The next morning, Loren once more found himself in Happy Homes. It wasn’t as unreasonably early as last time since he wasn’t commuting with Harmony so she could show him how to get there, so he wasn’t feeling half-asleep, so he was able to use his Flame to give him a burst of energy to at least reasonably fake being a morning person.

For a moment, he stood outside of the business’s front doors, contemplating the choice before him one last time. On the one hand, if Harmony’s investigation and deduction was correct and they managed to get the ghost haunting his apartment to agree to peaceful coexistence, he’d essentially have a new roommate and for all intents and purposes no more privacy in the confines of his new home. The ghost would always be there, watching him, feeding off the heat in the room and the heat he gave off to slowly get stronger and more able to affect the world within the apartment. He would be sharing his life with someone he had essentially never met and if things didn’t work out between them in all likelihood he would have to be the one to leave.

On the other hand, if he didn’t do this, he’d have to pay months of rent on the apartment that he wouldn’t use, find another apartment in the area that he could afford, replace a good chunk of his wardrobe, and Harmony would probably do horrible things to him.

…

Well, when put that way, what did privacy matter anyway? It wasn’t like the ghost had a camera and could post embarrassing picture of him for people to scry and see. Any violation of privacy would be purely for the ghost’s private consumption, and who was she going to tell? Besides, she was a girl-ghost—er, woman-ghost who was technically single, right? That, like, theoretically half of the demographic he was culturally ingrained to be fine with seeing him naked. So it’ll be fiiiine!

…

Even in his head it sounded like Harmony making excuses for the fact they had a pile of sulfur, some curing salt, and were in the middle of trying to use a grater turn charcoal into powder.

Well, he’d just have to make sure he never let his laptop and phone out of his sight when in his apartment ever again, and regularly change his passwords out in the hallway where the ghost couldn’t go looking over his shoulder… he hoped.

…

He might have to look up what kinds of Flame he could make to protect his stuff against spiritual handling. It hadn’t been particularly relevant to him before now—most of his studies and searching had focused on using Flame’s aspects of Change and Life—but he was young and intelligent and quite motivated! He’d learn!

…

Yeah, he still sounded like Harmony.

…

Well, nothing to be done about it! Self-medicate and move on!

Taking a little tin from his pocket, he pulled out a little ball of beeswax—real beeswax, not paraffin with extenders and flavorings—and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly as the soft substance began to deform under her teeth. The taste of honey that had impregnated the wax filled his mouth. Self-medicating completely, Loren made his way inside.

From the front, the old house was an impressive building made in the old style of a bygone century, surrounded by a well-tended mix of grass lawn, decorative garden and what looked like a large vegetable patch. Old trees planted around the periphery of the grounds served as a means of obfuscating the view from surrounding buildings and even some of the skyscrapers not far away without actually blocking the wind. It was a sprawling structure that seemed composed of three different houses made at different times, their only common feature being the color of the paint on their wooden—oh, never mind, the section over there that looked to be emulating the style of an Amatsushiman mansion had wood that was oiled instead of painted, although the panels of the shoji doors looked like they were made of plastic rather than washi paper.

Loren took note of other details as he walked towards the front door before detouring to the left along a marked and arrowed path that took him around the corner of the house. In addition to the Amatsuhiman influence, there was a more classical Tawalisi house, where the first two floors of the house were made of solid stone that had been Flame-fused together rather than mortared—a significant, almost extravagant expense even today— with the higher floors made of clean and brightly painted wood, Qinzhou-style tile roofs… it was the kind of house not just a single person or even generation had built, which had clearly had a lot of money and time and money spent on it following the trends of passing centuries. Really, it was no wonder the house had a spirit of its own. Conventional wisdom said it took ‘only’ a hundred years of being lived in for a house to develop a spirit of its own, and this place was clearly much older than that. It wore the years like a distinguished old actor, the kind that women still found sexy no matter how old and white-haired they got.

The little door he was led towards was made of heavy wood that might have been older than he was, and when he raised his hand to turn the knob, the door swung open on its own. He almost expected to find himself in a dark, candle-lit kitchen from something out of that turn of the century period drama the rest of his family liked to watch—personally, he’d never seen the appeal—and so was slightly disoriented when he found himself in a brightly lit hallway. Loren crossed the threshold and was about to close the door behind him when he heard it click close by itself. When he turned, he didn’t see any mechanism that would let it do that. After a week, he was much less jumpy about things moving by themselves. “Thank you, Miss Diwata,” he said cautiously, and was rewarded by the sound of a bell further down the hall. Taking the hint, he started walking towards the sound.

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At every intersection, the sound of a bell helped indicate which direction he should turn, though it was a fairly short walk, and he soon found himself in a large room that looked like a mix of an office and a break room, two doors down from Steve’s office. There were several people in the room—three of them were payatin, two were oni—but the only ones Loren recognized were Harmony and Steve.

“Hey, Lor! Over here!” Harmony said, calling out to him as he walked towards them. “Everyone, this is Loren, our client. Lor, this is everyone. Malory here will be coming with us to your apartment, the one cowering in the corner behind the filing cabinet—you can just see her tentacle—is her sister Loni, this is Mang Ambong…”

Loren nodded politely at the introductions, shaking hands as with those close enough as Steve put a small box on the central table. At the moment, the only other thing the table contained was a box of donuts—the nice deep-fried and glazed kind from a Lasablican chain—and a tin box that looked decorated in red and gold in a vaguely Qinzhou style.

“Loren,” Steve said as he pulled out some red candles from the box, a bit over thumb thick and maybe twelve inches long. “Before we go, I want to familiarize you with something we’ll be using. These are ghost candles. I got them from a supplier in Qinzhoutown. We’ll be using them to make dealing with this ghost easier.”

They sounded vaguely familiar to him, and Loren could feel a slight amount of heat coming from the candles. It was a familiar miniscule amount that told him the heat was actually from magic instead of an increased temperature. Well, significant temperature. That was enough to rouse something in his memory thought, from a documentary he’d seen years ago when his parents had still thought it was worth paying for cable TV, before scrychanneling became a thing. “Those are the ones that show ghosts and spirits, right? I’ve heard of those.” It was an old kind of Flame-based alchemy, with the wax being imbued with so that the light the candles produced would reflect off invisible spiritforms. It had traditionally been used in the annual festivals to honor the dead.

Steve nodded. “That’s the one. They’ll also help us hear the ghost, so that way we can negotiate. They’re not too expensive, but they burn up fast, and each candle lasts for about twenty minutes. I’ll give you the address and number of the guy I bought these from, since you’ll need it for after negotiations. You’ll need a way to see and talk to your roommate, after all.”

Loren frown down at the candles, gesturing towards them. “May I?”

“Sure, just be careful.”

He nodded, picking up one of the red candles. Carefully, he pulled up his Flame and gently claimed the subtle heat. It was something he had a lot of experience with from dealing with alchemical pharmaceuticals, since the relatively small amounts of combustibles that can be mixed into pills and tablets required a very fine touch so he wouldn’t alter the Flame that had been imbued into them. Compared to working with those, these candles could be handled with what felt like clumsy oven mitts.

It would take more time than he currently had to analyze the more fine aspects of the Flame imbued into it—though he could tell that it consisted of Light and Energy—but he was fairly sure… “I think I can extend the duration of the effect,” Loren said. “I just have to feed the Flame myself.”

“Really? That would be a big help. These aren’t expensive, but they’re hard to get because the supplier is getting old and doesn’t make as much as he used to.”

“I’m reasonably sure.” Loren put the candle back down, surrendering his claim. “If I’m wrong… well, we’ll just have to finish in twenty minutes.”

Steve looked thoughtful but nodded. “All right. Now, the plan is to negotiate with the ghost, and from Harmony’s research, they should be receptive to doing so. However, in case the research is wrong…” The Spiritualist gestured towards one of the two payatin women, the one who wasn’t cowering behind a filing cabinet for some reason. She had mestiza features, with black skin and dark blue hair, and waved one of her tentacles towards Loren as she continued eating her donut with dainty little bites of her saw-like triangular teeth. “Mallory is a Thaumaturgist. Between her, myself and Harmony, we can deal with the ghost if they become violent and let us get out of the apartment. However, after that point, negotiating is probably not going to be an option anymore, so the only way you’ll be able to retain the apartment will be a forceful exorcism.”

“And by forceful, we mean violent.” Harmony chirped.

“I got that Hari, subtle as it was,” Loren said flatly.

The payatin—Malory—turned her eyeless face towards Harmony. “Your nickname is ‘Hari’?”

“I have many names!”

Huh. It wasn’t just actors. Payatin really could look like they were rolling their eyes at you even though they didn’t have any.

Happy Homes possessed several work vehicles, one of which was a company car. It meant that happily, Loren didn’t have to commute back to the apartment that was allegedly his, and could hitch a ride. Fortunately, there was little traffic in that direction, and the drive only took an hour instead of two and a bit. Loren sat awkwardly at the back, waiting nervously for awkward small talk that never materialized. Steve was apparently the sort to not talk while he was driving, and Malory turned out to be sleeping.

In lieu of spontaneous conversation, Harmony talked him through the flowchart of the planned conversation with Dalisay’s ghost, and he did his best to listen. It felt as awkward as planning for an internship interview, and he could only hope that it wasn’t similarly pointless. It started with a somewhat stilted ‘hello’, introductions that he couldn’t help think seemed awkward, what seemed like an unnecessary preamble before they finally got to the actually important question…

Despite all the hard work that Harmony had clearly put into the flowchart, Loren couldn’t help feeling anxious looking at it. He’d failed too many internship interviews for the flowchart’s similarity to one such interview to give him any comfort that the necromancy they were going to attempt would be successful.