Mar. 14th, 2008

gone_byebye: (secret emergency phone)
Somewhere 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 Wires and consoles had been replaced by brass and glass, and tables of harmonic resonances and the electromagnetic spectrum had been replaced by charts of obscure religious symbology.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.
gone_byebye: (civvies)
Sundown brought about one of the darkest nights in Manhattan Ray had ever seen. Oh, sure, there were streetlamps- arc lighting, mostly- and yeah, the residential buildings had electricity here and there, but there were no towers stretching towards the sky with all forty or sixty or eighty lighted floors. It was bizarre, especially when he got a glimpse of either the New Jersey or the Brooklyn side of the island. Across the river in either direction the dull orange-yellow of sodium light spilled upwards as far as the eye could see. The presence of the Goldman-Sachs tower on the Jersey shoreline was especially disconcerting. New Jersey wasn’t supposed to be ahead of New York City in anything, and it definitely wasn’t supposed to have skyscrapers when Manhattan didn’t. It was an article of every New Yorker’s faith.

Still, there was no arguing with the view across the water, so he turned away from the river and started making his way back towards the Firehouse. He’d been able to interview a lot of people about the timewave today. It seemed like everybody in south Manhattan, bar none, wanted to talk to anyone who gave even the slightest impression of knowing what was going on. Surprisingly for New York, most of the stories were roughly the same. No visible spirits, no manifestations- just an odd feeling in the air, a visible distortion coming up from the south, and wham. 1905. Simple as that. Of course, the stories afterwards were as varied and crazed a bag of variable elements as you could imagine, but honestly, this was New York. If five people didn’t have six or seven different reactions to the same event, Ray would be hard pressed not to consider it a sign of the Apocalypse.

As far as the meter went… well, Ray was pretty sure he’d figure it out. Eventually. It was definitely reacting to something, but the darn thing didn’t have any kind of scale that he recognized. The most he could do was watch the arms rise and fall and pivot like some kind of extremely complicated divining rod. If he only had some other-

Some other way-

Two women who were arguing over the fastest way to the nearest working subway station- the MTA had begin opening service up again on the handful of existing lines- stopped mid-sentence at the sound of one hand clapping. Against Ray’s forehead, that is.



“It’s got to be here, it’s got to be here, it’s not like extremely minor demonic entities didn’t exist in 1905, it’s got to be- oh thank Rassilon.” Ray sat up triumphantly and held his prize out for Winston to see: a box of polished ruddy wood, edged in brass, attached to a broad wrist strap. “We might just be in luck after all.”

Winston eyed the box dubiously and scratched at one muttonchop. “I don’t know, Ray. I’d feel kind of safer relying on machines.”

“So would I, Winston, but I don’t think we’re going to get that chance.” Ray strapped the box to his wrist like an overly awkward wristwatch. “The amount of time it took me today to get any kind of information at all out of the meter isn’t likely to go down fast enough to please anybody. Whereas Lenny, here, came straight from the Hogfather with a one hundred per cent comprehensibility rate.”

“I don’t want any part of this,” Egon announced from the hallway outside. “You know how I feel about that thing.”

“I don’t see the difference between him and Slimer,” Ray called back. “Except that Lenny only has to get fed one Coco Puff at a time.” He rapped on the box lightly with one fingernail. “Hey, Lenny? Lenny, you still in there?”

The top of the box slid open to reveal the same minuscule grey-skinned imp Ray had received from the Hogfather at Milliways, dressed in bizarrely dapper evening wear and a top hat. “Hey,” the imp announced, raising his hat. “What’s shaking?”

“Actually, we were hoping you could tell us,” Ray said as Winston leaned in to peer more closely. “Something big swept through the city a couple of hours ago and left a wave of transformed technology and seriously worked-over people in its wake.”

“Yeah, I felt it.” Lenny ran the back of his hand over his nose. “Somebody really cut loose with that one.”

“Literally?” Winston asked before Ray could think to do the same. “Some kind of a spell or something?”

“Nah. Not like a wizard would use, anyways,” said Lenny. “And I know wizards. Their magic stinks, you can’t miss it. Nah, this was a spirit. Somebody pretty powerful, and pretty specialized. You know how some things out there just have a sphere of influence?”

“Sure,” said Ray. “There’s all kinds of entities that just project fear or rage or-“ He stopped before he got to lust. “All kinds of things. Are you saying this all came from one spirit?”

“Sure felt like it,” said Lenny. “Somebody who’d been working himself up for a lonnnnng time. That was stored power that got discharged.”

“Ask him whether he could identify the source this far after the fact,” came Egon’s muffled words.

Lenny rolled his eyes. “Yes,” he said, raising his voice. “As a matter of fact I could. Bring me near it and I’ll point it out like a !&*()&ing bird dog.”

“What did you just say?” asked Winston.

“!&*()&,” Lenny repeated.

“You can pronounce punctuation?”

“It’s one of the many glamorous perks of life in the detection imp industry,” said Lenny dryly. “Any other genius questions?”

“Only if you could tell us what kind of spirit was behind this,” Ray said. “It seems a little bit… well, modern, really… for a god to be responsible.”

“Yeah, no. Not a god,” said Lenny. “I’d know them, too. Nah, this was something else. Something weird. I’m gonna need something fresher to go by before I can say for sure, though.”

“All right,” said Ray. “We’ll go downtown with you tomorrow, if that’s all right.”

“Peachy,” said Lenny. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to catch up on.”

The imp dove back into the box and pulled the lid shut, leaving a faint smell of cigar smoke in his wake. Ray and Winston exchanged glances; then Winston raised his voice. ”You get all that, Egon?”

“Unfortunately yes.”

“Okay, then. We’d better go tell Peter and Ecto.”

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Raymond Stantz

February 2014

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