Profile

Thrown out of Columbia University for failing to produce results- and, more importantly, for working closely with the thoroughly disreputable Peter Venkman- Ray Stantz was one of the founding three Ghostbusters. In his particular version of reality, the battle with Gozer got a little bit uglier than the movie was willing to show; when he admitted he wasn't a god, Ray took the Sumerian deity's blast full on, and was blown right off the Shandor Building.

Dimensional cross-rips can sometimes be a lifesaver.

DISCLAIMER: This is a roleplaying journal for use primarily at milliways_bar. No copyright infringement WHATSOEVER is intended. I LOVED the movie Ghostbusters, I thought the Real Ghostbusters cartoon was one of the best things ever done in this country's animation industry, and I would never never ever want to take away from that. Please don't sue me.

NB: For roleplaying purposes it should be noted that this version of Ray Stantz originally hails from the continuity established in the licensed comic book limited series Ghostbusters: Legion, from 88 MPH Comics. The comic book in question takes place six months after the events of the first movie, but is set in early 2004. Ray's first point of departure from his own continuity, therefore, was in early October 2003- during the battle with Gozer.

Note the phrase 'first point of departure'. Ray has walked out of Milliways more than once and landed in what he considers alternate realities. 'Alternate continuities' is closer to the truth. He's spent six months in the universe of the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, including the events of the episodes "Collect Call of Cthulhu", "Knock Knock", "Citizen Ghost", "Ragnarok and Roll", "Egon's Ghost", "Chicken, He Clucked", "Mr. Sandman, Dream Me A Dream", and "No One Comes To Lupusville", and "The Ghostbusters in Paris" among others. He's aware of the events of "The Boogeyman Cometh" and "Egon's Dragon", though he wasn't there for them. He's also spent three or four months in the movie universe, assisting his fellow Ghostbusters in coming up with the financial resources to properly fight the city's post-Gozer lawsuits and restraining orders. He has no knowledge of the events of the second movie, beyond being told to learn psychic defense and stay away from paintings of Vigo the Carpathian- this comes from his friend doc_venkman.

Ray is aware of the existence of the first Ghostbusters movie. He recently returned to the animated continuum for a few weeks, where he lived through the events of the episode "Take Two"- in which the movie was filmed as a somewhat fictionalized biography of the cartoon Ghostbusters, but was presented at the very end of the episode through film footage from the movie itself. He left that reality shortly after the end credits rolled for the movie's New York premiere, but he's seen the whole thing.

The contents of this journal are not related in any way whatsoever to the version of Ray I briefly played at sages_of_chaos or the one I currently play at dear_multiverse. I'm not taking any Milliways stuff into other games, nor am I bringing any external stuff in; if you want to interact with D_M Ray, feel free to do so, but don't use the stuff in this particular journal as a guide. Thanks!

For reference's sake, this is where Ray lives and works when he's not at Milliways.

Addenda:

Oh sweet mother of Eris where do I even START?

In November of 2005, thanks to technology trading between the Ghostbusters and the Milliways people of Knight Industries/the FLAG foundation, Ecto achieved full sentience a la KITT and KARR. Her initial unprogrammed psyche was that of a six-year-old girl. Her developmental rate led to her being the cognitive equivalent of a human adult within three years. Sometime in late 2005 or early 2006, Ray also proposed marriage to Romanadvoratrelundar of Gallifrey, having traveled with her for some time as a Companion at first and then continued keeping company with her afterwards. She accepted, with the caveat that Gallifreyans preferred very long engagements.

In 2006: Ray was kidnapped by Black Ops members of a group called Foliage Census, hidden within the EPA's budget, and held prisoner in Montana in an effort to get him to either work for the Feds or work not at all. Turned out Walter Peck hadn't been fired from the EPA, but had taken advantage of a clerical error and wound up working for the Black Ops guys instead. Ray was rescued and a spectacular orgy of Milliways-based destruction was visited upon the Foliage Census headquarters a few days later.

Later that year Ray received an amulet from Garion of Riva (canon: The Belgariad, The Malloreon). The amulet is silver and worn under his clothes; it bears an image of the Ghostbusters logo on it. As with all the amulets of similar design in Garion's canon, it has a few powers to it. The obvious one is that it allows Ray to walk out of Milliways and into Riva if he so wills it or needs to- assuming the door opens to him at all, of course. The less obvious one is that it facilitates Ray's communication with nonhumans greatly, allowing him considerable understanding of what would otherwise be incomprehensible language, grunts/gestures, or streams of audible binary code.

In 2006 Ray also lost all potential to ever develop any kind of paranormal power whatsoever, as he made the mistake of attempting to contribute blue mana to the Key to Armageddon to try and keep the Armageddon Clock from destroying Milliways. He knew enough magical theory and metamagic information that the Key simply took all possible power from every possible future path Ray could ever take, along with the baseline level of PKE any human being has by virtue of being alive. Psychics and certain magic users will sense the gigantic metaphysical scar this left.

Slimer, the first ghost they ever bagged, came to live with the Ghostbusters in 2006 shortly before they had to deal with a would-be thief named Thomas Horlick raising the ghosts of the Prison Ships from the waters off Brooklyn to help him steal British paymasters' gold from under the Hell Gate Bridge. In December of 2006 the Federal government declared Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz national heroes in order to secure the Ghostbusters' cooperation (well, Ray's- he'd refused to even TALK to the feds until 'the day Tesla and Steinmetz are national heroes', never expecting them to actually DO it) in dealing with a Cthulhu Mythos intrusion on the International Space Station. No mention was made of just where (Milliways) they got their assistants from. That ended with one dead astronaut, one captured cultist, and one astronaut left as a brain in a Mi-Go cylinder.

In 2007: Ray's sister relented in her attitude towards the paranormal and allowed Ray to resume training her nephews in the use of their telekinetic and other psychic abilities, most of which were pretty low-level due to the fact that they were still very young. The training mostly took the form of Jedi apprenticeship, albeit administered twice or three times a week rather than live-with-the-master padawanship. New York City set aside a squad of police under the command of Detective John Chen whose sole purpose was to investigate and pursue crimes with supernatural involvement. The Federal government kicked the National Paranormal Activity Survey into gear on the Ghostbusters' post-Space Station recommendation, planning to take national steps to deal with the supernatural once they had a year's worth of study results. A Deep One colony was discovered off the coast of Massachusetts, but it turned out that they had split off from Mythos Earth four hundred thousand years prior and rather liked Ray's universe because Dagon and Cthulhu weren't there, and that many of their worst excesses had been Lovecraft's racism getting away with him. Walter Peck, who had been imprisoned for his role in the Black Ops group that captured Ray, escaped from Federal prison in October and went on a spree across the United States trying to gain supernatural power and allies. He pissed off everything he made contact with, was captured by Mounties when he tried to enter Canada, and escaped again within five minutes of his extradition back to the States.

An incident in September 2007 with a madman calling himself Dark Lord Ivan von Stabbington III led to Ray and Ecto swapping bodies for a few days. When Ray-in-Ecto's-body encountered Optimus Prime at Milliways, the Autobot leader, having befriended Ray some time back, offered to have Ratchet build a set of manipulator arms for him to use then and Ecto to use later. Ratchet went overboard. Ray did not find out about this until, after Dominic Deegan helped them to move back into their appropriate bodies, a mad paleontologist raised most of the contents of the Lila Acheson Wallace Hall of Extinct Mammals and their Relatives from the dead in an attempt at revenge on her old high school classmates. Ecto transformed into a bipedal giant robot to get her father out of the way of a Basileosaurus attack. The event was captured by several TV networks and several hundred people with cameraphones who were busy rubbernecking. It came in handy later when Walter Peck gave up on finding more occult help, recruited the Illinois Nazi Party's aid, and stole the Ark of the Covenant from a government warehouse in Cleveland. Peck and his minions were defeated when Peck tried to blackmail Ray into opening the Ark, but it turned out that it was a fake built by Roosevelt's top men in the forties using Ivo Shandor's paranormal technology, so as to throw the Nazis off the track. Peck was then turned into a Siamese fighting fish by Garion of Riva and sent to live on Janine's desk. Hell sent a Wolfram and Hart representative from several universes over a few days later to give the Ghostbusters their claim on Peck's soul, saying nobody Down There actually wanted it.

Shortly thereafter Beldaran of Riva, Ray's goddaughter, pleaded with the gods Belar and UL to make her favorite uncle immortal like the sorcerors in her family. She bargained them into doing so in exchange for 'one of my best Erastide presents and my new pony that I love very much'. Ray did not find out about this until he was attacked by Stone Angels (from the new Doctor Who series) and thrown into Melcena, on Garion's world, some two hundred years before Garion was slated to be born. He got a job as Senji the alchemist's lab assistant and stayed at the university for forty years, trying to work up a way of getting out of Mallorea and into the Vale of Aldur to get Belgarath's help. When Senji finally tried to translocate him, he was distracted at the last instant and sent Ray to the wrong destination; Ray then spent seven years as an experimental alchemist and researcher in Salmissra's palace in Sthiss Tor until he figured out how to use existing tech to build Salmissra a vibrator. He then got out of the palace and was halfway across Maragor when Dominic Deegan found him and Garion brought him back to Milliways. Shortly thereafter he inadvertently walked out of the Bar and into 1906 Cthulhu Mythos Earth, where he wound up getting a job as an assistant librarian at Miskatonic. He held that position for twenty-five years, got a degree in mechanical engineering there, and would've been just fine with waiting for 1986 and trying to contact the Animated Continuum if Frank Pabodie hadn't dragged him along on the Dyer expedition to Antarctica- which is how he got back to Milliways.

In December, the Federal government created the position of Ambassador-at-large for issues of non-human sentient beings, and convinced Ray to take the position by offering Ecto citizenship.

Nyarlathotep showed up at the Firehouse to wish him a happy New Year after that.

In 2008: representatives of fourteen different universes' Canadas showed up in Washington trying to secure aid in keeping forces of the Cthulhu Mythos from seizing the hidden inner city at the Earth's northern magnetic pole, thereby allowing Mythos entities free reign to attack any worlds on which the City touched. The battle was won and Russia's official policy of the supernatural not existing turned out to be the result of an Azathoth cultist in the Navy influencing the Russian President. With the cultist gone, the policy changed to reflect reality. So did America's; they created a full Paranormal Responder Corps in ten cities nationwide, starting with a second Ghostbusters unit in New York, the Harlem Hellfighters. Other cities included Philadelphia, Chicago, Galveston, San Francisco, and New Orleans. The Corps commander was Admiral Albert Calavicci.

Presidents' Day Weekend in 2008 featured Manhattan Island being temporarily converted to the year 1905, much to the disgruntlement of its 2008 residents, who were really not up for dealing with horses and such. This was reversed once the time-spirit that had caused the incident was captured and then fed to a Hound of Tindalos.

In May of 2008, the government of the Congo contacted the State Department to ask assistance in a matter of a possible sentient Mokele-mbembe. Turned out it was a dimensionally sideswiped Grimlock, who'd arrived on Earth during the Tunguska blast's dimensional cross-rip a hundred years ago and had been going in and out of stasis lock whenever he could muster enough energy to activate. He got sent home.

Ray adopted a Jotok alien as a daughter later that year after it imprinted on him in Milliways; they picked the name Jhalak out of a book. She was with him when the Great Lemurian Empire, in the Pacific ocean, demanded the humans send their ambassador. The Great Lemurian Empire turned out to be sapient cirrate octopuses who had been waked to sapience before the evolution of humpback whales thanks to the interference of the Dreamer of R'lyeh. They'd spent their entire history keeping it asleep; it was waking up, and they wanted to warn the landers. On the ride home they found a copy of the Belgariad in a bookstore, and later they and Garion went with Optimus Prime to go visit David Eddings and yell at him some. (Ray spent that time in the backyard with Leigh Eddings, apologizing a lot.) They passed through Lupusville, NY as well, where Ray found out that there was at least one werewolf in town; he ran a Texaco.

In October, the Lemurians lost their battle to keep Cthulhu asleep when a Uruguayan fishing boat full of Patagonian toothfish ignored the Waller protocols and blundered into R'lyeh's waters. Cthulhu rose. Earth unleashed a nuclear arsenal on him. It did not work. Fortunately (ish), Ivo Shandor's cult had survived his death, and six buildings they had built in the Caribbean were still active; Gozer arose shortly thereafter. Ray managed to give Gozer the form of Unicron, and Gozer crossed half the planet to do battle with Cthulhu for the right to devour the world. Gozer won, and would have commenced devouring had the Ghostbusters not been on a Naval vessel where one of the ship's petty officers had been hijacked by the Great Race of Yith and taken the step of stocking up on a LOT of Twinkies; Gozer now gets a shipment of Twinkies twice a week to keep him quiet.

The rest of 2008 was pretty normal except that Ded Moroz and Snegurochka showed up at New Year to wish Ray a happy New Year and tell him not everything was out to destroy humanity. Oh, and Egon built a functional golem with knowledge he'd acquired back when it was 1906. He'd been trying to prove it wouldn't work. Not only did it work, but it shortly picked up the spirit of the recently deceased Eartha Kitt, who refuses to leave.


... yeah, that's about it so far. Oh, except that he and Romana finally eloped, what with him now being around a hundred and eight and the engagement being seventy-five years long as a result and all.