Been posting this over on AO3. I'm historically Not Great with finishing longfics, but I got approved to use this (or at least, the first three chapters of it) to fill a phic phight 2021 prompt, so I thought I'd give it the ol' college try.

note: I am playing around with the ghost core fanon a little bit, but that's really the only one I'll be using, as I'm not super fond of most of DP fanon lol. This one just fit quite well into some blank spaces that needed filling, so I decided to use it.

Phic Phight 2021 Prompt: "Vlad and Harriet reconnect at the reunion and begin to date", from ghostanimal (my fellow Vlad/Harriet lover, thank u forever for turning me onto this ship and also helping me brainstorm ideas for this fic)

Harriet Chin has never believed in the supernatural.

All her life she's been raised to believe that anything people tout as supernatural always has a logical, factual, scientific reason behind it, and that reason is usually C02 poisoning. She's never believed in aliens, ghosts, cryptids, fairytales - she never even believed in Santa Claus as a child.

And yet-

As she sits, stunned, in the passenger's seat of the Fentons' RV, which is currently being driven by some unseen force, watching as Jack Fenton tries to fight off a glowing man with red eyes who's flying twenty-plus feet off the ground and holding Maddie Fenton hostage, how can she possibly doubt? All her senses are filled with evidence, with the truth - that ghosts exist, that they are powerful, intelligent, sentient, strange, apparently hostile - a tiny part of her mind tries to file these feelings away for later, for when she inevitably writes out individual apologies to everyone whose stories she ever scoffed at.

When it's all over, she can't focus, between the adrenaline and the horror and the mystery and the intrigue! The worldview-shaking implications! The story potential! She gets statements from the Fentons and writes down everything she can remember, in as much detail as she can still envision, immediately sends it off to her boss along with the admittedly somewhat-garbled recording of the events, nearly bouncing off the walls with anticipation as she waits for him to reply. This is the story of the decade-of the century! This will be her break, her claim to journalistic fame, will make all those years racking up college debt worth it, this will be her legacy-

She's fired. Effective immediately.