Less than ten minutes later, a groggy Luke was also in my room, as he and Liam frantically set up a bunch of cameras to look at my cupboard. I tried to tell them that the ghost was no longer there - he was still in the room, but he was much more interested in watching Luke and Liam than getting my attention - but it was to no avail. Ultimately, it didn’t matter to me whether they caught the ghost on film or not. It just mattered to me whether I’d actually get to sleep that night.

“So it was right here,” Liam explained to Luke for what already seemed like the tenth time. “I was standing right here because Andromeda said the ghost was standing right here, and then I heard these glasses start to clink together.”

“It’s because he had his hands in the cupboard, trying to get my attention,” I explained again. “It won’t happen now, though, because now he’s over by the bed.”

“But you can get him to do it again, right?” Liam asked excitedly.

“Um, maybe? I can ask, but it’s not like I can make him do anything.”

“It’s like we’ve got the fucking ghost whisperer on our team,” Luke enthused. “This is fucking epic!”

“He can hear you too, you know,” I said, rolling my eyes. The ghost didn’t particularly seem to mind either way.

“Shit, I guess that means we’re ghost whisperers too,” he said, adjusting one last light, then stepping away to view his handiwork. From what Liam had said when the two of them started hauling bags into my room, this was nowhere near the largest setup they could get, but it still took up a vast majority of the room. I couldn’t imagine how long the full setup would take. Considering I had no experience with it, I could only hope they wouldn’t make me help with it. “Do you have a name or anything? That’d make it easier to talk with him.”

I shook my head. “He hasn’t actually said anything since he got here. We were working toward it, but with this,” I gestured toward the equipment, “I’m guessing it won’t help much.”

Liam nodded, clearly deep in thought. “So an unknown spirit, potentially just passing through but trying to make contact? Can we assume anything else that we might use for the story?”

“Probably died in the hotel?” I added. My eyes flicked over the the old man, but he didn’t respond to the assumption. “Sometimes spirits will return to areas that meant a lot to them, but it’s not the most common, especially in a place like this.”

“If I died around here, I’d think about coming back,” Luke joked. “It’s a nice hotel, and it’s gotta be better than a lot of the places in Florida.” He flipped a switch, filling up the cupboard area with such bright light that I would have thought that filming would be impossible. “And we’re rolling!” he said, pushing a button on the camera. “If you could convince the ghost to move those cups again, that’d be great.”

I turned toward the ghost, but he was busy looking at the screen of the camera. “I don’t think he’s very interested in cooperating with your shoot,” I said.

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“That’s fine,” Liam said, lightly grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the filming area. “We need to get an intro for you, anyway. The sooner, the better, so we can leak a scene to TikTok to test it.”

I pulled my arm from his grip. “I’m in my pajamas!”

“You’re in a black t-shirt, and I guarantee that nobody is going to think anything about it.”

“And I don’t have my makeup on!”

Liam looked at my face, as though just realizing that for the first time. He frowned slightly, as if contemplating his options. “Honestly, I wonder if our audience would prefer it if we didn’t have you in makeup for the first introduction. What do you think, Luke?”

He nodded vigorously. “It’ll seem more authentic, and we can lean into the whole ‘you were woken up in the middle of a night by a ghost’ aesthetic.”

“That’s literally what happened,” I said, crossing my arms.

“And that’s why we want them to believe that,” he argued back. “If you come on in a full face of makeup, at least the women viewers won’t believe that it’s authentic, and if you look at the analytics, our audience is mostly women between the ages of 13 and 30. They’ll want you to be you, and then when we do the actual all-night shoot, you’ll have plenty of time to get your makeup just right.”

“Fine,” I sighed. Ultimately, I reminded myself, it didn’t really matter if their audience liked me, so long as I found out more about that little girl I saw in the background of the Peters Building video. “But I want it noted that I don’t like it.”

Liam laughed lightly, then jumped in front of the camera. His face immediately lit up as he went into performance mode. “What’s up, everyone?” he started. “It’s Luke and Liam, and we’re coming to you straight from the hotel we’re staying in. These cups behind us have been rattling all night, so we’re going to try to catch them on camera. In the meantime, though, we wanted to introduce you to our new special guest. Everybody give it up for Andi!”

Luke clapped off to the side, and I stepped forward into the line of the camera. “Andi? It’s Andromeda.”

Liam gave me a huge smile. “Andi sounds better. So Andi here,” he turned his attention back to the camera, “has been seeing ghosts forever, isn’t that right?”

“Andromeda,” I corrected. “But yes, I’ve been seeing ghosts since I was at least two years old. It might have been before that, but it’s hard to tell since I couldn’t talk.”

Liam laughed a hollow tinny laugh that sounded particularly fake. “And you came to us because you saw a ghost in the background of our videos, right?”

I nodded. “When you went to the Peters Building, I saw Grady in the background of your video, yeah.”

“And now,” Liam said, ramping himself up to an announcement voice, “you’re going to have the chance to see him again, because we’re going back to the Peters Building!”

Luke jumped into frame behind the two of us. “And this time, there’ll be even more ghosts! And with your help, we’ll be able to catch them all and prove to the world that ghosts are real!”

“Keep your eyes peeled for the most conclusive evidence you’ve ever seen in our next video for GhostHunter 180!”

“Flipping the script on ghost hunting!” Both Luke and Liam finished their catchphrase and then froze for a moment. Then, Luke continued, “and now we’ve got our screenshot for the intro video, so we should be good on that. We can add some makeup to you in post for the image if you want - Caitlin’s done that for herself before and she’s pretty good at it. And now, we’re just going to let the film run throughout the night and we’ll see tomorrow morning if the ghost has moved anything else in the cupboard.”

I looked at the giant lights that were now filling up my hotel room. “So I’m just supposed to sleep in essentially broad daylight?” I asked.

“No, of course not!” Liam said. “We’ll make sure to set up the night vision before we leave. Unless you want to sleep in my room with me.” He said with a sly smile.

“Dude, quit flirting with every woman we have on the show,” Luke said, lightly elbowing him in the ribs.

Liam grunted and put his hand over his ribs, but the smile didn’t leave his face. “I’ll have you know that I haven’t flirted with Caitlin for almost a year,” he insisted.

“Yet,” Luke said, rolling his eyes. “We just got an official psychic on the channel. Don’t mess this up for us before we even see the audience's reaction.”

Liam did a phony salute before he turned off the spotlights and messed with a couple of settings on the camera. At least I wasn’t going to have to deal with that.