Chapter Text
The living room looked the same. Which was to say, it looked terrible.
If a bomb had exploded, been politely vacuumed, and then had a raccoon die somewhere inside it, you might get close to the aesthetic of the old student flat. The walls were still stained. The furniture was still unidentifiable. The toaster still refused to toast.
Only difference now? Everyone was dead.
"I refuse to accept this is the afterlife!" Rick shrieked, doing a dramatic somersault mid-air, arms flailing like a panic-struck ballerina. “This is, like, social purgatory. I demand a second opinion!”
“You’re definitely dead,” Neil murmured, lying suspended in the air like a limp cloud of despair. “I saw your soul leave your body. It was really… sparkly.”
Rick scowled. “I bet mine was the only one with style.”
“Yours screamed,” Vyvyan screeched, from the kitchen doorway, where he was attempting to shove ghost-toast back into a ghost-toaster. “Like a little girl! Or a baby goat. Got stuck halfway and made a noise like a deflating balloon.”
Rick flipped him the ghost-bird.
Mike leaned casually on a non-existent surface, polishing his already shiny ghost-sunglasses. “What I want to know is: who the hell designed this place? We die and they keep us here? In this dump?”
Rick pouted. “It’s our dump. My dump. I was the soul of this house.”
“You were the soul of every blocked toilet we ever had,” Vyvyan shrieked.
Neil sighed. “Maybe we’re here because we didn’t move on properly. Like, we’ve got unfinished business.”
Rick perked up. “Yes! Like avenging our deaths! Or writing our legacy! Or finishing my collection of Sylvia Plath-inspired limericks!”
“No one needs that,” Mike said flatly.
The room buzzed faintly with ghost-energy—mostly the kind generated when Vyvyan tried to punch Rick and passed straight through him, again.