"Aiya, and I was hoping that would last a little longer."Nearby, someone not quite like all the other inhabitants of the Holy Cross sits on a table.
The slender young woman, clad in all black, frowns as she checks the innards of her coin pouch. They were much lighter than she had been hoping for, far too light.
That previous job had gone right. That ghost had been rather rowdy. He'd been a violent drunk gambler in life, one who'd died a rather ignimonious death drowning in his own vomit. Her employer had bought the house from the gambler's wife, who'd fled the place when her husband's ghost had decided to become a poltergeist. He'd resisted most of the efforts by the local priest to get rid of him.
He hadn't accounted for an exorcist from the East with far too much experience dealing with the dead.
It was no trouble, no trouble at all for Lin Guifei, daughter of Lin Qiang, former director of the Lin Funeral Parlor and exorcist of the Hundred Trees, to get rid of such a meddlesome, mundane ghost.
It was far too much trouble for her to be paid properly. She suspected the house owner had stiffed her. They'd agreed thirty guilders; what she'd gotten was ten. It'd get her through the week, but....
In a word, Guifei was broke.
"It'll be a long time before I can return home."And then salvation.
A group of people had gathered over near where she was, and she even recognised a face.
If she knew her rumours - and Lin Guifei knew them well, she'd been the subject of them herself - then she knew who was standing right before her.
The man in the hat, if she was right, was the demon slayer from the islands to the Far East. The one she'd been hearing about, and the one she always just about missed.
It was about the closest she was getting to a fellow Easterner, and if rumour served right, the best chance she was getting at a payday.
"Well, it is what it is."She stands up, steeling her courage, and walks over.
"Sooooooo what's going on here?"