No one knows exactly why The Problem started, or when. It was…maybe fifty years ago? Or maybe sixty? It had all blurred together.
There were things that people did know, of course - The Problem had started in Europe, and spread like some kind of infectious disease through surrounding areas, sprouting suddenly in other countries. It hadn't fully engulfed the planet until about twenty years ago, and there were lucky areas of the world where it was weak. Small islands were usually safer than mainland continents, as long as you didn't swim out too far - anywhere with fewer people had less of a problem with The Problem.
City Z had once been densely populated. Now, huge sections of it had emptied out, leaving only thin veins of citizens too poor to run and too scared to fight. It was, all told, the perfect place to have an agency - plenty of work, peace and quiet, very few iron bells or ghost lamps still functioning, cheap rent - just so long as you weren't afraid of ghosts. Which was probably why The Accidental Team had proudly holed up in an old apartment building on the sparsely populated side of town.
It wasn't an eloquent name, or an eloquent business, but frankly, it wasn't an eloquent job, either - agents who spent time trying to look good for publicity stunts were often on the weaker side of the spectrum. The Accidental Team, on the other hand, had practically no clients, but it did, to its credit, have Saitama.
xx
The team had once been a full set, a solid three agents - now, it was just down to Saitama and Mumen. More often than not, Saitama took jobs on his own - but it was always nice to be in a pair, Saitama thought, glancing sideways at his partner as they stood on the doorstep. On the one hand, there was no one he could rely on to do their best if not Mumen, and on the other, he hated talking to clients like the one scowling down at him from behind the door.
"I was told I would be receiving Agents hand-picked by Bang Silverfang," she said, eyes narrowed.
"Yeah, that's us," Saitama replied blandly, "so can we come in? These bags are kind of heavy."
If possible, her eyes narrowed more. The woman was old, her face a mass of wrinkled skin and generalized contempt, her hair thin and white. "You don't look like Agents," she said, eying them cautiously. It was true - Agents were typically known for their smart black uniforms, turtlenecks and flapping coats and rapiers hanging at the hip. Saitama was wearing a yellow tracksuit. Mumen was in neoprene silver riding shorts. Not, Mumen had to admit, the most professional garb. Still, he had a lot of practice with smoothing ruffled feathers and greasing wheels where Saitama would just kick a bird over and knock the car onto its side. He elbowed his partner gently in the side and took over.
"Part of our special charm as Agents in the field is our discretion," Mumen supplied helpfully, "we don't go to our jobs looking like Agents - to protect the privacy of our clients."
She studied him carefully, sizing him up, before rolling her eyes and opening the door. "Come inside," she said, a little more coldly than either of the boys thought was really necessary, "and wipe your shoes off on the mat, I don't want mud on this floor. I just had it cleaned."
The floor didn't look like it had just been cleaned. Nothing in the house did. Saitama was reminded of their kitchen in the combination apartment-office - dust in the air, corners crowded with dirt, piles upon piles of books on paper on odd knickknacks sprouting up on every surface like toadstools. Still, he wasn't one to criticize - cleaning up was boring, and hard - and it didn't look like the old lady had anyone to help her out with it. Heads down, they both followed her into the kitchen to press for details.
xx
Silver and iron are the most powerful defenses against ghosts, followed shortly by salt, fire, running water, and lavender. The typical Agent carries fifty feet of iron chain, one iron rapier, three canisters of salt, one silver-glass container, and, if money will permit, two magnesium bombs. Some Agents also carry silver bladed (or silver-tipped) rapiers, salt-guns, lavender bombs, and personal defensive silver jewelry. Every piece of equipment has its own use, and most will be used at every job without exception.
There are three basic types of Agents, classified by their specialty - Sight, Touch, and Hearing. These abilities are inborn, natural, unattainable by those born without them, and allow Agents to interact with ghosts beyond superficial knowledge of their presence. Only children can become Agents - the older an Agent becomes, the weaker their power, until it disappears entirely at nineteen or twenty years old. Former Agents often work at their old agencies, or create new ones, recruiting the young for the difficult - but rewarding - task of hunting, catching, and destroying the dead.
xx
Mumen and Saitama sat in silence, drinking tea as the daylight slipped away through the window. The client, like all clients, had practically run for the hills as soon as the sun had tinted slightly, hurrying to safety at her sister's house and leaving the two boys sitting peaceably at the kitchen table.
"From what she said, it sounds kind of vengeful," Mumen said, more to break the silence than anything else, "what do you think it is? Type two?"
"Nah, can't be," Saitama said, flipped the page of the comic book he was reading, "she said she just left it for like a month before it really started being trouble. If it was a type two, I don't think she could've ignored it."
"Maybe she couldn't afford to pay for Agents," Mumen replied, "it doesn't seem like she has a lot of money - this place is really small."
They considered this in silence for a moment. "Well, at any rate, we won't know until dark," Saitama said eventually, "so we shouldn't bother about worrying about it. Make sure you have your chains ready just in case. More tea?"
The pot had boiled peacefully, and Mumen always brought tea bags with him on haunts. Sometimes, comfort items - tea, books, jewelry, makeup - were just as important as iron chains or salt. They kept Agents sane. Against ghosts, that was nothing to shrug off or laugh about or leave behind. A clear head was the most important tool an Agent had, more than silver, more than fancy swords or guards. Armed with nothing but a clear head, an Agent might survive the night against even a formidable foe. But sanity was hard to keep. Tea was important.
xx
There are four main types of psychic attacks used by ghosts against humans. These are Miasma, Chill, Creeping Fear, and Malaise. On top of this, Type Two ghosts can also instigate Ghost-Lock and Ghost-Touch.
Chill and Creeping Fear are self-explanatory - a drop in temperature, an instinctive flare of terror - but Miasma and Malaise are different, harder to classify. Miasma can best be classified as a loss of perception, a fog in the brain, a cloudy, psychic blindness - a blur of emotions and thoughts and vision, whirling and confusing and dizzy. Perhaps Malaise is the hardest to describe of all, and the hardest to fight against - an oppressive, suffering well of nothingness rising up to course through the entire body. Weakness of mind, slowness of presence, an inability to function or smile or think or feel. Darkness of the soul.
There are a multitude of different kinds of ghosts, but they fall into three basic type categories. Colloquially referred to as Tiger, Demon, and Dragon, but formally as simply Type Ones, Type Twos, and Type Threes respectively, these classifications help to define what Agents might need to rid the space of them, or if Agents are needed at all.
Type One (Tiger) ghosts are, while capable of doing harm, typically weaker spirits, unable to directly attack humans, and weaker Tiger ghosts barely appear even on the astral plane. The ones that do often only hold the form of gently glowing light, or bare memories of who they were as humans. They are very rarely aggressive, and will often stay in a single spot, or move only barely, pacing in place. Some will attempt to approach humans, sensing and desiring the life in them, but few will ever get too close.
Type Two (Demon) ghosts are far more dangerous - usually emotional, sorrowful or vengeful spirits, trying to right a wrong from their life. Many will seek out and hunt down humans, hungry for life, and attack them directly with either Ghost-Lock (a nasty form of terrifying paralysis), or, worse, with Ghost-Touch. The result of being touched directly by a ghost sends humans into a nasty bout of anaphylactic shock, and requires a shot of adrenaline and immediate medical attention to survive.
However, it is always soothing to remember that ghosts are not smart - indeed, they have no minds or brains to speak of. They are nothing but memories, haunting their own source, stuck in repetitive thoughts, motions, feelings. They might speak or cry, but they cannot create rational thought - their words are words said at their death, a single, powerful feeling manifesting itself into language only superficially. Ghosts cannot think.
Except for Type Threes.
xx
Mumen checked the circle he'd made with his iron chains around his feet - no weak spots - and started to take the temperature. Already, only an hour after sundown, the temperature had dropped from 23 C down to 18 C. Hopefully, the only thing the little beast in the house could do was chill.
In the next room, footboards gently creaking, he could hear Saitama wandering around, humming off-key. Silently, Mumen wished his friend would stop being so nonchalant when they were on jobs, but that attitude had never gotten the two of them into trouble before, so he kept his mouth shut and recorded temperature in his notebook. There were an awful lot of spiders in the kitchen, he'd noticed earlier - one on the wall whenever he glanced sideways - but the room seemed clean in comparison now. At first, he'd hoped that their client was just unhygienic - but unfortunately, this didn't seem to be the case.
More creaking footsteps - then the door to the next room, gliding open. Mumen didn't bother to glance up. "All done in there, then?" He asked, then added "11:45 PM, 18-C, early drop."
"Nah, I have a couple more things I wanna check. This lady really needs to clean up."
"Why'd you come out, then?"
"What? I'm still in here."
Mumen glanced up at the door. "Oh," he said, and then, "ah." And then, maybe sensing this wasn't enough, added "well, I found the ghost, anyway."
The ghost was floating maybe two feet off the ground, hair gently scraping and drifting against the ceiling. Even with his weak sight, Mumen could make her out quite clearly - faded in shades of grey and eerie white, the long, hanging sleeves of her ornately decorated kimono billowing gently as though in the wind. Her head, while above her shoulders, was not attached to her head - she held it between two hands, up and forward, like a lantern on a cold night. The face was contorted into a shape of fear and sorrow.
It made his heart hurt, to see ghosts like this one - so clearly sad, so oppressively quiet even in the din of the world - but he also felt relieved. "She's a Floating Bride," he called into the other room. A Tiger ghost. Nothing they hadn't handled before, nothing they couldn't handle now.
Still - it didn't make sense. Floating Brides weren't known for being particularly vengeful, or even aggressive. And why would there even be one here in City Z? Floating Brides were always very old, weak spirits - from the style of her dress, she was probably two or three hundred years old at least - the tsunokakushi on her head, through which her hair floated through and above, was ornately styled. "Have you found the source?" Mumen called, after a moment of silence. "Something's off about her. I don't know what."
"Uh," Saitama said, poking his head through the door. "Is it that she's wearing a tsunokakushi with a furisode kimono?"
"Oh," Mumen said, and then, "oh, shit."
"'Oh, shit' is right," Saitama agreed, pulling his red gloves on and almost up to his elbows. "You know, there's not much in that room that isn't junk," he went on conversationally, even as the ghost's mouth began to gape, "but I did see a decorative uchikake hanging on the wall. I don't think it was old enough, though."
The ghost's body turned slowly to face Saitama. 'My day…' she said, voice ringing in between the sides of his skull, 'my day…'
"That's right, it's your day," Saitama agreed, nodding carefully. There were no chains around him or slung over his shoulders. He had no belt around his skinny waist, no rapier, no magnesium flares, not even salt or lavender. But then, Saitama never did. Saitama never carried anything with him. He flexed his fingers experimentally within his gloves to tense squeaking sounds. "But was it hers? Who's day was it?" His eyes narrowed. "Not your older sister's, then?"
'My…DAY…' The face, held between two hands, began to contort. Mumen reached for his belt, heart beating fast in his ears. He could feel it, in the temperature, in the way his eyes kept blurring like they were thick with tears. Not one ghost. Two.
xx
The appearance of a ghost in a specific place relates not necessarily to the place of death, or a person the ghost wishes to haunt, but to the ghost's source.
A source is the object (or, more rarely, place) where a ghost enters the world from the Other Side. It can be anything, though it must be something that was important to the person before they became a ghost. It may be a treasured necklace, or a letter, or anything in between - but, more than eighty percent of the time, the source is biological residue. A remnant of the body. Bones are the most common, but it can also be skin, hair, or, in recent bodies, even flesh or blood. Finding sources is rarely a job for the squeamish - but the only way to truly destroy a ghost is to destroy its source.
xx
"Mumen, are you okay?"
Mumen struggled to force his mouth into action. "Y-yes," he managed, teeth clenched, "but I'm - locked - pretty bad. Please hurry."
From under the kitchen sink, he could hear Saitama rattling around, the only soothing wave of sound in an overwhelming ocean of terror. One ghost stood on either side of him, emanating Creeping Fear and cold, the helplessness of Malaise freezing him to a spot. His rapier hung uselessly in a bone-white hand.
Two Floating Brides - as far as he could tell, sisters, holding one another's heads. The younger of the two was dressed for a wedding - the elder in the garb of an unmarried woman. Jealousy and anger crashed over him between the two. In the kitchen, too far away to help, Saitama was searching desperately for the source that might free him. Mumen tried to piece these women together, but with no talent for hearing, he couldn't get anything out of them beyond what he could see with his eyes.
Saitama, on the other hand, was following the spiders. Once sprawling all over the kitchen, the spiders had concentrated their mass in and around the sink, and, finding no luck in the bowl, he'd stuck his head into the cabinet below and was throwing things out with wild abandon. He hated the feeling of dozens of tiny creatures swarming up and over his arms or trying to crawl down his neckline, but it was part of the job. Though he was good at many things, Saitama could admit that he'd never been very good at following protocol, which made finding a source uncomfortably difficult. He could only go by environmental clues, like spiders, or the movement of the ghost itself. Sources gave out no psychic auras. Here, he was in the dark.
But that didn't mean he couldn't find a source, or that he didn't know what or where one was once he'd located it. With a precision very little of his work was familiar with, he slammed a fist through the drywall into which the piping of the sink disappeared. In the small space between the thin plaster and the insulation and wood of the exterior of the building, he found…well. Exactly what he was looking for. He scooped the source up into his hand, wriggled out from under the sink, and looked at it in the light.
A small, dusty pile of bones, cupped delicately in the palm of his hand. Small, thin bones. If he'd known anything about bones (which he didn't), he might have identified them as the fingers of two hands.
But he didn't.
"Oi, Mumen, I got the source!" He called over his shoulder. "Where's the silver glass in your bag?"
"M-main p-pocket," Mumen said, teeth chattering loudly in his ears. Around him, the defensive iron chains were beginning to clink and shift. Both ghosts were pushing, mouths open in silent groans.
"Got it," Saitama said, and made to walk past Mumen and the manifestations to the front door, where Mumen's backpack had been set for easy access. The two apparitions turned - held their heads out in front of their bodies - began to glide after him.
'Mine…that's mine…give it back…'
"Yeah, yeah, just let me put it in a box for you," Saitama said, apparently thoroughly unconcerned and unaffected by the Malaise radiating off of the two of them. He kneeled down next to the bag. "So where are you girls from?"
'My day…My day…'
'That's mine…give it back…'
"Ah, yeah," Saitama said, "that's what I thought you'd say." And with two decisive hands, he flicked the silver-glass jar open and dumped the handful of bones into it. There was a hideous screaming noise, wailing and crying, the two Brides throwing themselves forwards suddenly at him - and then, as the lid snapped down, nothing.
Silence. Darkness. The pale glow of weak ghosts had snuffed out all at once, leaving the apartment pitch black. "Mumen?" Saitama ventured after a moment. "You okay, dude?"
There was a long beat, in which Saitama felt his heart beating, nervous, fast. Then, calmly, his partner said, "I could really go for some tea, if it's all the same to you."
xx
It wasn't much of a story, and beyond the team and their client, no one else ever heard about it. That was the way most jobs between the Accidental Team worked - no thanks, not a lot of gratitude, and certainly no fame. But they did their job, and they were happy to do it.
Neither of them would've been happy if they'd been told that things were about to change.