Chapter Text
“Guys, I’ve finished it!” Hoseok bursts into the room, and almost immediately Taehyung’s eyes snap open from the couch. He sits up abruptly, squinting at his hyung from his dark-circle-rimmed eyes, the pout on his face signifying that he is not yet in touch with reality.
“What?” he mumbles, and Hoseok rushes over, shoving a small box-shaped contraption into his face with an excited smile.
“It’s my energy reader!” he gushes with pride. “It’s supposed to calculate all the electromagnetic fields in the surrounding atmosphere and give a numeric and relative measure on the average energy levels in the area! Gosh, it took me wiring fifty-seven circuits for like two years in order to finally get the thing to just read properly.”
“...What?”
Hoseok sighs. “You know how the electric field is created due to the surrounding charges in the atmosphere? Like it usually neutralizes because there’s a balance of--”
Taehyung interrupts the other’s explanation to jump off the couch and run towards the bedroom. “NAMJOON-HYUNG!” he screams, and Hoseok visibly deflates at the lack of recognition. The younger turns back with a blank look.
“Sorry, hyung,” he says. “I got a C in all three of my physics courses and I’m literally only running on--” he pauses to lean towards the kitchen and look at the clock, “--like four hours of sleep right now, so I don’t even have to ability to try and understand what you’re telling me.”
Hoseok scowls as a sleepy Namjoon appears, glasses not on properly and hand rubbing at his eyes. “You should know this stuff too, you idiot,” he hisses, “cells and axons also have a distribution of charge around their membranes. Aren’t you a fucking graduate?”
“I specialize in the biological structures and psychology of the human body, hyung. All I know about your subject is force equals mass times acceleration.”
“Force is also charge times the electric field if that’s what you’re trying to teach him. You know, Tae, qE? With an arrow over it. We went over this three years ago.”
“What did I eat for breakfast again?”
Namjoon shakes his head in dismay. “What were you trying to say, Hoseok?”
“Ugh, finally, a fellow intellectual to listen to my genius!”
Taehyung scowls at the statement. “Can you even list the parts that make up the thing that encapsules your big head?” he yells back, and Hoseok blows him a raspberry.
“Leave, fool! Only intellectuals allowed in this conversation!”
“Whatever, I’m taking the dumb bed!” he screams as he disappears into the room, and Namjoon only shrugs.
“We really need a better apartment,” he says.
“What you need to do is listen to me,” Hoseok sasses back. “Look here, Namjoon. This is my energy detector. The one I said I’ve been working on in my free time.”
“The reason you don’t get enough sleep and literally drank seven cups of coffee--”
“You did it too, so don’t try to bring that back up, that’s not the point. The point is, I’ve finally finished assembling all the nitty-gritty pieces of the device! Look, let me turn it on. It’s supposed to calculate a net average of the energy level of the surrounding area by taking into consideration all the electric fields that it reads through summing the dipole moments and magnetic attractions and repulsions, and some other stuff. I’m going to try writing a paper on it, I’ll let you read it when I’m done.”
“Cool, did you test it out yet?”
“I did indeed!” The smile on Hoseok’s face is smug, like a little child who has won a race against another kid in the supermarket aisles. “The radius of detection is a little small, but I was able to hook it up to an amplifier by the main computer in my lab--”
“Are you allowed to do that?”
“Shush, Namjoon, the professor’s all for self-experimentation as long as I don’t screw with his lab’s experiments. And anyways, with a little bit of coding we could probably hook it up to any ol’ computer and let Google Maps do its thing. I printed out some of the readings I got around the city though, from places I’ve been to and have stayed far away from and the readings are fairly accurate. It needs a little bit of fine tuning--”
“It needs a lot of fine tuning,” Namjoon raises an eyebrow, his gaze glossing over the many sheets of paper. “There’s a lot of white noise on your machine. There’s weird fuzzes here and there in certain areas.”
Hoseok leans over, a frown on his face. “Yeah,” he agrees, “I don’t know about that. It works completely fine in the lab and in our apartment, but if we head on over to random streets and malls and stuff there’s a bit of disturbance that keeps showing.”
“Is it the electricity causing an issue? Some places might have their own machines that create a magnetic or electric field--”
“I mean, yeah, but some of these are literally desolate areas without a single working light. And usually it should ignore the readings that are neutralized, which is, I don’t know, most of the world. Even in the busier places, I tried to account for some fluctuations in the math. See, if you look here,” he points to one of the sheets, “this was the reading I had for the new plaza that was built last year. I went around looking through the various establishments and interviewed the construction and development managers--”
“The fuck? You managed to do that? God damn it Hobi, just go be an engineer or a business manager or something.”
“Shut up, my communication skills at least got me somewhere instead of all your philosophy and crap.”
“Philosophy is the foundation of theory, stupid. What do you think Aristotle and Copernicus had to work with before they had any information?”
“Fucking mathematician, are you going to listen to me or not?”
“Speaking of math, what happened with your math? Do you have the results?”
“My math is correct, you ass, I had Wonshik check it over for me--”
“Rip Wonshik.”
“Fuck you! Anyways, as I was saying, I subtracted the calculated energy levels from the reading off the machine to try and get a natural energy. The error due to fluctuation shouldn’t be high, maybe around the 10 to the negatives, but for some reason it keeps giving me deviated readings at a magnitude of five, and I have no idea what’s going on. Ah, shit, my four years of hard work and dedication..!”
“Maybe the energy level is just supposed to be that high? I don’t know man, my specialty is in gravitational pulls and thermodynamics,” Namjoon shrugs as he keeps flipping through the pages. Raises an eyebrow again. Makes a confused expression. “Uh, Hoseok?”
“Yeah,” Hoseok replies, too busy fiddling with his detector.
“Did you look through all of these?”
“Yeah, duh, why?”
“There’s one that’s just got crazy spikes all over it. And the graphical view is just all black.”
“Yeah, holy shit, that one, I don’t even know what the hell was going on there, I just had to get out of the area as quickly as I possibly could. It was fucking creepy, okay?”
“Where’d you go?”
“The graveyard at night.”
“...”
“...”
“Dude. What the fuck?”
“Look!” Hoseok’s eyes are wide in anger. “I had Minhyuk choose the locations for me, and he made this stupid program that did a randomized coordinate system of the damn city, okay? Fricking 37.56632° N, 126.97845° E spelled out the damn graveyard--holy shit, I wanted to kill him when he handed me that list, but I was supposed to follow the experiment without deviations and ugh I’m never doing that again!”
Namjoon blinks at him. “You… remembered the exact coordinates.”
“I’m traumatized.”
The blond sighs, running a hand through his hair. “That’s fucking crazy,” he says as he goes back to staring at the paper filled with spikes of energy. Hoseok takes this time to collapse on the couch, finally placing the box contraption down gently onto the coffee table. The apartment is a pleasant quiet for a few minutes until Namjoon speaks up again.
“Hey, you know what this reminds me of?” he asks, and Hoseok hums as a gesture for him to continue. “You know all those crazy spiels that used the law that energy isn’t created or destroyed, only transferred and tried to facilitate the belief in ghosts and explain their existence? It’s kind of crazy, but I think your machine is literally showing the exact evidence to that discussion.”
“Uh,” Hoseok shoots the other a grimace. “That’s scary.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, crazy, but like--” he bends down, kneeling onto the carpet as he begins to lay out the papers across the table. Namjoon places all the sheets that include a few more significantly higher energy readings close to the two of them. “Hey, tell me where these readings were taken.”
Hoseok props himself onto one elbow to get a clearer view. “Uh, that one’s the plaza, and that one’s the graveyard. The paper to your right is from the mining site a little farther south of here, I got permission to enter the site for ‘educational research purposes,’ there’s the hospital, the abandoned parking lot by the southern streets, an apartment, the…”
As he lists the information, Namjoon diligently jots them down in his phone, eyes glinting with more and more curiosity as he looks through the locations Hoseok is mentioning. Before the other manages to finish, he rushes up and into the bedroom, eliciting a groan from a just woken up Taehyung. The sound is largely ignored, and Namjoon runs back out with his laptop. Hoseok watches him curiously.
“What are you doing?” he asks, and Namjoon is almost shaking in excitement.
“Shit, hyung, this is crazy,” he calls, and the rare usage of the term really catches Hoseok’s attention now. “Look, all those places you’ve mentioned? I can’t be one hundred percent sure about them, but like, the graveyard, the hospital, those are places where a lot of deaths and corpses have gathered. I heard the plaza was built in the same foundation as a previous project that crashed due to bad planning. There were a lot of accidents, apparently. And the mining site--that’s a complete site for things like this to happen. What if the ghosts thing is actually real? We could have just made a crazy discovery.”
Hoseok blinks at him, worried. “Namjoonie,” he coos, “did you eat something bad again?”
“No, I’m serious, just think about it. It all makes sense if you put these pieces of information together. The deaths, the readings--what if the energy levels are due to reactions from the spirits themselves. I think you may have just discovered something much greater than you thought you have,” he says, and Hoseok returns the excited look with an uncertain one.
“I...have? I mean, what do you want me to do with that information?”
“Hoseok,” the other sighs, exasperated. “Don’t you see what I’m getting at here? Look at the statistics, just-- here, out of all these locations you’ve visited there is evidence of the presence of spiritual energy in more than half of them. Does that sound natural to you? There’s almost half as many ghosts as there are inhabitants in this city! It’s an infestation.”
Hoseok scoffs at this. “What, so you want to go on a ghost-hunt or something? Come on, Namjoon, I can’t just drop everything I’m currently working on to pursue a thesis that might have no conclusion.”
“That’s what all the great people do, though. Dropped out of school, quit their seemingly promising jobs, thrown away everything only to discover something greater. And anyways, if you try to apply for, say, a grant in conducting the research, this could not only help you in answering your question but also in funding your research and that thesis of yours. Your paper won’t be under your professor’s work anymore; you’ll have your own theory, man! That stuff you did on the side will become relevant.”
“...I mean, this is mostly your way of thinking based on all those crazy books you’ve been reading about theory and stuff. I can mention it to the university, but I don’t think anything would come out of it,” he shrugs, and Namjoon nods quickly.
“Do it, I’ll have your back. We have all the numerical data right here. All we need is visual proof, but...they can’t shoot down an idea with solid backing just because the concept of ghosts has been rejected for so long, right?”
--
“I can’t fucking believe--” Namjoon hisses as he stares at the email on Hoseok’s computer, the latter only giving him a side-stare of ‘I-told-you-so’ written on his face.
“I mean, if they rejected Harvey and Mendel and Semmelweis even for common sense principles today, it’s not surprising they’d reject Hoseokie-hyung,” Taehyung reasons as he sips his drink, looking over their shoulders.
“What are those,” Hoseok deadpans, and the younger sighs.
“Fucking hell, let me compose a proposal,” Namjoon says, ignoring the presence of the other two as he opens a new document and quickly begins to type into it.
“Hey hey hey, slow down,” Hoseok warns. “You’ve just inputted two curse words in the first sentence. An email of ninety percent anger isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Taehyung agrees as he scrolls the twitter feed on his phone. “Hoseok-hyung’s email of ninety percent professionality and ten percent hope and uncertainty was rejected, after all, and it wasn’t even remotely hostile.”
Hoseok tries unsuccessfully to knock the other’s drink across his face, and Taehyung flings his hand at him in disapproval. In front of the computer, Namjoon pulls at his hair before he pushes the laptop away from him in frustration, Hoseok choking on his saliva as he goes to cradle it. “Ugh, screw this university and the physical limits it puts on us,” he hisses. “We don’t need to rely on them anyways!”
“Uh, no,” Hoseok corrects slowly. “We kind of do need to rely on them. We’re poor, and Seoul is expensive as fuck. We’re rotating a bed.”
“I know, but like--” Namjoon’s stubborn side is out, and Hoseok sighs. When Namjoon gets stubborn, he gets determined. And when Namjoon is determined, things usually happen. “We should just do our own thing. Like, on the side. Create a system that will allow us to look into these theories and experiment outside of the lab.”
“Look man, I know you’re 160 percent into your trade, but I don’t want to be the living breathing definition of a physics man, okay? I actually like having a life,” Hoseok snarks, and Namjoon flips him the finger. “Hey!” he calls, offended. “And, it’s useless if we don’t gain anything from it. Like, I’d rather be doing a part-time if I’m forced to work even more, just because I’d get paid less than the shitty minimum wage of society.”
“Well, what if we could make it a part-time?” Namjoon suggests, the life returning to his voice. “Come on, Hoseok, it could be like a business thing. You get your frugal ass satisfied, I get my curiosity satisfied. Everyone gains.”
“You want to lose the last few hours of rest you have?” Hoseok asks. “For some stupid ghostbusting roleplay?”
Suddenly, Taehyung slams a hand down on the table, startling the both of them. His eyes are wide with excitement, and he speaks with a jittery voice. “Did you just say ghostbusting?” he asks. “Because honestly, that sounds so fucking cool and I’d be down.”
“Wha--what, what--” Hoseok splutters, and Namjoon stands quickly, dimples showing from the wideness of his smile.
“Tae, you really are my bro, man!” The two of them exchange high fives.
“Aren’t you a biologist?! You’re supposed to be focusing on the studies of human life and some shit like that, aren’t you?” Taehyung turns back to him with a serious expression.
“Hyung,” he breathes. “No one can learn about life if they don’t embrace the facts about death.”
Hoseok gapes. “Are you two crazy?! Why are you so excited about the prospect of ghosts?! They fucking haunt you and move shit when you can’t see them! Don’t you watch the movies?!?!”
The room is quiet, and slowly Namjoon and Taehyung turn to each other, devious smiles on their faces. Hoseok’s stomach feels queasy.
“Ohhhhh,” Taehyung says slowly. “I see why Hoseok-hyung won’t agree to our idea.”
“You’re scared of ghosts,” Namjoon adds teasingly, and Hoseok visibly bristles at them.
“That’s not what I was trying to say,” he hisses.
“But it’s true, right?” And Taehyung is downright purring now, the smirk on his face serving to rile Hoseok up more and more.
“I’m not scared!”
“But yes you are.”
“I’m not.”
“He’s scared,” they snicker to each other.
“I’m NOT!”
“Scaredy-cat~”
“FINE!” Hoseok screams. “I’LL DO IT. I’M NOT SCARED, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. HOW’S THAT SOUND. FINE.”
“FINE, DO IT THEN.”
“FINE, I WILL.”
“FINE!”
“FINE!!!”
--
“I honestly can’t believe we’re doing this,” Hoseok grumbles, eyes bags prominent as he fiddles with his machine, fingers moving between it and the computer it is connected to. “Fucking nerds,” he hisses again as he angrily backspaces when his code shows an error. “Do it for the science,” he scoffs, taking a large gulp of his coffee. His sixth cup of coffee today. At least he hasn’t broken his record of seven yet.
“Hey, Namjoon-hyung just texted the group chat,” Taehyung says as he leans backwards in his chair. “He’s coming back now. Apparently he was able to put together some sort of contraption to collect ghosts in.”
“The fuck?!?! Within a week?? What the fuck is he?! Fuck people with high IQs. Don’t fucking talk to me!”
Yep, Hoseok-hyung is really irritated right now, Taehyung notes. ‘You can’t sit with us anymore,’ he types into the group chat before placing his phone down onto the counter and scooting closer towards the other. “What are you doing again, hyung?”
“Trying to connect this shit to a computer so we have a damn wider range because Namjoon can’t code for shit and you aren’t doing shit, leave me alone!”
“Hey,” Taehyung calls out with a whine, “I was the one who binge watched all those ghostbusting movies and told you what you guys needed to do. Stop being mean!”
Hoseok sighs and leans back into his chair, running a hand across his face in frustration. “Sorry, sorry, I just,” he sighs, “my eyes are dizzy because I haven’t looked away from this screen in so long and I have no idea if this is even working and I’m trying to connect Minhyuk’s code but I just got fifty issues to debug and Namjoon goes and straight up builds a thing from the movies like it’s no big deal.”
“I mean, he hasn’t tested it yet, but he says he’ll get on that as soon as he can within the week, and then our business will be up and running!” Taehyung flashes a wide smile, and the energy relaxes Hoseok’s muscles. He returns the attempt at positivity with a tired smile of his own.
“In the meantime,” the other reaches for his laptop and brings it over for Hoseok to see, “I tried making some flyers. What do you think, hyung? Genius, or genius?”
“Creepy and untrustworthy,” Hoseok muses, and Taehyung pouts.
“Damn, I thought getting rid of the X-ray filter would’ve helped it a little,” he mumbles, retreating back into his corner to click away at the design.
The room is a busy kind of quiet, for the next hour or so, with the only intrusions of noise being clicks and clacks, and the whirring of overheating machinery. It is disturbed, sadly, by a loud slamming off the door, opening to reveal a frenzied Namjoon, who is welcomed with a snarl and a dismissive glance.
He frowns at the lack of recognition, but ignores it in favor of heading towards the other physicist. “Here, look at this!” Namjoon says excitedly, and thrusts something towards Hoseok, who looks at it with something akin to refusal.
“Is this the concraption that you’ve managed to come up with in a week’s worth of time, completely overshadowing my efforts and unintentionally belittling my brain in the process?” he asks.
“You mean contraption,” Namjoon corrects.
“I know what I said.”
“You get really bitchy when you don’t sleep enough, Hobi. You should take a nap, really,” he voices again, concern present in his voice this time, and Hoseok rubs his hand across his face. He looks back at the other with a guilty expression.
“Shit, sorry, I did it again. What is this?”
“A vacuum collector,” Namjoon answers. “So Taehyung said we needed something to hold in possible balls of energy, if that’s what we’re assuming the spirits are made out of, and so I was in the library for a good 18 hours trying to brainstorm a way to do that when--”
“Did you just say 18 hours? Straight?”
“Why didn’t you do the proton pack?” Taehyung asks with a pout, and Namjoon gives him a look.
“Because we’re poor,” he replies, and all three of them sigh.
“...So. What is this again?” Hoseok asks, and Namjoon peers down at the thing in his hands.
“Compressed and vacuumed air complete with a vacuum tube to suction valve in any ghosts, and small panel that collects any sort of energy to transfer it into a usable form,” he shrugs. “I made the inside something similar to that of a black hole, but if all the parts of this thing work correctly we should be able to see an energy transformation in the form of light or heat. It’ll take a bit of fine-tuning, but first I need to test it to see how it works and where it doesn’t.”
“Possibility of failure?” Hoseok asks, turning back to his computer. When he runs the code this time, there are no crashes, and his eyes widen.
“Quite honestly? Very high.”
“Possibility of success?” Taehyung raises an eyebrow, and Namjoon gives him a smile.
“Not zero.”
--
“This is most definitely not a good idea,” Namjoon states as he reach the top of the stairs, following the hallway down to the very old corner. There stands a rusted door, paint chipping and windows shielded, as if no life seemed to take place inside.
“I told you that like, two weeks ago,” Hoseok snarks automatically, eyes not leaving his own small machine. “But nooo, you two had to get all excited about the stupid idea of ghosts, and here we are.”
“Okay, it was your dumb thing that gave us these coordinates, so if we happen to be entering the domain of some serial killer, then it’s really your fault.”
“I mean, people live here, right? It is a residence, after all. It can’t be that bad.”
Taehyung steps forward and knocks loudly on the door, Hoseok and Namjoon watching him curiously. “Does someone really live here?” Hoseok asks incredulously. “The outside looks like a wreck.”
“I don’t know,” Taehyung shrugs. “They say you should enter empty hotel rooms after you knock on it once to let any residing ghosts leave the room first. I was just doing the same thing.”
Namjoon furrows his brows at that. “Aren’t we here to catch ghosts? What happens if they leave?”
Taehyung blinks. “Oh.”
“You idiot!”
Just then, there is a small shuffling from the other side of the room, and the three of them pause in wait, sharing silent glances with each other. Not a minute later, the door opens to reveal a person with wild bed hair at the back of his head, eyebrows raised in an effort to keep his eyes open. His eyelids, however, are drooping, and the clothes on him are disheveled and too big to fit correctly.
“Uh,” he voices, “hello? Can I help you?” His voice is scratchy, sounding almost sick, but otherwise it is pleasant to hear.
“Man, I did not believe someone would actually come out, but I’m so glad you did,” Hoseok lets out a relieved sigh, and next to him Namjoon rolls his eyes.
“Uhh, what?” the stranger asks.
“You have to let us in,” Taehyung says, and the man gives him a confused look.
“...Um, what?”
“There’s a ghost in your apartment,” Namjoon supplies, and the man pales slightly, although he doesn’t seem like he believes them. “If you let us in, we can help you clear your residence. Or, at least, that’s what we’ve hypothesized. If you see here--” he gestures to Hoseok’s machine, the readings fluctuating drastically as the detector points in the direction of the interior, “--the energy readings are pointing towards the inside of your residence, while the rest of the area seems clear of this response. So we’ve deduced that there’s a high energy concentrated within--”
“Uh, wait, I’m kind of, too sick for this,” the other stops them, clearing his throat into the back of his hand. He looks at them like they have three heads. “Is this physics or something?”
“The basis behind this contraption is electric and magnetic fields, yes,” Hoseok supplies. “That’s my concentration! I’m a fourth year graduate student at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology. We’re all graduate students, actually.”
“Oh, uh, sorry, I only know force equals mass times acceleration, so… I’m just gonna--”
“It’s also qE with an arrow, apparently,” Taehyung supplies.
“...What’s that?”
“Force.”
“Well, there’s also the magnetic field to take into account if you look at the total force in a system. We’re really looking at energy here, though, so it’s more like U we want to find.”
“Isn’t it E?”
“U is E.”
“That’s impossible! Don’t belittle my knowledge of the alphabet.”
“What the hell have you been doing in all of your classes?!” From the doorway, the stranger watches the exchange, feeling his head starting to throb and his nose starting to itch again. What a waste of all those hours he spent in bed watching reruns and hugging that box of tissues.
“Uh,” the other says, and the three of them turn to him. “So I’m just going to…” and he makes to shut the door right as Taehyung shoves a foot into the small opening. The stranger looks peeved now, a little mix of angry and on the verge of a panic attack. “What the hell?!” he shouts, and the sudden increase in volume causes him to cough. On the other side of the door, the three graduates exchange glances, waiting for the boy’s coughing to subside. “Ah *cough* fuck *cough* see *cough* what *cough* you *cough* did *cough*?”
The sudden coughing fit, although unluckily for him, causes him to loosen his push on the door, and Hoseok takes this time to push the three of them inwards, Namjoon toppling into the room with Taehyung behind him, swinging the door as he tries to steady himself using the hold.
The small apartment is a mess. There are papers littering the floor and trashcans filled to the brim with crumpled tissues and packets of instant food. The overall place has a smell of mild wall mold mixed with a lot of lemon. Taehyung makes a face when he sees a bowl of boiled broccoli on the table, next to an almost empty glass of an equally disgusting concoction.
“Hey!” the man is cut off by another coughing fit, the force of it causing him to bend over and hack into his arms. He looks more tired as he rises from his position, and Hoseok gives him a worried glance.
“Dude, you alright?”
“I’m gonna call the cops,” the boy croaks, and at this the three of them pounce.
“Nononono you shouldn’t do that!”
Just hear us out, there’s a good reason for this-- Namjoon!”
Namjoon holds the device in his hands higher up in the air. “Look, the waves are getting an abnormally high reading in this house,” he says. “If our theory is right, your apartment is currently housing a ghost. If you let us, we can rid the place of this bad energy."
“You’re wasting all my good energy,” he fires back, before doubling over into another coughing fit. Taehyung steps forward, lips curled in neither a smile nor a frown.
“You know, you’re dry-hacking. Have you been drinking water or the like? Broccoli and all that other shit is good, but you should stick to some softer foods that are easier to swallow so you don’t risk aggravating your throat more.”
The other blinks at him and nods. “I have,” he says, before climbing onto the couch. “I’ll keep that into mind, though. Thanks. Holy shit, I feel so tired all the time.”
“You look tired. Are you always this pale? Do you have bouts of freezing?”
“I mean, I guess? I don’t know.”
“If you’ve been sick for more than a few weeks you should go see the doctor. It could be strep throat if anything, have you tried pressing your sides to see if it hurts? Or is the back of your throat swollen?”
“Uhm, I don’t think so…”
“I didn’t know you were premed,” Hoseok glances over at him, and Taehyung turns to him.
“I’m not.”
“...Are you spirit mediums or nurses or physicists..?” the boy asks. His expression is completely confused.
“We’re ghostbusters!” Taehyung supplies. “We can help you get rid of your symptoms.”
This claim seems to catch the other’s attention. “You’re what?”
“Ghostbusters,” Taehyung repeats. “That sickness you have is induced by the spirit sucking your life force out of you--” the other two watch as the stranger’s expression turns horrified, “--you know how spirits need the energy to keep in existence, but because they’re no longer alive they’re not allowed to produced their own and so instead they try and take it from living humans which in return drags them into the other world instead?”
“I--” the other starts.
“It starts out with you getting sickly, but I’m sure it’s been like this for a while and only getting worse? I can see all those green energy drinks you have on your tables, but they won’t help. Soon you’ll find it harder and harder to move, and then eat, and then breathe, and soon--”
“Um--” Namjoon starts behind him but Taehyung shoots the two of them a crazed look, and they shut up.
“We’re the solution to all your problems, so if you believe us you’ll let us do our job and we’ll be gone in a flash. If not there’s always the florist a few streets down.”
The man seems close to quivering now, eyes wide and staring frightfully at the three of them. “Are you saying I’ll die?” he whimpers, and Taehyung only smiles.
“What’s your answer?”
--
“So, you say you’ve been sick for a month already?” Taehyung nods as he scrutinizes the boy.
“Um, yeah. There’s just a lot of coughing and sneezing. I guess I’m pretty tired all the time, too. I-- I didn’t know it was because of a ghost, there didn’t seem to be anything serious other than annoying headaches and fatigue.”
“That’s because it’s not strong enough to get a stable hold on you or the place it inhabits. See? Look here, the waves on this reading keep fluctuating within certain boundaries and after every few minutes. It’s trying to gain control, but it’s not able to.”
“...I...still don’t really get what you’re trying to say. You can fix it though, right?”
Taehyung sighs dramatically. “Yes! Yes, we can fix it. Here let me run through that again. So you know when you’re being haunted by a spirit, it slowly…”
On the other side of the worn couch, Hoseok and Namjoon share a look. “Where is he getting this?” Hoseok whispers to the other, and Namjoon only shrugs.
‘No idea,’ he mouths as the stranger begins to cough violently into the crook of his arm.
“Oh hey,” Hoseok digs in his bag and pulls out a few wrapped pieces of the said candy. “Here, you can take some of these cough drops. I always keep these on hand. I get sick easily.”
“Oh, thanks,” the other says. His voice is a pitch lower and slightly more hoarse than before.
“What was your name again?”
“Hm?” the other is in the midst of popping a cough drop into his mouth. “Oh, Jeon Jungkook. Nice to meet you. By the way, I appreciate all this high-tech stuff, it’s really cool, but you guys know you shouldn’t show up to people’s houses with a bunch of weird machines and then try to force your way in, right?”
The three of them exchange a glance. “But you let us in, kind of.”
“No I didn’t. Not at first, anyways. I think I can take you guys in a fight, though, so it doesn’t really matter. But I’m kind of--” he pauses to cough, “sickish right now. Sucks.” He turns to Taehyung again.
“Is this going to cost a fee? Like an exorcism thing? Because I really can’t afford that, but you can take some of my broccoli and the last of my rice.”
“Well, it’s your lucky day, because our business is just up and running, so we’re doing test drives around the city! If it works, we’ll see your improvement rate and decide on a price afterwards. For now try not to worry too much about it!”
“He should be a salesperson,” Hoseok mumbles.
“We’re all studying the wrong thing,” Namjoon adds quietly. Taehyung whips around to face him, and the action is so sudden that the two physicists straighten up instinctively, clamping their mouths shut.
“So,” Taehyung starts, “those two guys over there will be your go-to people. We’ve come prepared with devices, and we just have to detect the exact location of the ghost and we’ll be right on it so Hoseok-hyung! Chop chop! Jungkook needs his sleep!”
“Are you sure we can just uh,” Hoseok starts, looking around the house, “go through your place? I mean, I know we kind of barged in here, but I feel kind of bad now that...erm, yeah,” he finishes lamely. Now that you’ve been completely fooled into believing Taehyung’s crazy spiel is not something he can easily bring up after half an hour of the other listening to the biologist’s speech.
But the youngster only brushes the question away with a wave of his hand.
“Oh yeah, sure, go do whatever it is you wanted to do,” Jungkook says half-heartedly. “I don’t really have anything for you to steal. My credit card’s been canceled and all my money is at the landlord’s. I guess you could take my food, but…”
Namjoon furrows a brow at him. “You’re living a pretty sad life,” he comments, and Jungkook gives him a blank look. Namjoon clears his throat.
“Anyways, Hoseok, can you turn your device on again?”
“Uh, yeah, it already is. I just have to increase the sensitivity of the receptors and lower the amplitude of the waves so that we can get a smaller field of focus and…” as he says it, the small boxed device flashes awake, previously blank screen now showing sharp waves moving across its surface.
“That looks like orgo class,” Taehyung comments.
“What the heck,” Jungkook breathes, eyes glinting as he watches the three of them gathered around the machine. “That’s so cool.”
“Uh, it’s giving off crazy readings, but I’d say that’s because we’re already pretty close. It was like this around the front of the apartment too. Mind if we walk around?”
Jungkook shakes his head. “No, go ahead,” he states.
The apartment is fairly small, and the three of them reach their target area quickly when they walk into the kitchen and suddenly, Hoseok’s machine begins to make a whirring sound from the force of the reactions.
“Ohhh lord, I think we have our mark!” Hoseok calls as he quickly turns the dials, quieting the device’s response and placing it on the counter. “Okay, Namjoon, now it’s all you.”
“Uhhh, what--what do you want me to do,” Namjoon asks, digging through his bag and pulling out his own invention.
“I don’t know, you wanted to test this thing, you should know what to do with it.”
“I mean, I was kind of hoping you’d give me an exact location, not just a ‘oh hey it’s in this kitchen.’”
“Wait, so how legitimate are you guys again?” Jungkook asks from the back, and they pretend they don’t hear his question.
“I think if I get anymore specific the thing is gonna break. I’m not risking it okay?”
“I mean, I built it to point towards a specific direction…” the other mumbles. Looking a little lost, Namjoon holds his hands outwards and turns towards a few directions, before his eyes flicker over to Jungkook, who is gradually beginning to look more and more unimpressed. Swallowing, he flicks the switch on, and the machine crackles a few times, but otherwise it stays quiet, no sign of anything being sucked or absorbed within it.
They wait for a while longer, until Hoseok finally turns to him and crosses his arms.
“Are you sure you know how to use this thing? Is it broken?” Hoseok asks, and Namjoon raises an eye at him.
“Uh, hello, I built it? It works perfectly fine, the thing is vibrating and I can feel a small suction from my hands.”
“But I see no energy, Namjoon, where’s the evidence?”
Taehyung makes grabby hands, and without second thought Namjoon hands it over to him. The two physicists continue arguing while Taehyung shoots Jungkook a look, and the both of them shrug. He shakes it a little. No response. Passes it over to Jungkook, who smacks it a little. Still no response. He passes it back.
“Hey, I spent one week of sleepless nights on this thing, what can you expect?!”
“What did you expect? We’re in this random kid’s house telling him crazy stuff about how it’s infested with ghosts--”
“That was because your machine had a reading and I was trying to help justify the past two years of your life.”
“Oh,” Hoseok splutters, “mine has usable results! Maybe not for ghosts but we can use it to tune the required--”
“Shit!!” a loud cry interrupts both of their spiels, and when they turn over Taehyung is holding the device as far away from him as he possibly can, the thing sparking and black smoke rising from it. Jungkook looks horrified, and he glances at the smoke detector before rushing to the window and throwing it open.
“Holy crap, throw it out!”
“Throw it out?!” Namjoon screams, “I fucking built that baby--”
“I’m not doing shit with this, there’s fucking sparks on me, you take it!!” Taehyung thrusts it towards him, and Namjoon catches it with a scream. As it meets his hands, the contraption starts being enveloped in short bursts of electric bolts, and he screams even louder, Hoseok joining in the noise.
At this time, the smoke begins to rise up and fill the house despite the open air, and the smoke detector starts to ring loudly. One inhale has them all coughing as Namjoon tries to throw the thing out the window, but like static drawing it in it is pulled towards the top of the refrigerator, hovering in the air and shaking violently before a loud hissing noise is heard.
The place is a mess for a few minutes as Jungkook tries to stop the alarm in a panic that his landlord will throw him out of the house, and in his effort he accidentally drops it into the sink, where it crackles, electricity flowing out of it in crazy waves before it dies down just as quickly, its noise shrinking from loud beeps to muffled clutters.
Almost frighteningly quick, the rest of the apartment stills, and the spherical capsule falls to the floor with a dull thud. All that is left is the noise of four people coughing and grey dispersing from the air.
The rest of them scramble to catch their breath and rush towards the window for fresh air, still coughing as they rub at their eyes. The black air filters out of the open window, and disappears quickly into the atmosphere. Namjoon’s face, which had been the closest to the device during its crazed reaction, is a slight shade of grey from the smoke. Taehyung, recovering first from the shock, looks at him and laughs.
“Hyung!” he calls, “you look like you’ve just been in an explosion!” And he cracks up even harder.
Next to him, Hoseok also begins to chuckle, his own panic fading away. “I just knew you wouldn’t be able to make a working device that easily! Hah! It took me years, get off your high horse!”
“I helped you with some of your shit--” Namjoon hisses back at him, before he heads over to pick up the container and peer at it. It looks the same as usual without all of the fuzz and black smoke, and he frowns. “That’s strange,” he says, “I can’t seem to see where it failed. I didn’t even input any energy for it to short-circuit from...”
“Wow, fuck you all,” Jungkook hisses from where he had been squished over the windowsill from the force of three people clambering on top of him. “I should’ve known better than to trust you guys, the landlord is going to kill me, that smoke detector is gonna cost four days of work, oh my--”
“Look,” Hoseok starts, his face morphing into one of guilt. “Uh, if anything, we can help you clean up and pay for whatever happens--”
“--to your smoke detector,” Taehyung finishes, and Hoseok shoots him a glare, which he only shrugs at. He rubs his thumbs to his other fingers. ‘No money,’ it silently means, and Hoseok sighs.
Jungkook is still in a state of shock as he looks over his apartment. After a minute of silent despair, however, he mumbles something that sounds kind of like “fuck it” and heads over to where Namjoon is, his eyes filled more with curiosity than anything else.
“Other than the fact that I’m kind of screwed, that was so cool. Like out a movie or something,” he breathes, and Taehyung cheers.
“See? I told you ghostbusting was cool!” They ignore him.
“What the hell is that thing anyways?” Jungkook voices, eyes blown wide.
“Oh, uh, it’s supposed to be a vacuum container. But, uh, sorry about your house man--” Namjoon begins to say as Jungkook reaches over for the contraption. Before his fingers make contact, however, the device lights up an aggressively bright blue, and in unison all four of them scream. Namjoon throws the container upwards in a frenzy, and in an instant both Hoseok and Taehyung dash for it in the air. They knock their heads together as they fall, but the object is unbroken and safe in their hands.
“Aw, shit!”
“Owww!”
Jungkook watches from where he fell over in shock, the feeling in his legs slowly returning. Hoseok shoots Namjoon a glare.
“Dude! What the hell!”
“Holy shit, it lit up what the fuck is going on?!”
“I don’t know, ask the genius who built this thing! Namjoon!”
Namjoon holds his hands up quickly and takes a step back. “I don’t know, that thing just suddenly lit up, there wasn’t even any batteries in it, what the heck?”
“D-did, you catch the ghost?” Jungkook whimpers from the couch, and all three of them turn to look at him.
“...”
Suddenly, the three graduates’ eyes widen, and they rush over to the kitchen counter, where Hoseok’s device is lying quietly where he left it. Jungkook watches with eyes of resignation as they converse in the corner.
“Guys, guys, guys it’s quiet oh my god what the hell--”
“What that really a ghost? We fucking caught a ghost!”
“The energy from the ghost is--that makes so much sense--”
“Guys, we can use ghosts as electricity what the fuck--”
“Are you fucking dumb?! I’m not sitting in a room full of fifty of these weird glass balls that release black smoke and fucking contain ghosts--”
“But holy shit, I can’t believe that still worked, I mean damn we actually caught a ghost!!” Taehyung turns to look at Jungkook, who blinks up at him.
“Dude,” he says, a wide smile spilling on his face. “We caught your ghost! I’m going to finally have a five-course dinner at a French restaurant with our payment!”
Jungkook blinks again, and his gaze moves to the object that is now flashing dimmer and dimmer each time, almost as if whatever is inside of it is steadily losing the power to subsist. He looks back at the three of them. “...Huh?”