The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories (draft) - Part 31

Ye gods, I was not counting on this chapter taking this long to finish. >_< Wasn't counting on it turning into a single scene that went on for very nearly six thousand words either. It's been a real chapter for underestimation. I'm so very sorry.

Just a quick side note to since there've been quite a lot of people pointing out typos in the last couple of chapters: I appreciate that people are trying to help me out, but I'm not labeling this thing a 'draft' because I expect my audience to do the betaing for me, I'm doing it because it helps to have that regular posting schedule to keep the momentum going, even though I'm still half expecting I'll wind up completely rewriting every other line between now and the finished version. So combing through for spelling errors is probably a bit of a waste of everyone's time at this stage, especially when corrections made on LJ posts generally don't make it back to the main word document on account of authorial laziness and will only have to be found again later if they don't get written out in the meantime. I'll have to get to finding someone to do a proper full betaing job on this monster some way down the line, but for now picking out typos is better left to the later polishing stages. (Unless of course it really has gotten so bad you can't make sense out of what I'm trying to say, which would be your cue to bash me over the head a few times and remind me that the whole world can see what I'm posting here, and I might want to pay a bit more attention. >.>)

Other parts: The original ficlets, Plot notes, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Side Story 1

( Part 31 )