about complimentary graffiti, Joan’s face knotted up a touch. “It’s
one thing to send a letterbomb to the Council, but it’s
completely different when you address the label for the
historic Town Hall, and—”
"Yeah, we
could've just addressed it as 'please open in a non-historical basement with all Council present'," Ene scoffed, while Aerona sighed and patted Joan on the shoulder - as much as a ghost
could pat a living human's shoulder, anyway - with an amused-smirk.
"Well, nobody's sending anyone or any buildings letterbombs, so I think that's an argument we can put to rest." It would have been easier at the time, getting rid of the Council in one fell swoop - but after seeing how difficult it had been for the town to rebuild itself and establish new laws and leaders and organizations with the Councilors alive; Aerona had to admit that might not have been the cleanest way, either. The confusion would have been immense, and the Resistance stepping up to explain what they'd done...might not have been taken well. It didn't matter much now, though. "And like I said - nicer conversations.
Different ones. Ene, I'll have the smoked porter."
“I’ll try your house brew,” said Joan (still a bit tersely). Then, after a slight pause, glancing around the pub: “Do you already have a corporeal menu? You should have a menu. The Goodshows’ son is an excellent illustrator, and even if your repeat business here knows your full selection by heart already, a tangible menu can be extremely helpful for newcomers, have you gotten a lot of people for the anniversary?”
"One smoked porter and house brew coming right up," Ene said, getting up, caught Theodor's eye and, after a quick wordless exchange of information, sat down again while the man went off in search for the magic vat. "You know, it's kind of scary how professional this whole thing is becoming. When it started out, it was really mostly a gettogether place and I just cooked whatever people asked for, give or take some creative liberties." It was generally known that the pub had good beef burgers, if you didn't mind then being
beet burgers. "The thing is, I can only really work with plants, and if you advertise that, it starts to draw in a very specific crowd. The other day I got a few chicks of the long skirts and tote bags sort asking if the peppermint tea is fair trade. Fair trade! I told 'em that peppermint is pretty straightforward business, you put manure on the soil and you get peppermint back and that's the fairest trade I know, but they keep going on about the thing needing proper
labelling."
She sucked on her cigarette in a rather outraged manner while Theodor sidled in with the drinks and then went and settled down in his armchair, still the quiet unchanging core of the whole pub.
"I reckon the anniversary crowd is going to crowd later," she then said. "It's still pretty early. Come to think of it, I was thinking of going outside and seeing how things were getting along in the city - they were planning to do something or other with the clocktower ruins, weren't they?"
“Oh!” exclaimed Joan, brightening up again. She pulled out her origami wallet again and unfurled a very large, rather dog-eared map of the Island. (The map flopped over the area and one corner fizzled into the foam of her house brew.) “That’s where they built the residences for the Outside Creatures, wasn’t it? Very innovative, beautifully built, lots of ingenuity and creative solutions, I hear Mrs. Stonewick made the lift special so that it was accessible even for creatures under a foot tall, I’d love to go see it, is it all full up, do you know?”
"Not quite yet," Aerona said, attempting to push the map corner out of Joan's drink, and frowning slightly as her hand phased through it. She shook it off. "But it's definitely impressive - everything from the doors to basic floor coverings had to be rethought at some point. The skyraptors need more roof than interior or they get claustrophobic; then the Bahlgrimms - the batcoons, people keep calling them - need a solid beam to hang from so they can sleep, and they weigh about as much as they look; they had to uproot and transplant a tree for the stickwalkers because we couldn't figure out how to make something as twining as a tree canopy with two-by-fours... But that lift is a wonder, truly; it can lift a Skyraptor but is perfectly operable by the little whiptail families. And all the little knobs work even with their stingers. It's all quite fascinating, and everyone's been really friendly - I'll show you sometime."
She paused to take a sip of her beer. "Speaking of friendly, how's the banehound in your back garden, Ene?"
"Likes the music, it turns out," Ene said. "We get bashful little notes slid under the door now and again requesting for favorites - which is a bit of a challenge, seeing how it communicates in different scribbles for different songs, but Ranumgen looks to be able to make sense of it, so it works out." She shot a semi-habitual glare at the piano; Ranumgen wasn't currently in and there was nobody playing, but that didn't mean that she should let a perfectly good glare go to waste.
She craned her neck to look at the map, which looked to have the new residences drawn in over the old clocktower image. "Hm, yeah, that's a good place for something like this. Good solid foundation, lots of iron-reinforced tunnels underneath and inasmuch as I remember, there was this solid shell of three-foot thick wall still standing at the base after the fire. They'd better not have torn that down, that'd just be a waste."
"Oh, no, they left all that up," Aerona assured her. "The lift also goes
down now, so the owldogs have a place to lurk during the day. And the Bahlgrims use part of it as a nursery, the pups have to be introduced to light slowly or it causes blindness. And gnarls their horn growth, for some reason."
Joan busied herself by frantically scribbling excited notes on construction and on creatures at the side of the map. “Are there a lot of other new creature-specific buildings in town?” she asked. “I’ve heard there was a special section at the grocery, but I haven’t heard much more, have any of them expressed interest in tours of Melville, or do they prefer unguided exploration, has anyone been translating brochures into their languages?”
"Well, there are sections of places, like the grocery - the hospital has a whole new wing to it as well. I think they're just now getting started on plans for completely new buildings. There's only so much material and only so many people to do the construction at one time. But uhm. Well...they get an initial tour just so they know where everything is, but it's very essentials-focused. So no, they haven't been taken to see the giant ball of twine yet." Aerona smirked over the rim of her glass. (“Giant ball of
yarn,” Joan corrected her helpfully.) "A lot of them can probably understand our language well-enough to get some fun out of a tour by now."
There was a pause.
"Bleedin' hell, you guys," Ene said, almost absentmindedly, and lit a new cigarette from the end of the previous one, "do you know, we could've been
friends. We could've met up at a café and talked about beer, plants, local attractions, lamps, Outside creatures, families, politics, whatever. Traded, I don't know, knitting patterns or whatever it is normal people do. But here we got ourselves roped into the greater cause and only ever talked about plans of action, who to kill, how to hide, how to succeed, always avoided each other in public for fear of being exposed, and by the time it was over, four of the group are dead and the fifth," she raised an eyebrow at Sylvester (who was still striving very hard to be inconspicuous as he dutifully sipped his mandatory beer), "is chained to a good-looking guard and oblivious to the fact, which might or might not count as a fate worse than death depending on who you ask."
She blew a smoke ring and picked it out of the air, turning it this way and that. "I don't necessarily regret anything, mind. I still think we did the best we could in a bad situation where most opted to do nothing. Or maybe a bad situation is an easy excuse for doing bad things?"
Aerona frowned down at her beer. "Well, I couldn't have spoken about Outside creatures without getting in trouble with the Council. You couldn't be running this bar without paying a hefty chunk of your wages to the Council. Joan - no offense, Joan, but someone on the Council was bound to get paranoid about your researching sooner or later. ...Still. It would have been nice if it was cleaner. I don't think there was much else we could do; spreading what we knew would just have gotten us thrown on the stake for instigating
trouble, we had to make the Council show how hard they would hit. But..." She resisted the urge to look around the bar for Jensa Noberry, and to let the memories of Ezekiel finding out just why Aerona had been shot by a city guard bubble to the forefront of her thoughts. "There was a lot of shooting of civilians for something that was supposed to be the right thing."
“A lot of knives and bullets and,” Joan agreed faintly. She had finally fished her map out of her drink and was trying to clean it up with her striped sleeve, to little avail. “Did—Did you know that the crematory and cemetery on the northern banks of the Abill decided—decided to make—...” Then she stopped. She turned her attention back to trying to wring out her wet sleeve.
"Bullets and knives," Ene picked up, her voice suddenly fierce, "knives and bullets are
honest, though. Did I ever tell you what was under the clock tower? All those nice tunnels where Bahlgrim pups now frolic, reinforced with steel so that nobody could hear screams? All those piles of papers that had the dirt on everyone, that they used to keep grieving wives and mothers in check, lest they're next? I imagine they had one on me. Probably read 'Leverage: executed husband part of Resistance, never proven but who cares, fair trials are for sissies'."
The cigarette stub flew loose from her wildly gesticulating hand and plunged into the same glass that the corner of the map had just been fished out of.
"Bugger," Ene said grimly, sliding down onto the sofa seat, "you'll get a new one on the house. The point is, we had only the bullets and knives to fight against fog and mirrors, whispers, fear, disappearing friends and family, hangings without trial. We should've fought fire with fire but we didn't have any - well, until all the papers burned, anyway, fun times."
Joan, who had been offered a sip of Sylvester’s beer, suddenly choked on the drink and started hacking.
“Wh-What do you mean, Ene, we
never fought fire with literal fire.”
"Of course we didn't, the entire Island is too well guarded," Ene said, half testy, half amused. "But once I'd died, I could go through walls, so all those great big reinforced doors weren't any problem - and in any case they had a plain ol' candle on a desk right on top of papers, bleedin' fire hazard if I ever saw one."
"Wait—Wh—
NO—"
Aerona shook her head. "A lone candle - what an awful lighting choice."
"There were gas lamps, but none above the work desk," Ene supplied. "Stupid, I know. All those papers strewn all over the place too. Accident waiting to happen. And yes, a bunch of people died under the rubble, but that part was thoroughly stupid, it was three in the morning when the fire got started and the place was empty - way to leave a candle unattended, by the way - and it took a good few hours before it started chewing at the structure."
"...
WHAT."
"They could've evacuated the entire Island at a casual pace, but what do people do when there's a fire? They have to get right up close to get the best view. And what the firefighters were doing, I have no idea. Probably sleeping off the endless interrogations like everyone else. At least, everyone else who didn't get up to go stick their noses right in a blazing inferno."
Aerona took her beer and leaned back, not eager to see if a ghostly mug of beer could be spilled by an angry-enough living person.
“Ene—
ENE!” cried Joan in a tight squawk, jumping up. She might have wanted to grab Ene’s dress collar for emphasis, but knowing that the woman was not strictly corporeal, Joan’s fingers instead just wrangled furiously with the ordinary air just in front of her—which really conveyed her absolute frustration just as well.
Sensing trouble, Sylvester Castell quickly stood up as well and tried to clear his throat. “Uh—It’s been—lovely—Uh. Joan, whyyyy don’t we go see about that carousel—”
Ene leaned back and grinned brightly. "Ooh, we've upgraded from Miss Wrigley, haven't we?"
“
ENE. That was the
clock tower. How many times did we go
over this back then, when you find something wrong, you don’t
DESTROY it for a
statement, you don’t
BURN it—You—YOU
EXPOSE IT FOR EVERYONE TO SEE, YOU DON’T!
BURN! IT! And when you slap
death threat graffiti on the Wall, you use
WATER-SOLUBLE PAINT, and, and—
THAT. WAS THE HISTORIC CLOCK TOWER.”
"Historic clock tower and torture rooms, that'll draw in the kids," Ene noted dryly, nevertheless shying away from Joan out of sheer human instinct. "Who would I have told? You? Had you tried to expose anything, you would've gotten this cool party trick out of the deal." She tilted her head sideways and her neck broke with a quiet
snap, leaving her head lolling oddly.
"Or I could've tried to make it public," she continued, pushing her head upright again, "and they would've removed the evidence before anyone got through the doors. More smoke and mirrors. Plenty of people had been through those rooms anyway, knew what was going on, and nobody ever did anything, other than us. Sheep, the lot of them. And you can probably sell tickets to the historic Resistance graffiti," she added with a grin, ducking under a flailing arm at the last second.
“Cover ups—torture chambers—
do you have ANY IDEA WHAT—
party tricks?!—you’re lucky that the Outside housing is doing so well—Oh, did you at least file a report for the current history museum, you better do that so they have it on record—I mean,
how dare you—the upper floors had some
good things in them, too—there was going to be discounted admission—you could have directed visitors as a ghost—I lost my favorite slippers in—the clock faces were constructed over a century ago in a city-wide collaborative effort, it wasn’t ALL TORTURE, the gears and oil and maintenance were a thing of intricate artistry unto themselves, did you ever even take a tour of the building before you died, would that have made you reconsider
burning it to the ground to a heap of smoldering rubble, why, the—Aerona, help me out here—did you know that the clock tower was struck by lightning thirty-one years ago, but even
that didn’t deter it from continuing its legacy—and
why did you have to burn it at three in the morning when everyone was exhausted, honestly, if you HAD to burn it, why couldn’t you have burned it when you’d spooked everyone out of it first or something when everyone had had proper
sleep, it was
so cold that night, OH, and the
guard barracks, if historical significance doesn’t mean anything to you, Sylvester lost everything in that fire, didn’t you—”
“Please leave me out of this—”
“That stupid Old Council, why did they have to keep
torture chambers in the basement of one of Melville’s
most treasured landmarks, OH, I’m going to give them an
earful, talk about terrible city planning, those heinous—let’s go back to the prison, I’ll give them what for, those immoral, scandalizing, depraved little—”
Ene, who'd been taking the tirade with an indifferent pout while trying very hard to fight back an amused smile, sat bolt upright on the sofa at Joan's final words.
"Oh, this I definitely have to see," she said. "It's been ages since I got out of the house anyway and that's a fine way to go full poltergeist and start throwing things at people. Theo, I'll be out for a bit to watch Joan yell at the Council and see that new Outside housing while I'm at it, should I pick something up?"
"Get the poor woman some new slippers?" Theodor suggested absently, draped across his armchair and engrossed in what looked like a pulp crime novel. "Mr. Weatherby is still waiting to discuss pub merchandise with you, howditgo, at your earliest convenience."
Ene grunted. "I run a pub, I don't have earliest conveniences. Will see what I can do, I guess."
Aerona downed the last of her beer and set the mug on the table with...no sound at all because the mug was intangible, but the sentiment was definitely there. "Oh, it's great entertainment, you'll love it - who knew such terror could come from reciting tourist spots?" The lights of the fireflies hovering around Aerona flickered a little faster as she grinned. "Oh - and after that's done, I can show you both - er, you three - the Outside district. Maybe introduce you to a few of the residents; if your throat isn't too sore from shouting the Council members down, Joan, you could maybe start gauging tourism interest. And Ene, there's only two or three species you shouldn't offer alcohol to,
ever, and I can let you know which ones those are."
Joan was already out the door, and her voice was still prattling wrathfully about
clocks! tourism! Council! And in the last moments before the chain grew taut, Sylvester said speedily to Theodor and Ene, “I’m terribly sorry about all this, we’ll be sure to pay our tab when we come back. And I’m sure we will come back, since she still has some coupons to use around town after this, so—” Then he gave a small
hurk and was subsequently dragged out the door, followed by the two ghosts.
...The Ghost Town pub was rather quiet in their absence. But probably not for long. After all, life—and life after death—would always be exciting for someone.
~And much, much later that night~
(Hunty art! *jazz hands*)
