#ectoplasmiic

       She had heard from Norman a couple of days ago about the guest who had checked out a room, and how she had requested to not be disturbed. From what Norman explained, the guest looked to be just a bit younger than the two of them and she was by herself. While guests weren’t a commodity around the motel, the details did set off a few red flags in Emma’s mind. She herself had gone through rebellious phases when she was younger where she would imagine what she would do if she were in another life and she went on the run, and how she would carefree, spending weeks in motels and driving to different states when she stayed in one place for too long. It was glamorous, playing out like a movie in her adolescent mind, but Emma had been witness to runaways in real life and the Hollywood-like illusion had been shattered. The real red flag had been that Norma had mentioned how she had reached out to the girl to ask if her parents were going to be meeting her somewhere or coming to stay as well, to which the Bates matriarch apparently got a sideways reply before the girl excused herself from the conversation. 

       Emma was never one to pry in the private lives of the guests, but she had a job she needed to do. As a worker of the motel, she needed to check the rooms and give fresh toiletries, linens, and towels each day. It had been two days, and Emma had stayed away from the cabin because the guest had asked not to be disturbed, but she was growing worried. With the luck that the motel had had in the recent past, with Norma having found a corpse in her bed in the first year of the motel opening and countless other things that Emma tried not to think about at work, she grew worried something was wrong with the girl in cabin 7. So, with housekeeping cart pushed in front of her, she stopped in front of Cabin 7 before giving a solid knock to the door. 

“Alright, okay, you’ve convinced me.”

Halloween had only recently started gaining traction in her old neighborhood. Minerva could count the number of times she’d been trick-or-treating on one hand. Last year was not on the list-- too busy with being a newly formed god. Plus, she didn’t exactly have any friends her age then.

She might’ve been acting somewhat resistant to the idea, but frankly she was glad that there was another kid who just wanted to do kid stuff with her.