"Gosh. What's it like to be a ghost, besides... possible to not notice, apparently?"

"Well, in some ways it's very convenient, but I rather miss eating and sleeping."

"I wouldn't have guessed sleeping! I don't sleep much myself. Do you read? Is there a way to turn pages without touching them?"

"I wasn't particularly attached to sleeping while I was alive, but the castle is rather boring when everyone else is asleep. I can read over people's shoulders in the library sometimes, though that's usually the same set of textbooks."

"Yeah, I'm back to thinking you need some kind of disability aide. Maybe a trained monkey if wizard labor is expensive or something, I bet a capuchin could turn pages. I could make a robot for it but it'd break here."

"That sounds . . . bizzare, but potentially helpful. Of course, what I'd really like would be to get properly beheaded."

"...why?"

"Well you see, if I was a real headless ghost, I would be eligible to join the Headless Hunt. But instead I am merely 'nearly headless', and apparently that's not good enough for them."

"The proportion of dead who become ghosts appears small enough that I'm surprised there's an entire... organization... for those who specifically were beheaded, but maybe the most haunted building in Britain has a few thousand, or most ghosts live outdoors, or beheadings specifically generate a lot of ghosts and France is teeming with them? - dwell outdoors, I guess."

"It's an international organization. I don't know that beheadings are any more likely than anything else to result in a ghost, though some say it's based on how much you wanted to live, and I guess a lot of beheaded people would have much preferred not to be. Heaven knows I did."

"I sympathize! I didn't want to die either but I turned into this instead of a ghost."

"I suspect you got the better deal; you look very . . . corporeal."

"I got a great deal. Nothing doing on corporealizing ghosts?"

"Reviving the dead is generally believed to be beyond the power of magic.  How did you manage it? The rumors going around are so outlandish I can't work backwards to the truth."

"I'm from another universe, this is just part of how it works there."

"Another universe! I think that might actually be stranger than the rumor that you sold your soul to the devil for immortality and the ability to kill anything by looking at it. Pity our universe doesn't work that way."

"How would the devil expect to profit from the soul of an immortal person?"

Ghostly shrug. "No idea. I didn't spend much time on religion even when I was alive, and there doesn't seem to be a point to it now." He shakes his head. "Students here will exaggerate anything. The number of people I've heard being accused of secretly being dark lords just this past year . . ."

"Well, this year may reasonably have been exceptional, there was a cursed artifact possessing at least one person."

Slight, careful nod of acknowledgement. "So, if you are from another world, are you planning to return there? For that matter, is anyone else from your world likely to come here?"

"There is no immediate plan for either but it could happen! Why?"

"Just trying to get a sense of what to expect. Your world must be very pleasant, if people become magic instead of dying."

"People only become as magic as I am if they summon magic beings like myself to the world of the living first. If they don't do that, they still remain corporeal, and they get to be indestructible, but they don't get additional powers and wind up in a realm called Limbo, and you can't get summoned out of Limbo."

"Ah, so that's how you ended up here? I don't think anyone has tried summoning ghosts, except by means of mailing us invitations to things."

"...mailing you - how do you open your mail?"