Ghost Slayers

Chapter Four

By Relm

In a normal situation finding an unexpected person in the reflection of your review mirror would be cause for alarm. And if that person whom was now taking residence in the back seat of your car was in fact a ghost that would be greater cause for alarm. But this wasn't the first time Lina found an unexpected visitor sitting in the back seat of her car. So seeing this so called ghost sitting rather leisurely in the back seat didn't make Lina scream in terror.

Lina just flinched.

Sylphiel on the other hand screamed. But then she was sitting in the seat next to the ghost. "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! What the hell is he doing here?"

"Calm down Sylphiel!" Lina yelled.

"Looks like he wants to come along for the ride." Filia joked.

"Well what do we do?" Sylphiel was panicking slightly. She had dealt with several ghosts in her career as a ghost slayer but she wasn't normally boxed in with one. And ghosts tended to be unpredictable as it was so you never knew what was going to happen.

"We take him with us. You were the one that was so concerned about us taking the money for an unfinished job. Well this way we ensure that the ghost doesn't come back and haunt Sailune Publishing again. And maybe we can do some research to find out who he is." Lina rationalized paying her attention back onto the road.

Though Sylphiel was still distressed she didn't say anything more of the subject.

The ghost however didn't seem to pay much attention to them at all. Instead he choose to just sit back and read another newly materialized newspaper.

...

The ride back to Ghost Slayers HQ proved to be eventless and Lina parked the car in the massive parking lot. Given the large size of the old police station parking lot it was rather comical that only five cars were occupying spaces.

Lina, Sylphiel and Filia all got out the car taking their packs with them. The ghost however seemed to be far too engrossed in his paper to move from the car seat. It was probable that he didn't even notice that the car had stopped moving in the first place.

"Lina what are we going to do?" Sylphiel frowned. One can't do research and tests on a subject if the subject can't be taken to the lab.

"Yeah it's not like w can just grab him and haul him upstairs." Filia chuckled darkly.

Lina rolled her eyes. Filia's constant dark humoured jokes were starting to get on her nerves. "Hey you… Mister Ghost!" Lina went to 'tap' him on the shoulder.

The ghost instantly acknowledged Lina's presence and smiled.

"Hi, we're going upstairs. We want you to come with us." Lina tried to convey her message with hand gestures hoping he'd understand that if he couldn't hear her.

Either way the ghost seemed to understand Lina and he got out of the car with his newspaper tucked under his arm.

"Good. Now follow us."

For the most part the ghost followed the three ghost slayers. There were only a few instances where they lost sight of him. That was due to the fact that the ghost seemed to prefer going through the walls instead of doors.

In the main office Amelia sat bored but the phone. She was aimlessly flipping through some fashion magazine that didn't seem to hold much of the girl's interest.

Slimer was also in the office with Amelia. Slimer was 'sitting' at a table doing a crossword puzzle. Well trying to do a crossword puzzle. He wasn't so much as working on the puzzle as he was covered the paper in slime and writing with a slime covered pen.

"Oh you're back!" Amelia explained jumping up from her seat. "How did it go? Did you…" She trailed off when she noticed the person walking in behind Lina. "Hey who's that with you?" Amelia looked sideways at the new spectre.

"Don't know yet." Lina plopped her stuff down. "But I hope to find out soon enough."

"Hey he's a ghost!" Amelia observed finally noticing that the man was transparent and she could see through him to the wall that was behind him.

"Well I'm not quite so sure of that. He can go through walls and as you can see he's transparent like one. However those are the only ghostly things about him." Filia cryptically explained.

"What Filia is trying to say is Amelia that this um… 'spectre' gives off thermal energy instead of absorbing it. And his behavioural patterns a little strange for a ghost. And he didn't seem to be affected all that much by our guns." Sylphiel explained further for their youngest Ghost Slayer.

"So you just decided to bring him here?" Amelia's eyes widened. Having normal ghosts in the building Amelia could deal with. But having strange things that were like ghosts but weren't in the building did creep her out a bit.

"Not really. Would you believe he followed us home?" Lina said sheepishly. "Because he did. After we left with the money we just found him in the car."

Amelia looked at her 'boss' with narrowed eyes. "What do you mean after you left with the money?"

"Well she paid us for the job and then we left."

"What job? Miss Sylphiel just said that the guns didn't work on him."

"Yeah instead of forcing him into one of our containment boxes he just vanished."

"He vanished? You had to have known that he was still around though right? Our guns only stun the spectres, not kill them."

"Well technically ghosts are already dead so you can't really kill them again." Lina rubbed the back of her neck while sprouting a sweatdrop.

"You know what I mean. What I'm saying is you all knew that you hadn't dealt with the problem but you took payment from Sailune Publishing anyway? I can't believe that!"

"Well we did take him home with us." Filia interjected.

"You didn't know you would be when you took the money though! That's dishonest Miss Lina! You can't just take people's money like that when you didn't even do what you were being paid to do! What were you going to do if he showed up again? Go back and charge them more money to not deal with the problem again?" Amelia chided waving her finger in the air. Though one should take a person seriously when they are that angry but it was hard to do so. Especially when Slimer was standing adjacent to Amelia mocking every movement she made.

Lina stifled a giggle.

"Why are you laughing for? This is not funny!" Amelia protested waving her arms in the air. It was then that she noticed that Slimer was doing the same thing she was. "Slimer! Stop that!" Amelia stopped her foot.

Slimer looked down and floated back the table with his crossword puzzle.

"Now Amelia we wouldn't have charged them again. If the ghost did show up we would have gone back and dealt with him for free. And we were going to come back and do research anyway to find out about him. So that if he did come back then we'd have a better idea of what to do with the situation." Lina said in her defence.

Amelia frowned in thought. "Alright fine I won't get angry anymore. Though I'm still not happy with what you did. And I'm disappointed in you Miss Sylphiel for letting Miss Lina and Miss Filia just take the money like that."

"I tried to stop them!" Sylphiel protested. "They wouldn't listen to me!"

"Okay. So… how much did you get?" Amelia grinned with greed in her eyes.

The three older ghost slayers facefaulted.

"You were just preaching about not taking the money and now you want to know how much we got?" Lina exclaimed.

"Yeah so you brought him here so the job's done for the most part. So how much did you get?"

Lina handed Amelia the check to look at.

Amelia's eyes bugged out. "That's a lot of money for a simple ghost extermination…"

"That's why I love doing jobs for mega funded establishments. They always pay ridiculously high. Mostly just so that you won't go bragging around that you did a ghost slaying job for them. Big companies don't like their reputation marred by their beliefs in the supernatural." Lina sat back herself down in her chair and stretched.

The new 'ghost' looked at Slimer curiously. Perhaps this 'ghost' had never seen another ghost before, or it was perhaps Slimer's green color that seemed to cause the new 'ghost' to look so confused.

Slimer showed equal interest in the new visitor to Ghost Slayers HQ. But by the grin on his face you could tell he was up to something mischievous. He floated over to the new ghost still grinning. With slobber ready he went flying at the new ghost with arms outstretched.

The new ghost looked at Slimer with obvious fear in his eyes. In fact any person whom didn't know Slimer would be scared about a flying, drooling green torso, head and arms coming flying at you. To those that knew Slimer, this is what he did with all new arrivals, he went to hug them. Now with the living ghosts go through them, unless the ghost concentrated real hard. But if one ghost goes to touch another ghost then they can touch them quite easily. So whenever a new ghost came to the building Slimer instantly wanted to make friends. Which his way of doing so was to give the new ghost a big sloppy gooey hug. Most of the time the ghosts were frightened by this and would actually leave the building. That was in fact how they managed to get the ghost haunting the Ghost Slayermobile to leave. [See I told you it wasn't an interesting story.] In this case however Slimer didn't actually hug the new ghost. Instead Slimer went right through him leaving a nice splatter of goo on the new ghost's clothing.

Slimer looked around confused. He had been expecting to hug his new friend but instead found himself floating in front of the wall. He turned around and tried it again. And again Slimer went right through the new ghost leaving more goo. And he tried it two more times before giving up.

The new ghost shook off some of the goo from himself not looking quite too pleased. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound emerged from his lips. But if you were quite good at reading lips you would have noticed that the ghost was making a complaint about having to take his suit to the drycleaners.

"Slimer went right through him." Amelia said pointing. "Slimer can touch other ghosts but he can't touch that one. That's not right."

"I know which is why we need to find out who this guy is and how he died." Lina said in commanding authority. "Alright Amelia I want you to look up some records on the net. I want the newspaper listings for all the people that have died in the past nine months."

"Nine months? Shouldn't I be looking farther back then that?" Amelia frowned as she sat down at the computer.

"He had a paper with him. The Sailune Times dated July 1st of last year. I'm sure that's a paper he had either before he died or when he died. He's able to make them materialize out of thin air. Right now it's the only connection I have. If that doesn't pan up with anything then we can look farther back. For now just stick with those search parameters."

"Okay." Amelia started to work.

"Filia I want you to take our new friend here to do some basic tests on him. Nothing too threatening, I don't want him to run off. And Sylphiel go analyze the newspaper we have. Check its properties and see if there is anything strange about it. Oh and make sure to read it to see if there's any relevant articles to our ghost friend."

"What are you going to do Lina?"

"I'm going to make some calls. I'm going to see if any of my old colleagues have heard of a ghost like ours." Lina pulled out her cell phone and began dialling.