Runo Misaki was waiting for Runo by his locker at the end of the day, backpack slung over one shoulder. Runo had yet to figure out if Runo Misaki did this because he thought it looked cool or because he genuinely liked carrying his bag like that; there were a lot of things like that he was still trying to figure out about Runo Misaki.
Runo Misaki was scowling at a piece of paper, though when he saw Runo, he grinned, one fang visible at the edge of the expression.
"Runo! I hope you do not have plans tonight, because we are going out on the town!"
"Uh, I've got a trigonometry test on Monday-"
"Math was created by the devil to torment me personally," Runo Misaki retorted. He crumpled the paper in his hand, which Runo could see was marked liberally with red ink.
"Well, maybe I could try to help you with-"
"No! It is Friday night, Runo, and you need to experience the glory and majesty of Anime World!"
"I don't know, last weekend you showed me Sludge Puddle Creek, and everything after that seems like a step down."
"I know you are making a joke, but I promise, when I have a car, we are jumping that tributary."
Runo sighed. He liked Runo Misaki fine, but his encounter with Carmilla the vampiric rabbit had given him certain expectations about what life in Anime World was like, and the weekends spent driving the roads and hanging at the Empty Bucket, local dive and apparently sole restaurant, didn't live up to that.
"What is the matter, Runo?" Runo Misaki nudged him, startling Runo from his focus. "That is not a happy look. Are you failing math, too?"
"No, I just…" Runo hesitated. He'd known Runo Misaki only a few weeks, and was aware how tentative that friendship was. Runo Misaki had his cousin Miana, Sweetie Belle (the weasel's parents had wanted their child's name to command respect, but had missed the mark), Sweetie Belle's bro Mokuba, and some other assorted hangers-on to spend time with. So if Runo proved too demanding, Runo Misaki was spoiled for choice, while Runo could go back to composing music he'd never perform in public.
"Come on. We're buds, right? Well, I am, of course, but you…" Runo Misaki patted Runo's shoulder. "You can tell me what the problem is."
"I just expected Anime World to be...a little more exciting. What with vampires and all-"
"Oh fart nuggets, didn't you explain it to the boy?" A sudden presence behind Runo made him jump, until he recognized Miana's drawling tones. He turned slowly to see her and Cosmo, a bulky weasel he wasn't certain was actually her friend, given their frequent bickering. "Hey, look." She snapped her fingers in Runo, making him jerk back. "Anime World isn't Hogwarts or Narnia or whatever. It's dangerous. If you're lucky, you don't run into all the crud around here, and if you're not, you just try to get through it more or less in one piece."
"Yeah, but…" Runo Misaki's ears were drooping as he looked up at his cousin.
"No," Miana repeated.
"Come on, there's got to be something around here that's, you know, interesting without being dangerous."
"What about Ziel's?" Runo Misaki and Miana turned to Cosmo in unison, Runo Misaki smiling and Miana scowling.
"Look, just because no one's lost their dang fool heads over there-"
"That is an excellent idea!"
Runo Misaki and Miana turned on each other, carefully sizing each other up. Runo wondered if they were going to fight.
"Hey, what's going on?" It had, Runo noted, been almost five minutes of Runo Misaki standing in one place, so the appearance of Sweetie Belle was inevitable, and thus the appearance of the hulking Mokuba, a pale grey dog who loomed anywhere he showed up. Though Mokuba hadn't ever attacked Runo, he had a habit of punctuating statements by punching things, and on one notable occasion, flipping a picnic table; so he eyed the arrivals with a little trepidation.
"We are going to Ziel's," Runo Misaki announced.
Miana growled. "I am going home. I'll tell Auntie Uncle to send a search party if you're not back by morning. Cosmo?"
"No, this sounds like a good time."
Miana rolled her eyes. "Okay. Runo, if you haven't gotten yourself possessed or turned into a pillar of salt or whatever, I'll see you on Monday. The rest of you: don't die, I guess."
She sauntered off, leaving the five of them grouped around Runo's locker.
"Um, what's Ziel's?"
"It's a haunted truck stop!" Sweetie Belle exclaimed. "No one's ever worked there longer than a month, and at night people see weird lights and sounds coming from the garage. And no one's seen the owner for years!"
"Huh." It sounded more interesting than Sludge Puddle Creek, at least. "And...no one's died there, right?"
"Well, good money's on the owner having died of a creamed corn-related accident and his spirit still lingering there, but no."
"Alright, then let's get on the road!"
"With what car? Miana was our ride."
Runo Misaki paused, glancing around the group. "Um."
"No worries, Runo Misaki. Mokuba's got his mom's van." As Sweetie Belle promised, Mokuba produced a rainbow keychain and rattled the keys for a moment.
"Awesome!" Runo Misaki held a fist up to Runo, who carefully tapped it. "Ka-boom! Ooh, do we need snacks?"
"It's a truck stop, Runo Misaki," Cosmo retorted. "So unless you have a burning need for caviar or, god forbid, fresh fruit, we'll be set."
Outside, Runo discovered Mokuba's mom's van was not the minivan he expected, but a jet-black van painted with a a mural of a wolf howling at a blood red moon, and the words, 'The Agony Aunts' written across it.
"What."
"My mom's band," Mokuba said. "They play in the great tradition of Pain Diamond."
"Yeah, sort of a queer death punk," Cosmo explained, pulling open the rear door. "They make up approximately half the musical talent in this town, the other being," she paused, eyes going soft, "Angus Scattergood."
"Are we here to fantasize about Anime World's resident sex god or break into a haunted convenience store? Because I made certain promises that did not involve a lot of imagining Angus Scattergood shirtless."
"Some of us can multi-task," Cosmo grumbled, climbing into the back of the van. Runo and Runo Misaki followed, Sweetie Belle apparently claiming shotgun by bro rights.
"Wait, are we talking about a white cat, like five feet tall, wears sunglasses indoors? Because if so, I think he's in my trigonometry class."
"Well, you've got to see him on stage," Cosmo said. "Guitar strapped on, standing on a speaker, he's...larger than life."
"Yeah," Sweetie Belle agreed dreamily from the front seat.
"Anyway," Runo Misaki growled, "We had places to be. My bud here was promised ghosts, and I intend to deliver."
"Yeah, and who's driving?" Mokuba demanded, slamming his palm against the dash between him and Sweetie Belle "However, I do agree with Runo Misaki. You can gush over cute boys as much as you want on the road."
This did not prove to be true, as Mokuba peeled out of the school parking lot at speeds that would be impressive on a race track, and Runo spent most of the trip gripping Runo Misaki, who was apparently the most stable object in the van. So whether anyone was talking about boys, cute or otherwise, escaped Runo's attention entirely.
He may have bolted from the van when it stopped, earning a derisive snort from Cosmo as she clambered out.
When he pulled himself together enough to look around, what he saw wasn't what he'd expected. Instead of a crumbling, abandoned building, Ziel's was a wide, one-story combination garage and convenience store, built of brick and helpfully labeled with the sign, 'Ziel's Truck Stop'.
Admittedly, the building was dark, door locked, and a sign posted that read, 'All Trespassers Will Be Persecuted to the Full Extent of the Law'.
"Um," Runo said, pointed at the sign.
"I don't think ghosts can call the cops," Runo Misaki said. "In any case, we can outrun Sheriff Cannonball, right, Mokuba?"
Mokuba grunted vaguely, staring at the locked door, and then to the window next to it. A sixth sense only vaguely forming in Runo's mind spoke up, and he shifted between Mokuba and the nearest trash barrels.
"Any idea how we're going to get in?"
Mokuba stepped toward Runo, pausing when he noticed Runo between him and something to throw.
"Looks like it's Sweetie Belle's time to shine! Hey, Runo Misaki, can you give me a lift?"
"Sure!" With Runo Misaki's assistance, Sweetie Belle scrambled to the top of the building, wandering until he found an exhaust and kicked it until the grate fell off.
He turned to the group, gave them a salute, and then jumped down the shaft. Runo held his breath for a few moments, expelling it in surprise when he heard a clatter, a shout, and then a loud thud.
"Sweetie Belle?" When Sweetie Belle didn't immediately respond, Mokuba lunged past Runo, grabbing the trash can Runo had tried to block, and turned toward Ziel's.
"I'm okay!" As promised, the weasel, looking a little dirt-smudged, appeared at the door, waving through its window. There was a click and he pulled the door open. "See?"
"Awesome job," Runo Misaki said as he passed Sweetie Belle, patting his shoulder. Sweetie Belle glowed at the praise, not noticing Runo's attempt to offer a fist bump.
He heard a whispered, "Don't worry me like that," from behind him, but ignored it in favor of the truck stop, a cramped convenience store with something like six aisles. Admittedly, they were high enough to block even Mokuba's vision, and the emergency lighting cast an unnatural blue shade over everything, but it was not what Runo would have expected from a haunting.
"Ooh, they have nachos!" Runo Misaki breezed past the unoccupied register toward a nacho cheese dispenser. "Runo, see if you can find something to put them in!"
"Yeah, there - there's little cardboard bowls right there, dude."
"Awesome!"
"Okay, as awesome as wandering around in the dark is," Cosmo said somewhere to the right, and the whole building was abruptly flooded with flickering fluorescent light. "Wow, that was a step down."
The light did, in fact, make the place look even less impressive. Runo wandered down an aisle at random, surprised to find a shelf sporting caviar and fancy bottled water (the water had an expiration date twelve years prior. Runo didn't want to know how water could go bad; he put the bottle back).
"You wonder if any of these lotto tickets are winners?" Mokuba had, Runo saw, glancing back, gone behind the counter, where he had pulled out a long roll of scratch-offs.
"Only one way to - ooh, Snowballs!" Sweetie Belle darted down another aisle, and a moment later, Runo heard plastic wrinkling. On a whim, he checked the Meat Sticks brand jerky next to the caviar, finding it had expired six months ago. He almost shouted out a warning to Sweetie Belle, but figured there wasn't much that could happen to a Snowball to make it toxic.
Instead, he began examining the shelves more closely, looking for something more interesting than expired food. He heard several thumps as Runo Misaki hit the nacho machine, either to draw out more cheese or to punish it for some slight.
The lights went out, leaving him blinking in the relative darkness of just the emergency lighting.
"Quit messing around, Cosmo, I almost won $20,000 cash money," Mokuba snapped from the front of the store.
"Yeah, not me." Cosmo's voice came from just an aisle over. Two tan hands rose above the aisle, waving, and the lights snapped back on. Runo Misaki stopped hitting the nacho machine. "I think these things are on some kind of motion sensor timer thing."
"I thought I had gone blind," Runo Misaki whimpered.
"Oh my gosh, go stand next to Runo if this place is freaking you out. I want to see if they've got a good black lipstick here."
Mokuba cursed and slapped the front counter, presumably having again failed to win a fortune.
The lights went back out.
"Oh, for-" Cosmo's hand appeared again, waving wildly, but nothing happened. "It's probably a fuse. I'm going to see if I can find a fuse box or something."
Sweetie Belle gasped. "Mokuba!"
"It's obviously some sort of joke," Mokuba retorted.
Runo glanced up front; Sweetie Belle was struggling with Mokuba over the lottery tickets, tearing a dozen of them away from the roll.
"What's wrong?"
"The lottery tickets are haunted!"
Runo drew a little closer, even as Mokuba growled at Sweetie Belle and shoved him aside. "It's a stupid prank."
Runo bent to pick up the tickets Sweetie Belle and Mokuba had scattered. One read, 'Loser'. Another, 'Liar'. A third, 'Bad Luck - FOREVER'. A fourth, 'You're going to scratch yourself into an early grave'.
"Um. Mokuba, these look a little...ominous?"
"Runo?" There was a crash somewhere back in the aisles. "Where are you?"
"We're up front!" Runo shouted back.
Another crash followed. "Up front where? I keep getting turned around."
"What?" Runo looked away from the struggle over the lottery tickets. Runo Misaki wasn't in the middle aisle, the only one he could see in full. "There are two directions, Runo Misaki. If you walk in one and don't find the front counter, turn around and go in the other." There was silence for a few minutes, and then a panicked whine. "Runo Misaki?" He glanced back at Mokuba and Sweetie Belle "Don't scratch off any more of those."
"You're not my mom!" Sweetie Belle took the opportunity to leap at Mokuba, sending both of them crashing down behind the counter.
Runo didn't have time to deal with them; Runo Misaki needed his help. He found Runo Misaki huddled up against the shelves in the furthest aisle, arms wrapped around his legs. Runo sank down next to him.
"Hey, Runo Misaki. It's me, Runo."
Runo Misaki looked up, ears perking, though he still looked morose.
"You okay?"
"I just got...turned around in here," Runo Misaki said. "Like some sort of labyrinthine maze thing." Runo looked back and forth, finding no apparent twisting in the path of the aisle, but with the lottery tickets predicting Mokuba's death, the continuing absence of light, and Runo Misaki's real panic, he wasn't about to discount the possibility something very freaky was going on here.
"Okay, let's get you up and I'll take you to the front of the store, okay?"
Runo Misaki grabbed onto Runo's arm as he helped Runo Misaki up, and didn't let go once they were standing. Runo patted Runo Misaki's hand and led him to the front of the truck stop, with no apparent warping of time and space. There, Mokuba was glowering at Sweetie Belle, who had the entire roll of lottery tickets in his lap.
"You aren't dead," Mokuba noted. "Congratulations."
"And you won't be either, if I have anything to say about it!" Sweetie Belle snapped. "We're getting out of here."
"No argument here," Runo Misaki agreed, tugging at Runo's arm. "Come on."
"Wait." Runo turned in a slow circle. "Where's Cosmo?"
There was a scream from the opposite side of the store, muffled by distance or some intervening barrier.
"She said she was looking for a fuse box," Sweetie Belle said.
"The sort of fuse box that is usually in a dark corner of a cobweb-filled basement?" Runo Misaki asked.
"The exact sort," Sweetie Belle said shakily.
The glance between the four of them wasn't complicated, because they were all thinking the same thing. All of them wanted to get out of Ziel's, but none were willing to be the one to suggest leaving Cosmo behind.
"Well, if we are going to do this, we are going to do it together." Runo Misaki pulled the divider of the counter up to allow Sweetie Belle and Mokuba out, and, when they didn't immediately come along, gave them fixed glares until they did. "Look, there are four of us-"
"Yeah," Sweetie Belle said, "but how many of them do you think there are?"
"I wish you hadn't asked that," Runo muttered, because he had been trying to avoid thinking that same thought.
But at the same time, Runo Misaki was right. There were four of them, and Mokuba was huge and could lift a table, and Runo Misaki had gone toe-to-toe with a vampire, and Runo had staked one right in the heart with a #2 pencil, and Sweetie Belle presumably had qualities that would be useful in a fight. So bunched together, barely able to squeeze down one of the aisles, they crept toward the back of the store.
A door at the far end clanged open, and Mokuba, apparently more on edge than he'd let on, grabbed the nearest shelf, and, because they were sectional and thus five feet of welded metal frames, and not twenty, lifted it over his head and hurled it toward the rear of the truck stop.
Cosmo screamed and rolled aside. The shelf hit the door behind her, denting the door and twisting the shelf out of shape. They stood, frozen, in the wake of the shattered bottles around them, the cans and plastic rolling around their feet, and one bag of dried beans or something slowly emptying around their feet. Eventually, everything had stopped moving, silent, and in that, Cosmo stood, face scrunched up in anger.
"What do you think you're doing, throwing that? You could have killed me!"
"Mokuba was just worried you'd been eaten by a ghost or something!" Sweetie Belle retorted.
"Guys, I would really like to get out of here," Runo interrupted. "So we can argue outside about who almost killed who-"
"Oh, god! I forgot! We have to get outside and call the cops or something; there's a dead body back there!"
"Not even remotely accurate." If there'd been another shelf in reach, Runo is certain Mokuba would have thrown it. Sweetie Belle screamed in terror, Runo Misaki yelped, and Runo may have latched onto Runo Misaki's arm, and possibly stepped behind the taller boy. When nothing stripped their flesh from their bones, Runo peered around Runo Misaki.
A raven, just a little shorter than Runo Misaki, stood in front of the door to the back room. The emergency lighting made him look like little more than a mobile shadow, but the gold-rimmed spectacles and red trucker hat countered an otherwise intimidating appearance. The raven clapped twice, and the lights flickered on.
The raven was even less intimidating in the light, dressed in a puffy vest and flannel shirt. However, the glare he offered through beady eyes promised calls to cops, and, possibly, parents, which held its own sort of terror.
"What exactly is going on here?"
The following look between the teens also was not complicated. Having been caught where they weren't supposed to be, having destroyed at least one shelf of consumer goods, they were all estimating exactly how much trouble they were looking at.
"Look, this is my fault-" Runo started, until another voice cut through his.
"Entirely my fault-"
He glanced at Runo Misaki, who gave him an exasperated scowl. "Come on, dude, I was trying to do the bro thing and take the fall for you! You can't do the same thing to me!"
"Okay, setting aside the question of whose fault this is, what in tarnation are you doing?" Runo Misaki raised a hand. "Yes, go ahead; this isn't high school."
"We thought this place was haunted."
"Haunted?" The crow snorted. "Why would you-"
"The owner hasn't been seen for years, this place is never open at night, can't keep any employees, and all those strange lights-"
"And I got lost in the labyrinth in Aisle 6!" Runo Misaki added.
"I. What?" The raven peered around to the aisle Runo had found Runo Misaki in. "I don't even know where to start. For one, your friend sounds like he might have some sort of inner ear problem. And the reason I hire people is so I don't have to deal with customers. Work in retail for a month and you'll understand."
"You looked dead back there!" Cosmo snapped.
The raven shrugged. "I sleep back there sometimes. I won't apologize because I didn't expect anyone to be wandering around the Employees Only portion of my closed and locked store."
"And you can't keep any employees? How about that, if this place isn't haunted?"
"Yeah, this may come as a shock, but there are a lot of incompetent lazy bums in Anime World."
"Then what about the lights?" Runo demanded.
"That." The raven rolled his eyes. "The Clapper I've hooked up to the lights is liable to go off without any notice." He gave two almost silent claps with his hands, and the lights went out. He clapped again, and they came back on. "I guess the only question left is what to do with you five."
"Please don't call the cops!" Runo Misaki begged. "I am already in enough trouble with Principal Moneybags, and if he finds out you had me arrested-"
"Oh lord, is Cannonball still sheriff?"
"Yeah?"
"Look, I need an actual employee around here. Any of you any good at customer service? Or at least capable of following simple directions?" When no one's hand went up, he sighed and pointed at Runo. "You'll do. Minimum wage, stay at least until New Years, and I don't call the cops or your parents. Deal?"
Runo looked at the others, earning a hopeful look from Sweetie Belle, a threatening one from Mokuba, a steady glare from Cosmo, and the widest, most pleading eyes he'd ever seen from Runo Misaki. Runo sighed.
"Okay, but I get to cut back if it's interfering with my schoolwork."
"Deal. Now get the hell out of my shop before you break anything else."
Runo Misaki whooped when they were outside, dragging Runo around by his shoulder, grinning. "That was awesome!"
"If your goal was to showcase the supernatural aspects of Anime World, it was an unmitigated disaster," Cosmo retorted.
"But it was cool! Right?"
Runo considered. Sure, Ziel's hadn't turned out to be haunted, but getting freaked out by what was going on had been exciting, and while working for minimum wage selling lotto tickets and food chock full of preservatives wasn't glamorous, it would get him some extra cash.
"Yeah."
"Come on, let's get hot wings at the Empty Bucket."
"I don't know how you can eat those things; they're terrible," Cosmo protested.
"The trick is to get them with sauce so hot you can't taste anything else."
"Wait, did the old man ever explain the lotto tickets?" Sweetie Belle asked.
"How about we just leave that as one of life's great mysteries, Sweetie Belle, my pal?"
Syrus looked around the wreck of his store, and sighed.
"Teenagers believing in ghosts," he grumbled. "Ridiculous." He waved a hand at the upturned shelf, which righted itself, bending back into his proper shape, before falling into its proper spot. He hated cleaning up this way; it gave him a terrible headache, and anyway, using these sorts of talents attracted the wrong sort of attention. He was going to have bad dreams tonight, he was sure.