Pyramids All The Way Down

     But venture to the neighboring Haunted Woods, and the story changed. They weren't exactly woods--more like a very large forest--but the "haunted" moniker certainly fit. After doing some focus testing here, he would get the most bang for his buck there.

     Second, he needed a message: Didn't you want to stop wandering aimlessly? What if, for a moment, you could literally get your unlife back together, like you did when you were younger? Yes, it did sound like an advertisement for sham vitamins and snake oil, but there was a reason these things never had--and never would--fall out of fashion.

     Third was the medium, the most difficult part. It wasn't like his audience had Spirit TV or Perishing Periodicals he could just buy an ad spot from. He'd have to rely on the word of mouth, or, more accurately, the word of telepathic communication, and the fact that fading spirits could not talk to each other complicated this. No matter. He had a solution.

     Theodaxx went back to the listening post and procured a few remote explosives; there was an entire armory in the basement, and also some old construction material. The explosives went on Razul's pyramid, and as for the construction materials, some of them became a 3-by-3-square-foot steel pyramid, spacious and portable, with a piece of that bright-orange pyramid safety inside. Others became pyramid-shaped grains in the thousands.

     The grains were divided into three tiers: the basic tier, the premium tier, and the ultra tier. There was no real difference among the groups except that they got progressively more colorful.

     With a loaded wheelbarrow filled to the brim with basic-level pyramid grains, he strode across the desert in a very large circle. Now, since Theodaxx began most days with a two-mile run, he had completed two complete circumnavigations before he collapsed face-down on the ground.

     A spirit had hitched a ride in one of the micro-pyramids, crystallizing into a concrete form. It appeared as an oblong blob, a bit like an eel without any features, swimming in midair.

     "Where... where am I?"

     "Take a guess," replied Theodaxx, head buried in the sand.

     "It looks like I'm the middle of a desert..."

     "Is that normal for you?"

     "No," said the spirit. "I lived on the plains."

     Theodaxx pushed himself up and took a swig out of his thermos containing some refreshing turmeric saltwater. Some sand fell from his ears into it, but that only added to the flavor. "You must have been gone a long time. Do you remember anything?"

     The spirit said that she met her demise because her rival wanted to steal her trade secrets. Which trade secrets? No memory of it remained, but what did was the memory of her searching for closure, only to fail and watch as the killer lived a relatively normal life, then die as the pillar of their community.

     Some spirits would have haunted their village until someone needed to deal with them. This one simply fell into despondence and slowly faded.

     "That's quite unfortunate," said Theodaxx. "But you can't let the way you died define you forever. Maybe going somewhere else would be good for you."

     "Maybe. It's better than whatever I've been doing."

     She went on about things he did not particularly like to think about, like the sad injustices of a world that would erase them and start anew, performing them again and again. Theodaxx smiled blankly as the spirit mused about the meaning of life and existence. He internally sang the theme song to his favorite show when he was a kid.

     "... And that's it. I'm not really much of a philosopher; sorry for rambling..."

     "Eh, it's been a day for you. Besides, philosophers are the most confused people in the universe."

     A bunch of eggheads who thought they would change the world by writing obtuse papers that nobody would read. Well, maybe some people would read them, but then they would go on to tell everybody else what they wanted them to believe anyways.

     This was anathema to Theodaxx, who currently needed to broadcast a message to get a large amount of people to do what he wanted them to. If the spirit kept yapping about the big questions, she might stumble across inner peace and proceed to the beyond. She could do that on her own time.

     "I just wonder how long it's been since I've passed, you know?"

     "Assuming where you lived was here, probably about 20,000 years." Long enough to account for the desert to hold as much civilization as it had, then long enough to account for desertification on the type of planet Neopia was. "But you might have also moved."

     That would hopefully pique her curiosity enough to stay tethered to the mortal plane, at least for a few more days. Theodaxx continued, "You know, there are plenty of people we could ask to answer that question, people with the same predicament you had, people stuck diffusely into the world, also looking for answers.

     "I'm trying to help them, help you all. But..." he gestured theatrically at his wheelbarrow and raised the bottom of his eyes to give her an entreating expression. "There are many of you."

     One end of the tubular spirit moved up and down. "What can I do?"

     He told her to find other spirits. Theodaxx had to fish one spirit out for a few hours, but someone who was already dead could find them in 1/20th of the time. From there, the recruited spirit could come and receive a basic-tier crystal-grain. If they managed to enlist three others, they would be upgraded to the premium tier. Two more, and they would receive the ultra-tier.

     They wouldn't even know that they were all functionally identical, because it's not like they had bodies to experience any hypothetical luxury anyways. But even amnesiacs loved status.

     He couldn't rely on just the one spirit to spread the word. Theodaxx went to another part of the Lost Desert to focus another spirit whose current form was a sphere. They spoke their story: they had had a complicated relationship with their son all their life, passed before they could reconcile, and the next day, their son had vanished.

     "If your son hasn't found peace, then he should be somewhere in the world. I have a campaign just for finding lost spirits, but I need your help..."

     After selling the spirit on his little movement, Theodaxx moved on to the Haunted Woods, which was really a forest.

     It was not the ideal place to focus spirits, given that many of them tried to pull silly and amusing pranks on him, such as trying to assume direct control of his body. A zombie Meowclops had its jaws around his helmet and tried to suck on his brains. At one point, a vampire took a sample of his blood, only to spit it out and say it tasted like onions.

     Finally, after wandering for too long, he dug up a crystal that gleamed with an indescribable, supernatural hue. The spirit contained within was cuboidal.

     "Aha! My purpose! It has been fulfilled!"

     "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. You're just un-living again."

     They were extremely disappointed; in life, the spirit tried to create a place even spookier than the Haunted Woods; in death, they travelled across the planet, haunting this house or that. Their failures started to stack on top of each other. They took small pieces of them and threw it to the wind until they had dispersed.

     "You're in luck," said Theodaxx. "I'm organizing the biggest haunting ever. Care to join?"

     The cuboidal spirit's heart jiggled with such joy that they looked like a box with a kitten playing with it. When told what they had to do, they took Theodaxx's entire wheelbarrow of crystals and zoomed into the arches of the forest.

     Having done a full day's "work," Theodaxx returned to the listening post and waited near his many piles of micro-pyramids. One by one, they started glowing. Soon a queue of spirits formed at the base of the listening post, waiting for their premium- or ultra-tier abodes. It would have taken many days to process.

     Except it only took a night. The Alien Aisha had managed to wrangle a few spirits to help him with keeping track of the members and tiers associated with each individual. At the end he had three wheelbarrows filled with what looked like radioactive sand.

     He hooked the wheelbarrows up to his GoQuick Galactic Motorbike (TM), and, remote detonator in hand, rode it all the way to Qasala. The motorbike's engine didn't smell too much of ozone as he creeped above the kingdom's crater.

     "Okay," he said, "it's showtime. Ready, guys?"

     A discordant boom was the reply. Satisfied, Theodaxx spilled the crystals right into the city onto a stone fixture. They shattered, sending thousands of wisps snaking through the streets. So numerous were they that you could forget Qasala was shrouded in endless night. They infused themselves into anything even vaguely pyramid-like, whether they be tents, roofs, door handles, ice cream cones, or even torch scones.

     He wiped his hands. A job well-done. Never mind all the screaming and yelling and frantic guards all running about, or the fire that had started in the distance. It wasn't long before Razul's specter phased in to keep the peace, at which point Theodaxx pulled the trigger on the detonator.

     Like a deflating balloon, Razul shrunk and sputtered about. He darted from potential pyramid to potential pyramid. When he could not find one, his now-elongated image flew all the way in the direction of the nearest empty pyramid: the one Theodaxx had built out of metal.

     There he waited until he came face-to-face with him again, at which point his image blinked on top of the pyramid, and the flames around his floating skull burst. They sparked harmlessly off Theodaxx's space helmet.

     "You...! What have you done?"

     "I've ended your Raz-rule."

     "Raz-rule? I should smite you where you stand."

     "I'd like to see you try."

     Razul's nasal cavity expanded, and he spread his arms dramatically as if to cast a spell. Nothing happened.

     "How am I supposed to assist my son now? To help Qasala out of the pit it dug itself in? And you--Theodore. You flooded it with third-rate spirits."

     "Please, it's hardly more than the makeover you gave it. You should be thanking me."

     "Do you dare--"

     "Dare to do? King Razul, I do not dare to do anything. I simply do, and I always succeed."

     This statement was so vacuous it sucked all meaning out of the conversation, ending it with great efficiency. Razul stewed quietly in his robes as Theodaxx stretched and yawned. At 11 a.m., Somnolence finally weighed on his eyes. "I'll--I'll see you later."

     He leaned back on his work chair and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was an hour past midnight, according to the news broadcast still playing passively in the background. Faerieland had already felt the first few bites of autumn, it said. Next week would have an average temperature of--

     Theodaxx swiped away the virtual panel that played the news channel and instead resorted to actually reading news articles. Qasala was... well, not free, but close enough. At first, the outside world thought a disaster had struck Qasala, because there was only one known way a large number of ghosts materialized very quickly.

     Later reporting went on to clarify that the residents were all still alive. Many experts were consulted to weigh in on the situation, but it was hours until someone had simply asked the spirits how they got there. Some "little green guy" was responsible. "Little green guy"--like he wasn't so much larger than them!

     It was fine, he thought. Some good deeds simply went unnoticed. There were many, many green people in Neopia. Perhaps they would never know. The spirits were much too busy chasing inner enlightenment or resolving their business and did not give particularly helpful details.

     Then, at midnight, a video of Queen Nabile was released. She stood solemnly in front of the camera while her husband breathed into a paper bag. Microphones and questions were lobbed in her face.

     "What happened to the former King Razul?"

     "What do you think of his proposed economic policy?"

     "Is King Jazan all right?"

     "Do you have any idea how long it'll take for things to get back to normal?"

     "He left; I obviously disagree on many aspects; my dear Jazan is simply shaken; perhaps a few months," she batted off the answers as fast as they came. "It has certainly been an exciting few days for our city, with some exciting new visitors; certainly they have the potential to teach us something new, and I would hope both spirits and Qasalans can come to a mutual understanding in the meantime."

     "Queen Nabile, do you know why all this happened?"

     She smiled sweetly, looked directly at the camera. "Oh, I wouldn't exactly know that. Of course,"--she smiled slightly before going back to her serious demeanor--"I admire strange feats like this one, on a personal level, but this was unacceptable. Whoever they are, they caused a lot of trouble for us, and I would hope that he--they--never come here again."

     The End.