((Collab with
Huntress and
Thundy!))
A year had elapsed since the Old Council had been overthrown and the remaining member of the Resistance had been arrested. Many reforms had been enacted throughout the town, including the momentus adoption of a free press. This had allowed for the creation of a new radio station, using the old KMLV equipment, there was a new station on the air: Melville Public Radio, with its host Reuben Isaacson. It covered all the latest events in the city, reporting on the new democratic elections, the release of political prisoners from the jails, and the establishment of a tangible good life.
Amidst all this, the ghosts of Melville remained, now seamlessly woven into the fabric of the daily lives of the townspeople. Sampson Thorpe had become a regular feature at the ghost public house, when he wasn’t spotted taking strolls around the island with the ghost of Fortune Hart. He was there right now, with enjoying a drink with friends. Some were familiar faces from the rebellion and that terrible night a year ago, others newly come patrons to the bar.
He was presently engaged with a hand full of cards and a glass of a ghost ale that was brewed on site. The cards weren’t that great. A six and a two of different suits, it would definitely have to be a bluff hand. Jensa Noberry was dealing, skillfully flicking out three cards onto the table, there was nothing useful there.
“Hrm. I’ll check.” Sampson said, looking up. “You listen to the radio today?” he asked Jensa. There had been a program where Reuben interviewed the new commissioner of the city Police, the new unit replacing the city Guards.
“Hm?” Jensa said after a distracted moment. “Oh, yeah.” While the house on one side of the pub that was used as Pup’s playground didn’t seem very happy about all the ghostly happenings, the neighbors on the other side were more understanding; they kept their large radio right by the window, aimed toward the ghost pub. This was likely because, Jensa later learned, the family’s eldest child had been hanged alongside Ene. “I think it’s understandable that people are nervous about any of the old Guards being allowed to continue serving,” she said as Theodor pushed forward several chips, “but you can’t really form a brand new city guard - uh, police force from scratch. There just wouldn’t be enough people. And the new commissioner seems like he has his heart in the right place. But you were in the Guard, right? What do you think?”
Jensa had been halfway living at the pub for most of the past year. Well, she was halfway alive, and was half residing at the pub, so...quarter-way living? She had no immediate living relatives (her closest family member was a great-uncle who owned a small farm), so her house had been reclaimed by the city and sold. She didn’t resent it, since space was scarce and if they kept making room for the dead, soon there would soon be no room for the living. But this did leave her homeless, and so she spent most of her time at the pub. When she wanted to be away from people, she went to a small shack she had found in the farmland in the south. Ene had made a bleating noise when Jensa mentioned it, but refused to explain why.
She wanted to keep up her conspiracy hobby, which meant moving the entire thing to the ghost pub. Ene had allowed her a single drawer of a desk in the back room, on the grounds that “this much crazy shouldn’t be given room to spread out.” Jensa had needed to revamp her organizing system, but managed to make it work. She also owed Ene a favor for not telling anyone. Before Sampson spoke to her, she had been lost in thought uncovering the connection between the Melville Tourism Agency and the subterranean Rainbow’s Shadow Army.
Her book was coming along nicely, if she could figure out how to get it physically onto paper.
“Well, for the most part, a lot of the people who wanted to do good by being in the guard didn’t get the chance. The conscription element randomised it for the most part. Sure there were some volunteers, but those were mostly for the officers, who came from the island,” Sampson said as he took a sip from his pewter flagon. “There are a lot of people that want the best for the town, but there also those who saw it as an easy position of power. It’ll take time to weed out the ones with those kinds of intentions. Your bet, I believe.” he nodded at Theodor.
“This was never going to be a fast process,” Theodor pointed out, staring at his hand almost accusingly - something he tended to do regardless of how good his hand actually was. “If we’d been successful with the old Resistance back then, we might be seeing some actual proper change right now.” Theodor had taken to playing poker on a regular basis whenever there were enough people to get a proper game going. He’d spent the past fifteen years of his afterlife having nothing for entertainment other than the newspaper, which he couldn’t pick up, and which Ene, who wasn’t usually best pleased with the propaganda, generally crumpled up after reading. When your life has consisted of nothing but “oday at the Melvispoke to the Councippies for sale for cheapspress our deepest condolences for BUY NOW” for over a decade, you
really learn to appreciate a poker night.
Over time, his armchair had migrated to the poker table, or maybe vice versa. Theodor’s armchair had been a predictable point of contention in a pub that filled up at weekends, being placed right in the center and at the poker table to boot, but this was one point that the man had always been adamant over. His armchair was
his armchair. Things had come to a head a few months ago when a group of teenagers had snuck in on a bet, taken the chair over and refused to move. Theodor had asked Victoria in his usual amiable way if he could borrow the Skillet for a moment and the rest quickly became history, as it were. There’d been a broken window, a few broken bones and a subsequent haphazard investigation carried out by very inexperienced and very embarrassed officials who were eventually forced to close the case as an “alleged supernatural incident”.
“Do people just not
remember that I was a Resistance hitman?” Theodor had asked Ene, who was laughing too hard to give any sort of coherent response. The pub had since become even more popular - any publicity is good publicity.
But that was a while back, and life in the pub had quickly worn itself into a comfortable rut. Life outside was still as volatile as ever, but for the dead, it was largely a topic to observe from the outside.
The betting had ended with Jensa dealing another card on the table. Sampson’s hand had turned into a low pair, nothing spectacular, but he decided to press on regardless to try and bluff out his opponents. He slowly moved a small pile of chips into the pot. “Call. Well it’s only been a year so far. Who’s to say people won’t make the same mistakes generations down the line? Although I suppose they’d be in for a haunting.”
Perhaps that was why the were all still here, Sampson inwardly thought. Somebody needed to stick around and keep history from repeating itself, the victims themselves would make for good reminders. Time, in the end, would be ultimate overseer. He wasn’t particularly the haunting type either. Although he sometimes hung around the radio station reliving old memories, but nobody seemed spooked by it. He was pretty sure Reuben may have seen him a couple of times.
In any case, he felt no need to leave the town for whatever afterlife awaited, he was perfectly content to spend his day lounging around and talking with Fortune. It was like a sort of endless early retirement, with no need to worry about his pension or rations. She seemed a lot happier these days, despite all the misfortune during the rebellion, reuniting her with Arlie and spending time together had helped alot. There were strange metaphysical questions about why the ghostly quasi existence was a lot better than actually being alive under the previous regime, but Sampson tried not to think about that too much, and just enjoy it for what it was.
“Don’t tell me one of you got a flush again,” he said, chuckling at Jensa and Theodor. “my wallet is already in pain. Say, what did you call this batch of ale again? It’s very nice.”
“Ask the wife,” Theodor said, strongly suspecting that Ene came up with beer names on the fly whenever someone asked. As wives do, the proprietress materialized behind his chair at that point and craned her neck to look at the flagon.
“Oh yeah,” she said cheerfully, “that’s the Scythe of the Underworld batch. I developed this one right around the same time as the Hammer and Sickle moonshine batch - you know, the one that hits you on the head and takes your feet off - and was kind of hurting for names so it turned into a theme. It’s got rosemary in it, pretty proud of how it turned out.”
She balanced her tray on the back of the chair to take a metaphorical sort of breath when the door opened and a couple came in, both of the giggly, clingy, we-can’t-actually-walk-while-embracing-but-we’ll-jolly-well-try sort. Ene gave them an absentminded catty scowl known to all middle-aged married women, then she did a double-take as recognition dawned.
“Oh, you are
mine,” she said and slid off. Theodor looked after her with a suspicious scowl and the distraction cost him the next round.
“Aaaand she’s up to something,” he said.
After serving the next card, Jensa peeked again at her own. She didn’t have anything aside from a possible straight. They were actual, physical cards, with the logo of the New Melville Tourism Agency on the back. This meant that manipulating physical objects was a requirement for entering these poker nights, but since everyone had had at least a year to practice, that was no longer a problem. Jensa was usually called on to deal since she was the first ghost who had figured out how to shuffle.
“I don’t know, maybe it isn’t even possible to fix things for good,” she said, picking up on Sampson’s previous topic. “It sounds like things were really bad before the town was founded, and then they were probably better for awhile, at least for the people living in Melville. But then they got worse again when the Council got too much power, and now they’re better again. And it all took centuries. Maybe things will be bad again in twenty years, or maybe in two hundred. But I don’t think that makes what we’ve accomplished any less meaningful, because at least people will have better lives for a while.” She stared down at the table for a long moment in quiet thought, looking up when Theodor cleared his throat. Everyone at the table was watching her impatiently. “Oh, right.” A pale blush glowed on her ephemeral cheeks. “Call.” After a round of checks, she dealt another card.
Theodor gave another accusing stare at his hand, weighed his options and shot a quick glance at Ene. The giggly pair had since broken up to leave the girl behind and there was a new woman at the table. Ene looked to be serving them in person and being quite pleasant about it, which just meant that she was definitely up to something.
“Mhm,” he did, wondering idly if there was any way to build this hand into a straight, “frankly the whole thing with ‘Life is Good’ was flawed from the start. Can’t have ups without downs. The new council started work with the idea that life isn’t good and therefore they need to work to make it better, which at least is a good approach to have. Do they have any plans for the old Council? I mean, that’s a lot of taxpayer money going into their upkeep in prison, even if they’ve cleared up rubble here and there.”
“I don’t think anyone knows what to do with them yet,” Jensa said. She gleaned some idea of current events from pub gossip, listening in on conversations around the town, and sitting in on the deliberations of the New Council. It was a good thing she hadn’t known about ghosts when she herself had been alive; the prospect that one could be listening to your conversation
right now was almost worse than just being haunted. “People are saying that in a way, things haven’t actually changed; we’re still giving the Old Council our food and resources and getting nothing back from them, just like it used to be. The New Council seems to be leaning toward putting them to work doing construction. Well, and there are also those who just want to execute them.” She dealt the final card, and her straight became impossible. “They say it would be justified, but...they haven’t even built enough of a legal system to say that properly yet. And if they were executed, then they’d just be bothering us ghosts.” She thought for a moment. “I wonder if that ancestor of Ene’s could do something about that for us.”
Theodor grunted. “He struck me as an expensive sort of man to hire. Unless he gives family discounts, but Ene herself probably wouldn’t give any family discounts, so I wouldn’t bank on that.”
“Say what?” Ene asked, having just arrived back at the table and caught the last few words. She perched on the arm of Theodor’s armchair for lack of anywhere else to sit, looking a very specific brand of smug.
“Family discounts.”
“Don’t believe in ‘em. Set a fair price from the start and spare everyone the fuss.”
Theodor shot another sideways glance at the table with the two women who looked to be more or less enjoying their drinks and none the worse for wear. “What was the deal with them?”
“Them?” Ene asked innocently. “The Brant sisters. One formerly in the Guard, the other with the City Hall officials. Nice girl. Good at interrogating. Good at sending people to the gallows. Not so good at ensuring fair trials. Not entirely sure if she recognized me, but I guess it was a busy day.”
Theodor gave his potionwoman wife a suspicious glare. “Did you… put something in their drinks?”
Ene looked genuinely offended by this. “Good grief, man, I run a pub! Can’t have any of that here. No, I just gave them what they ordered. And charged them a... fair price.”
She clattered off in the direction of the till.
Jensa had long since realized that discussing scruples with Ene wouldn’t get anywhere. The round ended, and as Jensa shuffled and dealt the next round, the pub’s resident god inscrutable’d itself through the door and sat down at the piano. Jazz music filled the room, and time seemed to speed down and slow up.
Death, for the time being, was good.
Jensa (
Fraze), Sampson (
Thundy), and Theodor (
Huntress) play a game of poker while discussing current events and the fate of the Council.
