LJ Idol Minor+ Prompt2: "Roopkund"

No one really knows why one becomes a ghost. It's almost like Fate flips a coin and "Heads!", you journey on to an afterlife. Or "Tails!", your spirit gets stuck on a never-ending eternal plane of half existence. Unlucky.

I suppose it could be worse. Not all deaths are met with choruses of cherubic angels and halos. Oh no...sometimes those trumpets herald a darker ending for a soul. Witness those passings and well, you realize that ending up as a ghost isn't *that* bad after all.

If you're lucky, you die someplace interesting. A house, a bar, maybe a school is built over your death spot. Someplace to haunt. Someplace with people. Some place with *LIFE*.

God forbid you should die in some frozen remote location, far from human civilization, with nothing to keep you company except the howling winds and the occasional snow leopard.

Eternity is a long damned time to be stuck as a ghost without some level of life going on around you. And a frozen lake in the Himalayas is about as shitty a location to die in as well...ALMOST ANY PLACE ELSE ON EARTH. Wanna guess how I know how miserable THAT existence is? Voice of experience here. Unlucky.

Imagine our surprise when they found us. We'd been in that lake for hundreds of years. Which for humans is a long time, but for an earth-trapped spirit, it felt like forever.

They say that the longer we remain, the more we fade, passing through your world, maybe glimpsed just out of the corner of your eye, a mere shadow. But that actually takes more time than you'd expect. So I was still quite active when they came to that frozen lake and dragged us up onto the shore.

They dragged our bones out of the water and onto the banks. There were so many bones, you could tell they were confused about the whole situation. So many bones, but remarkably, very few ghosts. Remember that coin flip? Most got lucky.

Me? Eternally unlucky...

Eventually, the scientists carefully packed us up in crates and brought us down that God-forsaken mountain to the museum labs for further study. My bones had been packed, and I had no desire to remain with that frozen death field, so I went along with them.

Being a ghost, you really learn what the word commitment means. Because you are. Committed, that is. Whether you like it or not there is no Manager to speak to or complaint department to call. Stranded, as we are in this world, we've few options for anything really.

So, while we can, we watch you. And I watched. Some of the porters mumbled about curses and ghosts, and I had to chuckle. Oh, if they only knew what they carried down that mountain with them.

Being dead really offsets any human responsibility you once might have had. After all, what's to stop you from creating a little havoc? Once you're a ghost, your sense of right and wrong really becomes a moot point. Who's going to tell you no, or punish you?

So, we rattle you.

And so I figured, why the hell not?

It started simply enough. A pen would go missing when the scientist had just laid it down.

"I was sure I'd just laid that here..."

A sample might move from one table to another.

"Would you please leave my samples alone?!?"

Then I discovered electricity. Oh, now THAT was a lucky find!

We find ways to mess with your lives, then vanish with little remorse for our misdeeds and mischiefs. We do these things because we have nothing better to do.

And we do these things because we can.