(no subject)

[gone_byebye]

The first thing one notices upon opening the door into New York is that it's hot. August is a hot month in most of the Northern hemisphere, but even for August, it's vile outside. The smell of horse is on the air, and hydrocarbon. A nasty tang of ozone can be felt across the teeth; the sky has an unwholesomely orange cast across the darkness.

Ray glances around and lays a hand on the side of the building next to him. "We're home," he says.

Comments

[gone_byebye]

... but you just don't get that kind of treatment in New York City, as a general rule. Janine smiles, and reaches over to shake the hand. "Why, thank you," she says. You could cut bricks with that accent of hers. "I think I like this one, Ray..."

"Good." Ray was rooting through the nearest of the supply lockers, and so did not look up. "The guys- can you get them down here, please? I don't think we have much time."

"I'll say you don't," came a voice from up above. screeeee*thunk*- the sound of one (1) Ghostbuster sliding down a fire pole. "Ray, you've been away for less than two minutes!"

Ray lifted his head as two more thunks heralded the arrival of the rest of the team. "Excellent, you're all here... Kay, Naraht, these are my colleagues. Winston Zeddemore, Dr. Egon Spengler, and Dr. Peter Venkman. Guys? We have backup now."

There was really a lot of staring going on in the firehouse tonight.

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht finds himself chuckling at the sight. "Perhaps you should have sent a note through first, Ray."

He then wonders if this particular Peter Venkman shares his counterparts abilities and thinks as loudly as he can, Hailing frequencies open. Can you read me, Dr. Venkman?

[k_in_black]

"Peter Venk--?" Aw, hell. Should have known.

He shakes hands fast, since time's a-wasting.

"Venkman. Zeddemore. Spengler. Pleased to meet you, gentlemen. Now if you could direct me to that spare proton pack, I'd like to give it a once over before we get into this thing."

[gone_byebye]

Aside from a brief look that suggests he might have to sneeze, Peter gives no particular sign that he's perceived anything from Naraht. He does, however, look at Kay with momentary puzzlement. "How do-"

"Milliways," says Ray.

"Ah."

Egon cast a skeptical glance at the man, but Winston's attention was taken up largely by Naraht. "You... okay, question," he said, holding up a finger. "You look kinda... familiar."

Winston's late-night television viewing included considerably more Star Trek than Janine's did.

"I've got the spare right here," Ray said, but Egon intruded.

"Sir, I'm not going to ask about any paranormal experience you might or might not have, since I trust Dr. Stantz here to judge properly in that department. I do have to ask whether you're proficient in any kind of energy weapon."

Ray just smiles.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," says Peter. "Did Janine tell you about the new calls, Ray? We got problems. Big, ugly problems."

"We had them before-"

"Not oozing out of the sewer gratings, we didn't."

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For better or worse, Naraht still doesn't know that he's fiction in another universe.

"Oh?" he says, puzzled. "I don't know how you could. If I recall correctly, there are no lifeforms similar to Horta on your planet at this time...but this is another universe, after all."

The bit about the sewer gratings grabs his attention. "I take it we need to get underground ASAP. It is urgent enough to make our own way?"

[k_in_black]

K gives Egon that K Look for a moment.

"Janine. Think you might be able to get by without that wastebasket there?"

Janine hands it over, with an uncertain look at her face.

"Much obliged, ma'am." K finds an empty garbage can and puts the wastebasket on top.

He walks back next to Egon and in one fluid motion draws an impressive looking weapon. Within seconds K breaks it down, reassembles it, and begins the powering up sequence. A low whine starts to echo around the room.

"The Series 4 Deatomizer. Manufactured on the fifth planet of the Detrazi system. Three power cells energized by medium force atomizers in a reverse polarity the Detrazi say Earth won't even imagine for another three centuries. Battery pack guaranteed to last three weeks without recharge." He looks at Egon. "The Detrazi get around."

The echo suddenly kicks out, and with another fluid motion, K whips it into a firm grip and blasts the wastebasket to atoms. There's a brilliant flash, and suddenly the top of the trashcan is empty.

"Any further tests, gentlemen, or can we get this mission underway?"

[gone_byebye]

"... I think we're good," Egon says.

Silently, Ray hands over the pack, and heads over to start opening doors and the back hatch of the car.

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"And away we go," Naraht says as he hauls himself into the cargo section of the converted hearse. The suspension system creaks, but Bonnie's modifications paid off.

[k_in_black]

K slides into a seat and somehow manages to get the proton pack in his lap, where he starts to check it out.

It looks almost exactly the same as the one he used on the demon bunnies before. He check the readings and feels the grip on the thrower. It's all good. The Ghostbusters obviously take good care of their equipment. But, then, having met Ray and Peter, K would expect no less.

He feels Ecto coming to life around them. Damn. An impressive rig all right. He might have to ask Ray for the specs once this business is done.

[gone_byebye]

Ray waited for the others to take their seats before sliding behind the wheel. "Okay, fill me in," he said. "What's been going on in the last two minutes?"

"It doesn't look good, Ray. It looks even worse than it did when we pulled in here earlier this evening." That was Egon, who was seated in the back, near Naraht. "The focus of the problem seems to be tightening- I had enough time to plot our GPS data out by time on a map of the city. PKE levels are soaring throughout the city, yes, but they're rising much, much faster here in Manhattan than anywhere else."

"Those three calls I was telling you about?" said Winston. "Right here on the island. All of 'em. One down by the stock exchange, one from the Cloisters, and one big one from Rock Center."

Ray winced. "Priority?"

"Stock is nearest, but it's just a couple of goopers- and the Cloisters are gonna have to wait," said Peter. "The post office under Rockefeller Center's where the problem is. They've got this goo that the security guard on duty said looked like ducksauce from hell welling up out of every hole, grating, and drain in their floors, and it's starting to eat the furnishings."

Ray nodded grimly and leaned out the window. "Janine? Tell the guys on Wall Street we'll get to them as fast as we can. Hopefully, before the market opens tomorrow."

"Not a problem, Dr. Stantz."

He cast a glance back over his shoulder. "We might have to cut through a piece of actual street if the sewers are backing up all around the building, Naraht. Think you're ready for some hydrocarbon-ridden asphalt?"

The car peeled out of the Firehouse as if propelled from a rocket, flinging itself over the cobblestoned streets of Tribeca.

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Naraht clung to the floor and sides of Ecto-1 with every bit of fringe. This was not the time to get unbalanced. "Asphalt? Lots of tar-products in that, right?" Naraht says, digging up what little he knows about ancient building materials. "Not a problem. And rather tasty depending on the grade of tar they use."

He notices the look that Peter is giving him. "What?" he asks innocently. "Is it a crime to occasionally indulge in junk food?"

[k_in_black]

That gets a silent, "Fucking Milliways" from K, though very much a comrade-ly one.

Ecto's suspension is holding up beautifully. K can *feel* Naraht's mass nearby, but the former hearse is taking the corners like a top-end speedboat. Might have to chat up those talking cars sometime after all.

Sewers, though. Damn. Subterranean work is always the worst. Just got the suit pressed too. K wonders how the rodent population is holding up in Ray's New York, what with all the slime.

And what he wouldn't give to have a semi-friendly giant unipod like Jeff around right now.

[gone_byebye]

"More tar than a cheap South Carolina cigarette," Ray says, leaning over to turn on the radio out of reflex.

A Public service announcement followed me home the other day / I paid it nevermind. Go away / Shit's so thick you could stir it with a stick...

"Okay, Egon. I got that. Any chance you guys were able to get Jim Brady over at the MTA on the phone?"

"Yeah," says Winston, grabbing at one of the interior door-handles as they shoot over Canal and make for Sixth Avenue. "No good. He says the drillers' union pulled all their guys out when the poltergeists started trying to take away their jackhammers- and nobody got anywhere near the old IRT lines."

Broadcast me a joyful noise unto the times, lord, / Count your blessings / We're sick of being jerked around / We all fall down...

"Crud. You're sure?"

Winston nods. "Pretty sure."

Ray flicks a switch, and Ecto's sirens start blaring. "Anybody start speaking any languages they don't know? ANy reports of hearing voices?"

"Nothing," says Egon.

Peter, for his part, is looking out the window. "Guys?" he says, pointing up ahead. "You seeing what I'm seeing?"

It's a hallowed, hollow anesthesized / "save my own ass, screw these guys" / smoke and mirror lock down...

Wispy forms of what was either something spectral or of very determined smoke were leaking into the street from the sewer gratings. Literally. The smoky blur was pouring downward, vanishing into the storm drains.

"Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?" Winston asked.

Without warning, a manhole cover ten yards in front of the hurtling hearse exploded into the air, spewing blazing orange-pink droplets every which way.

Broadcast me a joyful noise unto the times, lord, / Count your blessings.
the papers wouldn't lie! / I sigh. Not one more...

"HOLD ON!"

Ray rams one foot down on the brake and yanks the steering wheel hard to one side. And the hearse...

swings.

In an absolutely perfect 180-degree arc.

And comes to a dead stop.

It's been a bad day. / Please don't take a picture / It's been a bad day. / Please...

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht slowly lets go of his grip on the car walls. "Well, that was exciting," he says. "Next up?"

[k_in_black]

"Great job, kid! But next time I wanna see a Bootlegger's."

K's shades begin to brighten and shift through several tints as he tries to get a reading on that smoke. It's not like anything he's seen--.

K's head jerks up as he hears a very weird sound coming from ahead. A bogey of some kind, flying right for Ecto. It's green, a lot like that damn drink Ray is always throwing back. With what looks like arms waving wildly through the air.

Damn thing's going to buzz us, K thinks. But they've got what feels like a reinforced roof above their heads, so he's not too worried.

Sure enough it whips by overhead, cackling madly. K gets a firm grip on his proton pack, but there's no way he can slip it on in here.

Greenie's already getting ready to make another pass. K tracks it as it starts making another run along the same flight path. He's not too hip to their system yet, but he estimates it's probably about a class 3.

"Hey, Ray, don't we have a--."

And suddenly K shoves himself back in his seat. The dark-green ghost has burst right through the roof and is whipping its arms around in the cab. K feels a wave of dizzyness hit him hard as an arm sweeps by his head.

"Hit the ground, men!" K roars, as he throws open his door and leaps from the cab. He spins in mid-air, curling his body in a ball around the proton pack. He lands on his ass but keeps rolling over his shoulder and then up on his knees. The Deatomizer ground into his side along the way, but K ignores the pain.

The other Ghostbusters are spilling out into the street, but K's eyes are on Naraht. How the hell is a Horta supposed to bail?

K throws the proton pack on his back and starts pulling the straps tight.

[gone_byebye]

There is, to put it mildly, screaming. From the ghost, from the Ghostbusters, from- oh, you name it, it's going on. And then there is mass exodus. You couldn't get the other Ghostbusters out of there faster if you lit a fire under their asses.

Which is what it feels like is going on out here. There is no way it was this warm when the car left the Firehouse. None at all. Then again there weren't neon-bright rivulets of orangey-pink stuff dribbling along the street, hissing their way into the asphalt surface, either. And the street lights weren't blinking out one by one, the cars on the cross streets screeching to a halt-

"Where's Ray?" Peter asks suddenly. He's about halfway across Sixth Avenue, proton thrower at the ready, looking this way and that as if he expects a spectral sniper to pop into existence any second.

He gets no answer- save the rear hatch of the hearse being thrown open. And a muffled cry of "NOW, Naraht!"

The dark-green ghost (still visible where it's flinging itself against the windows in a vain quest to find moving targets, rather like a fly looking for the way out of the apartment) pauses, turning to face the Horta's bulk.

The interior of the car erupts in searing blue-white light.

[k_in_black]

The shades catch most of the flash.

"Naraht!?" Silence. K grips the thrower, rises into a run back to Ecto, then ducks as another ghost hurtles over head.

"Dammit!" K has the thrower up a split second later and fires. The orange-white light rips through the air and slams into the ghost. K staggers back--ground is starting to buckle, and he can't get a firm stance--and the ghost slips out of the arc.

But K sure as hell got its attention.

Except now the damn thing is swinging back around for another bombing run.

[gone_byebye]

It grins, a ghastly, horrible look, and spreads long pincer-like fingers that could've come out of a Chinese horror movie.

It dives. They always do.

The first stream flares from behind a parked Mini, which probably isn't going to last much longer the way the street is sizzling. That's Peter's. The ghost screams, writhing out of the way.

The second comes from further down the street, where Winston has the crook of one arm around a streetlamp and is holding onto the thrower for dear life with both hands. That's not aimed too well and another streetlamp goes out as he gets his aim on target, prompting a fresh round of wailing from the thing.

Beam number three flares up from a doorway, where Egon is bracing himself as if he expects the ground to go out from under him- but he's firing anyway and he's complementing Winston's work. The thing's pinned in the swirling energy cage of the ends of the two beams.

There is no beam number four. What there is instead, is a trap that comes sailing over the top of Ecto's silhouette, soaring into the street to land conveniently just short of the blazing orange stuff.

"Don't look directly into the trap!" Egon yells, and he should know. There is a sound to his voice, a peculiar anticipation, as if his lips were saying one thing and his mind were saying instead four, three, two-

On one the trap opens, the vortex of light streaking upwards to snatch the ghost out of midair as Winston and Egon both divert their beams away.

[k_in_black]

There's a deafening silence for a moment after the trap shuts.

'Ok,' K thinks. 'A little trickier than I thought.' He scans the nearby skyscrapers and can see a few other green streaks. Looks like he would get plenty of practice.

The orange-pink ooze is eating its way across the street and out from the sewer ducts. K whips out a small PDA-style device, not completely different form a tricorder and takes a reading.

K calls out, but his voice is firm and as cool as the air is hot.

"Ray, the heat of this stuff is right off my scale. Any idea where we'll going to find the locus? We have to shut this thing down or we're going to lose the entire block."

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht tumbles out of Ecto, leaving massive cracks in the asphalt as he lands. Half of him is covered with dark-green slime...the half which includes his voder which kind of explains why no one heard him respond to K's call.

"I guess he didn't care much for the taste of me," he says as his fringe clears the gunk off the grill. The slime begins to hiss and sputter as the Horta turns on his acid glands to clean the rest off of him. He turns his attention to the energy fluxes and radiation levels of the area.

"Losing a block would be a conservative guess by my opinion," Naraht says. "I'm sounding a large tunnel...possibly a subway near here. There is good chance that, if it breaches it, the force of the explosion will extend pracitcally to the end of the line."

[gone_byebye]

"Egon!" Ray calls in answer. "Have you got an epicenter on this?"

The car radio is still playing, dimly, probably too faintly to hear. "They're going wild " the call came in / At early morning pre dawn then / "The followers of chaos out of control..."

It's a horrible situation. It's nerve-wracking. It really ought to be terrifying him. But in point of fact Ray almost wants to crow and dance in the street because this did not happen in New-York-Of-The-Doors. This isn't the underground hell he's lived through once before after all. They might just survive.

"Uptown!" says Egon, who's got his PKE meter out. The device's arms are waggling wildly; the data on the screen must be fluctuating something fierce, because its light is flickering, weirdly illuminating the physicist's face. "Somewhere past Rockefeller Center, although I can't tell for sure from here."

"They're meeting at the monument-" / The call came in, the monument / To liberty and honor under the honor roll...

"Ray, this stuff isn't- I can't tell what it is, but it's not ectoplasm."

"They've gathered up the cages- the cages and courageous..."

Ray looks around rapidly. "K! Is any of the backscatter cool enough for us to get a sample? And what direction is it flowing from?" Please not down. Please not down."

The followers of chaos out of control...

[k_in_black]

"Spengler!" K shouts.

Egon, reading K's mind, pulls out a specimen jar with a tight lid on it.

K grabs it out of the air, unscrews the lid with one hand and gets down to a crouch next to a small pool of the stuff.

"It's NOT flowing from below. It's backing up. Very high viscosity."

Ray yells, "Make sure it's cool enough before you try for a sample!"

The stuff by K is steaming, but a lot less than the rest of it on the street. That's going to have to do.

K scoops up some of it. The stuff is so thick he has to move the jar around to get a sample into it. Finally he screws the top back on.

The stuff is still moving around inside the jar, as if it was a alive, moving around the interior surface, as if it was looking for a way out of the jar. If the street wasn't such a sauna, K might have almost felt a chill to see that.

With his other hand, he pulls out the MiB scanner and runs it across the jar. Only to get a kaleidoscope of gibberish. Damn.

"My tech can't get a reading on this! Spengler! Here, catc--."

K's about to throw it back to Egon, when the bottom drops out of the specimen jar and the sample plops noisily on the sidewalk--and immediately begins to eat through the asphalt. Only a quick step back from K kept it from splashing on his pants leg.

K hears Ray call out: "Should've used glass instead of plastic, Egon."

"That WAS glass!"

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

"Somehow, I do not find this development reassuring," Naraht says. He glides over to the edge of the orange goo and starts chewing the street. NOt a tunnel, more of a trench. The goo pours in behind him, flowing just slow enough that Naraht can keep abreast of it.

"Ray! Give me a direction. If I'm going to channel this away, I need a place to dump it!"

[gone_byebye]

"Welcome to a typical day at work for me, K," Ray calls, wry expression all but lost in the shadows. "Naraht, head west- follow that cross street there. There's a small park between two of the avenues that was built on fill. It'll ruin the landscaping but we can make reparations to the city later."

Peter runs the back of one sleeve across his forehead. "I think the city's gonna have bigger issues than whether we incinerated a bunch of crappy trees and wood chips, Ray."

[k_in_black]

"Yeah, got me longing for an Argillian invasion force already, kid," K calls back.

K unsnaps the holster of his Deatomizer with one hand as he keeps a firm grip on the thrower with the other, and jogs across the street to move parallel to Naraht. Never having seen a Horta in action, he has to take a moment to let out a whistle of admiration loud enough for Naraht to hear.

But then K's attention is drawn back to the rest of the street. Because thing's having suddenly gone much too quiet. And then he gets the feeling something very wrong is about to happen right below....