FORMER FARMER PALMER.
It was getting dark again by the time all the fuss finally died down (hey, when people round here partied, they partied, after all, usually the most exciting thing to happen all year was a toss-up between a party or an occasional two-headed goat.) So it was decided the group would stay in the village for an additional night, and Mibbet and Rosalind had just started to relax for a nice nap when suddenly the peaceful night air was disturbed by a terrifying scream from the fields.
Mibbet being Mibbet, of course, grabbed Choppy and dashed out to see what the fuss was about. Eventually, encountering a terrified looking farmer surrounded by a large cluster of scarecrows (which had apparently somewhere down the line extended their job description to scarecrow, and scare farmer, though they were still getting stiffed on the pay front.)
“O- ol- old Palmer’s at it again,“ stuttered the terrified farmer Giles, gesturing at the remains of a rather decrepit farm on a nearby hill
“Old Palmer?” Mibbet enquired, while Rosalind seemed nervous at the sight of the terrifying tattie bogles.
“Farmer Palmer used to run the farm up on the hill until one day after his wife passed away. He passed on not too long afterwards, apparently a freak accident with a scythe, but ever since then, he’s haunted the place; the whole damned farm is cursed if you ask me.”
“How exactly do you do that?” Mibbet asked; something really didn’t add up here, logistically speaking, if nothing else.
Rosalind, meanwhile, was getting increasingly nervous as time went on. As a royal, she had many former relatives in the spooky category, many of whom, according to legend, still hung around the place, usually sans noggin. Often having been divested of said thinking apparatus by direct ancestors to herself, and as you can probably imagine sharing housing with people your great granny assassinated, defenestrated, or directly decapitated (Great-grandma Hilda Von Harmsworth was very much a fan of overkill when it came to the retirement plans for potential political rivals. She was a firm believer that without overkill, you got under-kill, and that leads to messy grudges.) Made for a lot of areas of the castle, she did not go, as she had zero desire to have awkward conversations with the undead, who technically were of equal rank to her and may have many, many, many reasons to dislike her family.
She had, of course, never seen a ghost herself (and she was happy to make a scrupulous effort to keep it that way, it was hard to boss around the dead, and that thought, far more than the potential ghosts themselves, haunted her.)
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This resulted in a rather big conflict of interest between Mibbet and Rosalind, in which Mibbet was interested in finding out what the hell was going on, and Rosalind was interested in getting as far away from here as physically possible as quickly as possible.
“How do you do that with a scythe anyway?” Asked Mibbet, trying to wrap her head around the logistics of it all.
“Well, there was a rumour going around at the time his death may not have been an accident.”
“A scythe is hard to have an accident with, I guess being on a long handle and all.”
“Yes, that was the first clue.”
“Only the first?”
“Yeah, the second may have been him being found strapped up like a scarecrow.”
“That’d definitely make me suspicious too.” Agreed Mibbet.
“Took us a while to realise, too, his scarecrows were always realistic enough to be contest winners anyway.”
“So what you are saying is his skill was outstanding in his field.”
Inside her head, Rosalind facepalmed and wished, not for the first time she could smack Mibbet upside the head. Ghosts or not, there was no excuse for terrible punnage.
“Alright, I’m going up there to find out what the hell is going on, Errol, with me.”
Errol did not like the sound of that, but he had long since realised there was no point arguing once the princess made up her mind.
He was unaware, of course, of the fact, Mibbet really was in two minds over this as she dragged Rosalind along kicking and screaming (metaphorically, of course, her being somewhat intangible and not exactly in the driver’s seat at the moment.)
As you can probably figure out by now, frogs, not usually being the spiritual sort or the religious sort, didn’t usually have much of a premise of an afterlife. Their deaths were usually obvious enough that other frogs didn’t exactly relish the idea of overthinking the prospect. Plus, the distinct lack of deities dependent on them for offerings, dedication, or faith meant that no pantheon really had an amphibian department (at least not until very, very recently, and proper formation of the said department. Was still a long way off.)
Because of this, of course, when it came to frogs, the gods usually just recycled. (The new karma-Tron 5000 ethereal essence extractor got a lot of use, erased all trace of former identities, and only rarely came back with an isekai ID10T error.) so frogs tended not to stick around much after passing, except in a purely physical form, usually as pellets.
This meant that despite Rosalind’s encouragement, Mibbet wasn’t afraid of no ghost and was instead curious as to what it looked like when a human who was already dead decided to stick around and bug the living.
They got to the farm fairly quickly, and the front door swung open in front of them, freaking the hell out of Rosalind in the process. The farm itself had, of course, seen better days but seemed OK if you ignored the creepy laughter. Then as they stepped inside, the door slammed shut behind them. (Oddly, there was no creak as it did so though the slam was impressive.) They entered the living room, looking around as they were suddenly faced with the frightening phantasmal form of former farmer Palmer.