Electra

"Neither of you cares that much about money or status, so you're not too likely to fight about it until you get to like hobo-level subsistence, and even then you'd probably each be trying to give the other the last bowl of shoe soup," Raina countered, ticking off on her fingers. "Even alchemists need people to wash beakers and move big boxes of reagents and stuff. She'll have to hire folks to do the grunti work, so at the very least you'd be qualified for that. I suspect she'll probably come up with something better, but it's her business plan and I don't pay attention that much." Merlin looked up long enough to point out that even with all Fred's progress over the past year, she was also going to need trustworthy people around her who had much better understanding of present day society and technology. Raina nodded agreement. "Good point. And there's different kinds of responsibility. I'm not suggesting you put on some damsel in distress thing and let her rescue you. But she wants to feel like what she's doing matters to somebody besides her. She's already trying to make sure that Riley and Robin have a place to live when they graduate, despite their best efforts. You could probably help with that too, come to think of it." She ticked off another finger. "Everybody needs help sometimes, no matter how put together they are. You've just got to pay attention to her." Raina folded down her last finger and looked at Merlin. "Was that everything?" Merlin nodded. "Good." She took a leisurely sip of coffee.

"After spending a year in superhero school, I can say with confidence that subtlety is lost on most of you," Raina pointed out with a faint smile. "Fred's lonely and looking for a direction. She's got a good thing going with the makeup stuff, but she's only going to feel guilty about it if she's not helping other people out at the same time she's fixing up her own life. You need a job that's not superheroing but that lets you take time off to do your thing, plus you don't stay dead if something bad and monstery happens. She likes you, you like her." She shrugged. "What's not to like?"

"Ugh, that doesn't actually sound like much of a perk," Raina opined, sipping her coffee. "Though I guess you could always drop it into a conversation with Fred that you're temporarily immortal, maybe without the 'being put back from your component pieces' part. She needs more sturdy friends." Merlin chirruped an absent assent to that notion. "I kinda doubt your power set would make you a good muni defender, and the Freedom League probably wouldn't take you, both because you're green and you'd have to be a part timer. Getting a career in the cosmetics business wouldn't be so bad. Have you got decent grades?"

Raina let him talk as they resumed their seats, sipping her drink and passing the cake pop to Merlin. "I guess the difference is I love doing magic," she pointed out. "Everything else might be crappy, but the magic makes it better, not worse. Just seemed like you were saying that the gig as Death was pretty bad and you didn't really want to be doing it." She shrugged. "But if you get something out of it, then more power to you." She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment, relaxing bonelessly as a cat. "Another good reason to try and sign on with Fred," she pointed out after a moment. "You're not going to find too many workplaces that'll let you take an afternoon off so you can go deal with the restless dead."

"Couldn't you get the dogs to pick somebody else? They chose you, why couldn't they go find some poor new guy to make Death out of?" Raina asked pragmatically. "Like an adult, even, somebody who doesn't have to spend their whole life easing into it first?" She shrugged her shoulders. "I mean, I can see why you can't really shake off the guilt if nobody's doing what's got to be done, but does it actually have to be you? Aren't there enough reformed ex-villain types determined to spend the rest of their lives atoning out there? Wouldn't one of them give his or her left tit for the opportunity to really get down and wallow in the pit of redemption?" The barista across the room called her name with no care whatsoever for the N. Raina got up and fetched her beverage.

"So it's the dogs who picked you?" Raina asked as they walked over to the more comfortable seats on the far side of the dining room. It would take several minutes to make her drink anyway. "I thought it was cats who picked their owners." She settled down comfortably in a chair, then let Merlin out of the backpack. He had donned a little vest that said "Service Animal" on it, though he didn't necessarily look too pleased about it. He settled down on the ottoman next to her chair and resumed playing with his phone. "What happens if you don't do it?" she asked Matt. "Could you quit if you wanted to?"

"How do you get picked for a gig like that, anyway?" A quick spell had turned Raina's costume back into her usual street clothes, at least superficially, and Matt could pass for normal anyway, especially in a city like this. "It it like genetic, or were you cursed, or just one of those weird things?" She dropped the subject momentarily as they reached the counter. Without looking at the menu, she quickly rattled off an order with at least half a dozen modifications, then dropped a couple of dollars into the tip jar to sweeten the deal. "Oh, and a strawberry cake pop. What do you want?" she asked Matt, scanning her phone to pay preemptively.

"So you're not like Edward Cullen or something," Raina confirmed cautiously, "and like 200 years old but still hanging around in high school?" This seemed to be much more of a concern for her than the fact that Matt was apparently some sort of incarnation of death, capital-D or otherwise. "Because that's creepy. I read all those books and I don't understand why anybody would think it's even appropriate for Edward to be going out with Bella. She has the emotional maturity of a walnut, and she's still more mature than he is somehow. I don't even understand why she wouldn't just go to Jacob and say "please kill this crazy stalker vampire for me and then let me put my hands all over your abs and we'll live happily ever after." She was talking a little faster than usual, not quite babbling, but close to it. "Anyway, so you're the one who makes sure dead people don't get stuck on earth?"

Raina blinked, trying to absorb that. "Wait a second. So you're like, Death-capital-D-Death?" she asked, studying him from her seat. He looked no different than he had a few hours before, except maybe slightly more dishevled after the scene in the cemetary. "Does that mean you're an immortal being who causes, like, heart attacks with his bare hands? What the hell are you doing hanging aorund a high school, then?"

"I am definitely not okay with cheap," Raina told him, mostly to cover up how disquieted she was by the story he was telling. She didn't really want to hear about some little kid playing with candles and burning herself to death. "Let's at least drive through at Starbucks. I can pay there with my phone." An impressively large Starbucks gift card had been one of her birthday presents from Anibal, one that would've annoyed her with its impersonality if she hadn't already had a good idea that the two of them were not long for this relationship. It was hard to date a guy who was never around, and even in her hour of need, Raina couldn't sponge off a guy forever. Letting Merlin out to scramble onto her shoulder, she tossed her backpack into the backseat and climbed into the car. "So what did you do to her? It was like... you bled off her aura or something. Is that your power?"

Raina stared toward the gate for a minute, the last dancing flames on her fingertips sputtering to darkness as the last embers in the graveyard died out. Her makeup still glittered faintly in the starlight, but other than that, it was quite dark. She rubbed the back of her neck. "Okay, that was definitely a thing that happened. And unless I miss my guess, we're done with the thing you wanted to do tonight. I'm gonna hold onto the two favors, but I'm calling in my explanation. If you want to do it over coffee, I'll buy." She would pay more than the price of a latte to get out of this cemetery right now, but unlike some people, Raina kept her powder dry when she was negotiating. Even when the freaking out option was seeming more and more palatable.

"I'm an excellent witch," Raina assured her, resisting the urge to turn around and look at what the dogs were doing. Somehow it didn't feel as though the danger were quite over yet, and whatever was out there in the dark might not be too impressed by a light show. Merlin was keeping an eye out, he'd smack her if anything got too dangerous in back of them. "We know you didn't mean it, no harm done." The flames on her fingertips faded to a subtle glow, not entirely gone but more light than heat now. She glanced over to Matt. "So what happens now?" she murmured, sotto voce. "We all live happily ever after?"

Raina raised her hands and her voice at once, holding her palms out flat to the fire on either side of them. "That's the way the money goes, POP goes the weasel!" On 'pop', the flames around them seemed to take a giant hop backwards, evading the dogs but giving the two humans a much wider circle of safety. A trickle of fire made its way from the burning circle to the tips of Raina's fingers, hanging there like a shining spark. Her face began to glow with hints of bronze and gold, till she looked a bit like a flame herself. "My lady," she said quellingly, "we come to your court with respect, bearing gifts, and you treat us like this? At the very least you could let him present his gift first!" She was less certain than ever that a teddy bear was going to resolve anything with this crazed creature, but maybe Matt had been speaking metaphorically.

Raina looked around at the fire with eyes that were a little wide, but it was too early to freak out. She'd hold the option in reserve. Instead, she palmed the paper fan that Merlin handed her out of a secret slit on the side of the backpack and gave the woman an ingratiating smile. "I actually brought him here so he could apologize on his own. Apologies always sound better coming from the person who needs forgiveness, don't you think?" She gave Matt a nudge. "Go on then, say you're sorry to the very nice lady." Crinkling the fan in her fingers, she began humming softly under her breath, something that sounded suspiciously like "Pop Goes the Weasel."

"Nope, I'm good. Let's get this ghostbusting show on the road." Raina picked up her backpack and was out of the car as soon as they stopped, looking around to get her bearings. She didn't spend a lot of time in the local cemetaries because that would be weird, so she didn't really see anything she recognized. Merlin poked his head up out of her backpack as soon as she slung it over her shoulders, doing his own reconnaisance. He reiterated his opinion that human rituals surrounding death were macabre at best, but Raina had no interest in revisiting that old argument. "So where do we find this lady?"

"I think he's got a rich relative or something," Raina said, double-checking her outfit and the items in her bag now that they were getting closer. "You should talk to Fred, see if maybe you can work with her. She's doing most of the grunt work on her own right now and she could probably use some help getting things set up. But it's not going to be too long before she's making money hand over fist. Get in on the ground floor of that and you could be set. Besides, you two get along, so that helps." She zipped up her bag and leaned back again in the seat. "Could be a good plan for after graduation, too. Only this school year and then we're all out of here."

Raina's eyebrows went up again. "If you say so." Merlin was more than a little disquieted by the idea of twenty grinning ghost dogs, eventually retreating to the safety of Raina's backpack where he could work in peace. "So do you do this a lot?" Raina asked conversationally as they drove. "Laying spirits to rest, I mean. You hardly ever come hang out with everybody else, is this what you're doing instead? Like hero work but for ghosts?" That was a more interesting line of thought to pursue than dwelling on people who died fiery burning deaths, definitely.

"Okay," Raina agreed easily. "I'm probably going to hang back and let you deal with the ghost stuff unless I have to do something. I've seen ghosts before, during seances and stuff, but it's not exactly my thing." Merlin looked over the back of the seat and chirruped alarm, which got Raina craning her neck as well. "Holy... how many dogs do you even have?" she asked, though not sounding like she necessarily expectd an answer. "Oh, and if there's some tell that means she's winding up to start in with the fireballs, that'd be good. So are you going to, like, resolve her unfinished business or something? Have you got stuff of hers in that bag?"

Raina had a bag of her own, a black backpack full of many, many pockets, including a large mesh-fronted one that was most likely for Merlin if he wanted to go undercover. He was riding on her shoulder for the moment, though, his furry face lit oddly by the screen of his phone as he tapped away busily. Raina was wearing her brand new Sparkler uniform for this, a black bodysuit with stylized gold and red flames chased across it, and a matching hairpiece that pinned up her golden hair with a metallic red barette. It was, in her opinion, at least a thousand times better than the school uniforms she'd been wearing for two years. It was also rather unlike what Matt was wearing. "Ah, so is this not a costume gig then?" she asked, pulling a round makeup compact from her bag. "I can change, just give me a quick second."

"Who better to negotiate deals with than your friends?" Raina pointed out cheerfully. "Besides, it sounds as though if I do get killed or something, you'll be able to see me haunting you. That's not nothing." She unfolded her legs and stood on them again. "Tomorrow's not going to be enough time for me to get anything meaningful done on a ghost-proofing ritual, so we may as well wing it tonight. I'm gonna have to get some supplies ready but I'll be set after dinner." Merlin took that opportunity to remind her that she had homework to do and he had a multiplayer mission setup for that evening, but she scoffed in his little face. "There may once in our entire lives been a time when I would've cared about either of those things, but it is certainly not now. Just tell them to get another tank for the evening. You'll just be in more demand if you're elusive." Merlin seemed dubious but thoughtful about that proposition. "Meet out by the back gate at dusk?" she asked Matt.

Raina seemed a little uncertain, not a look she wore often. "I might be able to get into the library books and set something up to deal with ghosts, but it wouldn't be very powerful and it would take some time," she warned him. "Ghosts and stuff aren't really my thing, but I can handle fire stuff, and at least give you an idea of what's going on if magic starts flying around." She folded her arms, regarding him frankly while looking a bit like a djinni floating out of a bottle. "Now I'm just left to wonder if you're really bad at negotiating a deal or if there's something you're not telling me about how dangerous this is. But Fred trusts you, and despite her cluelessness about many things she's a decent judge of character, so for now I'm going to go with the former. When exactly do you want to do this?"

Raina thought about that, drawing up one leg under her so she looked oddly flamingo-like, then pulling the other one up as well to sit cross-legged in the air. "So what you're saying is that you've got some kind of poltergeist thing setting fires, and you're going to try and lay it to rest? But it doesn't want to go to rest because it doesn't exactly know it's dead, so it's liable to try and set you on fire if you get too close to it." She seemed to be ticking off points on an invisble checklist, with the monkey nodding along. "You can handle the ghost mojo on your own, but you need somebody around to keep you from getting a fifth-degree sunburn from it. And I can't ask you why you're so interested, but if I do this for you, you owe me two favors?" She looked at him for confirmation, her brows arched.

"There, see?" Raina told Merlin, who seemed unconvinced. "The dog's going to leave you alone, Matt says so." Merlin pointed out that's exactly what Matt would say even if it were possible that the dogs would in fact try to eat him. "Look, if they try anything you can, I dunno, ruin his credit rating or something. But I'm sure it's fine. Stop being such a baby." Merlin's chirrup in reply was untranslatable, but she got the gist. Raina turned her attention back to Matt. "So why are you helping a ghost that doesn't want to be helped?" She paused a moment, tilted her head. "Okay, let me unpack that. Why are you trying to help a ghost, and why doesn't it want to be helped, and what exactly is the trouble?"

"You ever hear the one about the guy who protested too much?" Raina asked, slanting a glance in Matt's direction. "I'm going to need a little more than 'it involves fire and it's not too sinister' before I promise you anything." She glanced behind her. "I'm also going to need you to tell me whether I have to set your dog on fire before he tries to eat my monkey. I don't really want to do it, but you know how it is." They walked out of the building and into the pleasantly cool fall air, away from the quad where students tended to congregate. "Is this something that's going to be illegal or get us suspended?" she asked bluntly. "Cause that's not necessarily a dealbreaker, but I'd like to know up front."

Raina began walking, subtly moving them away from the flow of students leaving the classroom. The last thing she needed was one of Madison's girl gang hearing her say anything about magic. It wasn't that she minded a fight, but she had better things to do with her time right now. "You know anti-fire anything goes against everything I stand for, but I do know the basic principles," she told him. "What is it you're trying to do? And how'd you screw up your arm?" Merlin kept his perch on Raina's shoulder as he rode, one tiny hand in her hair for security. He gave the dog a surreptitious hiss, showing his teeth in a grin that would've been more threatening if he'd cracked the ten-pound-bodyweight threshold.