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The nice thing about owning your own building is that if you want to go up on the rooftop without setting off an alarm, you can. Ray does a lot of his big thinking up there. Sure, the Firehouse is only three stories tall, but it's still up on the roof. It gives him a little more perspective, and it's a nicely controlled perspective, too, rather than oh-my-god-my-place-in-the-universe-is-WHAT perspective.

Sometimes he finds it easier to talk about certain things up here, too. Slimer doesn't come up here much, and Ecto can't hear this far up without deploying active scanning, and Peter and Egon can't stumble in on things by accident. So he's waiting for Winston just now.

This is gonna be at least as hard as telling the guys about Milliways in the first place.

Comments

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He considers that for a minute before looking out at the City, his elbows on his knees as he folded his hands and unfolded them a few times.

"Yeah. Once or twice."

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"It's a weird experience," says Ray. "Something that's supposed to happen doesn't. Not that I haven't had winters without any kind of real snow here, but at least it got cold. Some places... not so much."

He glances sidelong at Winston, and then up at the AT&T building, over on Canal.

"You keep waiting for it, even if you know intellectually that it's not gonna happen, and when it doesn't... it's just weird, you know?"

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"Weird," he agrees. "Makes you kind of homesick. Makes the days go longer and the whole time feel like nothing's going to change."

He doesn't say anything else and he doesn't look at Ray. That is one mighty interesting AT&T building.

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No kidding.

Ray rubs at the back of his neck absently. "And then one day you look up and you realize six years've gone by, just like that..."

Mr. Segue, he's not, but this is the best he can do.

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It's a mark of Winston's experience that he only stills for a second before turning a questioning look at Ray with one eyebrow raised silently.

Startled 'WHAT!?!'s are for those who haven't had a giant marshmallow man and a living, Transforming car integrated into their reality matrix.

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And maybe Peter.

"Yeah, um... you know how time gets weird for me whenever I go to Milliways? It, um, kind of got a lot weirder this time around."

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There's a slow nod as he licks his lips and swallows, just once.

All right. It's Ray. This can be done.

"Sounds it."

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"Unfortunately, this conversation is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better," Ray says. "And for once I'm not going to give you the short version first, because you'll just look at me funny and then I'll have to go through the whole thing. I guess the simplest place to start is with my friend Garion- remember him? Big guy? Never really looks comfortable wearing pants?"

He's brought Garion to the Firehouse once or twice in the process of getting him back and forth between New York and Riva. People have been around.

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"Yeah," he says with a mildly amused look. It's not as if the man's children weren't at the firehouse often enough.

"Why, what about him?"

If this was anyone else, he might be tempted to ask something like 'he's not in trouble, is he?' or 'he didn't get you into trouble, did he?' but this is Ray. If a friend was in trouble, he wouldn't be sitting on a roof. And if the other man had gotten Ray in trouble--

He wasn't quite sure about that. From his experience (his personal experience), Ray tended to get others into trouble. Or they were worried about him and got into trouble on their own.

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"Well, his world still has a couple of gods kicking around it, even though they're not really supposed to be there any more. They're sort of keeping an eye on things until the one who's supposed to be in charge of their world now really learns the ropes. And, well-"

This is gonna be the fun part.

"It seems that at some point, my goddaughter went and talked to a couple of them on my behalf. Without telling me. Or her father, for that matter."

Ray hasn't mentioned Dominic's bout of second sight to anyone from Gara yet. He doesn't want to get Beldaran in trouble.

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...Ray and gods. Oh this was going in a great direction. Beldaran and Ray and gods.

"The little redhead? The little redhead talked to the gods about you? I'm assuming since you're not, you know, fried and crispy that this was a good thing."

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"Yeah, that's her," Ray says. "I'm lucky, I guess. Her father's people's god is pretty much the mellowest god of the bunch. The impression I got from reading the Alorn folktales was that he's sort of this... fratboy type who's into hunting and parties and boats and beer, instead of smiting and honor and all that kind of thing."

Garion warned him once that his grandfather didn't think much of the Book of Alorn, but there's always other sources of information about a people's gods.

"She's sort of in an interesting position. For one thing, she's genetically a Dryad. It runs in her mother's female line. For another, pretty much all of her close relatives on her father's side? Sorcerers." It's getting a little easier, as long as he doesn't think about it too much. "Dryads live as long as their trees live, and her mother's tree is an oak. So're the trees of all her mother's relatives. And where Garion comes from, sorcerers have this tendency to not die. I mean, not of old age, anyway."

He's gonna pause and let the picture start drawing itself before he goes any further.

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Winston's pretty good at drawing at this point. Considering the kind of nonsense that would come out of the other four occupants of the firehouse, it was something of a necessity.

"So... you going to start swinging that lightsaber around and shouting about how there can only be one or did you not spend six years somewhere and look exactly like you did before you left?"

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Ray snorts. "Winston, I've never committed an act of violence against a human being who wasn't Walter Peck in my life," he says. (Agent N totally doesn't count; he was possessed by the Black Oil at the time, and probably long since dead.) "Do you honestly think I'm going to start something like that now?"

Then he sobers. "Sorry. Yeah, that's pretty much the gist of Beldaran's arrangement. And it wasn't six years, it was more like forty-seven, but they at least get snow in Melcene. I kind of found out about the no-aging package when I got shoved into the past of Garion's world by a being or forces unknown and realized just how long I'd been trying to work out how to get back home."

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He laughs, because that helps.

"It was a joke, Ray. I do know you, you know."

He pats the other man's shoulder before breathing in deep.

"Man. Forty seven years? That's... that's wild. And forty-seven years in a totally different world?"

He whistles.

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"At least I got a job at a university. There's only two actual universities in Garion's world, and this was the better one. I spent most of my time there in the lab, so it's not as if it was too different, except for the part where there were a lot more explosions and I had to invent toilet paper myself. Medieval alchemists have weird priorities."

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Winston just nods.

It's usually safest.

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Wise man.

"Anyway, that's the big thing. Around forty years at the university, six and a half in a tropical country with so many jungles and snakes that I'm never going to be able to go to Rain Forest World at the Bronx Zoo again without flinching. I finally got contacted by the guy who switched me and Ecto back, and he got Garion to find me in the past and pull me out of it, and that's pretty much when I finally came home."

There is no power on Earth or in Heaven that can compel Ray to say exactly what he was trying to do in Nyissa.

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That gets another nod.







"So. You're immortal."

He presses his lips together into a line for a moment before breathing out in a puff.

"Better than it could be."

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"Yep," says Ray. "I don't think it changes anything except my investment strategy, really. I'm going to have to go long term now. Everything else is pretty much the same."

Except what happens on Mexican Night, but he'll deal with that later.

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"You gonna tell your sister?"

Because he thinks of these things.

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"I can't figure out how, for the life of me," Ray confesses. "And I've been trying to think how to say it for days. 'Oh, hey, Catherine, you remember how we talked about me setting up a will? That might not be necessary after all' doesn't really work very well with her."

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"You could just wait," he offers. "She notices, she notices... and it'll give you a few years to think up something to say about it. Plus, hey, people tend to get used to things over time. Might soften the blow."

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"I was kind of hoping that approach might be an acceptable one," Ray says. "Catherine can swallow a lot, but this would really be asking too much of her right now. Maybe over the course of a couple of years she might get around to being able to handle it, right?"

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"Probably," he says.

And he looks out over the City.

"So, were you trying that speech out on me before giving it out to the other guys?"

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"No, they're getting a different one," Ray says. "I haven't worked Peter's out yet. Egon's is mostly shaping up to be what he is and isn't allowed to test me for."

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He reaches out now and gives Ray a healthy pat on the shoulder.

"Just remind Peter that he's not allowed to hide behind you any more than he used to be," he says with a warm smile. "And Egon--"

There's a short pause.

"You're on your own there. Sorry."

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Ray smiles wryly. "I'll work something out," he says. "Thanks, Winston."

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He shrugs.

"What're friends for?"