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Souls Town
Room 349

Room 349

Beau looks pale, Frankie thinks, but of course, the journey into Death hits everyone differently. He sits in a creaky metal chair, head between his knees, and groans.

Frankie hands him a lozenge. “It’ll help with the nausea.” She pops one into her own mouth, and the ginger-sharpness seeps into her tongue as she looks around.

The office is much like any other office, an oblong space with shabby utilitarian furniture and permanently stale coffee in the breakroom. An inescapable cloud of something that feels faintly like despair clings to the carpet and wallpaper and to the underside of their chairs.

There are desks and partitions spaced at seemingly random intervals, but, upon closer inspection, Frankie realizes the arrangement of workspaces is not random. Rather, it is designed to accommodate a diverse workforce, like employees with spiked tails hunched over typewriters, assistants with wings softly humming in the background, and fish-tailed clerks with water tanks installed underneath their desks.

A large snake sits in the corner of the cubicle to their left, hissing into the phone. With a grunt, the snake hangs up the phone and turns to his desk mate. “The ghouls who work in Administration have no idea what they’re doing. Can you believe…”

A cloven-footed man with pointed ears walks past them with a companion, a black cat walking on two legs.

The man gives his companion an impish smile and says, “So I said, ‘Look, I know you’re dead, but sometimes you have to live a little, you know?’”

His companion purrs, twisting his cavalry mustache with a long, finely sharpened nail. He begins to respond, but Frankie misses the retort as they walk on, out of earshot. She turns to watch them leave the office, the glass-paneled door swinging shut behind them. The name of the office is painted onto the pebbled glass, and although she is reading it from the inside, she rearranges the letters in her head.

Room 349

Passport Services

Frankie turns back to Beau and sighs. His head is still between his knees, and he lets out a tiny groan.

She drums her fingers absentmindedly against her knee and reflects on how they got here. Beau’s hands may be white-knuckled against his knees at the moment, but they were shaking when he approached her at Harley’s Cafe. He slid into the chair opposite hers with no invitation (typical Astor behavior, she thought at the time) and asked for her help.

An unlit cigarette wobbled between his fingers while he attempted to explain the series of events that led him there, to her, in a noisy cafe on a Saturday night, despite the fact that their friendship ended years ago, and, especially, despite the fact that he hasn’t said more than two polite words to her in almost as long.

Beau’s story was jumbled, and his voice was hard to hear over the jazz band playing in the corner. She had to lean across the table to hear him, which only increased her annoyance at being interrupted by him in the first place. The crucial element of Beau’s story, however, was that his girlfriend, Penelope Church, was now, sadly, no longer amongst the living.

As the daughter of witches, Frankie Hart was born with mischief—ancient magic passed down by generations past that allows her to bend the rules of Life and Death. It’s no coincidence that Beau Astor approached with this issue: he knew she was magic when he approached her as she sat hunched over a tattered leather-bound book, sipping her tea and twirling a strand of her hair in thought.

Indeed, he has had enough run-ins with her over the years to know about her abilities. She likes to think that she always gives as much as she gets, and she is exceedingly pleased to think that Beau might be a little bit afraid of her.

Because, of course, she is the Frankie Hart—who cursed him in the ninth grade after he said something discouraging about her nose.

The Frankie Hart—who once whispered something under her breath after he tripped her in the lunchroom causing his lungs to feel like they would burst from lack of oxygen.

The Frankie Hart—who blinked and gave him oozing, painful boils on his face for two days after he said her glasses made her look like a frog.

Yes, that Frankie Hart.

And while that underlying fear and uncertainty is still there (so rife, she can almost smell it), the fact remains that there are bigger, more important matters to see to: his girlfriend is dead, after all, and he’s fairly certain it was his fault.

He had no qualms with signing her standard contract, complete with a confidentiality clause that, if broken, would render the deliverable (i.e. Penelope) back to the state it was in at the time the agreement was signed (i.e. dead).

And, really, where would he be then?

Where he is right now, Frankie supposes.

As they sit in the dimly lit space that smells of disinfectant and stale food, the coldness of Death seeps into her bones slowly and consistently, like a clock counting down the time they can spend here before becoming permanent residents.

Tick, tock.

The minutes slide by, and she begins to regret her decision to help Beau Astor. They have been warily circling each other for years, the children of neighboring families that have never quite gotten along, with few exceptions. They are the same age, go to the same school, have sat in the same classrooms, and have taken the same exams. His persistently thoughtless comments about her appearance, her lineage, and even her abilities as a student have had plenty of time to undercut her pride and leave her perpetually bruised (emotionally speaking).

Of course, they were friends once. But high school changed more than just her height, which is why now, at seventeen and three-quarters years of age, she is not particularly fond of him.

Plus, he won’t stop nervously jiggling his leg.

She reminds herself that Beau Astor is the heir to a family fortune so large that she can’t even really fathom it. She’s looking forward to having an Astor in her debt. Really, waiting in this room is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.

She repeats this to herself three times, hoping to believe it.

When the lozenge dissolves, Beau sits up. His cheeks look pinker, and his eyes look brighter, livelier. He is still jiggling his leg, though, and Frankie places a hand on his knee, feeling the warmth of his skin through the fabric of his pants.

“Would you stop that?” she says, her tongue moving around the lozenge.

“Sorry.” His fingers clench against his knees to hold them still. But the jiggling starts up again in a few seconds.

She grits her teeth. “Feeling better?” Her sarcasm is lost on him.

He smiles appreciatively. “Yeah, that was a great spell.”

She sighs. “It was just ginger.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Oh.”

“Not everything is magic….” Crossing her arms over her chest, she pulls her bulky coat around herself. She may have been foolish enough to help Beau enter Death, but at least she was not foolish enough to enter without the proper attire.

She casts a sidelong glance at Beau, whose leg is still jiggling. The coat he wears once belonged to her grandfather, a decommissioned military uniform with an embroidered patch on the left lapel that says “Hart.” There were other jackets she could have given to him, but to be perfectly honest, she was hoping the raggedly cut mass of patched fabric would make him look…small, dimmed, bowed under the weight of death. At the very least, she was hoping the olive green, so faded it might as well be brown, would somehow draw out the paleness of his complexion or highlight the gauntness of his face, and not just because she is predisposed to think unkindly about him.

While Death is not without color, there is a coordinated drabness to it all—a muted quality as if someone has simply lowered the saturation and dimmed the brightness. The coat is just as drab as Death and, theoretically, should counteract the inherent color of life that Beau, being alive, still possesses. It’s important to note that there is no particular amount of danger to be derived from being alive in Death, as long as the trip is kept brief. She has been told, by those with more expertise, that Death isn’t quite so monochrome from the view of its permanent residents, but even so, her attempt at lowering the vibrancy of life that both she and Beau give off has more to do with trying to assimilate into their surroundings. It’s just not nice to remind the more permanent residents of what they’ve lost.

And anyway, the coats have an added benefit. It’s terribly cold in Death—the deceptive kind of cold that silently eases its way into your body until you forget what warmth is. But, of course, Beau sits in this office as if he were made of sunshine, the frayed edges of the jacket framing his broad shoulders quite nicely, the spent green bringing out the olive undertone in his skin. He looks vibrant, like he is sitting on a beach in southern Italy instead of this dingy, cold office in Death.

Frankie reaches over and pulls on the shoulder of the coat. “Don’t sit so straight,” she whispers.

Beau hunches his shoulders forward. “Better?”

No, she thinks. “Perfect,” she says.

“So where are we again?”

This is the third time he’s asked this question, and she’s running out of ways to phrase the explanation. “We’re in Death. Sort of.”

“And Death is a real place?”

She shrugs. “Mostly.”

“So, we’re in Death, and we need to find Penelope to bring her back.”

“Yep.”

“But we got stuck at the border.” A pause. “Because your passport is expired?”

She grits her teeth. “Yep,” she admits.

After all, she must be honest with herself. She knew her passport would be expiring soon but kept putting off the renewal. The deadline snuck up on her, as deadlines so often do.

“Why do you have a passport for Death?”

Finally, a different question, she thinks, relief flooding through her chest. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

“I’m a Reaper-in-Training,” she says lightly. “I only have one month left for my certification.”

“So that’s why we’re here, in this office? To get your passport renewed?”

“Indeed.”

“And after that, we can find Penelope and get out of here?”

The tension gathers again, like electricity amassing before a storm. Technically speaking, there is no way to undo death. Once a soul loses their body, they are faced with a handful of decisions, but becoming alive again is not one of them. There is, however, a loophole that only a select few know about.

Luckily, Frankie is one of the few, being a Reaper-in-Training, and the plan had been quite simple: open the doorway beside Penelope’s body, step through, grab her, and pull her back so that her soul could be rejoined with her body. Of course, this plan assumed several things, in particular that Penelope was still standing next to her body, having just died a few moments ago, that her body was habitable, and that Frankie could make the trip with such expediency that it wouldn’t register on any official records.

And yet…

Beau had not been entirely accurate in stating that Penelope died in, “I don’t know. Like two minutes ago.” It had been at least thirty minutes, which is plenty of time for a body to not only become uninhabitable, but for a recently-deceased soul to begin their journey into Death.

To make matters worse, Frankie had quite forgotten that her passport had expired last week. The quick trip was logged and an official summons arrived promptly. The carrier-bat flapped in her face until she took the envelope, which, when opened, transported them here, to Passport Services.

“When do you think Crawfield will show up?” Beau points to the nameplate on the desk in front of them. The desk is exceptionally tidy and would look unused if it weren’t for a small typewriter, two stacks of papers, and a coffee mug filled with an assortment of pens. The coffee mug says, “Death’s Best Passport Acceptance Agent 1992.”

“Soon, I hope,” mutters Frankie, looking around the room again. She spots a clock, a faceless white circle hanging on the wall.

Completely useless.

During one of her first sojourns into Death, Frankie asked her instructor why all of the clocks here are faceless and yet still seem to work, a faint ticking sound coming from the depths of the contraption. The instructor, a balding centaur named Darren, shrugged and said, “One of Death’s great mysteries. The clocks were installed centuries ago and they can’t be removed or changed. Now, for Charon’s sake, can we please get back to the syllabus?”

Darren had not liked being interrupted.

“Brimstone and boils,” she curses under her breath, wishing she had remembered to wear her watch this morning. The waiting is making her impatient. Beau’s leg is still jiggling, and she is seconds away from firmly grasping his knee to again disrupt his movements, when Crawfield arrives, sitting down in his creaky swivel chair with a huff. His attire is far less tidy than his desk, his hair sticking up at odd angles around two tiny horns protruding from either side of his forehead. His disheveled appearance is punctuated by a tiny whirlwind of energy swirling about him, playfully lifting up his tie.

“Sorry,” says Crawfield, the sound muffled by his tie. He smooths the offending strip of silk down and holds it to his chest. “The whirlwinds will stop soon. A side-effect of traveling by portal. The vortex was packed this morning. And it’s not even rush hour!”

The wind begins to settle as he picks up the top piece of paper on the stack on his desk. “What do we have here?” he mumbles to himself. “Ah, I see.” He looks up. “Just here for a standard Passport Renewal, yes? Are you aware that you might be able to accomplish this using a carrier-bat?”

“Yes,” replies Frankie, “But we didn’t have much choice.”

“Right,” says Crawfield, looking down at the paper again. “You entered an unsanctioned doorway with an expired passport. Well, let’s get this sorted then. Do you have Form DPS-13 filled out?”

At their blank faces, Crawfield smiles tightly. “Well, let’s get DPS-13 filled out first.” He points to the second stack of papers on his desk, inviting them to take a blank application. “You can only use green ink from a creature of the Dark, preferably a Hydra, given that it was extracted from the seventh head. Do you have an appropriate pen with you?”

Their blank faces answer him again. “Well. No mind, you may use one of mine.” He gestures toward the coffee mug. “Will you be filling out an application, as well?” he asks Beau.

Beau looks over at Frankie. She has already started her application, leaning forward and resting her arm on the desk as she fills in the form with quick, deliberate pen strokes. She offers no advice but does raise her eyebrow, a minute expression change that might as well be an exaggerated shrug. He picks up a copy of Form DPS-13 and selects a pen from the coffee mug.

Crawfield watches them fill out their applications. “We’ll just need a thumbprint, there,” he interrupts, motioning to an ink pad that has suddenly appeared on the desk. When Beau begins the second page, Crawfield makes a tutting sound. “Sorry, I see you put your mother’s married name. The form is asking for her maiden name. No worry, it happens all the time.” Crawfield gives Beau another application. “I’ll just incinerate this one, shall I?”

The chair squeaks as Crawfield swivels around. There is a marble pedestal behind his desk with a brass rod rising from its center. He clips the paper to the end of the rod and taps on the surface of the pedestal. The top slides back, and a palm-size dragon (an Inferior Flametongue from the looks of it, thinks Frankie, taking note of her small size and the characteristic horn on her snout) arises. Her leathery wings gently displace the air, ruffling the piece of paper above her. Her purple scales shimmer in the lighting overhead.

With a deep intake of breath, the dragon releases a stream of fire aimed at the application. The paper whooshes up into flames and the still-smoldering remains float down to rest on the dragon’s head. She shakes them loose.

Crawfield smiles, thanking the dragon for her assistance by feeding her one of the dead flies he collects in a little jar by his typewriter. The dragon returns to her lair inside the pedestal, and Crawfield swivels back to Frankie and Beau.

He folds his hands together and continues their appointment. “I am also obligated to let you know about the fee schedule. The only acceptable form of payment is Time. You will have to make a withdrawal from your remaining balance on Earth.” He pauses, looking at them expectantly.

“We’re willing to make a withdrawal,” says Frankie.

Beau nods.

“Right.” Crawfield stamps their applications and then motions toward a room adjacent to his desk. “That’ll be three hours and twenty-four minutes, to be paid in Real Time.”

Clutching their receipts, they make their way toward the waiting room. As they step over the threshold, the timer above the door changes from 00:00 to 03:24 and begins its countdown.