Essence Win 10-24-22

Xu asked the Genie to grant them a wish

Essence of Crikey is now in your Items







“Maryland? What’s merry about this land?”

The woman looked at the man like he had grown a second head. Either he was joking or he really wasn't from around here.

"Maryland is a state," the floating spirit echoed the sentiment, speaking as though this was common knowledge everyone should know.

“There’s more than one of it?”

Celeste looked at the wide eyed floating apparition. It was tiny, almost infantile and largely featureless; like a caricature of a ghost. It looked like it should have been the mascot of something one might see on a shirt at Hot Topic.

She shook her head no.

"That's different from any other ghost I've seen," Celeste observed, "I don't see them that often. Occasionally I'll see ghosts not long after someone dies, but they usually disappear."

Startled by the blare of the car horn behind her, she didn't have time to protest as the strangely dressed man shoved his belongings in the car window, followed by awkwardly climbing in through the window himself.

To anyone else she would have had some choice words for a stranger literally making his way into her car THROUGH THE WINDOW nonetheless, but this man...

"There's a door there!" was all she could manage to exclaim in exasperation. Why was she allowing this?

As Thayer yanked the thing he referred to as bedsheet into the car, she had some choice expletives for the drivers that were laying on the horn behind her. As the two passengers made it in, she put the car into drive.

What was she doing? She was chauffeur to a floating thing and a man who didn't seem to know how cars worked.

"Put your seatbelt on. I'm not paying if we get pulled over," she said.

The ghost creature had to show the man how to buckle a seatbelt. How did it know what a seatbelt was and the man didn't? It was like the man had walked into the present day from medieval times or something.

“What do you know of that thing?”

"When I've seen ghosts, they're usually more like after images of whoever they were in life. I've never seen one that... unique."

She chose her words carefully. Strange, featureless, and tiny were her immediate thoughts, but glancing back at the creature through her rearview mirror, it had a blank, almost contemplative expression, causing her to choose her words to spare the thing's feelings.

What was it anyway?

"Do you have a name?" she asked the translucent creature. She assumed it wasn't actually called Bedsheet, but it gave no response as it looked out the window.

As she drove, her attention turned partially to Thayer, who seemed to react to every turn, break, and acceleration of the car, even if he tried to hide it. He truly seemed like he had never been in a car before, if it wasn't obvious how he struggled to get through the window instead of using a door...

Celeste felt rather ridiculous for allowing the strange man and his stranger companion in the car. In some ways, the entire scenario felt like it was either a hallucination or the start of a dumb joke. A ghost and a man who looks like he was from a past century hop into a car...? Okay, what's the punchline?

"Err... Thayer, was it?" Celeste questioned as she decided to cut through the awkward silence, "Where are you from? Where are you headed now?"

She hoped he would tell him where he needed to be dropped off, but she was beginning to doubt that was going to happen.