(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]

"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....

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

K is right. Naraht knows he's right because, just as he reaches the park, he feels vibrations...forunners of violent geological activity.

"You might want to get where something won't fall on you!" he yells through his voder, as he finishes the trench and pulls himself out of the way of the flowing goo.

And the ground starts to dance. Not "the big one" but enough to generally rattle everyone's cage...it was also enough to cause the goo to splash up and hit Naraht across the back!

"Aaaaahhhh!" he shouted, more from suprise than pain. The heat didn't bother him, but he had no idea what this stuff was.

[gone_byebye]

"Naraht!" Ray yells, forgetting momentarily that Horta physiology bears about as much resemblance to human as Ecto's engine bears to that of the USS Nautilus. He lunges forward in the Horta's direction-

-only to get an arm snagged by Pete Venkman as he passes. "Don't get near that stuff!"

"But Naraht-"

"He's a friggin' rock! You're all squishy and burny and stuff!"

"... oh yeah."

Winston, for his part, has successfully positioned himself squarely against the most stable bit of a local building's foundation. "Since when does New York have friggin' earthquakes?" he yells.

Winston always was the most commonsensical of the bunch.

[k_in_black]

K hits the ground next to the trench, keeping Naraht between himself and the splashing muck.

"Naraht!"

The Horta seems to be holding up all right, but K keeps a sharp eye on him as the ground rumbles all around. He still thinks the Naraht is the most likely one to walk--uh, scuttle--away from this, but christ only knows what that goo can do.

Another rumble and K rolls several feet west, along the trench, as a piece of masonry slams into the road right where he was. He glares up at the sky--that was no accident.

Sure enough, another demonic cackle swoops through the sky overhead. K yanks his Deatomizer from his holster. If he gets another chance with these ghosts, he's sure as hell not going to miss.

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

The Horta, in the meantime, is trying to get the junk off of him before it does anything bad while trying to figure out if it is going to do anything bad. Some has gotten onto his...well, equivalent of tastebuds, so he's analyzing.

"I'm okay, guys," he says. "You don't want it on your skin because it's hot enough to burn you to the bone but it's not caustic in and of itself. In fact...copralite! It's a silicon based fluid...rather like a lubricant and..." he realises something else. "Someone get a high pressure hose and get it the hell off of me!"

[gone_byebye]

The scene: four Ghostbusters, one Man in Black, one slightly boggled Horta, one aerial ghost. And one trench full of radiant heat, eagerly draining off into what's going to be an extremely unhappy city park by tomorrow.

Assuming there is a tomorrow, anyway.

"There's no hoses anywhere but inside the buildings!" yells Ray. "I don't even know if-"

"We don't need a hose!" Winston answers. "What's the water pressure around here like?"

"Pretty high, why?"

"Hydrant!" says Winston, pointing before dashing off towards Ecto. There's a toolkit in there, and there's a big wrench in that. The water pressure should be enough to do some cleaning.

Assuming he can get there in time. There's a lot of assuming going on today.

At any rate, Ray nods and charges for the hydrant, sweeping the air in front of and above him for signs of ghost or masonry or anything else that might get in his way. It's Peter who spots the critter that tried to take out the Agent, though; he points at the faintly blue thing, which is attempting to rip off another piece of the nearest building. "Got you, you stinkin'"-

The rest of his words are lost in the sound of proton fire.

[k_in_black]

"Go get 'em, Ray!" K shouts.

"Naraht! Stay right there!"

K swings his legs around until he's sitting at the edge of the trench. Bracing his legs he dials the Deatomizer down to a lower setting.

Calling to Winston to hold back, K takes careful aim and fires a single pulse at the hydrant. There's a flash followed by a roar as a burst of New York City's famously well filtered water floods into the trench, and pours over Naraht.

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht shoves himself into the most powerful part of the stream. While he gets the goo off, a ghost with mulitiple tentacles tries to divebomb him, buy is quickly picked off by Winston's thrower.

"Thanks!" Naraht calls out as he finishes getting clean and backs out of the water. "Ugh! Water immersion isn't pleasant but better than the alternative."

He notices Ray's look of concern. "Don't worry, it wouldn't have killed me. That stuff is a mix of silicon and other chemicals that make it probably the best lubicant I've ever seen."

The Horta shakes himself, spraying water droplets everywhere. "However, that particular mix of chemicals is rapidly absorbed through my acid glands and respirers...and highly intoxicating. If it had stayed on me much longer I would have been three sheets to the wind, so to speak."

[gone_byebye]

The ozone smell in the air only gets stronger as the proton streams bark into life, left, right, and center. Ray for his part nods. "That's something, at least-"

"Ray, did I hear him right?" calls Peter as he reels in the ghost at the end of his stream.

"How do you mean?"

"You brought us-" Dr. Venkman drops a trap, and kicks it out as far as it'll go. "-a space rock-" One foot comes up; the stream cuts off; the trap springs open. As it slams shut with the ghost inside, the sentence finishes: "-and you almost got it drunk?"

"Um-"

Before Ray can answer, the pleedle-eedle-eedle of a cellular phone rings out. Peter gets an odd look on his face and rips a bright yellow handset from one of his pockets. "This had better be good, Janine."

In the relative quiet that's fallen, the secretary's voice can be heard. "It's the Mayor. He wants to know where the heck you guys are."

"Tell Lenny he can-" Peter checked himself. "We're north of Canal and heading for-" He looked over at Egon. "Still Rock Center?"

"I think I've found our locus, Peter, and it's farther north than that. It looks as if our ultimate goal is under Central Park- behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, if GPS is worth trusting any more."

"Tell him we're on Avenue of the Americas and heading north if he wants to send an escort." He shuts off the cell phone and gestures to the others. "Come on, guys. The Mayor wants us on the move."

Ray moves forward to gather up the traps as Peter herds the other two Ghostbusters back to Ecto. There's a slightly shamefaced look about Ray as he hurries past K, but other than that he doesn't say anything.

[k_in_black]

Might be some kind of group dynamics thing going on, but K's keeping it linear. Everything else can wait.

K checks the charges on the Deatomizer and his proton pack. Good to go. Then hurries back to Ecto.

"Ray! Behind the Met? You mean the Great Lawn or the Reservoir?"

[lt-naraht.livejournal.com]

Naraht hurries over to Ecto and starts to climb in.

"Look out!" someone screams from the crowd gathering on the periphery. It's a cop who was apparently too busy taking cover to note the Horta earlier. And his gun is out...God only knows what good he thinks it would do on a ghost. "One's trying to get your car!"

Naraht, rather peeved at this point, drops back to the ground and lets a huge gout of steam off. "Oh for the love of the Mother! I'm on their side, waterbag!"

[gone_byebye]

Ray slaps one glove-covered hand over his face, inadvertently dropping a trap or two in the process. Fortunately, none of them open. That would be horrifically embarrassing. "Officer," he begins, but the cop isn't hearing.

"Stand back!" the officer yells. "I can get a clear shot from-"

"Nobody's shooting anybody, Officer, this is-"

Egon, who had been about to seat himself, steps in front of the Horta instead. "Put the gun down," says the physicist firmly. "He's on our side."

There's still some argument in the cop, but Egon's given Ray time to think. As he gathers up the traps he mutters to K, "We don't have time to explain things here. Can you do something about this guy so we can get uptown now?"

[k_in_black]

And there's a faint smile on K's face. Aw, hell, he really shouldn't enjoy this, he knows that. But it's been *weeks* since he's had a chance to--.

"Officer! Excuse me," K strides right up to the policeman in the way only Federal and MiB agents know how. The cop can't help it. His gun stays pointed at Naraht and Egon, but he's looking at K now.

The shiny cylinder is in K's hand already, "Hell of a day we're having, isn't it? (If you could look right here.) I'm sure you're searching for a handle on the moment. Who wouldn't be? (Yes, right here, that's it.)"

*foomp*

K palms the neuralyzer as he grabs the cop by his shoulders and spins him around, facing away from Naraht.

"I want to *personally* thank you for taking part in our disaster-training simulation. I don't have to tell you that we would be *lost* without the valuable input of the NYPD. Your force is truly an inspiration to us all. Now if you would please proceed directly to your next station--that would be the second floor of Zabar's, right by the kitchen utensil display--we can move right along to the next phase."

"And thank you again for your invaluable service to the PATRIOT Act."