She drops the shield and flies for fluctuating tear in reality chased by plasmic ecto fire from the army surrounding Casper High. She tackles the figure bracing it open through to the nauseating warp.
They cling to each other as the churning ecto currents throw them about. It feels like an eternity before the twisting space spits them out into a living realm, a loud crack ringing through the space as something breaks their fall. Several figures in strange clothing are moving cautiously towards them. She can't understand them, but they are radiating concern-caution.
"My Star," Danny's soft voice grabs her attention. "I'm sorry..."
A hacking, wet cough splatters the front of her armor with ecto as she frantically reaches out with their bond. There's a sinking feeling in her stomach as Danny, despite being right in front of her, feels far away.
"Danny, what-?"
He looks at her like she's the most precious thing in the multiverse.
"I'm sorry. They still have my core. I don't think I have much..."
There's ecto sweating from his pours. She can feel the ecto in front of her losing cohesion.
"I got everyone out. I got you out. That's what matters."
She should be saying something. Anything. He's not even really talking to her anymore.
Shock. She's in shock.
He's gone still, a deflated corpse in puddle of brackish green. Estelle Phantom blacks out as the figures pull her away.
somehow it just occurred to me that if the canon GIW ever found out Phantom was a halfa they would adjust their traps and containment units for that but like
in a completely bonkers way
like imagine them presenting a ghost AND human proof cell with bars. how is it proofed against both? well you see every second bar is proofed against ghosts, while the rest are proofed against regular humans
Danny: so wait i could just- *turns intangible and phases through one bar between 2 glowing ones* or just- *turns human and phases though a glowing bar between 2 normal ones* -do that?
The most experienced operative in the entire Ghost Investigation Ward recalls his history with the organization.
For the prompt: It was easier 15 years ago [from @dykesville]
Read on AO3
[No warnings apply]
The Ghost Investigation Ward had been around for a long time, but interestingly, it had a very short turnover rate for employees. For whatever reason, this job got to people. Especially these days.
Operative E was currently the most experienced active operative in the organization, and he was only on his... fifteenth... sixteenth year? Something like that. He wasn't the oldest. No, that honor belonged to Operative M, but he'd joined up older, and had only been with the agency for about ten years.
Rumor had it that only three agents in G.I.W. history had ever served for twenty years, since the Ward was founded in 1946. Operative E always planned to make it four. But, God help him, he was starting to wonder if he'd make it.
The organization had changed since he first joined up, a fresh-faced young man of twenty-five, fresh out of the U.S. Navy with an honorable discharge and glowing letter of recommendation that his captain assured him would get him into damn near any government agency there was.
E had chosen this one.
The head of the G.I.W. had raised an eyebrow when he read the recommendation and asked E why the hell he wanted the join the G.I.W. when he had a letter that could practically get him into the presidential cabinet. It was an exaggeration, of course. It was a good letter, but not that good.
Operative E had simply shrugged and said this seemed like more fun.
At the time, it had just been a handful of operatives, three or four scientists, and a couple dozen support staff members, including hazmats—all of them working out of a building down the street from the Pentagon that was little more than a shack with a couple of dingy basement levels. They didn't have much to do, but they kept themselves busy anyway, and even though they hardly had any direct oversight, they tried to be as professional and by-the-book as possible.
Operative E had respected them from the beginning because they clearly respected themselves. They took themselves seriously, even if no one else did.
The Ghost Investigation Ward had been a joke back then—even to the Extra-Terrestrial Research Unit (which was not in Area 51 by the way, and hadn't investigated any more legitimate cases than the G.I.W. had, not back then nor since, because aliens weren't real). They were the bottom of the barrel, lower than even the other niche departments that dealt with things no one believed it. The Cryptozoolgical Response Sector used them as the butt of their jokes, and those guys had been fruitlessly searching for Bigfoot since the fifties.
Operative E hadn't minded though. He'd always kept it to himself to avoid judgement from his peers, but he'd believed in ghosts since he was a little boy, and he'd had a fascination with the macabre and paranormal for just as long. Joining the military had been expected of him, family tradition and all, but studying ghosts, investigating spiritual activity, this was his dream job.
Or it had been his dream job... when he started.
A lot had changed since then. Things were different now, more intense, more dangerous, more difficult.
It was easier fifteen years ago.
Operative E could remember his first mission for the G.I.W., all the way back in the eighties. He'd been dispatched to a small town in western New York that he no longer remembered the name of with his partner, who had been Operative K at the time, although there was a new Operative K who was nothing at all like his predecessor. An alleged haunted house owned by one Margaret Porter.
He and his partner had performed a perfectly by-the-book investigation, and int the process, K had shown him the ropes, pointed out what and what not to look for, what to be wary of, what sort of things might look like ghosts but weren't, and how he could avoid letting himself be fooled by them.
In the end, they determined that Margaret Porter's house was not haunted. She'd just had a faulty radiator and a pair of raccoons living in her attic.
Operative K had seen the same thing before. Downtrodden, he'd warned the bright-eyed young Operative E that most of the cases he would investigate with the G.I.W. would turn out to be duds like that one, if not deliberate hoaxes. E had heard him, but chosen not to internalize that warning, to hold out hope that the next case would be a real haunting.
His second case was a woman whose seven-year-old daughter swore up and down that she'd been playing with a ghost in the garden at least once a week since they'd moved into the house. Operative K let E take the lead on that one, sidelining himself to give his trainee some practice. Operative E had thought for sure that it had to be a real haunting this time. It was too compelling not to be.
It had turned out to be one of the neighbor kids playing a trick on the little girl. She'd mistaken him for a ghost since he was albino, and could only go outside at night, or for very brief periods during day, because of the sun. The neighbor boy had thought it was hilariously funny and encouraged her misconception.
Still, the young Operative E refused to let it get him down. The third time was the charm, as the saying went, after all.
The third time was the charm.
Apparently young Operative E hadn't learned yet to be careful what he wished for. Now, he would give anything to go back to those easy days.
Operative K—his original partner, not the young hotshot who had the title now—was a cynic, so when they got their third case, a college student in Wisconsin who had a case of 'ghostly acne', K immediately assumed it was a crank call. Nevertheless, the two of them went to investigate. After all, it wasn't as if there were any more pressing cases that needed to be taken care of. The only active case at the time that the organization thought might have any legitimacy was already being taken care of by Operatives U and I.
At the time, U and I were the G.I.W.'s top operatives, so they got all the best cases, the ones that sounded most like they could be genuine hauntings. Operative E had been so jealous. He'd wanted so badly to be in their position, but he knew that he was green, and new, and he would have to establish himself more before he had that kind of credibility with the higher ups, so he went to investigate the probably fake ghost acne in Wisconsin.
The afflicted was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin in Madison, but it wasn't at the school that the operatives found him. It was in the urgent care ward of Madison General Hospital. He had apparently been hospitalized for the very same bout of acne that the G.I.W. had caught wind of and sent people to look into.
"Excuse me, we're here to visit a Vladimir Masters," Operative K said to the administrator at the visitors desk.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Masters isn't taking visitors, his parents were very insistent that no one be allowed to see him. He's in quite a state."
"We're with the government, ma'am." Operative K flashed his badge and E took the hint that he should do the same. "We need to ask him some questions."
As long as she didn't look to closely at their credentials, they wouldn't be laughed out of the building for being paranormal investigators. Although technically K hadn't been lying when he said they were government, he just knew which parts needed to be left out in order to get the job done. K was clever like that, cunning, not like the young brash Operative K they had now, relying on technology to do his job because he didn't have any common sense.
"Oh... well..."
She hemmed and hawed, no doubt weighing in her mind whether it would be better to piss off Masters' parents or the US government and coming to the right conclusion—or at least the one the benefited them the most. Operative E never found out how the parents had reacted, so he couldn't know for sure how that had turned out for the administrator, not that it was of any importance to his own work.
"Alright, I suppose we can make an exception for the government," she said. Then she handed them both yellow paper tags. "Here are your visitor badges. Just clip 'em to your label, or your pocket, anywhere as long as they're visible. Masters is in room 212 on the second floor."
They did as she said and made their way up to the room, where they found a man around the same age Operative E had been at the time, if not a few years younger, lying on a bed, visibly in pain, despite all the tubes connected to him—no doubt at least one was painkillers. And on his face, his arms, every visible inch of skin and no doubt the ones hidden under his blankets and hospital gown as well... was glowing green spots.
It was like no acne E had ever seen before or since.
In fact, he'd never seen anything like it before, acne or otherwise. And judging by the look on K's face, it was a first for him, too. He regained his composure faster than E did, though, introduced them both and started to ask the routine questions about cold spots and lights flickering.
Masters responded to the questions with a weak, ailing voice, and repeatedly asked why they were even there, in his hospital room, and what they thought they could learn by talking to him. The G.I.W. didn't go places to answer questions, however, they went to ask them, and once K was done with the standard interview, he moved on to the case-specific questions.
Namely: where, when, and how Masters had become inflicted with his condition.
It was an odd mix to hear someone tell a story with such a bitter tone whilst simultaneously moaning and gasping in pain every so often. He recounted his experience of trying to open a portal with his school's paranormal research club, and how things went awry. At the end, he added with a sneer that they hadn't even come to visit him, even though his condition was their fault and he'd thought they were friends.
E and K had looked at each other at that, but neither had said anything. It seemed like something Masters should discuss with his parents, and not two strangers with a job to do. College friendships were not their business. Their business was ghosts.
With his permission, they'd carefully taken some samples of the... stuff... the whatever it was under his skin that gave his pimples that sickly glow. Apparently the doctors were having no luck curing it thus far, and he didn't see the harm in having more people trying to find a solution. Then they'd gotten the names of the two other club members, thanked Masters for his time, and left.
It wasn't the last time they had cause to go to that hospital, but it was the last time they visited Masters directly.
After the hospital, they went to the school to learn more about this paranormal research club that Masters had been working with. They quickly found it. Apparently the club was rather infamous on campus for being freaks and nutjobs. Rumors like that wouldn't deter the G.I.W., of course. Freaks and nutjobs were exactly the kind of people they wanted to hear from.
The other two members of the paranormal research club were a behemoth of a man named Fenton and a lean but sprightly young woman by the name of Winch. They confirmed Masters' story.
When the operatives had asked to look at their portal project, the two students were happy to oblige, but warned that it probably wouldn't be of much value to them. The heap of scorched scrap metal in a cardboard box labeled 'ghost portal' was explanation enough. As expected, examining the remains of the portal project yielded no worthwhile information.
The whole situation was certainly ghost-adjacent, which was good news for the continued existence of the G.I.W., but as there were no actual ghosts to investigate, the operatives had eventually returned to HQ with only copious notes in hand, as well as the names of three people upon which keeping tabs might prove fruitful. The higher-ups had agreed, and activated surveillance on Vladimir Masters, Madeline Winch, and Jack Fenton.
That was the turning point.
First it was evidence of a haunting at the hospital where Masters was. U and I were sent to investigate—despite Operative E's protest that it was his and K's case to begin with and they should be the ones going back there—and they determined that the haunting was legitimate, and furthermore that the ghosts seemed to be drawn to whatever strange energy Masters gave off, probably due to his condition.
E and K had gotten to return after that, to stake out the hospital for continued spectral activity—but only because the organization thought their best operatives would be more useful elsewhere. Just as their fellow operatives had reported, Madison General Hospital had several ghosts hanging around it then, and they were the real deal.
At least, Operative E had thought they were the real deal. He had been so excited, and dutifully logged every single shred of activity they observed before finally cleansing the place of ghosts with their anti-ecto pulse generators—the first time Operative K had ever had need to use his in the field.
A month or so later, however, they were called in to return to that hospital and cleanse it again. Then again. Every month or two for years, Operatives E and K would go to cleanse that hospital of spectral activity, then, when K retired after eleven years with the ward, Operative E took his new partner, Operative J.
It wasn't an especially difficult task, but it was the first consistent and recurring ghostly activity on the record, and E was happy to do it. It was fulfilling work, and he actually got to deal with real ghosts.
He learned years later that those weren't real ghosts. They were barely shades, each one a shadow of a whisper of what a real ghost was like.
Masters wasn't the only one they were keeping tabs on, but, embarrassingly, the G.I.W. sort of lost track of Fenton and Winch shortly after the two of them got married. Someone had been slacking, and when the two of them moved out of Wisconsin, they dropped off the organization's radar entirely.
The slacker was summarily identified and their employment with the G.I.W. terminated. That kind of oversight was unacceptable, especially now that they'd provided actual proof of the existence of ghost and were under review for a funding increase.
The funding increase was eventually approved, and it was enough that they could move into a new headquarters and hire a few more employees. The little ghost activity they'd been able to confirm finally justified their existence, and they were given the means to combat the ghost issue more effectively than ever.
That didn't stop things being weird, though.
It was as if that portal experiment actually had worked to some degree, because after that very first trip to Wisconsin, the number of genuine hauntings the G.I.W. operatives identified skyrocketed. And as time passed, the ghosts they encountered became ever so slightly stronger. They were more visible, some of them could even move things... touch things.
Slowly... slowly... Operative E began to understand the truth about ghosts. Began to learn that the shades he'd first encountered were mere echoes of a true ghost's power.
Then... there was the million dollar ghost.
And suddenly that slow, steady progression sped up exponentially, and the G.I.W. was suddenly faced with ghosts leaps and bounds more powerful and more dangerous than they'd ever encountered before. Their anti-ecto pulse generators were ineffective against the more powerful ecto-entities, and the organization was forced to adapt or become obsolete.
If there was one thing that those who worked at the Ghost Investigation Ward would rather die than become, it was obsolete. This organization had stayed afloat for decades with hardly anything to show for it, and it wasn't about to die because the workload became overwhelming.
Instead, the G.I.W. rose to the occasion. Increased ghost activity meant reasonable cause to request increased funding, increased staffing, better equipment and technology, better training. Within a few months, they had gone from a dedicated, but underappreciated and underutilized sector of the government, to an elite, and highly efficient ghost hunting group.
But it was difficult. Intense. Keeping that up was too much for a lot of people.
The turnaround for employees back when Operative E first started was around ten to fifteen years, now, people who'd only worked there for five or six were handing in their resignations.
The work itself wasn't all that much more difficult than what the CIA or FBI did. But there was something about it that got to people. It wasn't a moral or ethical thing. It wasn't the fact that it made them question their very understanding of reality, of life and death—although that certainly didn't help matters.
It was something else. Something Operative E understood but couldn't identify, like a word on the tip of his tongue that he couldn't quite say.
"Ah, Operative E, I hear congratulations are in order."
E jerked his head up, suddenly pulled from his thoughts by Operative M stopping to talk to him.
"Elaborate?" E requested.
"I was just down in records, and Meg down there saw that today marks your twentieth year in the organization. That makes you the fourth operative ever, right?"
"That is what they say."
"Well, congratulations," M repeated. "I can only hope to survive long enough to be the fifth, although at my age and in this line of work, there's no guarantee of that."
"Well, all you have to do is not die for a while and your set."
Operative M gave him a good natured laugh. "Well, sir, I'll do my darnedest."
"That's all anyone can do," Operative E replied. "Thanks, but if you'll excuse me."
He pardoned himself to the restroom, which was, thankfully, empty, and took a good look at himself in the mirror. He was still tall, his muscles hadn't atrophied, thanks to his stringent fitness routine and his physically demanding work. But he hardly recognized himself.
He looked old. His hair greying at the temples, a deep furrow forming on his forehead, skin starting to sag and wrinkle. His eyes were tired. This job had certainly done a number on him over the years. Twenty of them... apparently, not fifteen, not even close.
But still, things were easier fifteen years ago, when he knew how long he'd actually been working, and he could recognize his own face looking back at him in the mirror.
