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Being dead doesn’t stop detective work.
Amelia thinks the only change in her life is that she celebrates her death day instead of her birthday now. Her world feels like it's upside down but in reality, it’s just, down. She’s down now and that’s where the underworld is.
It’s…normal.
It’s cities that have an amalgamation of cultures and many, many different things going on all at once all the time. There’s order here to how it works. The buildings shift and move constantly. The Ethereal Plane is never one place and it’s never as it should be. It has to fit trillions of deaths and it expands and contracts to fit that.
Lost souls are just way too frequent.
Amelia will admit. She’s a bit moody about being the human that was the first to go out of everyone. Like, yeah, of course, she saw it coming, but part of her had hoped to grow old with friends and- well. Whatever. She’s dead now and she has to wait. This in particular sucks because the only way a lot of her friends will ever find themselves dead in any capacity would be the end of the universe.
Calli is here.
It was actually Calli who approached her, a regular to her apartment and a sheepish one. She’s a constant in Amelia’s life now. It was odd. Beforehand, Calli’s schedule didn’t involve her very often, if to occasionally pull her out of danger. Now, Calli visited her every other day.
There’s a guilty hunch on her shoulders as she does. Amelia had asked her, candidly, if it was because Calli was the one to herd her sorry ass to death.
Calli had looked away, “Well, I would have preferred it be me. So no.”
So what?
The reaper is a mystery that presents Amelia with a job, an honest to god job. Amelia thought capitalism was dead but even in undeath, it was plaguing her. Calli had laughed at her expression.
“Dude, you get mortal days saved up.” She wiggles her eyebrows enticingly. “You get to go up and visit the girls.”
“You’re shitting me.” It was absurd. It was ridiculous. Amelia thinks everyone who runs the underworld is dumb as hell.
Calli grins like it’s her favorite running joke, “Ready for your first job?”
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Finding lost souls is not easy.
The Ethereal Plane is more than just the underworld. There are not seven layers to the earth's crust, there are no nine levels of hell, there’s an infinite, ever-changing plane that goes on and on and on. There’s no map. There’s no compass.
She just kinda eyeballs it.
She doesn’t have her watch anymore which, yeah, makes a bitch of sense when she knows Kronii is probably doing nothing with it. She’ll complain about that when she can, but mostly, she complains about public transport.
“It’s not so bad,” Calli says because for some reason she wants to shadow her on her investigations. The train car they’re in is passing through a mist cloud that hasn’t ended in nearly forty minutes. Amelia has had to learn to stand with time instead of skipping through it. It’s making her jaw tight with impatience. Calli is the better person as she leans against the window, her gaze out into the fog and far past it. “Nice time to think.”
“How do we even find them?” Amelia asks. “A lost soul. How’d they even get lost?”
“It’s easy. Just get lost.” Calli shrugs her shoulders. “Finding them is the hard part. There’s no evidence, nowhere, no how. They’re just lost.”
Amelia rubs her temples, “Okay, well, can we noclip through the floor and fucking find them or what?”
Calli blinks at her, “We kinda just wander around until we find them.”
Amelia thinks she’s going to tear her hair out before she gets a chance to see Myth in its entirety again. The underworld is old and it thinks like it's old, which sucks for her. Reapers are the ones charged with finding lost or wayward souls and they’re stretched thin. There are not enough reapers to go around.
Amelia feels like a glorified dog.
“I don’t know.” Calli looks amused, warmth in her eyes needling at Amelia’s irritation. “You're the greatest detective that ever lived. Just Ameway it.”
“Don’t use that against me.” Amelia sniffs. The praise was assuaging some of her darker thoughts about finding the train conductor and sending them into a building. “And I will, for your information. I always have.”
Calli smiles like honey, crooked and fun. Amelia hates how well it works.
Woof woof, she thinks miserably.
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The Ameway is just a fun way of brute forcing it until it works. And it will work. She makes sure of that out of stubbornness and spite. She finds people through the old and the original: questioning anyone she can, tracking down whereabouts however she can, memories, and note taking.
Calli follows her through every case.
Amelia eyes her suspiciously, “Is something wrong? Did your boss think I’m making stuff up?”
“What?” Calli gives her huge eyes. “No, no. I’m here by myself.”
“Really?”
“I’m just… literally, don’t mind me.” Calli waves her off. “Just keep being big-brained. I’m a fly on the wall.”
“My brain is very big,” Amelia confirms, crossing her arms. “But why do you wanna be here so badly? Don’t you have reaping duties?”
Calli looks amused, “I’m still on hiatus.”
“Yeah, for music. Upstairs. ” Amelia points up at the ceiling for emphasis. “Whatchya doin’ wasting your vacation time down here?”
Calli looks away from her. She’s hiding behind her bands, her shoulders hiking up to her ears with the guilt again. Amelia deflates. She doesn’t want it to be a problem and she doesn’t want to pry things from her friends.
Calli murmurs, “You’re not a reaper, so you’ll become a lost soul if you’re not careful.”
“So?” Amelia prods. “I’ll just get unlost. Whatever.”
Calli smiles helplessly. She leans against Amelia’s wall, her eyes closed as she says, “You’re really refreshing down here, Ame.”
“Thanks, this place sucks.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Amelia snorts. She feels lighter as she sits beside Calli. She feels a sliver of those older days, back when they sang karaoke together and laughed and played. When Calli leans her cheek against the top of her head, Amelia preens.
“So,” Amelia drawls, “I’m thinking about pretending I have amnesia.”
Calli wheezes above her head, “What? Ame, that’s fucked.”
“Can you imagine Kiara’s face?”
“That’s so messed up.”
“But it’d be funny.”
Calli laughs, “I dunno ‘bout that.”
Amelia side eyes the reaper. She’s pressed against her side. Calli’s hands are resting awkwardly in her lap, but Amelia feels mischievous and dangerously bored. She leans forward until she’s falling into Calli’s lap. She exhales as she rests her cheek against Calli’s thigh. She’s expecting a startled squeak. She’s expecting the stuttery, flustered reaper she’s used to.
She isn’t expecting the hand that starts combing through her hair. The sheer tenderness of it quails the emotions in Amelia’s heart. The air is vulnerable without quips to fill it.
“Is that the only reason why you’re here?” Amelia asks quietly. “That I’ll be a lost soul?”
“A little bit.” Calli murmurs, her voice rumbling close to her ear. “A little bit of something else.”
Amelia closes her eyes. She can’t help the giddy smile spreading across her face. She hears Calli huff. She hasn’t stopped petting Amelia’s hair and Amelia is more than content to let the reaper pamper her.
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