°˖✧Gaijin✧˖°

°˖✧Face Down✧˖°

[Author's Note: Hi everyone! Sorry I didn't post last week. To be honest, I've been feeling a lot of burnout lately and I feel like I as well as you guys aren't into this story as much anymore which is sad but... well, I've been doing this for a long while so hyperfixations will come and go. But here's this chapter and I have more to post later too.]

There are times when Megumi gets lonely. This is one of those times.

She trails behind Ari and Shigeo as they chit chat as they walk out of their school. It's not as if she doesn't like that they're close - she really is happy, but... well, it's a tough situation. She can't often get responses when she speaks aloud during the day because it'll look like they're talking to thin air, which... Well, people will think they're nuts that way.

She can talk to Dimple all day every day, though, which she does often even though he pisses her off with his tendency to say crude stuff. But sometimes she wishes that she had a friend that was like her and understood her form from experience rather than empathy alone. She's not an evil spirit like Dimple is. She's just... a spirit. Nothing more, nothing less.

She wrings her hands as she thinks to herself. If she could have any other fellow spirit friend... She thinks that she would like someone around her age. Sure, she's been around for many years since that day, but she still feels as though she's sixteen. She doesn't feel... Shit, how old is she now if we're being technical? Somewhere in her forties if she had to guess.

She'd prefer someone who passed away around the same era as her, too. That way, she could gush about the celebrities and the media she loved so much back then and they could actually understand it. She still remembers how devastated she was when she saw the headline about Miki Matsubara's passing plastered on the TV. That was when the last family before the Anayas lived there, too... Before it became abandoned.

"Megumi? You're being pretty quiet. Is there something on your mind?" Ari asks, looking at her with a slight furrow in her brow over her shoulder.

She flinches, being dragged out of her thoughts from the question. She rubs the back of her neck, a sheepish half-smile coming upon her lips. "Oh, sorry... I was just thinking, that's all."

"What about?"

"About..." She trails off, pressing her fingers together not unlike an anime villain, but in a much more nervous way. She doesn't want to hurt Ari's feelings, but she's not the type to lie, either.-* She shrugs. "About whether or not there are people like me... Spirits. Not evil spirits, but plain ol' spirits. Sometimes, I wonder what it's like to have someone like me around... that's all."

Ari doesn't say anything for a moment, her expression unreadable. Megumi worries for a split second that she's offended her in some way or another, but she brightens up a bit, offering a little smile in her direction. "What if we tried to find them?" She asks. "Who better to go ghost hunting than us? I mean, it's not like it'll be hard."

Her eyes widen a fraction of an inch behind her bangs. "Wha...? You're serious?"

Ari looks over at Shigeo. "You don't mind if we have a little bit of a detour, right?" She asks, which immediately gets her a little shake of the head. Knowing him, all he cares about is getting to spend time with her no matter what they're doing.

Her never-ending kindness is something that always pulls on my heartstrings, she thinks to herself.

"Let's go, then! I've seen a whole lot of places that are rumored to be haunted on social media," she chirps, pulling her phone from her bag and beginning to look for said locations on Twitter. "Though, knowing how reliable these people can be, I bet a whole lot of them are going to be hoaxes... it's a good thing that Seasoning City is so big."