Retirement post

[gone_byebye]

The door opens on a chilly grey day in an alleyway in New York and closes behind a Ray wearing his winter dark bluegrey Ghostbusters duds. "Wow," he says, looking around the Bar. "What'd I miss?"

He doesn't stop for an answer, though. He heads for the Bar to drop off a note ("give a copy of this to anybody who asks about me, please?"), and then to the bulletin board to pin up the same thing for people who go there first.

Hi, everybody. This is Ray.

I realize I haven't been to Milliways very often in the past year or so. Believe it or not, I've been too busy. Some of you will remember that my particular universal continuum has linkages, very unfortunate ones, to the realm of the Cthulhu Mythos. Well, here's the thing: for the past several years those linkages have been getting stronger. The stars, as the Old Gent says, have been becoming right- and this past year they've been slotting into place one after another, so to speak.

This has not been a good October. And, bluntly put, there is not going to be a good October again within most humans' lifetimes in my world.

Egon and Ecto and I have been running a lot of mathematical models and simulations and every single one of them reports the same thing. We're about to enter into a phase of seriously horrific Mythos activity beyond the sort even Gozer would be able to stand up to. I've been working on my old applied dimensional science from the times when I worked with Eddie Dean and the Beam generators for this past year and I believe we can just about maintain conditions suitable to human life and sanity during the Mythos assaults on my world, but, as usual with these things, there's going to be a price. We have to slam the door on anything that might give the Great Old Ones and their minions access- and on anything they might be able to use to access other continua should they manage to manifest in my own.

Bluntly put, we have to close the door on all access to and from my world, to and from other universes, until such time as the stars are wrong again. Estimated duration: three hundred Terran standard years.

I may still be around at the end of it. If that happens to be the case I'll make a point of being the first person back to Milliways once we drop the barriers again. If not... well, it's been great knowing you all, and I hope you have a better time than we do.

-Raymond Stantz, Ghostbuster

(P.S. If another version of me shows up here from one of the other continua after I'm gone, please be kind to him. He probably won't wind up in my situation, but ... just be nice to him anyway? Please? For me? Thanks.)

Once the note is up he heads for the Bar, because this is going to be his last time here, and he'd like to make some use of that fact while he's saying goodbye to people.


[OOC: As I mentioned in the Back Room a few week ago, I'm retiring Ray. This is his goodbye post; it's open as long as people are finding it, basically.]

Comments

[gone_byebye]

"I don't remember if you were here then, but contact with the remains of the spirit after we had the trap that we eventually locked it into destroyed was what caused the Bar to break out in steampunk a few years ago," Ray says. "For us, it was a President's Day weekend worth of 1905 in New York City. Things got kind of interesting."

[claudiometer]

"Nnnnno, I think I'd remember that. Probably just as well HG missed it - she doesn't understand why anyone would want to relive the Victorian era, but then, she was there the first time around."
Claudia mostly thinks it was a neat aesthetic, but that's about it.

[gone_byebye]

"On our side of the door Janine nearly went up in flames when her clothing changed to something with a corset and bustle midway through her walk to work," Ray says. "And Detective Chen, the cop we work with most closely on the Spook Squad, went out to his police cruiser only to find it'd become a Morgan gelding named Two-Bits. About the only really good thing that came out of it was the fact that every single human immunodeficiency virus on the island of Manhattan was changed into a different disease organism entirely- and since the viruses had reproduced and died by the time we got the island's time reset three days later, nobody in Manhattan had AIDS any more. A lot of other horrifying things, but not AIDS."

[claudiometer]

"Yeah, but presumably once everything reset itself you could cure the other horrifying things. So there's that, at least. But it'd take one... very thorough Artifact to pull off something like that."
And Claudia's not at all sure she wants to contemplate the downside.

[gone_byebye]

Ray nods. "No artifact. Just an extremely angry fourth or fifth dimensional spirit being," he says. "If we're lucky there won't be more of them once we've locked the doors, but who knows."

[claudiometer]

"Here's hoping. You're gonna have your hands full enough with the extra-dimensional nasties - no idea how Teslas will work on those, by the way, but it's better than nothing."

[gone_byebye]

"Well, if they don't work that's what the proton packs are for," Ray says. "We'll have to cross our fingers and hope."

[claudiometer]

"Yeah."
She musters a smile. "Good luck out there, man."

[gone_byebye]

"Thanks," says Ray. "I appreciate it."