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“Come on, Georgia. This is stupid.”
“Says you! I’m gonna look great when I’m done here!”
The ghost shimmied forward, her repulsors humming with effort.
“All the other ghosts get cool shells, why don’t I?”
Her guardian sighed, and crouched down next to the ghost, gathering the discarded pieces of her old, mottled green shell in her hands.
“You don’t need a ‘cool shell.’” She said, smiling softly through her helmet. “You look just fine as you are, and you’re more than fine at your job.”
Georgia scoffed, a sound her guardian had never heard a ghost make before.
“’More than fine,’ she said. Sure, I can make a map, scan a room, open a door. Sometimes I even do it without setting off all the alarms! But that’s not all there is to being a ghost!”
She stopped struggling for a moment, and looked straight at her guardian.
“It’s not just about being good at my job. It’s about looking good while I do it!”
The guardian leaned forward slightly, squinting at her ghost as it looked up at her, just a small orb without its shell, trying to fit somewhere it probably shouldn’t.
“Looking good while you do it… have you been hanging out with those Hunters’ ghosts again?”
“Maybe I have. I can hang out with whoever I want to!”
She leaned back and sighed.
“Look, I know you want to do this, but we have to get to the outpost before nightfall. Would you stop messing around and put your old shell back on so we can get a move on?”
“One second… I’ve almost got it…”
Georgia wiggled back and forth, her repulsors glowing with effort as she shoved her way forward a few millimetres, and…
Pop!
“I did it!”
The ghost hovered unsteadily upward, listing slightly to the left before correcting her course and coming to a stop at eye level with her guardian.
“Well? How do I look?”
The guardian sighed. “Georgia, you look absolutely ridiculous.”
“I know, right? Isn’t it amazing?” she replied, her voice echoing slightly through the human skull she now occupied.
“Isn’t it hard to fly like that? It sure looks heavier than your usual shell. And you look so unbalanced!”
Georgia laughed, struggling to counter-rotate against its weight.
“Sure, but I’m literally inside a skull! How cool is that?”
Her guardian made a face. Or at least, she probably did. Georgia couldn’t really tell through her helmet.
“It’s kind of gross, actually. That person was alive once, you know. And now you’re inside their eye socket. Can you even get out?”
There was a pause, and then Georgia said,
“Let’s worry about that later, for now, look at this!”
As she spoke, the jaw of the skeleton moved, a pantomime of her words.
“Hey guardian, do you know why I wanted this to be my new shell?”
“…because you thought it looked cool?”
“No, because I wanted to get into the spirit of the Festival of the Lost!”
The guardian sighed, a long, drawn-out sound of exasperation and agony.
“Get it? Spirit? Because I’m a ghost?”
This time, she was sure her guardian was rolling here eyes.
“Look, Georgia, do you really want that to be your shell? You just look so weird, a skull with one eye empty, and one eye glowing blue…”
“I mean, sure, but it’s not like I’m suddenly an eyeball. I can still do everything I normally d-“
“Yeah, yeah, you know what I meant. Now can you please leave that thing behind?”
The skull’s mouth dropped open, then closed shut as Georgia considered.
“Fine, I’ll go back to my old shell, but only if I get to do one thing first. The acoustics of this thing have given me the perfect opportunity…”
“For what?”
“There’s this classic pre-Golden Age song I’ve got saved, it’s one of the few surviving pieces from before the Traveler’s arrival. Give me a second.”
The ghost whirred and flickered as she accessed her memory, the skull vibrating slightly as she did so. Then the sounds stopped, and she looked up at her Guardian.
“Alright, here goes!”
And she began to play a song.