Chapter 1: The haunted house

It had been only two days since I met that priest Tomos in the Snapping Line and he appeared to have kept his word. His other helpers had arrived faster than I expected, but that was only a good thing. We left early in the morning and his other helpers were briefly introduced to me, though little more than their name was given:
 
Kanna: A gray-haired rabbit girl that the priest had helped before apparently. It seems she came along solely to repay the priest for his kindness.
Eshin: A hairy dwarf and local brewer that lives in Saltmarsh. I don't remember seeing him around the town before, but I didn't pay much attention to things like that either. He looks a bit of a coward and not very comfortable with fighting.
Beatrice: A human with long blonde hair that was wearing heavy armor. She appears to be very full of herself and constantly shouts nonsense about heroics. She also has a pet raccoon that she drags around with her.
 
Tomos had truly assembled a weird team for this. While I may be qualified for this, Tomos would have had no way of knowing this so is he simply that confident in his own abilities? From the others, only Beatrice seems to have combat experience. Perhaps he considers us expendable? But no, a priest of Giamae wouldn't do such a thing.
 
We traveled to where the haunted house was for several hours. During this time, we chatted a bit about why we were tagging along. Apart from Kanna, the two others appeared to have come along just for the money which was revealed to be 10g, or 20 if there was trouble though it was never stated what exactly that meant. Either way, money was not my main concern here. I simply had to kill the ghosts, no matter what it took. The people from the town appeared to be very interested in us, some even going as far as to follow us all the way to our destination. Did they not have anything better to do? Beatrice tried to show off in front of them, while I tried to scare them a bit after their horrible accusations about me being a necromancer. It's not too surprising after I switched back to my traditional outfit, the dark clothing and scythe was meant to scare people. To most people, death was something scary after all. I didn't go too far in scaring them though. Hanna had taken good care of me and I didn't want her to get into trouble because of me.
 
The haunted house we arrived at looked like it had been abandoned for several years. Although mansion would be a better word to describe how large the building was. Before we entered, Tomos was kind enough to give each of us a vial of holy water and two healing potions just in case. I don't remember much about prices and maybe things have changed, but wouldn't those items be worth more than the reward that was offered as pay for this assignment? None of the others seemed to have this question either due to lack of knowledge or maybe they were worried Tomos would ask for them back later.
 
The inside of the mansion looked as I would expect from a house that had been abandoned for so long. I tried to sense where the heretics were hiding, but could only feel a faint trace of a living person that had been here. It startled me for a bit, as I was only expecting to find undead here. My immediate thought was that a necromancer was responsible for the creation of these ghosts. If so, then maybe my job wasn't finished after this then. While I was thinking of this, Tomos suggested that one of us take the lead and Beatrice immediately volunteered for the job. She walked deeper into the house and began to open the doors of the many rooms of the mansion.
 
Most of them were empty with little of interest inside of them. There was a kitchen, a room with a table and two chairs, another room with a broken table and a broken chair, a room with a clump of tiny red mushrooms growing in a semicircular fashion around the fireplace and an empty room of which Kanna warned us that the ceiling looked unstable. We never bothered to give these rooms a deeper look, despite some of them sounding kind of suspicious. I'm just here to kill the ghosts after all. In one of the rooms, Beatrice used some form of magic to move the chair and scare Eshim, who responded by shooting the chair. She claimed it was a test, but none of us were really buying it. Maybe the heroics thing was simply a well-performed act? I'll need to try it some time.
 
Another room we entered was a room with a desk. Two of the drawers were open, but one of them was locked. This time I volunteered to try and open the lock as I vaguely remembered having done things like this before. While these two hands were more skilled, I hadn't done such a thing in a while so it took me longer than I would have liked. After I opened it, I took out two more healing potions and handed one to Beatrice and Kanna each.
 
Across from the room with the desk was a room with a pile of books. I'm not particularly interested in reading, but if this was the work of a necromancer then I have no choice but to take a look. While I didn't find any necromancy books, I did come across two books that stood out. "The magical properties of gemstones" and "The magical properties of herbs and flowers" - both written by Archmage Thelia. I tossed the gemstone book away while loudly saying its title, seeing if anyone else would be interested in the book. This did not appears to be the case as everyone ignored it. Kanna then called me over after having found a scrap of paper in another book and asking me if I could read more. Unfortunately, I was unable to do so as well and the only few words legible were 'beyond skeletons'. Maybe this was written by the necromancer who was here. Ghosts are certainly beyond skeletons. Beatrice took the book the scrap of paper was in, "The metaphysics of mathematics" and then we headed for the next room.
 
This next room looked uninteresting at first glance and even on a more through inspection by Kanna, but suddenly a loud booming voice that sounded fiendishly evil screamed
 
"WELCOME, FOOLS - WELCOME TO YOUR DEATHS!"