Disclaimer: Godzilla: The Series belongs to Touhou and Sony-Tristar. Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the property of Joss Whedon. The Real Ghostbusters belong to DIC and Columbia Pictures. I own lots of stuffed penguins, that's all. This story is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for violence and language and follows after "Cinema Sins" in "Lizards and Wizards and Demons, Oh My!" Things start getting a bit more serious here, folks… though it's still me, so, y'know.

Gather The Smoke

"Who can gather the smoke from the dead wood burning, or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?" - 'Lament for Eorl The Young,' JRR Tolkien

Riley

"Just once," I could hear Dr. Craven complaining, somewhere ahead of me, "I would like to deal with something that wasn't immune to conventional weaponry!"

"You and me both, compadre," Hernandez agreed. The two of them were hunkered down behind an ornamental cement planter, one of the ones in front of the Butterfly Lake City Hall. I risked a look out from behind the car I'd taken shelter behind and had to duck back quickly as a blast of yellow energy took part of the fender off.

"Observant little bugger, isn't it?" my companion asked, returning fire from the proton rifle he carried. Dr. Venkman's aim, as always, was on point, but the beam only left a mild scorch mark on the target's black and yellow armored carapace.

Because yeah, we were in Upstate New York fighting a giant caterpillar. This was not what I had expected when I signed up with the recruiter after high school.

Apparently the whole mess had started with the town council hiring the Ghostbusters to look into the rash of missing persons reports that the local police had been baffled by. They'd uncovered, literally, the burrow of a giant caterpillar that had been abducting people for unknown reasons and sticking them to the wall of said burrow with silk. On discovering that the caterpillar wasn't actually a ghost, they'd done the sensible thing and called the experts, HEAT. The Major and I had wound up flying the entire team up on the double, arriving just as the running battle between paranormalists and insect had hit Main Street. And here we were.

"Tranks aren't penetrating either," Dr. Tatopoulos called, from his position behind a building wall.

"Don't suppose we could use a really big bug bomb." Mr. Zeddemore and Dr. Spengler had taken position in the front of a barber shop that was down about three good windows.

I could just see Dr. Chapman shaking her head from the car she and Dr. Stantz were behind. "No way of knowing what kind of insecticides it would even be vulnerable to, plus for it to be this big, its internal structure can't be much like a standard insect at all anymore."

My radio crackled as the sound of a helicopter echoed overhead. "This is Hicks! We're going to try dropping the glue bomb now."

It had been Dr. Craven's suggestion- maybe we couldn't knock the caterpillar out, but if we could stop it from moving, that would be something. The thing moved like a train when it got up to speed. Also, hopefully the glue would block that horn on its head that seemed to be able to let loose blasts of some sort of energy.

"Finn here, Major, we're in position. Ready to flank the target on deployment." If we spread out, it wouldn't be able to fire on all of us. That was the hope, anyway.

"Glue bomb away." The metal capsule detached from the helicopter, tumbling downward, but the caterpillar seemed to realize what was up. Rearing up onto its back half, it shot a blast of string upward, ensnaring the bomb and the helicopter both. The rotors choked, then slowed to a stop, but before the helicopter started to drop, the bug followed up with a blast of energy that broke the entire wad into pieces. The debris went flying off, spreading out in an arc as my heart jumped up into my throat.

"MAJOR!" Tatopoulos's yell was agonized as he turned to follow the debris with his eyes. His spin brought him out from behind cover for just a second, before he realized and tried to retreat.

It wasn't fast enough.

Another blast of yellow energy caught the pavement under his feet, sending him flying through the air to land on the hood of a nearby SUV, then slip unconscious to the ground. Before any of us could react, the caterpillar had spat a rope of silk at him and hauled it in, dragging Tatopoulos across the pavement to where it stood. Then it blasted the road surface away and burrowed into the ground beneath, taking the unconscious man with it.

After the noise of the battle, the silence on the street seemed almost to ring like a bell. With a start, I realized that, given the lack of officers in our response squad, I was now technically in charge.

"Well. Shit."

Hicks

I have, unfortunately, regained consciousness in all sorts of strange places, some of them even not due to the US Army. Strapped into the passenger seat of a helicopter, caught inside a giant wad of silk spat by a mutant caterpillar was still a new one. Okay, "inside" was a bit of a misstatement, there were globs all over the seat, sticking it to the tree. I was… about twenty feet up, that was going to be a fun trip down.

First things first, get loose from the seat. Luckily, the pockets on my tac vest were still accessible, and I was able to pull out a folding knife to cut through the straps. The caterpillar silk had somehow missed me entirely… except for my helmet, which was stuck to the seat back, so I had to unsnap the chin strap and leave it behind.

Also lucky for me was the fact that the tree I'd landed in was a nice big oak, with lots of thick branches to use as I went down to the floor. That was all the luck I was getting, however, because I didn't see a road, a house, or a plume of smoke anywhere around. And… I squinted up at the sky. Damned if the sunlight didn't seem to have a greenish tinge somehow, even though the conditions were dead wrong for tornadoes. There was a distinct lack of shrews, for one thing.

Pulling my radio off my belt, I tried hailing all the usual frequencies, and came up with nothing, to my complete lack of surprise. Okay, survival training said when in doubt, head downhill. Water runs downhill and civilization runs toward water. I picked a general direction and headed off.

I got maybe a hundred feet before I took a step and felt the ground rumbling under my feet. I admit it; I threw myself backward, pulling my sidearm immediately. Look, the number of things that have attacked me by burrowing up from below, it's a reflex I don't feel like losing, okay? But nothing happened, and persisted in happening, or not happening, and after a few minutes, I lowered the gun. Carefully, I got back to my feet, inched forward, and put a foot down… and felt the rumble again. It wasn't a vibration at all, not really. It was more like hearing an underground river rushing by, except I wasn't hearing it with my ears.

Damn it, I hate this magic crap. I believe in it these days, don't get me wrong. Hard not to when your CO takes you to LA for a briefing and introduction to a green-skinned nightclub owner who goes by Lorne and tells fortunes by listening to you sing. Apparently he and the Colonel go way back, and I didn't want to know more.

He'd asked me to sing for him, so I'd done a verse of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," not being much of a singer. That got me a wince, advice to invest in headache remedies, and a seriously cryptic warning that sometimes you had to let a wound bleed clean before bandaging it. Did I mention I hate magic?

Well, this energy flow had to be going somewhere, and it was more of a direction than I'd had before, so I started off after it. I knew I was getting somewhere when I realized the woods were getting quieter as I went in that direction. I hadn't re-holstered my sidearm yet, and now I was holding it ready, moving as quietly over the sticks and underbrush as I could. Now that I looked, I could see the subtle signs of the flow in the plants, the way a corridor seemed to naturally form straight through the trees.

Cresting a small rise, I stopped. There was a cave mouth in front of me, a big one, with no sign of human habitation. Which… I couldn't have been thrown that far from Butterfly Lake, could I? Caves like this would have been snapped up for cold storage back in the 1700s, and most of them were tourist attractions these days. I was getting a seriously hinky feeling about all of this.

But it was there, I was here, and the energy flow was headed straight into the mouth of it. Of course. Returning my sidearm to its holster, I carefully climbed down the rise and made my way into the cave. At this point, if anything jumped me, it probably wasn't going to be fazed by bullets, and would laugh at my little folding knife. Sometimes I wonder why I didn't just go to trade school and become a plumber.

The cave was surprisingly dry and airy, and I made my way cautiously along a twisting little passage, glad for the flashlight in my tac vest. Then I turned a corner, the passage opened out into a huge underground room, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from cursing.

The room wasn't dark. I wasn't sure where the light was coming from, but it was an eerie blueish color that made everything look as though it was underwater. Or maybe in a Spielberg movie. In the center was a giant cocoon, approximately the size of a tanker trailer. Smaller cocoons littered the walls of the cavern, all seemingly tied into the one in the center by a network of silk.

… And the one closest to me was moving slightly. No, wait- the cocoon wasn't moving, the glow was coming from the silk, and it was the glow that was moving, from the smaller bundle to the larger, as if it was… sucking something out of it.

I didn't think about it. Probably should have, but it was like I was running on instinct. I pulled my folding knife, stepped up to the still-glowing cocoon and hacked it loose from the wall, then very carefully slit it open. Pulling the edges apart, I stopped dead.

Inside was a boy of about ten, with red-brown hair, and wearing a set of oversized clothes I'd seen earlier today on one Dr. Nick Tatopoulos.

"Oh hell, Worm Guy… what did you do to yourself this time?"

Peter

Well, this was going to go up as Exhibit A on why I hate Upstate New York. This day had basically been going downhill right from the start. Missing people is always a Class A red flag that a bust is going to get nasty, beaten out only by actual bodies being found. Or worse, body parts. Not that that one's happened so far, but cynicism has never disappointed me yet.

The caterpillar's tunnel had caved in after it, which meant even if we'd been crazy enough to follow a laser-shooting larva down into a confined space, (and believe me, HEAT was looking that crazy and then some,) we weren't going to be able to.

Egon and Ray had pulled out the PKE meters. We'd figured out pretty quickly that while the caterpillar was an actual live animal, it did have a strong PKE signature, which meant we had a good chance of tracking it. Unfortunately, the ground was interfering, and boosting the gain only got us a vague reading of the woods to the west. And then an explosion. But this is Egon and Ray, there's always an explosion.

The Army guys sent up another helicopter- carefully- and overflew the western area, reporting back that there was a fifteen square-mile area of woods that was apparently covered by some sort of weird green energy dome. PKE meters said that our bug was in there, somewhere, but getting into it was going to be harder.

The kid who'd taken over the Army guys was out of OCS for maybe a year tops, if I was any judge, but he seemed to know what he was doing. He'd managed to get a command post set up in the local fire department's meeting hall, which is where we were now, hanging up maps, setting up equipment, and generally trying to figure out where the hell to go next.

Over in that corner, Dr. Craven was huddled with my two favorite mad scientists, looking over the readings they were getting from Craven's little robot scanning thing. So far, they'd mostly found out that the thing was some sort of force field, but at least it didn't zap anything that touched it, just knocked it away. Physics jargon was flying thick and fast, and I'd been lost the moment the word "gluon" had come out, but given that the three of them had something like five degrees in Physics and Engineering, that was kind of par for the course.

Monique Dupres was currently checking over HEAT's collection of weaponry, and I wasn't getting anywhere near that. At any other time, I might have flirted a bit mostly for the fun of getting creatively shot down, but the expression on her face suggested she wasn't in the mood for interaction. Even I know when to take a hint. Sometimes.

Over in that corner, Randy Hernandez was on his own laptop, linked into the local Internet and doing something that I was avoiding paying attention to so as to avoid being an accessory before or after the fact. I could hear him grumbling about snails on ice as his fingers flew over the keys.

And… uh huh. Over there, leaning on a currently empty table, Dr. Elsie Chapman was staring at the map somebody had hung up, showing the extent of the affected area. Despite her reasonably thick sweatshirt, she was rubbing at her arms like she was cold, and I was pretty sure it wasn't just the late April weather. (Although Upstate's been known to have blizzards this time of year. Did I mention I really hate Upstate New York?)

Winston was busy talking shop with some of the Army guys, so nobody was going to notice me sidling over to talk to the lady. Good; the woman had the kind of prickly pride that would savage a helping hand if she thought the offer made her look weak. Not that I could blame her- that insistence on introducing herself with full title said to me that there were a lot of idiots who discounted her, either because she was a woman, or because she was gorgeous, or maybe because she was in biology and some assholes thought nothing but physics and math were 'real' sciences. (Like, oh, Egon's Uncle Cyrus. I'm still wishing I'd punched him and I haven't even seen him in ten years.)

"So, any idea what the hell we're dealing with here?" I asked, taking up position next to her. She shot me a suspicious glance, but didn't move away, so I was taking that as a good start.

"Well, the color morph is reminiscent of the Pipevine Swallowtail, but it has only one horn on the head. Plus, y'know, it's the size of a steam locomotive."

I snorted. "Yeah, that is kind of a stumbling block. You said something about the internal structure being different, earlier?"

She sighed. "A big part of the reason bugs don't get particularly large? Exoskeletons aren't very good at supporting large amounts of mass. Once you get past… oh, coconut crab size, you start needing an internal structure to offer support. Add in that insects don't really have lungs, they breathe through tubes from the skin… This thing might have started out as a bug, but at this point, it barely qualifies. Which means we don't know… what it eats."

"Point, but… it had some of those people stuck underground for days. They were dehydrated, but other than that, they looked fine. So people probably aren't on the menu." At least not in any traditional sense. The thing had dragged Tatopoulos off for a reason, and hadn't so much as looked at the rest of us.

Hernandez looked up at us. "Uh, so, I might possibly have an update on those people, actually. They were all taken to the local hospital, right?"

"Yeah," Ray chimed in, as the rest of the room looked our way. "Nobody seemed to need Life Flight that we saw, anyway."

"Well, I may have lucked into some medical files. We're looking at dehydration, some minor starvation, cold-related injuries- being underground helped, but they were out overnight, a lot of 'em. Then we get to the weird stuff."

Winston sighed. "Because of course there's weird stuff."

"Is there ever not? We've got scars being removed, grey hair disappearing and one lady got her wisdom teeth back."

Dr. Chapman blinked. "It… healed them?"

"I mean, maybe? We've got a dude with a cold that might turn into bronchitis, though, so not healing across the board. And nobody regrew their tonsils."

"That's… weirdly selective," Finn frowned.

"Yeah, but there has to be a connecting element there. Randy, any commonalities in the victims?"

He tapped a few keys. "Well, nobody under forty? Men and women, body types are a pretty good spread, looks like all sorts of blood types. Oh hey, it looks like this guy had the progress of his dementia reversed! Damn."

Chapman frowned, tapping her fingers on her arm. "There's something there… I just can't quite get it."

Right, I knew where this was going. "You'll do better if you stop thinking about it," I told her. "You want to help me make sure the brain trust get chow into them? You know they won't eat unless we make 'em."

"Yeah… okay," she replied, casting a fond glance Dr. Craven's way. "Lead the way."

Nick

Owwww. I think even my hair hurt. The last time I felt like this was when I got that really bad flu when I was seven. Which, at least I got to stay home from school, even if I was too sick to do more than sleep and maybe read a book. Not like there was anything good on TV. Bobby Pherson's family got HBO, but we just got five channels on the antenna, and two of those were out of Montreal. I'm not bored enough to watch Sesame Street in French.

Funny, though. I didn't feel hot, and it didn't feel like I was in a bed… I forced my eyes open and saw some guy looking down at me with worry written all over his face. He wasn't old, old, maybe Mom's age or a little older, and he was wearing Army gear… maybe a hunter? I tried to sit up, and he immediately moved to help me.

"Easy there, Worm Guy. I don't think you got your bell rung, but take it slow, all right?"

Oookay, definitely not from around here, that sounded more like a New York or maybe New Jersey accent. I lifted a hand to push my bangs back off my face and stopped. What was I wearing? I mean, yeah, t-shirt, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt over it were my usual picks, but why were they like, five sizes too big for me? And why was that guy calling me "Worm Guy?"

All my questions swirled together and I blurted "What the hell is going on here?" Then I winced and looked around for my grandmother and her bar of laundry soap.

Nope, no Grandma. No house, for that matter, just the blue-lit inside of a giant cave filled with what looked like moth cocoons, only way, way bigger than any bug ought to get.

"Long story, kid. What's the last thing you remember?"

"Uh. I think… going to bed last night? Except it probably wasn't last night, if you're asking me that. It was July 17th, if that helps."

He grimaced. "What year?"

Ohhh, that didn't sound good. "Um. 1980?"

"... I was afraid of that."

I really wasn't sure I wanted to ask. Instead, I decided to check out the pockets of my jeans. The first lump I pulled out was obviously a wallet, and I flipped it open, then stopped dead. There was a New York State driver's license staring back at me. Name, Niko Tatopoulos. Date of issue, February 18, 2000.

"I'm thirty?" I yelped. Man, if any of the guys at school heard me hit that pitch, I'd never live it down. The photo looked right, and the hair and eyes were the right color, anyway. I quickly flipped through the rest of the wallet. Credit cards, all for Niko Tatopoulos, business card for an attorney's office with the name "Ray" written on it in what looked like my handwriting, some money...

"Are these counterfeit?" I asked, holding up a pair of weird twenties. The guy next to me snickered a little.

"Right, right, 1980. No, they're real, they redesigned 'em in 96 to make it easier to tell what they were at a glance."

"Oh. Uh. I'm sorry, who are you, anyway?"

He sighed. "Name's Major Hicks, I'm with the US Army. And weird as it sounds, I'm a friend of yours. Or will be."

In those twenty years that I'd apparently… lost somehow. Man. A lump in my other pocket got my attention and I pulled out… it kind of looked like a communicator from Star Trek or something. Hinged on one end, with an antenna sticking off of it. I opened it up carefully and stared at the phone keyboard inside.

"What's this?"

Hicks looked amused. "That's your phone."

"My what." I couldn't even put a question mark in my voice.

"Cellular phone. You remember car phones?"

"I mean, I've heard of them, yeah, on TV…"

He nodded. "Well, they made 'em smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. Doubt it'll work out here, though, signal doesn't carry so well with all the hills and trees."

Yeah, that's why Grandpa had to put the TV antenna up on a pole right on the edge of the cliff, it was the only place open enough.

The buttons were pretty clearly marked, so I turned the thing on and started to poke through it. There was a list of contacts with short names, including two numbers labeled Major Hicks. Audrey, Randy, Elsie, Mendel, Monique, GBI, Ray again… No Mom. Or Grandpa and Grandma. I felt the bottom of my stomach drop.

"Major? My mom, is she…" I couldn't finish. I didn't have to.

Hicks put a hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry, Nick."

I just nodded. I didn't really feel much of anything, it just didn't seem real. But it was too clear to be a dream, and way too elaborate to be somebody's idea of a joke.

Then I realized what exactly I was sitting on. "Major? Did… you get me out of one of these cocoons?"

"Yeah. Last time I saw you, you were thirty years old and fighting a giant caterpillar. Got here, opened that up, and you were ten."

"A giant-" I looked around the room at all the other cocoons stuck to the walls, surrounding the giant one in the center, and tried to scramble to my feet. "We need to get them out!"

Hicks grabbed me by the shoulders before I could get up… and probably stopped me from falling flat on my face, honestly. "I already checked, Worm Guy. There's nobody in them."

Now. I'm not sure how I managed to hear that word he very carefully wasn't saying. Maybe I actually read it in his face. For a moment, I thought about asking what was in them before deciding I didn't want to know.

"Anyway, we need to get out of here and regroup," he continued. "Let's see what we can do about getting those clothes of yours at least good enough to move in."

We wound up using something the Major called "paracord" to tie my pant legs shut around my ankles. We pulled my belt as tight as it would go and used a small flip knife to make an extra hole in it, which would at least keep my pants up, even if I kind of felt like a clown at the circus. The hiking boots I was wearing fit better with a couple of extra pairs of socks- seriously, apparently the Major packed like my mom going in-country for Search and Rescue. I said as much, and he laughed.

"Got into the habit in boot camp, and working with you and your team just kinda drove it home. Now come on, let's get out of here."

I took the offered hand and let him help me up, and we headed out of the cave.

"You said I was fighting a giant caterpillar… what kind of job do I have, anyway?"

"Technically, you're a biologist. Expert in mutations. In practice, that means you wind up chasing giant monsters all over the globe and taking them down before they eat people."

"... You're kidding me."

"Dead serious. That's how we met, actually, I'm the guy who has to do cleanup."

"Far out."

We came out into a forest that wasn't quite like the ones back home. Fewer pine trees, mostly. The Major squinted up at the sun- which, was that green?- and then sighed, pulling a phone a lot like mine out of another pocket on his vest.

"I thought you said that wouldn't get signal out here?"

"This one's a little different," he explained, dialing. He waited a bit, then began to talk.

"Hey, it's Hicks, I need a favor. I seem to be stuck under a barrier that's messing with EM, radio signals aren't getting through. Think you could patch this thing through to Riley? Yeah, that'd be perfect. Great. Thanks, Willow, I owe you one."

Another minute or so of waiting, and then he spoke again. "Finn? Hicks here. Yeah, I'm fine, no injuries. Tell HEAT there's good news and bad news. Good news is, I found Nick, he's not hurt. Bad news is, he's ten. No, I don't know how it happened either. I got him out of a cocoon that was hooked up to a bigger one, which I think our caterpillar is in. It was glowing and looked like it was sucking something out of him, so… I don't know. No memories of anything since 1980. Any idea where we are? … Okay, so we'll need to head east. All right, we're losing daylight, so I'm going to get the hell away from this place just in case, then we'll make camp for the night. Tomorrow we'll make for the barrier, you can see about getting us through it then. I hope. Hicks out."

"... Thanks."

He looked over at me. "For what?"

"For not putting me on the phone. They were asking for me, right? I… don't think I'm ready to talk to anybody else who knows me yet."

The Major tucked the phone away, frowning thoughtfully. "Yeah, I could hear Elsie and Randy in the background demanding the phone, but how did you know that? I didn't have the volume turned up that high."

I stopped. "I don't… I don't know. I just… knew. You know?" Then I dropped my face into my hands at how dumb that sounded.

"It's okay, Nick," he laughed. "I do know. Come on, I want to get at least half a mile between us and that cave before we stop for the night."

Elsie

I was good; I didn't try to strangle Finn as he hung up the phone. I thought about it, but it was really more Hicks's fault anyway. I'd save my revenge for the man in charge.

"'Scuse me, did he say Nick was ten?" Randy demanded, next to me.

Finn sighed. "Yes, he did. Apparently he found Dr. Tatopoulos cocooned in a cave, and when he got him out, he was back to ten years old."

At that point, the thought that had been orbiting my head for two hours came in for a landing. "Reversion!" I blurted, causing everyone to look at me. To my surprise, Dr. Stantz got it first.

"Of course! Everyone affected by the silk was reset to an earlier state! No scarring, no age-related disease, and a reversed surgery! All short-term resets, probably due to the smaller amount of silk used…"

Dr. Spengler pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. "That tracks with the analysis of the silk I've been doing." Tapping on his laptop keyboard, he brought up a report, and we all crowded closer trying for a look.

"Chemical analysis looks like pretty standard caterpillar silk," I commented, reading the component list.

"It is, chemically speaking. However, if you look under it, you'll see a psychokinetic spectrum. You see these peaks here and here? It's magically active."

Mendel sounded just a little doubtful. "It's… a magic caterpillar?"

"No, it's a caterpillar that's been mutated by exposure to strong magical fields, in much the same way that exposure to strong radiation causes mutation."

That… made a weird kind of sense. "It's energy, right?" I said, working it through. "Wait, is magical radiation a particle or a wave?"

A spark of humor flickered in those blue eyes. "Yes," Dr. Spengler replied. "Some manifests as one, some manifests as the other, and some seems to be quantumly uncertain, rather like light."

"Ask a stupid question. But okay, so the high-energy radiation causes DNA breakage, and the repair and copying errors are mutations. Which means that it has a psychokinetic charge instead of a radioactive one like some of the mutants we've seen." I'm a biologist, yeah, but you don't work with mutants the way we do without getting some idea of how high-energy physics works.

"But it's physical and doesn't have enough PKE charge for the throwers to do more than annoy it," Dr. Venkman threw in. "Worst of both worlds."

Randy'd been listening to the whole thing with a look of deep concentration on his face. "Okay, wait, if I'm following all this correctly, you're saying that the caterpillar somehow stole time off all these people?"

Spengler and Stantz exchanged glances. "That basically completely misrepresents the mechanism at work, but… functionally, yes," the physicist replied.

"Okay, okay, hold up." I held up a hand, the other one rubbing at my face. "I'm not Nicky, I'll accept a crazy theory if the evidence is there, and a ten-story marshmallow man stomping through downtown is pretty good evidence. I can even loosely follow how most of the physics works, at least from a layperson's level. But how the hell can anything steal time?"

"Think of it like this," Stantz told me. "Language exists, right?"

"Since we're having this conversation, yeah."

"But language isn't anything solidly real, it's just symbols. Two people looked at a part of their shared experience and agreed on a set of sounds to stand as an equivalent for the thing. Magic, subtle magic like this, is sort of the same thing."

"In terms of mechanism, what we're seeing is the manipulation of elements to give a symbolic effect, and that symbolic effect then has a physical effect," Spengler continued. "The silk sets the target to a state analogous with a chronologically earlier state. This creates, notionally, a unit of "stolen time" that can be used elsewhere to do some other kind of time-related work, like the counterweight of a trebuchet is used to toss a boulder."

My head was still hurting, but I thought I got it. Enough to be going on with, anyway.

"So what kind of 'time-related work' are we talking about, here?" Mr. Zeddemore wanted to know. Unfortunately, I was pretty sure I had the answer to that one.

"Hicks said it had cocooned itself. If it stole people's time, setting them back on an… an energy curve, then from what you've said, it's probably using the stolen time to move itself forward, and accelerate the process of going from pupa to imago."

"Ima- what?" Dr. Venkman asked.

"The stages of a butterfly's life cycle are larva, pupa… and imago. Given that we've discovered that caterpillars break down almost completely in the chrysalis and are then rebuilt, for something that big, it's going to take a long time… unless it uses something to jump-start the process."

"That brings up a different question," Monique broke in, the first thing she'd said in hours. "Why did the creature have two larders?"

Randy looked vaguely queasy. Next to him, Venkman shrugged. "Maybe it keeps kosher?"

"PETER!" That came from all three of the other Ghostbusters, with what sounded like the ease of long practice.

Over by NIGEL's monitoring station, though, Mendel looked thoughtful. "Lieutenant Finn, do you have that list of missing people the town council compiled?" he asked. Accepting the offered folder, he scanned it quickly, making checkmarks with a pencil. Then he looked up at the rest of us, dark eyes serious.

"Not everybody was in the first one. About… five percent of the missing people are still missing. And if Hicks didn't mention them… I don't think we're going to get them back."

Everybody went a little pale, except Monique, of course. But when Randy grabbed her hand, she let him, so she wasn't any less affected than the rest of us.

Venkman took the folder from Mendel, scanning it as he did so. "Egon? I'm seeing a lot of the standard keywords in these bios," he said, unusually serious.

"Standard keywords?" Finn beat me to the question.

"Loner, eccentric, character, recluse," Venkman replied. "What it boils down to is people who were a little weird, and other people didn't so much avoid them, but they didn't have a lot of close friends. You see it a lot in people with low-level psychic or magical gifts, especially in small towns where the social scene can be a bit warped at times. I'm thinking the burrow we found was for people with low PKE charges, good for a quick hit, but not worth the expenditure of silk to drain completely. The other one…"

I was not going to get sick. I'd seen worse than this before. But the damn thing had dragged Nick off, and only Hick's good timing had made the difference between a ten year old Nick running around and another cocoon empty of anything except maybe some clothes.

"Loner, eccentric, character, recluse," Randy commented, obviously forced jocularity in his tone. "Is it me, or does that describe Nick to a T?"

It kind of did, actually, not that I thought Nick would appreciate the implication. He was a die-hard rationalist, sometimes to the point where it interfered with his reasoning. But we could deal with that when we had him back, even if we had to sit on him.

"Brings up one last question," Zeddemore said slowly. "The thing's stealing time to accelerate growing into an adult. So the big question is, what's it going to want when it hatches?"