"I'm telling you Parker, this is gonna make our career! You've heard of all of the ghost sightings in Amity Park! Imagine how many ghosts we'll be able to collect here!"

Two men were walking down the street together, both wearing trench coats. The first man was looking at Parker with a big smile on his face.

"I hope you're right, Don." Parker said, fiddling with a device in his hands. "Otherwise we came all the way here for nothing. What if all that talk about ghosts is just one giant tourist trap? We'd be out a lot of money."

"Nah, nah, you'll see. It'll be great! Now turn that thing on already! I wanna see where our first ghost is."

Parker turned on the machine and it started a slow and steady beep. They followed the dot on the screen towards the park. That makes sense. The ghosts here seem to terrorize the people who live here all the time so the park would be-

The tracker started to beep rapidly as they walked up to a picnic bench where a teen sat with headphones on, doing her homework.

Parker looked at the tracker and back up at the girl. "What is this? That doesn't look like a ghost. What's wrong with this thing?"

Don nudged Parker with his elbow. "Some of these ghosts can be sneaky. Did you ever hear about that one therapist lady? Couldn't even tell. I bet it's the same with this one."

He slowly walked up behind the girl, inching up behind her. Once he got close enough, he grabbed onto her arm. The girls fist came flying towards him though and he was not prepared. He fell to the ground when her fist connected with his face and tried covering his eyes when she pulled some pepper spray from her backpack.

"Fuck off, you creep!"

Parker sighed, holding his head in his hand, as he watched Don get sprayed. The girl gathered up her stuff and stormed past him, knocking her shoulder into him as she went.

Walking up to Don, Parker looked down as his friend squirmed and whined on the ground.

"See, I told you-"

Suddenly the tracker started beeping rapidly again and two ghosts quickly flew over them, causing the wind to pick up. Once they left, the tree next to the picnic table stopped shaking.

"Huh." Parker said, staring at where they disappeared to. "I guess there are actually ghosts here."

"Help.." Don croaked.

QQQQQ

They sat outside a corner store on a bus stop bench. Don had a gallon of milk in his hand and milk soaking his hair and jacket. His eyes were puffy and red and people walking by shot them strange looks.

Parker waved at a particularly scary old lady who was giving Don the stink eye.

"Okay." He said, turning to Don. "So we know that the tracker works since those two ghosts flew over us before. But why did it pick up on that girl?"

Sulking, Don responded. "Maybe she's a witch instead. Maybe they do some voodoo magic with ectoplasm."

Parker scoffed. "What are you crazy? Witches aren't real. But how are we supposed to know if someone's a ghost or not?"

"Keep grabbing them until we can't take any more pepper spray?"

"Maybe we gotta do more observations first." Parker continued, ignoring Don. "We could go scope around town and see how many incorrect readings we get."
As they walked around town, they got person after person that were incorrectly labeled as a ghost by their machine. They'd walk up to someone, study them, and ask if they were a ghost. The looks they got were anywhere between confused to disgusted. Some were even grossed out and refused to talk to them at all because of the rotten milk still covering Don.

"How can none of these people be ghosts?!" Parker threw his arms up in the air when they came to a stop at an intersection. "Why are they all setting off the tracker if they're not ghosts? It doesn't make sense!"

The light turned green and they started heading across the street.

"Maybe the entire town is full of dead people and no one knows."

Parker shot Don an unimpressed look. "No. There has to be some sort of explanation."

They walked by an ice cream shop where a teenager with black hair was walking out with a cone. The tracker started beeping rapidly at him and Parker smacked it.

"See! This one doesn't even say this kid is a level one! It's trying to tell me this scrawny teenager is a level eight ectoplasmic entity!"

"Hey! Who are you calling scrawny?" The kid licked his ice cream cone as he glared at them.

"Hey, kid, you wouldn't happen to be a ghost would you?" Don called.

The teenager's eyes widened a bit and he took a bite of ice cream and swallowed it before answering. "No, I'm not a ghost, that'd be crazy, haha."

Parker growled. "We've walked by so many people today and our tracker picked up on all of them! Not a single one was a ghost except for those two that flew over the park today! This thing is just a hunk of garbage!"

"Wait, it's reading humans as ghosts?" The kid looked perplexed.

"Yeah. We've been asking person after person if they were a ghost or not because they were all showing up on the radar." Don said.

"I wonder why-" He snapped his fingers. "Oh! I remember my mom saying something about this! They had to adjust all their instruments because they said everyone in town is starting to pick up their own residual ecto-signatures. Especially the teenagers because-"

"Wait, wait, wait." Parker said, arms in a pause motion. "Residual ecto-signatures?"

"Yeah." He took another lick of his ice cream. "Having a fully functional, always open portal to the ghost zone letting all the ghosts loose into town was probably bound to have some effects eventually."

"You." Don paused. "You said especially the teenagers. Why is that?"

"Well." The kid said. "Ghost attacks happen most frequently at the high school which leads to higher rates of ectoplasmic entities there along with more chances the kids are gonna get caught up in something. That could be possession, getting hit by an ectoblast, getting ghost powers-"

"Ghost powers?!" Parker shouted. "How did they get ghost powers?"

"Ghost mosquito bites." He shrugged.

"Well why is yours so high? All the other people have been level ones, but you're a level eight."

He shrugged again. "I don't know. Maybe it's because I've grown up with scientists and inventors for parents and they occasionally misplaced their ectoplasm inside the fridge."

Don stared at him. "What? Who are your parents?"

"Jack and Madeline Fenton, resident ghost hunters and experts."

They stared at the boy with slack jaws. "Your parents are the Fentons?"

"Yes?"

"I should've known that if something this crazy was going on that they were bound to be near." Parker sighed and hung his head. "Come on Don. I don't think this is quite the place we were looking for." They started walking away, heads hanging down.

"Bye?" The boy called to them in a confused tone of voice.

The two men walked away into the distance, the sound of beeping filling the air as people milled about around them.