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"Ah, you read my mind!" Join said as he walked into the kitchen, accepting his mug of tea gratefully and slurping it a little, relishing the burn in his chest as he looked ay the cookies wantonly. "Ah, what do you have in mind?"

He smirked down to her, his mug steaming in his hand as he thought for a moment. As if she needed a reason to crawl all over him... "Hmmm...scary...ever seen the original version of The Grudge?" he asked with an evil sneer.

Little b*****d ghosts swallowing people up...that movie gave him the willies. However, its amazing how much courage a man could garner from having a beautiful woman squeal and hold him close to bury her face in his chest...

John was much the same - he could fight till he had barely any blood left in his body and he'd still stand there, laughing for more...but a few ghost stories gave him shivers. He figured it was his barbarian nature - stories swapped around a campfire to scare and delight in kind.

"I'll go put it on, you bring the ice cream." He said with a smile, moving down the stairs to the elaborate entertainment room beneath the house. He was a little giddy now - half because he got to snuggle with Raven and protect her from the nasty horror movie, but also his control of his powers had gotten to the stage where he could operate these machines without having to fear blowing them up!

Finally figuring out where he'd put the DVD - why the hell did he buy this again? He never watched it, and when he did it gave him the heebie-jeebies! - he popped it into the machine and scuttled back to sit back on the couch, wrapping his right arm around Hono'o's lithe frame and hitting play on the remote.

The next hour and a half was a tense, horrifying experience. Ju-On is a ghost story from Japan, where the ghosts aren't freaks under white sheets - they are manevolent spirits called yurei which place a curse upon the people who visit the house they are murdered in. The spirits take the shape of a pale little boy with bloodred eyes who wails like a strangled cat, a misshappened and deathly pale woman with thick, long, tangled strands of jet black hair obscuring her face (with good reason), and the husband of the woman, who went psychotic after assuming she was cheating on him and slaughtered her, butchered her, and stuffed her in the attic.

The movie wasn't gory, instead it had almost no blood in it whatsoever, relying solely on the tension the actors brought, the viewer's imagination, and the brief 'blink and you'll miss it' sightings of the yurei at work, the woman's haunting death rattle especially chilling to hear.

Whilst the whole first half of the movie is scary enough, John particularly didn't like the second half, where a woman runs from the haunted house to be persued all the way to her apartment by the yurei, culminating in a tense, frigthening scene where, as she cowered under the sheets of her bed in terror, she looked down her body to see the ghost looking up at her under the sheets as well, emitting that aweful death rattle....

John shivered at the sight and sound, but did not look away - he most certainly would have nightmares tonight, but the best way to defeat such demons was to approach them and master them. That tactic might not work on Hono'o, however...

John kept his arms tight around Hono'o for the majority of the movie, keeping his face buried in her hair whenever something seriously scary got to him. When a young girl was chased through her house by the ghosts of her dead friends only to be pulled into the shinto shrine of her home by the woman yuri, emitting that horrible death rattle, he literally shivered, trembling Hono'o in his lap.

When the credits finally ran, John say silently, not wanting to look around - he'd stupidly dimmed the lights when putting it on, and now he was a little scared, his nyctophobia beginning to play on his mind. "shouldn't have done that..." He moaned.

"Me neither....ooo, cartoons!"

That was the good thing about not being too bright. You forgot fear quite fast...but not fast enough to realise their ice cream had melted, forgotten on the coffee table. "Damn....icecream is dead....reckon you could get us some more?" John asked Hono'o hopefully, looking at the open door up to the dark condo upstairs and shivering slightly.

John frowned at the punnet, watching as she placed it on the coffee table. "Can't we just...?" he began to ask impatiently, before figuring he'd just do it himself.

Drawing a few runes in the air before him, he looked down at the punnet and snapping his fingers, laughing in surprise as the whole punnet caught fire, burning merrily on the coffee table...

Allhe did was try to swap the frost with heat...