(no subject)
Mar. 14th, 2008 02:05 amSomewhere in the middle of the afternoon, Ray managed to get away from not only the other Ghostbusters, but also the clot of reporters who’d descended on the Firehouse. The fact that they had to use pencils and notepads instead of their old tape recorders didn’t seem to be bothering them any; they were as loud and intrusive as always, especially since someone at City Hall had let slip that the Ghostbusters were on the case. The way Ray saw it, Peter could be loud and intrusive right back at them far, far better than Ray ever could, so they didn’t need him hanging around and getting in the way. Right? Right.
He started for the Firehouse roof, but paused just short of the door. The reassuring skyline wasn’t going to be very reassuring, was it? Half the buildings would be missing, or too tall or too short. Not to mention that the city sounds were going to be all wrong… So much for that idea. Time to hijack Egon’s lab. Not that there was anything wrong with his own, but there were too many individual projects waiting in there to distract him, and he needed to think this through. Egon’s lab might look like what happened the day Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked the chaos bucket over, but Egon swore up and down that he knew where everything was and that dire fates would befall anyone who disturbed so much as a paper clip. If that wasn’t an incentive to leave the shiny things alone and work through the logical sequence of events, Ray didn’t know what was.
He locked the door behind him, just in case. Only once he was sure Egon wasn’t about to turn up in search of sanctuary of his own did he look around and heave a sigh; just like every other room in the Firehouse, Egon's lab had been given a chronological makeover. Wires and consoles had been replaced by brass and glass, and tables of harmonic resonances and the electromagnetic spectrum had been replaced by charts of obscure religious symbology. The bookshelves were still there, but most of the volumes were bound in leather of questionable age and provenance. It looked, Ray thought, a little bit like what he'd always imagined Ivo Shandor's study to look like...
He put the thought swiftly out of his head and settled down on a convenient stool.
All right. The city had been overwhelmed by some kind of temporal phenomenon. That much was certain. It had come from somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, by the sound of things. (Unless there were multiple epicenters of the conversion phenomenon, which was admittedly a possibility.) It affected the animate and the inanimate alike to varying degrees. It had mental effects as well as physical, although the mental effects varied considerably by person. It reached downward one hell of a distance, upward far enough for the entire Empire State Building to have been affected, and outward to the river. (Possibly further, as he hadn't been down to the river yet to see whether the piers were messed up or not.) What did that suggest? Under other circumstances he'd be inclined to say there'd been some kind of cross-rip or possibly even an island-wide aborted temporal swap phenomenon, with the possibility of people in 1905 suddenly finding themselves surrounded by esoteric technology, but the impression of secondary memories didn't quite...
Hm. No. Maybe. He'd read a number of TARDIS archives in the past, when he'd first traveled with Romana. He dimly remembered seeing something about splits in the time-stream resulting in a second set of memories until the split could be resolved, at least in certain very specialized circumstances. Usually the splits didn't manifest quite like this, though. This felt almost like a split and a splice combined- but that kind of thing didn't happen without serious interference of some kind. Generally there were lesser phenomena that indicated an upstream temporal disturbance of that magnitude, if he remembered right. So. . .
. . . so he had nothing, at least not at the moment. Bleah. Well, he'd just have to find a way to get further downtown and see if he couldn't locate other people who'd witnessed the same wave as Janine. Maybe they could fill him in further. And he'd definitely need to get-
To get readings. Again, bleah. Ray pulled the PKE meter from his belt; he'd found it under Ecto's front seat. When the timewave hit, it'd been turned into an insurmountably complicated device of clockwork and coils, all tiny lights glimmering off gears and sheets of crystal. Doubtless it was capable of responding to something, but he had no idea what the response would look like, or how great it would be, or even how to turn the meter on. There was, admittedly, something faintly familiar about the design- something he knew he ought to remember...
Unfortunately, Egon was the one with the secondary set of memories. Ray? Not so much. He was going to have to figure this one out on the fly, somehow, and fast. They didn't have time for him not to know what he was doing.
He started for the Firehouse roof, but paused just short of the door. The reassuring skyline wasn’t going to be very reassuring, was it? Half the buildings would be missing, or too tall or too short. Not to mention that the city sounds were going to be all wrong… So much for that idea. Time to hijack Egon’s lab. Not that there was anything wrong with his own, but there were too many individual projects waiting in there to distract him, and he needed to think this through. Egon’s lab might look like what happened the day Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked the chaos bucket over, but Egon swore up and down that he knew where everything was and that dire fates would befall anyone who disturbed so much as a paper clip. If that wasn’t an incentive to leave the shiny things alone and work through the logical sequence of events, Ray didn’t know what was.
He locked the door behind him, just in case. Only once he was sure Egon wasn’t about to turn up in search of sanctuary of his own did he look around and heave a sigh; just like every other room in the Firehouse, Egon's lab had been given a chronological makeover. Wires and consoles had been replaced by brass and glass, and tables of harmonic resonances and the electromagnetic spectrum had been replaced by charts of obscure religious symbology. The bookshelves were still there, but most of the volumes were bound in leather of questionable age and provenance. It looked, Ray thought, a little bit like what he'd always imagined Ivo Shandor's study to look like...
He put the thought swiftly out of his head and settled down on a convenient stool.
All right. The city had been overwhelmed by some kind of temporal phenomenon. That much was certain. It had come from somewhere south of Fourteenth Street, by the sound of things. (Unless there were multiple epicenters of the conversion phenomenon, which was admittedly a possibility.) It affected the animate and the inanimate alike to varying degrees. It had mental effects as well as physical, although the mental effects varied considerably by person. It reached downward one hell of a distance, upward far enough for the entire Empire State Building to have been affected, and outward to the river. (Possibly further, as he hadn't been down to the river yet to see whether the piers were messed up or not.) What did that suggest? Under other circumstances he'd be inclined to say there'd been some kind of cross-rip or possibly even an island-wide aborted temporal swap phenomenon, with the possibility of people in 1905 suddenly finding themselves surrounded by esoteric technology, but the impression of secondary memories didn't quite...
Hm. No. Maybe. He'd read a number of TARDIS archives in the past, when he'd first traveled with Romana. He dimly remembered seeing something about splits in the time-stream resulting in a second set of memories until the split could be resolved, at least in certain very specialized circumstances. Usually the splits didn't manifest quite like this, though. This felt almost like a split and a splice combined- but that kind of thing didn't happen without serious interference of some kind. Generally there were lesser phenomena that indicated an upstream temporal disturbance of that magnitude, if he remembered right. So. . .
. . . so he had nothing, at least not at the moment. Bleah. Well, he'd just have to find a way to get further downtown and see if he couldn't locate other people who'd witnessed the same wave as Janine. Maybe they could fill him in further. And he'd definitely need to get-
To get readings. Again, bleah. Ray pulled the PKE meter from his belt; he'd found it under Ecto's front seat. When the timewave hit, it'd been turned into an insurmountably complicated device of clockwork and coils, all tiny lights glimmering off gears and sheets of crystal. Doubtless it was capable of responding to something, but he had no idea what the response would look like, or how great it would be, or even how to turn the meter on. There was, admittedly, something faintly familiar about the design- something he knew he ought to remember...
Unfortunately, Egon was the one with the secondary set of memories. Ray? Not so much. He was going to have to figure this one out on the fly, somehow, and fast. They didn't have time for him not to know what he was doing.