The Tale of Jordan Frye and Jimmy Casket

Chapter 3: Ghost and Toast

From the moment he woke up, Johnny Ghost, Paranormal Investigator Extraordinaire, knew something was off. First of all, his night was peaceful and dreamless. More specifically, he had no nightmares. When the fogginess of sleep wore off a bit, he noticed something was missing. Not from his bedroom but, inside him. It left like a heavy weight was lifted off his shoulders. A sinking feeling quickly took its place when he realized why he felt this way. Johnny jumped out of bed and barged into the next room. There his partner and employee, Johnny Toast was rudely awoken by the break in. "For the hundredth time," Toast nagged Ghost in a thick British accent. "Please knock before you-,"

"Casket's gone."

That woke Toast up real good. He fully took off his sleeping mask and got out of bed. "Gone? What do you mean gone?!"

"I don't feel him anymore!"

"Could it just be that he finally... died?"

"No, no. According to Venturian, Jimmy is one of the most popular characters on his..." Ghost snapped his fingers trying to remember a term, "Oh, what's that platform called? The one that connects this world to the 'reality'?"

"Channel?" Toast guessed.

"Yes! That's it! I really need to brush back up on my YouTube terminology. Besides the point! Someone with that much popularity can't just vanish. It'd have to be someone more like Sue or something for that to happen."

"Yeah..." The two Johnnys stood there in thought, trying to come up with anything as quickly as they could.

The ghost hunter realized something. That realization filled him with dread. "Oh no..."

"What?"

Ghost looked Toast in the eye. "What if he's not on this plane anymore?" he asked, "What if he passed it?"

The idea scared them both. If Jimmy could move in between dimensions without a host such as Johnny Ghost, that would only spell out trouble and problems for so many innocent people. Toast shook that hideous image out of his head. "Let's not jump to any rash conclusions. How about we check to see if anyone else knows where he might be."

Ghost was beginning to panic. "If I don't know here Jimmy Casket is, nobody else is going to know!"

Johnny Toast may have loved his boss like a brother but, he could be a pain in the neck when he wanted to be. "Well, it's impossible if we don't try! The worse this will do keep their eyes open for Casket." He picks up a nearby phone. "Ring, ring." Toast imitated. The call was sent across several maps over to the map House with Garden 3, where he most chaotic family ever lived. The Acachalla family.

--

Running, screaming, and the occasional Davy Crocket nuclear warhead. This is just another normal day for the Acachallas. Billy Acachalla ran around the house, and a little off the map, while Mama Gertrude was trying to keep him and his sister, Sally, under control. For Sally, all Gertrude had to do was give her a serving of waffles. With that, Sally sat by her father, Papa Acachalla, gleefully eating her 7th serving this morning. A nearby phone goes off and Sally snatched it to her ear. "Hello?" The seventeen year old asked in the voice of a toddler. She nods. "Uh, huh? Okay!" Sally handed the phone to her dad. "Papa, it's for you."

"Tell 'em I'm busy!" He snapped in a gruff Kentucky accent.

"My papa's busy." She told the caller. Sally looks back at Papa, "He said 'Sir, watching TV isn't busy. I can hear you over the phone.'."

He grumbled, sat up, and snatched the phone out of her hands. "Johnny Toast, I swear to Venturiantale, if this has anything to do with me or Jose Jose Jose Jose, I want nothing to do with it!"

On the other end, Toast was trying to keep Ghost from taking the phone from him. "Don't worry. We were unable to tie up that case. We just here to ask about-,"

"Goodbye." Papa interrupted, slamming the phone off. He fell back into the couch. For a minute, it looked like they weren't going to push it. Until it rang again. By now, he was fuming. "What do you want?"

Now it was Johnny Ghost on the line. "Hey, just because that case is closed, doesn't mean we can't reopen it and find something." The Kentucky man became uncomfortable, "But, I'll being willing to turn a blind eye for now. All you have to do is cooperate, capeesh?" Papa grunted. "Good, now, we just need to know if you've seen Jimmy Casket. Have you?"

"Nope. I thought you handled him?"

Ghost went silent. "Well," he started, "I don't know where he is anymore."

Papa Acachalla got out of his seat; something he rarely did unless he had to. "You're tellin' me that Jimmy Casket, a deranged murderer, is missin'?! How could you let that happen?! Do you realize what that means?! If that annoying idiot gets into a dimension where people don't come back from the dead, so many lives are at risk!"

"We don't know if he has gone into another dimension." Ghost corrected.

"How the heck could it be anythin' else?" Johnny Ghost went silent and sunk down into the nearest seat. Papa Acachalla was right. Casket can only haunt from the same dimension and knowing the madman, he wouldn't just stop unless he'd gone somewhere else.

"Where could he have gone?" Ghost wondered. "We have to figure out-,"

"We?" Papa interrupted, "Papa Acachalla will have nothing to do with this. Now if you'll excuse me..."

"No!" Ghost snaps, "You will not 'be excused' if Casket found his way back to the Zero World, we're all in grave dang-," he stopped. No. No no no no no! Not there! Anywhere but there! "I gotta go. I'll call you if I need your help."

"And I'll say no."

"Absolutely not," Papa stiffened. The only person who could reject his commands so confidently would be his wife, Gertrude. "If my suspicions are correct, we could all die with our creators, especially the Venturian-made. Including you. So, if I call again, you will help me, understand?"

"Understood." Although he didn't like it, he couldn't let the creators fall. Though he didn't act like it, he was a family man and he wasn't going to leave them behind, no matter how many times he said he would.

Ghost hung up. "You think Jimmy went to the Zero World? Venturiantale's home?" Toast asked.

His boss nodded. "Yeah. Everybody knows that Jimmy Casket is a different entity than us. Unlike us, he existed before he was named or ever brought to the screen. He has knowledge of Jordan that we barely have. It would be easier for him to get past the wall saying that he only used my body instead of actually having it."

Toast had doubts that his partner was right. "But what if that's wrong? It would take months to break the wall, let alone pass though it. I mean, if Venturiantale knew everything about this, they probably could help us out but, the creators don't know that we're more than characters they made. Plus, we can't tell them about our reality because they take over when they're online. There is also an infinite amount of other dimensions-,"

Ghost sprung up from his seat. "Oh, please! Tell me one time when I've been wrong before."

Toast clicked his tongue. "Well, there was that time when-,"

"That was rhetorical," His partner interrupted, "In all seriousness, my gut is screaming at me. Since Jimmy has left, I have not felt more clear about my choices. Please, if you have never trusted me before, trust me on this."

Toast could not resist Ghost's beg. He bows his head in defeat. "Fine. I'll trust you." With that permission, Ghost gathered some possible plans to break the fourth wall and meet Venturiantale. They knew it was dangerous work but, Paranormal Investors Extraordinaire, or P.I.E. for short, knew they had to do it for both this world's sake and the one Casket decided to wreck.