With Thee in Spirit

Creating With Thee in Spirit is a story written and illustrated by Iron Eater. It ran in Issue 84 at https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/with-thee-in-spirit/.

Summary

A local historian has a friend over for a different sort of weekend.

When Clark got into the urban exploration hobby, he’d expected to be the only thing haunting the condemned manor house out past the edge of town. Worst case scenario, he figured, was that he’d have to evade squatters or some weirdos making meth, and his cautious daytime sweeps with a drone-mounted camera hadn’t revealed anything but which parts of the architecture looked the least stable. He’d geared up for his capstone excursion to be spooky but ultimately uneventful. Then he’d met Fletcher, who’d proved him wrong on several accounts.

Connections

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Author's Notes

I'm writing these notes a good half a year since the story went up, so I'm sure I'm forgetting something. So it goes.

I really liked this issue's theme; as someone who writes way too much, challenging myself to KISS is great, and it also keeps me from noodling around in the weeds forever! I'm a fan of urbex stuff and ghosts, and while the usual "IT IS EVIDENCE OF GHOSTS" videos try my patience mightily, I figured it'd be fun going for a "what if ghosts were real and you could be friends?" angle. It also seemed like a good excuse to break some laws of physics in a sex scene! Thusly, here we are. Apparently this is a trope or something? If so, glad y'all enjoyed, even if I wasn't consciously going for such a thing.

Clark has no reason to publicize his relationship with Fletcher, whose name I must be very careful to type, though he absolutely uses his ectoplasmic pal as a reference when doing research on the area. I'm not actually sure of Clark's ethnicity since it never came up. Just not bothering to set character details in stone unless they're needed or would otherwise enrich the experience is a favorite trick of mine. Comes in very handy for writing shorty-shorts.

I could probably write a lot about Fletcher's continuing culture shock, even if my knowledge of his personal history (short of how he died) is spotty. He was rich and white and now he's dead, the end! Another triumph of trying not to develop things more than I absolutely have to. Can I repeat this trick? Guess we'll find out later.

Fletcher's experience with modern media varies and Clark regularly finds himself needing to explain half a dozen different things when trying to untangle the punchline of a joke for him. They've watched enough of Clark's old Dexter DVDs for Fletcher to get the "not a dark passenger, but still a little dim" jokes Clark reserves for special occasions when Fletcher is being intentionally obtuse about something. It's all in good fun; tor all their occasional ribbing they do like each other. Sometimes you get friends on the other side with benefits and that's all you need.