#Bertie Wooster encounters Edwin Payne

[badassindistress]

I'll be the first to admit that Wooster is not a name known all 'round for his skills in the brains department (in fact the whole matter of this alma mater attic break-in might be considered a sound illustration of the fact), but even I knew that something had gone distinctly souplike when I was confronted with a spectral boy with an expression so judgmental it would not have been misplaced on an Aunt.

The boy was thinnish, tallish, and dressed in the uniform I myself had donned not too many years ago. A schoolboy in a Boy’s School ought to necessitate no more remark than say, a fork in the kitchen, or Bingo in love, but this schoolboy was as see-through as the crepe paper my fruity new spats came wrapped in. That is to say, the translucency of a lace hanky, hiding barely anything of what was behind him.

“What ho!” I ventured, under the basis that a polite greeting might ward off spirits the same way it pacified Aunts and other evil powers.

The distinctly translucent boy looked up in surprise.

“You are not supposed to be able to see me,” he said crisply. Then he murmured to himself, as if he had already dismissed old Bertram as a sound conversationalist, “I was so certain I had been sent back here to find Charles.”

“Terribly sorry,” I excused myself, for lack of anything better to say. Perhaps in spectral society it was awfully rude, to go about seeing and whatho-ing people.

The boy pulled out a magnifying glass of ridiculous proportions and stared at me as if I was an ant on his Sunday pick-nick.

“You are not dead, nor are you displaced,” he stated rudely, “what year is it?”

Unaccustomed to being interrogated by mere schoolboys, dead or otherwise, I told him. His face fell, as if he'd hoped to hear something different.

Read 'Expelling Young Edwin' on AO3