bb u ok?

The mall was always a nice place to hang out. Calm, empty, mostly abandoned. It was a vibe to be sure. You just had to stay away from the "civilized" areas of the mall, where an arcade was just barely clinging on to life and the few other stores surrounding it. You'd occasionally get a few intrusions, wandering fauna, lost travelers, other people like you, but for the most part, it was chill.

Phew... Cigarette smoke had a terrible smell, at least until you experienced it enough to get used to it. Kinda like coffee I guess, but either way, the lord of land didn't like it, so here was where he smoked, in the peace and quiet of Nam, the Nearly Abandoned Mall. Not that that was its name, probably something like Homely Mills, but when there was no one else to name it something, that was what it was named.

Hanging out on the 2nd floor near the main entrance with your feet dangling over the sides while smoking was one of the best ways to discourage unwanted visitors from staying too long. You gotta know the best ways to put off off-putting vibes, and that worked pretty dang well. At least for most, he knew when to step back into the shadows when the wrong crowd walked in, the po-lice, the genuine thugs, and the people emitting just rancid vibes.

But this person, this person was weird. Normally people come in vibed up in obvious shades of melancholy, suspiciosity, or consumer-ocity, but this chick? Absolutely vibed down. A mix of sadness, confusion, and... anger? It was hard to tell from up here, she didn't even notice him to make a movement of acknowledgement. That, or the lack of one was telling. After a moment of unchecked curiosity, he decided to make the second worst decision of his life. The first was jumping off the first time, in case you were curious.

The ground rushed towards him and he considered briefly if this was his last dumb stunt, before crashing into the giant banner he had folded and put there to hopefully stop him from being sore for the next week. And as he landed, he put his weight forward to go into a roll annnnd... Toppled over like an idiot, moving some of the shock of the landing not on the act of rolling forward, but onto his ribcage. "FFFFFUCK" he cried out as he felt the first wave of pain shoot through his body. Over the next few seconds the second wave of pain would hit him, and he'd still be feeling the third hours later.

When he looked up, the girl was gone, probably spooked off by his display of unchecked manliness. Maybe it was the curiosity of who this girl was, maybe the desire to not be misunderstood, or maybe just the sunken cost fallacy, but he got off his sorry ass and ran in the direction he assumed she went in. Thankfully there weren't many big cool shops in the direction except for the Scopes, what used to be a supermarket, despite having a remarkably badass military name. Failing to see her when he looked through the door, he decided to go to what remained of the clothing section, cause where else would a girl go? I mean like, he knew next to nothing about her, there wasn't a lot of information to go off of. It's not like anything would change if he was wrong and didn't find her either. After a solid 5 minutes of just standing in the middle of an empty aisle, out in the open like an idiot, he decided to hide in one of the changing rooms. After another 15 of waiting, he saw her wandering near and...

"Boo!" He jumped out from behind the curtain, trying to surprise the girl. "Has anyone ever told you you're a spoilsport? Here I am trying to spook you with a shitty imitation of a ghost and you just sit here like the fish it came from." Nero just stood there, remaining a dead fish. "Uh, hello? Did I actually spook ya that hard? Are you a deer in headlights right now? Maybe a cat not in a box? Er, I guess that one doesn't really work" Suddenly, Nero came back to life(or maybe she was a statue before and this was her BECOMING alive, you never really know) and asked but one question. "Ghost?" He knew he had a tough conversation ahead of him. He buckled his nonexistent shoe, strapped on his nonexistent helmet(which musta been REAL odd to look at), and started with "you know how things die, right? Like your nan, your friend's cat, that hamster you had back in 6th grade to make you learn responsibility n shit that only made you more scared of responsibility cause it died 2 weeks later and you haven't been able to resolve that trauma since?" Or maybe that was too much projecting. "Uhm, uh, I guess...?" Her words trailed off until he spoke up again. "So the idea is that when you die, er, actually that depends on what you believe in, but uh, one of the ways people think about it is that your ghost detaches from your dead body when you die and-" He paused for a moment, only to realize "I haven't told you my name! Its Take by the way, not T-A-L-K-E-H, just T-A-K-E"

"You're funny, you know that, right?" Nero laughed the laugh of someone who was distinctly not happy for the better part of an hour and had only recently stopped being not-happy. "Funny in the sense that you're so wacky you just can't be taken seriously, not funny in the sense that you're clever or anything." For some reason that statement didn't hurt as much as it should have. "Hey, that's better than nothing." He interjected quickly, not one to have the second to last laugh. "You keep telling yourself that. I'm Nero by the way, like the roman emperor, spelled N-E-R-O."