milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Hey, Pete," says Ray, who's got a big damn book on Chinese broadsword practice. "HOw's it going? Make it out of October okay?"

"Hey Ray," Peter then blinked. "Huh? It's only July back home, what do you mean? Guessing yours was crazy?"

"Considering that on Halloween morning we had a guy manage to set off a stored spell that completely blocked access to about eight miles worth of the East River so that he could raise an army of Revolutionary War ghosts to help him retrieve sunken treasure from under the Hellgate Bridge, yeah," Ray says. "July, huh? Nice."

Peter just stared.

"...Wait, what?"

"Nine thousand Revolutionary War ghosts were raised from the vicinity of Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn- what we know today as the Brooklyn Navy Yards- using earth and dust from the Prison Ships Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene," Ray says. "These were the guys who died as prisoners of the Redcoat forces, not dead in battle. Our man was planning the biggest gold heist ever accomplished via supernatural means and he was going to use spirits who'd been dead since the Battle of Brooklyn to do it."

Peter knew of the battle. Seemed interesting as a kid to know there was a battle right around where he grew up.

"...Shit. Guessing the army finally got sent packing?"

"Yeah, thanks to the help we got from here. We're just not equipped to handle nine thousand fully sentient ghosts at once." Ray runs a hand over his face. "Agent K, Hel, Andrew Wells, Richard Sharpe, Michael the Wraith, and Yuna the Summoner all came along. We couldn't've done it without them even if we did manage to call down several dozen lightning bolts by using our proton packs to charge up the Triboro Bridge."

Peter sighed, and glanced down at the table.

I should have been here.

"...No, you couldn't."

Ray is not good at reading people's body language, although once in a while he has some success with his teammates. This is not one of those times. It's just that oh yeah, and I had to temporarily serve as a vessel for one of the most powerful deities of the Santeria pantheon never really seems to go over well, so he's not going to say it.

"Yuna was amazing. Once the spells got broken she managed to send all of those spirits back to the afterlife- and an incredible percentage of the other ghosts and spirits loose in the city as well. It was the first time we've had a quiet first week of November in, like, ever. You should've seen it."

Peter still had his head down.

He mumbled, "Yeah, sounds great, Ray. New girl? Name not ringing a bell, but maybe I've been away for longer than I thought."

"She came in relatively recently, yeah," says Ray, blissfully oblivious to any weird implications that others might have read into Peter's choice of words. "She's from a world with a lot of magic and relatively low tech. Looms and steel are okay, but much more than that and they consider the tech to be an excess of human vanity. Really sweet girl, though, especially since she did agree to help us even though she knew how much tech would be involved in what we were doing."

"Yeah, I noticed some new folks around here, but been getting the feeling the door's less my friend these days. That, and just busy with stuff at home."

"Sometimes that happens," Ray says, a little less enthusiastically and more gently. "All things considered it's probably just as well you weren't around for this. We had a police escort and I'd've had a hard time explaining two Peters Venkman to Detective Chen."

Peter finally lifted his head at that, "Oh? Yeah, I guess so with a big job like that."

"Yeah. We couldn't get onto the river and all the bridges south of the Manhattan span of the Triboro were blocked off by the spell, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was closed for renovation, and the entrance to the Queen-Midtown Tunnel was blocked off too, so the cops ran escort duty and got us up to 125th so we could get onto the bridge without too much trouble. It went pretty well, although Detective Chen sent us a bill for the case of Maalox he bought at Sam's Club afterwards."

Peter nodded, "Figures. Always working on something." He wasn't sure what Ray meant, but figured it was some store in his weird timeline.

"Pretty much. Of course, now the city's rewriting their disaster response plan. The mayor's had one too many people poking him about it. New York City's on the fast track to being the first city government to officially acknowledge the disaster potential of the supernatural, and it looks as if we're gonna be the first non-governmental organization included in the plan."

Peter's eyebrows went up.

"Really? Wish our city saw the light on that end. They're still behind the times."

"When you lose control of eight miles of river because you haven't got anybody capable of coordinating a response, the amount of money that goes down the drain because you might decide to be vengeful at four guys in a firehouse is far, far outweighed by the amount of money you lose every hour the docks go unmanned and the bridges are undrivable. The city's had one too many major supernatural incidents to turn any more blind eyes."

"....."

"Yeah, good point."

"They're talking about increasing the level of security in general around the bridges and tunnels, too. A lot of this could've been headed off at the pass if they'd had any kind of camera footage to show something unusual was going on when the guy was setting up the spell. I don't know how well that's going to go over, what with the whole civil liberties angle and all, but it's sure going to make for an interesting time in City Hall. Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, let me know if you guys need a little extra mundane storage space, like for diapers or something. I've been tinkering with controlled dimensional out-pouching effects after seeing some of the quasi-worlds we've been through and I've constructed a few amazingly useful prototypes."

"Well, I like cameras, but even I have my limits when I want to be watched. Don't blame them, maybe something can be set up where you don't get enough unless there's something spooky there?"

Peter then wondered off the next part, "That's the portable hole thing you were working on before, right?"

"Mmmmno, not the portable hole," says Ray. "I got that to work already, before the robot spiders got to it. I'll go back to that project sometime later. No, this is more along the lines of building a box that's bigger on the inside than on the outside."

Mun grins at the idea of an actual Bag of Holding. While the pup:

Peter's eyebrows go up, "Oh? That sounds neat. Be nice not to have lug a huge diaper bag around... Or something lighter for the pack, or wait, guessing proton pack in that would be a bad thing, right?" Well, he and his sore back's just curious on options for proton pack schlepping.

"Yeah, so far that wouldn't be a very good idea at all," Ray says. "On the other hand, I've tested it with kitty litter, house plants, and several goldfish from Petland Discounts. No indicators of it being hazardous to anything's health, or of anything that gets put in going missing. It's still going to weigh as much as the contents, though. I haven't figured out how to cheat gravity yet."