Phic Phight / Team Ghost / 3,442 words

Prompt by Nat Your Average Nerd on Discord

Ghost Writer and Jazz meet after Jazz learns about him through Danny's past experience in "The Fright Before Christmas," and she realizes that they have a lot in common since they are both certified bookworms. Can they be friends, or is it unfeasible between a human and a ghost?

Author's Note:

This prompt is so cheating for me because I always write Jazz and Ghostwriter anyway. But how could I just leave it there, given that?

He Didn't Feel Like Lying
A Phic Phight Fic by Pseudinymous

One thing was certain: Jazz wasn't in a hurry.

She was, in fact, trying particularly hard not to be in a hurry, as her two week staycation started today and it was about time she got some proper rest. So naturally she'd gotten up at her normal hour of six in the morning and gotten ready — showering, brushing her teeth, stretching, untangling a mop of orange hair that was just as long as it'd been in high school — leaving her clean and refreshed for the day ahead.

For someone who was supposed to have no plans, she seemed to have rather a lot of them indeed.

There was an event on today at the local university. Not the one she'd attended in her youth, mind you — her scores and reasonably well-off background had led her to better pastures — but a university nonetheless. It was homey and communal and apparently Lancer had taken up a post lecturing there once the school children had started to get a bit much for him to handle anymore. Didn't matter. The seminar was skating the line of cutting-edge research in ghost behaviour, and as the psychologist she'd always dreamed of becoming, it wasn't something she could miss.

The university itself, however, was nothing to look at.

Big and grey and utterly boring in every way — that's how she'd have described it. The campus grounds were as uninspiring as the utilitarian philosophy they were built on, and the gardens were so overgrown that it looked like no one had hired a gardener in the last six months. The ivy that crept up the walls was nice, at least.

Everything was normal until she sat down.

The lecture hall was one of medium size, but that didn't stop it from being packed and full — this seminar was well-anticipated among the psychological research community and quite a number of attendees had travelled from afar just to listen. She managed to find a solitary seat in the corner at the back among her fellow enthusiasts and tried to get comfortable on the cold, hard plastic. She couldn't. It was never comfortable. But she'd probably forget about that when this lecture got going, at least.

From there her eyes wandered. Another five minutes and the lecture would begin. The backs of people's heads weren't very interesting. Next to her, a man was writing lazily into his notebook. She side-eyed it carefully, not quite sure why she wanted to read the notes of a stranger but finding herself continuing just because she was bored. It was a breach of privacy, maybe, but if he didn't want it seen then he probably shouldn't have had it out in a crowded lecture hall.

sc.34.5 / para 8 needs work, paras 23 - 28 move too slowly for scene, where did the knife go?
sc.34.6 / choppy sentences still lurking in paras 13, 23, 33, why is this a sequence in tens?
sc.35.1 / for the love of god explain the knife.

Through the corner of her eye she sensed him frown at the notes, before he began to idly scratch out some aimless decor pattern along the left-hand margin. He switched to dark green ink to do this but the ink itself also seemed oddly bright, as if shining on the page. A kind of gel pen, maybe? But the pen itself looked too ornate to be one of those cheap plastic things high school girls usually defaced their books with. It was more in kind with something expensive to buy and even more expensive to lose.

Questions blooming within her mind, she chanced it. "What do you mean, 'explain the knife'?" she asked. The man looked up.

"It means I have a knife that appears out of nowhere, but I'm not sure how to fix the scene without breaking one of the other ones," he said, keeping his voice low.

"It's fiction, then?"

"It's fiction."

A slight pause occurred, of the sort that inevitably happens when you're interacting with a stranger very much unsolicited. Jazz didn't quite know what was driving her to keep talking — maybe it was the oddness of the ink on the page, as if there was something wrong with it, that made her want to speak. Maybe it was just boredom. Nonetheless, she opened her mouth again:

"So, you're into the psych fields too, then?"

"Not exactly. Although behavioural psychology's useful for characterisation."

Jazz's brow dropped. "But this lecture's about ghosts," she whispered.

'I know,' he wrote, in very tiny letters in the bottom-right margin. 'I am one.'

Jasmine Fenton, daughter of two of the most esteemed ghost hunters in modern history and premier researcher into the very field this seminar covered herself, blanched.

… Was it a joke? She hazarded a better look at him, but he seemed perfectly human. Black hair, green eyes — but the green was darker, not that weird ectoplasmic colour Danny's could carry. His skin seemed normal. Even aside from all of that, though, he just didn't glow. Ghosts were supposed to glow. It was one of the first ways you could tell you were talking to one. None of the research ever suggested it was possible to suppress it, so what exactly was the deal here?

Maybe he really was just joking. His face remained serious, though, as he stared to the front of the lecture hall. The seminar was starting.

To say a cliffhanger like that drove Jazz crazy was an understatement. For one of the first times in her life she found it difficult to pay attention to the lecture, and she couldn't help but periodically glance to the side to try to get a better look at this stranger. Purple coat — okay, a bit of an odd taste in fashion statement, but hardly damning. Wearing a scarf indoors during the beginning of Fall wasn't exactly all that common either, but he fidgeted with it idly as the lecture went on so perhaps there was some kind of sentimental attachment? There wasn't even anything strange about the glasses. There wasn't anything wrong with him at all!

Worse still, he seemed well aware of the fact that he was being analysed into next Tuesday, and if that odd not-there smile said anything, it was that he was thoroughly enjoying having her trip over herself to get to the bottom of his words.

Jazz all but missed the first ten minutes.

Another twenty passed. The lecture was interesting, put forth some fringe ideas about ghost behaviour — Jazz even managed to take notes, who'd have thought? But it was a little difficult to do all of this thinking about the psychological makeup of spirits and then not wonder about the man next to her who'd just claimed to be one. Didn't matter. She wasn't going to give him that satisfaction anymore, at least not until they got to the end. He continued writing scene corrections in his book as the speakers rolled through, listening idly.

… Surely he couldn't be serious? Tickets for this thing cost thirty-five dollars a piece, and there was a not insignificant crowd of people standing up at the back for the lack of seats. Was it a joke to him?

A small elderly woman eventually hobbled up to the podium, but alas she was too small to see properly above it and stepped to the side to give her speech after someone offered her a portable mic. Shirley Hemming, Ph.D. gave a small smile at first, then without further ado got stuck into the meaty topic of how consciousness might persist and then develop over the course of several centuries. You could've dropped a pin.

"… And we should see parallels between the chemical reactions in human brains and the corresponding outward reactions a ghost might make, but I do subscribe to the theory that the consciousness held by a ghost may not exactly parallel to the consciousness they held in life," said the speaker. "As to whether we might call them the same person as their living counterpart, most circumstantial evidence points to them being at best an imperfect copy."

The stranger didn't visibly react. At first Jazz wondered if he'd thought anything at all about such a statement, but then he took his pen down to the bottom margin and started writing.

'It's true that chemical reactions in the brain cannot be perfectly replicated by what remains, but many would argue that the brain is merely an interpreter for consciousness,' it said, and he paused for a moment to think. 'This would indicate that humans experience an extra layer of abstraction above the truth — indeed, that to be human is to be the imperfect copy itself.'

It threw Jazz's brain for a loop. She barely heard the rest of what this short woman with the Ph.D. said. Her words evaporated into the mists inside her head as she attempted to process such a shocking accusation — that the human brain did not produce its own emotions and that the mind of a ghost was not simply doing its best to copy and replicate that. Such proposals put significant strain on current theories of consciousness and bled dangerously into the realms of philosophy. And she wondered — would anyone but a ghost say something like that?

Maybe there was someone in this world. But how likely was it that she was sitting next to him right now?

Jazz eventually slid out her phone and opened a note-taking program, determined to get to the bottom of this. 'You look human.'

He turned a page to claim a fresh one, writing in small letters that were difficult to read when your face wasn't thirty centimetres from the page. 'When in Rome,' it said.

'Prove it.'

It was a testament to her years of growing up around ghosts that Jazz didn't immediately feel fear at the idea of being next to one. Indeed, if it was non-violent — and it was becoming increasingly obvious that many of them were — then there was hardly any threat to speak of. The stranger rested his pen upon his notebook and crossed his arms, staring to the front. Thinking, maybe?

Except he didn't do anything else. At some point he seemed to stop trying and then that meshed into intentionally listening to the lecture, leaving Jazz with a feeling not unlike wanting to strangle someone. Not an ounce of communication passed between them for the rest of the seminar, and indeed it was only when people started to leave that he actually opened his mouth.

"That last speaker was good," he mentioned, casually. "I think—"

Jazz had him cornered.

"Are you really?" she said, quite seriously.

"Really what?"

"A ghost," she whispered, hoping others wouldn't overhear. There was a lot of clamour as everyone else left the room, so it worked in her favour. "Why would you even tell me something like that?"

The stranger sat in his chair, waiting patiently for more people to leave. Slowly he began to tuck away his pen and his notes into one of the deep pockets of his coat. "I didn't feel like lying."

"You didn't—" it threw Jazz's brain for a loop. She'd spent a good portion of her latter teens growing up in a house literally built on lies, where 'I didn't feel like lying' simply wasn't a damn option. "What if I was hostile?" she sputtered, as the final attendee drained out of the room. The speaker and some of her assistants however were still packing up, and the stranger looked warily up to the podium as they went.

"Well, it would've made quite the scene, wouldn't it?" he said, quietly. "A human accusing a human of being a ghost."

She wasn't going to admit that he was right. He'd known the only realistic course of events from the start. Maybe — maybe if he wasn't lying, he was one of those types that liked playing games with humans, confusing and shocking them a little, maybe he was even bored. That seemed to be a theme among many ghosts — boredom.

It happened as their obsessions flared down, in the gaps between Things To Do. And boy, if Danny was right, nothing gave you gaps between Things To Do like living in the Ghost Zone did.

She narrowed her eyes, though — humans got perfectly bored as well. And some still enjoyed shocking others. Really, it was down to personality.

"You're coming with me," said Jazz, suddenly. "No ifs, no buts."

"Am I, now? I had plans."

"Really? And what kind of plans were those?"

That look was almost conspiratorial. "Cancelled ones, if you must be so persistant."

A chill ran down the back of Jazz's spine. He wanted her for something — for what, she couldn't tell, and that was a dangerous thing to play with when possibly in the presence of a being clearly more powerful than you.

"… Let's go," she began, carefully, trying her best not to attract the attention of that damn speaker. Still packing up! It was as if she was shuffling her papers in slow motion. "You should know, though, I am definitely armed."

The stranger, who seemed to clearly have no intention of attacking her (but who could really tell?) tilted his head, his eyebrows knitted together. "If you say so?"

The lecturer had now moved on to shuffling a different stack of papers that seemed to be little more than magicked out of thin air, for some reason unknown to both man and God. They left in silence. Jazz strode ahead of him and slid through the corridors as she kept an eye on him from behind, but he just walked behind her with his hands in his pockets, looking bored. She took him outside. Out onto the grass, down the field, a bit out of earshot of the hustle and bustle but still within screaming distance if something went wrong. Discretely, she texted Danny a % symbol — something reserved especially for situations that might become dangerous later — just in case.

There was a spot beneath a line of trees that had quite a lot of grass, not unlike some of the outdoor areas she'd liked to study in back at her own university if it wasn't for the fact that everything had needed a good prone roughly five years ago. She pointed to it. "Here's fine."

"I should think so," said the stranger, who immediately sat down without being invited to do so. His hands dug slowly into the little individual blades. "Hm. I'd almost forgotten what grass felt like, it's been so long."

Jazz didn't sit. She didn't even listen to the comment about the grass, only watched his hands as they sank beneath the green. "It's pretty cruel, you know," she said.

"What?"

"Putting me on the spot like that. Telling me you're a ghost in the middle of a crowded lecture about ghosts. You'd better have some actual proof."

The perfectly human eyes of the perfectly human stranger flashed green. Not that dark green that was normal under quite extreme circumstances, but the sort of green that ran chills through you. Jazz felt the hair on the back of her neck raise, but she didn't react, wouldn't give him the satisfaction. "Good enough?"

That settled it — only a ghost could ever manage an effect like that. But there was still a nagging problem.

"And how is it you look human?" Jazz asked, her arms crossed.

"An illusion."

"An illusion?"

The ghost seemed rather satisfied with himself, drawing his posture up properly with his legs crossed on the ground. "I don't look human at all, but the minds of the people I pass think I do."

Jazz shook her head. It was like trying to extract information from an iron brick with a plastic straw. "Presumably some sort of power allows you to do this?"

"Something like that."

"Enlighten me, per se?"

He raised his arm high, and at first Jazz flinched and tried not to jump backwards, to which he responded by leaving his arm in the air and shooting her a sardonic stare. "This was at your own request, remember."

"I—" said Jazz, but there was a primal instinct inside her that wasn't part of her fight or flight response. What opportunity had she really ever had to be this close to a ghost and not directly in the line of fire? Or where the ghost was captive and terrified? The situation was unique and it warranted a certain delicacy that she was going to have to work to give. "S-sorry, just do it," she managed. She wasn't sure why she stuttered.

The ghost seemed oddly hesitant at first, but this flicker of emotion evaporated in front of them when he brought his hand down and to the left, glowing green with potent, clearly ectoplasmic energy. A slightly curved keyboard almost one and a half feet in length formed beneath it, bright purple with a wide variety of unmarked keys.

Jazz's face was white.

"I haven't even done the shocking thing yet," said the ghost, almost bored. "For someone interested in ghosts, you're a little faint of heart."

"I-I-Is that a keyboard?" Jazz stammered. Her feet took her a step backwards but she didn't even notice. The ghost seemed confused.

"Yes?"

"I know who you are," she managed, voice shocked to a whisper. "That keyboard — it changes reality, doesn't it?"

It was the ghost's turn to be shocked. "I never told you that."

But it finally made sense to her. Danny had mentioned a few key features: a writer ghost who lived in a library. He wore glasses and a purple coat that was questionable in fashion choice to match. His hair was black, and reality would change according to his very whims. Whatever he typed on that keyboard became real — and with it, he wielded a power so potent and dangerous that literally anything could come under his control.

Except if he broke rhyme, apparently.

"You're the Ghostwriter," she said, significantly.

"And who are you, exactly?" said the Ghostwriter, now apparently annoyed. The keyboard continued to float in front of him essentially ignored. "I didn't think my reputation had quite this far preceded me."

How was it that she wasn't running? Why did she feel as if her feet were glued to the spot?

"Well, go on, if it's all that frightening to you you might as well disappear," the ghost continued, moodily. "Goodness knows everyone else has."

Jazz wasn't sure what made her stay. Perhaps it was sheer fright, a type of freeze response at the weight of what she was dealing with, but more than anything she wondered if it was the words he spoke — he was acting almost as if he'd found himself attention starved and not quite willing to admit it, something she could relate to in ways she similarly didn't want to recount.

"—You don't know who I am?" she said, eventually. "I was in one of your stories. Apparently."

His eyebrows raised. The keyboard vanished, now unnecessary. "I did?"

"I'm Phantom's sister."

She watched it hit him like a ton of ectoplasmic bricks. His eyes widened. There was that little notch of recognition within those irises, and when he began to cringe at the thought, she almost thought she caught sight of some unnaturally serrated teeth…

"Please understand—"

"What's there to understand?" said Jazz, appearing angry, before her face suddenly melted. "When he told me about it, it was one of the funniest stories I've ever heard. You're one of the only ghosts who actually tried to teach him instead of kill him. And — yes he told me about the book." she paused, then broke out into a strange stifled laugh. "If anything, I should be apologising to you. My brother destroyed your entire manuscript, barely apologised, and then you actually spared his life?"

Finally that smug outwards appearance had gotten up and gone home for the day, leaving the Ghostwriter looking confused and vulnerable. "Surely you're not sympathetic to what I did? It was—"

"—Completely justified. I did a PhD, Ghostwriter, if someone destroyed my thesis I would murder them."

The Ghostwriter didn't know if it was safe to laugh. Jazz did anyway, because Danny had repeated some of the lamest rhymes to her and she wouldn't be able to get them out of her head for as long as she looked at this ghost.

He mustn't have been harmful at all.

Later in the day, which was finally starting to seem like the holiday she was supposed to take, Jazz slipped out her phone again and shot off another text to Danny.

%/

The situation has resolved.