Chapter Text
Squiddo stared down the mess of dust and cobwebs her new apartment currently was. As it turned out, suspiciously cheap apartment listings online with no photos tended to be bad quality. Who’d have guessed?
With a long-suffering sigh, she began the arduous task of moving everything to the least dirty spot, which wasn’t much better than any other. As an up-and-coming ghost hunter, she made YouTube videos for a living, which was not the most profitable with her limited time and equipment. Hey, it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t afford all that fancy stuff! At least she’d made a decent amount off her hobby, although not nearly enough to scrape by. So here she was: cleaning out a shitty apartment and juggling school with ghost hunting and her actual job of waitressing at a nearby cafe.
Squiddo hummed to herself as she swept, brushing away what looked like eons worth of dust. Seriously, had the previous owner never used this place?
Two days later, she was feeling slightly better about the new place. Sure, it was cramped and probably had rats in the walls (she’d seen at least one), but it was a lot cleaner now! Even if there was still dust over half the house.
Squiddo sighed, stretching out her back from all the manual labour she’d done recently, and flopped backward onto her mattress. Which felt like it was made of pebbles. She promptly decided that she did not in fact feel better about this place.
“Squiddooooooo!”
With a clang, the door swung open, revealing an all-too-excited Kaboodle. Squiddo sat back up. “Wh- Kab? How did you even find my place? It’s literally been two days!”
The blue-haired girl shrugged and sat down. On Squiddo’s table. Why.
“Oh you know, just some good old-fashioned stalking and address tracking.”
Squiddo squinted at her. “Yeah, I don’t believe that. You asked Clown, didn’t you?”
Kaboodle grinned. “Hey, you should have told me! I can’t believe you’d not tell your best friend that you were going to move! Oh woe is me!” She fell back, flat on the table, and promptly fell over as an unamused Squiddo applied a push force to her knee. “Ow!”
Squiddo grinned. “Haha, I hath betrayed thee!”
Kab swooned further from her place on the floor. “Oh, how will I ever recover from such a twisted betrayal?” She maintained her sorrowful face for a total of two seconds more before collapsing into laughter. Squiddo’s “evil” facade too dropped, and both girls laughed together.
Eventually Kab sat back up and plopped down next to Squiddo, transferring half the dust from the floor onto the bed. The other half went onto Squiddo herself as Kab shook herself off. “Ugh. No offense, but this place is kinda dirty. Why is there so much dust? And is that a spiderweb? Literally next to your bed?”
Squiddo shrugged. “Hey, I have a budget and time constraints. Not all of us make money from playing Minecraft all day.” She elbowed her friend with a teasing grin. “Besides, I can clean this place up! It was worse when I arrived.”
Kaboodle turned to her with an incredulous expression. “Worse? How can it be worse than this?” Squiddo shuddered. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“Oh.”
The two chatted on for a while, Squiddo bringing her friend up to speed on her recent housing developments and Kaboodle mostly gossiping about their friends.
“Hey Squiddo, what if this place was haunted? I mean, it fits the entire vibe, and imagine the video you could make from that! ‘I Moved Into An Apartment Haunted By Ghosts’. That’d definitely bring your channel up.”
Squiddo laughed. “C’mon Kab, what are the chances of a ghost hunter moving into a haunted apartment? Still, that ghost better wait. I wouldn’t have time to make a video with how much stuff I have to do.” She paused. “Right, I should probably at least post an update on why I’m not posting. Can’t go poke around in cemeteries when I’ve got boxes to move!” Both girls giggled.
With a resounding crash, a box left on a high shelf creaked and fell to the ground.
Squiddo blinked and calmly wiped her glasses. “What the - how did that even happen?” Kaboodle, conversely, yelped and jumped behind Squiddo, sending more dust flying. “Um… that chance is looking like a hundred percent right now…”
“There’s no way… surely it’s just a coinciden- AAAH!” This time, it was Squiddo’s turn to scream. Kab immediately spun to face where her friend was looking. “What? What did you see? Was it a ghost?” The orange-haired girl gulped. “Yeah, I might believe you a bit more now… I swear I saw a purple figure appear in the doorway for a split second.”
Both girls looked around, the lighthearted mood of a few seconds ago wholly dispelled. Nothing more happened, though, and eventually they calmed down.
“That was terrifying. How do you do this? I’d run screaming the moment a ghost appeared, let alone come after me.” Squiddo chuckled. “Actually, most spirits don’t show themselves until they really wanna get you. They’ll usually try to push stuff around, spook you a bit first.” Kab blinked. “Wait, so the ghost here wants to kill you?”
Squiddo looked away. “That’s a good question. Some spirits just want closure, or are neutral. But I have met those few who did try to kill me, so…”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay here? You can run from a haunted place, but not if you live in one!”
Squiddo pondered for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, I should be fine. I have ways to ward off most demons, and the few that I can’t won’t be bound to locations. If this is a really strong spirit out to get me, there’s really nothing I can do. But most aren’t, so I’ll be fine!”
The blue-haired girl stared at her doubtfully, then nodded slowly. “If you’re sure… I should probably go now, I said I’d meet Clown for something.”
Kaboodle gave Squiddo a brief hug, then left the apartment. After all the noise, the ensuing silence seemed even louder. The girl shivered. Yeah, Squiddo was starting to get a bad feeling about this place.
Still, she cleaned up the fallen box, then moved to set up her wards. She hadn’t been lying to Kab - she did have precautionary measures that should work to keep ghosts away.
He groaned, watching the human meddle about and paint sigils over their floor. Great. Not only did a human break into his abode and mess up his stuff, they also turned out to be one well-versed in the occult. Well, he had to do something about this.