Jesse was the one to get up and open the door, but Beca and Benji were close behind him, peering over his shoulder to see a short, irritated, uniformed NYPD officer standing in the hallway. Next to him was another man, not quite uniformed but wearing the shirt, tie and tweed blazer that unmistakably marked him out as a college professor; more so than the officer, the sight of this man caused Beca the most worry.

"Dad?"

Her father looked about as angry as she'd ever seen him. "You've really done it this time, Bec."

"Which one of you is Benji Applebaum?" said the cop. Behind Jesse, Benji bemusedly raised his hand. The officer produced a small, Star Wars themed wallet from his jacket pocket, and tossed it to Benji.

"Hey, my wallet!" he said gleefully. "I didn't even realise it was missing. I must have dropped it at the…"

He, Jesse and Beca went very still. From his pocket, the cop also fished out a clear plastic bag containing Benji's lock picking tools.

"Wanna tell me what you three were doing at the Aldridge Mansion this evening?"

The Aldridge Mansion, it turned out, had a pretty nice security system. The officer, once they let him inside the dorm, explained how they had tripped an alarm during their forced entry. A museum staff member had found Benji's wallet, containing his Columbia University ID card, and contacted the police.

"You kids are pretty lucky," said the officer. They were sat on Benji's bed silently as he spoke, like three children being scolded for not doing their chores. "The nice folks at the Aldridge Mansion aren't pressing any charges."

"They're not?" asked Beca in confusion. Surely, she thought, the museum had them red handed.

"You don't have to sound so upset about that," said her Dad from Jesse's desk chair.

"They just requested I give you a stern warning," said the officer.

Jesse turned to Beca, a knowing look on his face. "And I'm guessing they'd like us to keep quiet about anything we saw in there?"

The cop shrugged. "Probably. All I know is, if you kids try and play break in again, you might not be so lucky. You're really terrible criminals."

The officer spoke briefly to Beca's Dad, then took his leave. Theoretically, that should have been the end of the matter. Yet nobody moved. Dr Mitchell sat there, arms folded, staring down at the carpet and shaking his head slowly.

"Dad…" Beca started.

"God damn it, Beca," he interrupted. "All I wanted was for you to get a good education. Do you know how many people would kill for a free ride to this university? I know you had other ideas, but we had a deal. You give college a shot, and if it's not for you, I can say I tried. And for that, this what I get. Breaking and entering?"

Beca gripped the edge of Benji's bed sheets, feeling her temper rising. "Dad, you don't understand what we've seen tonight."

"Do you understand what I've seen?" said Dr Mitchell, gesturing to the door the officer had left through. "My own daughter questioned by NYPD?"

"Dr Mitchell," said Jesse, "Just let us explain."

"He doesn't want to hear explanations," Beca laughed bitterly. "He just wants to give another lecture on how much of a dead end my life would be if he wasn't forcing a college education upon me."

"Oh, there won't be any more lectures. It's too late for that. Columbia University doesn't tolerate this kind of stuff." He stood up from his chair and sighed, like he was deeply disappointed but tired of the fight. "Congratulations, Bec. You got your wish. As of tomorrow, you're all expelled."

"I feel terrible," said Benji. "The whole breaking and entering thing was my idea."

After a night of hardly any sleep, the morning had brought the difficult task of packing up all of their things. They were currently hauling heavy boxes across the Columbia U campus, aware of the stares from other students walking past them. Jesse and Benji's enthusiasm for the paranormal had made them fairly infamous, and news of their expulsion had spread pretty quickly.

"Don't be dumb," said Jesse, nudging Benji with his elbow, "We're all adults, we knew what we were getting into. And besides, we can appeal against this. If we can just make them understand what we accomplished with that little field trip, they'll be begging us to come back."

Beca, who had hardly spoken a word since last night, came to a stop. The talk of appealing, of begging and pleading to come back, did not sit well with her. She surveyed their surroundings, the long stretches of green laid out in front of the many prestigious buildings, and the beginnings of an epiphany began to brew.

"Nah," she said, letting the box she carried drop to the floor. "Screw that. Screw appealing. We don't need this place and we never did."

"Beca, where else can we go?" asked Benji. "We were expelled for breaking the law. No other college will touch us with a ten meter cattle prod."

"College?" she said, turning to Benji, her hair in the wind and her wide eyes making her look ever so slightly manic. "What the hell do we need college for? Half the people with college degrees end up working at the Post Office anyway."

"Actually I've heard the Post Office pays pretty well," said Benji.

Jesse nodded. "That's true, actually. I have an uncle that works there."

Beca rolled her eyes. "The point is that we can prove the existence of ghosts! If we brought that to a Professor, what would we get? A passing grade? A nice write-up in the school paper? I say we bid this dump adieu, and go into business for ourselves!"

She flung out her arms theatrically, but their reactions were slightly more subdued than she'd hoped for.

"So, what," said Jesse, "you want to start some kind of ghost busting business? Businesses cost money, Beca, and we're three college drop outs with criminal records. How are we possibly gonna finance something like that?"

"We could get loans," she said defensively. Then, in a much quieter voice, she added "The interest rates might just be a little not-awesome, because of the whole expelled, criminal record stuff."

"Not awesome?" he repeated. "Try 'astronomical'."

"Jesse, think about this! Professional paranormal investigations and elimination - that's not a niche market, that's a market that doesn't exist yet. We'd be the innovators!"

Jesse scoffed, and she saw his eyes reading her like a book. "Is this about starting a business or is this about proving to your Dad that you can be a success without his help?"

"The first one!" she said, though if Jesse and Benji's expressions were anything to go by, her voice was just a tad too high and squeaky to be believable. A deep, angry growl escaped her and she practically clawed at her hair in frustration. "Okay, fine! I hate that my Dad judges success by academic achievement. I hate that he'll take my expulsion from this place as confirmation of that philosophy. And nothing in the world will make me happy until I shove that philosophy down his throat!"

Benji gave her a pitying look. "Oh, Rebecca. Who hurt you?"

"Shut up!" she said. There was a bench a few feet away, and she found jumped over her box so she could hop onto it. The speech she felt brewing inside her felt like a sermon, and the bench was the closest thing she had to a pulpit. "Because maybe this is partly about me, but damnit it's also about you. You guys have spent your whole lives believing in ghosts. You staked your professional reputations on that belief. Now that blind faith has been rewarded with hard proof and you're just gonna ignore that to focus on trying to get back into a college that doesn't even want you? That's not fair. Not fair to you or to anyone else out there that knows this stuff is real. What about the owners of the Aldridge Mansion, who have a crazy murder ghost living in their museum? What about the guy in Queens who emailed you asking for help with the poltergeist in his tool shed? Who's supposed to help those people, Jesse? Who are they supposed to call?"

She stopped only to take a breath, hoping her eyes didn't look too desperate while she tried to gauge their reactions. Benji looked quietly contemplative, but he was hard to read on most days anyway. Jesse's expression, on the other hand, was almost hostile. It took a few seconds before Beca realised: he was angry at how much sense she was making.

"God damn you, Mitchell," he finally sighed.

"Yas!" Beca screeched, drawing the looks of some other students in the quad as she punched the air. Jesse ignored this, turning instead to Benji.

"She's right. If our math is right, and we can actually build this spectral containment unit, we don't need college."

"My math has only ever been wrong once," replied Benji, "and I lost a toe. After that I always made sure to double check. We can build this."

Beca, after instinctively glancing down at Benji's shoe-covered feet and wondering which toe was missing, hopped off the bench and gave Jesse an affectionate shoulder punch.

"You're not gonna regret this, Jesse. I promise. We're gonna help a lot of people, and when we do, Columbia will be begging us to come back so we can cut the ribbon on the lecture halls they name after us."

"You're nuts," said Jesse, grinning despite himself. And Beca felt such a swell of pride when she saw him hop up onto the same bench she had been on. "All those people out there," he said, looking around the grounds wistfully, "with spirits in their homes and no one that believes them. No one to call. Well now they do. Now they can call us. They can call 'The Conductors Of The Metaphysical Examination'!"

The swell of pride went away. Beca frowned.

"I was thinking more like 'Ghostbusters' or something," she said.

"Ghostbusters, right?" Benji agreed almost immediately.

"You were thinking Ghostbusters too?" she asked.

"Yeah, he literally said the phrase 'ghost busting business' like two minutes ago, I just assumed…"

Beca nodded and turned apologetically to Jesse. "Your thing is just a little bit of a mouthful, y'know?"

Jesse sighed and stepped down to the floor. "Screw you guys. Let's go get in some debt."

She threw an arm around each of them as they walked off the university grounds for the last time.

"And just think," she said, "our first customer is out there somewhere, right now."

The walls of Aubrey's hotel were thin. So while she and Chloe had spent the last three hours reviewing the audio recording of that day's Bellas practice, so had all the other guests on that floor. The couple three rooms down had been five minutes away from calling down to the lobby to complain about 'weird, poorly pitched mouth music', when finally the noise had stopped.

Now, Chloe was laid out on the bed, exhausted. Next to her, an equally tired Aubrey sighed.

"I think I saw Bumper on Fifth Avenue today," she said.

Chloe grimaced. "It was only a matter of time before the Trebles came out here too. They need to rehearse just like us."

"I heard a rumour they're trying to convince Lincoln Centre to let them use a smoke machine in their performance."

Chloe's face scrunched up in disgust. "Tacky. Style over substance."

There was a beat of silence, and when Aubrey spoke again her voice was unsteady. "If they beat us again, Chloe, I swear to God…"

Chloe instantly reached out to grab her hand. "Aubrey!"

"I mean it. I can't take another crushing defeat. I'll leave the country. I won't come to graduation. I'll make them take my picture out of the yearbook."

"Aubrey Posen," said Chloe, gripping the other girl's wrist and making her look at Chloe's stern gaze. "Your parents will kill you if you leave the country. I'll kill you if you don't come with me to graduation. And you are so pretty that if your picture wasn't in the yearbook, they probably wouldn't bother publishing it."

Aubrey's face softened. "Aw, Chlo."

Chloe smiled. "Don't worry about Bumper. We're gonna show that midget up this year. I promise."

A huge yawn immediately followed that sentence, and Chloe found herself closing her eyes and snuggling into a comfier position on the bed. A minute more like that and she would have been fast asleep, if not for Aubrey asking her: "So, you're crashing here tonight? Again?"

Chloe's eyes flew back open. "Yeah," she said slowly. "Is that okay?"

Aubrey sat up straight on the bed, looking Chloe over with a worried gaze.

"It's fine, it's just… you have this massive apartment in the middle of the city. With a killer view! I thought I'd be having to drag you out of it just to get you to practice."

"If you want me to leave," said Chloe stiffly.

Aubrey rolled her eyes. "Chloe, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just confused."

Chloe lay still on the bed for a second, digging around frantically for the courage to move. Finally she swung her legs around to the side of the bed and stood up.

"No, you're right. I should go."

Aubrey frowned. "You don't have to, if you don't want to."

"No, seriously, it's fine. I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on the place anyway, and I haven't been there in three days. Plus, my parents bought groceries and - " Burning paper bags and eggs frying upon a counter flashed through her mind, and her voice cracked. " - um. Yeah. I should go. I'll call you in the morning."

"Okay," said Aubrey weakly, watching Chloe gather up her things, throw her a quick wave, and rush out the door.

It was all very bizarre, but Chloe could be like that sometimes. Aubrey figured she'd check on her again after tomorrow's practice, and prepared to settle in to bed.

But after barely two minutes, there was a soft knock at her hotel door. She frowned, and went to answer it.

In the doorway stood Chloe. She was pale, and the beginnings of tears were forming in her eyes.

"Aubrey," she said. "I can't go home."