Tiles Of Dread

The ceiling tiles of my apartment are beginning to bulge downwards, reaching hungrily for my unwashed laundry. I blame ghosts.

In the beginning, I thought to cover up the water-damaged tiles with Lordi posters. But there's too much damage, and not enough poster to go around. Besides, where the hell is Lordi, anyway? The arockalypse seems to have been postponed until later in the year. We have been given no excuses as to why Mr. Lordi couldn't be bothered to fly to America. Hell, he flies upon wings made from stolen dreams, so there's really no reason why he couldn't come on time.

Perhaps we have failed him in some way. This is about the only reason that I'm willing to accept. Even that might not suffice for Narraptor, but he places the very highest standards on his monsters.

You've Got Ghost

Oh, right. You're haunted. I forgot about that. I've been reading comics and playing Dead Rising. Have you tried putting on a Lego mask (note: not a Bionicle mask) and hitting the ghost repeatedly with a bench? It worked in the last Scary Movie, and it's a good way to level up so when you die and restart for the eighth time, you can finally survive the first boss fight long enough for the boss to run away.

Good ol' Pierre LaMay.

But enough mixing my references. I consulted my wife, and it sounds like you've got what we in America, with our inability to pronounce the complicated Japanese language, would call a "ringu." (In Japan, this classification of spirit is simply referred to as a "ring." Tough to wrap your tongue around, right?) Unfortunately, that's all I could get out of her before she barricaded herself in the bathroom with a stack of good china, an abandoned well, Lam Ching-Ying, and a bunch of bureaucratic red tape. She then set off a EMP device. I have been unable to contact her since.

The Japanese don't like ghosts very much. I get the impression that the feeling is mutual.

The good news is that you still have your good luck charm, so you aren't dealing with the ringu I barely escaped on my honeymoon in Tokyo. That would have been a difficult situation to remedy, as I can't remember what kind of candy she liked. The bad news is I don't really have any otaku freelancers on call. They formed a union a few months back, and I can no longer afford their services. So until I return home to my library of occult role-playing sourcebooks, I suggest you do the following:

A) Don't answer the phone
B) Destroy your TV, VCR, and DVD player
C) Discard any devices capable of taking photographs and all yearbooks and photos
D) Remove the blankets and sheets from your bed
E) Avoid anything a ghost might hide inside: closets, showers, water tanks, washing machines, air vents, refrigerators, microwaves, sinks, sleeping bags, hoodie sweatshirts, puddles, boxer briefs, etc.

Follow those guidelines, and you should be able to last a few days while your friends and acquaintances are picked off one by one. I'll get back to you when I have the time, but right now I need to prepare for board game night.

The Price Of Clean

Some time ago, my ceiling had an aneurysm, letting a rich spray of arterial roofwater into my apartment. Since then, I've been inspired to launch a number of cleaning assaults onto my already questionable carpet, in the hopes of reverting it from bad beige to good beige. My latest ploy to this end involved buying a mediocre steam cleaner, immediately losing the instruction manual, and improvising from there.

At first, the large tufts of pitch black hair that the cleaner kicked up delighted me. I didn't know where the hell they came from, but each one was proof that my house was getting incrementally better.

Then I heard the scratching coming from the attached water tank, and found out that I've got a damn ghost stuck in it. Not one of those mostly domesticated Midwest ghosts, either. I've got one of those Asian Longhairs that came over to America six years ago, before Customs learned to check shipments of imported Asian lumber for infestations. Without any unnatural predators to control them, the damn things are popping up everywhere.

I don't know to do about her, and I certainly don't know what she was doing in my carpet. The apartment's previous tenant has moved to Japan, and asking him over long distance if he happens to know why there's a dead girl in my room seems ill advised. Plus, the guidebooks agree that knowing a Longhair's secret past just pisses it off, anyway. What the guides don't agree on is a way to successfully get rid of a Longhair. I could just drop the water tank off at a landfill, but then I'd be out of a water tank, and constantly afraid that the ghost would go on an Incredible Journey back to my place.

The worst thing about the situation is her age. My apartment does have a contract that assures me that "Any spectral denizens within your apartment are all eighteen years of age or older, and do not represent any living or fictional characters." It would be a nice piece of CYA legalese, if it wasn't so obviously a pack of lies. The girl is...eight, perhaps. I'm willing to go so far as twelve. Either way, it looks bad, and I want her gone before my neighbors find out.

I'm probably going to have to get Narraptor to deal with the damn thing. Longhairs are pretty damn instant that they get the last word in, but after his extra-strength exorcism of this blog, I'm pretty sure he can handle her. But that means I'll have to commit to PAX, and watch people play Dance Dance Revolution for cash and prizes. There are worse fates, but none of them involve complete strangers telling me how great The Minibosses are.