Chapter 22: Division

Starlight Tower

6:05 PM

Red and green silhouettes of two people formed several feet above the floor. They began to materialize in the void as the light began to fade around them. Dan Shannon and Sailor Jupiter solidified and were then dropped to the floor below them, collapsing as they touched down. Sailor Jupiter rolled to her side as she shook the surprise from her senses, "What just happened?"

Dan was heard groaning beside her as he commented, "I donno, but at least we know gravity is still working." Sailor Jupiter stood and helped the Ghostbuster up onto his feet, realizing how heavy the Proton Pack he was wearing was as she lifted him. Once upright they surveyed the landscape to find a trashed office surrounding; papers lining the floor; cubicles broken apart; desks flipped; computers and monitors busted; most disturbing of all, bodies…

Multiple bodies on the ground.

The sight of the bodies made Sailor Jupiter gasp, a tremble of worry in her voice, "My God, where are we?" Dan looked toward one of the closest outer walls and walked to the window. He looked down to the street below, "We're somewhere in the building. I can see the vehicles down on the street from here," he looked back to her, "Where's everyone else?" The question made Sailor Jupiter turn to the greater spaces of the office and call out, "Sailor Moon? Sailor Mercury?" When she didn't get a response she looked back to Dan, "I donno! I don't see any of them!"

Hearing that, Dan knew exactly what happened. It set him off, "Oh, you son-of-a-bitch!" "What?" Sailor Jupiter asked, "What is it?" "That was the other condition! We not only have to find the people abducted from the park, we gotta find each other!" Dan began pulling his radio out of its holster, "Jedite is such a goddamn cockroach!" He keyed the radio and began contacting the other Ghostbusters, "Venkman, Stantz, come in?" He unkeyed the radio to silence. He adjusted the squelch to be greeted with static and low audio squealing hoping to hear a weak, low volume response, but nothing else came through. Looking to Sailor Jupiter as the audio gremlins came over the radio he was listening to the sounds waiting, but also looking at her to see her tension translate onto her face. He keyed the radio again, "Zeddemore, Spengler, you guys read?" Unkeying again he heard the same distorted audio he heard before.

Sailor Jupiter was holding her breath. She hoped to hear his fellow Ghostbusters come over the device denoting they were okay, but alas. Dan tried one more time, "This is Shannon. If anyone can hear me, please respond." Nothing. The sounds of the distorted audio made Sailor Jupiter become unnerved, "W-why are they not talking?" Dan turned the squelch back up and cut the distortion before holstering the radio aback on his belt, "It's not getting though. Egon once told me really high Psychokinetic energy levels can interrupt radio signals. We're gonna have to look for them on our way up to the roof."

Sailor Jupiter watched as he began walking the floor in an attempt to locate the stairs. There was one thing on her mind, "Do you think the others are alright?" "If we are," his voice had just enough confidence to ease her worry, "they are." Just as Sailor Jupiter began following her Ghostbuster companion through the office space, the lights on the floor went out, the power in the building ceasing to operate. She stopped walking, sighed in frustration, and placed her hands on her hips, "Oh, great! This should help us!"

Dan had also stopped and started feeling around on the right strap of his experimental Proton Pack, "Hang tight, I got a light." On his right strap was a control box with two switches. A light housing over his right shoulder containing fluorescent lights was connected to the box and once Dan flipped the switch a blacklight tube in the housing flickered and ignited, lighting the office around them in long-frequency light. Sailor Jupiter sneered at the light, "How's that gonna help? It's a blacklight! This isn't a hippie-rave at a club you know!"

"This blacklight has a specific purpose," he turned to her, shining the deep purple light in her direction, "We use the long wavelength light to react to ectoplasm to give us a visual trail to track. When the light hits the slime, it reacts causing it to glow a bright color…" He looked her over and took note of her Sailor Scout uniform, "and it looks like the green and pink in your outfit is reactive." Sailor Jupiter looked down to herself and saw her collar, skirt, and ribbon were glowing brightly. She was enthralled with the glow of her uniform in the light she looked all around her to look at the glow.

As she looked around herself Dan took notice of something else that was illuminating on her person, Beautiful earrings, he thought.

She immediately stopped and looked at him, "What?"

Dan took his focus off the earrings and responded, "What ya mean, 'what'?"

"You said something about my earrings."

"I did?"

"Yes," she crossed her arms across her chest, "I heard you clearly say, 'Beautiful earrings.'" In that sentence it dawned on Dan that his mental link with Sailor Jupiter was beginning to strengthen. Apparently two way communication was something they could do with each other; that would explain why he felt so panicked at the airport as she was crying out for help. He didn't even realize it was an induced feeling; he thought it was his mind that went off on it's own to project that idea to him. Then again, he didn't know Lita was Sailor Jupiter yet.

"Well, I saw your earrings glowing in the light. I remember last night when I saw them; I didn't realize they didn't change when you transformed. You must have a hard emotional attachment to them." Dan watched as Sailor Jupiter caressed one of the earrings with her hand, a sad look gracing her face, "My parents let me get my ears pierced right before they died. These earrings are the last things they gave me before the plane crash," a tear formed in the corner of her eye. She felt it trail down her cheek making her wipe it away and clear her throat, "I'm sorry. It's a ridiculous thing to get upset over, but I wear them for good luck; to keep my parents with me."

Dan sighed, "I don't think it's ridiculous. I mean, I have my own good luck piece," he unzipped his front suit pocket on his uniform and pulled out a small silver object. It was dented and nicked in places with a deposit of soot on the flip back lid, "Not too long before he passed away my grandfather gave me this. This is the Zippo lighter he had for nearly 25 years before he gave it to me. He was in the hospital. His cancer moved from his pancreas to his liver. We didn't have long. I keep it to remember what he told me. He said, 'No matter where you go, no matter what you do, remember that I love you and that I will always be proud of you.'" He looked down to the lighter, "I begged my mom to stay with him overnight. I felt it coming," he closed his eyes hard as a couple of tears streamed down. He took a deep breath, a small waver in his voice, "He passed away the next day," he looked back to her, "I know what it feels like to have the need to keep those we value with us. Last night I saw you wearing my vest and it told me what you thought of me," he looked back away to the lighter in his hand, "If I know I'm not coming back, that's the only time I'll leave this lighter with someone else."

Sailor Jupiter came closer to him and gently wiped the tears from his eyes. The look of worry and understanding radiated from her eyes as she went from attending to his tears to gently brushing his cheek making him look into her eyes again. These two people were hurt. They saw each other as an equal and felt the same, and what they felt was loneliness. The feeling they felt toward each other made them feel whole. They became lost in each other's eyes as they both inched closer. Sailor Jupiter slid her hand behind his neck, Dan sliding his hand behind her back. The both of them began pulling each other closer. The Sailor Scout lowered her resistance and began closing her eyes to the Ghostbuster's embrace…

SCREECH!

Dan quickly pulled away and started looking around the room to find the source of the sound. Sailor Jupiter became rather annoyed with the interruption until she saw Dan's detection light illuminating a freshly splattered wall. The material looked dark, but it was reacting to the light with a red and green hue. "Uh, oh!" she explained, "I think we got company!"

Dan grabbed the pistol on his side and activated it again as Sailor Jupiter placed herself into a ready fighting stance. They stood back to back in an attempt to avoid an ambush, but it was for naught. They simply didn't notice, but the bodies of the people on the floor weren't really dead. They started glowing in the blacklight as 3 men in suits, a woman in a dress, and a woman in a skirt and blazer stood up. Their skin looked decayed and their eyes were whited out. When they started shuffling to stand Dan and Sailor Jupiter turned their attention to them, Dan being rather taken aback, "Oh my God!"

"They…" Sailor Jupiter was a bit jilted by their appearance, "T-They look like zombies!"

"I don't think they're actually dead!" he exclaimed as he took out a PKE meter, "I think those are the people from the park!"

"Whatever they are," she began lining herself up to begin one of her attacks, "we have to stop them! Jupiter… Thunder Clap…"

Just before the electricity became attracted toward the antenna in her tiara, Dan saw what she was about to do, "No!" He immediately ran shoulder first into the side of her before she could complete the attack, knocking her over and interrupting the attack. Now standing where she was, one of the men lunged quickly at him and tackled him into a standing cubicle wall causing him to lose his meter. The wall was knocked down with the man on top of Dan with his hands around his throat. Dan took the pistol in his hand and pistol whipped the man in the temple, but it wasn't making him yield. Before he knew it, he looked at the man's lapel pin. He suddenly realized who it was he was fighting.

"Hiya!" Sailor Jupiter performed a flying kick from the side of the man and kicked him away from the Ghostbuster. While the possessed man was recovering on the floor she picked Dan up and began dragging him around a corner. After reaching safety she started scolding him, "Why did you stop me?" Dan coughed, his voice raspy as he spoke, "There's people in these things! You won't just blast whatever's possessing 'em, you'll destroy their bodies! You would have killed them!" As Dan kept breathing heavily getting his air back, the Scout of Thunder took heed of his words and realized that limited her options. He wasn't acting rashly; there was a reason why he stopped her. She proceeded to ask as she peered around the corner, "Then what do we do?"

Dan had to think fast. Remembering back to what Egon told him about these new Ectoplasmic Destabilizer pistols he then remembered back to his first field call when he needed to separate that girl from the demon possessing her. The new piece in his hand was based on the original rifle he modified… He quickly took a small screwdriver out of his front suit pocket and began opening the electric housing that operated the weapon. Sailor Jupiter heard him dismantling the device and turned to see what he was doing, "Why are you…?" "I gotta know exactly what Egon and Ray did. I'm an electronic savant; I can look at a circuit board and know exactly how it operates."

Sailor Jupiter looked around the corner again and saw the zombie-like shamblers approaching where they were, "Uh… can you be one of those savants just a bit faster?" Dan put the screwdriver between his teeth like a cigarette as he opened the back of the device, his speech becoming distorted, "Yer go-a ha to distrad em!"

Despite the slurring of language, she knew what he said, "Distract them?"

He took the tool out from his teeth as he started messing with the guts of the pistol, "I gotta alter this thing to give me a one-shot destabilization without hurting the people," he looked away a moment as he looked with panic into her eyes, "I need your help!" For a moment she was worried, but she immediately felt confident. She wasn't sure why either, mostly because she had never used her enhanced strength on a regular person and wasn't sure she could control that strength. She looked at the look on the blonde engineer's face and knew he believed in her to do it. It was as though she felt his faith in her.

She nodded. She rounded the corner and immediately engaged in physical combat, performing an aerial kick to one of the possessed. Throwing kicks, punches, and dodging attacks on the return kept her fighting hard. Dan finally located the proper trim potentiometer on the main circuit board and began the process of altering settings when he realized something. The PKE meter was in the middle of the floor and he absolutely needed it to adjust the frequency, "Oh, goddamnit!"

Sailor Jupiter was locked into a compromising position with one of the women when she felt the dire urge to look for something. The creature had its hands outstretched reaching out toward her and she was holding them by their wrists to arrest her movement. She looked behind her and saw the still running PKE meter on the floor. She immediately made it a priority to retrieve the piece of Ghostbusting tech., forcing the woman off her. She performed a drop kick to make the woman stumble back then performed a back handspring, her hand landing on the PKE meter's handle and gripping it, then back to her feet. She turned and called out, "Dan!" Dan rounded the corner just as she threw the meter at him. Dan quickly put the screwdriver back in his mouth and caught it midair. Sailor Jupiter quickly went back to stalling the creatures as Dan looked at the meter confused. Shaking himself out of his stupor he went back to his task as well.

The creatures attempted to swarm her when one-on-one combat wasn't gaining them the upper hand. Hand on shoulder got them an elbow to the face; a lunge received a punch to the stomach; a dive didn't get much more than a dodge. Sailor Jupiter was growing impatient, "Any time is a good time, 'Buster boy!" Dan completed the adjustment and reassembly of the pistol as she called out. Reactivating the weapon he rounded the corner, put his forefinger and pink in his mouth, and emanated an extremely loud whistle, "Hey! Deadasses!" They all stopped their attack on Sailor Jupiter and turned to the Ghostbuster as he taunted them, "Say hello to the children of the Manhattan Project!" He pointed the barrel of the weapon toward the creatures as he screamed, "DUCK!"

Sailor Jupiter dropped to the floor as Dan fired. The woman in the dress and one of the men jumped away as the others were struck with the charged bolts. Once struck a black cloud of energy blew out from behind them, soon after dissipating in the air. The last two started running toward Dan at high speed. The only thing he could think to do was rush them back. Diving over a desk Dan avoided the running creatures by hitting the floor, rolling under them, and while in a prone position shooting them in the back. Once hit, the last of the two attackers collapsed to the floor like sacks of wheat.

Sailor Jupiter stood after the encounter and walked to one of the victims, kneeling and turning them over. The decaying appearance of their skin disappeared. She opened one of the victim's eyes and saw their pupils returned to normal, "Dan! You gotta see this!"

Dan holstered the pistol and walked toward her. Kneeling beside Sailor Jupiter he checked the person's pulse and didn't feel anything. He couldn't feel anything. He quickly put his ear to the person's mouth and felt air. Backing off, he took the PKE meter back off his belt and took a scan. The reading was… odd, "What the…?"

Sailor Jupiter looked over his shoulder at the meter. She didn't understand the readout, "What is it?" "Their base PKE reading is negative," he looked away from the meter and looked to the victim, "There's nothing in there."

She asked, "Isn't that a good thing?"

He shook his head, "No, I mean there's no PKE. Even the living give off PKE. We call that type of PKE protoplasmic," he looked to her, "all of them are absolutely blank." "You mean all of their energy's been drained?" he nodded as he looked back at the meter, "In a way, yeah. The only thing that's still there is their involuntary neurological functions; they're basically in comas, if not brain dead. Jedite's not just abducting people. He's harvesting their life force energy for something, but for what?"