Hollow Gestures [P/Yaksha]

The crowds, the press, the rat race.  People were quick to dismiss these things as being inherently bad, or at least inherently disagreeable.  While Harold did not feel any particular empathy to the masses struggling all around him, each a single cell in a macroorgasmism he preferred to think of as "not my problem", he took a certain comfort from it that most people would not understand.  Every inconvenient shoulder-bump, every rude glare and curseword, every thoughtless teen absorbed in a world of social networks and status updates, all of them reminded that he was, in fact, in the midst of humans.  Fragile, chaotic, but ultimately real humans.  Individually, he might have lacked the ability to care about any single one of them, might have thought his piss too precious to spare them a fire.  Collectively, though, they reassured him.  This was normal.  This was life.

He was only a few steps from his office when he heard that voice, standing out above the din, ringing with that surreal echo that was distinctly not human.  His skin prickled into goosepimples, his teeth clenched tightly, his sins crawled across his back.  That was the voice of a ghost.  It was not the nice kind of ghost, either, the sort content to stick to a single place rattling it's chain, nor was it the rarely sensed civil ghost, cavorting about in a bathrobe from place to place.  It was one of those dreadful, flesh-searing, hungry ghosts.  They were the sort that tormented him, kept him running for the safety of ugly crowded places and sprinkling salt about his otherwise pristine hardwood bedroom floor at night.

They were the same kind of ghost as that guy.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Sol tilted his head.  He felt this strange sensation, as if somebody somewhere were talking of him, or at least thinking of him very loudly.  He raised up from his current endeavour, having been largely failing at getting a soccer mom to argue with the proprietor of a lemonade stand, and drifted off towards greener pastures.

Harold, for his part, was so distraught by the sound of bizarre echo-y ghost voices that he didn't notice the smartphone until it had already smashed into his face.  He glared at the wobbly outline of the ghost who'd flung it, ignoring the panicked victim who had fallen to the depths of mortal despair at the loss of their iPhone, a part of them more vital than their very soul.  A moment later he realized that acknowledging the spirit was the very worst thing he could do, and so he went about the business of pretending that he saw nothing, he knew nothing, and rapidly paced the few remaining, crowded steps towards the entrance of his office building.

Harold knew he had screwed the pooch when the fellow who's phone he'd been stricken with was stricken aside.  In a saner age, the throng would have marveled at this phantom assault.  They would have screamed and panicked and done everything in their power to escape from this unknown assailant.  Unfortunately, even in a sea of humanity, each individual one of them inherently possessed of at least one single fuck to give, not a fuck was given.  The man was pushed out of the sentient membrane, an inconvenience, somebody else's problem.  The chaos that should have protected him was sealed away by an ungodly sense of personal interest.  No one cared about the man who'd been deprived first of his phone and then of his footing.

"No, no, I'm sorry, I can't help you," Harold replied, forcing himself into the revolving doors of his office building.

Safe! he thought, bustling through the significantly less crowded lobby.  Surely, even the most determined of ghosts would not follow him here, past the threshold, into this place where only money reigned supreme.  Ghosts were all dead-broke hippie bums, his experience had taught him.  He'd broke clear!

No such luck.  Harold let out a moan as the ghastly thing followed him, as it rambled on and on with its dreadful empty promises.  Go away if he just asked it to?  There could be no such luck.  The one thing about ghosts that never changed was that they tended to fixate.  This one was particularly obnoxious in it's seemingly harmless baiting.  Once he was in the elevator, the lawyer slammed the emergency stop and turned to face the shifting, wobbling form that was all he could see of what he was sure to be another future tormentor.

"Look, I'm already haunted!  I've got my own private spook!  I can't be the only one in all of this backwater Asian shithole that can see spirits, they've practically made a profession of it.  I have, what did he call it, 'fleeting mortal trivialities' to attend!  Just go away!"

His pudgy fingers slammed at the elevator's button panel several more times before he managed to release the stop, and the box continued to rise.  As it did so, the already chill air grew yet chiller, and a second, even more dreadfully familiar empty voice filled the space.  Out of reflex, Harold wore his most insincere smile, aiming it at the diffuse reflection of his own face cast on the aluminium elevator doors.

"While I can appreciate your interest in my colleague, I must nonetheless petition you to disengage him.  If you've any personal affairs with the mortal world in need of resolution, however, I will be happy to offer my own services."

"Harold and I are business partners.  Between us there is no measure of equality, but rather of equity; he accomplishes those things I am not capable of, such as interacting directly with unaware humans, and for him I provide the professional legal council that he himself has neither the talent nor education to provide on his own.  Learned though I may be, I will not let pride interfere with my goals.  You are right about the man's anal retentive personality, and he could hardly be more lacking in depth, the fact remains that he is, in fact, my colleague, and of his own free will.

As he spoke, Sol slowly drifted forward out of the back wall of the elevator.  He hadn't been trying to hide from the other hollow, of course, but had merely begun speaking before he'd finished clearing all the physical obstacles between him and his buddy.  Just then, the elevator doors closed in his face.  He once more had to float through another barrier.  Though he was not the sort hung up on making dramatic entrances, he realized that his authority had been somewhat undermined by being forced to emerge not once but twice.  Nobody liked a double emerger.

The hollow now making a speech about how he'd be obligated to give Sol a hard time over some matter involving their respective penile powers.  He'd heard a bit about Freud over the years and wrote the statement off as a metaphor.  None of that seemed particularly important to the ghost lawyer at the moment.  The hollow seemed rich with potential for conflict.  He'd as much as started one for no other reason than spite.  If that sort of hair-trigger petulance could be directed elsewhere, he may prove valuable.

"It was never my intent to hide, of course.  It's a pleasure, Mr. Dokuja.  I am Sol Mediar, attorney, advocate, arbitrator, and advisor, ably assisting the spiritually aware by allaying their aggreivement."