milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Ray stayed at Milliways last night. It's late October in a New York City where the wall between the realm of the spirits and the world of the living has all the stopping power of Tyvek. A man needs his sleep, dammit.

But he's awake now, and he has a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and he's wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt (Silver Age, thank you) and a modified set of his usual goggles pushed up on his head. And he's got a trap hanging from his belt, standard Ghostbusters issue. So he's happy.

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Amadna walks up to him, "Good morning Ray"

noticing the trap she points, "What is that?"

"Huh? Oh... morning, Amanda." Ray sets his spoon aside. "That's a trap, one of the ones my colleagues and I use for capturing ghosts. I've gotten a little paranoid lately- it's a bad time of year. How're you?"

"I'm doing very well."

Amanda thinks for a moment, "Wow, all hollows eve must be a nightmare for you."

"Nightmare," says Ray, "is putting it mildly. It only starts on the thirty-first. The whole sorry mess peaks around the eleventh of November. Right now it's just the preludes to a twelve-day symphony of pure, unadulterated nutcakery."

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Depends. You any good at greater binding or lesser banishment rituals of the twelfth circle of Sigismund the Tall? There's a whole cluster of buildings around the Lower East Side Tenement Museum that'll be spitting out the ghosts of the immigrant dead by the end of the week if last year was anything to go on." He thinks. "Or if you read Chinese, I could really use some brush-ups on the ward papers used in wrangling hopping vampires."

"I don't have much proficiency with banishment rituals but I can both read and write Chinese."

"Okay," Ray says. "My spoken Chinese is limited to the Cantonese for 'that's a lovely roasted duck, thank you', 'which way to the bathroom, please' and 'are you absolutely sure you want us to remove the spirit of your uncle from the premises'. Useful phrases, but not really much use when Chinatown starts getting overrun by spirit creatures with tusks growing out of their nostrils. Any chance I could hit you up for a few reading lessons at some point?"

"Sure, anytime. I should be around most of the time, probably around the fire reading. It seems that bar wants me to learn anciant egyptian." she lift up the book and walkman. and laughs.

Ray eyes the Walkman uneasily. "Um, yeah," he says. "If I were you, I'd listen. After what she put me through with Sumerian..."

Amanda raises an eyebrow, "Naraht told me that bar had given you the task of learning Sumerian. Did that have something to do with the God that Asari-Suti helped you with in the alternate reality of New York?"

Heard of Ray before meeting him, maybe. *gives convincing innocent look*

"Yep," Ray says. "If we hadn't been able to get Andrew Wells in on the deal I would've been struck with trying to cast the Zi Dignir myself. Which, you know, could be done in a mana-saturated environment like that, but I didn't exactly have time to rehearse it."

"Are you some sort of mage?"

"Nope," Ray says cheerfully, "but with the amount of unassigned PKE supersaturating the air on that rooftop, President Winston could've recited the words and gotten results. At least I know how to focus the energy, from a purely theoretical standpoint, of course."

"Interesting, well if that is the case with the banisment ritual I would be willing to learn it."

"What's a PKE?"

"Psychokinetic energy. The energy involved in psychic powers- such as psychokinesis, obviously- and in the action of ghosts, spirits, magic, and several other poorly-understood phenomena."

She nods listening to each word, "Your meter must go crazy in this place."

"I had to build a damper into it after the first one shorted out from scanning an Endless and the second one exploded."

"Your the second person I've heard mention the Endless, I haven't met any of them."

"Do you have your meter with you now?"

"I met Death not long after I got here," Ray says. "And her brother Destiny later, and Dream, once. Death's pretty cool, and Dream is absolutely fascinating, but Destiny gives me the willies something awful."

He nods, indicating a much smaller device hanging at his belt. "This is another iteration of the damper model," he says. "It's much less likely to blow up even with the damper off, but why take a chance?"

"Yeah, what does your device say about me?" She gives him a large smile.

There goes that curiosity again.

There's a wave from behind a cup of tea and some toast.

Toast is good. So are waves. Ray looks up. "Hey, Garion," he says. "How's it going?"

He smiles.

"Better. Much better."

He'd made up with his grandfather.

"Yourself?"

"Up to my navel in work back home, which is why I slept here last night. My world gets very, very hairy for a while at this time of year and I wanted to at least get some rest that wouldn't be interrupted by an alarm going off or something green and semitransparent trying to bite off my nose."

He winces.

"That sounds...unpleasant, to say the least. And this place is a nice getaway. I'm just enjoying my time, since I don't know when I'll come back after I leave and a little vacation is nice. I do miss Ce'Nedra, though."

"Oh, she hasn't come through yet?" Ray shakes his head sympathetically. "Sorry to hear that. Anybody else from home turn up lately, maybe?"

He shakes his head.

"No. I saw Zakath, and he was quite shaken by everything but we got on all right after that. And Grandfather and Silk, obviously. But I don't think she'll be showing up."

He points to the door.

"I think I'll be heading home soon enough. For a while, anyway."

"Gotcha," Ray says. "Probably a good idea. No sense sticking around here for an extended period if you don't absolutely have to."

He shrugs.

"I like the vacation, but..."

Another shrug.

"I'm sure I'll be back. I just wonder when."

"Don't get here on purpose, huh? Ray says. "That sounds like it could be a problem. If it helps at all, I have reason to believe I'll probably still be here when you turn up next."

He smiles.

"Good to know, Ray."

"Hi."

Guppy appears next to Ray.

"Before you say anything I would like to apologise to your for frequently subjecting you to unreasonable levels of angst when you were already feeling stressed, for disturbing you and bothering you repeatedly, not listening to your valuable advice on occasion and behaving in a totally out of order way." He pauses for breath. "And to ask you how you are, if you would rather I went away, and if you would like coffee."

Said in a calm and not whiny-I'm-a-terrible-person way.

It is very hard to formulate an appropriate response to this kind of thing when you have a spoon sticking out of your mouth and a 'gnh?' expression on your face. In all fairness this has more to do with the hour of the morning than anything else.

Eventually, Ray remembers that he has to take the spoon out before he can talk. He does so.

"Apology accepted," he says, "although if I were you I'd get my ass to a therapist next time the situation gets as bad as what you described, because what I know about patching up the human psyche could fit in a gnat's navel and leave room for three caraway seeds and the heart of Walter Peck. As for the coffee that's probably not a good idea right now." He pokes the spoon at his cereal bowl. "This comes with Egon Spengler's highest recommendation. Tempting as the idea of vibrating at speeds sufficient to walk through solid matter may be, I don't think the management's gonna go for it if I try."

Ray off coffee? Things must be bad.

"Things still rough out there huh?" he asks sympathetically.

"October," Ray says. "The early part of the month isn't too bad, other than the part where I try to hide under the couch or something on the fifth to avoid any reminders of it being Gozer Day, but then you start getting up to the end of the month. Between Halloween, Dia de los Muertos and its follow-up days, and the proper Celtic Samhain falling on November eleventh, it's pretty much the hairiest month in the Ghostbusting calendar. I came here to sleep."

Guppy winces.

"I bet you get prank calls this time of year too."

Ray laughs. Not much, just a short, bark-like little sound. "Oh, we do. Janine knows all the tricks, though. She's our secretary and receptionist. And she keeps an air horn next to her desk."

Guppy laughs. "I'll have to get one of those for our receptionist. I heard once we had some people in for a major incident training session, volunteers to see how the department would cope with the plan. One of the doctors was examining this one lad and found his pupil didn't dilate. So he was just about to get a tube down his throat before the volunteer yelled at him to stop that. Turned out he'd gone and bought special contact lenses for the day. And last year there was a guy with a fake nail through his hand who we didn't manage to detect until after the X-ray. He got a sharp lecture from us and won a fifty pound bet in the process."

Ray tries to picture this. "You know," he says, "that... actually sounds like something I could see Peter pulling. My Peter, anyway. I don't know so much about the one here. The nail thing, I mean. Especially since there was a bet involved."

Guppy smiles. "It was even funnier when he couldn't get it off again afterwards and had to come to A+E for real."

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