Calypso Slaves - Ghost Story

Cassie was escorted back to the elevator, and closed her eyes against the staff deck. It didn't seem so bad, now that she knew that someday she would live somewhere like it, but she still hated to see it. The elevator halted at the second deck from the bottom, and Cassie was led back through to what she dimly remembered as the processing section of the ship, where the shuttlebay was.

Once Cassie was seated inside the shuttle, Mira uncuffed her hands, then unlocked her waist chain and removed her ankle shackles. The chains gripped in one hand, Mira folded her arms and glowered down at Cassie. "This whole plan of Enlil's is crazy. You'd better make it crazy enough to work, cunt, 'cause if you don't, I'm the one holding the whip. And if you let the commander down, I'll split you to the bone with every blow."

"Yes, ma'am," Cassie said. Mira spat on her face before leaving the shuttle. Cassie didn't wipe the strand of saliva off her face until after Mira had left. Apparently there weren't any laws about spitting on this boat.

Cassie's lockbox was already here, the key attached to it by a short chain. She pulled out the pistol, the shoes with socks tucked in, and then her clothes. Underneath those was a white facemask, a pair of manila folders, and a binder sitting on top of a backpack. The label had been removed from the binder, but opening it up she quickly recognized it as her copy of the Encyclopedia Mortuis. Inside the backpack was a phone, a few of the unlabeled meal bars, and what looked like about 100 TradeCoin in bills. From a quick skim, one of the manila folders contained information on the Majestic Thirteen activity in the area and the disappearances. The other was transcripts of informant reports. A lot of the information has been blacked out, but what remained were the reports on wisps.

Cassie pulled her pants up and her shirt over her head, and for a few minutes she lay back and just soaked in how good it felt to be wearing them again. She imagined that she was on the shuttle now because the Lockhearts had a change of heart, decided she couldn't have been wrapped up in any serious blasphemy, and got their legal team to overturn her conviction, and now she was headed back home to catch up on class and give vague answers about her adventure in space to build up her mystique amongst her friends.

Except she was wrapped up in serious blasphemy. Which, okay, blasphemy laws were a stupid cover for other things, but those things, it turned out, totally should be illegal for completely different reasons. Cassie had been telling herself that she wasn't a criminal and she didn't deserve this, but maybe what she didn't deserve was this psuedo-parole from her slavery. She was partly responsible for what was happening to Toluca County, but how big a part?

Cassie didn't really want to follow that train of thought to its conclusion. She knew she would be looking for reasons to justify her actions, and she was afraid she wouldn't be able to find them. And regardless of who was at fault, her first priority should be solving the problem.

She examined the first folder. The names of the informants had been redacted, but the dates and times were still there, along with exact text of the reports themselves. Looked like wisp activity dropped precipitously at around the same time disappearances picked up, briefly resurged slightly, and then dropped to "pre-Hellmouth levels" which, for a town the size of Echoshire, probably meant none at all.

All of this was perfectly consistent with a poltergeist. Wisps were the degenerate remnant of a regular ghost, with only a handful of personality traits still clinging to reality, usually some unresolved business. The wisp could no longer remember their appearance in life, which is why they appeared as disembodied balls of light usually visible only in photographs or video footage. They could usually only remember a few words, and they repeated them with little idea as to their meaning. A mantra related to the circumstances of their murder may have lost all meaning to a wisp except as something which, if only the living would hear it, would bring their killer to justice. That the words conveyed information that would help solve their murder was more complex than a wisp could comprehend. They just knew that saying the words to the living would result in their being able to pass on, like a magic spell.

Poltergeists were mindless wisp gestalts, usually made when dozens of angry ghosts were created in the same place and all of them degenerated into wisps, which most ghosts did almost immediately. Under normal circumstances lone wisps usually vanished into Mictlan within a few weeks at most, so poltergeists tended to only form if there were lots of horrible deaths all right on top of each other, but with the border between Mictlan and the mortal world weak, wisps who were sucked into the land of the dead long ago could come through again, and if lots of them died for similar reasons, they might combine to form a poltergeist decades or centuries after the events that killed them. This was possible with decades or centuries between the first and most recent deaths, if one area just happened to have a lot of deaths under similar circumstances.

Once a poltergeist was formed, it sucked nearby wisps into itself, becoming bigger, angrier, and less coherent. As the poltergeist draws in more wisps unrelated to the original tragedy, wisps with entirely unrelated and sometimes contradictory fetters to the living world, it would go insane, lashing out at random at anyone within its haunt, often with fatal consequences.

Sometimes proper wraiths, who could still remember their mortal lives, got sucked in as well, becoming the face of the poltergeist. With dozens or hundreds of wisps to feed off of, this could cause the wraith face of the poltergeist to sustain itself much longer than normal, lasting decades or centuries instead of just a few years. And as the poltergeist goes insane, the wraith can become the only coherent voice in the storm, and use the rest of the poltergeist to resolve the wraith's unfinished business exclusively. Occultist wraiths had been known to murder lots of people in similar ways in a similar place for the express purpose of creating a poltergeist to seize control of and feed on while resolving their fetters. Once the wraith left, the unled poltergeist would go berserk.

So, a drastic drop in wisp levels was caused by the poltergeist manifesting and devouring nearby wisps, a temporary resurgence is caused by the now-insane poltergeist murdering people at random, which also explained the uptick in disappearances, and the following drop to a total lack of wisps would be because the poltergeist had assimilated all of them. Without a high population density, and thus without a high death rate, it'd probably peter out on its own after a while, provided people were smart enough to avoid its haunt. It usually only takes a few unexplained deaths before people start looking for a new apartment.

In the other folder were a lot of reports of suspected Majestic Thirteen activity about a week and a half ago, which as of two days ago had been reduced to just a single suspicious pair of individuals. The records of the two individuals checked out on the Echoshire census, but investigations reported that no one in town seemed to know who they were, and they hung out in the heart of the city at the Administrative District, which was where all the disappearances had been occurring. And that was a pretty damn hard part of the city to just abandon if it got too spooky, so probably sending someone to get rid of the poltergeist prematurely was the right call.

There wasn't much else reported, but being 90% sure that she was looking at a poltergeist, Cassie knew that she needed to figure out who the poltergeist was made out of. Although the majority of the poltergeist was probably made up of unrelated wisps, a plurality of the poltergeist's wisps would be rooted to a single source. If she could get them coherent long enough to pacify them, the poltergeist would become much less dangerous. Echoshire was a small town, so crawling through the archives for every murder in its history should be manageable, although would be a dull afternoon. Hopefully. The town's newsnet HQ was in the admin district, which meant it might be within range of the poltergeist's haunt or under Majestic Thirteen surveillance.

Cassie pulled the phone out of the pack next. It wasn't her old one. Only the basic apps were installed, and even then the marketplace was missing. There were only two contacts, "Local" and "Emergency." Emergency was listed in red as an emergency contact. Mixed in with the plastic bills in the pack was a piece of paper with instructions written on it: "Phone contacts: Local is shuttle, Emergency is strike team. Do not connect phone to any networks besides ours. Tear this message up and swallow pieces after reading."

Cassie sighed and began tearing up the message and swallowing it one little piece at a time. She'd gotten way better at not missing lunch, but even so her stomach almost always had a little pinch, a constant reminder that even if she wasn't going to die or anything, a little extra food would really be nice. She wasn't really so hungry that the paper actually seemed appetizing, but she'd gotten really good at eating things that tasted, at best, like nothing, in the hopes of making that pinch go away for at least a little while.

The lights indicating atmospheric re-entry came on. Cassie shoved the gun, the folders, and the binder into the backpack and clutched it to her chest as she prepared for re-entry, holding onto a strap on a wall that was about to be the ceiling.

Re-entry was always weird. The acceleration started to fight with gravity and Cassie was pulled in two different directions at once, the shuttle rocked as friction hit the heat shields hard. After a few minutes she was back in atmosphere, sideways in her seat. She unbuckled herself and used the seats' armrests as a ladder to climb down to the new floor, then folded out a new seat on what was previously a wall and buckled herself into that.

The shuttle landed out in the plains near the highway a few miles outside town and the pilot got out of the cockpit to greet Cassie. "Hey, there, I'm Jason Briggs. Would've introduced myself earlier, but I'd rather meet on even ground."

He offered his hand to shake and Cassie took it cautiously. "I'm Cassandra Heart. Call me Cassie," she said.

"Nice to meet you," Briggs said with a firm shake, "I'm your pilot. I'll be waiting at the starport out on the lake to extract you, just give the word and I'll be here in ten minutes flat. Shuttle can hover and it's got a gun, but I'm under strict orders from the commander not to use it where the authorities might see. My understanding is that we aren't technically allowed to have weapons on our shuttle and the commander doesn't wanna deal with the court case."

"I understand, sir. Any tips for me?" Cassie said.

"Well, I just fly the shuttle, but I overhear a lot of briefings for the teams. Now you're investigation, right? The MO with investigation jobs is usually to avoid firefights if at all possible. No roughin' up informants who're holding out on you, things like that." Well, no problems there. Even after two weeks in the workshop Cassie didn't think she could rough up anyone tougher than an arthritic old man. "They gave you a gun, right? Don't leave it in your pack, you won't be able to reach it when you need it. And don't put it in your pocket, either, way too obvious, especially with jeans like yours." Cassie looked down at her jeans. They weren't skin tight, but they were pretty clingy. She didn't really pick her outfit for smuggling contraband the day she was arrested. Really, she picked it because they were the pieces of clothing nearest her at the time.

"Tuck the gun in the waistband, and keep your shirt over it," Briggs continued, "you'll be able to tug it out when you need it. And don't be afraid to call me if you need to make a quick exit, either. You're the only agent we got in Toluca right now, and I'm not going anywhere else. I'm not here for anyone but you."

"Thank you, sir," Cassie said.

"Oh, one more thing, don't have to call me 'sir.' I'm Jason. Crewman Briggs, if you're feeling fancy."

"Yes, sir, Crewman Briggs," Cassie said.

He laughed a bit and asked "is it possible to be disrespectfully respectful?"

"I don't know, sir, but I intend to find out," Cassie said with a soft smile.

"Good luck, Cassie," he said, clapping her on the shoulder and then returning to the shuttle. Cassie pulled the gun out from her pack and slipped it into the waistband of her jeans, covering it up with her shirt.

It took her about an hour before she reached Echoshire, and another thirty minutes to get into the admin district at the heart of the city. Maybe it was just her imagination, but people seemed jumpier. Probably not her imagination, really, the recent string of disappearances would definitely have made the news. Which was perfect, because that would hopefully stop her from being recognized from the news coverage of her arrest and conviction. She talked to the archive receptionist about getting in and she had barely even started making an excuse about being a history major from Ashen Grove looking for...Well, that's as far as she got before the bored receptionist pointed her down the hall and to the right.

In the hall, Cassie spotted a camera, double-checked to make sure no one was looking, and pulled out the Encyclopedia Mortuis. Mictlan-related occultism was slim on sigils and the like, but even a description of its inhabitants would serve to fry a computer. Cassie held the book close enough that the words would show up clearly on the recording, and while the camera didn't emit any helpful trail of smoke, she was 90% sure that whatever system was used to store the video had been fried, taking any recordings of her with it.

The archives room had rows of terminals built directly into desks, which stretched up to the ceiling in order to mimic the aisles of bookshelves of pre-digital libraries. Immediately upon entry Cassie recognized the sound of a conversation cut short by someone hiding behind one of the stacks. She walked directly into one of the aisles to hide herself from anyone who came to check on the main entrance, and leaned over one of the terminals without taking a seat, typing a random string into the query and pretending to scrutinize the results. If someone came around the corner, she'd blend. No footsteps approached, however, and she could hear whispering.

She navigated the stacks to come at the whispering from the opposite side of the entrance and peek around a corner at them. She knew these three. The 'apprentices' they'd recruited from Candlewick High. Neil was the short one with the irritating puppy dog crush on Cassie that she tried not to hold against him, Amber was the one who thought every conspiracy theory was real and wasn't aware of the existence of any colors besides onyx black and ghoulish pale, and Lionel was the reluctant redhead kid who was probably only here because he was dating Amber.

"I know I heard something," Amber was saying.

"I checked, there's no one here," Neil said, "besides we aren't even doing anything illegal."

"So? Majestic Thirteen could be following us!" Amber said.

"Majestic Thirteen isn't real," Neil said, "and the police and DDIA have bigger things to worry about. We aren't involved in the disappearances."

"The DDIA isn't here," Amber said, "you don't think it's a little bit suspicious that after this many disappearances they haven't shown up? It's because there's an even higher agency looking into things."

"I'm pretty sure if some kind of super-DDIA were after us, they'd have us by now. They already caught Cassie," Neil said.

"Of course you think she's the gold standard for evading arrest," Amber said.

"She was better at it than we are! They probably got Jack and Jeanette, too," Neil said, "those two probably just...Well, y'know."

"Cassie probably sold them out to dodge the firing squad," Amber said.

"Will you shut the fuck up about your conspiracy theories?" Neil said, "Cassie wouldn't do that, all you've got is a hunch."

"How come no one else stood trial?" Amber asked.

"Guys," Lionel cut in, "aren't we trying to be sneaky?" The other two looked at him, glared at each other, and stopped. "Look. I know we've had this conversation before, but we shouldn't be doing this anymore. Cassie got caught, and I haven't heard from the others since."

Cassie wasn't supposed to get these kids involved. But they were involving themselves, weren't they? She knew that Enlil wouldn't accept that explanation, but all Cassie needed was someone to help her dig through the archives. Enlil didn't need to know the details. And technically she'd only been told not to go looking for them. She stumbled across them completely accidentally, so she wasn't really disobeying orders at all, just taking advantage.

"Hey, guys, what's up," Cassie said, rounding the corner. The scoobies backed away like they'd seen a ghost. "What're you up to, anyway?"

"Cassie," Neil said, "you were arrested!"

"Yeah," Cassie said.

"And sent into space," Neil said.

"Yup," Cassie said.

"So what are you doing here?" Neil asked.

"I'm tricksy and clever," Cassie said.

"You've got a collar," Amber said.

"It's dead," Cassie said, "how do you think I got back down to the surface? Slaves don't get vacations."

"Or maybe you made a deal with Majestic Thirteen," Amber said.

"Majestic Thirteen doesn't use slaves," Cassie said.

"Majestic Thirteen isn't real," Neil said.

"No, actually, they are. I ran into them," Cassie said, "but trust me, they don't give a shit about you. There's a serious cult operating in Toluca. I'm small fry compared to them, you guys...I mean, frankly, you don't even rate. I mean, you're guilty of what, trespassing?"

"Majestic Thirteen doesn't need actual crimes to get convictions," Amber said.

"Missing the point, Amber," Cassie said, "why would Majestic give a fuck? That you, what, go looking up obituaries and sometimes buy weird things from weird people? You don't even know how to use them. Nobody cares." But by the time she was even halfway through she knew it was the wrong approach. Nothing got on Amber's nerves more than how thoroughly she was displaced as the local spooky expert when actual occultists showed up. Especially occultists who were so irreverent as to refer to occultism as 'spooky,' like it was a Halloween ride or something.

"This is exactly what a Majestic Thirteen spy would say," Amber said.

"Look, I'm here to look some stuff up in connection to a poltergeist causing the disappearances around here. If any of you don't trust me, you can leave," Cassie said.

"How do you know it's a poltergeist?" Neil asked.

Cassie had always played coy about real supernatural secrets. She told yourself that it was to keep the scoobies safe, and it did keep them safe. Majestic Thirteen wasn't just a maybe anymore, they were really, definitely out there. The danger she was putting these kids in used to seem abstract. Now it was very real.

But on the other hand, she knew that the real reason she'd kept secrets was because she liked being mysterious and aloof. She liked being a wise elder sage who knew things they didn't and wouldn't always share. And it was stupid, and selfish, and now that Toluca was under attack these kids needed to know what they were dealing with or else they'd be in danger anyway.

"Wisps show up on film photographs. When the borders between realms are as weak as they are now, they show up everywhere. Poltergeists eat them to sustain themselves, and then kill people which produces more, and then eat those. So if wisps go down, then back up, then down again, that's a poltergeist," Cassie said.