I've been bored, so I started writing this.

[Ghosty]

Section 2

Mysty opened her eyes. All she could see was a bright cyan blue. It took a second to realize that she was lying on her back, looking up at the sky. She felt immensely exhausted, but otherwise fine. The hideous, evil feelings in her mind were gone, and she could no longer feel the abrasion on her leg. She attempted to sit up, but was too tired, and sank back, blinking. It took her a second to realize she was firmly grasping something in her left hand, and surprised, she dropped it. It was the device that had been in her hand when she had passed out. She looked to her right, and finally saw the area in which she now was resting.
She was lying in a grassy meadow dotted with yellow dandelions, with a small stream running nearby. There were trees a good distance away, maybe a couple hundred feet. These weren't the same short pin-oak trees that the woods near her house were made of, though. These were tall, wide-branched, leafy trees, with a slight yellow tinge to their knotted medium-grey bark. The ground immediately around her was relatively flat, with small variations in height that could hardly be called hills. The grass was several inches high and thick but not tall and overgrown and wheaty. There were no animals in sight. All in all, it was beautifully peaceful.
She managed to stand up, a bit wobbly. She looked down at her right leg where she had scraped it against the ground when she had tripped. There was no sign of there ever being any wound. She looked back at the green TRNS-MTRLZR, and noticed that it had a nasty black, burnt-looking scar across it now. She gave a small gasp as she realized that it was roughly in the shape of her hand as she had held it. Whatever energy had coursed through her was strong enough to fry the plastic.
Uneasy, she scanned the horizon. The only movement was a gentle breeze blowing through the lush foliage of the trees, and tilting the tips of the grass and dandelions. All she could hear was the quiet splashing and gurgling of the stream. There was an odd, unfamiliar smell in the air, but it was very faint and not entirely unpleasant. There was no sign of the evil fog, or anyone pursuing her.
She suddenly realized what was wrong.
"GHOSTY!" she yelled.
There was no response, not even an echo.
"Hello?"
She turned in a full circle, then collapsed back into the grass, tears beginning to fall from her eyes.
"I... I must be dead." She sniffed, and then choked back a sob. "It's awfully empty in heaven, or wherever this is." She wiped her face with her sleeve. She looked up at the brilliantly blue sky. The sun was just below a quarter-way up from the horizon, but it was impossible to tell if it was morning or afternoon. She sadly shook her head. "I still haven't got most of my memories. I guess death doesn't fix amnesia."
She stared back down at the ground in front of her face. There were no bugs in the dirt -- no ants, no beetles. She couldn't hear any birds. The only forms of life in this place seemed to be the plants, and herself. It felt too quiet and lonely, as the wind gently tossed her hair around. She curled up into a ball, and let the exhaustion take over. She drifted into a dreamless sleep.

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Eventually, Mysty woke up. Slowly, she uncurled and sat up. Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she blinked a few times and looked around. She was still in the meadow surrounded by the odd yellow-barked trees with yellow-tinged leaves. There was still a gentle breeze blowing on and off. The sun was still a quarter-way up the sky, which gave Mysty a nasty shock for a second -- she knew she'd slept for more than few minutes! Then she groaned, and shook her head. "Ohhh, hehe, it's afternoon now." More clearly awake, she scanned the area again for any sign of life. Again, nothing but plants and herself could be spotted. She sighed, picked up the charred TRNS-MTRLZR, and walked over to the stream.
"It just doesn't make sense," she mumbled. "How come this thing is here with me, but not the battery or Ghosty?" Tipping over a large pebble with her foot, she continued, "And for that matter, if I died, how come I'm not a ghost but he was?" She stared sadly at the rushing water. After a few moments of standing there, feeling depressed, the wind nudging her hair around, and thinking unhappy, pessimistic thoughts, she turned away and trudged back up the small hill to the place where she'd awakened. She decided to try again once, before following the stream and seeing if she could find anything of interest. "GHOOOOOOOOOSTYYYYYYYYY!" she shouted. As before, there was no response. She began to turn away, but froze as she heard a low, quiet moan. "Hello?!" she called out, her heart beginning to thud painfully. She slowly rotated her head around and saw nothing but the same landscape as before. Then, a few feet to her left and behind her, she saw a faint shadow begin to fade into view.
"Well," said, or rather groaned, the shadow, "that went well." The shadow's shape began to define itself into the now-familiar shape of a teenage boy, a rather worn-out and disoriented one. "I highly suggest that next time, though, we stick to double-A's."
"Ghosty! You're al-" She realized the illogicity of a ghost being alive. "-right!" Immensely relieved, she wiped her hand across her face.
"Well," he said, still rather faint, "I think I am. I'm incredibly exhausted, though. I barely have enough energy to make myself visible right now. I've handled batteries once before as a ghost, but that was a lot more energy than what it should have been." He flickered a bit, the sunlight nearly making him invisible. "I can't see anything dangerous around here, have you?"
Mysty shook her head. "No, nothing." She looked out at the trees across the stream again. "It's entirely empty of any sort of people or animals. Not even bugs. If you weren't here, I'd be certain that this is some sort of afterlife."
The breeze picked up again briefly, tossing her hair back into her face and making Ghosty shimmer even more. "Since it seems that somehow we've managed to lose our pursuers, and quite likely ourselves, I'm going to go rest in a shadow under one of these trees," he said. "When I have enough energy to do anything, then we can try to figure out what the heck happened and why we're quite obviously no longer in Rockton."
"Okay," Mysty said. "I'll stay around here. I hope nothing bad will come out at night..."
Ghosty faded entirely out of sight. "Don't worry about it," he said quietly. "What if's are worse than is's."
Mysty sat down on the hill again. The afternoon glow of the sun across the field looked a lot less mournful now. She still didn't have all her memory, she had no idea where she was, and didn't know the wherabouts of the terrifying, paranormal menace and the supposedly anti-paranormal government men who were chasing her, but now she was not entirely alone. She lay back down, and as she watched the trees slowly sway with their golden auras, she drifted back into a peaceful sleep.

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Slowly, consciousness returned, and she found herself awake again. She felt as if something had woken her up, but couldn't figure out what and, after a quick look around, didn't care. It was night now, and though she couldn't see the moon anywhere in the still-cloudless sky, there were so many stars that she could still see well enough. Slightly awed, she stared up at the massive dotted expanse above her. It was much clearer than anything she'd ever seen before in the light-polluted, slightly smoggy atmosphere of Rockton. It was incredibly quiet, as well: the wind had stopped, so now there weren't even the rustling of the grass and leaves. She was still having trouble believing all of this was real. Then, with a start, she knew with certainty that it was, and what had woken her up.
A distant, screeching honk blared out across the forest and the meadow. She gasped, and quickly glanced around. As the sound died away, there was still no movement. The only sound she could hear was her increasingly loud breathing. The dark blue world suddenly seemed a lot less peaceful and a lot more ominous. Was that a pair of eyes in the grass? No, that's actually just a couple of dandelions. In that tree, what's that shape draped over a branch? Nevermind, just a bunch of leaves from a higher branch. "Relax," said Ghosty.
She let out a small noise, something like "Eep!" and quickly turned around. By the time her eyes registered the ghost slowly becoming less translucent, she'd gotten enough of a grip again to say something. "You have got to stop doing that!" she told him, and picked herself up off the ground. In the nighttime, Ghosty's appearance was quite different from what he looked like in the day. It was as if whatever substance he was made of was in more natural surroundings in the starlit darkness, and didn't have to fight the sunlight to appear. She could still see the trees through him, but she could also see him just as clearly, depending on what distance she focused her eyes at. He still looked very tired, but less so than that afternoon.
"Sorry," he said, with a bit of a chuckle. "Wasn't thinking about that." He looked over at the forest in the direction of the mournful noise that had shattered the serenity of the night. "Whatever that was," he said, "we shouldn't worry about it."
"Why? It could be another horrible thing, and if we let our guard down, if it comes near here..."
"You remember that awful feeling of terror-inducing menace and power that that thing gave us when it made that awful noise?"
"I would definitely not mind forgetting that forever."
"Did you get it from that call just now?"
"Well... no, not at all."
"Exactly. Whatever it is, it wouldn't seem to be, well, evil. Lions, tigers and bears we can find ways to deal with. And if that reminded me of any creature, it's a whale, not some hungry night predator."
Less anxious but still feeling the slight adrenaline rush, Mysty brushed off the thin layer of dirt that had stuck to her clothes as she'd slept. "Well," she said, "I'm definitely awake now. Have you gotten enough of your energy back or whatever you need to do?"
Ghosty shifted a bit. "Well, it's pretty strange -- yes, I think I'm back up to normal strength, but in the daytime it was like there was something here draining it away as fast as I could recover it, like if I was trying to be solid enough to carry something instead of being invisible and not doing anything. I can't feel it now, but it's a bit worrying."
This made Mysty remember the huge burst of power that had immediately preceded her blackout and transport to wherever she was now. "How did you use the energy from that battery? I could feel it when you did, and I don't think there's that much power in 9 volts. It didn't entirely feel like electricity, either." She paused. "Although I have no idea how I know what electricity feels like..."
Ghosty shook his head. "I know. A few months ago, I picked up a C battery someone had thrown away that still was mostly charged. It felt something like going from being half-awake at 7 AM to an hour after lunch on a nice day when you're walking outside. Instant energy boost. This, though, was out of control. It wasn't like waking up, it was like that feeling you get when you rub your socks across a rug for 10 minutes and then touch a doorknob and it zaps you strong enough to hear it, only in all of you instead of just your finger. Maybe that government thingy had energy in it and I absorbed it through you."
Mysty looked around for a moment, saw the TRNS-MTRLZR lying in the grass a few feet away, and picked it up. "Maybe... Look at where I was holding it," she said, showing him the burn marks. Ghosty recoiled. "Your hand got hot enough to burn plastic? That much electricity would kill an elephant!" He looked closer, and saw the letters. "Wait a second," he said. "That might make something clearer. Those letters on the top," he pointed. "Can you make out what they would say if the vowels weren't taken out?"
Mysty studied it for a second, then shook her head. "No," she admitted. "I can't think of anything that would make sense."
"It seems to me like it could say 'Trans-Materializer', which sounds like some overfancified brand-name word for 'Teleporter'. And that would explain in some way why we woke up in some unknown world with no obvious reason why or how we got here. Those government people sure have more tech than they let the public know."
"So, just my pushing the button brought us here?"
"I really don't know. Like I said, unless something we don't know about happened and scorched that thing, there was enough electricty going through there to kill you twice and have some left over. I don't know how any of it happened to put us here now."
"It's weird," Mysty agreed.

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The dark woods were perfectly still, with not a trace of the ever-present breeze of the day. It gave Mysty the same sense of being both at peace and freaked out as the emptyness of the daytime. The ground near the trees was not as grassy as the meadow, and small pebbles were scattered here and there among the soft dirt, as were small ferns and other low plants. There was still no moon visible anywhere, so Mysty assumed it had not risen or had already set. She looked up at the trees and still couldn't quite identify what type they were, but she noticed that although most of them were the kind with yellow-tinted bark she'd noticed earlier, there were a few other types scattered about a hundred feet apart. The silence was just starting to get awkward, and she was trying to think of something to say, when the honk shattered the silence for her.
Mysty turned in the direction of it, which happened to be in the direction the stream was flowing. "Well, instead of sitting around here being dazed and confused," she said, pointing ahead, "why don't we try to see what it is? It's the only thing I can think of that would prove we aren't entirely alone in these woods."
Ghosty shook his head. "I don't know. Like I said, it doesn't sound evil," He paused talking and kept shaking his head. "It's still hard for me to believe in something purely evil... like out of some wacko fairy tale. Anyway, I don't want you to walk blindly into some pack of angry caribou or something stupid like that."
Now Mysty shook her head. "It sounds a long way off. We'll probably see it before we run into it. And if it is something we shouldn't have bothered, I can climb one of these trees okay," she said, pointing out the rough, knobbed yellow-tinged bark of the dominant tree type. She stepped a few inches off the ground onto one for emphasis before hopping back off.
Ghosty shrugged. "Alright, if it gets really rough I'll see what tricks I can pull... Hopefully more effectively than I did against those ghost hunter idiots."
The two of them started walking, or, in Ghosty's case, floating, along the stream to what Mysty thought was the west. After a few minutes, the forest remained mostly the same as it was at the edge of the meadow. The stream stayed quiet and smooth, burbling almost inaudibly among the fist-sized pebbles in its bed, the only sound besides the quiet tread of Mysty's sneakers in the dirt and grass.
After a few minutes of floating along silently, Ghosty turned to Mysty. Continuing to float along, he asked, "Any progress with your mind? Remembered anything to help you figure out, well, any of all this?"
Mysty sighed. She'd managed to forget about it with everything else that had been going on (she noted that there was some irony in that) but now she shook her head and grimaced. "Nothing more than before. I can remember small mundane pieces, but there are grey spots and a big blank from ten, maybe eleven whole days ago now." She looked up at Ghosty, worried. "We've been here for at least long enough for the sun to go from just being up to being entirely down, and I don't know how long we were blacked out before I woke up the first time. My mom's going to be in a panic. Unless," she suddenly realized with horror, "the government cooked up some story because of my helping you, and she thinks I'm dead, or... or worse! Some sort of teenage fugitive!"
"Yikes, you have a point," Ghosty said. "But, just like everything else right now, we have not only no idea what's going on nor any way to affect it right now, so the best we can do is just not worry about it, focus on what we can do, which is find whatever creature or machine is making that noise, and we'll cross or burn that bridge when we reach it."
The surreal screech cut through the night yet again. "It sounds a bit like some sort of bird," he remarked.
"Maybe, but a very big one... You think it might be a griffin or something?"
"Those things are only mythical creatures."
"So, supposedly, are ghosts."
"Oh yeah. Heh. Good point."
Mysty smirked a bit.
"If it is a griffin," she continued, "do you think it would try to attack us?"
"No idea," Ghosty answered. "I haven't met any outlandish beings except a couple other random ghosts, that entourage that came after us, and [ put some suitable person's name here, I can't think of anyone right now ]. Although, these trees... " He stopped and critically examined one of the yellow-barked trees. "It's just stories, but there are some old legends about forests..." He backed away from the tree and starting following the stream again. "Nah, now's not really a good time or place to talk about it."
Mysty stayed put. "What old legends?"
Ghosty turned around. "If you insist..." He glanced over at the trees again. "These don't seem to be that kind of tree... At least I hope they aren't."
Mysty felt a bit irritated. "What type of tree do you hope they're not?"
Ghosty floated down to the ground near the stream, his face solemn. Mysty sat down a few feet away, impatient and curious. "Hundreds of years ago," he began, "over in Europe, and England in particular, the Roman Army invaded the land that had been inhabited only by the wild forest-dwellers and a few small cultures. They were much more powerful than any civilization that had come through those forests before, and they showed very little respect for the land and its helpless inhabitants -- cutting down century-old trees to make way for their cobblestone roads, massacring any warlike tribes who didn't agree to the Pax Romana, and hunting scores of deer and boar. This is all fact, as you could gather from any good history book. The history books will also tell you that Rome fell into decline afterwards, mostly because of hostile nomads at the borders breaking through the outer defenses of the huge empire. However, the legends say that the humans were not the only factor. The forests themselves took revenge."
Mysty scoffed. "But they're trees. What did they do, uproot themselves over the fortresses?"
"Like I said, it's all myth, so it's not necessarily true, I'm just saying what I know about them. Anyway, the legends say that when solitary Romans would go into the woods beyond sight of the edge for any reason, they would begin to get tired. They would usually find some large tree and rest on its roots. But the roots would then slide up and out a bit, and still asleep, the soldiers would slip between them. The roots would then creep back down on top of the person, enclosing them in their wooden tendrils. The poor Roman would never again wake up, as their body would slowly become an extension of the tree."
Mysty was silent for a moment. She glanced at the trees, skeptical yet a bit unsure. She wasn't sure of anything now, especially after the shadow-hounds.
"Of course," Ghosty remarked with a grin, "I think it's just a fireside story someone made up to explain why the knots in the roots of some trees looked vaguely like faces if you twist your head just so." He floated back up off the ground. "Anyway, enough 'ghost stories', hehe, for now. We have a griffin-honker-bird-thingy to find."
The aforementioned 'griffin-honker-bird-thingy' chose this moment to let out another of its strange cries.
"C'mon, it sounds a bit nearer now, don't you think?"
Slightly unnerved, Mysty nodded, got up, brushed the soil off her jeans, and followed her shadowy friend along the creek again.

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The pair kept hiking through the dark forest. After a few minutes of nervous glancing around at the dimly shadowed landscape, Mysty found she really wasn't that spooked by the trees. Ghosty was right -- these thin trees with hardly any exposed roots didn't look like the menacing mythical soldier-smotherers, and her instincts told her that there wasn't anything worth fearing here. She wasn't entirely sure where these feelings were coming from, so she suspected it was part of her mind that was still locked away. Pushing her long brown-tinged black hair out of her face again (she noted to herself to get a hair band or cap as soon as she could, it was getting annoying) she glanced ahead at Ghosty.
"You haven't really said much about yourself or where you came from," she remarked. "What's it like being a ghost?"
She thought he may have tensed for a second, but as he answered her he was back in his normal relaxed travelling position, standing upright a few inches off the ground with his knees bent slightly, his legs trailing a bit behind his torso. "It's a whole lot different than having a body," he said. "For one, I have much more control over how I can move around, but it's much more difficult to move things around. I have to focus on making my hand solid, and keeping it solid, and it can drain my energy pretty fast."
"How do you get energy, anyway? You don't eat, right, so where does it come from, the sun?"
Ghosty tilted his head and rubbed his eyebrows. "Well," he said, drawing out the word, "it's a bit difficult to explain, but I'll try. As far as I can piece it together, there's some sort of background energy spread throughout space. It's 'brighter' in some areas than others, but it's everywhere. My consciousness, my soul, I guess, can manipulate this energy into something dense enough to absorb and refract light -- what you can see with your eyes. However, everything I do -- from drifting around to talking to you to picking up something to just thinking -- absorbs a bit of this energy. I don't know whether it gets totally used up, or if it radiates back out, or what, but if I do something that takes a lot of energy, like making myself fully solid, I can tell that it takes a little while for the energy wherever I was to refill. It also takes away from what I guess you could call my reserve; in addition to using energy from around me, I use up a bit from my, for lack of a better word, body, and it makes me a bit dimmer and tired. Like I was when you woke me up in the meadow back there. I don't think I've ever gotten that worn out, even when I was alive."
"Speaking of that, who were you when you were alive? You've never actually said your name."
Ghosty was still a few feet in front of her, so she couldn't see his face, but he was silent for a few seconds and Mysty was sure she saw his shoulders tense this time. "Is, ah, is it alright if we don't talk about that for now?" he finally said. Mysty felt a bit surprised. "Um, okay... Why not?" He replied evasively, "I've got my reasons; I just really don't feel like talking about it. Memories better left buried and all that..."
"Oh. Alright. Sorry to bring it up then..." Mysty mentally scolded herself. She should have guessed that the topic of the life her friend had lost, and the way in which he lost it, might be a sensitive subject with him. She pushed the matter from her mind and kept on moving along the small winding waterway. She was trying to think up some other, less-touchy subject of conversation when the noise they had been tracking erupted quite loudly from just ahead of them, startling her. "Woah," she yelped, as her foot skidded on one of the few pebbles in the soil, causing her to lose her balance and slip sideways hard onto the ground, tumbling into the creek with a splash.

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END OF WRITTEN POSTED STORY