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“Trick or treat!” Pearly yells at the old spirit medium. Maya is proud of her: the hideous boar mask she tied to her face (probably a priceless artifact, whoops) hardly does anything to muffle the words. She’s been doing a lot of voice training lately, to get over that whole shyness thing.
The medium frowns, probably not sure what is asked of her.
“She wants you to give her candy,” Maya explains, always happy to help.
The medium rummages through the pockets of her robes and produces one of the cough drops they now keep for tourists who spend too much time under the waterfalls. It took the elders a while to admit that yeah, sometimes tea and meditation just don’t cut it. The medium drops the drop into Pearl’s repurposed singing bowl.
“Shouldn’t you be at the temple?” she adds, frowning at Maya.
“Oh, would you look at the time,” Maya says. “Gotta go thanks bye!”
She drags Pearl away from the old woman’s chambers and out into the courtyard. They’ve knocked on five doors so far. Maya peers into Pearl’s bowl. Five cough drops.
“At least they’re not all eucalyptus-flavored,” she says cheerfully.
Pearl frowns behind her mask. “It was different last year.”
That’s because last year, they went down to the city and spent Halloween with Nick and Trucy. Trucy had made matching stage-magician-and-bunny costumes for her and Pearly and performed a little magic trick at every door in the neighborhood, declaring “Trick AND treat!”, while Nick stood in the background with his newly acquired scruffy young DILF charm turned up to eleven. By the end of the night they were drowning in chocolate bars, and not the cheap kind, either.
But this year, well, this year it just so happens that Edgeworth is hanging out in Europe, and it just so happens that he needs help with some case or other, and it just so happens that Nick is the only one who can do it, or whatever excuse they’re currently using. Yesterday, Nick sent her a picture, the three of them in front of … some landmark. His face looked weird in the photo, Edgeworth’s was blurry beyond recognition, Trucy’s only half in frame.
Maya could hardly look at it. She felt numb and breathless, sick with the recurring realization that yeah, even small things change forever and there’s no going back.
“Am I doing it wrong, Mystic Maya?” Pearly says now. Maya can’t see her eyes very well, but her voice is wobbling dangerously.
“What, no, you’re doing great,” Maya says quickly. “Kurain is just lame. LAME!” she repeats, hoping that the elders can hear her.
Pearly isn’t reassured. “What did Mystic Martha mean when she said you should be at the temple?”
“Nothing,” Maya says. “Hey, since Kurain is so lame, what do you say we go downtown?”
‘Downtown’, being, of course, the one single village close by, with the corner store and the shitty internet café. At least the people there are a little less likely to think a cough drop qualifies as candy. The last bus down already left an hour ago, so they hop onto the motorbike that Edgeworth bought for Maya because he is both loaded and bad at expressing affection, and leave Kurain behind.
(So there's this secret ritual, right, because when does Kurain ever not have a fucking ritual. The veil between worlds is thin on the last night of October, and the spirits get upset, and so it's super important that the current Master of Kurain hold a ceremony to appease them, or so the elders swear up and down. It might all just be a ploy to stop Maya from ever having a fun night out, who knows. After all, she didn't have to do it last year – she wasn't officially Master, not yet, was still allowed to walk around the neighborhood with Pearly and Trucy and Nick and not think about dead people's needs for five minutes.
But this year – this year – )
–
“Trick or treat!” Pearl roars thirty minutes later at a middle-aged lady. She smiles indulgently, mom-energy oozing out of her.
“Oh, aren't you a scary monster,” she says. “I better give you all of my best chocolates so you won't eat me instead.”
“Thank you very much!” Pearl says, still roaring because last year Trucy was very adamant about not breaking character even once, and it seems that the lesson stuck. Maya is about to thank the woman at a more normal volume, except then she gets a handful of candy herself.
“I don't think I've seen you around, have I?” the lady says. “Your Master of Kurain costume is incredible. The level of detail!”
“Uh,” Maya says.
“It's not a costume,” Pearl roars, confused but still in-character.
“You should join our arts and crafts group,” the woman says and closes the door on them.
“Why did she call your clothes a costume, Mystic Maya?” Pearl says.
“Haha,” Maya says. “No idea.”
(Not only is Kurain super lame, it also has no economy to speak of. Tourism has only started up again after she and Nick put the lid on that stupid DL-6 thing, and it's still going slow, what with the murder back in 2017. Half the time Maya doesn't even want tourists there, doesn't want people to visit for a week and gush over how beautiful and peaceful everything is and never think about how much work it took to keep the ugly and disturbing bits away from their eyes.
There's only one set of Master's robes, is what Maya is saying, the one set that belonged to Misty Fey. Kurain doesn't have a lot. What they do have, they use until it breaks.)
–
“Trick or treat!” Pearly shouts at the young man. He looks like he hasn't seen sunlight since graduating high school, which is a pretty big achievement when you live in a village like this where the beauty of nature slaps you in the face every day.
The guy mulls over her opener for way longer than is socially acceptable.
“What if I don't give you a treat though,” he says eventually.
Pearl glances over to Maya, all confused little boar. This isn't how the script is meant to go. Maya smiles encouragingly; she's allowed to improvise.
“I will … haunt you for the rest of your days?” is what Pearly goes with. Pretty good, though she lost a little bit of voice power there.
The guy's eyes open wide, emphasizing the bags underneath.
“I'm already haunted by my past mistakes,” he says.
“Oh my God,” Maya says, rolling her eyes. “Just give her some candy.”
The guy sighs, leaves for a bit and returns with two peanut butter protein bars.
“Nice costume,” he says to Maya. “Although I'm pretty sure the actual Master of Kurain has bigger boobs.”
“It's not a costume!” Pearl says.
“Let's go, Pearl,” Maya says, snatching the protein bars and turning away from the door.
“Are you not going to curse my bloodline?” the guy calls after her.
“Your bloodline's probably gonna end with you, buddy,” Maya says over her shoulder.
A deep sadness overcomes the man's face then. “Fair enough,” he sighs, closing the door.
(Shit, but it feels like a costume. That's probably the whole point: get her body into a vague Master-of-Kurain shape, to fill the vaguely Master-of-Kurain-shaped hole her mother left. It's a little like channeling twenty-four-seven, except that she still has to be herself while doing it. She thinks about it sometimes, channeling Misty and having her do the mastery things instead of Maya, just to see if anyone would notice, but there's no point. All Misty was good at was running, and Maya manages that just fine herself.)
–
“Trick or treat!” Pearly says until her voice is hoarse and her bowl is full of candy. Sure, the bowl is small, but so is the village. While they walk down the road back to the motorcycle, they review the fruits of her labor. Sour candy with soft filling, chocolate squares with hazelnuts, wine gums shaped like bats and eyeballs which is pretty badass, the two protein bars from that one guy, and –
“Sugar-free healthy fruit snacks with date syrup and acai berries and extra anti-o-xee-dants,” Pearly reads out loud. Her reading got a lot better without Aunt Morgan around. “What do those do, Mystic Maya?”
“They make your cells die less quickly,” Maya says, then catches herself. “I mean. They make you stay young!”
Pearly frowns, boar mask pushed up into her hair, but whatever she was going to say is cut off when she sees the iron gate at the end of the road. “Ooooh! What is that?”
The gate is beautiful, red brick wall on either side, iron bars twisted into flowers, a few lanterns along a path. Cypress trees are swaying in the night breeze.
“That's a graveyard,” Maya says.
Pearl turns to her with bright eyes. “How exciting! I've never seen one before!”
Maya tests the handle at the gate; it opens invitingly. She grins at Pearl. “Wanna check it out?”
(Kurain has no graveyard because it keeps its dead in urns all over the place. If you walk over any given patch of grass or road or even living room carpet, there's a non-zero chance somebody dropped an urn there and didn't quite clean everything up. If you analyzed the dust in the houses, at least forty percent would definitely be dead people ash. Death is everywhere, all the time.)
–
“Trick or treat!” Pearly yells into the silence of the graveyard.
“The dead people aren't going to give you candy, Pearly,” Maya says.
“I know that, Mystic Maya,” Pearl says. “I just like saying it. Trick or treat!”
Maya stops at a random gravestone and does the math. Sixty-seven. That's objectively pretty young for biting the dust. And yet Misty Fey was forty-nine when she died and Gregory Edgeworth was thirty-five when he died and Mia was twenty-seven when she died and the boy that Maya was asked to channel last week was fourteen when he died, and somehow, the elders expect Maya to make sense of all of this.
“Are you okay, Mystic Maya?” Pearly says, suddenly concerned.
I'm fine, Maya is about to say, and then doesn't. She's been white-lying to Pearly this entire evening; she really should cut down on that.
“Doesn't it upset you?” she says instead. “All of these dead people. I could channel any one of them, and then they could tell you all about what their life was like, right up until the moment when that life was over for no reason. They're not even really gone. They've just – stopped existing.”
Shit, that was probably too much. Pearl is staring at her with wide, teary eyes.
“But – but – Mystic Maya,” she says. “You're the Master! You're not supposed to be upset!”
And obviously, Maya knows that Pearl is just repeating the things that she's been told all of her life, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. “Well, I am! I am upset!”
Helpless, she picks up one of the protein bars and hurls it at the gravestone. She was meant to perform a ritual to bring peace to the dead tonight, but how the fuck is she supposed to do that when she's barely able to find any peace herself?
Meanwhile, Pearly keeps staring, first at Maya, then at the protein bar on the ground. And suddenly, there is something dawning in her eyes: a glimpse of the world as told by Pearl Fey.
“Oh, Mystic Maya!” she exclaims. “What a wonderful idea!”
Maya watches dumbly as Pearl starts walking along the graves and depositing a small piece of candy on each one.
“Trick or treat, Mr. … Harry 'Haz' Bean,” Pearly reads out loud. “Would you like a sweet eyeball?”
“What are you doing,” Maya says.
“It was your idea,” Pearl says. “Of course they don't want to feel left out from trick-or-treating! But they're dead, so we have to do it the other way round.”
She continues along the rows of tombstones. After a few bewildered seconds, Maya scrambles to help her.
(Pearly's always so determined to look at the world and see sparkles everywhere. It's super not sustainable; it's also most of what keeps Maya going these days. When Pearl looks at things, they have potential, for wonder or for horror, but definitely for something. Anything can happen; nothing's pre-determined. Nothing's dead.)
–
“Trick or treat!” Pearly says whenever she stops at a gravestone to appease another dead person's soul by giving them candy.
Their singing bowl isn't even empty when they're done. Sure, the bowl is small, but so is the graveyard. They spent a lot of time deciding who gets what, based purely on age and any vibes that the names give off. Maya made sure to leave the second protein bar with another middle-aged person; she feels like they might appreciate it. At the end, they're left with only a few caramels (“Old people don't like those! It sticks their teeth together!” Pearly claimed), some wine gum eyeballs, and that one sugar-free fruit snack.
“You should eat that one, Pearly,” Maya says on the way back to the motorcycle, mostly joking. “It's healthy for you!”
She expects something along the lines of But Mystic Maya, candy isn't supposed to be healthy! Instead, Pearl carefully re-reads what's printed on the packaging.
“The anti-o-xee-dants keep you young, right?” she says.
“Exactly,” Maya says. “At least that's what all the ads say.”
Pearly frowns. “I don't want to stay young. I have to grow up so that I can help you better with your response-abilites! You should have it instead, Mystic Maya!”
With great ceremony, Pearly bestows the fruit snack upon Maya.
“Okay,” Maya says and eats it right there on the spot, even though her throat is tight and her eyes hurt from trying not to cry and she fucking hates acai berries.
(When they get back to Kurain, all of the elders are pretty pissed because the time for the secret ritual has long passed and Maya didn't show up. Turns out that somehow, the spirits of the dead were calmed this year, anyway. The wrapper of the fruit snack stays crumpled up in the pocket of Misty Fey's robes.)